His challenge as an educator today is to teach his students the profound dignity of their own African identity. A crucial part of this challenge is to make a connection between being Catholic and being African. Mr. Kindall's experience demonstrates that black skin color is not meaningless. Black matters because it symbolizes both a history of American oppression and a rich African heritage. This brings us to the second principle, that different communities will, when given convenient opportunity, discriminate against one another.
Human beings are creatures of habit, fearful of what is foreign.
When given the opportunity, members of a community associate only with others of their own community. Whichever group controls the institutions of education and employment tends to block those outside their group from equal sharing in these institutions. Human beings, when they find themselves in a stable situation, prefer maintenance of the status quo to the achievement of justice. A painful reminder of this reality is that segregation ended in the South not because ideas of justice prevailed on southern whites, leading them to change their opinions on race, but because the federal government forced change and because whites discovered that they could not survive economically if blacks refused to spend money in white businesses. If skin color does matter in the sense that it causes us to split into different communities, and if different communities necessarily tend, by the very structure of human nature, to discriminate against one another, then we are led to the conclusion that African-Americans will not be given a just share of resources without the institution of programs like affirmative action.