Is racism taught or learned?

Taught

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by Steven Garrett

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Racism, prejudice, is the quintessence of ignorance and produces the most potentially violent and dangerous visions of deception: other' people are different from us' people.

Merriam-Webster's (10th edition);

RACISM: n

1: Belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.

2: racial prejudice or discrimination.

That word doesn't get its ugly sound from its spelling and that belief doesn't get into someone's mind through a process of logic or reasoning, it has to be put there.

With one hard smack prejudice cracks a person's vision of life into meaningless divisions that can send heated words and bullets flying. But long before the action starts this groundless view of others has to be planted and allowed to take root in our minds before flourishing to potent dimensions in adulthood.

Racism is prejudice and the word itself tells you something: Pre-Judge' is not an act of reason or logic and no innocent child's mind will produce it. Pre-judging' is a reaction, not a response and for a child [or young adult] to form the basis of such reactions there has to be two factors involved:

1.A thorough lack of education and constructive experience with other races; i.e. ignorance.
2.Someone who is prejudiced must share and instill these thoughts in a young, malleable mind.

I was lucky to have had the opportunity as a child to gain the experience needed to avoid the void' of ignorance about people beginning on a Santa Cruz, California beach as a five year-old in 1956. Our family was sitting on the piece of sand we had staked out for the day when a man wearing only a bathing suit walked past us. On his forearm was a string of tattooed numbers and this unusual sight set my young mind and mouth in motion as my mother tried to shush me quiet. Undaunted I jumped up and sprinted to where he had stopped, hearing my commotion, and turned around to face me.

Assuring my mother it was quite alright, that children needed to hear what he had to say, he then explained to me what Nazi concentration camps were and what had happened to him and his family. My child's mind was only able to comprehend the meanness' and wrongness' done to people by a bad government' but that encounter is still clear in my mind today and I'm convinced it was the basis for solid and reasonable views of others that I was to develop through life.

It was the impressions that man made on my young mind that day and the books of Andre Schwarz-bart, Leon Uris and Herman Wouk that told me the Jewish story, leaving no space for other versions' of reality that an empty space in that spot in my head would have provided and as I grew older even more encounters with people would give me more knowledge for my expanding views.

I was seven or eight years old and at Lake Almanor in Northern California when I met my first black person. I'll never forget my jaw-dropping awe at the sight of this huge man in a white summer suit as he walked past us, tipping his white Panama hat to my mother. My mouth must have been going a mile a minute as I struggled and then yanked myself free of my mom's grip and sprinted the ten feet or so to where he too, like the Jewish man, had stopped and turned at my racket. I was all questions as he explained to me details of a far away continent his ancestors had come from and when he was finished, before I would leave, I had to rub the coal black skin on the top of his hand with my fingers to satisfy my childish curiosity.

That memory too is crystal clear in my mind and enhanced by the many novels of Wilbur Smith that describe in detail the history of African cultures and its peoples. That man in the white Panama hat and those books brought to me the experience of variety in people as a natural and comfortable state in the world.

But that's not all I learned growing up in the agricultural valley of Santa Clara as a kid. The summer months back then gave us an opportunity to earn money in the fruit industry and one of those ways was to cut cots', or slice apricots and set them for drying on large wooden trays.

There I met a kid named Arturo, who taught me the ins and outs of cutting cots' without cutting my fingers to pieces in the process. Arturo and his family were migrant farm workers and it was there in those orchards at ten years of age that I got my first taste of Mexican food when my pal Arturo and I shared lunches.

For years I have lived and learned amongst a growing Mexican-American community here in California, but my knowledge of Mexico has been considerably enhanced by the novels of James Michener and others.

Where knowledge grows, the weeds of prejudice have no room to take root and a poignant childhood memory reverberates through me to this day, an incident of ignorance that taught me about the errors and shortcomings of our humanity and nothing about cultures or race.

When I was eleven years old I was with my family at a neighborhood public pool where I met a little girl clinging tightly to the pool side, she didn't know how to swim she said, and, like all young boys eager to impress the girls, I gallantly offered to teach her. Her father showed up quickly and, understandably, interrogated me regarding my credentials as swimming coach'. After reciting my swimming accomplishments in terms of racing ribbons won, I then quickly intercepted his lingering doubts with my observation that his daughter, who was returning my intense stare, was very pretty and I would never let anything in the world to happen to her. A giggle from her sealed his approval and he left with a final admonishment to take care of her'. No doubt, we were both smitten with each other as children can quickly become and the lessons went on.

But only for a few minutes until my father's arm yanked me out of the pool and shattered the bliss of the moment. Pulled unceremoniously back to my family, it was only a short time until the little girl and I waved sadly goodbye to each other from across the vast width of a mere swimming pool.

The only black family at the pool had suddenly decided to leave.

That was my first experience with racism and the confusion I felt wasn't dispelled until I read a book by John Howard Griffin, a white man who traveled through the southern states in 1959 posing as a black man; it was only then I understood.

Thankfully, my father grew out of his ignorance and that incident, along with the others throughout my childhood and since, has left me with a constructive understanding of racism, prejudice, which books alone could not have taught me.

Knowledge through education and interpersonal experiences produces empathy for other people regardless of racial, religious and cultural identity and empathy counteracts the de-humanizing requirements of racism.

People are people, regardless of the packaging and only ignorance of another person's humanity can provide the impressionable mind needed to implant the irrational fear and displaced anger of prejudice: racism.

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