Editor’s Note: Kavita Das (@kavitamix) is the author of “Poignant Song: The Life and Music of Lakshmi Shankar,” and her writing has appeared in Tin House, Longreads, The Atlantic, The Washington Post and elsewhere. Das worked for 15 years in community development, public health and most recently, in racial justice. The views expressed here are hers. Read more opinion on CNN.
As a first-generation Indian American who grew up in 1980s Reagan-era New York City shaped by efforts at multiculturalism, I had social studies classes that were filled with lessons about America’s guiding principle of tolerance. My teachers pointed to the Statue of Liberty as this virtue’s crowning symbol, asking us to bring in pennies to help underwrite efforts to restore Lady Liberty marred by decades of pollution. When we learned about Martin Luther King Jr. and his fight for civil rights for black Americans, “tolerance” also took on the tacit assumption that we had now achieved his dream, even if it had cost him his life.
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the primary definition of tolerance is the “capacity to endure pain or hardship,” followed by secondary and tertiary definitions, “sympathy or indulgence for beliefs or practices differing from or conflicting with one’s own;” or “the act of allowing something.” However, it’s primary definition most closely aligns with how it operates in American culture. For example, when we talk about pain, we talk about how much we can “tolerate.” And if someone described an experience as “tolerable,” would you rush out to experience it for yourself? Probably not.
Tolerance – which shaped my childhood and continues to mold how too many Americans talk about fighting for equity – might be an affirming term, but just barely. I know this from experience; as a brown woman I have felt tolerated for much of my life by white Americans, even though I was born and raised in this country and consider myself an American before anything else about me. Any room I’ve walked into, be it classroom or boardroom, I’ve remained aware of the ways in which I’m considered different and don’t belong. One of the most enduring impacts of teaching tolerance long enough is that it gets internalized.
Tolerance is an underwhelming goal for a truly vibrant and just American society because, like diversity, it is satisfied by the mere presence of those with different experiences and perspectives. Instead, we should strive for inclusion, where people are accepted, welcomed and valued. We should prioritize equity, where opportunities are distributed based on an accurate understanding of our sociocultural history. Recent events make painfully clear how much further we have to go. To get to a better place, we must use the power of our imagination, compassion and intrepid spirit to look past tolerance and manifest what an inclusive and equitable America would look like across every sector of our society.
Underlying America’s guiding principle of tolerance is a presumption of who’s entitled to do most of the tolerating (white Americans) and who is relegated to being tolerated (everyone else). While some watered down history books would have us believe tolerance is what built America’s multicultural society, it is in part responsible for our current deep divisions. Adopting tolerance as a guiding principle does nothing to challenge the power structures or systemic racism at work in American society.
In fact, we need only flip the script on tolerance to see that it is black Americans who are being forced to tolerate much more. Just in the last few months alone, we have seen black men and women killed while doing everyday things that white Americans take for granted, like going for a run to sleeping in their own bed.
Meanwhile, the pandemic has highlighted how unequal freedom is in this country. Protesters against police brutality and racism are accused of being reckless and face further brutality for attempting to peacefully gather (many while masked), but white rallygoers advocating for ending shelter-in-place policies have been permitted to endanger the general public by protesting free of masks, sometimes with weapons strapped to their backs and with little to no police intervention. Despite verified photos showing white New Yorkers crowding the city’s parks, 68% of arrests for failure to social distance were of black New Yorkers, while just 7% were white. Given the hateful rhetoric from the President and other lawmakers referring to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus,” Asian Americans have been experiencing a rise in hate crimes.
In a 2017 article titled “America is Stuck in the Purgatory of Tolerance” veteran journalist and TV news anchor, Dan Rather said of tolerance, “We often hear about how we need to be more tolerant: to make room for people, ideas, and actions with which we may not agree. This is a prerequisite for a functional democracy. But tolerance alone is not sufficient; it allows us to accept others without engaging with them, to feel smug and self-satisfied without challenging the boundaries within which too many of us live.” Rather goes on to aptly note that tolerance is merely a “way station” to the “much grander destination” of true inclusion of people of diverse backgrounds and experiences.
I’m no longer content just being tolerated. I want more for black Americans, for fellow Americans of color and for my country. In order to stand up for this nation and its potential, I’m rejecting tolerance, the notion that the people who have historically had and abused their power and privilege should feel like they are benevolently putting up with people who have just as much claim to this country and its true ideals. I want to be included, why not even welcomed?
Tolerance, like this virus and the ongoing pandemic of racism in America, has kept us shut in our respective homes and silenced us from engaging with each other for fear that we may have differing opinions. In this moment we must choose to close the distance between us by acknowledging our interdependence and our respective and inherent value as well as the fact that we are made stronger and more dynamic by inclusion. The alternative is intolerable, hence the desperation and rage we see playing out in the streets of city after city across America.