Diversity is essential to the health of any ecosystem. But the language we use around racial diversity, particularly the word tolerance, tends to imply that other people are essentially a nuisance, and disguises the fact that we need and depend on each other. “They aren’t blind,” my son says of moles, “they just can’t see.” The same could be said of humans. We often manage not to see that we are, as Martin Luther King reminds us, “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.”
