Most of what I know about prejudice — name your own favourite variety — I learned at home… at a fairly young age. The rest of it I just picked up along the way from the usual sources: media, friends, literature, psychotropic experience and the propagandistic teachings of a public school education.
The statistical distortions represented within my very un-random sampling of real life prejudice were coloured by the very lack of colour in my real world. Mine was a vanilla upbringing. The neighbourhoods I lived in were homogenous, Caucasian tracts just around the block from Beaver Cleaver’s house. There were tons of white boys and girls and the occasional redskin when the first intense days of spring rolled around, sunscreen being an invention yet undiscovered.
There were no black people in any of the worlds I lived in or visited. None in the ’hood, none in school, none in church, none at the grocery store and, not surprisingly, none on the television. Of course, black people were called coloured people by polite society at that time, and various words that’ll get you fired from your media job these days by quite a few people in impolite society. I learned most of those words from my grandfather who was oblivious to the profound depths of his own prejudices, racial being only one in a grab bag that included assorted ethnicities, religions, locales, languages, foods, automobiles, fishing tackle and, well, just about anything one might harbour a prejudice against or predisposition towards.
In those early days of black-and-white television, not many years after Jackie Robinson had broken the colour barrier in professional baseball and long after the boxing ring had largely come to be dominated by black boxers, my darkest lessons of racial intolerance were taught and learned during Friday night’s Gillette Cavalcade of Sports. I’ve never been certain whether my grandfather was a fight fan or if it was just something he did to make Friday night bleed into Saturday morning but I watched enough boxing with him for the memories of it to seem voluminous.
He didn’t have a favourite fighter. He just had a hierarchy of prejudices. On the rare nights when there was a white guy in the ring, he’d want the white guy to win. I’m sure there were times two white guys fought and those nights I don’t think he really cared who won unless one of them had a funny-sounding foreign name and the other one was named Smith or something very vanilla. White guys were always the best. Spics and dagos were okay, especially if they were fighting a coloured guy… who was never called a coloured guy but I’m pretty much pressing the envelope already and I’m not nearly brave enough to use any of the words he called black fighters. I was never exactly sure what differentiated one of those slurs from the other, since they were both aimed at Italians, or how Gramps could square the animus he felt for them against his enjoyment of spaghetti. I’m pretty sure he’d have gone apeshit if he ever saw sumo wrestling.
When two black guys were fighting, he seemed to harbour a wistful fantasy about seeing them both land simultaneous knockout blows.
The prejudice of my grandfather was watered down in my father. Not a lot, but since his life, which I’m grateful he still enjoys, has spanned profound changes in North American society, he has overcome much of the poison injected into his soul when he was a kid.
I believe the virulence of my own prejudice has been diluted still further. When they finally appeared in my world, I made friends with people of colour. Chicanos first, since I lived in the southwest. Blacks later, after I discovered first-hand they did not smell “funny”, they had more in common with me than I ever imagined and, notwithstanding having lived their lives under a very real shadow of overt racism, were willing to befriend a bleached-out white kid who was willing to deal with them evenhandedly and maybe even be friends.
But the cesspool of deeply-ingrained prejudices are still there. Like a drop of iodine in a gallon of water, they taint the largely unknown volumes of my unconscious, they bubble to the surface at the most unexpected of times, the surface being the dim gloaming of my conscious thoughts. Even at that unspoken, unacted-upon level, they shame me and leave me feeling diminished. They remind me how little I — and presumably all humankind — have really evolved. They help explain things like Darfur, Rwanda, Iraq, the synagogue defacing in the Lower Mainland, acts of blind prejudice great and small.
I’ll never drive them out. You’ll never drive yours out. For the most part, I’ll never even understand what all of them are; neither will you. The sad fact is this: the best we can hope for, the most enlightened we can be is to keep them at bay and not act them out. Not forever; that’s an impossibility. But right now and for the next five minutes and the next 24 hours and the next week. If we can make it through today without giving light and air to those prejudices, that’s as much as we can hope for. That’ll make us good people. That’s enough to back up the boast: “I’m not a racist.”
It’s good enough because there is a wide void between being prejudiced and being a racist… or a sexist, or fatist or, name your poison.
But sometimes, with luck rarely, we’ll slip. Stress, depression, fatigue, agitation, some combination of forces that drive us to the edge of human-ness will open a portal between unconscious and conscious. “You goddam nig…,” we’ll find ourselves thinking, maybe even whispering as we’re cut off in traffic. Might not be a black guy. Might be a Chinese driver, might it not? Or a snowboarder. Or a punk kid. Or a bitch. Shine a strong light on your own cesspool and you’ll understand what I mean.
But a slip does not an “X”ist make.
Giving voice to our prejudices — occasional, rare, heated voice — doesn’t make us racists or misogynistic assholes. There shouldn’t be any free pass though. Any time we let that vile poison out is a time we deserve the opprobrium of those around us. But absent a clear pattern, a human screwup doesn’t deserve a branding. That’s because intolerance is just another ugly prejudice, one that fuels mobs, one that demands consequences far beyond the offense, one that makes lynching seem reasonable.
Just one hour, one day at a time, people. Our world will be a better place for it.
