It is said that fear is the parent of prejudice and ignorance is its grandparent.
I live in a very small community that in some ways is isolated from many of the social and economic realities that must be faced by the majority of the citizens of this country. There are a great many positives about the community, and all of them are rooted in the people who live here. They can be welcoming, warm, loving, hospitable, and charitable.
Like people many other communities, they can also be prejudiced. We recently experienced a community gala that involved most of the community. It was a celebration of the lifestyle of the community and many of the events were designed with families and children in mind. There were entertainers including musicians and clowns. There was a “family” comedian. According to our local newspaper editor, her favorite joke told by the family comedian was a not so subtle digression into the language of prejudice. It is very sad to see a newspaper editor in this country in the 21st Century unabashedly promoting racism. I find it even more disturbing that the work of this comedian was deemed appropriate for families and children.
I grew up in the New York City, but I’ll never be as “smart” or as accomplished as Neil deGrasse Tyson who also grew up there. I’ll never be as smart, wealthy or as powerful as Michael Bloomberg. I grew up in the Bronx just like Sonia Maria Sotomayor, but I’ll never be as smart or as powerful as her. They are not “the exceptions that prove the rule.” They are each just one more example (out the millions) of the stupidity of racial stereotyping.
There is no such thing as a positive racial stereotype. The effort to stereotype anyone along “racial” lines is an exercise in ignorance. It leads to the extension of that stereotype to everyone who carries the most readily recognizable trait of the category. The “language of prejudice,” through either the use of not very subtle racial humor or overt and blatant racial epithets, is a concept first outlined almost 60 years ago. The “language of prejudice” is one of the strongest building blocks in the institutional approval of bigotry and by extension of hatred.
The Lord God created the human race. A variety of factors (biological, social, religious, even climatological) led to a host of physical and intellectual variants within the human race. Most of the people in my community would call themselves “Christian.” Jesus died for all humanity that we might reunite as the one family of God. Neither hatred nor the language of prejudice has any place in God’s family.
Pastor Jim
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