Let That Be Your Last Battlefield

Remember the Star Trek episode “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield?” It’s the one where Gene Rodenberry, or whoever, made his plug for civil rights. The Enterprise has encountered a planet where the people are divided down the middle, one side of them colored black and the other white. Two of these people are on board the ship, one expressing unmitigated loathing toward the other. The crew is puzzled (I was, too, as I remember): Why do they hate each other so much? But one of the two-toned people clues them in: “Don’t you see?” he asks. “I am white on the left side, and black on the right, but he! He is white on the right side, and black on the left!”

I thought of that episode when driving into the POC, the refugee camp inside the UN compound where Nuers have been fleeing to escape Dinka violence since 2013. I have no real qualification to talk about this ethnic conflict (which, to be clear, goes both ways – in predominantly Nuer areas, Dinka have had to flee for their lives). I have no deep knowledge of the roots or content of the tension. All I have are the perceptions and reactions of an outsider. But, then, as with the emperor and his clothes, there may be times when that’s not useless.

All I can say, as an outsider, is that it is impossible to see any difference between the groups. To me, the patients I was treating in Juba (Nuer) look exactly like the patients I was treating in Aweil (Dinka). The kids you drive past on the way to the Quonset hut look exactly like the kids who used to hang out outside the “Maternity gate.” I gather that names are different, and that, if you know what you are looking for, you can tell the difference based on the patterns of scarification on people’s faces and bodies. But if the dissention comes down to things as tiny as that, it makes the Star Trek episode seem even more a propos.

Of course, this is oversimplified. If you asked an anti-Semite why he doesn’t like Jews, I doubt the first response would be “because they look different.” He would seek to justify himself based on some verdict about values and behavior and goals and loyalties – and I’m sure the same applies here. But – I don’t know – when you think of all the killing, all the patients we’ve been patching up, and then you drive into that compound and see people who look exactly like their “enemies,” it’s hard not to think, “What the fuck??”

It hit particularly hard regarding the little girl whose arm we had to amputate. Apparently, she was shot a long way from town. When her family managed to get her to Juba, they were not far from a medical facility. But, as one of my colleagues put it, they couldn’t go to it because “they don’t treat Nuer there.” When you hear that a five-year-old girl in desperate need of medical attention can’t get it because she belongs to the “wrong” group, it makes you think, just what is WRONG with people??

In the end, from one point of view, it’s not “my” problem. I can just fly away, as I did on Monday. But it’s gotten me thinking, naturally, about bigotry in the US. And not necessarily in the way I might have expected.

Sad though it is, I think there is something salutary in realizing that this kind of hatred is universal. As a white American, one of the things I think is unhelpful in the discussions of racism here is any tendency to treat it not as a universal aspect of power struggles and power relations, but as some particular pathology of white people. I don’t think this is a conscious belief of many people (although it is of some – remember Leonard Jeffries, the City College professor from the early 90s, with his condemnation of the pale “ice people”?). More, it’s a kind of vague, potential background assumption that some people, both white and non-white, may slide into making. And it moves the focus away from understanding, taking responsibility, and changing, mucking it up with a guilty and resistant defensiveness.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t historical differences that inflect the problem in critical ways. Thus, in most of the world, white people have, for centuries, been the ones on the “winning” end of racism, the ones benefiting from it, the ones inflicting it or tolerating it, the ones actively seeking to maintain it. And, in America, more than anyone else, black people have been the ones suffering from it, in ways enormous and small, violent and laughable. So it’s not like “we’re all equal” in this. My point is just that seeing the universality of it helps clear away some unhelpful emotional baggage, so we can more clearly (and perhaps with more hope) focus on fixing it.

Or maybe I’m just looking for a silver lining in what is, however you look at it, a sad reality.