Transcriber: Annet Johnson Reviewer: David DeRuwe
I used to be an executive at a Fortune 500 company in Los Angeles,
but 11 years ago, I dropped out of the rat race because I had an epiphany:
I’m not a rat!
(Laughter)
So I decided to completely change my life.
I quit my job,
and my family and I moved out of L.A. and into the woods ...
of Montana.
(Laughter)
So in case you haven’t noticed,
I’m Black.
(Laughter)
And in case, you know, it may not be quite as obvious to you,
I’m also gay.
My partner’s white, and our son is bi-racial.
Now if you’re wondering why someone like me
would move to a place that’s 90% white,
predominantly Christian,
and overwhelmingly heteronormative in supporting those values,
you’re not alone.
When we first announced our relocation plan,
many of our friends and family were terrified
about what we’d find on the other side.
They were worried that we wouldn’t be welcomed.
One of my colleagues was so fearful
that he emailed me an article about a white supremacist
who just set up shop in our new home,
along with a note: “Hope you don’t run into this guy!”
But I’ve never shied away from a challenge.
I figured,
if I could graduate from Harvard Law School
and run a business affairs department,
I wasn’t afraid of what might be outside the safety zone.
Well, at least that’s what I told myself
and told everyone else.
But deep down,
I held a secret I didn’t share with anyone.
Deep down,
a very small part of me
was afraid of what might lie on the other side.
I couldn’t help but wonder, “Was I being naive?
Would the decision to surround myself
with so many of these wrong types of white people,
be one that might put my family at risk?”
One day while we were vacationing in the Idaho Panhandle,
not far from our home in Montana, I came face to face with that fear.
It happened at a resort that caters to working- and middle-class white families.
It’s a place where you’re more likely to see a black bear than a Black person.
(Laughter)
There are no all-gender restrooms.
There’s no signage on the walls reminding patrons that Black Lives Matter.
So as our son was romping in the pool,
my partner and I were catching up with the news on our phones,
and I remembered that there had been another mass shooting.
Sadly, I can't tell you which one because there have been so many.
But I remember talking with my partner
and we were discussing the seemingly impossible dilemma
of stopping the senseless killing of innocent people
without violating the rights of law-abiding Americans.
Anyway, so as we’re talking, I sense someone watching us.
I casually look over my shoulder,
I see the last thing any Black person wants to see:
a white man,
in his early thirties,
head shaved clean,
tattooed sleeves all up and down his arms
and under one of his eyes - a single teardrop.
You see, in our haste to book our trip, I’d forgotten that the Idaho Panhandle
isn’t just the home of a family-friendly water park.
It’s also the home of white supremacy.
In fact, at the time, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center,
Idaho was home to 12 active hate groups.
That made it the most hateful state in the country,
OK?
So the kind of person my colleague always,
when I left California, had warned us about,
the kind of person I’d always thought, I was hoping, I’d never run into,
that person was just sitting a few feet from us.
I tried to play it cool, my friends, but at that moment,
I felt what so many of us fear now in a deeply divided America:
I felt fear.
And after watching us for a few minutes,
he got up and he started walking towards our table,
and that’s when I really started freaking out.
But this bald, tattooed, white man with the teardrop surprised me.
He greeted us politely and he asked if he could join us.
OK.
And then ...
then he said he’d overheard us talking about guns,
and then I went to another level, and then I thought,
(Laughter)
“Oh, geez,
we’re about to get into a confrontation
with a skinhead who thinks anyone with a pulse should own an assault rifle.”
But then he surprised me again.
He said he was concerned about the recent wave of mass shootings too.
In fact,
he wanted the same common sense balanced solutions to gun control
that my partner and I did.
He wanted laws that would keep guns out of the hands of kids
and people with a history of mental illness
and people with criminal records,
while still respecting the rights of Americans who were law-abiding
and who treated guns with respect.
You see, I thought that because of the way he looked
we wouldn’t be on the same page, but I was wrong.
Anyway,
we talked about half an hour about a lot of different stuff,
and when he got up to leave, he said something I will never forget:
He looked me in the eye and said,
“You know what they’re trying to do to us, right?”
And I’m like, “Who? What? What are you talking about?”
(Laughter)
He said, “The media,
the politicians -
they don’t want people like you and me talking to each other.
They want us divided.
But you’re my sister, and I’m your brother.
We’re all Americans.”
Today,
America seems more deeply divided
than it’s been any time since the Civil War.
And lockdowns and social distancing have only deepened our sense of isolation
and pushed us further from each other.
Everywhere we turn,
we find reasons to separate ourselves.
Are we conservative? Are we liberal?
Are we Black or white?
Are we gay, straight?
What pronoun do we use to identify ourselves?
Are we vaccinated or unvaccinated?
Do we listen to mainstream news or do we buy into misinformation?
We’ve been sliced and diced with so many different labels,
and every day it seems a new one surfaces to remind us just how different we are.
But,
what if we’re not as different from each other as we think?
What if our collective reality has been distorted?
What if what we’re really seeing is just the illusion of division.
My friends,
my journey across the political and racial divide
has gifted me with an unexpected insight.
What we have in common ...
is more important than what separates us.
Now, look, we all know America is in crisis now,
and it’s tempting to think that that’s happening because of our differences
or because the other side won the last election.
But I believe the key to pulling America out of crisis
lies in shattering the illusion of division
and focusing on what we have in common because that’s what matters most now.
11 years ago,
my family took a leap of faith
to live among people who don’t look like me
and certainly don’t share my lifestyle,
but we held hope that our new neighbors want to like us in so many ways,
but still respect our differences
and welcome us.
And, my friends, it was a bet that paid off.
The people we had been primed to fear
have treated us with kindness,
respect,
and even love.
They’ve helped us wrangle livestock,
recover from windstorms,
our families have traveled together across the state to soccer games,
and believe it or not,
my son has forged bonds with boys who treat him like a brother.
Have we experienced homophobia and racism in our new home?
Yes,
but,
there’s a but,
those experiences have been the rare exception,
not the norm.
More often than not, we connect with each other,
not just because we love Big Sky Country, because we do,
and not just because we delight
in the sound of Canada geese soaring over our heads on spring mornings,
but because we have the same things on our minds day in and day out.
My experience has taught me that our perception
of reality has been so distorted
that it’s magnified
the true sense of division in America.
And there’s research to support this.
Between 2016 and 2020,
Boston Globe editor, Diane Hessan, conducted thousands of interviews
with American voters and she discovered something astonishing:
On issue after issue, from immigration to health care to gun control,
Americans all along this political spectrum
have remarkably similar thoughts on most issues.
They wanted the same common sense solutions to these issues.
She found that we have a distorted perception of each other
that’s magnifying our sense of division.
We think we have nothing in common, but it's an illusion, my friends.
It’s an illusion.
So the question is: Why do we embrace an illusion?
Her research also found that TV news
and the political establishment
are distorting our reality by focusing on the political fringe.
They get more eyeballs and they get more votes
when they fixate our attention on people with the loudest, most extreme voices
and get us agitated.
The problem is - focusing on our differences,
especially the extreme ones, it doesn’t just magnify division,
it keeps our attention focused away from the big picture.
The big picture, my friends,
is that regardless of what we look like or which side we’re on,
the cost of gas, food, housing, and education, and health care,
everything is becoming more unaffordable for us.
We are watching our cities fill up with homeless Americans.
We are struggling every year to find jobs that pay a living wage.
Our children,
we’re trying to keep our children safe in a pandemic of opioids.
This is what's pulling America into crisis, my friends.
Not our differences,
but the problems we all have in common.
The problems that never seem to get better, only seem to get worse,
no matter who’s in office or which side they’re on.
Succumbing to the illusion of division also keeps us from understanding
that we are all connected in profound ways, not just to each other,
but to every living thing on this planet.
The recent photos from the James Webb Space Telescope
remind us that every molecule in our body,
every one was made from stars
that were born billions and billions of years ago, light years away.
Friends, that means that we are all cosmically connected.
We are one.
One, my friends.
How different can we possibly be from each other
when the energy within all of us flows through everything in the universe?
54 years ago,
Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us of our common bonds
when he planned the Poor People’s March on Washington.
His goal was to reduce poverty
on a broadest level possible by demanding systemic economic reform.
His march would have been an unprecedented display of power
by a broad coalition of Americans of all races
coming together united against a system that was failing them.
But less than one month before King was to lead that march,
he was assassinated.
My friends, we may have lost a great leader that day,
but there is still hope.
Why do I say this?
Because no longer locked down or socially distanced,
we have the chance to come together
at this very, very critical time in history
and overcome the illusion of division.
We have the chance to restart America,
and I don't want anyone to tell me it's not possible because we've done it before.
When our country was first born, Thomas Paine reminded us,
“We have the power to begin the world over again.”
We still have this power within us.
If we can find it within ourselves, in our hearts,
if we have the courage to look beyond our differences
and to focus on what we have in common,
oh my God,
we can create the country, the world, and the future
that we all want and we all deserve
because we are one.
Thank you.
(Applause)