I'm not wanting to rub anyone's fur the wrong way, but I have a fundamental problem with the whole issue of racism.
And the problem is not that I'm pro or anti racism, the problem is that something just quite doesn't fit here. Lemme explain...
I've never met anyone who didn't make up his own mind for himself based on our actual personal experiences. We're all wired that way. We listen to what others might say about certain people or groups of people with an open mind, but fundamentally, we don't make up our minds until we have personal experience to base our opinions on.
When we here in North America were deluged with propoganda about the Communists wanting to take over our world, all of us felt the need for vigilence, but none of us "hated" any communists because we didn't have any actual personal experience with a communist on which to base that opinion about them on. Deep down, all of us felt that them commies were people just like we were, and that their brains were wired just like ours, and if we understood what exactly their objectives were we could work out a way to co-exist with them without having to give up our freedom. So, when Gorbachev struck up the Perestroika band, 300 million North Americans all exhaled a breath of relief. We were not "surprised" that they "had changed", instead we were relieved to know that we were correct in presuming that these commies were logical and rational just like we were, they were just doing things differently because their circumstances were different than ours. But, they were still using the same rules of logic to determine what to do based on their circumstances as we would in our circumstances.
And, there-in lies my point.
When we hear something bad about someone, we listen but reserve opinion until we have personal experience to corroborate or refute that allegation. And we all do that. None of us will passionately hate anything without personal experience as an underlying basis for that hate.
So, when I hear that the Americans in the Southern USA are "prejudice" against the blacks living there, what am I to believe?
If I accept that they are in fact prejudice, then I have to somehow come to grips with the idea that millions of people who think just like me somehow learned to dislike or despise another race of people strictly on what they heard or read in books about them. That they all developed these strong and nearly unshakable opinions WITHOUT any personal experience of their own to go on.
I find that nearly impossible for me to believe. We humans simply aren't wired that way. We listen and learn, but reserve judgement until we see with our own eyes.
If I am correct in presuming that none of us can be "convinced" to hate anyone else through logic and reason and heresay and news reports and propoganda, then the only way there could be prejudice in Mississippi and Alabama is if millions of people living in the South all came to the same conclusions independantly based on their own personal experiences.
So, the fundamental problem I have with the whole issue of racism is how it's possible to claim that a whole group of people are "racist" without also presuming that that entire group of people have brains that are wired differently than the rest of us. None of us would hate someone just based on what we heard or were told about them. We would all wait until we had personal experience to go on before forming a firm opinion. Why do we presume that the "racists" would not do the same?
