ALL HUMANS ARE CREATED EQUAL, UNTIL YOU MAKE THEM DIFFERENT
Comfort is a feeling most of us are familiar with. It’s that nice and warm feeling we get when things are the way they should be. Comfort makes us feel safe. It makes us feel in control. Comfort is easy. Our comfort zones define us. We have established these so-called boundaries of our comfort zone over the course of our lifetime. They’ve been imprinted by our experiences, challenges, struggles and achievements. We’ve grown to enjoy the little space of comfort we’ve created for ourselves and rarely venture out beyond. However, we need to understand that, while comfort is natural, it can and has desperately held us back as a society. Dr. Tatum even writes that:
In childhood, who becomes a friend is governed largely by convenience and proximity; but in adolescence, and certainly in adulthood, we make more active choices. Our choice of friends is shaped in part, if not wholly, by our sense of self-definition, particularly in adolescence and adulthood. But self-definition does not emerge in a vacuum. It is shaped by a lifetime of ‘social interactions’, molded by messages received about who we are in the world, how others perceive us, and with whom we should seek connection.
However, there is a powerful link between our level of comfort and the goals we’re constantly striving for, and thus a connection between the situations we will or will not confront. Hence, our prior experiences of race (or gender, religion, sexuality and social economics) play an important role in our daily life based on the aspects we gain from these experiences; as we may or may not choose to have confrontation in situations that would make us feel uncomfortable.