Don’t judge me until you know me

I was raised Unitarian, even though my father was Jewish. He chose not to raise us in his faith because he didn’t want us to feel the persecution he experienced growing up in Brooklyn during the early part of the last century.

My best friend in kindergarten -- who is still one of my closest friends today -- is Japanese. It never crossed my mind that she was “different.”  Yet her American-born mother, spent much of World War II in a California internment camp with millions of other Japanese-American citizens.

Last night over dinner, my girlfriend shared her memories of the Detroit race riots. She was 8 years old in 1967 when army tanks rumbled through her neighborhood and sent her running for cover under her bed!

While over time the world has become a global community, ironically we’re still fighting many of the same battles we did decades ago.  It seems the more alike we become, the more we want to preserve our differences.

Confucius said that “Human beings are drawn close to one another by their common nature, but habits and customs keep them apart.”  

The goal, then, should be unity without uniformity.  Inclusion, not assimilation.  That means embracing diversity, not resisting it.  We need to learn to value differences not feel threatened by them.  

Barry Rand, a former executive with Xerox Corporation, says:  “When two people think alike, one of them is redundant.”  What a great mindset! 

My definition of diversity is pretty broad.  It’s not only defined by race or gender or religion.  It extends to age, education, lifestyle, physical ability, family status, sexual preference, geographic origin, and other characteristics. We are all more the same than we might imagine.

A couple of years ago when the initial findings on the human genome were announced, scientists reported an interesting fact – every person shares 99.99 percent of his or her genetic code with all other people.  And people from different racial groups can have more in common genetically than people of the same race.

So why, then, is there so much misunderstanding and injustice in the world?  That’s a question I can’t answer.  But I look to the future with optimism.  We are making progress.

Make no mistake, we still have a long way to go.  Our world is far from perfect, and it may never be.  But I think that as long as we do the best we can to improve conditions, we can make this a better place – one step at a time.

All of us have a role to play.  Each of us can make a difference – at home, at work and in our communities.  

So please don’t judge me until you know me. You may be surprised by what you find!