Zen and the Art of Rubik's Cube Racism

After spending years trying to rearrange the patchwork coloring of a Rubik's Cube that's been sitting in my apartment, and failing, I finally went online and found a variety of websites that gave insight on solving the problem. I chose to follow the instructions on a site that showed how to remove the offensively arranged stickers outright with a blow dryer, clean off the remaining adhesive and replace them with new ones that could be purchased for a reasonable price. With a little bit of money, mostly spent on a glass display case, and more importantly a minimal investment of time and effort I finally had the monument to my intelligence that I've always deserved.

I began wondering if I could find similarly elegant solutions to other intractable problems in the the world. That's when I set my sights on the problem of racism.

Racism is the opposite of a Rubik's Cube in so many ways. Racism is made of people, Rubik's Cubes are made of plastic. Instead of trying to segregate colors, ridding the world of racial prejudice is about helping integrate them. There are no stickers people can purchase to make racism alright.

It is on that last point that I'd like to offer a suggestion. It doesn't have to be that way. Stickers may be the long-overlooked solution to racial injustice for which this country has been waiting. In fact, I do believe they are.

(Like the world, a Rubik's Cube has four dimensions. Height, width, depth and stickers.)

The most important result of the media firestorm that resulted from Geraldine Ferraro's and Jeremiah Wright's comments was not in highlighting how race relations are little changed in the last forty years, but how they are little changed in the minds of older people.

Older people seem to believe that race is still related to skin color. It is an idea that makes them seem very old. The key concept driving modern racial identity is that race is not related to skin color, but correlated with skin color. Whereas, in the past, being white referred to having a lack of pigment, modern whiteness can also be defined by purchases and actions.

For example: A few months ago, a friend of mine commented that she was the whitest person she knew. "I'm the whitest person I know", she said. She’s Indian. She then detailed the characteristics she displayed, of modern-day white people. She drove a Toyota Prius, once went backpacking and regularly drinks fair-trade coffee. According to modern racial thought, those choices overwhelmed her brownness so much, that it made her the whitest person she knew.

The logic becomes straightforward. Purchasing Jimmy Buffett albums make you whiter, and having a taste for Young Jeezy makes you blacker. Abercrombie, white, Sean John, black. Race has moved away from skin color into lifestyles and branding. Which means with the right investment of time or money, racial identity can now be purchased. This can only qualify as a positive development.

(You are not the color of the sticker that was put on you in the beginning, but the color put on you in the end. - Zen Rubik's Cubist saying)

In the 1960s when U.S. government finally took the stance that all races were equal under the law, it looked like racial reconciliation was inevitable. All the states were forced to follow suit and institutional racism in the United States was effectively removed. Looking back, the belief that this would pave the way towards real racial equality may have been somewhat naive. Central planning in a country that detests such a thing was unlikely to work, especially when it came to planning people's beliefs. In that way, the nationalized effort over the last four decades to eradicate personal racial prejudices was bound to fail.

Modern racial thought could qualify as a reaction to this failure, a failure of the government to deliver on promised racial equality. The result is that, individuals of each race have devised a crude way to purchase equal treatment within the other racial groups using the time and money they spend.

Measurable problems can have measurable solutions. The problem with fighting individual racial prejudice until now has been that we could not quantify it. But if the racial-ity of a purchase can actually be measured, even crudely, then that should change everything.

(Do not wear the sticker. Be the sticker.)

The fight against racism has some significant parallels with current fight against global warming. There is general agreement that both are bad, and it's seemingly cheaper to sit back and not do anything about either.

In the case of global warming, a few years ago an effort was made to fix this market inefficiency, and a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions was developed. How it works is not relevant. What is relevant is that, it could only happen because carbon is measurable. The result, is that companies who emit too much carbon, through the purchase of carbon credits, must now pay to pollute. Carbon emissions have now become a luxury item.

If the government were to intervene and set a cap on individual racial prejudice, a trading market would develop, and would have a similar effect. Instead of our society being racially prejudiced and wishing we were not, we'd stop having racial prejudices and could yearn for them. The only people who would be prejudiced are those who could afford it.

A new vocabulary would come into being. Racial credit, racial offset, racial footprint. People could go race neutral. But even without government intervention people have been going race neutral for years.

(Before there were stickers, there were no stickers.)

The concept of race neutrality, or the offsetting of the perceptions about one's race, has been around for a long time. What has not existed is an easy way for individuals to achieve it.

Traditionally it is done with the investment of time, through volunteering or participating in the life of a different racial community. Bill Clinton, for example, invested a great deal of effort reconciling with African-Americans. He actually ended up more than offsetting people's perceptions, over-neutralizing his race and is considered to be America's first black president.

Race-neutrality is quite valuable, for example, it is an almost requisite feature of any Presidential candidate especially from the Democratic Party. More people than just politicians would likely try to achieve it if the traditional method, the Clinton method, had a lower barrier to entry. It takes work. To achieve neutrality, and promote reconciliation, Bill Clinton went into black communities and actually interacted with black people. This is something a lot of white people, who otherwise are for racial reconciliation, are not comfortable doing. Racial credits would work because they specifically address this.

(Be the sticker until you realize, there is no sticker.)

An obstacle to racial reconciliation has always been that the public had to change their lifestyle to achieve it. Whether it is a racist person enduring twinges of discomfort while play-acting not being racist in the solitude of his home, or a Young Jeezy fan listening, with teeth clenched, to a Jimmy Buffet or Nickelback album, courageous individuals can currently move towards racial-neutrality the only way available, painfully.

Racial credits would allow people, in the pursuit of racial harmony and reconciliation to substitute their time and discomfort with money. With that money they would purchase a stake in the future of a different racial community, with the goal of offsetting their racial footprint. A racial credit could be linked with giving to charitable organizations such as the NAACP for black racial credits or in the case of white racial credits, say, Farm Aid. In this way, racial-reconciliation would become pain-free for a price.

(Beneath the sticker, we are all the same color. - Zen Rubik's Cubist saying)

But even this solution is hobbled by the mere fact that it relies on individuals who already have a motivation to reconcile races, like politicians, or feel guilty about their racial prejudices, like liberals. In spite of having a new mechanism to measure the racial-ity of lifestyles, nothing will be achieved unless there exists an incentive for racial harmony that appeals to a broad variety of people.

This brings us to stickers. People love stickers. From the age of five in elementary school when the best students were given gold stars, we as a society have been conditioned to change our behavior with the prospect of receiving stickers. This is why a good racial credit program would be accompanied by a good amount of stickers. For each racial credit purchased, individuals could be given a racial sticker they could affix to the side of their car or backpack or body, to show off their commitment to racial harmony. The peer pressure alone to have the most stickers would cause a great deal of money to be funneled into race-neutralizing purchases and charities and thus racism would be solved.

(Try not. Buy, stickers.)

Racism is a complicated problem. That must be why people avoid looking for simple solutions. They think they wouldn't work. Most people can't imagine solving a long-simmering problem like racial prejudice with stickers. But they should start. I have a monument to solving such a problem sitting on my mantle. It's in a glass case with a Rubik's Cube inside. Stickers work.