HB2 and learning who the enemy is: It’s not the ‘other’

In my high school years, I loved the movie of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical “South Pacific.” In particular, I loved two songs best of all: “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair” and “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.” One cheered my teenage “boy angst.” One fed my soul at a very deep level that I didn’t fully understand until my true adulthood. Allow me to share its lyrics:

You’ve got to be taught

To hate and fear,

You’ve got to be taught

From year to year,

It’s got to be drummed

In your dear little ear

You’ve got to be carefully taught

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid

Of people whose eyes are oddly made

And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade

You’ve got to be carefully taught

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,

Before you are six or seven or eight,

To hate all the people your relatives hate,

You’ve got to be carefully taught!

Thank you, Oscar Hammerstein II, for giving me that lesson in my youth. I have heard its message reverberate far too many times over the past six decades. It helped me to understand the nonsensical battle of integration in the public schools. It was a stretch, but it in a small way helped me understand why the white “Christian” leaders of my Methodist Church vowed that, if black people tried to attend services there, they would be stopped from entering. Stopped from entering. Stopped from coming into a house of worship. I think that was my first big clue that I’d best be thinking for myself when it came to religious leaders.

The lesson was woven into the seeds of unrest that, as a college student and young mother, I subsequently felt during this nation’s disturbing war in Southeast Asia. A battle against “other.” A sickening excuse to denigrate, to slaughter “other.” Male friends who served in that war returned with mind-fracturing stories of the beauty of the landscape before it was napalmed; the beauty of the families they spent time with on R&R. I will never forget that dichotomy. It tore them up, and it made a permanent imprint on me.

And I can’t even wrap my head around this country’s physical war against Iraq, with results that subsequently transformed some minds into a hatred of all things Muslim. But I can see the “carefully taught” lesson plainly juxtaposed against the ungodly consequences and the boiling violence and retaliatory hatred that haunt the world at this juncture.

And so in my mind, I look to home. I look to my native state of North Carolina. That should be a place that gives me peace – that gives all its residents peace. Over many years, I have proudly watched my state step forward with blessed intention in the realms of education for all, opportunity for the many, civil justice that even in its failures has maintained the decent and honorable aspirations that justice requires.

But now there is a boiling cloud on this state’s horizon that spreads fear and hatred, not justice and enlightenment. That same hatred seems to have consumed the minds of enough political “leaders” that it is spreading its evil, thick smoke across the communities of this state and into the homes of the vulnerable. The homes of the “other.” The people who do not look like the average white male legislator or his family members. The people whose lives present struggles that he will never know. Yet he is driven to make life harder for them because he, too, has been carefully taught.

My heart is so sad. To copy a currently familiar phrase, “We are better than this.” My state is better than this. But I believe we first must identify exactly who the real enemy is in this debacle. The enemy is not a transgender individual living his or her life in an attempt to become as fully whole as possible. The enemy is not a Latino immigrant carrying a city-government ID card. The enemy is not, for god’s sake, the eloquent U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch. The enemy is hate. Hate that has been carefully taught. Our task is to carefully unwind its grip from around our collective throats.

This story was originally published May 21, 2016 at 6:00 PM with the headline "HB2 and learning who the enemy is: It’s not the ‘other’."