It never occurred to me that I was prejudiced. In fact, I was inspired to leave the life I knew as a young white man to be a Christian missionary in Africa. Yet, until that time at age 22 in my little town in Colorado, I don’t remember ever meeting a black person or knowing anything about black history. I just knew I wanted to know and serve God. As I prepared to depart my country for that foreign land, I felt an inward restraint so strong that I canceled my plans with Africa Inland Mission. In the coming years, several events and relationships impacted my decision and changed my life. My desire had been admirable, but difficult circumstances revealed that I was not like I had hoped that I was. It would take 49 years before I went on my first visit to Kenya.

Watts

Amid a complicated set of circumstances, I found myself in Los Angeles—alone, far from home, and having made decisions that canceled everything that I had accomplished in college and learned from my numerous, hopeful mentors. Suddenly I needed a job. Not knowing why, I was impressed to apply for a teaching position in Watts. This was soon after the riots and fires of the mid-sixties.

When I applied to L.A. City Schools, Superintendent Baer said that in all of Los Angeles only one teaching position was open. It was in Watts! I went to Charles Drew Jr. High for an interview with the principal, Mr. Henrikson. He told me I could have the job if I wanted it, but he wanted to assure me I would be a failure. I was white, and I would be a teacher. I would face nothing but rebellion among the 1800 black students and represent authority. Having a strong conviction, I surprised him. I said “Fine, I will take the job.”

Suddenly, I was a white teacher in a black school. I was to teach plastics and other industrial subjects, of which I knew absolutely nothing. I would have as many as 44 students in my shop classes. On my second day, a riot broke out. It was chaos. My students threw my two desks into the walls and tore down some of the plaster. They were all screaming “Get outta here Whitey and don’t ever come back!” I ran out of my shop door, across the teachers’ parking lot and across the campus to hide in the Counselor’s Office under Mr. Kerr’s desk. He was a black man, the former teacher of my shop classes. He knew if I were a failure he would have to return to that impossible job.

I cried on the way to school and quit every day for three months. In the agony of my situation, I learned things about myself. I discovered that my love for God was mostly doctrinal, and my love for people mostly theoretical. In the next four years, 700 students passed through my classes. I had as many as four death threats on my life in a single week. My students sometimes started fights in class, chased others with a hack saw and chisel, threw a hammer at others, threw orange juice at me during recess, and more. In my constant distress, one day I went into my supply room during class, slammed the door and just stood there, cursing them all. I was frustrated and angry that many saw my white skin and cursed me for the same reason. I didn’t see people. I didn’t see faces. I just saw black bodies in motion. And I suddenly saw the prejudice and hatred in my own heart.

Where had that little missionary in me gone? A light dawned inside of me—something was wrong in my own heart. The situation had not made me prejudiced. It only exposed what was deep inside of me already. Perhaps my students had the same problem. I cried out to the living God and realizations began.  My hatred began to turn to a genuine love that I previously only thought I had.

Soon, I was elected Department Chairman, and my students had responded to my changing view and feelings. I brought many of them home with me on weekends. I had no “teacher’s pet.” Rather, it was a rivalry, a great honor to be invited to Mr. and Mrs. Nelson’s apartment for the weekend. In my third year, students prepared a project display for the Los Angeles Industrial Crafts Fair. Of 34 Junior High Schools, my students took First Place, a phenomenal accomplishment.

By that time, I had begun to see them as people, individuals, creations of a loving God whom everyone can relate to. I wasn’t “color blind.” I saw color as a beautiful gift, the more diverse the better. To this day, Ricky, Michael, Louis and the others remain in my heart. If there were ever a need, I knew they and the others would defend me to the death, as I also would have for them. I failed a lot, but a lot was gained—in them and in me. Watts had become my Africa.

Transition

Between my entrance into the black community and the present time, I have had countless experiences of peoples with complexions, languages, and cultures different from mine. When I discovered the depths of my own prejudice and depravity while teaching in Watts, I opened my heart deeper than I could have ever known possible. Since that time, I have grown, filled with love of God and love of all people.

Expansion

Half-way through my doctoral program 42 years after teaching at Watts, I was required to present a Forum Essay to students, faculty, and the public. My essay was on Poetry. The essay’s impact was significant. The critiquing professors were all known to be incredibly sophisticated, daunting, and tough. No critiques being offered, the chairman concluded by saying that during his 14 years at Oxford Graduate School (OGS) there had never been a student’s presentation that was so outstanding that no one thought it could be improved. The discussion was then opened up to the audience for responses. One impactful, positive comment came from a highly esteemed, black professor. Another wonderful comment in the audience came from a successful black woman, my esteemed colleague. The President of OGS later asked if I would extend my Forum Essay to a doctoral dissertation. Eventually, she also arranged for me to meet the esteemed Dr. Maya Angelou.

Dr. Maya Angelou

Through amazing circumstances, among a luncheon of 500 black women and I in Charlotte, NC, I heard Dr. Angelou speak. Weeks later, my wife and other guests were sitting at her lunch table, an exquisite affair! I had read much of her stunning life story but physically being with her vastly enlarged my views of the black community, of their suffering, struggles, and successes. On one occasion in her home, we sat with Dr. Angelou and Oprah Winfrey for a casual discussion of more than one hour. The night she invited us to stay overnight in her home, she asked me to autograph one of my books for her and then ordered eight more copies for her friends. She included us in her Annual Five-Day-Celebration of Thanksgiving in Winston-Salem among her closest biological and social friends.

From my friend Dr. Maya Angelou, I learned of her great involvement with Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Because of her, I became acquainted with the daughter of Malcolm X as we were seated in the VIP section at the U.S. Post Office inauguration of the “Maya Angelou Stamp.” Because of her, I have great friends among the black community in America and with Africans of many countries. I even got to go on a fantastic visit to see Mama Sarah, President Obama’s grandmother in Kenya. Five weeks before she passed away in 2014, Dr. Angelou designated me to help design, build, and launch a traveling, educational museum of her life and work. Her personal assistant of more than 15 years continues to call me and stay overnight with us in Nashville occasionally as he is crisscrossing our great nation. And so much more…

Summary

The experiences and perspectives that I have shared in this discussion were pivotal adventures of my life, but there are countless other stories of impact to my own life—of concept, of sub-culture, and appreciation of the black community. The relevant enlightenment and spiritual renewal of my heart has included people of every culture, religion, and complexion whom I know from all around the world. It is through experiencing persons in their context with mine, serving and participating in mutual events in my home and theirs, that my appreciation has grown, expanded, and been shared. It may be that others have found the need to discover their own inward condition and realize a journey such as mine. The joyful overflow of my life’s adventure thus far has led me to publish more than 25 books on family, spiritual guidance, and work, relevant to all. My contribution to celebrating Black History Month here may be small, but it is personal, it is real, and it is mine.

In his Models of My Life, social scientist Herbert Simon stated that science’s purpose is to find meaningful simplicity in the midst of disorderly complexity. Although the systems in nature and society seem to be very complex, we need simple theories to understand them. The key to finding these simple rules or principles, which Plato called perfect form and thing-in-itself and Kant described as a kind of untouchable essence behind physical things or systems, is mathematics.

Mathematics and social science

One of mathematics’ main challenges is its uses in social sciences. But does mathematics, which is considered rigid and restrictive and the best tool for explaining matter, have laws for human life? The latest studies in sociology, biology, and epidemiology show that such laws and meaningful patterns do exist and can be discovered. One of the great achievements of mathematics and physics in sociology is explaining the six degrees of separation (i.e., the small world) phenomenon.(1)

Almost everyone has met someone far from our home who is a friend of a friend. This is so common that it has become a clich: It’s a small world “ even though there are now more than 6 billion people. Even more surprising is the structure of social networks, the map of who knows whom, which shows that all people are closely connected.(2)

A social network is a collection of people, each of whom is acquainted with some subset of others. This can be represented as a set of points (nodes) denoting people, joined in pairs by lines (edges) denoting acquaintance, in a company, university, or even a global community. Social scientists have studied such networks, both empirically and theoretically, for at least 50 years.

A revealing experiment

One of the first and famous empirical studies was conducted in 1967 by Stanley Milgram, a Harvard psychology professor: the small world phenomenon. He asked: Starting with any two people in the world, what is the probability that they will know one another? In a large social network, although X and Z might not know each other, they might have a mutual acquaintance. Moreover, X might be linked to Z by a series of links. In other words, X knows a, who knows b, who knows c … who knows y, who knows Z. But how many intermediate acquaintance links are needed, on the average, to connect X and Z?

According to Milgram (3), this phenomenon raises the issue of a certain mathematical structure in society, one that often plays a part in discussions about history, sociology, and other disciplines. For example, during western Europe’s Dark Age, cities became isolated because inter-city communications broke down and thus severely limited the network of individual acquaintances. Thus, social disintegration was expressed in the communities’ growing isolation and people’s infrequent contact with non-local people.

Milgram asked his test subjects, chosen at random from Nebraskan and Kansan telephone directories, to get a letter to one of his Boston stockbroker friends. The letters were to be sent passing them from one person to another, but only if both parties were on a first-name basis. Since it was unlikely that the letter’s initial recipient and a Boston stockbroker would be on a first-name basis, their best strategy was to pass the letter to someone whom they felt would be socially or geographically closer to the stockbroker.

A moderate number of the letters eventually reached their destination. Milgram discovered that the average number of steps in this process was about six. This is usually considered evidence of the small world hypothesis: Most pairs of people, even in a very large population, can be connected by a short chain of intermediate acquaintances.

Milgram’s work passed into folklore and was immortalized in John Guare’s 1990 play Six Degrees of Separation, where Ouisa claims: Everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation. Between us and everybody else on this planet. The president of the United States. A gondolier in Venice…. It’s not just the big names. It’s anyone. A native in a rain forest. A Tierra del Fuegan. An Eskimo. I am bound to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people. It’s a profound thought…. How every person is a new door, opening to other worlds.(4)

Watts and Strogatz used this model to explain the six degrees of separation in society- and nature-based networks.(5) Their model employs mathematical graph theory, which consists of nodes (people) and links (acquaintance). They modified the regular network, in which every node has short-range fixed number of connections, by adding long-range connections to the regular network to simulate the short path length between nodes. This model is now used in such areas as networks connected with biological metabolism, genomes, proteins, the Internet backbone, power grids, companies, and the stock market.

Research on social networks has helped health professionals understand how epidemics spread. Epidemiological models help them to predict how fast a disease will spread and to develop small world theory strategies to combat them, for scientists now realize that this social network property is a main cause for the outbreak of epidemics. This network offers a super-connected web of stepping stones for infectious diseases. After analyzing the social network’s structure, public health specialists can devise new vaccination strategies to slow or stop the epidemic. The small world theory also explains the rapid spread of news, rumors, fashions, and gossip.

Other types of systems show similar properties: networks of actors involved in the same movie, scientific collaboration networks of scientists who coauthor an article, and even the Internet, where millions of web pages are connected via mutual links. Recent research shows that in all of these networks, there are only a few steps between one node and any other node. The average shortest path between a network’s nodes, is 3.5 for the actor network and 9.5 for the scientific collaboration network. Despite the Internet’s more than 800 million nodes, there are, on average, only 19 steps between one web page and any other.(6)

Conclusion

The small world theory is a great success of the theory of complexity in nature and social life. It reveals an underlying dynamic of interconnectedness that expresses itself indelibly in who we are and how we think, behave, and communicate. Such close interconnectedness reveals one important fact for constructing a peaceful and beneficial world: There are no strangers, for everyone is one of our friends’ or neighbors’ friend or relative. The key element in understanding people is communication. Mutual love and good relations continue as long as we understand each other. We are loyal and faithful to the extent that we share our friends’ troubles, because ignorance only builds an impenetrable wall between us.(7)

Hasan Guclu is a doctoral student in the field of very large complex systems, such as computer networks, social networks, epidemics, and surface growth.

Footnotes

1. See, respectively, A. L. Barabasi, Linked (Perseus Publishing: 2002); D. J. Watts, Small Worlds (Princeton University Press: 1999); and M. Buchanan, Nexus (W. W. Norton: 2002).
2. D. J. Watts and S. H. Strogatz, Collective Dynamics of Small World Networks, Nature 393 (1998):440-42.
3. S. Milgram, The Individual In A Social World (Addison-Wesley: 1977).
4. J. Guare, Six Degrees of Separation: A Play (Vintage: 1990).
5. Watts and Strogatz, Collective Dynamics.
6. A. L. Barabasi, Linked.
7. F. Gulen, Pearls of Wisdom (The Fountain: 2001).