When I was eleven years old, a beloved English teacher suggested I read “Jane Eyre.” When I said that I didn’t like books written by women, she told me that I was “too smart to be prejudiced.”
I looked up the word and contemplated it. I allowed it to change my path in life, a journey that led me from Brontë to Zora Neale Hurston and Sylvia Plath, among so many others, not to even mention James Baldwin.
I think I wasn’t as prejudiced as I was badly programmed.
Now, I’m afraid that we are losing the ability to see progressions in language, vis-à-vis, the journey from unlearned, to badly influenced, to prejudiced, to ethnocentric, to xenophobic, to bigoted, to paranoid, and, finally, to racist.
The labeling of any nuanced action as the unassailable extremity of racism seems, at least to me, to pass over so many lesser manifestations that might possibly be treatable via gentle teaching, thus halting a journey that is bound to end badly. There should be a hole in the prison wall of distrust through which one could escape ere hatred takes hold.
Failure may doom us as a society if we force the young to choose poorly and permanently, via the placing of labels. We begin life so full of wonder. What happens along way?
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