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Growing Beyond My Parent's Prejudice [1]

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Date: 2022-11-28

It has been my observation that racists are generally born either of racist parents who inculcate their hateful beliefs into their children, or as a result of such a pervasive sense of shame and worthlessness that they transfer their self loathing onto others, often with different skin colors or cultures. Young humans often join gangs to authenticate their self-hatred.

My parents were mildly racist. I qualify it as mild because they were never overtly hateful or militant about it. It was just always there amid a sense of low self-esteem and not having access to the knowledge that would have allowed them to step beyond it. The world had yet to hear of the ‘dream’, let alone the name of ‘Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’.

Growing up, I was often exposed to words like nigger and kike, usually spoken in the context of a racist joke shared by my parents and their few friends (mostly relatives). Both (and all of their siblings) were poorly educated. As far as I know, neither of them ever read a book during my childhood (except my mother, her bible). They both suffered through the ‘great depression’ as children. No adult in my extended family ever suggested that any of us should go to college.

My mother was raised on a 120-acre farm near a town that virtually no one has ever heard of (Caddo Gap, Arkansas), with 9 siblings. There was a hand-dug well, a 2-seater outhouse (complete with corn cobs—before disposable paper), a ‘crick’ running through the property, lots of pines and the pervasive smell of horse and cow dung. Oh, and there were chickens, cardinals and fireflies. They raised livestock, tended a large garden, and put up fruits and vegetables each fall for survival through the winter. My mother’s parents, Francis and Ava, were married when he was 22 and she was 14. Grandma’s was a hapless life of pregnancy and child-care, while Grandpa often went into town alone, caroused, and got drunk. I think they hated each other, but had no alternative but to stay in the prison of their marriage.

My father and his five siblings were raised in Portland, Oregon, by my Grandfather. My Grandmother had died when the children were young. The old man was a strict (even cruel) German disciplinarian with no sense of humor. He did yodel well though. Dad dropped out of high school after his freshman year, to make money to support the family, I think. He drove trucks for a living. Neither of my parents’ early lives was in any way easy.

He spent most of his adult life as a depressed alcoholic. That and a lifetime of poor health maintenance killed him at the age of 70. His great dream was to own a wrecking yard, but he never tried.

I recall three pivotal events that allowed me to shift away from my parents’ negative attitudes about race:

1. I was 12 or 13 and at the boy’s club on Dekum Street, working out on the trampoline on a hot summer day, sweating as I was getting off; an acquaintance from school and the club offered me a drink of his Coke. YES! This Coke had huge ice-cold beads of condensation all over the bottle and my throat was parched. Immediate reaction, grab the Coke and drink.

At that moment my mind did a somersault. It said to itself, Whoa, Jim! This kid’s black and I have been taught all my life that that is not good and I just drank off his (unclean) bottle and what would mom and dad say, and a signal to the stomach triggering actual nausea, and in that instant, I made a reasoned choice for love. I didn’t comprehend this at the time, but in that simple choice, where my rational mind decided that there was no evidence to support my parent’s prejudice, I took a bold and defiant stand. It was fundamental to my becoming the honest,thoughtful man I am today. My nausea abated in moments.

Wow, early enlightenment in a simple decision to examine and reject a flawed inculcated belief.

2. My freshman year in High School. On a lovely Portland spring day with the promise of summer in the air, I shared the 5-mile walk home from school with a new acquaintance that lived in my neighborhood. The color of his skin just happened to be—you guessed it—black.

Our house had a basement garage which also housed the laundry area. We walked down the driveway and as we reached the basement I spoke to my mother and introduce my friend ‘Burt’. She turned around with an armload of laundry and an expectant smile. She dropped both the smile and the laundry. She actually lost her composure because the guy was black. She recovered enough to be civil, but I’m sure that Burt didn’t feel at all welcome. A dog would have sensed my mother’s discomfort, maybe even a hamster. That was the end of that potential friendship.

Afterward, she told me to never bring a ‘nigger’ home again. I was stunned. I remember getting into a heated argument with her about—what little I knew about— prejudice. No one won. Without knowledge and open minds, it’s just a battle between opposing ideas. I asked why and she said she was prejudiced because she was raised to be so, and that’s how it was in the south. Pure Baloney! NOT ACCEPTABLE!

With one’s parents, it takes tremendous courage for a child (who is technically owned by adults) to challenge the validity of their ‘owner’s’ beliefs. Tragically, some only do it once and are beaten into submission. Others have to lay low and wait until they are free of such repressive control to begin to break away. For most, the die is cast at a young age and they never break free of the bondage of inculcated stinkin’ thinkin’. Precious few of us are privileged to have intelligent, objective, mentors in our lives. It is far easier to conform than to question; to acquiesce, than challenge, when our minds are undeveloped and our basis for objectivity limited.

Ultimately, the steadfast decision, and commitment to question all authority is crucial in the development of wisdom. This enhances our ability to clear the mind of the many blocks and emotional filters that cloud our reason and logic, and which make erroneous reasoning easy and acceptance of misinformation and lies attractive. The early ability to question authority is a precedent for how well developed one’s thinking skills may become. To become effective, these must be supported by an ability to disregard the pressure to conform; an exercise in self-trust. It is a reflection of one’s level of confidence and unwillingness to be controlled by the (often errant) will, and ideas of others.

3. I moved away from Portland when I was 17 and typically visited every few years. On one such visit, in the course of conversation, my mother used the ’n-word ’ for the very last time. I had expressed to her on several occasions that it offended me deeply.

To her death, Mom was very sensitive about just one word, which is, I understand, an acronym for ‘fornication under consent of the King’. With Mom, one knew right away, immediately, the first time, not to ever use the word ‘fuck’ in front of her again. She went all fussy and angry and hostile, and really didn’t look so good doing this. So!

I said, “Mom, I’d like to suggest an agreement.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

I promise that if you will never again use the ‘N’ word in my presence, I will never say ‘fuck’ in yours.” That’s the last time I had to witness her going all red and bitchy. Actually she came around nicely over the years, with my honesty and forthright communication, and that of others. Age seems to temper bias most elegantly. And of course, there’s been the civil rights movement, resulting in the growing societal awareness of the terrible stupidity of racism, and the emerging consciousness that we are all one, and that harming any one of us does harm to all of us. Even if we are not aware of the ‘all one’ concept we are influenced by shifting social norms (increasingly, at some level there is an expanding and undeniable cosmic awareness these days).

There were many other conversations along the way. Change is generally slow, but when you can get an epiphany in a moment, like the coke bottle incident, you need to grab it. Life doesn’t often give us such opportunities to open up to love, particularly when our conditioning has been focused on fear (the absence of love). Failure to grab hold of transformation often heads us down the wrong path and once there it becomes a rut, increasingly difficult to get out of. Escaping mental ruts takes a superhuman effort, or an epiphany.

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