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shadowkatWhat follows is a loosely structured musing on prejudice/discrimination – the reasons for it and what it means. I have no idea what to do with it, am a little wary of pushing buttons, so am posting it in my livejournal. My safe haven. ;-)
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Read an interesting series of posts today on the atpo discussion board. These posts crystallized for me something that I’d been wrestling with off and on for some time now. Not consciously so much as subconsciously – in the back of my mind. Something that I couldn’t quite reach but was nagging at me. One of the things I love most about the atpobtvs discussion board is the off-topic intellectual discussion threads – this one concentrated on the issue of racism and prejudice. Before, I say anything more – I should explain that it wasn’t just these posts that got me thinking – it was a combination of unrelated posts and presentations that did – the first: a documentary on Rod Serling, the second: numerous and increasingly offensive posts on a listserve I lurk on about actors sexual orientation and weight and their attractiveness based on weight and how one can tell one is gay. Discussions with my parents over the holidays about corporate employment practices. And finally the wonderful atpo posts. What interested me most about the posts or rather what “triggered” this rambling essay – was what was hinted at but not really delved into. And that is – prejudice is *not * limited to racism, if anything racism is only one of the many forms prejudice can take. Also, the far greater issue – why do we prejudge others based on how their physical appearance and mannerisms differ from ours? Instead of celebrating the differences we appear to ostracize and ridicule them.
To get to the root of why people discriminate against others or form negative opinions – you need to expand the definition of prejudice a bit and realize it includes everyone. A male college counselor once told me that every man was a male chauvinist and every person has prejudices. That was 20 years ago and I still remember his words. Every human being on the face of this earth has experienced in one form or another prejudice and discrimination. Likewise every human being on this earth in one form or another is prejudiced or has discriminated against someone else, and not always intentionally or even consciously.
First a little personal history – throughout my life I have experienced discrimination either personally or seen it inflicted on others. There is a difference between discrimination and prejudice – one hurts someone or interferes with their basic rights, the other is the cause of it. Discrimination is often the effect of prejudice. As an old professor once told me – “I can tolerate prejudice, it’s discrimination I can’t tolerate. We all have prejudices.”
I am a big woman. My physique is very similar to Mariel Hemingway – sort of mannish. I’m not petite or the pretty feminine girl. And can be perceived as intimidating to many people – due to my size. Big bones. Big feet. Very Long Limbed. No matter how much weight I lose I will never fit into the coveted size 8. My feet are size 11 for starters. My background is Irish, Welsh, German, Belgium and Scotch-Irish. I was raised Catholic but consider myself agnostic, even though I do believe in the idea of a higher power. I have a visual and auditory coordination disability that I was born with and is genetic. Overtime I learned to compensate, but as a child – teachers treated me as “challenged”. I did not know it was a learning disability until a bright teacher in college caught me compensating for it in the same way she did – she was dyslexic. In law school, a couple of law professors persuaded me to get tested before taking the bar, so fair accommodations could be set. I hit the wall in law school – my compensation techniques did not work on the multiple choice timed computer tests. What I did was color in the wrong box without knowing it. The disability affects how I hear and repeat sounds and word syntax. I often confuse words based on their sound, mispronounce words, and misuse them or misspell them. Certain sounds I confuse completely – especially similar sounding consonants – this has made it impossible for me to master other languages or to sing. I have not allowed these things to hold me back, but people have ridiculed me for them. I also have a tremor – my hands shake uncontrollably all the time. Severity varies.
Every single item I mentioned above, someone at some point in time has used as a justification to discriminate against me. They have prejudged me based on mannerisms or physical symptoms of these traits. The wonder of the internet is these traits remain invisible online – I can hide them. Of course now that I’ve revealed them, I worry that people may prejudge and discriminate against me based on what they read above, one can only hope that won’t be the case. But we have no control over how others will respond to us. We don’t know the reasons behind their prejudices and in some cases neither do they. Some prejudices lie hidden inside us, like sleeping dragons or hidden buttons waiting to be pushed. We don’t know why we react to them, just that we do. Sometimes it’s not until someone draws attention to our reaction that we even realize what we are doing.
During New Year’s Eve, after a wonderful meal of beef tenderloin and roasted vegetables, my mother asked my father how he made hiring decisions. My father is retired now, but used to work for a very large consulting firm. Dad told her that he usually knew if someone was right for the job within the first five minutes of the interview. Mom asked what appealed to him. He responded: “Well, if they are attractive, poised, and *not* obese…” Mom retorted: “So you wouldn’t have hired BJ?” Dad: “I did hire BJ.” (BJ turned out to be one of my father’s best consultants.) Mom: “BJ was overweight, messy in attire and hardly poised.” Dad : “His experience and resume spoke for him. (somewhat flustered now) What I try to do is put myself in the clients shoes.”
(If you’ve ever watched the British situation comedy As Time Goes By with Gerald Palmer and Dame Judi Dench? You can imagine this conversation – that’s my parents.)
Is this prejudice? Is this discrimination? How many times do we pre-judge a person based on a behavior mannerism, a look, a size, a shape? While I was taking the Human Resources course, I asked the professor how they handled hiring/firing people with Touretts syndrome? She said that since there was no way to make reasonable accommodations and the syndrome interfered with a pleasant work environment – these people would not be hired. Discrimination?
Online and in articles – I’ve discovered that people assume a fictional character or real life person (possibly an actor) is gay because of their mannerisms. How they speak. What they say. A stereotype that shows such as Queer Eye for The Straight Guy advance unfortunately. I’ve known quite a few gay men in my life and sorry, they don’t act anything like the guys in Queer Eye. You can’t tell they are gay by looking at them. I’ve also known a few straight men who do act like those guys. Just as I know a few gay men who do. You cannot determine someone’s sexual orientation by how they act, dress, look, or speak. There are effeminate men who happen to be straight, just as there are macho women who are straight. Yet people keep making these assumptions and our society, unfortunately, encourages it. And once we do discover someone’s sexual orientation – we decide to prejudge the person or condemn them for it. We treat them differently then we did when we didn’t know. The violence and continued discriminatory practices against the gay community in our society is abominable and often overlooked. Why? Because something about being gay threatens people on a visceral level. Some people see it as a disease they can catch. My grandmother saw it as a sin – a mortal sin. (I fond her attitudes towards the gay community incredibly offensive and still do, may she rest in peace. But they only echoed those of the church she attended, which preached to her that AIDs was God’s punishment for homosexuality a la Sodom and Gomorrah. This was in the 1980s…they woke up finally.) It threatens their values, their worldview, their basic beliefs. And most people who harbor these views – would probably tell you if you asked them – that they don’t know any “gay” people. No one has challenged their views, or contradicted them. Several of them may live in insular communities where everyone has their values, their ideas, and their lifestyle.
I love living in New York City – partly because it is so diverse in every way. Makes it less easy for me to hold on to stereotypes or prejudices – especially when I’m constantly forced to see evidence to the contrary on a daily basis. I grew up in a somewhat insular community – Johnson County, Kansas – a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri. White. Middle Class. Judeo-Christian. Everyone looked more or less the same. Variations were in size, shape, religion and economic status – not color. And the racist comments? They lurked under the surface, along with all the other prejudices. Coming out in polite dinner conversations and debates. If someone who looked or acted *different * moved in? The neighbors would ignore them or make comments under their breath. They didn’t believe they were prejudiced though. They didn’t see it as discrimination. An old college classmate who was from a similar type of community – a suburb of Denver – once explained to me why she used to fear blacks or people of color, and why her parents still did. She had gotten past the fear and was at the time dating an African-American. The reason she gave was in her neighborhood – the only blacks were the people who robbed them. The people, who robbed her house and attacked her family, happened to be black. What she remembered was they were black, nothing else. It wasn’t until she was older and meet people in college from other countries and regions that she realized how wrong she was and could kill the fear. My experience was the opposite of my friends – previous to my experience in Johnson County – I lived in Pennsylvania and did interact with African-Americans. My experiences were very positive. I found my African-American friends kinder than the others. My prejudice was against the pretty popular blond cheerleader – the popular girls with the pretty clothes – the girls who got off on hurting others for a laugh. It took me at least a year of college to realize that these girls weren’t who they seemed and looks had zip to do with it. Everyone is an individual – we can’t lump them into groups – yet we instinctively do.
A question was asked in one of the posts on the atpo board – why do we ridicule people who don’t look or act like us? Why do we discriminate? Why do people make cruel remarks about immigrants or people seeking asylum? Ah…because they believe these people will steal their jobs, steal their livelihoods. Because they feel threatened. Heck – look at how many jobs have been outsourced over-seas the last year and how many people got laid off because of it? While I was in Hilton Head, my mother pointed out that more and more companies were hiring immigrants over older residents, because the immigrants were cheap labor. They tolerated smaller salaries. If you read some of the propaganda surrounding WWII, you’ll find that the Jews in Germany were turned into the scapegoat for all of Germany’s ills. If you were unemployed and poor in 1930s Germany – the time of the World Depression – you blamed the Jews – who from your perspective seemed to be living the good life – they seemed to have all the money. This wasn’t true of course – but that was what people felt. If we get rid of them – we’ll be all right. We’ll have money, we’ll have jobs. Poverty, unemployment, poor health care, lead to fear, fear leads to rage, and somewhere along the line people hunt someone to be angry at, someone to blame, and that’s the scapegoat. At the root of discrimination – lies envy, jealousy, hurt pride, and fear.
A woman in my book club once pre-judged me and somewhat harshly I might add, because she thought I looked like a WASP. I’m not. In fact I have some of the same lineage she does – Irish and Catholic. This shocked her. When I told her my ethnic makeup – including the German bit. She responded – “You don’t act German. You’re nice.” She has lived in Brooklyn her entire life – in the Italian/Irish community. She doesn’t see herself as prejudiced.
When I was in the third grade – my third grade teacher pre-judged me as a hillbilly from uneducated/white trash. Until she met my parents and discovered they both had Masters degrees and were more educated than she was. She pre-judged me based on my speech impediment and how I learned. (Later I overcame the speech impediment through theater courses and speech courses – somewhat the same way James Earl Jones and Nicholas Brendan over came their stutter. I compensated for the learning disability as well. )
Odd that so many people pre-judge others as stupid because of a learning disability. Did you know Einstein was dyslexic? Some of the brightest people in the world have learning disabilities. The ability to learn quickly does not make one smart. Any more than being a slow learner – makes one stupid. But people make assumptions on limited information all the time. It’s deductive reasoning – faulty deductive reasoning, but deductive reasoning all the same. Example: A. Under-educated people I’ve seen in movies and in person appear to speak with a lisp. B. Children learn to speak from their parents. C. This child has a lisp. Her parents must therefore be uneducated. Sometimes I think our prejudices say more about us than the people we are prejudiced against. They tell others what we fear and what our foibles are.
Rod Serling, the creator of The Twilight Zone, hated prejudice and discrimination in all its forms. He considered prejudice, racism, and discrimination the worst evil on earth. He was amongst the first to address this issue on television. And the first to write about the Holocaust in the Playhouse 90 episode – In The Presence Of Mine Enemies. In this episode, a Nazi General explains to a young Nazi Officer played by Robert Redford the politics of racism – how by despising the Jew and getting others to despise the Jew, they bond together. Germany is no longer fragmented. Germans can unite over hatred for a common enemy – a scapegoat. Serling wished to explore what lay behind people’s prejudices along with the consequences of those prejudices. He went on to write two more episodes that addressed this issue, episodes that in some ways are later echoed by Joss Whedon and Tim Minear in BTVS and Angel The Series. The first is the Twilight Zone episode – Eye of The Beholder – where a beautiful blond feels horribly disfigured in a world where everyone has pug noses, scars and black hair. The voice over by Serling states “beauty is in the eye of the beholder – especially in a society that dictates what beauty must be”. In The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street – Serling states that aliens don’t need to attack us physically – all they need do is suggest that the enemy is amongst us and we’ll turn on each other. Tim Minear addresses the same issue in Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? Which is less about racism then about discrimination and prejudice in general – and the horrible results – it is also a direct comment on what happened in during the Hollywood Blacklist – during the Mcarthy era. The title is the question McArthy’s panel asked suspected communists – “are you now or have you ever been a communist sympathsizer?” is the full statement. Within the episode, Minear places several souls who have experienced versions of discrimination, yet are guilty of discriminating themselves – the embezzler – a mulatto woman who fears people will discover her race and her misdeed, Angel – the vampire who fears people will discover his misdeeds…and then there’s the demon who feeds off the prejudices, hatreds, and fears of the people in the hotel – a metaphor of how fear/prejudice/hatred feeds and builds upon itself, if we let it. Like Monsters – the people in Are You Now – turn on each other, and end up lynching a convenient scapegoat. Whedon addresses the issue in a different way in the episodes The Pack, where students are cruel to people to impress their friends – like hyenas in a pack, becoming part of the pack mentality. But like Serling he takes it a step further metaphorically – showing how this behavior twists the students into monsters. Whedon like Serling seems to realize that prejudice is *not * limited to issues of race – which is important to understand in order to combat it. Whedon like Serling also shows the consequences of discrimination and ridicule. How we can create our own monsters – through characters such as Warren (Entropy), Spike (Fool For Love), Willow (Two to Go), Amy (Gingerbread/Witch), and Marcy in Out of Sight, Out of Mind. Cordelia asks in one episode why nasty things always happen to her and Xander responds - *cough*karma*cough*. Whedon demonstrates through Cordelia’s woes how we reap what we sow. Like Serling he both punishes his characters for their sins and provides them with a second chance – if they reach that crucial epiphany as Cordelia does in Season 1 ATS and possibly S3 BTVS that what they did was wrong. In Whedon and Serling’s worlds the most innocuous insult can be the most damaging. Marcy in Out of Sight/Out of Mind literally fades away because she is unnoticed, she is considered beneath notice. In one episode of the Twilight, can’t remember the name, a marine who orders his men to kill all Japanese, even women and children, finds himself turned into a Japanese solider being ordered by his commander to show no mercy to the Americans. Whedon and Serling aren’t safe writers – the characters they create aren’t cuddly but prickily and deeply flawed and incredibly gray. Like most of us.
What I find interesting in contemplating these issues is how guilty everyone is in making prejudgments about others. We don’t realize it of course. Partly because we may have rigidly defined prejudice as being something that others do to us, if we happen to be part of a racial minority, are handicapped, etc. But it goes far deeper than that. If it was simple – we could fix it, but it’s not. Even in within our minorities – lies prejudice. The reasons for it are so tied up with our subconscious that it’s hard to fight them until someone brings it painfully to our notice. Why do we prejudge others based on appearance or manner? Possibly because we associate their looks or behavior with a personal trauma we’ve repressed? Perhaps it’s a subconscious thing? I know it took me years to recognize my own prejudices – against cheerleaders. Silly, I know. I got over it. A friend of mine, who is African-American and part Irish, reads Flannery O’Connor and other prejudiced writers to better understand the nature of their prejudice. She feels if she sees it, if she understands it, she can combat it. Why do these writers perpetuate the stereotypes? Is it because that’s all they know based upon their own experiences?
The next time someone makes an offensive remark – perhaps I should ask the question: “Why did you say that? Why do you think it?” I have done this in the past by the way.
I have 0 tolerance for racism in myself or others and tend to be a tad out-spoken on the topic. Years ago, a friend’s father pushed my buttons by stating that blacks were less intelligent than whites. My friend cringed. I challenged him. Asking him first why he thought this and second disproving his theory with facts. I wanted to know what caused this 50 year old man, an engineering professor at a major university, to believe this. It was simple, really – he did not know any blacks or people of darker pigmentation who weren’t low wage workers or servants. He had spent his entire life in the “deep” south of Houston, Texas, Missippi, and Georgia. He’d gone to all white schools and he’d gotten a doctorate in a non-people intensive field. He looked at things from a logical standpoint, yet one based purely on his own limited spectrum of experience and observation. He’d been taught rhymes and games as a child that perpetuated these beliefs. From his perspective – the opinion was based on experience not prejudice. “All the blacks I’ve met are un-educated and not very smart, therefore all blacks must be of inferior intelligence.” He considered historical figures like Frederick Douglas and Barbara Jordan to be flukes. It wasn’t until I provided him with statistical figures and further recent history, that he conceded he was wrong.
Did you know – a recent issue of Scientific American announced the discovery that people from different races, ie. an African and a Caucausion, have a greater degree of genetic similarity than those from the same race? That the pigment of our skin, shape of our eyes, or area of the world in which we are born says very little conclusively about our genetic heritage? In other words – you cannot judge a person’s intelligence, aptitude, or character on how they look or where they were born. Yet we still do it.
I keep remembering a song from South Pacific, sung by John Kerr in the movie version, it asks the question why do we hate people who look or act differently than we do. He states because we are carefully carefully taught by family and friends. But I think there’s more to it than that – as is demonstrated on Angel and BTVS and Twilight Zone – it has a lot to do with fear. We fear that which we don’t understand, which threatens our lifestyle, our values, our beliefs. It also has a lot to do with envy, ignorance, jealousy…envying those who appear to have more than we do, ignorance – not knowing all the facts… If the skinny girl ridiculed us? We may be prejudiced against skinny people. If people make fun of our size – we may feel insecure around those who are smaller. It’s not always rational. Sometimes it’s a pure knee-jerk reaction. But understanding the reasons behind our prejudices helps us to find a way of over-coming them, of finding a way to be more tolerant of people who are different from us. Meeting and connecting with these people either through the safety of the internet or in person, provides a means of showing us that they do not pose the threat. That they are in reality not much different than we are.
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Read an interesting series of posts today on the atpo discussion board. These posts crystallized for me something that I’d been wrestling with off and on for some time now. Not consciously so much as subconsciously – in the back of my mind. Something that I couldn’t quite reach but was nagging at me. One of the things I love most about the atpobtvs discussion board is the off-topic intellectual discussion threads – this one concentrated on the issue of racism and prejudice. Before, I say anything more – I should explain that it wasn’t just these posts that got me thinking – it was a combination of unrelated posts and presentations that did – the first: a documentary on Rod Serling, the second: numerous and increasingly offensive posts on a listserve I lurk on about actors sexual orientation and weight and their attractiveness based on weight and how one can tell one is gay. Discussions with my parents over the holidays about corporate employment practices. And finally the wonderful atpo posts. What interested me most about the posts or rather what “triggered” this rambling essay – was what was hinted at but not really delved into. And that is – prejudice is *not * limited to racism, if anything racism is only one of the many forms prejudice can take. Also, the far greater issue – why do we prejudge others based on how their physical appearance and mannerisms differ from ours? Instead of celebrating the differences we appear to ostracize and ridicule them.
To get to the root of why people discriminate against others or form negative opinions – you need to expand the definition of prejudice a bit and realize it includes everyone. A male college counselor once told me that every man was a male chauvinist and every person has prejudices. That was 20 years ago and I still remember his words. Every human being on the face of this earth has experienced in one form or another prejudice and discrimination. Likewise every human being on this earth in one form or another is prejudiced or has discriminated against someone else, and not always intentionally or even consciously.
First a little personal history – throughout my life I have experienced discrimination either personally or seen it inflicted on others. There is a difference between discrimination and prejudice – one hurts someone or interferes with their basic rights, the other is the cause of it. Discrimination is often the effect of prejudice. As an old professor once told me – “I can tolerate prejudice, it’s discrimination I can’t tolerate. We all have prejudices.”
I am a big woman. My physique is very similar to Mariel Hemingway – sort of mannish. I’m not petite or the pretty feminine girl. And can be perceived as intimidating to many people – due to my size. Big bones. Big feet. Very Long Limbed. No matter how much weight I lose I will never fit into the coveted size 8. My feet are size 11 for starters. My background is Irish, Welsh, German, Belgium and Scotch-Irish. I was raised Catholic but consider myself agnostic, even though I do believe in the idea of a higher power. I have a visual and auditory coordination disability that I was born with and is genetic. Overtime I learned to compensate, but as a child – teachers treated me as “challenged”. I did not know it was a learning disability until a bright teacher in college caught me compensating for it in the same way she did – she was dyslexic. In law school, a couple of law professors persuaded me to get tested before taking the bar, so fair accommodations could be set. I hit the wall in law school – my compensation techniques did not work on the multiple choice timed computer tests. What I did was color in the wrong box without knowing it. The disability affects how I hear and repeat sounds and word syntax. I often confuse words based on their sound, mispronounce words, and misuse them or misspell them. Certain sounds I confuse completely – especially similar sounding consonants – this has made it impossible for me to master other languages or to sing. I have not allowed these things to hold me back, but people have ridiculed me for them. I also have a tremor – my hands shake uncontrollably all the time. Severity varies.
Every single item I mentioned above, someone at some point in time has used as a justification to discriminate against me. They have prejudged me based on mannerisms or physical symptoms of these traits. The wonder of the internet is these traits remain invisible online – I can hide them. Of course now that I’ve revealed them, I worry that people may prejudge and discriminate against me based on what they read above, one can only hope that won’t be the case. But we have no control over how others will respond to us. We don’t know the reasons behind their prejudices and in some cases neither do they. Some prejudices lie hidden inside us, like sleeping dragons or hidden buttons waiting to be pushed. We don’t know why we react to them, just that we do. Sometimes it’s not until someone draws attention to our reaction that we even realize what we are doing.
During New Year’s Eve, after a wonderful meal of beef tenderloin and roasted vegetables, my mother asked my father how he made hiring decisions. My father is retired now, but used to work for a very large consulting firm. Dad told her that he usually knew if someone was right for the job within the first five minutes of the interview. Mom asked what appealed to him. He responded: “Well, if they are attractive, poised, and *not* obese…” Mom retorted: “So you wouldn’t have hired BJ?” Dad: “I did hire BJ.” (BJ turned out to be one of my father’s best consultants.) Mom: “BJ was overweight, messy in attire and hardly poised.” Dad : “His experience and resume spoke for him. (somewhat flustered now) What I try to do is put myself in the clients shoes.”
(If you’ve ever watched the British situation comedy As Time Goes By with Gerald Palmer and Dame Judi Dench? You can imagine this conversation – that’s my parents.)
Is this prejudice? Is this discrimination? How many times do we pre-judge a person based on a behavior mannerism, a look, a size, a shape? While I was taking the Human Resources course, I asked the professor how they handled hiring/firing people with Touretts syndrome? She said that since there was no way to make reasonable accommodations and the syndrome interfered with a pleasant work environment – these people would not be hired. Discrimination?
Online and in articles – I’ve discovered that people assume a fictional character or real life person (possibly an actor) is gay because of their mannerisms. How they speak. What they say. A stereotype that shows such as Queer Eye for The Straight Guy advance unfortunately. I’ve known quite a few gay men in my life and sorry, they don’t act anything like the guys in Queer Eye. You can’t tell they are gay by looking at them. I’ve also known a few straight men who do act like those guys. Just as I know a few gay men who do. You cannot determine someone’s sexual orientation by how they act, dress, look, or speak. There are effeminate men who happen to be straight, just as there are macho women who are straight. Yet people keep making these assumptions and our society, unfortunately, encourages it. And once we do discover someone’s sexual orientation – we decide to prejudge the person or condemn them for it. We treat them differently then we did when we didn’t know. The violence and continued discriminatory practices against the gay community in our society is abominable and often overlooked. Why? Because something about being gay threatens people on a visceral level. Some people see it as a disease they can catch. My grandmother saw it as a sin – a mortal sin. (I fond her attitudes towards the gay community incredibly offensive and still do, may she rest in peace. But they only echoed those of the church she attended, which preached to her that AIDs was God’s punishment for homosexuality a la Sodom and Gomorrah. This was in the 1980s…they woke up finally.) It threatens their values, their worldview, their basic beliefs. And most people who harbor these views – would probably tell you if you asked them – that they don’t know any “gay” people. No one has challenged their views, or contradicted them. Several of them may live in insular communities where everyone has their values, their ideas, and their lifestyle.
I love living in New York City – partly because it is so diverse in every way. Makes it less easy for me to hold on to stereotypes or prejudices – especially when I’m constantly forced to see evidence to the contrary on a daily basis. I grew up in a somewhat insular community – Johnson County, Kansas – a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri. White. Middle Class. Judeo-Christian. Everyone looked more or less the same. Variations were in size, shape, religion and economic status – not color. And the racist comments? They lurked under the surface, along with all the other prejudices. Coming out in polite dinner conversations and debates. If someone who looked or acted *different * moved in? The neighbors would ignore them or make comments under their breath. They didn’t believe they were prejudiced though. They didn’t see it as discrimination. An old college classmate who was from a similar type of community – a suburb of Denver – once explained to me why she used to fear blacks or people of color, and why her parents still did. She had gotten past the fear and was at the time dating an African-American. The reason she gave was in her neighborhood – the only blacks were the people who robbed them. The people, who robbed her house and attacked her family, happened to be black. What she remembered was they were black, nothing else. It wasn’t until she was older and meet people in college from other countries and regions that she realized how wrong she was and could kill the fear. My experience was the opposite of my friends – previous to my experience in Johnson County – I lived in Pennsylvania and did interact with African-Americans. My experiences were very positive. I found my African-American friends kinder than the others. My prejudice was against the pretty popular blond cheerleader – the popular girls with the pretty clothes – the girls who got off on hurting others for a laugh. It took me at least a year of college to realize that these girls weren’t who they seemed and looks had zip to do with it. Everyone is an individual – we can’t lump them into groups – yet we instinctively do.
A question was asked in one of the posts on the atpo board – why do we ridicule people who don’t look or act like us? Why do we discriminate? Why do people make cruel remarks about immigrants or people seeking asylum? Ah…because they believe these people will steal their jobs, steal their livelihoods. Because they feel threatened. Heck – look at how many jobs have been outsourced over-seas the last year and how many people got laid off because of it? While I was in Hilton Head, my mother pointed out that more and more companies were hiring immigrants over older residents, because the immigrants were cheap labor. They tolerated smaller salaries. If you read some of the propaganda surrounding WWII, you’ll find that the Jews in Germany were turned into the scapegoat for all of Germany’s ills. If you were unemployed and poor in 1930s Germany – the time of the World Depression – you blamed the Jews – who from your perspective seemed to be living the good life – they seemed to have all the money. This wasn’t true of course – but that was what people felt. If we get rid of them – we’ll be all right. We’ll have money, we’ll have jobs. Poverty, unemployment, poor health care, lead to fear, fear leads to rage, and somewhere along the line people hunt someone to be angry at, someone to blame, and that’s the scapegoat. At the root of discrimination – lies envy, jealousy, hurt pride, and fear.
A woman in my book club once pre-judged me and somewhat harshly I might add, because she thought I looked like a WASP. I’m not. In fact I have some of the same lineage she does – Irish and Catholic. This shocked her. When I told her my ethnic makeup – including the German bit. She responded – “You don’t act German. You’re nice.” She has lived in Brooklyn her entire life – in the Italian/Irish community. She doesn’t see herself as prejudiced.
When I was in the third grade – my third grade teacher pre-judged me as a hillbilly from uneducated/white trash. Until she met my parents and discovered they both had Masters degrees and were more educated than she was. She pre-judged me based on my speech impediment and how I learned. (Later I overcame the speech impediment through theater courses and speech courses – somewhat the same way James Earl Jones and Nicholas Brendan over came their stutter. I compensated for the learning disability as well. )
Odd that so many people pre-judge others as stupid because of a learning disability. Did you know Einstein was dyslexic? Some of the brightest people in the world have learning disabilities. The ability to learn quickly does not make one smart. Any more than being a slow learner – makes one stupid. But people make assumptions on limited information all the time. It’s deductive reasoning – faulty deductive reasoning, but deductive reasoning all the same. Example: A. Under-educated people I’ve seen in movies and in person appear to speak with a lisp. B. Children learn to speak from their parents. C. This child has a lisp. Her parents must therefore be uneducated. Sometimes I think our prejudices say more about us than the people we are prejudiced against. They tell others what we fear and what our foibles are.
Rod Serling, the creator of The Twilight Zone, hated prejudice and discrimination in all its forms. He considered prejudice, racism, and discrimination the worst evil on earth. He was amongst the first to address this issue on television. And the first to write about the Holocaust in the Playhouse 90 episode – In The Presence Of Mine Enemies. In this episode, a Nazi General explains to a young Nazi Officer played by Robert Redford the politics of racism – how by despising the Jew and getting others to despise the Jew, they bond together. Germany is no longer fragmented. Germans can unite over hatred for a common enemy – a scapegoat. Serling wished to explore what lay behind people’s prejudices along with the consequences of those prejudices. He went on to write two more episodes that addressed this issue, episodes that in some ways are later echoed by Joss Whedon and Tim Minear in BTVS and Angel The Series. The first is the Twilight Zone episode – Eye of The Beholder – where a beautiful blond feels horribly disfigured in a world where everyone has pug noses, scars and black hair. The voice over by Serling states “beauty is in the eye of the beholder – especially in a society that dictates what beauty must be”. In The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street – Serling states that aliens don’t need to attack us physically – all they need do is suggest that the enemy is amongst us and we’ll turn on each other. Tim Minear addresses the same issue in Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? Which is less about racism then about discrimination and prejudice in general – and the horrible results – it is also a direct comment on what happened in during the Hollywood Blacklist – during the Mcarthy era. The title is the question McArthy’s panel asked suspected communists – “are you now or have you ever been a communist sympathsizer?” is the full statement. Within the episode, Minear places several souls who have experienced versions of discrimination, yet are guilty of discriminating themselves – the embezzler – a mulatto woman who fears people will discover her race and her misdeed, Angel – the vampire who fears people will discover his misdeeds…and then there’s the demon who feeds off the prejudices, hatreds, and fears of the people in the hotel – a metaphor of how fear/prejudice/hatred feeds and builds upon itself, if we let it. Like Monsters – the people in Are You Now – turn on each other, and end up lynching a convenient scapegoat. Whedon addresses the issue in a different way in the episodes The Pack, where students are cruel to people to impress their friends – like hyenas in a pack, becoming part of the pack mentality. But like Serling he takes it a step further metaphorically – showing how this behavior twists the students into monsters. Whedon like Serling seems to realize that prejudice is *not * limited to issues of race – which is important to understand in order to combat it. Whedon like Serling also shows the consequences of discrimination and ridicule. How we can create our own monsters – through characters such as Warren (Entropy), Spike (Fool For Love), Willow (Two to Go), Amy (Gingerbread/Witch), and Marcy in Out of Sight, Out of Mind. Cordelia asks in one episode why nasty things always happen to her and Xander responds - *cough*karma*cough*. Whedon demonstrates through Cordelia’s woes how we reap what we sow. Like Serling he both punishes his characters for their sins and provides them with a second chance – if they reach that crucial epiphany as Cordelia does in Season 1 ATS and possibly S3 BTVS that what they did was wrong. In Whedon and Serling’s worlds the most innocuous insult can be the most damaging. Marcy in Out of Sight/Out of Mind literally fades away because she is unnoticed, she is considered beneath notice. In one episode of the Twilight, can’t remember the name, a marine who orders his men to kill all Japanese, even women and children, finds himself turned into a Japanese solider being ordered by his commander to show no mercy to the Americans. Whedon and Serling aren’t safe writers – the characters they create aren’t cuddly but prickily and deeply flawed and incredibly gray. Like most of us.
What I find interesting in contemplating these issues is how guilty everyone is in making prejudgments about others. We don’t realize it of course. Partly because we may have rigidly defined prejudice as being something that others do to us, if we happen to be part of a racial minority, are handicapped, etc. But it goes far deeper than that. If it was simple – we could fix it, but it’s not. Even in within our minorities – lies prejudice. The reasons for it are so tied up with our subconscious that it’s hard to fight them until someone brings it painfully to our notice. Why do we prejudge others based on appearance or manner? Possibly because we associate their looks or behavior with a personal trauma we’ve repressed? Perhaps it’s a subconscious thing? I know it took me years to recognize my own prejudices – against cheerleaders. Silly, I know. I got over it. A friend of mine, who is African-American and part Irish, reads Flannery O’Connor and other prejudiced writers to better understand the nature of their prejudice. She feels if she sees it, if she understands it, she can combat it. Why do these writers perpetuate the stereotypes? Is it because that’s all they know based upon their own experiences?
The next time someone makes an offensive remark – perhaps I should ask the question: “Why did you say that? Why do you think it?” I have done this in the past by the way.
I have 0 tolerance for racism in myself or others and tend to be a tad out-spoken on the topic. Years ago, a friend’s father pushed my buttons by stating that blacks were less intelligent than whites. My friend cringed. I challenged him. Asking him first why he thought this and second disproving his theory with facts. I wanted to know what caused this 50 year old man, an engineering professor at a major university, to believe this. It was simple, really – he did not know any blacks or people of darker pigmentation who weren’t low wage workers or servants. He had spent his entire life in the “deep” south of Houston, Texas, Missippi, and Georgia. He’d gone to all white schools and he’d gotten a doctorate in a non-people intensive field. He looked at things from a logical standpoint, yet one based purely on his own limited spectrum of experience and observation. He’d been taught rhymes and games as a child that perpetuated these beliefs. From his perspective – the opinion was based on experience not prejudice. “All the blacks I’ve met are un-educated and not very smart, therefore all blacks must be of inferior intelligence.” He considered historical figures like Frederick Douglas and Barbara Jordan to be flukes. It wasn’t until I provided him with statistical figures and further recent history, that he conceded he was wrong.
Did you know – a recent issue of Scientific American announced the discovery that people from different races, ie. an African and a Caucausion, have a greater degree of genetic similarity than those from the same race? That the pigment of our skin, shape of our eyes, or area of the world in which we are born says very little conclusively about our genetic heritage? In other words – you cannot judge a person’s intelligence, aptitude, or character on how they look or where they were born. Yet we still do it.
I keep remembering a song from South Pacific, sung by John Kerr in the movie version, it asks the question why do we hate people who look or act differently than we do. He states because we are carefully carefully taught by family and friends. But I think there’s more to it than that – as is demonstrated on Angel and BTVS and Twilight Zone – it has a lot to do with fear. We fear that which we don’t understand, which threatens our lifestyle, our values, our beliefs. It also has a lot to do with envy, ignorance, jealousy…envying those who appear to have more than we do, ignorance – not knowing all the facts… If the skinny girl ridiculed us? We may be prejudiced against skinny people. If people make fun of our size – we may feel insecure around those who are smaller. It’s not always rational. Sometimes it’s a pure knee-jerk reaction. But understanding the reasons behind our prejudices helps us to find a way of over-coming them, of finding a way to be more tolerant of people who are different from us. Meeting and connecting with these people either through the safety of the internet or in person, provides a means of showing us that they do not pose the threat. That they are in reality not much different than we are.
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We are all flawed
Date: 2004-01-03 09:37 pm (UTC)Here's a funny thing to prove your point about how we are all prejudiced. I'm a computer programmer - have been for 20 years now. I program in many languages, from Assembler to C, worked on pc's, mini's and mainframes, and have both repaired and built computers. Yet, amazingly enough, if I call a tech support line, and hear a female voice, my immediate reaction is one of disappointment. I have more automatic confidence in a male voice - how pathetic is that????? Now luckily I realize that this is one of my stupider reactions, and have gotten excellent, friendly and satisfying help from those female voice on a consistent basis. However if I need to call a Tech Support line tomorrow and get a female - my initial reaction will be the same, and I'll have to take a deep breath and give myself an internal slap across the face, then I'll get down to business.
I'm starting to think that prejudice is not something that can ever be eliminated in anyone, but is something that must be controlled and managed by all of us. And you're right about fear playing a big part of things. Often you'll find more virulent prejudices in places where there is a noticeable size of a minority, then where the minority is insignificant in terms of population. I believe that we are the only Jewish family in our village, and possibly the entire township, but because of that, Graffiti has not had to deal with any real unpleasantness. Instead of being seen as threatening, he's seen as exotic.
I really enjoyed reading your take on this - it's a fascinating topic but also a scary one to discuss. I'm glad I got a chance to see your ideas and analysis!
Re: We are all flawed
Date: 2004-01-04 12:26 pm (UTC)It is a scary topic to discuss, isn't it? Possibly because it can push so many buttons.
As I grow older, I become more and more aware of my own prejudices - prejudices that have formed over time due to experience. The biggest struggle is not to allow myself to make scapegoats of people - as a means of dealing with my own frustrations and pains. I think that most discriminatory remarks are the result of the speakers own issues and frustrations. The temp worker who declares that immigrants should be deported may be expressing her own frustration at finding and keeping a job, deep inside, she thinks - if only there weren't so many people, I'd be a full-time employee. That by no means justifies her remarks, it only explains them. But when you are on the receiving end of the remark or the victim of it? The explanation is far from comforting. All the remark does is elicit a desire to lash back.
I'm starting to think that prejudice is not something that can ever be eliminated in anyone, but is something that must be controlled and managed by all of us. And you're right about fear playing a big part of things. Often you'll find more virulent prejudices in places where there is a noticeable size of a minority, then where the minority is insignificant in terms of population.
Exactly. I think - if the minority threatens individuals in the majority - that's when things get ugly. It's almost ironic in a way - since it's when the minority is numerically no longer an minority, that people reacte. The increase of hispanics or spanish speaking individuals in certain cities is causing more and more racial backlash - why? The fear that the former majority has of having to learn "spainish" and losing their livilihoods to the encroaching group. I think if you look back historically - you'll discover most of our wars and battles are about acquiring territory or over a thing, job, artifact, livilihood, money...The 4000 year old fight in the Middle East is partly just about who gets or deserves a peice of land. The Caine and Able fight over and over and over again. Can it be eliminated in us? I don't think so - b/c I think part of it is an animal instinct, something that has remained over centuries of evolution. OTOH, what separates us from most animals is our ability to think, to choose to ignore our instincts, our emotions and rise above them. I think that's the challenge - figuring out our prejudices and *not* allowing them to take us over or do things we'd later regret.
What I love about ATS and BTVS - is how ME has flipped stereotypes and contradicted certain prejudices. The cute petite blonde cheerleader who can't protect herself and runs screaming from the monster. The macho guy who is wolfish and a womanizer - in BTVS Phases - Larry proves to be homeosexual and actually very kind, it's the slight
and decidely unmacho OZ who is the werewolf. I think shows like BTVS, Angel, Queer As Folk, and Joan of Arcadia - all help to contradict media stereotypes. Unfortunately, there are so many television shows that continue to perpetuate these stereotypes...that it feels like a drop in the bucket, but it is progress and that's something.