In the previous iteration of this website, I wrote a piece about race in America with the same name as this one. Now, I should insert here that the previous website had over 100 articles that I wrote on a variety of subjects, but none of them garnered the same degree of vitriol and angst as that one. The truly funny part to me, after reading and replying to countless emails calling me a racist, a bigot, and Klan member, etc, was that it became more and more obvious that the people firing off all this hate toward me had not actually READ the entire article.
Due to a catastrophic server crash, all of the content from the previous website was lost, including the server backups. Believe me, nobody is more upset about that than me given the hundreds and hundreds of hours of my life spent researching and preparing that material. In the original article I'm referring to here, it was a multiple piece article that broke down not only racial issues but also ethnic issues as well. I attempted to explain the original and modern circumstances of 3 disparate states of mind; those being prejudice, racism, and bigotry.
Without going into the level of detail I had done previously, I will succinctly say that those 3 words, while used today interchangeably, are complete different words with completely different meanings. In this first piece of this article, I will take just a little time to explain this so that this current article will have a little more context for those that didn't have the opportunity to read the original.
What is prejudice? Simply, it is a choice one makes based on previous experience or previously assumed information. Prejudice was a word commonly used when I was young to describe a situation where a person or group of people were assumed to think a certain way, act a certain way, or believe a certain way because of their race, their ethnicity, their religion, or some other factor other than who they really are. Prejudice would very often lead to stereotyping of groups of people and pigeonholing them AS A GROUP. In the context of this (and the previous article), black people would be assumed to be a certain way, Irish people would be a certain way, Jewish people would be a certain way, etc etc. You get the picture.
To fully understand why I emphasize that prejudice, racism, and bigotry are completely different, you must first consider what prejudice actually is. "Pre" justice. In other words, you make a decision about a thing NOT because of information you're presented with in real time, but by information you had already assimilated. Is that necessarily a bad thing and is it always wrong? Short answer, no. We use prejudice constructively every single day of our lives. Imagine, you walk up to the window at Baskin-Robbins. They famously have 51 flavors of ice cream. You order a double scoop Rocky Road on a waffle cone. You have just exercised prejudice! How? Easy. Out of all 51 flavors, you eliminated 50 of them from your selection based on the fact that you have already tried most, if not all, of them and PREFER Rocky Road. Second, from past experience, you know that if you get 3 scoops, it has made you sick in the past, but 1 scoop just didn't satisfy your desire for the frosty delight. Third, you have already tasted the regular cone and the waffle cone and PREFER the waffle cone. Without thinking about it in that light, you exercised prejudice 3 different times! PREJUDICE then, is PREFERENCE. It's what we chose. Blondes or brunettes. Blue eyes or brown. Pie or cake. Beach vacation or ski vacation. Choices made by presupposition.
Lost yet? Let's bring you back around. Imagine the Korean immigrant man, Mr. Kim, who operates a storefront in a major city. Real estate prices being what they are and having limited funds for start-up costs, he chooses a building in a lower income neighborhood where the majority population is Black. After being in business for a few years, an incident takes place where a group of 5 young Black teens walk into his store. After several minutes in the store, one of the teens sees Mr. Kim watching them closely as they peruse. Angrily, the teen yells at Mr. Kim and accuses him of being a racist and states that the ONLY reason he is watching them is because they are Black and that he hates all Black people and assumes they are all thieves. Question: Is the teen right? Has Mr. Kim exhibited racism? Answer: The only thing you can say for sure is that he has displayed PREJUDICE.
See, in the time that Mr. Kim has owned and operated his store, he has observed that whenever groups of young teen boys come in his store, he notices an increase in shoplifted items disappearing from his shelves. As noted earlier, his store is located in a mostly Black neighborhood, thus it is entirely likely that most groups of young teens will ergo be Black as well. So it is entirely plausible that he was keeping a careful eye on his stock due to their AGE and the likelihood of their being shoplifters solely, totally excluding their race altogether. His reaction is based on his EXPERIENCE. They are teens. They are a group of boys. He is repeatedly stolen from by teen boys. It is only human nature then that he would be more cautious of being shoplifted by a group of teen boys. That is PREJUDICE.
Might Mr. Kim also be a racist? Maybe. But for the Black teenager to assume his vigilance is due to racism stems more from the teenager's PREJUDICE than it is from the possibility that Mr. Kim is somehow a racist. If Mr. Kim were actually a racist, he would do something more overt, like denying all Black people from his store. Get it?
Prejudice, in most forms, when it comes to people is 50/50 at best. Some times, your previous experience and notions will turn out to be well founded, but it is equally possible that they will be wrong as rain. Is prejudice wrong at it's core than? Frankly no. It is a natural, normal, human response in the ABSENCE OF ASSIMILATION of information in the current moment. That's all. In this example, the teen boys may very well be just a group of guys stopping on their way home from school to buy some snacks. In both the case of Mr. Kim AND the teenagers, the situation would have played itself out the moment the boys walked up to the register and paid for their purchases. The negative experiences that Mr. Kim had experienced in the past would have then been factored against the positive experience of a successful interaction with the hungry teenagers making a purchase.
We are all human beings subject to our life experiences, the things we have seen with our own eyes, heard about, and through what others have imparted about their experiences as well. Ergo, PREJUDICE is natural. It is also entirely possible that the teenager that took exception to being watched has been negatively targeted by true RACISM and assumed that Mr. Kim was stereotyping him and his friends. To the point, both individuals were exercising judgment, which is nothing more than the human brain reacting to external stimuli. Nothing more and nothing less.
Why am I taking the time to delineate the difference between these 3 words? Hopefully, by the end of this piece, you will more fully understand the rabbit hole we have all fallen down when it comes to race in this country and why, it seems, that we will never ever solve it. In the next installment of this article, we will delve deeply into the very idea of RACISM and how it continues to be one this single biggest driving factors in the social discord we are living through every day. Stay tuned.
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