The Marginalian
The Marginalian

The World We Live In: An Extraordinary Reality-Check

“You’ve got to tell the world how to treat you,” James Baldwin told Margaret Mead in their magnificently prescient 1970 conversation on race. “If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.” And yet the most pernicious seedbed of trouble is a world in which some people, but not others, are routinely told how they deserve to be treated, then routinely treated that way, based on criteria of visible difference that have nothing to do with the invisibilia of who they are. For, as a legendary Zen teacher observed, sameness and difference are constructs of the mind caught in the illusion of separateness — concepts that keep us from our expansive humanity.

Nothing illustrates this more clearly, nor with more harrowing honesty, than Traffic Stop — a breath-stopping animated short film from the always-excellent StoryCorps:

My whole worldview changed that night.

Complement with the wonderful StoryCorps film A Good Man, then revisit Dr. King on how the Ancient Greek notion of “agape” can help us cut off the chain of hate and Mead and Baldwin’s indispensable, urgently important A Rap on Race.


Published July 27, 2015

https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/07/27/story-corps-traffic-stop/

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