By Chris Warren.
Recent events in Charlotte, North Carolina and in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as well as other instances of black citizens being shot dead by the police have kept alive the ongoing and seemingly endless charges of institutional racism in the United States. I’m not here to make a lengthy commentary on the validity of the collective accusations, except to say that I believe neither side is totally right nor totally wrong.
What I am going to suggest is that race relations would improve if we followed the example of a sandwich. No, this is is not a gag or satire piece, and I am absolutely not trying to trivialize the immense emotional pain these deaths cause others. Twenty First Summer is a serious blog and this is a serious discourse.
The individual contents of a sandwich are not particularly inviting. No one eats just a raw onion or a spoonful of mustard or a leaf of plain lettuce. And while a solo slice of cheese or meat is completely palatable, it’s not very exciting. But put it all together between two slices of bread and the end result is a symphony of delicious that no one refuses.
Go anywhere in the world, in any culture, and they have some version of a sandwich. It’s the universal food for an entire planet, possibly the only food that everyone eats.
Now compare all of humanity to the ingredients of a sandwich. Each ingredient has its own special qualities and is inherently valuable, but by itself can only be so much. When combined together they are something that is greater than the sum of its parts.
The point is that people are better as a group than we are when wrapped up inside ourselves. We don’t have to always agree. We don’t have to hold hands and sing. Heck, we don’t even have to like each other! We simply have to live and let live respectfully.
That’s why we could learn a lot about race relations by looking at the example of the humble sandwich. Together, the ingredients of a sandwich accomplish something that they cannot achieve individually.
And so it is with people. We can stand alone and be just average, which is not horrible, but why settle for average? Or we can join together and be something stellar. It’s not lost on me that race relations are a complex topic with a high emotional payload and a lineage going back hundreds of years, but what the hell. Nothing else has worked; a “sandwich solution” is not any more a nutty idea than all the failures that came before it.