Look at the kids in this Humanity Project photo. And ask yourself: When they are adults, will they face the same systemic racism and police violence as their parents and grandparents?
At this moment when the Black Lives Matter movement has gained wider acceptance, our nonprofit group reaffirms our commitment to “equality for each, respect for all.” That is what we stand for. It’s what the Humanity Project has always been about.
We recognize the racism embedded in our American culture. We acknowledge the realities of white privilege. We see the antagonism toward people of color that too often drives the actions of police officers locally and around the nation. Oh yes, we have seen the videos, the final agonizing moments of George Floyd and so many others. Far too many others. Like you, we also have wondered as we watched: “How can anybody be so callous? How can one human being treat another human being in this way?”
At the Humanity Project, we believe the answer lies within each of us. At the core of the human psyche.
As we grow through childhood into adults, nearly every person learns to strongly doubt ourselves at times, acquiring a deep insecurity and self-contempt as part of our coping mechanisms in a competitive and often hostile society. To widely varying degrees most folks feel lacking somehow, as if we’re not good enough, as if there’s something wrong with us. For some people, those feelings are less intense and more manageable in daily life. For others, such feelings become forces that power many of their thoughts, beliefs and actions.
We think this is what happens when people adopt virulent racist opinions. They are looking for ways to feel better about themselves, to justify a sense that, “I’m better than this person because of the color of my skin.” Documents from the mid-1800s prove this attitude was prevalent among slaveowners and other whites in the American South. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. noted the same attitude in his own time and called it “the drum major instinct.” At the Humanity Project, we feel sure it’s still the fundamental problem today. Racism is the bitter fruit of self-loathing.
A desire to exist in meaningful ways, the need to love, appear hardwired into our individual personalities from birth. There is an innate goodness in each human being. But that goodness can be pushed so far into the mind’s background that it seems to disappear completely in some individuals. Only immediate self-interest matters to them. For those who suffer the disease of racism, their attempts to prove themselves superior to people of color are required to relieve their self-loathing. Their relief is brief, though — and soon they need the next racist thought, comment or action.
Not to get too entangled here in heavy psychological analysis. But we think it’s very important to have some grasp of racism’s profound emotional roots. Yes indeed, we live with a system that perpetuates racism. But ask yourself why. Why has that system not been dismantled and reinvented by now? Why do police so often continue to target blacks for harassment or worse? We would not need to call out systemic racism if enough white individuals truly wanted change, if enough police believed in the value of every human being. But that’s clearly not the case … which returns us to the origins of racism. The need by some individuals to believe they are superior to other individuals. “The drum major instinct” again.
Working from this perspective, the Humanity Project creates innovative programs, writings and materials that help individuals better understand their own value and that of everyone else. This allows more of us to treat each person with respect as an equally valuable member of the human race.
Humanity’s problems are the problems of the human heart. “Equality for each, respect for all” emerge naturally from within the healthy, well-balanced individual. No one who feels good about who they are needs to put anybody down to lift themselves up. The Black Lives Matter movement is a reminder that blacks in our society remain mired in a system that treats them as inferior. And that the time is horribly overdue to change that — finally teaching many more people to acknowledge the obvious. Each life of a black person is valuable, each life is important. Every black life matters.
