I grew up terrified of Black people. My parents had told me, directly and repeatedly, that Black people smelled bad and would kill me without hesitation. This was the explicit instruction of my childhood, delivered with the same matter-of-fact authority they used for everything else they knew to be true. They believed it. They’d got it from their parents, who had got it from theirs, in a chain of received certainty that nobody in the family had ever seen fit to examine. By the time it reached me it had the feel of fact.
What happened on the bus?
When I was eleven, during school desegregation, I got on a school bus and saw that the only open seat was next to a Black kid.
Every signal my nervous system sent said: don’t sit there.
I sat there because there was nowhere else to go. Within a week we were friends. His name was Sam. We played together after school almost every afternoon for two years. He was my best friend in that school. I was his. I never told my parents. They would have found a way to end it.
Why did that work when arguments would not have?
Because what I got, in their absence from those two years of afternoons, was the fact of Sam. A particular person with a particular temperament and particular interests, none of which had anything to do with the category my parents had given him before I ever met him.
The category had been wrong. Sam was what showed me it was wrong.
No argument would have done that. You can’t reason somebody out of a belief that arrived as a physical response, and at eleven I didn’t have the equipment to try. What I’d was a boy who liked the same things I liked, every afternoon, for two years, until the category couldn’t hold him.
Was that the only one?
No. I grew up terrified of Mormons because my mother told me they ate babies. Literally. Ritually.
That sat in my mind for thirty years, never examined, never tested, shaping a low-level wariness about a large religious community I’d never encountered.
In my late twenties a genealogy project took me to a Family History Center in Santa Monica, run by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I pulled into the parking lot and sat in the car for an hour before I could make myself go in. That was the low-grade version of the fear response. Not terror. A persistent inability to do the next obvious thing, accompanied by a succession of small plausible reasons why now wasn’t quite the right moment. The people inside were the kindest and most helpful researchers I’d encountered. The baby-eating theory didn’t survive five seconds of contact.
What does the low-grade version look like?
Exactly like that hour in the car park, and that’s why it’s worth describing precisely.
Nobody in that situation experiences themselves as prejudiced. What you experience is reasonable hesitation.
You’re busy. It’s late in the day. You could come back tomorrow when you have more time. Every one of those thoughts is plausible on its own and the effect of all of them together is that you don’t go in.
That’s the common form. Not hatred. That announces itself and can be argued with. A quiet difficulty doing the ordinary thing, with reasons attached.
Later I met Erika, who performs under the name Karma. She’s a gothic Mormon belly dancer and has been one of my closer friends for years. She’s the permanent, present-tense, irreducible answer to my mother’s theory, and every conversation I have with her is another small demolition of a category that was built around her identity before I’d met anybody who held it.
How do you unlearn the prejudice you were raised with?
My father used racial and ethnic slurs the way other people use punctuation.
Not in rage. Not as performance. In the ordinary course of describing the world, the neighbors, the news, the people he met at work or at the grocery store. The words were part of his vocabulary the way any word becomes part of a vocabulary, in through repetition until it needs no decision.
It would be easier if he had been a monster, because monsters are a separate category and the rest of us are safe from them. He wasn’t. He was an ordinary man who had received something without examining it and passed it on the same way.
The book on this: Everybody’s Prejudiced is built on sixty-plus years of paying attention to how this works in actual rooms with actual people, including the rooms where I was the one getting it wrong.
What is the actual claim?
Everybody is prejudiced. The question is what yours is attached to, and what you’ve built on top of it.
Categories lose to people. Every time, and nothing else works as reliably.
Watch for the hour in the car park. The low-grade version is the one you’ll have, and it comes with excellent reasons.
This comes from experience. It’s decades of paying attention in actual rooms with actual people, including rooms where I was the one getting it wrong.
Sam and I lost touch when I changed schools, the way eleven year olds do. I’ve thought about him for fifty years, because for two of them he was the only piece of evidence I had, and he was enough.
