Broken dreams

When I was young we never really talked much about racism as such. Mostly we used words like prejudice and discrimination. Then, as now, you could find people who were prejudiced against all sorts of people: black people, Jews, Catholics, immigrants, gays.

In my family we divided people who were prejudiced into one of two camps, they were either ignorant or bigoted. The difference being that the ignorant people didn’t like black people, Jews, Catholics, immigrants and gays, whereas the bigots hated them and thought of them as inferior and unworthy of civil rights. Of course if you were on the receiving end, the distinction didn’t matter much, the behaviour was the same.

Except there was a difference, generally speaking the ignorant had arrived at their views by absorbing them from their parents and peers. Their views were the kind of conventional un-wisdom that gets handed down from generation to generation.

If they were intelligent ignorants you could talk to them, discuss things and maybe, just maybe, sometimes get them to understand that their views were irrational, based on myths and stereotypes and just plain wrong. Of course most times, even if you could get these people to agree with you, they would still end the conversation by saying “I don’t care, I just don’t like them”.

In contrast, it was never worth trying to discuss things with a bigot. If talking with the ignorant would sometimes make me feel sad that otherwise decent people could hold such ugly views, conversing with a bigot just used to make me angry. They held to hate for hate’s sake alone and nothing would budge them.

Nowadays it seems to me that there aren’t so many ignorant people about as there used to be and the bigots mostly either keep quiet or keep to themselves. But it still seems that race is a big issue in America. Sometimes I think I understand it and sometimes I know I don’t, but it always makes me sad.

I grew up in the Sixties; too young to really understand, I heard the words of Kennedy and King and I watched Neil Armstrong take that giant step. And, in my innocence, I imagined that one day America would be a raceless society and we could all go to the moon.

[First posted July 2003]