RABBI MARC GELLMAN: It's like the greatest cancer that we can't get rid of. It's a cultural cancer. And I remember coming of age during the civil rights struggle as you did. You know, you're a little older than I am.

FATHER THOMAS HARTMAN: Yeah, but who looks older?

RABBI MARC GELLMAN: (laughing) I know, but you know I remember being totally transformed by the inclusive vision of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his extraordinary way of expressing the sinfulness of race. Not just that it was a mistake, not just that it was a bad social policy, but that it was a sin.

FATHER THOMAS HARTMAN: There's no doubt about it. I was in Birmingham during the race riots. I remember the mayor driving around in a station wagon with a machine gun in his window saying, "Now all you black people, this is a kind and peaceful community. I don't want to see you out on the road, otherwise I'm forced to shoot you."

I went to see an Archbishop. I asked, "Is the black person equal to the white?" He, who I admired in so many other areas of his life, said "no." I was stunned. Clearly race divides people. But I had an experience - I lived in Europe for awhile, and, there, the question wasn't race. People looked at me and said, "We don't understand. Your country is so advanced in so many ways. Why would you choose race as the barrier between people?"

RABBI MARC GELLMAN: Well, I don't buy that, because in Europe they have other barriers. First of all, they don't let people of color come into many European countries. Secondly, the cancer of Europe was anti-Semitism. There's a particular deep and ingrained thing, and it's still there.

FATHER THOMAS HARTMAN: And in other areas such as Africa maybe it's tribalism. Race - does it and will it continue to divide people? Today on the God Squad.

FATHER THOMAS HARTMAN: Will race continue to be a dividing factor in American society? With us to discuss this is Charles Byrd, editor of the Interracial Voice, Lucius Ware, President of the Eastern Long Island branch of the NAACP, and Julie Chang, a visiting scholar at Columbia University's Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. Welcome.

RABBI MARC GELLMAN: Welcome. Good to have you with us on the God Squad. Julie, tell us about the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and what it does.

JULIE CHANG: Well, like many other programs and universities across the country, we believe that the study of ethnicity and race is integral to the study of American society and to America as a nation. And that we can't talk about America as a nation without studying the history of race as well as present constructs of race.

RABBI MARC GELLMAN: And what is your general historical sense of whether we are making progress in the area of removing racial and ethnic prejudice from American culture?

JULIE CHANG: Well, it's a very complicated problem, and part of it has to do with prejudice, but part of it has also to do with the structural factors and economic inequality. And those are things that I think we still definitely need to work on. So, in terms of looking at it from an historical point of view, America as a nation, again you can't talk about its history without talking about race, and I think that right now that is one of the most pressing issues of our time.

FATHER THOMAS HARTMAN: Julie, when I went to Europe, I lived there for a summer. I lived in a place for young workers with people from many different nations. I was surprised when I met an African friend who said to me, "Your country is so advanced in so many ways, but you don't seem to be advanced in this area. Why is it that you choose race as a barrier of communications?" Is there a reason, historically, why America, putting this poorly, favored racism or race as a form of prejudice?

JULIE CHANG: Well, race has allowed economic inequalities in America, and it's very contradictory because it has allowed, I think, for the enormous gap in wealth between different peoples so that I think that's one reason why we don't like to talk about race in some ways. It's because a lot of our wealth was, in fact, based upon the exploitation of racialized peoples like African-Americans and Asian-Americans. Of course, it's very complicated, and now we have growing middle classes as well in many of these communities.

RABBI MARC GELLMAN: I'm not sure the economic analysis holds, because there's progress made across lines, and then there's poor people who are white. So I think that's a reductionist argument that may not hold in the long run, but we'll return to that and look at it more deeply later.

Charles, tell us about your work with the Interracial Voice and particularly your unique concerns for multiracial individuals and their unique problems.

CHARLES BYRD: Well, Interracial Voice is like a meeting place in cyberspace where mixed-race or multiethnic people come together, along with their families. It's designed along the lines of a print publication. We have editorials, op-ed articles, letters to the editor and a point-counterpoint section where people can argue and debate various issues.

Historically, in America, mixed-race people have been lumped into one category, and there is a growing number of individuals, myself included, who are simply rebelling against that, and that, I believe, is one of the proofs that America is making progress. Because people are meeting each other, they're falling in love, regardless of skin color or hair texture or nose width or lip thickness. They're having kids, but yet we still want to impose upon society this stark 1960s black/white dichotomy. That's not working.

FATHER THOMAS HARTMAN: Lucius, when Marc alluded before to the great Dr. Martin Luther King and I think of Joan Baez' songs and the Selma March, etc. Has race been so much a part of our history that it can't be denied? Is it getting better? Is it getting worse?

LUCIUS WARE: Historically, certainly we have a long history and tradition where race has mattered going back all 400 years here. Certainly in the last century we had the Plessey vs. Ferguson, and there are certain aspects of that that still exist today in all walks of life. And a person, no matter how many multiracial factors there are in that person's system, they are excluded from many organizations.

FATHER THOMAS HARTMAN: In your mind, can a person be so mature, so holy that they can look at another person and not see race?

LUCIUS WARE: I would imagine there are a lot of people on one end of the scale that way. But it so happens that the people with the power and the money, too often, don't look at it that way. And those in between keep the people squelched down in the bottom, because of race.

JULIE CHANG: I'd also like to address this question, because I think that when people talk about so-called racelessness or when they use the term color-blind, I think often they mean white, that we should just see everybody as white. And I think that it's not necessarily a negative thing to see someone as African-American or someone as Asian-American. I think it can be a very positive thing to see them that way and to recognize the cultural contributions that those peoples have made, too. So, I don't necessarily see color-blindness, actually, as an entirely good thing.

RABBI MARC GELLMAN: Two of the presenting issues of race in our culture right now are racial profiling which has achieved a great deal of notoriety both in the courts and even in the presidential debates. And also the continuing debate over affirmative action which brings the question of whether correcting racial prejudice by other forms of race-based prejudice is morally or politically correct. Let's start with the question of racial profiling. Do you believe that this really is a pervasive issue among police, that they pull over people who aren't really doing anything wrong, just because of the color of their skin? Has that been a discovery of your center?

JULIE CHANG: Well, in addition to being a visiting scholar at Columbia University, I'm also a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. And I have a friend who is female, and she is white and her husband is black. She says they don't drive very much because it's a small enough town that they don't have to. But she says 3 of the 4 times that they've gone out driving, they've been pulled over. And she thinks it's the fact that he's African-American but also that they look askance at them as an interracial couple, as well.

FATHER THOMAS HARTMAN: Charles, one of the areas that Marc and I have brought two different religions together, and we support the idea of learning about Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists. Are there movements, you mentioned on the web, are there movements in society which suggest that people are more open to interracial situations?

CHARLES BYRD: Well, yeah, for instance the rate of interracial marriages is increasing. It's still a small portion of the total number of marriages in this country. It's still no more than about 5%, but it is increasing. Since 1967 interracial marriages have been legal in all 50 states when the Supreme Court struck down this country's remaining anti-miscegenation laws with the "Loving vs. Virginia" decision. So there is a growing acceptance. Obviously there is still opposition, but that opposition comes from both the traditional white supremacist quarter as well as the black nationalist quarter who fear a dilution of political power if people, blacks, marry-out and the progeny then grow up, because you have no guarantee that those kids are going to share the political loyalties as their parents.

FATHER THOMAS HARTMAN: You know, Marc, there's a very powerful film that's called "Remember the Titans" that explores the issue of race in America. Stay tuned, because we have a clip from that movie, and it powerfully represents the drama that we're involved in.

RABBI MARC GELLMAN: It does indeed. Stay with us on the God Squad.

Denzel Washington: "Let's go. Listen up. I'm not going to talk to you tonight about winning and losing. You're already winners, because you didn't kill each other up at camp. Tonight, we got Hayfield. Like all the other schools in this conference, they're all white. They don't have to worry about race. We do, but we're better for it, men. Let me tell you something. You don't let anything, nothing come between us. Nothing tears us apart."

RABBI MARC GELLMAN: Yeah, nothing tears us apart, but I wish life was more like that movie. You know this show about the Titans is a powerful thing because, in a certain way, my father, when he went into World War II, overcame racial prejudice and other people overcame anti-Semitism by fighting with father in WWII. Maybe sports...

FATHER THOMAS HARTMAN: So that by fighting with them they saw the value of somebody who is Jewish.

RABBI MARC GELLMAN: Right, so I'm thinking the movie represents a possible cultural salvation. There's a lot of bad things about sports - the over competitiveness and all that - but maybe, do you think sports is a way out of some of the racial problems America has?

CHARLES BYRD: I take a fairly controversial position on this. I think education is the way out of our racial problem. I think we've spent too much time talking about racial equality. We've got to start educating our children from first grade on that race is a bogus construct. We have to tell them what scientists know and are now willing to affirm, that the genetic variation between 2 individuals of the same so-called race overwhelmingly overshadows the differences between racial groupings. Race has no scientific backing. It has no biological foundation, but yet we're still proceeding as if it does. We have to teach kids that you cannot be a racist - and racism still exists, don't get me wrong - but we have to teach kids that you can't be a racist unless, first of all, you've bought into this belief that race exists and that there's this hierarchy with white on top, black on the bottom and everyone else, all these other so-called races, occupying intermediate steps in-between. Unless we have the courage to do that, we're not going to get beyond where we are now. It's about education.

FATHER THOMAS HARTMAN: Lucius, Charles is suggesting another way of viewing the world - let's look at it scientifically. The NAACP, what is it trying to say about viewing the world in a different way?

LUCIUS WARE: I would just like to jump in and piggyback on what he's saying there, but hold him to the fact that we still have these issues of race that must be discussed - as he said educational - and too often we are not discussing it, and we're glossing over it. We're looking for ways like sports when we know that every weekend the most segregated places in America are our houses of worship and…

RABBI MARC GELLMAN: You really think that's true?

LUCIUS WARE: Oh, absolutely true.

RABBI MARC GELLMAN: There's lot of churches that are interracial churches.

LUCIUS WARE: Well, there are a lot of churches that are interracial churches to an extent, but there are a lot that are not.

FATHER THOMAS HARTMAN: The parish that I go to every Sunday is interracially mixed. It's a wonderful…

LUCIUS WARE: I'm sure, but they're, on Long Island, few and far between in terms of a real integrated effort in terms of all aspects of that church hierarchy.

FATHER THOMAS HARTMAN: When I was in Birmingham, Alabama during the race riots, when we were ministering to fourteen churches and seven of those churches were white and seven were black. There was no doubt that there was a dividing line. People were not welcome if they were of a different color. I don't see that on Long Island.

RABBI MARC GELLMAN: And in the South I think things are changing, too.

FATHER THOMAS HARTMAN: What I think is the need, most white people do not know that much about Hispanic history or black history or Asian history. I think in a lot of ways, when I heard you going in the area of education, is if we learn about the good things that each other bring to the table, it would be a positive thing. Now I'm not denying that there is racism…

LUCIUS WARE: There are a lot of places that we can work on, and certainly education…

FATHER THOMAS HARTMAN: How, Julie, in education, can we do this?

JULIE CHANG: Well, I guess just in response to some of these comments. I think that we like to and we want to look for these utopian sites for racial reconciliation and healing, and I think that we need to recognize at the same time that it's a lot of work. I think that a lot of Hollywood movies try to fulfill our desire for racial reconciliation and sometimes when I see them I'm very moved by these movies, but I also think we have a lot to do. In terms of education, as you're mentioning, I think learning about each other's histories is very important, learning about each other's contributions is very important. And I think maybe if there is a way that we can really try to put each other in the other person's shoes, really imagine what is it like to be a person of, especially a race that we don't see their perspective very much. I think that would be a great contribution.

FATHER THOMAS HARTMAN: One of the best moments in my life was, my dad was in the fruit and produce business, there was a man named Eddie Minta who was a loader of trucks. He looked, Lucius, like yourself, and one day he looked at me, and I was nine years old, and he put his wrist out and he said, "You're so lucky you have a father who really loves you. I love my son, too." And he said, "See my wrist? If somebody were to cut my wrist, I would bleed red blood. If somebody were to cut your dad's wrist, he would bleed red blood. What unites your dad and me is that we both care for our families and care for people." That was the best moment of education in my life. From then on, it's hard for me to see color. I see a heart. I see pumping blood. I see people who care versus people who don't care.

CHARLES BYRD: But now you're getting past the scientific viewpoint into the spiritual area.

FATHER THOMAS HARTMAN: I think that's the only route.

CHARLES BYRD: Well, exactly, and that's the area, you know most people still embrace this bodily concept of identity. Few of us are conscious of ourselves as spirit-soul or human. There is this need for tribalism. We are intent on being race-conscious.

RABBI MARC GELLMAN: Yeah, because we don't have any sense of a higher identity.

CHARLES BYRD: Exactly.

FATHER THOMAS HARTMAN: And that's what Martin Luther King did.

RABBI MARC GELLMAN: There's nothing that's the same for all of us, but if we're all children of God, then we're all the same.

CHARLES BYRD: Which is why I believe that religious leaders are the ones who are going to have to step up to the plate and do more than they or you guys, respectfully, have done in the past - and I'm sure you've done your part. But I think religious leaders have to separate themselves from politicians in this country and make that a part of their sermon to deconstruct race.

RABBI MARC GELLMAN: There isn't a single speech we give where we don't include this challenge to our audience. We say, "look, I'm sure everyone of you thinks you're not prejudiced, and I'm sure most of you are not prejudiced, but ask yourself this question. Do you have a friend of a different color? Have you ever had anybody of color into your home? If your answer to those two questions is 'no' - I don't have a friend of another color and nobody of another color has ever been in my home - the chances are that you are racist, and you don't realize it."

I think that's that secret racism, that silent racism. You ask a white supremacist if he is in favor of whites and does he hate blacks and people of color, he or she will say, "Yes, I hate them." If you ask Minister Farrakhan, you know, does he have in his heart a hatred of the white race, I mean an honest answer from ask Minister Farrakhan is he hates them. But for most people, they don't think they hate them, or they don't think they bear this prejudice. How do you root out prejudice people don't even think they have?

JULIE CHANG: Well, you referred to racism, I think, as a cancer earlier, and sometimes I think about racism, sometimes I think we have to take the same approach that some people take to alcoholism, that you have to admit that there's a problem before you can actually do something about it. Frankly speaking, I have a problem when people feel very guilty, when they have this white guilt, because the point is not are you a good person or are you a bad person. The point is we all have to recognize these problems that we all have responsibilities for, and those of us who are privileged need to recognize our privilege also and try to change that.

FATHER THOMAS HARTMAN: The question obviously is complex. Marc and I will be back in a moment to talk some more about it. We want to thank Julie, Lucius and Charles for being wonderful guests.

RABBI MARC GELLMAN: So, Tommy, what are your thoughts about racism and the insights that our guests had?

FATHER THOMAS HARTMAN: Well, racism etched itself in my heart and soul when I went to Birmingham that time, and I'll never forget a friend of mine was with a barber. He was shaving him, and I said, "Do you think the black man is equal," and he said "no." The Archbishop said the same thing. It struck me how pervasive it was. I was so relieved with the spiritual message of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. It made a difference; it gave us another way of looking at life, and that's the challenge. I think when we're racist or we're prejudiced, we're looking at life from a too narrow position.

RABBI MARC GELLMAN: I couldn't agree more, and you know I think that's the way out. You know people talk about, Julie and our other guests talked about education as the way out. Of course education is good, but I just don't see that. I think it's faith that's the way out. I think it's religion that's the way out, because when you just have a person who has no faith, no religion, then your race or your nation or your economic status, that's like the highest status you have. That's the only thing you know, but if you have a religious identity where you believe you're made in God's image, well that transcends nation. It transcends race.

FATHER THOMAS HARTMAN: Marc, it's so normal to be afraid of people who are different than ourselves, but what religion teaches you is, that's unacceptable. Each person is made in the image of God. Each person deserves the love of God and love of people.

RABBI MARC GELLMAN: Amen. Hallelujah. Do you remember that verse in Amos? "You are like the Ethiopians to me." God says you are like the Ethiopians, meaning don't think that you're any better. Don't think that I love you more. I love all people the same.

FATHER THOMAS HARTMAN: But see I like the idea that you mentioned during the show in which you said in that test that we extend to people. Have you ever had anybody to your home who was of a different color, a different religion, a different culture? And we have found in our own instances, before I met you, I didn't know that much about Judaism. Now I know a lot more. I love your people. I love your food. I love spending time with you.

RABBI MARC GELLMAN: And I love you, too, and you know this way of overcoming prejudice, that we've discovered, I think works for all forms of prejudice. You can't overcome prejudice by thinking your way out of it. You have to overcome prejudice by loving your way out of it.

FATHER THOMAS HARTMAN: You gotta walk the walk. You gotta talk the talk. I'm Father Tom Hartman.

RABBI MARC GELLMAN: My man, and I'm Rabbi Marc Gellman.

FATHER THOMAS HARTMAN: We're the God Squad. God bless you.