Lawrence Diggs

Erasing Race
By: By Nathan Johnson
nathan.johnson@yankton.net
Define a "white person."
That's the challenge Lawrence J. Diggs, a man most people would probably,
on first impulse, refer to as a "black man," issued to a crowd of Mount Marty
College students and faculty during a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day presentation
Monday titled, "Erasing Imaginary Lines to Escape Cultural Imprisonment."
What followed that challenge to them was silence.
"Come on, now," he fired back. "This country is built on what we call racism.
We struggle with racism every day -- the white people against the black
people. Somebody must have a definition of what a white person is. That's
fundamental, isn't it?"
And that was his point: Race has no foundation. No branch of science
acknowledges anything other than the "human race," Diggs said.
"I've been doing this for a while, and what's really astounding is how many
classes -- and I've been in rooms of 1,500 people in Ivy League schools -- I've
asked the same question. There's always stunned silence," he said.
Diggs, a Roslyn resident who has been speaking about the fallacy of race for
about 10 years, pointed out that in a country where a civil war has been
waged, millions of dollars have been spent on diversity programs and riots
have exploded around the issue of race, its citizens still can't define a "white
person" or a "black person" beyond the color of his or her skin.
Race, he said, is an imaginary line that has actually grown thicker since King's
time.
"What Martin Luther King asked us to do in his "I Have a Dream" speech was
judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their
skin," he said in a conversation after the presentation. "Now that we've gotten
into a diversity movement -- and that was a necessary passage, I suppose --
we've made more out of the fact that we're diverse than existed at that point.
It's the law of unintended consequences."
Diggs said Americans have ignored the fact that those differences, even if they
exist, are not really important differences.
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"We can say that your skin is different than the color of my skin, but the
question is, OEWhat does it mean?' The answer is, nothing," he said.
Now we perceive the boundary of race as so thick, Diggs said, that we're
afraid to cross it.
He compared it to cattle-guards that ranchers construct at gate openings to
keep cows from getting out. Even though, in reality, cows can cross the guard,
they don't believe they can -- and don't.
The result, he said, is cultural imprisonment.
"For many of us, our culture ... gives us a sense identity," Diggs said. "It gives
us a sense of who we are. It makes us feel special ... It's a fort. But the
difference between a fort and a prison is, a fort you can leave whenever you
feel like. A prison, you cannot."
If you feel that you cannot do something because "your culture does not do
that," he said, your culture becomes your prison.
He challenged the crowd to make the logical step: Break free of the prison.
"One of the benefits is, you get to choose your own friends," Diggs said. "I've
had many more opportunities opened up to me simply because ... I've
discovered one of "my kind' (a person he gets along with) in every place."
It can be a life-altering experience, he said.
"When you start to move out of these artificial boundaries that we have
accepted ... suddenly we have this whole freedom of new experiences," he
said after the presentation. "That's the power of it all. It's more than an
intellectual exercise we're talking about. It's a lifestyle change." - Press and Dakotan