Resurgent Prejudice: It Must Have Been Taught

As we sit behind our locked doors, sipping our coffee and reading our morning newspaper, yet another item about hate and racial violence jumps out at us. A young black man is accosted with racial epithets and then shot by a young white man while fishing at Playa del Rey. Our anger rises again. How can incidents like this, increasing in frequency, be avoided?

According to a recent report by the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations, there was a 17% rise in 1987 in the number of racially motivated incidents of vandalism and violence in the county. In some parts of the county the increase was far greater.

No matter how hard we try, we cannot wish away these disturbing racial incidents. Like the daily gang shootings and drug infestation permeating every neighborhood in Los Angeles, they demand our attention. We can no longer be lulled into a false sense of security, believing that “there is nothing to worry about” or that “it doesn’t affect me or my family.” There is plenty to worry about, and much that we can do.

The problem is that, between headlines, we don’t think enough about these incidents and the persistence of prejudice that lies behind them. For many of us these incidents grab our attention only when they make the newspaper--or if our own families or friends are hit by them. Let’s face it: Most middle-class Angelenos began thinking of gang violence only when Karen Toshima was killed on the streets of Westwood. There but for the grace of God, we said, could have been our own teenagers or friends or us. We must start thinking and put those thoughts into action by pressing our public officials to act.

Millions of immigrants of all races and ethnic groups have come to Southern California in the past 25 years. In many quarters prejudice against people who are visibly “different” has surfaced. Overcrowded inner-city schools, congested streets, increased foreign competitionand affirmative-action programs have added to the frustrations that many feel over the changes in “our Los Angeles.” In every generation this kind of frustration results in scapegoating. The beating death of Chinese-American Vincent Chin a few years ago comes to mind. To the unemployed Detroit auto workers he was a representative of Japanese competition that put them out of work. Racism fed by economic and social frustration needs no logic to result in tragedy.

We must insist that our institutions and public officials take note of what is occurring around us. Only a few of our public education officials are sensitive to the need to fight prejudice in our young people. Every study of prejudice and discrimination has told us that “you’ve got to be taught at 6 or 7 to hate”--to paraphrase that familiar line from the play “South Pacific.”

Social and economic conditions nurture fear and hatred of those who are different, but there is nothing inevitable about it. Fear and hatred don’t come naturally. They’re taught--by parents, classmates, television and movies. Schoolchildren communicate to each other their learned discomfort with those who are different from them--sometimes even if parents, teachers and a precious few media influences to which they are exposed attempt to teach otherwise. We’ve all seen pictures of 3- and 4-year-olds of different races hugging--and we’ve also seen the fear and even the hatred grow a few years after that. Elementary school is where it starts, and elementary school is where it must be fought.

Only the Los Angeles Unified School District and five other districts have seen this as a priority. Six districts of the 83 school districts in the county. These districts are supporting programs to help elementary school children understand and appreciate racial, religious and other differences among themselves. More funds are necessary to teach far more children that it’s all right to be different.

When children learn to feel better about who they are, they can also learn and understand who and what others are. With so many influences contributing to the growth of prejudice in our children, should we then be so surprised when teen-agers in white, middle-class suburbia become racist skinheads? Should we be astonished when our children (of all colors) grow up to be young people full of bigotry? Or when some resort to violence to act out their racial hatred?

Clearly, not enough dollars are being spent by the public or private sector to make possible programs that have a meaningful effect on more than a tiny minority of our children. If we are to mitigate hate crimes like the one that occurred close to home in middle-class Playa del Rey, we cannot tolerate this resurgence of prejudice. And we must deal with it when that prejudice is being formed--in childhood.