Everyone's A Little Bit Racist

Everyon'es A Little Bit Racist: Avenue Q

LINK TO AVENUE Q
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RovF1zsDoeM

Everyone's a little bit racist
Sometimes.
Doesn't mean we go 
Around committing hate crimes.
Look around and you will find
No one's really color blind.
Maybe it's a fact
We all should face
Everyone makes judgments
Based on race.


--Avenue Q

You know a new day has dawned with the director of the FBI quotes Avenue Q in a speech at Georgetown University, in the wake of the fatal shootings of three Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.  (And Director Comey remarked, "Just be glad I didn't try to sing it." If you want to hear it on youtube, try the link, above.)

Recognizing the disease is the first step toward diagnosis and therapy.

This nation, which has proclaimed itself a paragon of tolerance, has, in fact and is in fact still not free of racism. 

One of the great ironies of World War II was the fact the Nazis, that ultimate in glorification of racism was defeated by powers which were themselves deeply racist: England, the United States and Russia. When General George Patton "liberated" a concentration camp, he was appalled by the Jewish inmates he discovered and he described them as subhuman, animals and vermin. He was not saying these human beings had been degraded and reduced to subhuman conditions, but that they were simply subhumans, at core. 

The Great Liberator, General Patton

 Of these concentration camp prisoners, he said, "The inmates looked like feebly animated mummies and seemed to be of the same level of intelligence." 
He later opined that of the races in Europe left after the war, it was a choice between the Slavic/Mongols, the Communists and the Germans, and he thought the Germans were the only good race left.  Patton was something of an equal opportunity racist--he didn't  much like anyone, outside of the good White folk from Virginia.


When the United States government swept up all the Japanese on the West Coast and threw them into concentration camps, the rationale was, well, you just don't know if you can trust "them."  By virtue of your membership in a group identified by white, Christian, Anglo Americans, you were suspect and stripped of your possessions and sent off to a prison. You were seen differently, seen as a member of a group. You might see your Japanese American neighbor as socially or intellectually different from yourself, but the white American saw you as all the same.

Internees, guilty of the crime of being of Japanese ancestry

Black soldiers were not allowed to serve in the same units as white soldiers, and in fact, when they were stationed in England before D-Day, local English pubs had to post signs saying only white American soldiers could enter on Mondays and only Blacks on Thursdays, because the combination of alcohol and native racism proved so dangerous.

Black American Soldiers: It wasn't until 50 years later
they were given of the privilege of dying with Whites

There is hope. When my older son, at age 12,  described his English teacher, with whom we were about to meet for a parent/teacher conference, he said she was tall, thin, elegantly dressed and she spoke with an aristocratic accent.  What he did not mention, and the first thing I noticed, and would likely have mentioned up front--she was Black. He simply did not see that. 

We were very proud.

But the fact is, most of us do see color. There are more and more people like my son, who do not, but we are long way from there now.