I've been thinking a lot lately about the nature of prejudice. I'm going to write about it for few days. If you're easily upset by such things, I advise you to come back in a week.
Any discussion of people's prejudices should certainly begin with an examination of my own. For all my mom's faults as a parent, she did a remarkable job of not instilling in me distrust of people unlike myself. Nope, I learned to do that all on my own. My prejudices are uniformly not a function of childhood environment but of adult choice. I've wrestled with whether that makes them better or worse. Are they more forgivable because they've developed from experience and evidence? Or are they less forgivable because I consciously choose to generalize about groups of people? I suspect that the answer to both questions is "yes."
Rich old white fucks (ROWFs) with overdeveloped sense of entitlement. Born-again fucktards. HR Twinkies. Seatards. These are terms I've used in this very space to disparage enormous groups of people. While I'm not particularly proud of that fact, I'm not particularly ashamed of it, either. I wouldn't do it if I didn't feel justified—that's the essence of prejudice, isn't it? Yet I'll be the first to acknowledge the inherent ugliness and unfairness of it all, not to mention a central hypocrisy: I go batshit if someone presumes to categorize me. Yet somehow I feel justified if I decide that my anecdotal evidence against a group has achieved critical mass. You don't gotta eat the whole pie to know what it tastes like, I tell myself.
Sounds good. Maybe even sometimes it's accurate. But what a treacherous, slippery slope to navigate.
I keep reminding myself of Maddie's dad, Ken, my personal poster-boy for the dangers of learned prejudice. He was a hillbilly and, most unfortunately, a Columbus cop. Without exception, the blacks he met were on the job. A lot of them were criminals, and he said a few had tried to kill him. It's very hard, I suspect, for a cop to resist generalizing about people, but I'd always figured that wrestling with that inner demon came with the job. I'd figured wrong. Ken felt no such responsibility. By the time I met him, he was an unabashed racist spewing stunningly ignorant things. He himself was a living, breathing embodiment of a stereotype—specifically, the racist-white-trash-cop stereotype. He even had a trailer in the hills of southern Ohio, where he rode quad-runners and shot guns at cans.
I'll never forget the day we met. He was railing against the CPD's effort to recruit more black cops, a seemingly noble venture. The line I most remember: "They should just put recruiting pamphlets in women's purses."
I sat there, stunned stupid. I'd heard about this kind of person, but I'd never actually talked to one. He proceeded to hold forth, moving on to impugn the overall intelligence of black folks. Maddie tried to rescue him.
"Now Dad, you're not really saying that blacks are less intelligent."
"Oh yes I am," said the man who would one day accuse me of pretense because I used big college words like "delusions" and "grandeur."
Jesus H. Where do you even begin with such a person? Telling him off was going to make me an enemy I couldn't afford, reasoning with him was like trying to bail out the ocean with a bucket, and remaining silent implied consent. My chickenshit solution was to let him infer my offense. "I dunno about that," I finally said, feigning thoughtfulness. "My best friend is flat-out the most intelligent person I've ever met, and she's black. She's got like a 170 IQ."
My hand to god, this was his response: "How much white she got in her?"
Unimpressed, he proceeded to bury us in anecdotes of his own, story upon story about stupid blacks he'd supposedly met on the job. His hate ran deep. My mouth dropped. So did Maddie's. I shot her a bug-eyed look that said "Pack your things, demon-spawn." His confidence in his prejudice was proud, unyielding, unwavering. After all, he probably figured, you don't gotta eat the whole pie to know what it tastes like.