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What is the consequence of not honoring our heterogeneity? Not including those who appear different, or even unusual, to us? Howard Thurman, in The Luminous Darkness:
The son of a prominent white businessman, while studying abroad ..., met a Negro who was president of a college in his home town. The student wrote letters to his father about his new and wonderful friend - an educated [and] refined gentleman who reminded him very much of his father. After much correspondence ..., the son succeeded in getting his father to agree to invite the Negro college president to his home for dinner. Elaborate protections were provided; the dinner was scheduled for nine o'clock in the evening: the Negro servants were given the night off so they would not know what was going on. What must have been the agony of conflict in the bosom of that father who wanted to be true to the image which his son had of him, to be true to his own sense of integrity in encounter with a man of equal stature, and at the same time to do nothing that would disturb the pattern of segregation which was a part of his very peace of mind! The cost was the corrosion of the spirit, which is slow and imperceptible - but its effect is sure and relentless.
To the degree I deny the other the right to be different from me and fully reverence the other, I refuse that same to myself. Through dishonoring the other, one chips away at the self she or he is. With disrespect of the otherness of the other, one becomes, thereby, a little less human - as Thurman writes corrosion of the spirit.
Yet, the good news is, we can receive the other into ourselves, welcome her or his strangeness, and feel it run through us. Then, our lives become a little larger. We find ourselves more out in the open, freer to breathe the Common Air, a human among humans.
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(C) Brian K. Wilcox, 2020
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