Celebrating Black History Month by celebrating everyone

It’s a difficult time to celebrate anything. And with Black History Month upon us, there is actually much for the African-American community to be proud of: a Black vice-president, a Black secretary of defense, a Black poet laureate. But I suggest we commemorate Black History Month a different way, as well, one that celebrates the things that bring us together instead of drive us apart. Our common humanity, in other words.

The belief that we are stronger together has never been truer. COVID-19 does not discriminate among race, age, culture, ethnicity, creed, religion or any other factor that may tend to divide us. And so we must tighten the ties that bind us, because those ties are both the cure and the vaccine — if not for the virus itself, at least for its side effects certain to linger the longest in disrupting the lives we are now forced to redefine.

We are all so much more similar than different. As an orthopedic surgeon, I can tell you that when you make the incision, when you look inside, everybody is the same. Open up the skin and underneath it’s all one. The reality of the body tells you this. It’s a reality doctors see constantly. Our humanness is greater than our cultural differences, our differences in status or rank, our racial differences, and we share 99.9 percent of the same DNA. In the final analysis we’re just human and now we need the power of our common humanity to help us spot a future through the clouds, to bring light to the darkness that threatens to consume us.

“Pandemics will always be characterized by their randomness, pitilessness, and power to sicken and kill,” Jeffrey Kluger wrote for Time in February 2020. “The human response, when it’s at its best, is defined by collective courage and compassion, a ‘not-on-our-watch’ refusal to let a disease have its way with our fellow humans. And to limit the impact of — and ultimately defeat — the current coronavirus pandemic, that’s exactly what we’ll need.”

That’s the power of our common humanity and, more than anything else, we need it now. I served as a trauma surgeon in Vietnam and the MASH hospital we were working in just happened to be five miles from a leper colony run by a group of dedicated Franciscan nuns. Treating those lepers, sometimes just hours removed from a crushing stretch in our makeshift operating room, confronted me all at once with the incredible dichotomy between nature’s inhumanity to man and man’s inhumanity to man. They were ravaged by a disease beyond their control much as our country and world has been ravaged by an out-ofcontrol pandemic.

What we can control, on the other hand, is a common humanity with our fellow man. I propose that to celebrate Black History Month, all of us, everyone, work to become cross-culturally literate, which means we develop the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and ideas, and abilities to work with people of a different culture, or different sex, or a different lifestyle, or different country, or different religion, as effectively as we can with someone of our own religion, our own ethnicity, our own lifestyle.

For my latest book, I interviewed 20 individuals of all races, creeds and cultures who were united only in that all had found the resilience they needed to overcome often incredible levels of adversity, not unlike the level all of us are experiencing today. The one thing they all had in common was none beat the odds on their own; each had help from their fellow humans and has now gone on to do the same for others.

“I don't think of all the misery,” Anne Frank once wrote, “but of the beauty that still remains.”

It’s that beauty that unites us. It’s that beauty that gives us hope. According to Donald Plaff in his book “The Altruistic Brain,” we are wired to do the right thing, we want to do the right thing. So let’s do it. Let’s use the pandemic in our respective spheres of influence to work toward our common good, to highlight what brings us together instead of what drives us apart. From the storm clouds that have covered our world for almost a year now, let’s make a rainbow.

Dr. Augustus White III was the first Black surgical resident at Yale, the first Black professor of surgery at Yale and the first Black chief of service at a Harvard teaching hospital. He is professor of orthopedics and medical education at Harvard Medical School and professor emeritus in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.