Prejudice

My first tastes of prejudice

I’ll never forget my first tastes of prejudice.

It came as quite a shock to me to learn that some people simply weren’t allowed to do things that I took completely for granted. Prejudice warps many lives … with me, it was a much more subtle thing. When I was young, I gained friends of other races and religions, and this made many people around me uncomfortable. My “different” friends were often opening shunned, and my relationships with them were subtly and not-so-subtly discouraged.

Interestingly, I never really bought the arguments. I kept hearing that African-American people were uncivilized, Mexicans always carried switchblades and women couldn’t play baseball. Later in life, I heard horror stories about Mormons, Jews, and Arabs. I’m not sure why I didn’t buy any of this crap … it would have been so easy to believe all of the things that people were telling me.

I was son of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant parents. My father was a civil servant and my mother stayed at home to take care of my sister and I. Our entire neighborhood was white. All of my friends were white. Just about everyone in school was white. Everyone in church was white. In fact, I don’t remember meeting any children of any other race until I was in junior high school. Not a single non-white person comes to mind.

I remember the tension that built up during my final year at Hillside school.

Rumors flew around that Shandin Hills Junior High School was full of “blacks” and “wetbacks”. They all carried knives (guns weren’t known at the time) and never bathed. As summer vacation got closer the tension grew until it was almost unbearable.

Near the end of the year came the most shocking rumor of all. The African-Americans at Shandin Hills had rioted, and a teacher had been knifed. Now I was really scarred … terrified. Every information source at my disposal said that junior high was going to be a major nightmare.

Thus, my first day or junior high wasn’t fun.

I was so tense that I had a terrible headache. My stomach hurt and I felt so tense that the merest noise caused me to jump out of my shoes. I look back on this day wondering at the pain and agony that such a young man had to go through … and for what?

My fears were baseless. The African-American and Mexican people at the new junior high school were just kids. They weren’t any different from me, except they had darker skin or a different shape of eyes. Before the end of that first day was over, I knew that things were going to be okay.

In fact, before the end of that first month I’d found a friend. I forget his name, but throughout that first year of junior high school he was my best friend. This young man was about as black as they come … and he was one of the nicest kids that I knew.

We met in Physical Education … the class created by adults to torture kids like me. We both hated sports and we strongly disliked the P.E. teacher. This created a bond between us, something that we shared, something to link two kids of very different backgrounds and beliefs.

He was from Muscoy, which was the all-African-American community on “the bad side of town.”

White people weren’t allowed in that place. It was evil and dark. In fact, it was so shunned that when the freeway was built through San Bernardino, the engineers designed all of the on- and off-ramps to exit to the white side of town. They went to incredible lengths to perform this feat, including building the on-ramps to dump cars in the fast lane of the freeway.

My young African-American friend and I used to spend our P.E. class wandering around the school yard. We talked about many things, none of which were very important. Mostly, we both learned to respect one another, even though we were of different cultures and had different skin colors.

I don’t remember what happened to my friend. I think he moved away or something, because I have no recollection of him after that first year of junior high school. I still wonder where he went and what became of him sometimes.

Rumors of something called “mandatory busing” and “desegregation” colored (no pun intended) those two years of junior high.

I remember “everyone” being very upset by this concept. The people around me were uncomfortable enough with the idea of African-American and Mexican kids being bused to a white school. They were incensed at the idea that their kids might end up at a black school.

Everyone was concerned about the prospect. Nobody wanted their kids to go to a “black” school. The quality of education would be minimal or even non-existent and the morals of the children would be perverted. I even heard some parents worrying that the black kids might kill their children!

Everyone’s fears were groundless. Busing didn’t occur. Apparently it was okay to bus African-American kids to a white school, but the white kids would never be bused to a African-American school. It just didn’t happen.

Other prejudices were becoming visible as I continued through junior high. I was told that women were inferior to men; it didn’t take me very long to determine this wasn’t true. In fact, I’ve known many women who were far smarter, stronger and more capable than any man.

I had my own touch of prejudice when I was in high school.

I was very quiet and very shy, and found myself the butt of many jokes and pranks about nerds and geeks. I enjoyed learning, science, history and even English. It made me very unpopular with just about everyone. The picture at the top of this page is something that happened to me: a senior thought it would be funny to shove my head in a trash can. Sigh.

Five Years Later: A Facebook Exchange

This was a post I made in response to a post on facebook.

OK, I’ll chime in my two cents here. I’m white. I was raised by parents and family members that taught me that blacks were somehow “different” and inferior, but in a non-specific way. Blacks had rights and such, but they were expected to stay in their own areas. I remember wondering why the freeways in San Bernardino all had the offramps and onramps on the left instead of the right … I was told the left was the “white side of town” and the right was the “black side”. You won’t find that in any history book, but it seemed to be common knowledge at the time.

They started desegregation when I was in junior high school. I remember being on the bus and the very first ever black kid that I saw got on the bus and sat next to me. I was terrified. Oh my lord, what was he going to do to me? Kill me? Beat me up?

Instead, over the next two years, he and I became best friends.

My parents and family were much more vocal about Hispanics and Mexicans. “Wetbacks” was a term my father used often and with much venom and spite.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I met Hispanics. I looked and looked, trying to figure out what the heck my father was talking about… what was wrong with them? Finally, after much thought, I concluded I liked the Hispanic culture, their morals and their history.

You can imagine how my family reacted when I married a native Guatemalan lady. My parents weren’t happy at all. They never said anything, but they could sure communicate a lot without saying anything.

And Mormons, oh my Lord, I was taught these people ate babies (literally) and practiced bizarre rituals and were going directly to hell, and trying to bring as many people as they could with them.

When I wrote the family history I had to make a visit to the Mormon temple in Santa Monica. I was absolutely terrified. Literally, I expected to find a people who were going to drag me to the pits of hell itself.

The Mormon people I met were very nice, wonderful people. Yes, their beliefs are very different form mine, but I was learning different doesn’t mean bad. Today, one of my absolute best friends in the entire world is Mormon. (She’s also Gothic and a belly dancer, go figure.)

My grandfather was held in Japanese prisoner of war camps in World War II for three years and four months. He had a hatred of Japanese (and all Orientals) that was blinding. I guess if I’d been tortured for years I might have a bit of difficulty separating the good from the bad as well…

And, of course, homosexuality is a topic that only came up a few times… along with the words “Hell” and “damnation”. Yet today some of the very very best people I know are both homosexual and they’re married to each other, happy, and contributing to society.

So what am I trying to say here?

I’ve learned over and over that what matters is the person, the individual. I’ve met good white people and evil white people. I’ve seen bad done by blacks, by whites, by Indians (American and otherwise), by Mexicans and by all religions and cultures.

But I judge a man and a woman by his/her actions and words and they way they live. Mardhavi Sakuntala is among the most incredible beings I know, yet culturally, racially, religiously and by just about any other measurement she’s as different from me as anyone could be. Yet she’s one of my best friends.

Everyone looks at the past through the mirror of their experiences, their culture, their upbringing and their beliefs. That’s all baggage and it artificially warps us to think individuals are groups. A white person is WHITE. A black person is BLACK. A Mormon is MORMON. All with the negative emotions and visuals that come with the labels.

It’s far better to look at people as individuals and judge them individually. At least that’s the way I operate these days, now that I’m a bit older and a bit wiser.

Am I proud of being an American? You bet. It’s a country with a lot of good. Of course it’s a bloody history, and of course it’s not ALL good. But America does a lot of good, and with patience and the hard work of thoughtful activists of all peoples, America, and all countries, can be changed to be more good than bad.

Am I going to defend white history? Nope. That’s futile. A black person might view American history through the oppression of the slave traders and the KKK. An American Indian will view it through the slaughter of millions and the destruction (obliteration) of an entire culture. And so on.

What I do is try to see all of the viewpoints, and see what good can come of the mixture of all.

There’s good in most of us… and that’s were I choose to focus my energy.

I guess that was more than two cents, but I hope it makes some sense.

————-

I learned a lot from my grandfather, although it wasn’t a lesson he would have enjoyed passing along.

I spent many long hours staring at him, trying to figure out why he was so full of hate for Asian people. As I listened to him talk and learned, I understood that I never would really understand, at least I hope I don’t, what it’s like to have been marched into Manila as a prisoner, to have survived more than three years in Japanese POW camps, and to have seen and experienced what he saw and experienced. How could I possibly understand?

But by listening I came to an understanding that I could at least accept his reality, listen to his voice and hear what he had to say.

The same was true when I talked with a friend from Croatia.

This fellow had been through a lot. He survived the Serbian genocides and was an active part of the Croatian freedom movement. He’d gone through horrors, seen people butchered, raped and tortured. I could never understand what he went through, but I could listen, hear his words, and accept his viewpoint.

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure to spend a few days on a Navajo Indian reservation. It was a joy to spend time with these people.

I could see they were proud of their past and I could understand their anger at what happened to them. I remember sitting on a wall overlooking a five hundred foot high cliff, just observing the Indian people as they sold jewelry by the side fo the road. A vast gulf separated us, rivers of blood and hate, yet there I was, absorbing their culture and thoughts by observation.

And there are my Marine friends, who have fought in Afghanistan and Iraq. These dozen men and women deserve respect for they believe with their hearts they’re fighting for freedom and against terrorism and tyranny. They’ve been through a lot, more than I can imagine, and what I can do is listen, understand their viewpoint, and empathize with their feelings and thoughts.

It’s about listening without judging. It’s about trying to visualize what the other person is saying and feeling, putting myself in their shoes, so to speak. How would I feel if I was him or her? It’s about granting others the right to have a different viewpoint then mine.

I think that’s a fundamental right: the right to have our own viewpoint.

What I try very hard to do is grant to others the right, the absolute right, to their viewpoint to the world.

And that, my friends, makes it possible to get a glimmering of understanding of what is going on and why people think and act the way that they do.

This is one of the experiences that became my forthcoming book, Everybody’s Prejudiced: How We Judge, Why We Do It, and What Rational People Choose to Do About It. Coming soon.

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