Our Racist Past
“In the first discharge of emotions touched off by the Japanese assaults on their nation, U.S. citizens have been demonstrating a distressing ignorance on the delicate question of how to tell a Chinese from a Jap. Innocent victims in cities all over the country are many of the 75,000 U.S. Chinese, whose homeland is our stanch ally. So serious were the consequences threatened, that the Chinese consulates last week prepared to tag their nationals with identification buttons. To dispel some of this confusion, LIFE here adduces a rule-of-thumb from the anthropometric conformations that distinguish friendly Chinese from enemy alien Japs.”
Part of me cries out at the hypocrisy in making sure you attack the innocent Japanese-Americans instead of the innocent Chinese-Americans. But the thought that was most on my mind as I read these was how very little progress humanity has made in the past 60 years. Racial profiling still exists even more so since the attacks of September 11th, 2001. (As an aside, the buzz-word 9/11 strikes me as extremely disrespectful to those affected by that day.) But is it even possible for human nature to overcome those distrustful feelings of the “others”?
I don’t consider myself a racist. In my view, everyone is a person. Period. Any other classification is just some arbitrary rule we’ve come up with to exclude the “others”. And I realize that the attacks on the Pentagon and the WTC were perpetrated by a few extreme religious nuts. But, when a group of 4 college age male Arab-Americans moved into my apartment complex, I paused for an irrational moment. Intellectually, I know they are more likely to be millionaires than terrorists, but still, in that first moment when I realized who was moving in, I was scared.
So the question I must ask myself is, why? I don’t think that I am alone in my momentary irrationality, but the everybody does it excuse doesn’t cut it with me. I am more than the product of my biological functions. To me, I think this is a social memory. As far as I know, it is only in the last part of the 20th century that the idea that those different from yourself were not to be feared. At least, from what I know of the actions of history, it would seem to be a completely foreign idea to our ancestors. Greeks and Persians, Romans and Gauls, New Americans and Native Americans, and in reality everybody and everybody. The history of racism is the history of humanity. But like I said, the everybody does it excuse doesn’t cut it.
Why did it happen? It happened because I allowed myself to fall for the propaganda filling this nation that the people in Middle East are extremists who want to end our way of life. The great irony in all of this is that the Americans who are so afraid of what Muslims or Iraqis or whomever might do to us have the exact same mindset as the people who attacked us. When you allow that feeling to fester in your mind, that is when “they” win. Because they have turned you into the exact thing that you are so scared of. When FDR said that “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” he was right on so many levels.
So if there is a problem, how do we correct it? Do this. Talk about it. Having acknowledged a shortcoming in yourself will only make you more likely to avoid it in the future. Do it in public or with the people in your life if possible. Have them hold you accountable. That is one of the reasons the taboo against the discussion of racism is so detrimental to cause of fighting it. We have to be allowed to openly confront our shortcomings to have any hope of overcoming them. Next time you feel yourself fall for the temptation of racism find a way to do just that.
