She, the people

In your book, you quote a colleague at Stanford, Marcus Feldman, saying there is no proof that knowledge will make us a better species. How do you feel about that? Do you agree with it?

We kept thinking that schools would be the watering place for this human merger that I've been looking for -- that ignorance was the reason we're so mean to each other. Well, we've got a lot of evidence of a lot of real smart people being real mean!

So it gives me pause. If you consider that there's no proof that knowledge in and of itself, or our ability to pursue information, is going to make us less likely to be extinct, that's pretty sobering news. Then maybe we'd like to do more with our humanness than simply collect information.

You said in your book, "What is unique about America is the extent to which it does, from time to time, pull off being a merged culture." But it seems that what you're after most of the time is talking to people in moments of conflict or moments of deep challenge, not in moments of feeling merged.

I do that because those highlight for us the tragedy of the unmerged and stand as an inspiration for the merge. They're the shadow of the merger. So I represent those to understand how it went wrong, so we can understand more vividly how to make it go right.

Do you think it goes right more than it goes wrong or the other way around?

No, I think it goes wrong a lot, and not just in times of violence or catastrophe. I think it's going wrong now. If we were to start at the kind of schools where I usually teach -- Stanford, or now I'm teaching at NYU -- if we talked to all those students, we would hear about the really wonderful educations they've had to get them there. I teach bright people usually, and talented people, but I don't believe they were all born that way, nor do kids who live in less fortunate circumstances get born violent or drug addicts or any of the things that happen in the course of their lives.

But that's not in our face, because to some extent we live segregated lives. I lived in San Francisco for quite a while, and it would be possible for me, in the route that I took -- driving to Stanford, to my gym, to the health food store, to get coffee and the New York Times in the morning, down to my loft to work -- I could go all day and not see an African-American person, and I'm African-American.

So cities are obviously and not so obviously planned to keep us from experiencing one another. I don't have a project at the moment, but what I'm most interested in pursuing is: How do we get to We? How do we get to Us?

I went to a segregated elementary school, and the way the world is now I couldn't have imagined when I was a girl. But we have a long way to go -- to make Washington a different kind of place, for one thing. The two gentlemen running for office [today] were both bred to be president of the United States, but I don't think a little black girl, even in 2000, is actually thinking about that. So here we are in 2000 and these two guys are very similar in terms of their lineage.

Yeah. Though there is a Jew on the ticket. That's new.

Right. But it didn't happen without comment.

What do you think we can do?

I think we can think differently about our time on earth. We can call for different kinds of spirituality. We can call for anything that is not about material gain, because we've proven that we know how to do that. We know how to get territory. We know how to get material. We know how to get power from other human beings. But in the final analysis, how much do we know about helping one another, how much do we know about caring about one another?

What would it take to make an argument about caring about one another that's a sexy argument, that people want to pay attention to -- that might be in the headlines? What kind of genius will that take? That's my question.

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