Us versus them

George Wallace, who died last week, probably did many good things in his life. Unfortunately for him, he will likely be best remembered for seven words he uttered in 1963 as the new governor of Alabama: "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever!"

Little did he know then that huge pockets of segregation would develop all over this country without the rule of law or the force of his state troopers. Urban centers and the rural West are the most dramatic cases. Few cases are more striking than Idaho.

I would bet that most people living in the Wood River Valley can actually count the number of African-Americans they have seen in the last year.

That should not include the Brotherhood Ski Week when 1,800 African-Americans come here to ski, party and otherwise electrify this area. For six day's this almost seems like a regular American town. Then the Brotherhood leaves and Ketchum goes back to being its chalky white self.

So while race relations seem to be the most fundamental and divisive issue in America, we have here no relations, hence, no issue. Why write about it'? One, because we can afford to indulge in only so much escapism. Two, because sometimes the absence of a problem is worse than the problem itself.

The glaring contradiction in America, at least since emancipation, has been that our supposed, deep belief in democracy can exist so easily alongside persistent racism. If we truly believed in the former we wouldn't have the latter.

And it may be that democracy is a concept that we have not really come to grips with yet. In a sense, democracy and racism are alter-egos of one another. One sees a world comprised of equal parts, the other sees it in terms of unequal parts.

It is obvious why democracy has persisted, but why has racism hung on for so long? What is actually at the heart of it? Is it an inherent attitude that every generation will have to wrestle with?

One reason it has been such an intractable problem is that its causes are many, not singular. We have to do a better job of separating out the factors involved, factors such as economic and educational disparity. We might then be able to solve small parts of the problem instead of being paralyzed by the enormity of it. The other fact clouding the issue is that while racism may have many causes, it, conversely, gets blamed for just about every social ill there is: from weird legal verdicts, to the welfare state, to low S.A.T. scores.

These may or may not be reasonable hypotheses, but the net result is that the term racism gets bandied about so readily that its meaning becomes fuzzy. Concomitantly, it is such an inflammatory word that when it is attached to every issue absolutely nothing gets sorted out. Once emotion bleeds into reason all is lost.

One of the first steps to solving the problem of racism is to get people to think more clearly and precisely about it. What is it exactly?

I actually had to look up the word. My old Webster's says racism is "a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race." An important word here is "primary."

People tend to think that claiming any difference in traits is racist. It's not only a specious argument to make but an unrealistic one. The other point about this definition worth noting is that a difference in traits is linked with an inequality. I don't think in our everyday lives we are careful enough to make a distinction between difference and inequality. One does not beget the other.

So why do people have trouble celebrating racial differences without assigning a relative value to those differences as a whole? Are people inherently racist?

I doubt it.

I think, in general, it is a learned phenomenon. Small children, black and white, take to one another as if their eyes didn't even register a difference in color. But parents and peers eventually do influence the attitudes of those children as they grow up.

Another more innocent influence on our thinking is history itself. The very fact that slavery occurred in this country will forever be a filter through which all of our inter-racial relations will be sifted.

How could the average white person not feel some guilt and embarrassment about what went on, even if it was a different time with different people? And how could the average black person not feel a little distrust and apprehension toward white people?

One race made a practice of buying and selling another. You can't erase the knowledge of that fact. So we have that hurdle to overcome--the awkwardness--the ugly little fact floating around in our heads. It's a little like trying to carry on a conversation with someone while there is a small fire burning in the corner of the room.

While I don't think people are inherently racist, I do think that a root cause of it--fear and distrust of difference or, more broadly, outsiders--may be in everyone's genes.

It is a theme that recurs: us vs. them.

Take even a trivial example, the obsession here with "being a local." How many times have you heard questions like, "How many years have you lived here? Are those full years or just summers? Where did you come from?"

There is this bizarre desire to achieve "local status," which, of course, no one can ever truly achieve.

For nine years I spent the summers in Salmon. I always kept 2L license plates even though I spent the bulk of the year in Ketchum. One would never be so foolish as to drive around Salmon with 5B plates. People would treat you differently, and believe me, not better.

The underlying fear of the outsider is that he is going to take something from us, something that is ours, ours by rights of being insiders.

The irony of this fetish is that no one truly is a local. America is an entire country of people relocating and starting over, especially in the West.

There are just different degrees of being an outsider. Unfortunately, the color of someone's skin is so apparent that it is the primary way people make assumptions of whether someone is familiar and, hence, an insider, or not and considered an outsider. Someone who looks exactly like us may seem to be less of a threat. Of course, that may not be the case at all.

I'm sure that this binary way of thinking, us versus them, has a sound biological reason behind it.

Millions of years ago, when we were out there living in the trees, looking for scraps of food, outsiders were a real threat. They might take your mate, your food, your happy little perch. It seems, though, that our instincts may not have caught up with our changing way of life.

Sensibilities can evolve a lot faster than genetic dispositions. It takes at a minimum 30 or 40 years for genes to turn over. Insight can happen in a flash.

So maybe our instinct is to distrust all that is different. And maybe this is one of those cases when we have to keep fighting our instincts with our sensibilities. We have to keep telling ourselves we can learn and prosper from people of different experience, culture, and abilities.

The alternative is to revel in our homogeneity. But it seems that the nature of life is to diversify itself. The odds of survival always go up.

Even George Wallace finally learned this fact. At the end of his life his very best friend in the world was a black man.