Black Reality White Reality Michelle T.Johnson

Any one with the most passing interest in science fiction is familiar with the concept of a parallel universe. A parallel universe is where there's the whole life that exists someplace on the other side of the universe that's just like yours only something is radically different. Maybe in the parallel universe you stayed married to the person you divorced or you divorced the person you're still married too.

Black Americans and white Americans live in the same reality that seems like a parallel universe. Everything looks the same on the surface but underneath, it's experienced very differently.

On the surface, people, regardless of race or ethnicity have the same daily hurdles to face - high gas, annoying rules at work, inconvenient weather, aging bodies.

But in our parallel realities, when we see things on the news like a 5-year-old girl getting arrested and handcuffed and charged with battery by the St. Petersburg, Florida police department because she threw a tantrum, we see them with different eyes.

You see, there were probably many whites who didn't immediately have their minds disseminate that the little girl was black and the three police officers who arrested her were white. For many whites who saw that on television news or read about it in a newspaper, they just went to how horrific it was to see a little girl, a baby, hauled off in handcuffs like she was grown folk in an episode of "Cops."

On the other hand, it's hard for me to imagine that there were too many blacks who didn't have our mind's eye go directly to the issue of race - the knee jerk, gut feeling that this would not have happened if the little go was white.

When dealing with the science fiction world of parallel universe, the two worlds don't interact until maybe one person disturbs the delicate balance.

But the worlds of black and white Americans aren't parallel, they're intersecting, and it's not just one intersection, its countless intersections in a day.

And the countless, repeated intersections create a lot of chaos, a lot of disharmony, a lot of tragic misunderstanding.

Even with the blacks who agreed the police weren't wrong to handcuff a little girl because she needed to be "disciplined," the little girl's race was most likely still one of the first things noticed.

Another recent news story about the Georgia woman who went missing the week before her wedding and triggered a national search only to have shown up and said that she had cold feet and made up her kidnapping, probably prompted more than its share of sentences all across black America starting, "If it had been a sistah…"

While I do believe the parallel universes of "black America" and "white America" are getting closer together, for there to be true harmony there has to be an acknowledgment that they even exist. Because an increasing issue in our society is the growing hostility toward any perspective that isn't a "majority" perspective.

And while this growing hostility isn't just a race issue, since politics and religion have become even more polarized than they have ever been, it is a problem that keeps our country locked in to wallowing in our problems instead of tightly focusing on how to have more solutions.

Guest columnist Michelle T. Johnson is author of "Working While Black: A Black Person's Guide to Success in the White Workplace," published by Chicago Review Press.