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I affirm that it is a base instinct, a primal fear, to distrust, even hate those who are different from us. I believe that it is my challenge in life, and my challenge to you, the reader of my story, to confront that fear. A black friend of mine once said "You're either biased, or prejudiced. You're one or the other." Bias is a preference; prejudice is, as a poster in my 5th grade class read, "a decision without judgement.".
But the way I see it, I'm both. I'm biased because I was raised in a family that had 99 percent white friends & family. Even today, most of my friends are white. Most of my coworkers are also white. But I'm making an effort to become part of the solution. My church is 99 percent Filipino. I am gaining more and more close friends who are not white. And perhaps most wonderfully, my brother-in-law's brother's daughter is black! And I am very proud to call her family.
And I'm also prejudiced, because by avoiding building relationships with people who are of different races than myself, (despite the many many things we might have in common) I know that I'm only widening the void. I have preconceptions about groups of people that I confront daily. Yes, I have those thoughts, but I realize that these thoughts (like a superstition about crows or another black-furred creature) are based in fear and ignorance. Ignorance. It doesn't mean that you are necessarily "ignoring" anything. It simply means that yo have not taken the time to open your mind... to listen... long enough to understand. Jazz. People who are different than me.
And the more I listen to jazz, the more I spend time with it, the more I appreciate it. Even *gasp!* like it. I never want to stop learning. I hope that you, too, keep your mind open to learning something new, strange, and just not what you expected.
01/2002
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"America is... essentially a dream. A land where men of all nationalities... of all races... of all creeds... can live together and prosper. America has been, to use the words that the psychiatrists and the psychologists use, a schizophrenic personality."
---Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
"If we break down, if we say that we are free, who will believe us...?"
---Michael W. Smith . (Previous Page)
Paynetown, MD...
(just S/W of the
Snow Hill city limits)...