I suspect it’s nearly certain that if you grow up a straight white male, you’ll be exposed to a lot of prejudice. Some of it probably rubs off. One needs to think clearly so as to act properly.

Author’s Note:

I’ve done my best here. If I’ve missed the mark, or somehow offended, please let me know and I’ll try to fix it.

I am old, almost certainly older than you, dear reader, and probably by a wide margin. And yet, I expect that you may recognize similar influences in your life to the ones I’ll describe here. To set the calendar, it was near the end of my first year in high school that the Supreme Court ruled that schools must be integrated. I am quite sure that no people of color attended the same schools that I did, up through high school. Our family had no black friends, no brown friends. I hope that your own experience isn’t quite that pale.

I recall absolutely no prejudiced remarks from my parents, none at all. I do recall that my grandmother, when I was about ten, I’d guess, called for a railroad porter by calling “Boy!”. Even at that age, I recall feeling that that was wrong, though I don’t recall what was behind that feeling. My grandmother was Jewish, though non-practicing, and I think now that she should have known better, but I’m sure that “boy” was a common form of address to a black person in her time of growing up.

Children learn all the name-calling words quite early on. While still in grade school, I heard the N-word. It was obviously meant as something negative, not just a valueless description. I heard “faggot”, and “spic”. Again those terms were obviously negative even in the mouths of the Italian kids, while “Sicilian”, emphasis on the “an”, was a good word.

I was in the high school band, at a Catholic high school. The drum majorettes wore long pants, that’s how Catholic we were. The marching cadence was the standard ba-rump-bump-bump, ba-rump-bump-bump, cadence 101. Down on the other side of town, the Fraternal order of Eagles supported a drum and bugle corp of all black kids, and they had a parade, and pretty much everyone went.

At the next band practice, our drummers had their snare drums slung way low and the cadence was more bada-bada-boom-bah, boom-bah-boom-bah, bada-bada-boom-bah-bah! The band director put an immediate stop to that, I can tell you. None of that up on our side of town.

But in my life, at least, all the prejudice was very subliminal. Oh, sure, you heard it from some people, but even as a youngster I found those people kind of crass and repugnant. At my family’s level, it wasn’t even “Not Our Kind, Dear”. But we knew, somehow we knew.

Most of you are a generation past mine, maybe even two, and I am sure that your experience is different. You may even have been taught explicitly that “they” are just like “us”. And yet … and yet … I see that the same prejudices are out there today, so I would bet that you, too, took on a lot of subliminal messages.

Those messages sink into us and become part of our gut reactions to things. Even the great Jesse Jackson is quoted as saying:

There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start to think about robbery then look around and see it’s somebody white and feel relieved.

The things we see and hear repeatedly sink into us. They are very difficult to expunge.

There is some good news in my life.

First, in my younger years, I was very inclined toward scientific thinking and the power of reason. I read voraciously, including masses of speculative fiction. Somehow, out of that, I came to hold, rationally, that all people, indeed all life forms, had a sort of common rightness. I learned something like a sort of “logical empathy”, thinking that everyone was kind of like me and that they could be “figured out” and understood.

This was quite probably mistaken, but it did lead me to a very solid belief that all people must surely have the same rights and deserve the same benefits. And, as a professional wimp at that time, I felt a bit downtrodden myself, so it was probably easy to understand how someone in those other groups could be even more downtrodden than I was.

Somewhere along there, my brother came out as gay. There was no hassle, nothing negative given to him from our parents or his brothers. Zero. But there were many family discussions of the issues that then came with being gay. He had to keep it quiet for a long time, and would surely have lost his job had it become known. That was obviously and manifestly unfair: he was just exactly the same person before and after he let us know.

One of the most striking things he said about it was that when he was as young as nine or ten, he knew that he was different. Before he even knew what it meant, he knew he was different. Very clearly, despite what the church and others might tell us, being gay was not a choice that he made.

Somehow, as I have aged—and aged and aged—I have become more empathetic. I think that most likely I was always highly sensitive to the feelings of others, and that I more or less consciously closed myself off to receiving those feelings, in large part due to a bit of bullying that I experienced in grade school. But whatever the reason, while I’m certainly no expert, and while it’s true that under stress I am likely to lose a sense of what the other person is feeling, when I’m “at peace”, I feel that I can kind of “get inside” how another person is feeling.

I’m not saying I’m good at it. I’m saying I’m better.

Where am I now? This image, as extended by clinical psychologist David Murphy, tells you where I am:

inclusion

Every person in the world, without regard to color, nationality, origin, religion, gender, orientation, without regard to any measure someone might define to divide us, deserves full inclusion in the good things of life, and full protection against the bad things.

Every single person deserves full inclusion.

We are, of course, far from that situation today. We need to keep pushing toward the right-hand side of that picture. We need to push back against the current combination of oligarchy, fascism, and idiocracy that has risen up, and to move toward the right.

“They” are just like “us”. And “we” are just like “them”. We all deserve the good things, we all deserve protection against the bad things.

Make it so.