Moving past persistent racism
As if the recent multiple shootings involving young black men and local police were not enough, we now have university-wide protests involving athletics.
After repeated efforts to bring attention to persistent racial slurs on campus, the protests became instant national news from the University of Missouri, culminating in the unexpected resignation of the president of the university. What is so troubling is the nature of the racial comments: they are mean-spirited, show an embarrassing level of ignorance, and a primitive belief and prejudice against students of color, which one would expect to have heard in the distant past.
At the Virginia Commonwealth University, a student reported that white students would ask if they could touch her hair, or whether she knew the latest dance moves. At Chicago’s Loyola University, a student told that white students stop talking when he walks by and girls grip their handbags tighter. Some move away when a black student sits near them in a classroom. One might expect yet certainly not condone this prejudiced behavior in other places but surely not in a university setting.
A university should be a place of learning and accepting new and different concepts in life and un-learning potentially hurtful and learned preconceptions.
One does not grow up naturally to be prejudiced. We have to learn it somewhere, and our past history, our teacher, has done a number on us. Surely we could and should be able to overcome and grow beyond the days of Jim Crow in our country, and yet it persists.
We search for answers in sociology, in history, in the study of various civilizations, in psychology, and in anthropology. Sadly, what we find is the genetically wired need for a scapegoat, someone whom we can blame, someone to make us feel superior. Tendencies toward violence, neuroscientists tell us, may reside in our genes or be hard-wired into our brains. In other words, there is unfortunately a predisposition to not only violence in human beings but a predilection to acquired prejudices. That’s bad news.
This research says, however, only that we have a disposition, a prevailing tendency, and are susceptible to a prejudice, not that we must fall prey to it.
As I see it, the only answer is education that brings people together at a very early age, way before the learned prejudices of society kick in, and that wired part of our brain with the propensity toward prejudice has a chance to set roots. I am more convinced the fair, equal, open-minded, and humanitarian-based education is the answer. If we want to eradicate this problem in our society, we must endorse and financially support such early educational programs before it’s too late.
Tom Schwartz is a Muncie resident.