Race Walking

I've mentioned before that living on a walkable scale tends to bring the people in my various circles into 3D reality. By living in a smaller radius, people start filling multiple roles and cease being simply objects in my world. They are, like me, multifaceted.
I like the ability to walk around a person and see them from different angles - musician, employee, parent, person of religious convictions and questions - and I think the walking scale community is worth pursuing for this reason alone. But the reality of our society is that it is rooted in a racist past and is careening toward a deeply racist future. Adopting walking as a mode of transportation can limit the spread of racism.
By racism, I mean simply this: dividing the world into "us" and "them" on the basis of racial categories. Suburban reality is admirably arranged to promote racism. Single use zoning on a scale that requires automobile transportation predicts that most of the people we meet we will know in only one dimension. Thus if a Latino person lives near me, he will only impact me as a neighbor. If he drives in to mow my lawn, I will register his presence as a paid worker. An automotive way of life makes knowing this Latino person as a person, like me, having things in common with me as well as things that are different, unlikely. My tendency will be to view people who do not look like me as not like me. In other words, not us, but them.
It is agonizing to watch our country, with its ideals of religious freedom and history of conscious struggle toward equality for African Americans, choose a deeply xenophobic and stingy approach to legal and illegal immigrants from Latin America; and to adopt the language of religious war against people from Arab cultures. We are allowing ourselves to be reduced to our worst - by those who profit from our fears. We look at a person who could be Mexican, and we suspect they might be illegally in the U.S. We see a person who could be Arab, and are tempted to wonder what harm they are planning.
As I listen to my high school aged daughters process the racism in our culture, it seems to me that the alternative that is being presented to them (and all of us) is to rise above it. We ought not judge people by appearances, and ought to treat all people equally. This strikes me as liberal idealism (and, please understand me: there are worse labels than "liberal idealist") at its stupidest: simply educate people and they'll stop negative behavior. As I watch people age, I see them try to live by such ideals as teens and young adults, and then slip into resentful racism once they realize that jobs are scarce and billions of citizens' tax dollars are being spent each day to fight terrorism.
The only thing that fights racist ideas and assumptions is getting to know people as more, not simply other, than the color of their skin or the circumstances of their birth. That is, to see them as people. At first, people will strike us both "them" and "us". With continued interaction, however, they become simply "us". They care about their kids and the schools they attend; they're fussy about their yards in ways that I am not; they tend to smoke too much and are trying to quit. They are people: broken, hopeful, predictable, and unpredictable.
Getting to know people like this, especially people who start out as "them", takes a hugely intentional effort. Every Martin Luther King Jr. day we make promises to spend more time with people not like us. But with very few exceptions, people don't carry through on these promises. Forming a book club or a dinner club to "build bridges" is just another complication in life, no matter how noble; just another event to schedule, another plate to keep spinning.
Living on a walking scale allows me to develop natural relationships with people around me, relationships that reflect commonalities as well as supply and need. In suburban America, single use zoning will tend to insist that my neighbors inhabit the same economic bracket as I do, along with a host of other defining traits. But even here, I have found that people resist categorization - at the very least they exhibit a rich tapestry of stories that have brought them to this socially uniform place.
I walk to fight racism.