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Prejudice is Taught

When I was 15 years old, one of my female friends asked me what my parents would do if I ever brought home a black boy. I didn’t understand what she was really asking. I thought she was implying that my parents might think I’m too young to be dating, so I told her that they were okay with me dating.

She repeated her question, emphasizing the end of her sentence. I still didn’t get it. I asked her how old the boy was. She told me it didn’t matter, she was just wanting to know what my parents would do if I brought home a black boyfriend.

Well now, she was changing the question, now she was talking about an actual boyfriend, not just bringing a boy home. I finally knew how to answer the question. I told her that if I were to bring a boyfriend home to meet my parents, they would greet him at the door, shake his hand, and probably offer him a Coke.

She shook her head at me, disgusted that I was refusing to take her question seriously. She asked again, in the volume that is reserved for the elderly, those who speak a foreign language, small children, or people who are mentally retarded. Now I was starting to think she was crazy. I said they’d invite him in and probably ask him about his grades and whether or not he had a job and where he was thinking of going to college.

At that point, she gave up on me, as I was obviously too stupid to answer her question.
It would not be until six years later that I actually understood what she was asking me.

You see, my parents didn’t raise me to be prejudiced about anyone based on their skin color or ethnicity. At 15 years of age, I wasn’t stupid. I was an “A” student, but I seriously did not understand the question my friend was asking.

I continued to not understand it for another several years because my parents never made a single comment if I dated someone who was from a different background. In fact, my mom even got one boy’s phone number for me when I was too shy to ask. He was black. Obviously, that didn’t matter, not to me and not to my parents.

It was not until I attended the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, that I came to understand what my girlfriend was asking me so many years prior. That’s because people began calling me a “Yankee.” I thought it was kinda funny that they would use that term, but I really didn’t think much more about it. Not until it kept happening. Then I noticed that “Yankee” wasn’t necessarily a harmless, descriptive term. It slowly sunk in that it was an unflattering title. How weird. That was actually the first experience I had with discrimination of that sort and it floored me.

A fellow student, a black young woman, recalled having been spit on as a child and I could not believe it. She was my age. Certainly those things were not still going on, but, of course, they were, I just hadn’t witnessed it.

The thing is, prejudice and bigotry must be taught. Kids don’t just learn it on their own. If you don’t teach them, they won’t dream it up by themselves. Be very careful about what you say in front of children regarding people of different races, ethnic backgrounds, about people with various handicapping conditions, of certain religious beliefs, or of a given economic status. Without the careless words of adults, kids don’t just become prejudiced. They accept people for who they are and will continue to do so for as long as they are not taught negative stereotypes.

Posted on August 15, 2005