THE COLOR OF IGNORANCE

Recently I was watching a show about a man and his daughter, a young woman. She was a mother with a bi-racial baby, and there seemed to be no father present. This happens a lot, the girl gets pregnant and the father somehow escapes the responsibility of co-parenting the child. What made the situation even more toxic is the woman’s father was a racist, a member and grand knight of the KKK! You can’t make this up.

His disdain for the child was extreme, calling his grandchild a monkey and suggesting that if she wanted to visit him with the child, he would build a cage for the child!

Of course this is so egregious, not only to the child, but also to his daughter and to the spirit of this great country and God’s law. Incomprehensible too comes to mind, and unforgiveable to the extreme. Or is it? What makes a person so hateful, so extreme in his thinking that it comes to such a base level? Is it stupidity, or prejudice or ignorance or fear? How do we take a measure of such thinking? Do we have a title that ensures us we can pass judgment of others?

I know this: that we all harbor prejudice from the cradle on. We are all taught something somewhere that ‘colors’ our thinking, even the good things. The father’s racism goes back many centuries probably all the way back to the beginning of time. We can blame racism on many factors and only be partially correct, it is not a disease, not something you learn in a school or book, and it is an inherited idea that everyone else not like us has some fundamental flaws.

Being of Italian descent, I witnessed it in my life: first from those not Italian forming opinions of me without knowing me, a potential gangster? I talk with my hands, I’m from the Mediterranean and therefore not equal to anyone north of the Alps. This was a common occurrence to me growing up and entering the world outside my neighborhood. But there were those same kinds of thoughts emanating from my race too, about the Irish, Germans, Poles, Asians, Hispanics and blacks. Surprising? Why should it be, we all know these unspoken truths. After all, were the neighborhoods not refuge for the different ethnic groups that populated the 20^th Century, especially in the beginning of the century?

But the bottom line seems to me to be… the bottom line. The reason we have these prejudices is because no one invested the money or time to process the bigotry for us, that we fear what we don’t know, that we by our economic system keep the average man down. Who is the average man? The average man is either white, Hispanic, black or yellow, short, medium height and tall, who is a Muslim, Catholic or Protestant, Jew. Yes he is all of us; we need to come to grips with a way to handle this prejudice that shackles our acceptance and colors our views to obscurity.

We need to start investing time and money into teaching our children the false premises of bigotry of any kind. The way we can teach it is the way we can teach against it. We need the school boards to take up the cause of educating our children to learn how to prosper, beyond just the college and trade school route. We need to take the poor and raise their status in our minds to equality. What will it do? It will teach our children how to behave in a civil way, it will help the poor contribute in a big way by being doctors and nurses, school teachers and artists and dentists and whatever else an individual dreams to be. We need to help that dream.

Recently Starbucks came out with a campaign to bring awareness to the issue of racism. ‘Race Together’ is an attempt to bring racism out into a forum of social discussion and find dialogue among all people. It would be like buying a cup of their coffee and getting into a discussion with the guy or gal serving you the coffee, they writing ‘Race Together’ on your cup. If you object, they would cover the statement up. Detractors are already raising their voices, and criticizing Starbucks for their efforts, claiming big companies should stay out of social issues and not profit from this on their bottom line! I have to ask this question: since big business is already criticized for all the economic ills in this country, all the social faults laying squarely on their shoulders with the obscene profits they do make, how do you not want them to start to raise the consciousness of the people? Maybe the detractors have a solution? I have heard from Starbucks as trying to be part of the solution, but not from the detractors! How about we start with something rather than go back to nothing? Or are the detractors just blowing hot air?

Looking forward, we need to dissolve the myths of stereotyping races of people, get the nonsense and ignorance out of all of us. We are all responsible. From the blackness of Harlem to the whiteness of suburban America, and the mixes in between, we all are prejudice.