goodandevil

The Evil | Prejudice against Racism

     Imagine you’re walking to a store. It’s the same store you walk to every day, and like many of those days,  a circus clown comes up to you with a quick chest-heavy walk, speaking low and loudly even though he’s alone. You try different things, smiling, nodding, making no connection at all, but the clown comes up to you, is hostile, or sometimes physically abrasive, albeit in a minor way. Your experience travelling isn’t pleasant, is it?

     A far more relevant question: Were this the case in real life, you’d have an inherent distrust of clowns, right? Would you feel bad about that distrust? I imagine not.

     Are brains are hard-wired to accept the status quo, and retain information on negative circumstances as those threaten our ability to live in homeostasis. Thus the stereotype is born, and why stereotypes are almost always negative.

    If you were honest with yourself, you would be reasonable, and tell yourself that even though many of the clowns you’ve encountered are mean and irritable, it’s a very small sample size of the clown population. Plus, your distrust of clowns is really only a gateway to a fear of the consequences of interacting with them that you’ve endured. You keep that data on your experiences with clowns so as to monitor or avoid similar situations in the future. You’ve even counted many times, perhaps 1/3 of the time, where a clown, even an angry one, walked past you without causing a problem.
 
      You have a right to observe these qualities. Stereotyping has connotations nowadays, but it is probably one of the most denotative words out there.

      Racism is taking a stereotype and acting on it. You cross the line and use those experience to hate or to hurt because of taking those fears to an irrational level and placing the blame on those tied to the circumstance rather than the circumstance itself.

     I recently saw a video on YouTube where an individual told the author in a comment he felt certain people resembled an animal he had in mind. The resemblance is truly slight — maybe 5-10%, enough for you to know what the person was talking about, or get a joke had he made one. The fact is if he had pictures of these individuals side by side with the animal for comparison he’d see major differences in form and texture, and of course that his analogue could only work with a lot of mental stretching and exaggeration.

     The problem is, someone responded to the comment and called him a racist. True, coming out with a comment like that is something that probably wouldn’t come out of someone’s mouth unless they did have a hate or a fear of certain people, and there’s little chance this guy was just some naive individual trying to better the world with a cutesy connection he “happened to notice.” However, there’s wasn’t anything in the comment that immediately outed him as a card-carrier just by his literal words.

     I wouldn’t recommend people follow in the initial commenter’s footsteps, because it’s always in good taste to know your audience and not try outright to hurt people’s feelings.  Please, though, stop stomping on people for the mere identification of thoughts regarding people that are perceived as “different.” Everyone knows what’s true and what’s not, if we use huge umbrella generalities, about different belief systems and ethnicities and the other ways we box and label. Just don’t take it to the extreme.

    Here’s an example. Fifty identical white people are standing in a line in a photograph, all holding identical shovels. In the middle of this line there are two black people, one holding a shovel identical to the others, and the other holding a similar shovel but with a different tip. Say you wanted someone to see the special shovel. Guess what, there are fifty-two people standing there, it had to be taken from far back and the shovel details are therefore not easy to see.

    You should be able to say “Ah, one of the black guys has it” without worrying about some sort of retribution. That’s not racism, that’s efficiency; it’s the easiest way to zero in so that the person searching doesn’t waste time. You should have that freedom! Unfortunately anyone who ever has the ganas to say that in a similar situation will be dismissed as a hater of black people.

     What?

    You might like black people, shovels, photographs — stop me when it becomes offensive. I’ll just continue indefinitely, then, because it isn’t.

The Good | Lightning Round

     Kept on a fair bit, there, didn’t I? Well, the point of having a blog about good and evil is to illustrate balance, so I’ll compensate for the length you’ve just endured by listening a few of the tiny experiential things I treasure about life.

•  Finding out the person you suspected was innocent.
•  Talking to the pianist at an upscale department store
•  Driving by a car with just the right color on it
•  The sound of billiard balls clacking
•  The smell of oak burning
•  Animals with perpetual smiles frozen onto their face, like the dolphin
•  Listening to people’s answers to questions about which superpower they’d choose
•  Learning about technology you would believe was anachronistic
•  High quality furniture
•  Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
•  Watching babies trying to figure out something just beyond their mental capacity
•  Being able to go for a walk to sort out a problem
•  100% fruit juice
•  Looking at any texture and imagining how it would feel on your tongue
   

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