My Brother from Another Mother

My barber was telling me a story about these two little boys.  They were best friends.  They grew up together.  They did everything together.  They were practically brothers.  One day they went to the barber together and asked for the exact same haircut.  When their parents asked them why, they said that they didn’t want their teacher to be able to tell them apart.

One of the little boys was black and one was white.  Only children would see themselves as exactly the same, despite the rest of the world seeing them as different colors.  I always used to say that underneath it all, we’re all pink.  Maybe if we got back to a mentality more aligned with this, we’d have less problems in the world.

A famous anthropologist was once giving a lecture on the history of man, and he paused when he got to a slide of two skulls side-by-side that were almost identical.  He looked out over the quiet crowd, took in the sea of faces, each one different and unique.  He noted that there were men and women from every race and culture represented in the large audience filling the auditorium.  And when the silence had dragged on almost too long, he said, “On this slide you see the skulls of two men approximately the same size and age.  Which one is the black man, and which one is the white man?” 

He paused again to let the question sink in.  He watched the eyes of the audience flick back and forth between the two skulls, trying to note the differences, trying to pick out characteristics that would prove the races of the two men.  A slight smile crept over his lips as the people became increasingly more frustrated by the task.  One by one, their eyes were drawn back to the professor, questioning and imploring.  He had proven to them that he was smarter than them all.  He had beaten them.  So, they waited for him to answer the question and show them the slight nuances that would prove a man’s race from his bones.

But the professor didn’t do that.  He simply said, “There is no way to tell.  In all aspects, these skulls are essentially identical.  If we dig deeper to get beneath the surface of people, to get beneath the color of their skin, we’ll find that they are just like us.  Sure, we come from different cultures and backgrounds.  We’ve had different experiences, but the same can be said for people of the same color too.  So, why do we act like skin color changes us somehow?  We act as if we’re a completely different species.  Well, as you can see on the screen here…we aren’t.  And life would be so much better for everyone, if we remember that.”