Racism and Prejudice

What really amazes me about people who are racists, is that most of them claim to believe in a God.
They go to great lengths to portray this God that they believe in as a loving God who cares for all of humanity, they vociferously proclaim that all humans were “created equal” maybe in my naivety I cannot encompass the part of equality which defines one race as being superior to another.
Not too far back in history, for those who do not conveniently choose to forget, there was a period in some countries when pews in some churches were reserved for a certain race of people only.

“Racial segregation of churches in the United States is a pattern of Christian churches having segregated congregations based on race.
As many as 87% of Christian churches in the United States are completely made up of only White or African-American parishioners.
Racially segregated churches have existed within the United States since before it became a country, and lasted well through the post slavery era into the modern age.
There are many reasons for the history and continued prevalence of racial segregation in U.S. churches, including racism, denominational differences, and isolation.

This segregation also has effects on individuals and the larger society, including increased racism and segregation even outside of the church”.

Racism in the Mormon religion was rooted in their teachings, below is a quote from Brigam Young

Journal of Discourses 10:110-111; “Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so.” – Brigham Young, Salt Lake City, March 8, 1863

They call themselves followers of Christ but during that period in history they seem to have forgotten or chosen to ignore Romans 8:1

Romans 8:1; “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.”

Now if these people really believe in their God, I wonder if they have ever thought of asking Her why are there people of different races with some living in “Shithole” countries

I like everyone else had no choice in deciding what race to belong to, we were all born, we are who we are and we cannot change that reality.

In trying to understand the evolution of the human race, we are suspended between so many different schools of thinking.
Creation by God” seems to be widely accepted by most humans.

I was not there to see what the first created people looked like, the first time I became aware of the different kinds of people which exist today was when I lived in Jamaica.

I saw people who identified themselves as Blacks, whites, Chinese and Indians, there were many who were not sure how to classify themselves because they had difficulty deciding what race they belonged to, they more often than not tried to identify with the race to which the pigment of their skin was closer to, ironically sometimes the race they wanted to belong to rejected them.

I recently heard someone say that “people were not born racists, racism is something they learnt”.

Racism not only discriminates against and oppresses the targeted race; it also seeks to inject an inferiority complex into their psyche, it seeks to marginalize their educational development and control the level and growth of their economic prosperity. If we look very closely at the post slavery years of North America and the institutionalized oppression enacted upon a people who were supposed to be emerging from slavery to freedom, we can clearly see the evil of racism in its most barbaric operational form.

Mind Control

I spent part of my early life, in rural St. Mary Jamaica with my paternal grandmother during the latter part of British Colonialism.

I never really paid any attention to the complexity of racism and how mind control was so effectively used. I was too much engaged in the wonders of nature, the trees the rivers, mountains and forests, my more observant years came later on!!

There were however some things which got my attention, like my grandmother believing that if “white people” liked something that means that it was good, for example whole wheat bread was “white people bread” things were only good if they were “made in England”, still ricocheting vividly in the corners of my recollection was when she told me that I should marry a “Brown Skin Girl” so that my children would not be “too black”, was I angry with her for saying that? Absolutely not because she was only the manifestation of an insidiously orchestrated mechanism designed to control the minds of people to keep them from rising above the slotted mental prison of ignorance they were trapped in.

I recall one morning “Mass Mike” the white surveyor was supposed to survey some land for me, my grandmother wanted to be sure that I “combed my hair” and dress nicely “before Mass Mike come”.

When I pointed out to her that Mass Mike was coming to work for me, so he should be the one to be concerned about his appearance, she thought that I had gone crazy, the irony of this is that “Mass Mike” was coming to do a job and he had no interest in the way I dressed.

These were good hard working people, who believed in and fervently served the God handed down to them by the very people who murdered their ancestors who were deemed not to “have Souls”.

I remember my grandmother looking at a photograph of a blond haired, blue eyed person who was supposed to be Jesus Christ and remarked “Massa Gaad really pretty”.

I can safely say that almost everyone in that community at that time believed that God was white and that white people were superior to black people.

During slavery in North America, religion was used to control slaves, the slaves were made to believe that they were their master’s property and when they ran away they were stealing their master’s property and “the bible says that stealing is a sin”.

Retaliatory Actions

There is also the retaliatory effect of racism, what I mean by that is, a racially oppressed people will sometimes react in a hostile manner to their oppressors mainly because of the oppression enacted upon them by that race. It is not easy to love people who have trampled upon your rights and dehumanized you incessantly for generations.

“Although slavery had ended 100 years earlier, African Americans in Mississippi had been kept in subjugation for decades through a system known as “Jim Crow.” In 1964, state and local laws separated whites and Blacks in housing, jobs, schools, churches, playgrounds, and all other aspects of social life. These discriminatory policies meant that African Americans had the worst jobs, lowest pay, poorest schools, and harshest living conditions. Most Black Mississippians had less than a sixth-grade education and worked at menial jobs, such as field hands or maids. More than 90 percent of African Americans were barred from voting in local, state or national elections, even in places where African Americans constituted a majority of the residents. White supremacist politicians, police, and business leaders worked together to keep African Americans “in their place.” Black Mississippians who challenged the system were arrested and jailed, punished by white employers, or attacked by terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Some were even killed for trying to vote or improve their lives. Some people called this institutionalized racism “the Southern way of life.” The law, the police, the courts, the church, the media, and the schools taught that Black people were dangerous and inferior to white people. Government officials at all levels deliberately passed laws to keep the races apart and keep control over African American people. This type of segregation is called de jure segregation, or segregation “by law”.

This is a very complex issue and very hard to evaluate, for example a black person in the State of Mississippi or Alabama my react with hostility towards a white person but the basis of the hostility could be because of generations of the racial discrimination experienced. When people are abused, marginalized, discriminated against, deprived of proper education and jobs solely because of their race, they are angry and that anger sometimes is misdirected and perceived as racism.

Let me hasten to say that I have never been and I am not now a racist, but I am uncompromisingly antagonistic towards racial discrimination of any kind and from any race.

So if I am not a racist, why am I saying some of the things I say? , I say them because they are part of my experiences as an evolving human being, those experiences defined who I am today, and they helped me to understand the complexity of our relationship and interaction with each other as human beings. I have experienced racism in different forms in many parts of the world, I have seen many others being victims of racism, I have seen what the pernicious psychological effects racism brings to bear on many people.

I recall eons ago I was walking in Spanish Town Jamaica with a white girl I was dating at the time, a black man with dread lox approached me and verbally lambasted me, he accused me of being a “traitor to my race” for being in the company of a white woman, in North America I experienced the other side of racism when a white woman actually begged me not to date her daughter, she ssaid that she “respected my intelligence” but no one in her family had “ever done that before” meaning date a black person.

There was the time in Mandeville Jamaica when a white kid thought it was polite to tell me that “down here we call you all blacks but in Benton we call them niggers”.
Then there was the white client on one of my tours in Dominica complaining in my presence about her bad experience driving in Jamaica because “the stupid niggers were always honking their horns”.

It is imperative that I try to analyze and be truthful about my experiences and how they affect me and what I aspire to be, I am happy to say that in spite of my negative experiences I have never been a racist.

Racism is a product of extreme ignorance

For me there is no colour line behind or between which I feel a need to stand, I assess people by their character and how they conduct themselves as human beings regardless of what race they belong to.
“The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens”
Bahá’u’lláh

I am a citizen of this earth and no man or woman is superior to me because of the colour of his or her skin, I do not discriminate against people because of the colour of their skin.
Unfortunately still too many people are sadly living in a mode of extreme ignorance, yes extreme ignorance because anyone who today is still a racist, is living in the mode of extreme ignorance.

It is so sad to see people still discriminating against others because of their race; they still hang on to the feculence of their prejudices and nurture them like a child they are reluctant to wean.

The recrudescence of racism in North America and some parts of Europe is indisputable evidence that some humans have retrogressed back to the days we want to erase form our active recollection. This is happening in the age of our greatest technological advancement, an age when we have the tools to break down, circumvent and rise above the chasms of our cultural, social, religious and racial differences.

The amazing repository of the human mind, from which all thoughts, ideas, scientific breakthroughs and great inventions emanate, is not controlled by or is it dependent upon the colour of the skin of the body which housed the mind.

All bodies will die; all flesh will rot and the legacy left behind by all minds, will not be identified by the colour of anyone’s skin.

For those who profess to believe in God and an afterlife, I challenge you to ask yourself “In that hour when the spirit shall relinquish the black, white, yellow, red or couloured body, what colour is that spirit that shall mingle with the ether? Will that spirit be identified before the throne of life by a colour”?

Shall not the body which bears the distinction of colour disintegrate into nothingness?

Is it not then clear that one who erects his nobility upon the colour of his skin, has given himself to the adoration of the perishable.

Alas! a thousand times alas!, would that the people of the world could understand, that the life force which dwells within the amalgamation of sinews and cells we call the body, bears no distinction of colour.

The diversity of the trees in a rainforest is astounding, yet in their differences they create a symbiosis to maintain one of the most advanced Eco systems on the earth.

Why cannot we as humans who claim to be the most advanced of all species, emulate the forest and learn to live with each other as brothers and sisters rather than to hate, discriminate against and kill each other.

“O ye children of men! The fundamental purpose animating the Faith of God and His Religion is to safeguard the interests and promote the unity of the human race, and to foster the spirit of love and fellowship amongst men…Whatsoever is raised on this foundation, the changes and chances of the world can never impair its strength, nor will the revolution of countless centuries undermine its structure”.

Bahá’u’lláh

Kenneth George Dill