Letters July 2005
Colorful peopleWhen I read something as inspirational as Baharak Sedigh's "The color of your heart" it gives me hope. Perhaps, the human condition is not as hopeless as it often appears. The world in which we live is so full of ignorance, hate and prejudice towards others that we lose sight of the fact, that at the end of the day, we are all part of a single race ñ the human race. We conveniently forget that deep down inside all of us have the same dreams, hopes and desires, and, yes, fears. We build up and elevate the inconsequential differences that make us unique until we have erected walls of mistrust that that separate us and prevent us from seeing others the way we want them to see us. Hate and prejudice are primitive emotions which are intimately part of the human psyche and therefore difficult for us to purge from our individual consciousness. Unless we find a way to do this, however, we condemn not only ourselves, but our children to a life where we and those we hate are unable to see one another as part of the same human family. Consequently we become unwilling to look for that common ground in daily life that will permit us to have mutual respect and unconditional acceptance of one another. While the human capacity to irrationally hate others is well documented throughout the long annuls of human history, one would think that we would have long ago found a way to overcome this dark emotional relic of our specie's ancient past. Hate destroys not only those who are its objects, but it also those who perpetrate it. It cripples the hater and makes him incapable of seeing others the way they really are. It makes the hater incapable of seeing others as individuals with hopes, needs, and wants. It poisons the hater's heart and mind and sadly this hate is all too often passed on to the next generation who in turn passes it on to their children. What we often forget, however, its that hate begets hate. Hate dehumanizes both the hater and the hated. There are some individuals, though, that are able to rise above the natural inclination to see others as somehow different from and lower than ourselves. These people give us hope and inspiration that we as a species can grow emotionally and further distance ourselves from our primitive and more animalistic emotions. People such as Martin Luther King, Mohandas Gandhi, and Nelson Mandela are known worldwide, but there are others whose names we never hear that are trying to make a difference and help all of us rise above our terrible capacity to see others as different from ourselves. After reading Ms. Sedigh's wonderful account of her days spent at the hospital getting to know people who initially she thought of as very different from herself and then realizing that they weren't so different after all, I felt inspired by her message of hope and love. Hate and prejudice are things that I have seen up close in my life. Unlike most people who are part of a single ethnic group and thus privy to only one set ethnocentric beliefs and prejudices, I have had the opportunity to walk the thin line that all people of mixed ethnic, racial or cultural heritages walk in life. People like me are able to float in and out of two different social milieus, and we are, thus, able to see and hear that both groups to which we belong usually hold the same brainless beliefs and say the same irrational kinds of things about the other, thinking that they are superior and the other group knows it. I am not saying that every individual that is part of a group is a racist or a bigot, but rather that taken as a whole the same kinds of negative stereotypes and ugly unfounded beliefs flourish equally well in both groups. Being both American and Iranian has afforded me the chance to see up close and personal the prejudices, which each group to which I belong, holds for the other. I used to get angry about it when I'd hear someone say something unkind, but I grew to realize that hate is an equal opportunity emotion and now I laugh about it and I do what I can to convince others that it is just a waste of time seeing others as different because when you get right down to it we are all the same. I have been asked by more than one American in my life why my father didn't marry a woman from his own country. The inference behind this question is that he must have been defective in some manner. The only thing that people who asked this can think is that any decent-looking, well educated, red-blooded American man would want to share his life in the loving arms of an American woman. Surely, they surmise, he must be abnormal to have spent his life loving an Iranian lady. Similarly, many Iranians have the same reaction when they discover that my mother has been married to an American man for two and a half decades. They think that something must surely have been wrong with her for her to have married a "foreign" man. Either she must have married for money or she must have not been a virgin and thus rejected by the men of her country. Recently my mom took me to a dentist for a check-up. The dentist happened to be Iranian. The dentist was peppering my mother with questions about how she met my father and how she felt about being married to a "foreigner." The dentist asked my mother if she thought is was better to be married to a "foreigner" than to an Iranian man. My mother said she didn't know because she had never been married to an Iranian. Then the dentist asked her what year she got married and how old my elder sister was. As the dentist's eyes rolled up toward the ceiling, I could see that she was doing the math in her head. She was trying to determine if my mother married because she had to. Put another way, she was trying to figure out if my sister was born within the first 9 months of my parents wedding. Surely, this had to be it, why else would a decent Iranian girl want to marry a foreign man? The dentist looked disappointed when she realized that my sister was born two and half years after my parents married. The dentist was also curious about whether my father had come from a rich family. Surely this had to be the explanation, my mother must have sold herself in marriage to a man she could never love, only for a life of ease and wealth. When my mother explained that my father had
had to work for everything he ever got in life and that his parents
would not help
him when he married her (because they opposed his marriage to a tan skinned
girl from Iran), the dentist was completely confused. "Why" the dentist
asked incredulously, "would his parents oppose his marriage to an Iranian
girl?" My mother smiled and said, "For the same reason many
Iranian parents would oppose their sons or daughters being married with a pale
skinned or black skinned American, prejudice."
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