Building Rainbow Nations
SEVEN YEARS AGO, I took my sons Henry and Patrick to South Africa to check out some new charitable project requests for the Utopia Foundation and to review some projects we were already supporting. Utopia’s mission is to create a world where every person goes to bed feeling safe, fed, happy, and optimistic about tomorrow. The emphasis is on communities and transformative education, and our process is centered on humbly asking what people need, being as local as possible, and having conversations on how we can love the community without judging it.
In other words, we come to listen, and the intentional bias that guides us is to listen primarily to mothers and grandmothers. We do it because it works, and also because I was raised by a feminist who taught women’s studies and a dad who made sure we learned to listen with curiosity, intention, and acceptance because he did not wish to raise any bigots. The result of the process on that visit to South Africa is that we purposefully interacted with a lot of different people in many different situations. When we returned home to Uganda, my wife asked how it went, and I replied, “We should live in South Africa.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because no one there asked me if Patrick is my son,” I told her.
My answer has to do with what people pay attention to—something I notice because I have six kids from four DNA pools. What’s obvious to everyone is that, like most kids born in Zambia, Patrick’s eyes are brown and his skin is black. His younger brother Henry has DNA more akin to a Scotch-Irish guy: blue eyes, curly blond hair, and skin that burns easily. In Uganda, and also in the United States and many other countries, I get lots of looks and questions about my kids, and it does not feel good to hear people say, “He can’t be your son,” or “That’s not your son.” I’ve come to realize that while most nations typically see in black and white, the people of the “Rainbow Nation” of South Africa feel very different. At grocery stores, restaurants, and in line for ice cream, people saw how we interacted and assumed both boys were my kids. I had the feeling of being at home, and that is hard to find.
When we lived on Maui, the opposing football team taunted my oldest son with, “We will kill you, white boy.” When I lived in Uganda, I carried my adopted son Michael in a backpack, and the word I could always pick out was mzungu, which means foreigner or white person. After much prompting, my friends who know the local languages explained that people talked about me derisively because I was “carrying a child like a woman,” and “doing women’s work.” Thankfully, I am very curious, find cultural differences and biases fascinating, and I’m too introspective to find name-calling hurtful. But such comments certainly didn’t make me feel at home.
“There is nothing evil about tolerance that is grounded in the mindful work to end suffering and cause happiness.”
My six kids, ages 11 to 34, have been to more than 50 countries and every state in the United States. They have lived in countries where they were the only Black kids in their school or the only white kids in their class. So for them, it is normal to be seen as different, and it comes from, as they call it, being a “family of adventurers.” When others point out our differences, my kids reassure me that those folks are just ignorant. When the words are really hurtful, my kids remind me that no one can make you mad without your permission and that just because someone says something doesn’t make it true.
They have many versions of the famous saying, “Sticks and stones will break your bones, but names will never hurt you.”
I once overheard one of my children say while chatting with a friend, “We are vegetarian, except for two brothers, and Dad is Buddhist, I think, but we go to church. Our friends are Muslims, Catholics, and other religions.” He sees our quirky life not as embarrassing otherness but as something cool. Like most parents, we taught our kids not to be impolite by saying hurtful things: He farted. She is fat. He has zits. But education has to go much further—to be kind when it takes effort.
It is natural to notice different colors, races, accents, social statuses, and disabilities. And it is often easy to discern political bias, religion, or tribe. We also know that stereotypes are the brain being lazy by not actually paying attention to the real person in front of you—who may be doing exactly the same thing to you. So when we create a pecking order of good, bad, prettier, nicer, or dumber, we are feeding bigotry and accentuating apartness. Anything that pulls us apart is wrong—and by wrong I mean where evil dwells or the lazy ignorance that gives birth to evil.
I remember a young Christian woman applying to be a nanny for our children saying, “Tolerance is evil. It leads to hell. We can’t tolerate anything unholy.” Lazy tolerance—in which we tolerate bullying, a caste system, genital mutilation, rape, or any number of obvious wrongs because they are “cultural”— is evil. But there is nothing evil about tolerance that is grounded in the mindful work to end suffering and cause happiness.
Spiritual folks, in the name of being unattached or telling themselves that God has a plan, must resist the lazy path that makes them numb to the evils plaguing the world. The comfortable path of indifference and doing nothing feeds on misguided faith to separate us from this moment when we are needed most, pulling us away from the call to love, to show compassion, and to take action. In other words, seeing humanity as Nelson Mandela
dreamed: a rainbow of tribes, cultures, and races all equal, living in love, and supporting each other as one. They call it Ubuntu here. It is not an easy path.
I would love to hear your thoughts about Building Rainbow Nations. Contact me here.
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