Predjudice and Bigotry - Alive and Well in Michigan

We had all thought that the prejudice and bigotry of our parents’ generation would have lessened in a major way with our own and certainly our children, but I fear that that assumption is incorrect. 

Two incidents in the past week show we still have a long way to go in fighting prejudice and bigotry. Both incidents will undoubtedly raise eyebrows, though ignorance has no bounds and to be sure the situations can not be classified in any other way. There is a major difference between having a difference of opinion on say, gay marriage or abortion and out and out bigotry, be it anti-black, homophobic or anti-Semitic. 

In 2014, there will be a fiftieth anniversary reunion for one of our local high schools and recently an early notice of it was sent out to the class members. While I won’t quote it in its entirety, a comment was made on Facebook from a class member that included the following: “they will gather at their rich Jew Country Club while I will sit in the cheap seats” and further on “let the Hebs go to their Jew Country Clubs”. Disturbing as these ignorant statements are, perhaps more disturbing is the fact that at least eleven people “liked” his statements on Facebook. 

Much as I hate to give credence to this type of bigotry by publicizing it, at the same time we have to recognize that such prejudice is still with us in the United States and worldwide, and we have a long way to go before we caneradicate it.  

The second incident is equally as disturbing, and in some ways more so, because of the circumstances that the person blames for his bigotry – it’s “the world I was brought up in” just does not cut it as an excuse in an adult, supposedly educated individual in his 50s. He said he was brought up in a different world where his family had “a black maid who got room and board and $100 a week to cook, clean and take care of the kids”. And “the  only blacks you saw on the street [of his town] were servants."  Shades of “The Help”, typical Southern thinking  in the fifties and sixties, right? Wrong! This person was brought up in a town in New England. 

Well I was brought up in a family that was considered “affluent”– the family had a duplex penthouse on 72nd Street in New York with a Chauffer, Maid and Cook. But we were brought up to respect each other, and in fact, I had never heard the term “schvarte”  - the German/Yiddish word for black, but used in a pejorative sense to refer to African Americans, until I moved to Michigan, in 1979. We were taught to respect all people regardless of race, religion or ethnicity – I guess I was brought up in a “different world” also, one where young people like Andy Goodman (who lived down the block from me) fought and died for civil rights in Mississippi; and we stood with Bella Abzug fighting for equal rights for women.

Somehow I think my world was the right one. The point is, we have come a long way but not far enough. We have a long way to go before we can honestly say we are winning the war against bigotry and prejudice, and it really is up to each of us to do our part starting with our own beliefs and language and rejecting bigotry in others, by standing up and saying so.