Racism
The Owl Opinion #1: The United States is not a racist country.
The Owl Opinion #2: There is a significant number of racist people in The United States.
The Owl Opinion #3: There is no such thing as one race being better or having “supremacy”.
Racism. This is a concept that makes no sense to The Owl. Here’s why.
The Owl grew up in a 100% white town. The Owl never met a person of color until he went to college. He watched with wonder the goings on in the 1960’s that led to desegregation. The Owl never understood segregation. Black people just looked like people with dark skin. He couldn’t understand why people thought they were different.
The Owl ran into black people sometimes when he was in the big city. They were always nice to him. This reinforced his perception that the only difference between him and a black person was skin color. Watching all of the racial strife of the 1960’s on television seemed weird to The Owl. But, where he lived, none of that was going on. Everyone was white.
The Owl had to look up what racism was. According to the Webster Dictionary racism is: “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race”.
Racism against blacks seemed odd to The Owl, since a lot of his boyhood idols were black. All of those wonderful musical artists, from jazz greats like Duke Ellington to the slew of black artists from Motown. George Washington Carver (The Owl is a peanut lover). Martin Luther King. It didn’t make sense that these people were somehow inferior to white people. Then there were the athletes. There were no doubts that black athletes could easily compete with any race or ethnicity.
The Owl went to college after high school. He was approached by a fraternity to pledge. After watching those TV situation comedies where fraternities and sororities looked really cool, this seemed like an honor to The Owl. The fraternity had about 30 students in it. There were officers. The fraternity was all white guys except for one black guy. The black guy was the president. Yes, the white guys voted him into that position! This fact didn’t even phase The Owl or the other pledges. I never heard anyone in the fraternity even comment on it. The black guy was just another fraternity brother who everyone admired. And they should have. He was a great guy, and really smart. He got into Yale Medical School.
This just reinforced to The Owl that there is no real difference among all of the different races and ethnicities except external physical features like skin color, shape of eyes, color of hair, etc. A doctor will tell you, if you could take the skin off of any person and have someone try to identify their race or ethnicity, they wouldn’t be able to. There are some genetic differences related to health conditions like high blood pressure and diabetes, but that doesn’t define someone’s ability to perform in any way.
So, The Owl deduced that racism is all in the mind. It’s what people think. It’s based on perception, not reality.
Why do people think this way? These are The Owl’s opinions:
- People naturally react to a difference in physical appearance. The Owl thinks this is a teleologic factor. People feel more comfortable associating with people who look like themselves. This probably reduced the likelihood that you would be killed in primitive times. It’s probably deeply imbedded in people’s psyche, and it gets reinforced when you see the look on people’s faces when you are the one that looks different, or portrayals of criminals or bad guys in movies or on TV being from a non Anglo-Saxon heritage. White Anglo-Saxon folks in the US reacted to people of Mediterranean descent because they were darker skinned (but not black!). Look at the history in the US when Italians and Greeks immigrated to the US. There were even ethnic slurs – Greasy Guinea, Wop, Dago – for Italians, for example. How about all of those movies and TV shows portraying Italians as mobsters/criminals?
- People fear people who look different. This is related to #1 above. They fear they may be stronger. Maybe smarter. They fear the “other” people will take things from them like their jobs, their woman or man, their belongings, etc. To a white person, where black in most of their myths and literature connotes evil, a black person is likely subliminally perceived as inherently evil. But it is not just racial. Some segments of the whites in the US society fear white people with a lot of tattoos, spiked or unusual hairdos, and/or a lot of piercings. They look different; they should be feared. Something bad is going to happen.
To The Owl, the reason why the whites became globally dominant during the 1500’s to the 1900’s is that they had better weaponry. The Africans, American Indians, the Aztecs, the Polynesians, the Asians (e.g., India, China) had civilizations that were equally if not more developed (sociologically) than Europe, but the Europeans had focused for centuries on invading each other, and/or defending themselves in that small area of the world and so there was a furious arms race that resulted in advanced weaponry compared to the rest of the world. It was easy to run roughshod over other races who didn’t have the need to escalate their weaponry. If it weren’t for that, the world might be a very different place.
The Owl says that’s because only 11.5% of the world’s population is white. That means 88.5% of the world is people of color. You don’t have to believe The Owl about this. Google it yourself. Statistically, people of color should be globally dominant.
So, let’s get back to what The Owl stated at the top of this article.
The United States is not a racist country. It isn’t. There is no way a black man would be elected President in a country that was racist against blacks. There are a significant number of black multi-millionaires. Turn on your TV. Many blacks there. The Owl knows Pro basketball is 74.4% blacks. Football is 68% blacks. And there are only 14% blacks in the United States population. If the US was racist, there wouldn’t be any of the above.
There are a significant number of racists in the United States. Sadly, this is true. The Owl would bet people of any of the three major defined races would say at least once in their lives they felt that they were the object of someone’s racist attitude. But, The Owl’s opinion is, racists are in the vast minority. The problem is they create a lot of societal friction that gets amplified by the news media. It always gets a reaction that satisfies the media and its sponsors.
There is no such thing as one race being better or having “supremacy”. This statement doesn’t even deserve an explanation. There is no data supporting the supremacy of one race over another.
Think about yourself. You go about your day, your work, your business. You interact with your neighbors, your friends, your co-workers. How often do you have or see a racist event? The Owl’s experience is rarely.
Now, The Owl isn’t saying the “racist” attitude is a one way street. There are plenty of non-white people who have that same attitude towards white people. It may be more of a reaction to the way they’ve been treated by white people, but the anger, fear and sometimes even hatred is the same. That’s because it is connected to that innate and teleological perception that people have inside them that people who look different should somehow be “suspect”. And it’s fueled by a minority, same as racism. An example of this is back in the 1970’s when they were bussing black school children in Boston from black schools to white schools and white school children from white schools to black schools. Whites were beating up blacks in their neighborhood and blacks were beating up whites in their neighborhood. And for no other reason than they were racially different. The person being beat up (sometimes killed) didn’t do anything to provoke the attack. There was one guy who was stopped at a red light in one of these neighborhoods when the locals hauled him out of his car and beat him to death. Notice The Owl isn’t revealing which race did what. It doesn’t matter. It was happening in both neighborhoods.
A more pervasive set of problems is biases and prejudices. Like, gender bias (women get paid less and are more subject to sexual misconduct), religious prejudices (remember the Northern Ireland Catholic-Protestant unrest? How about the Muslim backlash since 9/11? How about the Jewish People’s entire history?), ethnic prejudice (Mexican or immigration into the US), LBGT prejudice, Goth prejudice, etc. The Owl has the opinion that these biases and prejudices are significantly more in play than racism in the Unites States, and perhaps, globally. Research what the status of women are in Africa, for example (http://archive.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/uu37we/uu37we0t.htm) where most of the people are black. These biases and prejudices transcend races and all have their own history that won’t be addressed in this article as it would become a 2000+ page book! But, think about how often you see or experience one of these. The Owl’s experience is, pretty often.
And then there are what The Owl calls “minor” prejudices/biases. There is definite prejudice behavior regarding: the obese, the less than beautiful (yup, the beautiful people get to marry each other and have beautiful children), the tall vs the short, introverts (formerly called “wall flowers” or nerds) vs extroverts, those that don’t dress “in fashion” (fanny packs?), those that dress extremely different, etc. Those are going on all the time.
And this isn’t a one way street either. The Owl has personally heard people in the above “prejudiced” categories spewing hate verbiage against people who don’t tolerate them. The interesting thing here is that those who preach and expect tolerance don’t tolerate the people who don’t tolerate them.
That’s because it’s human nature to not tolerate those who don’t “look” like you (back to #1 above). It seems you can’t fight human nature. If you could, there wouldn’t be any wars. Don’t expect anything to change any time soon. It hasn’t for eons.