Getting to Know You
In a recent column, I noted something long known by neuroscientists: The human brain is wired to believe there are two kinds of people—us and them. Oh, Mother Teresa types may see but one kind of people in a big tent world—us—but such folks are apparently few.
So, whites tend to see blacks, as “thems,” and probably not so good as us, just as most Europeans apparently see Romas (Gypsies) as “thems,” and to be avoided. On the other side of the globe, Japanese and Chinese tend to see us whites as inferior to them. And so it goes.
Can anything be done to make “us-es” out of thems, thus reducing division, distrust, conflict, and the protests of the present in our streets?
Based on my recollections of life growing up post-World War II, the key is “getting to know all about you,” as Julie Andrews sang.
There was one African-American family in my otherwise all-white rural small town. Joe Harrington was on the road crew that built Illinois Route 17 through Toulon in the 1920s. Mr. Harrington decided to stay. He and wife Dora had five children, all of whom were graduated from Toulon High in the 1940-50s.
The Harringtons attended the First Baptist Church regularly. The kids were all active in school, in sports, band and chorus, class plays and even in, get this, the annual minstrel show put on by the music department. When Toulon High held its first homecoming in 1947, Don Harrington was named Homecoming King (see photo nearby). When the football team took the yellow school bus to Chicago for a Bears game, the team stopped along the way at a café for lunch. When told that the café would not serve Don, the team all stood up and left the café, in a huff.
In other words, The Harringtons had become part of the Toulon community, or “us.”
My town was not unique, I’m sure. It was just playing out human nature. Getting to know someone breaks down stereotypes based on ignorance of the thems we know little about.
But that doesn’t mean the town had shed its racism. I recall sitting at a table in Les’ Café, where locals gathered. A young adult, Al Harrington was also at the table. During the conversation, one of the farmers started railing on about “N-----s.” Nobody seemed to think anything about it, as the table talk wasn’t about Al, one of us. I was just old enough to feel a bit awkward, and I’m sure Al did, too.
All the Harrington children went on to become solid, hardworking citizens—brick mason, career enlisted Air Force, factory worker. Sarah Jane went to college and reportedly wrote a book later about her husband, a high-ranking African-American Air Force officer.
One of the Harrington boys later married a white woman from a fine Toulon family.
Since the 1960s, increases in college going for African-Americans and desegregated housing have made it easier for people of different races to get to know one another.
The Illinois Farm Bureau Adopt-a-Legislator program brings city lawmakers to the farm for a weekend, and often there are reciprocal visits. A small thing, maybe, yet it should be replicated.
Today’s deeper divisions are more perplexing, seemingly intractable, to wit: The growing chasm, not between races, but between social strata. At the bottom, I fear, in both desperately poor isolated city neighborhoods as well as among more and more white single mothers and absent fathers in rural areas, is a layer of
