The I-Word

My eldest daughter was about two-years-old when she picked up a crumpled page from a coloring book at a playground and smoothed it out. “Look, it’s a picture of a rainbow,” she said. All its colors had been washed away except for one. “How come this rainbow has only one color, daddy?”

I often think of rainbows. I was very happy to see one almost every day during summers in Columbus where my children grew up, when I looked out of the back window of my house and saw my kids, who are part-Indian, part-German, and part-Italian, play with our white and black neighborhood kids. Maybe it’s just me. The I-word, integration--one of Dr. King’s favorite words--seems to be out of fashion.

“You’re still stuck in the 60’s,” a friend once told me. “The world today doesn’t rock to Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Ravi Shankar, and it sure doesn’t pay attention to integration.” She’s probably right. Who cares if Tiger Woods is part-black and part-Asian? Who cares if India, where I was born, also gave birth to Chess, Algebra, a good part of ancient Astronomy, the number system we use and words like sugar, pepper, ginger, orange, shampoo and pajamas? Who cares if much of our technology today is manufactured and programmed by hands of color? It seems diversity is everywhere … except where it matters most.

Most of us still stick with our own kind when it comes to who we eat with, who we live with, and who we worship with. What’s the harm, anyway, we say. Birds of a feather flock together. Well, at the rate at which things are going, we may flock ourselves out of existence.

Look at recent news: The Southern Poverty Law Center reports that hate crimes are on the rise. In the 2012 elections, the majority of White Americans voted for one party while an overwhelming majority of non-Whites—including African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans—voted for another. According to polls, most Whites do not consider it urgent to end deportations of undocumented children and mothers. Gun ownership—even owning not one but multiple semi-automatic weapons with high capacity magazines--is almost sacred to many White Americans while gun violence is devastating America’s inner cities. Most non-Whites want less money spent on prisons and more on schools and teachers. It’s not just we’re not mixing. We simply do not see eye-to-eye. Sure, integration doesn’t solve everything. As Malcolm X pointed out, slavery was a highly integrated institution. But integration—coming together to share a meal and have a heart-to-heart--is the first step. Without that first step, what we have is continued psychological civil war, and all we can hope for is truce, not peace. We need to make it a priority to integrate our dinner tables and worship centers like members of churches such as All Saints in DC and Shaker Heights UU in Cleveland have done. Let’s not forget what every two-year-old knows: there is something wonderful missing in a rainbow with just one color.

(1998; revised 2013)