Discussing racism is similar to attempting to have a coherent conversation about confusion; it’s difficult to figure out where to start and then how to proceed.
Because racism or prejudice is the quintessence of ignorance and produces the most potentially confusing and violent visions of deception: other people are different from ‘us’ people.
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—racism- has an ugly ring to it that doesn’t come from its spelling; and that type of belief doesn't get into someone’s mind through a process of reasoning. It has to be planted in young, malleable minds that lack the sophistication to challenge it. And once there, through attrition, a little at time racism blossoms into mistrust, fear and then full-blown hatred, turning ‘other’ people into indiscriminate targets; blaming others for one’s own unhappiness is such an easy- and thoughtless- thing to do.
With one hard smack racism will crack a person's vision of life into meaningless divisions that can send heated words and bullets flying.
Racism is prejudice and the words themselves tell us something: race-ism and pre-judge are reactive thoughts not reason or logic; and no innocent child's mind will produce them without two conditions present:
1. A lack of education about, and constructive experience with, other races; i.e. ignorance.
2. Someone who is prejudiced must share and instill these thoughts in a malleable mind.
I was lucky; as a child I gained the experience needed to avoid the ‘void’ of ignorance about other people beginning on a Santa Cruz, California beach as a five year-old. My 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 while my mother tried to shush me. Undaunted I jumped up and sprinted to where he had stopped and turned to face me at hearing my commotion.
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 a people by a bad government. But that encounter is still clear in my mind today and was the foundation for a solid and reasonable view of others that continued to develop throughout my life.
The impressions that man made on my young mind that day along with the books of Andre Schwarz-Bart, Leon Uris and Herman Wouk told me the Jewish story; leaving no space for other versions of reality that an empty space in that spot in my mind 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 a black person for the first time. 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 ran the ten feet or so to where he also, like the Jewish man, had stopped and turned toward my commotion.
I was all questions as he described to me details of a faraway continent that his ancestors had come from: my childhood visions that flew across the sea toward looming cliffs and lush tropical hills dotted with families walking in sweltering heat is still clear in my mind today. When he was finished, and before I would leave, he laughed as I rubbed the coal black skin on the back of his hand with my fingers to satisfy my childish curiosity.
That clear memory and its lessons were enhanced by the many novels of Wilbur Smith that describe in detail the history of Africa, its cultures and its peoples. That man in the white Panama hat and those books gave me the experience of ‘variety in people’ as a natural and comfortable state in the world.
But that's not all I learned while 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 agricultural industry and one of those ways was to slice apricots and set them out for drying on large wooden trays.
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 real Mexican food when my pal Arturo and I shared lunches.
For years since I lived amongst the growing Mexican-American community in California and my knowledge of Mexico and its culture has also been considerably enhanced by the novels of James Michener.
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 nothing about cultures or races but instead about the errors and shortcomings of humanity.
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 to interrogate me regarding my credentials as swimming coach and after reciting my swimming accomplishments in terms of racing ribbons won, 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.
And here is where the innocent sphere of childhood reality can pick up some dents from a blunt hammer of ignorance.
After only for a few minutes 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 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 the way it was in the early 1960’s.
That was my first experience with the more benign forms of racism, and the confusion I felt wasn't dispelled until I read a book by John Howard Griffin. Griffin was a white man who traveled through the southern states in 1959 posing as a black man. Mingling through the black culture, his skin dyed black and his eyes concealed behind the dark goggles of a blind man, Griffin was able to authentically experience and then starkly portray the ugliness of racism in its most virulently obvious and violent forms.
Then I did understand: even in its most benign forms- even without physical violence- racism is still a vicious emotional assault; the thought before the action.
Knowledge, education and interpersonal experience is a leveling off of the fertile grounds of our minds producing familiarity and empathy for other people regardless of racial, religious, cultural or sexual identity.
Education, experience and empathy is our greatest counter weight against injustice and the endless series of forms it appears in; including the de-humanizing requirements of racism.