Pride?...and Prejudice

      Quick word of caution: what follows deals with prejudice past and present and may prove upsetting and/or difficult to read...use your judgement.

     One is tempted to think of Jane Austen and her classic novel Pride & Prejudice...or maybe not.  In today's world, the word pride has evolved into a new definition while the word prejudice has stayed with us unchanged.  Mention that word and its meaning will shift almost immediately to people of color.  Here's how the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy defined prejudice: A hostile opinion about some person or class of persons.  Prejudice is socially learned, and is usually grounded in misconception, misunderstanding, and inflexible generalizations.  In particular, blacks in America have been victims of prejudice on a variety of social, economic, and political levels.  Full disclosure: I have no idea --zero-- of what it feels like to be Black, or Native American, or Mexican, or Iranian, or any of a host of other races who have faced discrimination, both subtle and blatant.  But a few of those thoughts emerged because of several recent events that coincided...reading Kevin Hazzard's book, watching the movie Race (on medal-winning runner, Jesse Owens), Columbus Day (less than half of our states still celebrate the holiday using that name), and the new British series, Sherwood (which takes place in modern times).  And all of that got me thinking, well when exactly does prejudice begin?  Some studies now say that it starts from the day we are born... 

     Said a piece in Scientific American: Learning begins on the first day of life—and not the first day of class.  The earliest years of a child's life are full of opportunity.  A child's brain will never be more receptive to experience, more plastic, than it is during this pivotal time.  Nearly 85 percent of brain growth occurs between birth and the age of three.  During this period one million neural connections per second are formed...On average, American children had lower literacy and numeracy scores, poorer self-regulation skills, and engaged in fewer acts of cooperation, kindness and other prosocial behaviors than did children in England and Estonia, the other countries studied.  Author Lynne Tillman was a bit more elaborate on writing about prejudice in her book, Mothercare, and in the taking care of her aging and dementia-ridden mother: The home care attendants we employed were people of color.  In this country, white writers could compose this story, and hopefully reckon honestly with prejudice, class and cultural differences, and possible or actual exploitation of undocumented workers.  It would be a harsh tale, and hard to write, and I may be writing it.  When I could think clearly, when there wasn't an emergency, this was an ethical problem that wouldn't go away.  Hiring a woman of color not born in the United States seemed a way to lessen complicity, a kind of elision, a veering away from the legacy of slavery.  But it was only an angle.  My privilege lived through the after-effects of colonialism and imperialism.  The terms and effects were not abstract, they were personal, embodied in the women we were able to hire to care for Mother.  I was conscious of it, but didn't forsake my privilege.  I could have done that by living with Mother, changing my life for her.  Even though I knew it was a way to resist that history, I couldn't.  I couldn't live with her, just couldn't.

    In Kevin Hazzard's book (mentioned in my last post), the highly-trained black paramedics (on average, the Freedom House workers had nearly 4x the training hours of the next highest city-force, and often close to 8x the training of most others) prejudice sometimes became a matter of choosing death over life.  Hazzard wrote that as the paramedics faced opposition from police, firefighters and politicians in white neighborhoods, it was nothing compared to what they faced when encountering a few of the actual people in need, one woman gasping for breath as she suffered a heart attack but upon seeing the two black men arriving to help her, adamantly told them that they were not to touch her, and certainly not to loosen her blouse to place EKG electrode monitors on her chest.  She, as with others, had heard all the rumors that "these" paramedics were selling drugs and "they weren't just practicing medicine in the back of those ambulances, they were doing the unthinkable" (none of which was true as proven by the professionalism and the sheer number of people Freedom House paramedics had saved).  Hazzard continues with what these paramedics encountered: So sometimes there was confusion.  But this wasn't confusion.  It was uglier.  It was disgust and hate.  The woman, who may well have been having a heart attack, was physically recoiling in their presence.  When all they wanted --the very reason she called them in the first place-- was to help.  John (John Moon, one of the paramedics) gave her the nicest smile he had.  "Without care you could die."  He looked around the room.  "And we're the only ones here to help.  So, it's either us or..."  As in "either you let us do our job, or you could die right here on the floor of your office.  Maybe make a mess of this nice carpet.  But hey, at least you won't be sullied by a pair of handsy Black dudes."

     It wasn't much different for Francis Whitebird, a member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe who told AARP Bulletin of his own days of being a medic in Vietnam: We were in the mountain and in the jungle a lot, and while people thing that medics don't carry guns, I did.  I remember one time, we were trying to figure out our location.  The jungle was so thick that we couldn't make out the terrain.  Because I was a medic, the guys all called me Doc.  Someone said, "Ask Doc where we are.  Indians never get lost."  I said, "I come from the plains.  I come from South Dakota.  You can always see 10 miles all around you."  I had no idea where we were...When someone gets wounded in battle and yells "Medic!," we have to go get that guy.  When a medic starts running to help an infantryman, the other soldiers increase firepower while the medic drags that wounded person out of the line of fire.  My job was to keep that guy alive until we could get him onto a helicopter.  The casualty rate of medics in Vietnam was very high.  We went through 27 medics the first nine months I was in Vietnam.  I wouldn't say medics were fearless, but we hid our fear.  There is an invisible bond between medics and the infantry.  Men become brothers for life.

     Unfortunately the same couldn't be said for Jesse Owens who shattered Hitler's view of black athletes during Hitler's 1936 Olympics.  As depicted in the movie Race, Owens went on to win both the 100 & 200 meter races, and the long jump, then was one of those substituted to replace the 2 Jewish runners in the 400 meter relay, which Owens also helped lead to a gold medal.  Four gold medals, and a welcoming parade of a million people; wrote a story in HistoryNet: After the 1936 Olympics were over, the US track and field team was scheduled to compete in Sweden.  Owens, however, opted to return to the U.S. to make some money off his his hard-earned success.  But American society hadn’t changed.  Even though Jesse Owens was a hero, he was still black.  First came the White House snub.  Presidents typically met with Olympic athletes to congratulate them on their achievements, but FDR never extended an invitation.  “When I came back to my native country…I couldn’t ride in the front of the bus,” he said in a 1971 interview.  “I had to go to the back door.  I couldn’t live where I wanted.  I wasn’t invited to shake hands with Hitler, but I wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the president, either.”

      A recent issue of NY Review of Books had several stories around similar themes.  There was the story of Reinhard Heydrich, the "butcher of Prague" who created Hitler's SS Einsatzgruppen, hand-picking hardened officers who both rounded up and executed nearly 600,000 people in the first six months of invading the Soviet Union: ...the victims were usually shot while standing or kneeling on the edge of a trench.  At times the units would shoot a thousand men, women, and children before taking a break.  When Heydrich was assassinated, Hitler "ordered the total destruction of the Czech village of Lidice and its residents, on suspicion that they had helped the assassins."  There was also a story on Angela Davis and her newly revised bio and how today's youthful activists remember an "imagined unity:" This sometimes makes it more difficult to remember both the ceaseless provocations directed at movement activists by police and federal agents and the political disagreements within the movement itself.  As ever on the left, there was tension over what leadership roles women should have, whether the United States was fascist, and whether multiracial organizing was necessary or desirable.  At times we neglect a more painful history of recrimination, sectarianism, and political and social intolerance among those who would otherwise be comrades.  There was the story on teaching white supremacy in the schools: Numerous states have enacted laws or regulations banning the teaching of “divisive concepts,” with the histories of slavery and racism at the top of the list.  Charges—almost entirely imaginary—proliferate that teachers are seeking to make white students feel guilty for our racial past and indoctrinate the young with critical race theory, an obscure methodology mostly encountered in law schools and graduate departments.  In some states teachers are breaking the law if they talk seriously about racism.  And there was also the story on "these disunited states:" In June the Supreme Court handed down a series of grossly retrogressive decisions on guns, abortion, and environmental regulation that have threatened America with fragmentation to a degree not seen since the Civil War...At the core of the US binational character is a deep and durable tension between a Christian white-supremacist ideology that evolved to justify slavery and a broad-based multiethnic resistance to it.  Reinforcing this tension are cultural divisions between the rural and urban populations, including divergent values on education and immigration.  The splits between the two halves of the nation—red and blue, right and left—increasingly appear irreconcilable.  Today, new state legislation on abortion, LGBTQ rights, gun rights, free speech, and public health is making red and blue states radically different.  Many Americans have relegated their political adversaries to the category of “the other,” an ominous prelude to the dehumanization that facilitates violence in civil conflict.  That was all in a single issue on newly released books for the fall...and then came Columbus Day.

      When we say that we're "American" we tend to think of that as being synonymous with being from the United States, shores which Columbus never reached or touched (he did make it as far as the Bahamas).  And apparently he was a fairly brutal viceroy who "committed atrocities against native peoples on the islands and decimated their populations," said The Washington Post.  The Italian (sailing under Spanish monies) had quite the journey as an explorer and by 1954, FDR (the same president who refused to meet with Olympian Jesse Owens) declared Columbas Day a federal holiday.  Which turned out to be a rather big victory for the Italian immigrants but less so for the native populations.  Here's what Benjamin Franklin originally suggested and which eventually became law (again from the NYB review): No less a personage than Benjamin Franklin suggested in 1751 that since the number of “purely white People” in the world was very small, Britain’s North American colonies ought to exclude all “Blacks and Tawneys,” among whom he included the “swarthy” peoples of Europe, such as Spaniards, Italians, and, in an original touch, Swedes.  This outlook was written into law in 1790 in the first Naturalization Act, which limited the right to become citizens to “white” immigrants.

     So this is "our" history, our fluctuations of picking and choosing who we do or don't want to consider equal.  And while I mentioned not knowing what it's like to be truly discriminated against, I can't relate to what that must actually feel like inside, day after day...to be a woman being told primarily by men what she can or cannot do (body, vote, job); to be Jewish, or Black, or a host of other cultures and religions being taunted through the centuries; to be a "native" of a land once without borders (the Amazon, the other Americas, Australia, etc.) and being pushed off those places that once thrived and were in balance; to be whatever designation your country's population may slap on you as being inferior because you're from the swamps (Where the Crawdads Sing) or from Appalachia; to be homeless or a refugee who is growing colder and hungrier and wondering how you got into, and how to get out of, this situation; to be a believer in a religion and to find that you're not accepted because of what you believe; to be a child or a teen looking into a world and a future seemingly out of control; to be caught in a war or the aftermath of one and wondering why and what was/is it all about; to be drawn into a sex or a relationship you didn't really want; to be categorized and placed into a political divide that offers little benefit; to be shunned and scarred because of your physical appearance; to be judged because of your age, or mental capacity, or a mistake you made long ago when you were young and "stupid" and for which you've harbored and regretted every day of your life; to be someone who crossed a picket line because you had to work and feed your family, and were hated and reminded of it for decades (the subject of the miners' strike and BBC series, Sherwood); to be animals genetically altered, raised and harvested as little more than fields of grain.  I can't relate to any of it, not the side that's feeling it or the side that is not feeling it.  But here's my prejudice -- I do believe that the people who believe this --both the overt and the hidden prejudice-- are a minority, that good still wins out, that more and more people don't feel this way, that tolerance is building even if it's taking hundreds and hundreds of years, that eventually things will change...just not yet.  But eventually.

     So I end with one last scenario: Imagine you're new to the world of dating, shy and not really sure of what to expect or where to go.  But you feel ready.  So you head to a club or bar, not a crowded one, and in walks a man, extremely attractive and self-assured and you're immediately drawn to him.  But it's a one-way street.  The man meets and leaves with another person.  The next weekend you try again and the same man walks in, this time making eye contact and actually coming near you when he orders a drink; but again he leaves with someone else.  You try your best; you lose some weight, you make yourself more attractive, you do everything right, even finding him alone one night, the bar basically empty...but he leaves alone, and leave you alone.  You give up.  You end up making a new life, your own life.  You move.  You make friends.  You grow into your own person.  And then you see a live news feed years later.  It's the FBI arresting a man, leading him down some stairs in handcuffs and talking of discovering some 55-gallon drums of acid found in his apartment.  It's the guy, the same man you saw so many years ago in that bar, the man who came into that bar over and over and yet never showed any interest in you.  It was fate and now he appears all these years later.  The story was told on The Moth Radio Hour.  The man being arrested was Jeffrey Dahmer.  The person telling the story was gay.

      How does prejudice begin?  And how does --or can-- it end?  Perhaps it's true that history is doomed to repeat itself, at least until a virus or a bacterium, or the planet itself, decides to again hit a Permian reset.  But perhaps one day, when we can understand what our dreams mean and where our feelings come from and why we both love and hate, perhaps then we'll understand...perhaps.  Said the Oscar-winning song: Like a door that keeps revolving in a half forgotten dream, or the ripples from a pebble someone tosses in a stream.  Like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel, never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel.  As the images unwind, like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind.