Casper - Presidential candidate Barack Obama was challenged last month to explain his tolerance of the polarizing racial rhetoric in his Chicago church. He did more than that - rather than merely rejecting Reverend Jeremiah Wright and changing the subject, he invited Americans to go deeper, exploring together our ethnic/cultural differences and commonalities. And he acknowledged our constitutional Xeno’s paradox: we must strive for a "more perfect union" knowing perfection is beyond any nation's reach.

 

   Is this a conversation that engages Wyoming? Sitting around a table recently with a group of people from all corners of the state, an acquaintance from Worland pointed out that you can grow up in the Cowboy State and never – that’s right, never – interact with a black person until you go to college, or, in his case, serve in the military. 

 

That makes you unworldly, but not racist. In fact, one could argue that the Wyoming youngster who talks to a black person for the first time at 18 does so with fewer biases and less guardedness than the white fellow who grew up playing basketball among mostly black teams at the Eastern Market in Washington, D.C.

 

   But that doesn’t mean Wyomingites don’t think about race and cultural differences. We see, at least within the secure boxes of our televisions, the tensions and tortures of ethnically diverse societies at war with themselves. Places where people fear to go outside, can't abide each other in the same restaurant, yell epithets at each other across barriers, clash violently over political differences. Wyoming is largely exempt from that. Those who were born here, and even more those who have moved here, tout the intimate communities of our state, the freedom of our kids to roam the neighborhood, the superfluity of locking doors, the shared values and easy understanding of our private and public discourse.

Which is another way of saying: We like that we're alike. It feels safer.

 

   Here are the numbers. Wyoming is 94.5 percent white, if you include Hispanics, 88.1% if you don't (these are 2006 estimates from the U.S. Bureau of Census, which apparently feels ethnographically ambivalent about Hispanics). Those Hispanics (a growing 6.9 % of the state’s population) are a mix of longtime residents and newcomers visible in construction and service jobs. A smattering of Asians (0.7 %) and an almost invisible contingent of about 3,700 blacks (0.9 %, compared to 12.8 % nationwide) reside here. For those who feel deprived of diversity, we can only say: at least you’re not in Montana, which is 88.7 % white (leaving out those confusing Hispanics).

 

One ethnic minority in Wyoming has a higher profile: Native Americans. That’s because the Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone are hard to miss if you come to Fremont County, where they are concentrated on the Wind River Indian Reservation, a swath of real estate that encompasses 2.2 million acres, surrounds the city of Riverton, and includes prime agricultural lands and spectacular wilderness that runs up to the Continental Divide. (And that, by the way, is the shrunken version of the reservation, which back in the 1860s extended all the way to the Great Salt Lake).

 

   Most people in Fremont County like to think they know their neighbors, including Indians, and they will not cotton to an interloper like me suggesting that, for the most part, they don't. Few of them have the opportunity to visit in Indian households, or have the social ease to invite Native Americans into their own. Most non-Indians encounter Indians only on "our" turf: at the supermarket, where Indians quietly going about their business can be virtually invisible, but a drunk or a surly teenager is sure to catch a clerk's attention. Nor do non-Indians generally know much history – not a lot is readily available – about the two tribes that reside here, and even less about the Sheepeaters, or the Crow and others who historically hunted this country.

   Those who want to know more – and these are often people who didn't grow up in Indian Country, and may arrive with needy, romantic ideas about Native Americans – often don't know where to begin, hampered by both the apparent shyness of many Indians and their own Politically Correct reticence. There are no signs guiding you to a Wind River Cultural Orientation Center. What you can get plenty of is politically incorrect gab about Indians among whites in coffee shops and bars – which, even though you may claim to disown it, is absorbed into the broad subconscious of the community.

Indian people know what you've heard. Over the years, as my newspaper and book projects at Wind River gave way to purely social visits, my hosts would sometimes tease me about it. They know non-Indians are curious about them, somewhat in awe of their mythical inheritance, now and then scared, and loaded with clichéd notions about them, some positive, some negative. They are genetically more susceptible to alcohol. They have large, warm extended families. They get a lot of federal welfare, guilt money for the sins of our fathers (which we resent). They are swift and overpowering on the basketball court (but don't play much defense). They do sweats, and have rich spiritual lives (how do I get invited?). They don't show up for work on time. 

   As a newcomer, you may cringe inwardly the first time you hear some of it, but you keep quiet, assuming it's not your place to wag a finger; over time you learn to tolerate it, because in so many ways your neighbors are good and decent people, and it's just words.

   When a Northern Arapaho is late getting to a meeting, the first person to say "He’s on Indian time" out loud is going to be an Indian – because you, the non-Indian, are thinking it, and he, the Indian, knows you’re thinking it, and wants you to know he knows. Plus, he's showing you he's got a self-deprecating sense of humor – he's making it easier for you to shed some of the up-tightness and political correctness that burden us all.

   People from racially homogenous regions, geographically or economically segregated worlds, learn about ethnic differences from the printed word and the flat screen. They may have opinions, but they probably don’t know how they really feel. Nicholas Kristof, a world-travelling, liberal columnist for the New York Times, recently took a psychological quiz developed by the University of Chicago, that tested his reaction to encounters with black and white men. To his embarrassment, he found that he was more afraid of an armed black man – quicker to shoot him – than he was of an armed white man.

 

You might think Kristof would carry less racial baggage than a Southerner. But like Barack Obama’s grandmother, he hadn't crossed that street. A person from Georgia may know better than a Manhattanite how she feels about blacks – however troubled the history of race relations in the South, it is an intimate knowledge enriched by voice and touch and proximity. People from racially homogenous regions, segregated geographically – like much of the American West –have opinions, but may not know how they really feel. That requires intimacy.

 

   If I may be presumptuous, Kristof should spend more time with the people that frighten him. He has the same advantage I had when I moved to Wyoming – as a journalist, you can cross a lot of cultural barriers, overcome your own and others' natural reticence, simply by doing your job, which is to ask questions. "Working on a story" is an acceptable explanation for knocking on someone's door, and it provided my first entry into homes on the Wind River Indian Reservation. There, I've found a hospitality that puts most of us to shame.

   Beyond that, the only tests you'll have to pass are the tests of any relationship, which are too nuanced to enumerate here, but of which the most important, when reaching over ethnic and cultural barriers, may be time. Reservations see a lot of friendly anthropologists and journalists, taking notes and taking off. You must keep coming back, without the notebook.

   The opportunities to experience diversity are few in Wyoming, except in Fremont County, and even there, many pass on the opportunity. Why? It could be self-doubt, fear, uncertainty about how to go about it, lack of interest. It could be that some of the supposedly color-blind values that we hold – the trust among neighbors, the isolation from urban strife, the stability of communities – are enhanced by lack of diversity.

   That table where we talked about this recently was about as diverse as Wyoming is – transplants from the Far West and Midwest and South, and people who had grown up in the state. And all white. We had all expressed our gratitude for what the state has given us and our families.

   Lastly, a woman from Laramie said she had moved here for a job opportunity that had more than met her expectations. But she wasn't sure she could stay. "I came from a place with people of color. Sometimes I just have to flee back to a city, because I miss the diversity. I really miss it. The sounds, the sights, the food, all of it.
"I shouldn’t have to leave for that experience."

 

   The point, I think, is that once experienced, it's addictive. "Diversity" is just a word, like "Indian time", but the sound and the color and the smell of our differences is sensual, invigorating, and at times scary. The scary part is the inflammatory rhetoric from a Chicago church which few whites knew existed until it got onto YouTube. The invigorating part is an invitation, like Barack Obama issued, that we cross those ethnic barriers and start experiencing each other in more than just words.

That can happen in Wyoming, too.

 

Editor’s Note: WyoFile columnist O’Gara is the author of the book “What You See in Clear Water: Life on the Wind River Reservation.” (Alfred A. Knopf, 2000). To read excerpt from his book click Here.