If you have gotten past the title of this post, good for you. If you went on a rant and starting calling me a horrible human being, then I know you didn't actually get beyond the title of this post and responding without reason and thought.
Let me preface this post with this: I am not denying mistreatment of one group of people by another group of people. If anything, I am supporting that premise. So please read on.
First, a couple of items to get out of our minds. Racism is a misused term in modern language. It was probably coined by people who wanted something that is not a reality. There is only ONE RACE. The HUMAN RACE. The misuse of the word probably came from hatred and disdain, or simply as a convenience of position. Unfortunately the concept remains, and indeed it runs much deeper than people think.
So here it is:
People tend to like or show preference toward people who are like them; people tend to dislike people who are not like them.
It is really that simple. I have come to this conclusion because a) I am human, b) I lived over 5 decades and have been observing people and their behavior all this time. Think about it. What was your childhood like? Do you remember the cliques that were formed in elementary and high school? Do you remember the hallways between periods, the lunch room? The bus? Surely you have realized that certain groups of people treat other groups of people differently, even poorly, yes?
Here is the next tragedy of that realization: how do we decide whether or not we like someone we have met for the first time? You know the adage "beauty is only skin deep?" That's right. When we first meet another person the ONLY way we can immediately gain any opinion of them is how they appear. Following that, how they sound. We are visual and aural creatures. What we see and hear are very important to how we process data. If you LOOK or SOUND different from me, I will be wary of you and will not assign any level of trust in you.
This could be skin color, hair color, hair type, accent in your voice, word choice for common conversation, the way you walk, etc. These are the immediate ways we form our opinions of other people. That is not to say that once we get to know someone more deeply, actually delve into their thoughts and emotions, we can throw away our original opinions. We certainly can and frequently do.
This, by the way, is a biblical principle and was covered in the bible. The Apostle Peter himself got "spanked" by God for behaving like this.
Anyway. The point I want to make is that a starting point for every human is to realize that at the core of all of us we have a sort of instinctual, binary predilection toward similarity and dissimilarity that we must overcome to understand all the terrible things going on in our society today.
Thank you for reading this and NOT flipping out. If you disagree or have additions to this very very short post, please add your comments. Please be thoughtful and polite.
