(Mr. Pitts delivered this speech at a membership-drive event sponsored by the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, and the Philadelphia chapters of the Asian American Journalists Association and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association.)
At the risk of putting you into a deep coma, I want to begin by talking about an academic study.
Last year, scientists at the University of California at Santa Barbara published the results of some fascinating research. Test subjects were shown images on a computer screen of two racially- integrated basketball teams whose members had supposedly been involved in a previous altercation. Each picture was accompanied by statements from the players - two black, two white on each team - talking about the supposed confrontation. Later, the test subjects were given the pictures and the statements and asked to match the speakers with their words from memory. Naturally, the test subjects made mistakes. In fact, the Researchers were counting on it. What they wanted to see was what mistakes they made. As one of the researchers put it, "Mistakes reveal encoding." Which is a fancy way of saying that people are more likely to confuse two individuals if, in their minds, they have filed them both as part of the same group.
So when the test subjects were shown pictures of all eight basketball players wearing similar jerseys, they tended to mix them up by race. That is, they assigned one black player's words to another black player and the same for whites. But a curious thing happened when the members of the two teams wore distinctive jerseys. Then the test subjects began to mix them up by teams. In other words, it may have been the black guy or the white guy who said it - I don't recall - but he was part of the team that wore the yellow uniform.
What it strongly suggests is that racism - indeed, all our isms - are not predetermined, not hard-wired into us, not some evolutionary leftover that we can't get rid of. Rather, that they reflect a failure of imagination, the inability to look at people who are not like ourselves and see them as members of the same team.
There are those who will tell you that all changed six months ago when the towers fell and the nation reeled. They will say that we finally came to understand ourselves as one nation, indivisible.
In a column that I wrote the day the towers were struck I described the nation as "a vast and quarrelsome family, a family rent by racial, social, political and class division, but a family nonetheless." The column went on to say that on this day, "the family's bickering is put on hold. As Americans we will weep, as Americans we will mourn, and as Americans, we will rise in defense of all that we cherish."
If I had an hour, I couldn't adequately describe for you the magnitude of the response. The flood of emails from around the nation and around the world that continues to this day. The people who read it on radio and television, the ones who set it to music, put it on their websites, made posters and books out of it.
But from of all those thousands of responses, and all the things those people had to say, one strain of thought emerged that was, for me, the most personally memorable. "Mr. Pitts," the letters would say, "I'm not black, I'm white. Mr. Pitts, I'm a political conservative. Mr. Pitts, I'm much older than you. Mr. Pitts, I'm a woman, not a man. Mr. Pitts, you and I are unalike in every conceivable way and I've never agreed with you on anything you've ever said, down to and including 'Hello.'
"But today none of that matters.
"But I consider you a fellow American."
"But I'm proud that we belong to the same family."
You could tell that for many of them, it was the first time they'd ever considered the idea that somebody who looks like me might be kin.
We are living in the aftermath of a day that now defines an era. It's amazing how that happens sometimes. Astonishing how a single moment in one 24-hour period can abruptly wrench history off its rails and send it careening in a new direction as frightening as it is unknown. October 29, 1929 was such a day, when the stock market crashed and the bottom fell out of the American economy. December 7, 1941 was also such a day, when a Hawaiian dawn was sundered by war planes on the attack. In the '60s, you seemed to have those days every time you turned around. November 22, 1963. April 4, 1968. June 5, 1968. John, Martin, Bobby. Bang, bang, bang.
And now there's this. Different and yet the same in the way it yanks you out of your individual concerns, puts everyone on the same page at the same time. Suddenly, I don't have to ask what's worrying your mind, because I know: It's the same thing that's worrying mine.
Now everyone struggles to figure out what will become of us in the new world. How have we been changed? How are things different now than they were before?
I came here today to talk about diversity, to speak a few words about those people who find themselves locked out of America's dreams by dint of race, belief, gender or sexual orientation. And I know there are some who would say, "Too late. No need." They'd consider the subject passé in the world to which tragedy has delivered us. "Mr. Pitts, didn't you say it yourself: The family's bickering is put on hold?" What need is there to concern ourselves with diversity - differences between human beings - at a time when we find ourselves drawn together in common cause? How can we be different when we all find ourselves worrying about the same things?
We have come together. We have overcome. A reader sent me an Email a few months ago that said, "All of those stupid prejudices which clouded our view hopefully have left our minds for evermore."
I wish it was that simple. The problem is that coming together is not the hard part. Learning how to be together is.
People always come together when they grieve. When eyes are Misted with tears and hearts are full of mourning, when shock leaves you gasping and outrage makes you breathless, it's easy to bond with people who are going through the same experience for the same reason at the same time. When you're terrified for your life, you will hug and cling to the nearest person who isn't trying to kill you.
I know this from personal experience. Ten years ago, a hurricane named Andrew hit South Florida, one of the most catastrophic natural disasters in American history. I spent the night of the storm huddled with my wife and five kids in a bedroom closet. We came out the next morning and found that the roof of our house had been peeled away and virtually everything we owned had been destroyed with the exception of the clothes we were wearing and one of our two cars.
When we ventured out of the house, we discovered that everyone was in the same situation. Disaster was the great equalizer. We all had the same thing. We all had nothing. No lights, no refrigerator, no television, no running water, no heat, no safe shelter, no money and no place to buy anything even if we did. We had been reduced to a primitive, pre-Industrial society whose primary goal was simple survival. Figuratively and literally speaking, the fences between us had been torn down. People met for the first time neighbors they'd had for years.
I remember this one day, I drove an hour and a half to the next county north after hearing on the car radio that a store up there had gotten in a shipment of ice. Ice. I mean, you'd be shocked the kind of things that you miss when you don't have anything. In South Florida right after the storm, ice was more valuable than gold. There was a guy I saw once who was selling it by the side of the road for $15 a bag. And here was this supermarket that had gotten some in and it was regular price, and you could buy it if you could just get there.
I drove up, stood in that long line, got 10 pounds of ice and returned to a house where the refrigerator didn't work and all we had for cold storage was a little Styrofoam ice chest. Had no idea what I was going to do with all those bags of ice. But not long after I got home, this lady comes by. Never met her before, but at her house, they've managed to hook up a grill and they've cooked all the meat in their refrigerator before it could spoil. Would we like some chicken? she asks. I've got ice, I tell her. I'll trade you.
You should have seen the woman's eyes. You'd have thought I had offered her a million dollar bill. I'm sure mine looked just as eager. She went away literally hugging bags of ice. And I've never seen her again.
The point being that people naturally come together in times of fear. Suddenly, they're able to see the dumb stuff for what it is. So it's no surprise that, in the weeks since Sept. 11, we've been giving money together, working shoulder to shoulder together, singing hymns together, weeping tears together, fearing fears together, praying prayers together, holding hands together, going to war together. Most of all, we have hung the flag together, a million banners of red, white and blue flying on car windows and mailboxes, small flag pins riding the rise and fall of breathing chests, large flags fluttering from freeway overpasses.
And it feels like redemption, confirmation, validation, all wrapped in one. Feels so right that you're tempted to believe some great watershed has been crossed. You feel as if this great American tragedy has left in its wake the unintended gift of national unity so that suddenly white and black can see themselves reflected in the lives of the other. And we can all know ourselves as members of the same family.
It's sobering, then, to remember that this isn't the first time tragedy has drawn the nation together across racial lines. For example, the Second World War, like this present one, came to us like lightning, came in a devastating sneak attack that left Americans feeling violated, outraged, and very much united against a common foe.
The nation pulled together and black soldiers, though confined to segregated units, went to war. One black newspaper publisher called it the Double V Campaign - for victory over military foes abroad and segregation at home. Over a million black soldiers served with distinction. One of them was my dad, an Army truck driver on the fabled Red Ball Express, ferrying supplies to U.S. troops during the Allied invasion of France.
Yet two years later, before the war was even over, black Americans and white Americans were literally at one another's throats. Nineteen forty-three saw some of the worst racial fighting of the 20th Century. There were riots in Detroit, MI; Beaumont, TX; Harlem, New York. White Americans went on the rampage in Mobile, Alabama after black shipyard workers were given a promotion.
By the time the war ended, the situation was, if anything, worse. The NAACP called 1946 "one of the grimmest years" it had ever seen. It issued a report deploring the "blowtorch killing and eye-gouging of Negro veterans freshly returned from a war to end torture and racial extermination." The civil rights group even took the extraordinary step of issuing "An Appeal To The World" - a report filed with the United Nations, asking the world body to intervene in the United States on behalf of a besieged minority.
So maybe you wonder why I'm telling you any of this. The point is that we are cursed with short memories. That sometimes, unity is as ephemeral as morning mist, as temporary as the stock market. Bonds forged in the face of common threat tend to erode when the threat fades. The bonds that hold together through times of plenty and times of pain are made of tougher stuff. And in America, we are still learning to look past our history and create those kinds of bonds.
To understand why we're finding that such a difficult challenge, you have to understand something of the ties that bind a group into a people. Historically, those ties have come about in one of two ways.
The first way involves a sharing of common ancestry in the context of a closed and homogenous society, as in Japan or North Korea.
The second way that a group of individual becomes a people has particular resonance for American history, and for our present circumstances. Because in that second way, as we've just discussed, you become a people when you face a common threat. An attack from without creates cohesion from within. It's been my experience, for instance, that whites in America never think of themselves as white, never think of themselves as a people until or unless they are confronted by complaints about racism from someone who is black or brown. Until, in other words, they feel themselves attacked. Until that moment, they do not identify themselves as "white people." They are Joe, or George or Carol. Not part of any group, in particular. Just average, everyday folks.
Don't misunderstand the point. Yes, certain white ethnics have historically seen themselves as "a people" - particular in the days right after emigration when they faced legal and cultural restrictions and second-class citizenship. When they faced, in other words, a common threat. The Irish, the Italians, the Germans at the time of the First World War, they all saw themselves as "a people" - because they were beset by an American mainstream that didn't like them, didn't trust them, questioned their patriotism, thought there was something strange about their accents and their cultures. But they assimilated - they "became white" as one writer puts it - and with that, they became less threatened and consequently, lost the need to see themselves as a discrete group.
African Americans, on the other hand, like Native Americans, Arab Americans and Hispanic Americans, seldom see themselves as anything but. Some people say the problem is all those hyphens, that if people would stop embracing compound identities, call themselves simply American, then everything else would be all right. It's a charming view, but ultimately, a naïve one. More to the point, it's a view that gets things exactly wrong. It looks at one of the effects of division and mistakes it for the cause.
People tend to band together, to circle the wagons, when they're all facing the same threat at the same time. That's just human nature. And it doesn't matter whether the threat is based on accident of race, religion, sexual orientation or even geography. Indeed, if for whatever reason, the rest of the country decided that Pennsylvanians were a strange, crime-prone, inherently immoral, mentally inferior subspecies of humanity, I can promise you that certain things would happen. First, some of you would try to pass for Marylanders or Ohioans. Second, you would bind together for mutual defense. And when I use that word, I mean defense against physical danger, yes. But I also mean defense against the emotional corrosion that comes from knowing 49 other states considered you inferior. So there would invariably arise some sort of pride movement to counteract that. Somebody would make millions selling a bumper sticker that said, "Say it loud! I'm Pennsylvanian and I'm proud!" Differences between the citizens of this state would become minimized and they would organize themselves around the fact of being endangered. You'd watch out for your fellow Pennsylvanians and you'll expect them to watch out for you.
That's how it once was in Irish America, Italian America and German America. It's how it has long been in African America, Arab America, and Hispanic America. It's how it is, post Sept. 11, in America at large. But oppression is an unreliable thing around which to build group identity. Because once the oppression is gone, the identity is, too. This, too, is what happened to the Irish, the Italians and the Germans. They think of themselves as Americans now.
None of us alive will be around to see it, but there's going to come a day when racism against African Americans ends. And black folks of that blessed day, I think, are going to be surprised and maybe a little vexed, to discover that racism was the main thing holding them together. That millions of people of different temperaments, political persuasions, religions, education, geographic backgrounds and class were held together largely by the fact of being hated. By the need for a common defense. Someday - not someday soon, but someday - black people are going to disappear in much the same way Italian and Irish people have.
And that's a hopeful thing. Because, while it is sometimes necessary and frequently life-saving to organize around the fact of being in jeopardy, that's not the ideal. We have come together based on what we fear. It would be better, I think, if we were able to come together based on what we love.
I guess that's why I tend to view the events of recent days with a slightly jaundiced eye. It's not that I'm displeased to see the way the country has come together. On the contrary, it swells the heart to see and feel the spirit in this country in this moment, to know that right now, there's no real division in us. That our only colors are red, white and blue and our only creed, American. It makes you feel proud, makes you suddenly aware of the potential that was in us all along. What we are now is what we always could have and should have been.
So no, it's not that I'm not unhappy to see this. It's just that I'm wary of trusting it. My knowledge of history and my understanding of what bonds a people suggests to me that I need to be careful about believing in this present moment.
What's to say that if Sept. 11 recedes in memory and Osama bin Laden is captured or killed, we won't go back to being what we were and behaving as we did in the old world where we used to live? After all, the literal and figurative fences that were torn down in South Florida a decade ago have long since been rebuilt.
Why should we reside so much faith in bonds forged in the heat of tragedy and fear?
But here's the thing: If historically there were two ways you became a people - through common ancestry or a common threat - the genius of America, in theory if not always in practice, was that it offered a third. That's the thing that made this country revolutionary. The fact that you became an American not because you shared the same blood or the same danger. Rather, you became an American because you shared the same belief. A profoundly radical belief.
You can state it in the words of Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."
You can state it in the words of the Pledge of Allegiance: "Liberty and justice for all."
Or you can state it in the words of King. "All of God's children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, I'm free at last.'"
This is the ideal upon which the country was founded. This is the thing that makes us distinctive among nations. This is the reason that being America means something.
And this is also our Achilles Heel. Because the people have never been worthy of the country. We have never managed to be quite as large as our largest ideals. It is worth noting that the man who wrote that all men are created equal was a slave owner. And the man who said, Free at last! was not. It's worth remembering that we have interned our own citizens because of their race. Lied to and stolen from the original tenants of this land. Once passed a law aimed at allowing for the deportation of any French or Irish person who displeased the president. Looked the other way as lynch mobs, crooked sheriffs and evil politicians conspired together to denigrate, demean and even kill native born citizens who simply had the wrong color skin. And we have, by law and custom, denied whole segments of our population access to those things from which quality of life is derived. Meaning a good job, a chance for higher education, a home in a safe neighborhood, decent medical care, bank loans, equal protection under the law, the ability to simply live your life, unmolested.
It would be nice to believe that the change we need can come on us like a bolt of lightning, that at least we can salvage the blessing of lasting unity from the atrocity that was visited upon us in September. I don't think it will happen that way. I'd love to be wrong, but I don't think that I am.
Unity is not two people clinging together because they both fear they're about to be annihilated. Nor, for that matter is unity two people standing together and pretending there are no differences between them.
Unity is respecting difference, honoring difference, valuing difference, learning from difference, but understanding that difference is not destiny. Understanding, in other words, that difference must be placed in perspective. And that, if there are ten things that divide us there are a hundred by which we are drawn together. If there are a hundred points of contention, there are a thousand of common cause.
I repeat: a failure of imagination. A failure to see beyond the obvious. It's like the university study, the one where test subjects confused people first by race and then by team. So often, race is the difference that trumps all similarities.
So that you look at me and maybe the first thing you register is that I am a member of the black team. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that.
Indeed, I've occasionally met people who, in wanting to impress Me with how "color-blind" they are, claim that they don't see me as a black man. And I always tell them that if you look at me and don't see a black man, call an eye doctor immediately. I am a member of the black team. I am proud to be a member of the black team.
But here's the thing: I'm also a member of the male team, the 40-something team, the born-in-California team, the husband team, the father team, the journalist team, the tax-payer team, the never-miss- an-episode-of-The Sopranos team, the can't-get-my-computer-to-act-right team, the putting-on-a-few-unwanted-pounds team, the American team. Why is it that so few people are able to see me as a member of many Teams? Why is it that so many people want to define me, consign me, condemn me, wholly, solely, completely, by that one factor of my existence?
There's an obscure old song I like that says, "This world is full of people, all kinds of people. And everybody wanna live on." It is really as simple - and as challenging and complex - as that. There are all kinds of people in this world. In this country. And everybody wanna live on.
So we look at this pause in our history, this pregnant moment of aftermath and we wonder what it means. Before Sept. 11, we were divided by difference. Here today, we are joined by jitters.
But it's my hope and faith that someday, people will finally do the hard but necessary work of leaving their comfort zones, abandoning the presumptions and biases born there. They will learn to value difference, embrace similarity and disagree with respect. They will have chosen to come together, not because they were born that way, not because they fear an external threat makes it necessary to be that way, but because they want to be that way. Because they choose to unite around a common belief in the value of human freedom, the dignity of human life. Because they choose to be, in the largest and fullest sense of the unrealized ideal, American.
And that is going to be a strange and wondrous day. Somebody will be able to look at a man like me, a man like you, a woman like you, a woman like you and wonder what all the fighting was about.
We were on the same team all along.