The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,29
and husbanding beauty or isolating goods and making sure enrichment is the privilege of the few, then it can be stopped in the sixth grade, or the sixth century, when it had been mastered. The rest is reinforcement. The function of twentieth-century education must be to produce humane human beings. To refuse to continue to produce generation after generation of people trained to make expedient decisions rather than humane ones.
Oh, what would it be like without putrefying hatred we have been told and taught was inevitable among humans? Inevitable? Natural? After five million years? After four thousand years we haven’t imagined anything better than that? Which one of us was born that way? Which one of us prefers it that way? Hating, grabbing, despising? Racism is a scholarly pursuit and it always has been. It is not gravity or ocean tides. It is the invention of our minor thinkers, our minor leaders, minor scholars, and our major entrepreneurs. It can be uninvented, deconstructed, and its annihilation begins with visualizing its absence, losing it, and if it can’t be lost at once or by saying so, then by behaving as if, in fact, our free life depended on it, because it does. If I spend my life despising you because of your race, or class, or religion, I become your slave. If you spend yours hating me for similar reasons, it is because you are my slave. I own your energy, your fear, your intellect. I determine where you live, how you live, what your work is, your definition of excellence, and I set limits to your ability to love. I will have shaped your life. That is the gift of your hatred; you are mine.
Well, now, you may be asking yourself: What is all this? I can’t save the world. What about my life? I didn’t ask to come here. I didn’t ask to be born. Didn’t you? I put it to you that you did. You not only asked to be born, you insisted on your life. That is why you are here. No other reason. It was too easy not to be. Now that you are here, you have to do something you respect, don’t you? Your parents did not dream you up—you did. I am simply urging you to continue the dream you started. For dreaming is not irresponsible; it is first-order human business. It is not entertainment; it is work. When Martin Luther King Jr. said, “I have a dream,” he was not playing; he was serious. When he imagined it, envisioned it, created it in his own mind it began to be, and we must dream it too to give it the heft and stretch and longevity it deserves. Don’t let anybody, anybody convince you this is the way the world is and therefore must be. It must be the way it ought to be. Full employment is possible. Positing a workforce of 20 to 30 percent of the population of the future is yearning greed, not inevitable economics.
All public schools can be hospitable, welcoming, safe learning environments. No one, teachers or students, prefers mindlessness, and in some places such environments have already been built.
Appetites for self-murder can be eradicated. No addict or suicide wants to be one.
Enemies, races, and nations can live together. Even I in the last forty years have seen deadly national enemies become warm, mutually supporting friends, and four national friends become enemies. And it doesn’t take forty years to witness it. Anybody over eight years old has witnessed the expedient, commercial, almost whimsical nature of national friendships. I have seen resources committed to the disenfranchised, the discredited, the unlucky, and before we could reap the harvest of those resources, before legislation put in place could work (twenty years?) it was disassembled. Like stopping the union in 1796 because there were problems. Building a bridge halfway and saying we can’t get there from here.
That determined commitment must be redreamed, rethought, reactivated—by me and by you. Otherwise, as nationalism and racisms solidify, as coasts and villages become and remain the sources of turmoil and dispute, as eagles and doves alike hover over the remaining sources of raw wealth on this earth, as guns and gold and cocaine topple grain, technology, and medicine to win first place in world trade, we will end up with a world not worth sharing or dreaming about.
We are already life-chosen by ourselves. Humans, and as far as we know there are no others. We are