Pia K. Hansen: Brief experience as minority drove home King’s message

A friend of mine stopped by after Christmas. Sitting on the couch he picked up a picture book about Denmark, which is where I grew up.

He flipped through the pages – 365 photos of life in the old country, one from each day throughout one year – looked at me and said, “Where are all the brothers? There are no brothers in here.”

With my mouth full of candy I said something profound like, “Huh?” Then I launched into explaining that minorities in Scandinavia today are predominantly immigrants from Middle Eastern countries, when my friend victoriously waved the book in my face saying, “I found one. Here’s a brother.”

The guy in the picture from Copenhagen was black and quite possibly American, just like my friend.

It’s human nature to look for someone who’s like yourself, to seek out the company of people who share your background, your family ties and your values. We find comfort among people like ourselves, and that’s fine as long as we don’t lose our curiosity and respect for people who are not like ourselves.

If the snap judgments by which we sort people into “I like” and “I don’t like” aren’t challenged on a regular basis, we become insular and prejudiced.

The first step toward avoiding prejudice is to admit that there are lots of things we don’t know.

I know what it’s like being Danish, and I’m learning this white majority American thing I’m doing, but I don’t know what it’s like being a black American. Or Russian. Or Chinese.

Last year I got a lesson in what it’s like being a minority. I spent a month volunteering at a newspaper in Lesotho, in southern Africa. There were no white people in the neighborhood where I lived, so as soon as I left the house I had an audience. Sometimes kids would flock together just to see me get out of the car. They wanted to touch my skin and my hair. When I walked over to the store with my two roommates, people would turn and stare, point and talk. My hosts worried about leaving me out in the sun for too long.

Here’s part of what I wrote in my blog from Africa:

“I can feel myself growing thin-skinned – I’m tired of being watched all the time. Mostly, I’m tired of the assumptions that come with my color. I guess this is what it’s like being tall and black in the United States: most everybody assumes you play basketball.

“Being short and white here, people assume that I have money. The status I have as a white person is the most difficult for me to deal with. I don’t want to be treated differently from everyone else.”

Perception is reality. It was my African friends’ assumptions about me and perception of me as a typical white woman, whatever that is, that bugged me the most. I struggled against their ideas of what I liked or didn’t like, trying to get them to see me as simply human.

When I moved to this country almost 16 years ago I already knew of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but I didn’t have the right context in which to really understand his message. It took a while, and perhaps ultimately a trip to Africa, for me to understand that King’s message of justice and equality isn’t just a rallying cry for black Americans – it is a rallying cry for us all to serve and respect each other.