Once, on a summer afternoon long ago, a neighbor and I astounded each other. I learned from him that he believed the sun moved around the earth every day, at which point he learned from me it did not. At the time, he was twenty-one, and I remember wondering “Wow! How did this happen?” How had he not learned this? We had engaged in many long conversations, and there had been nothing about him that had ever given me the impression that he would not know this –- nothing I could see.
 

     We have to be taught, by accident or planning, not to believe everything we “see”. It can be a difficult lesson to learn. Some manage to master the fundamentals of this weird idea, and too many fail to advance beyond that basic level of understanding.

      When science has a hard time against belief, what chance does belief have against belief? It is a question asked in lieu of despairing about the current “conversation” the nation is supposedly having about our native-born boogeyman. Race, as a topic of discussion, is once more thrust forward, not because of its worthiness but because of its prickliness. A substantial percentage of black Americans are pricked by the verdict in the George Zimmerman case (“pricked” being an obvious understatement), and by the seeming beliefs of a substantial percentage of white Americans in regard to said verdict. Many white Americans don’t understand why so many black Americans are pricked, and are in turn pricked. Everyone wonders about everyone else “Why can’t they see?”

     Are there things black Americans don’t see that whites believe should be seen? Undoubtedly, but I think its safe to say that — throughout the nation’s history — black Americans have had more experience in dealing with the chasm between one man’s beliefs and another man’s sight, and are more used to others not seeing what seems plainly visible. I’ll bet my great-great grandparents believed they should not have been slaves, and probably had a hard time trying to understand why so many white folk just couldn’t see that. I know for a fact that my father and mother believed their country -– a segregated country where my father served in a segregated army — should have guaranteed their rights as much as it did the rights of their white compatriots. Their compatriots just didn’t see it that way. When the two-room schoolhouse for black students in my mother’s hometown was closed due to desegregation, and my aunt — a teacher and principal at that school — was preparing to move herself and her students (including my sisters, brothers and cousins) to the white school, the threats made in anonymous phone calls to her the night before were a clear sign that some white community members couldn’t see things her way. Far from being ancient history, this is living history.

     A preponderance of white Americans being blind to the life, liberty and happiness — and sometimes even the very humanity — of black Americans is not a new phenomenon, just a continually confounding, frustrating and infuriating one. George Zimmerman reminds us it can be a deadly one, too, but those who believe Mr Zimmerman is an aberration should consider a bit of information about seeing and believing. While discussing the Zimmerman case on MSNBC’s Morning Joe two weeks ago, Maya Wiley of the Center for Social Inclusion cited research which demonstrates that police officers and college students have one thing in common: they are more likely to shoot a black man with a wallet than a white man with a gun. She noted further “That happens in a nanosecond.” 

      So, we have polls and bar graphs giving us a glimpse of what is being felt, viscerally, all around: we remain uncomfortably and unproductively divided more than we care to acknowledge. We seem to have no idea how to have a conversation in which what is being felt is effectively communicated to those who aren’t feeling it. Although it is a conversation worth having, that is true only if participants follow the example set by my neighbor years ago. Instead of being wedded to what he had assumed to be true, he was open to the idea that what he had believed up to that point might be false. He was intrigued by the implications of this new information, by what it would mean in how he viewed the world. He wanted to learn, and — instead of being embarrassed by what he didn’t know, what he had somehow missed learning along the way — he was astounded.