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Visions Past and Present
By lindamuralidharan on 2009-03-23 18:08:18
I enjoy following professional basketball and college basketball in a low key sort of way. I have a few favorite teams and
enjoy seeing a good game.
Thus I follow the NCAA tournament with some interest. I watched one of my favorites, Michigan, lose to Oklahoma. I
enjoyed seeing the close enough game and was sorry to be on the losing end. And yet I was really struck by something else
I observed as the Oklahoma team and audience was portrayed and described.
Two of the outstanding Oklahoma players are brothers, Blake and Taylor Griffin (if I have noted the names quite right).
Their mother and father were shown rooting them on from the side lines. Their father is a very dark skinned Afro American
appearing man. Their mother is fair skinned Caucasian appearing woman, and the brothers have reddish hair and fair skins.
This to me is a vision of how society changes for the good, of how people learn to live and let live, to accept difference of
ethnic background or ultimately religions and culture and life styles. I know this scene would not have happened in my
childhood. Of course, in those days few students of Afro American ancestry were even admitted to so many of our great
educational institutions. And just as significantly there were many barriers to people of differing ethnic backgrounds
marrying and forming successful families. In the areas where my own Southern relatives live, even being friends with
black people put you in a category "lower" than the black people themselves were placed in by the larger society.
I won't repeat here the ugly phrase that was used for white people who supported or associated on an equal basis with black
people in areas of the South.
I was thus filled with great joy to see the Griffin family shown on national TV as any other family of athletes would be
shown. I was thrilled to see the brothers acting like relatively mature young men who revel in their apparently close family
and in their own accomplishments in a college setting.
(I only could wish they had chosen to go to Michigan rather than Oklahoma..)
Then yesterday I had a conversation with a person who came to this country years ago from Syria. He was raised in a
Muslim family and remembers his small town in Syria where he went to a Catholic school and where Muslims and Catholic
Christians and Eastern Orthodox Christians lived and studied together with no rancor and no discrimination. I have heard
other tales from people raised 40 or more years ago in Lebanon where Jewish people, people of Islamic and Christian faiths
lived and worked with minimum conflict.
Since then, while we in the US have made our own kind of necessary progress in terms of ethnic relations, many foreign
countries have tried to play out their proxy struggles on the soil of Syria and Lebanon and Iraq and other areas of the world.
This type of interference has destroyed many functioning communities and much ethnic goodwill. I write about both
visions, the NCAA scenes and the historical Middle Eastern scenes, as a reminder that diverse groups really can accept each
other, no matter how different their personal cultural and religious choices may be. I want to keep these visions of positive
social life in our hearts and minds as we move with hope toward spreading the prevalence of conflict free and diverse and
peaceful nations and communities.
