When a nation tears down its walls

By Bryan McKenzie

Published: November 9, 2008

Walls make good neighbors, primarily because they can keep neighbors away, and, if there’s one thing we humans are good at, it’s social and psychological stone masonry.

We spend a great deal of psychic energy in our mental basements with brick and mortar like some Edgar Allan Poe character, walling up those things and people we don’t like, a piece of them dying with each brick we lay.

We build emotional walls high and wide enough so no one will surmount them. We build a few gates into the fences so people can get through, but then we camouflage them so that only those who can read our idiosyncratic messages and hints can find us.

If enough of us build the same wall — or tear it down — we change society. That’s what we did last week when we voted Barack Obama, an African-American, as president.

Along way from 1970

The idea of a black man being president was impossible back in 1970 when, for the first time in my life, I attended school with black kids who were bused to my white-neighborhood junior high. I lived in the North, a land of de facto segregation where bank loans and social pressure enforced separate schools and communities. It was effective, too. There were no blacks living near me for about five square miles and none in my elementary school.

This sudden mix of creed and color did not settle well. Kids were as angry as their parents on both sides of the race line. The civil rights movements, marches and rioting in nearby Detroit were fresh in everyone’s minds. The killing of Martin Luther King Jr., was only two years old.

I found many new fences and walls separating the races that first day of class at Walter French Junior High School. By the time I graduated from Lansing Everett High School some six years later, those fences had mostly been torn down, board by board and brick by brick, through daily contact between people who seemed so different and turned out to be so similar.

By the time my brothers followed me into junior high and high school some six years later, fights related strictly to race were a rarity. Their friendships included many colors, from black to brown to white.

Still moving forward

We’re not finished. There are more walls to fall. To do that, we need to tear down our own fortifications. We need to see others’ motives and understand their frustrations. We need to see ourselves as we really are so that we can better see others. If we can tear down the walls between us, the walls of society will crumble.

There’s a lot of work to do and it won’t be easy, but we’ve made a good start.