DISCURSOS - Rotary International

Diversity in Membership
Sylvia V. Whitlock
Governor, District 5300
An author wrote:
Never judge someone by the way he looks
Or a book by the way it is covered
For inside the tattered pages
There’s a lot to be discovered!
I learned from my grandmother, “Never judge a book by its cover.” I really understood that phrase
only when I had a thought-altering experience many years ago.
I was raised in a third-world culture where class distinctions were the rule of the day and the
main earmarks of prejudice. Because I was a light-skinned black person, I thought myself immune
to the pronouncements of worthlessness heaped on darker-skinned persons. As a young
person unschooled in the history of the black race, my response to differences was largely only
skin-deep. One of the insidious consequences of prejudice is that you can be taught to undervalue
and fear — even hate —groups to which you yourself belong. For South Pacific, the acclaimed
musical commentary on life in the ’40s, Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote the poignant song,
“You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught.” Lieutenant Cable, a young American conflicted over his love
for a Polynesian girl, sings
You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught from year to year.
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear.
You’ve got to be carefully taught.
You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six, or seven, or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate.
You’ve got to be carefully taught!
We are all carefully taught, way before kindergarten. My soul-searching moment came when I
ran out of gasoline on a busy New York City expressway and my car sputtered to a halt in the fast
lane, where there was no shoulder. I walked ahead to the police phone to report my plight and
was told by the person on the other end of the line, “If you’re still there in an hour, call us back.”
As I stood there befuddled, a car going in the other direction on the other side of the freeway
pulled up, and the driver, a black man with a ragged handkerchief tied around his head, called out,
“What’s the matter, baby?”
I can’t adequately describe for you the hesitation with which I explained my problem, because I
was looking right at the cover of this man and it was everything I had been taught to avoid. He
said, “I’ll get you some gas, baby,” and in the 10 minutes or so before he returned, a million unpleasant
scenarios played in my head. He returned, poured gasoline from a can into the gas tank,
poured some in the carburetor, and started my car. I offered to give him the $3 I had with me, but
he refused it, saying the gas had cost him only 29 cents. Remember, this was in the 1960s!
I went on my way — I was only about 10 minutes from home — went inside and took a deep
breath to reconstruct what had just happened. What had happened was that I had found, inside
some tattered pages, a gem! I replayed the potentially dangerous situation in my head and
International Assembly Speeches 2013 5