1
I like to believe I have fought through most, even all, of the prejudices I’ve held in the past. However, prejudice can be like a virus that keeps adapting and renewing itself.
2
Ignorant of Ireland’s history, I arrived in America from England at the age of thirteen with a generic anti-Irish prejudice. I say “generic” because I was unaware of having known any Irish people. I assume I picked up my bias from signals sent by television stereotypes and casual comments overheard.
English sentiment against the Irish would deepen after I left with the advent of the Troubles, Bloody Sunday and the IRA bombings during the late sixties and beyond. However, on visits to England in recent years, I haven’t detected that prejudice. Indeed, one childhood friend married an Irishman and another regularly visits friends in Ireland. In my case, it was friendships with descendants of Irish immigrants here in New York that changed my attitude. I’ve since had to come to terms with the brutal way that the English historically treated Ireland.
The year 1847 is on my mind after reading Something in the Blood, David J. Skal’s biography of the Irish author of Dracula, Bram Stoker. Few windows into historical events have more impact than biographies of those who lived through them. 1847 was the year of Stoker’s birth, in the depth of Ireland’s potato famine.
The potato crop had been destroyed by a fungus called Phytophthora, brought over from North America, cruelly ironic considering that the famine drove so many Irish in that direction. The potato itself was an American vegetable unknown in Ireland and Europe just two and a half centuries before.
I found it hard to believe that so much of Ireland relied on a single crop. In fact, the colonial government set aside Ireland’s grain production for shipment to England, a policy backed up by soldiers guarding the granaries from the Irish people. All this as the famine endured year after year.
In light of this history, I marvel at times that people from Ireland and their descendants are willing to be friends of mine. Proud as I am of my English heritage, I could imagine them hating the English as much as Jews might hate Germans for what the Nazis did eight decades ago.
Having adopted the United States as my home, I’ve had similar moments of wonder about African-Americans making their peace with a white person like me.
Had I been around in the American South in 1847, I would have lived side-by-side with slavery. Is it even possible I would have been a slave holder? A harsh master? Either way, I worry I would have absorbed the terrible myth of African-Americans as an inferior, not-quite-human race that needed to be governed by their white self-proclaimed superiors.
Even if I’d had a sense of African-Americans as human beings, deserving of the Declaration of Independence’s promise that all are created equal, what capability would I have had to ameliorate their conditions? Suppose I’d inherited slaves but somehow overcome prevailing social attitudes, I could have freed them: a significant, investment-sacrificing act but, history shows, not a society-changing one. I could have gone further by making public my opposition to slavery, thus risking my safety but without any clear goal. One person’s protest accomplished little, if anything, and might even have backfired.
Might I have been courageous? Morally or physically?
Such dilemmas, about how we might have conducted ourselves in a long-ago society, lead to speculation tainted by our sense of ourselves today and our idealized notions of who we’d like to be. All I know for certain is that it would take armies, four years of war and a million deaths to banish slavery from America, and even then the exploitation wasn’t done.
4
The pressures to see other people we’ve never met as less than human can be intense. War provides an easy example.
Early in our friendship, a Turkish immigrant complained about Britain’s occupation of Istanbul in 1918, right after what was then called the Great War. He’s such a considerate and kind man that I can’t conceive of ever wanting to do him any harm, or him me, but in that war, had we met fitness requirements, we would have been antagonists. We might have found ourselves on opposing sides at Gallipoli, that 1915 catastrophe for British commonwealth soldiers, a battle the Ottomans won near the start of a war that they’d go on to lose.
Of course, I’d have known nothing about him, nor he me, except that we wore different uniforms and were each out to defend ourselves by killing the other. Perhaps I would have projected a life for this enemy soldier that resembles his present-day story: a teacher, a man who cared about his students, a loving husband and father, a man who thought critically about the government in Istanbul. He might have gone through a similar process on facing me across that demarcation line. Yet there we would have been, in the midst of battle, shooting at each other. We might even have found ourselves in hand-to-hand combat. Had either of us refused to fight, we would have been subjected to court martial and probably executed.
5
These reflections bring up questions of identity and the accidents of birth. Who am I? Would I have been different if I’d been alive in 1847 or 1915? How about if I’d been born in America or Ireland rather than Britain?
The answer is, of course, yes, I would have been very different. But there remains my sense of myself as a distinct consciousness that survives time and circumstance. Call it “soul”—the soul that Hinduism says is reincarnated, returning as a despised insect, a sacred cow or a new human being.
Back in 1847, my soul might not have been housed in a white person. I might, instead, have been the child of African slaves, hence a slave myself. Reincarnation or no, there’s nothing inevitable about my belonging to the white race. We don’t get to choose our parents or the setting into which we’re born.
6
When we look back, an era’s prejudices seem preserved like insects in amber. Its scurrying, uncertain lives eventually become fixed like those insects in a tree’s hardening resin. Time and place prescribe the scope of what we can do, say and even think. Eventually, we in this era will also look like amber-trapped insects.
The notion of tree resin hardening into amber came to mind as I read a New York Times article about an instructor at Georgetown Law School caught on video commenting privately, or what she thought was privately, about her students to a colleague:
I hate to say this. I end up having this angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are Blacks — happens almost every semester. And it’s like, ‘Oh, come on.’ You know? You get some really good ones. But there are also usually some that are just plain at the bottom. It drives me crazy.
I see no reason to interpret this quotation as other than a dedicated teacher stating facts and expressing frustration. She isn’t saying all African-Americans are stupid; in her experience, some perform well. She isn’t even saying the poor performers are stupid. It’s entirely possible she has a good idea of the disadvantages they may well have faced. Rather than dismiss or condemn them, she seems frustrated that a whole category of student has come in consistently last. She does obviously believe in the grading system, and one might argue that this system has inherent biases, but to have faith in it is hardly a sign of prejudice. Likewise, lamenting poor performance isn’t evidence of bias.
However, for those quoted words, the instructor simultaneously resigned and was fired. In her resignation letter, she wrote: “Regardless of my intent, I have done irreparable harm and I am truly sorry for this.” The sentence reads like a confession at a communist Chinese reeducation camp. She may well have felt sincere as she wrote, but it’s at odds with her earlier, forthright expression of frustration.
From that same article, I learned that at Georgetown, to be disciplined doesn’t require words. The colleague to whom she spoke was placed on leave. Why? For failing to voice disagreement.
The good news behind this story is that institutions are bent on eradicating racial prejudice. The bad news is that they do so by forcing speech to be artificial. Rather than discourage prejudice, the atmosphere prevailing at universities and elsewhere redirects our prejudices against ourselves. It means we never really address our individual biases because we’re so afraid of speaking up and exposing ourselves to ridicule.
7
We can no more discern how time and place circumscribe us than those who lived in past times could see it in their world. Just as people in past centuries were incapable of contemplating a world without a monarch, sultan or similar tyrant, we are almost certainly missing something that will be plain to future generations. It’s only when the insect is trapped in amber that we can view the entire picture, with its beauty, its scariness and its boundaries.
Still, our society’s current battle lines do give us clues about how our world will be viewed in times to come. The theme of our age might lie over there by the windfarm, or in some biotech lab, or far-off in outer space awaiting Jeff Bezos’s and Elon Musk’s rocket passengers. Or just maybe, we’ll say farewell to tribal divisions.
As the radical improvement toward acceptance in social attitudes during recent decades toward gays demonstrates, having colleagues and neighbors who puncture our prejudices is what brings about change. It’s happening all across America. It may well explain why those who wish things to stay the same have become so loud and, as the January 6 assault on the Capitol demonstrated, violent. Tribalism can seem worse than ever, but a phenomenon’s peak can signal its end.
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