THE New York Times, bastion of liberal opinion, published an article that by 2060 minorities will be the majority in America. So, it seemed that Americans should extend a warm welcome to newcomers who may be welcoming their posterity into a country changed into the newcomers’ image.
Psychologist Allison Skinner says the effect was the opposite—not a feeling of welcome, but one of fear at the prospect that Americans today will be Strangers in a Strange Land, to borrow the title of Ursula Le Guinn’s classic fable.
Skinner discovered this when she conducted a test on American reaction to the New York Times article. The respondents showed fear and hostility. Another test confirmed this finding—a test of computerized reaction time when subjects had to quickly pair their reactions to pictures of white and colored folk. The results showed that telling the dominant race about the increasing size or increasing political power of minorities triggers fear and hate.
It doesn’t help when minorities, in a natural reaction to majority prejudice, emphasize their difference in dress, custom and accent-speaking English.
True, colored folk are all American citizens. But feelings are not changed by law. Obama said change needs the heart not just the law—though law is a good start. But the Civil Rights Act, like the Confederate defeat, gave a new lease of life to old bias.
A good law doesn’t change the fact that no one likes strangers among themselves. It has happened everywhere even in continents where the people are all colored. Hutus massacred Tutsis, and Tutsis paid them back. Oddly, South African whites put down but never massacred blacks. And blacks never retaliated against their white African brothers. What is the solution?
It’s found in coffee. Blend.
A brother of former House Speaker Joe de Venecia told a rapt audience of Filipinos aspiring to emigrate, “Stop eating tuyo”. It scares the other people in the building that someone is eating what smells like a decomposing corpse; in the case of durian, the odor of genitals. Or so I’m told.
Blending in is only polite. Single origin coffee ground is prized but blended isn’t much different.
I say this out of concern for the safety of immigrants. Even Catholic teaching tells us to avoid martyrdom for our Catholic beliefs, Hugh Benson wrote in The Lord of the World—Pope Francis’s favorite sci-fi fiction. Practice, but don’t show off your faith if it offends society.
I say this also with deep regret that Americans have forgotten that they are not just any race of men but a promise of solidarity among all people in one world under a triune but single God who made them all.