I strongly believe racism is learned behavior. It is therefore up to parents to take great care what they say around their children.
A little school bus driver event to explicate this claim.
Two years ago I had a group of siblings that had not ridden school buses before. Their very first day the youngest said to me as he stepped up from the last step: "You're a racist".
Now, perhaps you can imagine the kind of challenge I would have with that child from that day forward. I maintained my composure with him always but never succeeded in gaining his respect much less his sustained attention. Sitting down with him trying to engage in simple conversation was always disrupted either by his own angst or by the distractions of others nearby.
Hard as you may try you are no match for the indoctrinating impressions that preceded you. All you can do in such a case is to remain an exemplary compassionate adult. Kindness and even coming to their defense is the best you can do.
The same can be said of parents and adults of all races and cultures. So until parents learn to stop propagating the hate through language in the presence of their children, and adults learn to restrain their biases, anger and hatred these once innocent offspring will carry that germ of violence into adulthood.
An example of unproductive thinking:
"Gangs exist because the American family is broken. The family is broken because corrupt government is in league with corporate growth destroyed family financial stability. Corrupt government exists because voters stopped vetting. Voters "dropped the ball on democracy" because of materialistic desires. Desires are prioritized because of suffering. Sufferers are vulnerable to vices. Vices are promulgated by pharmaceutical, alcohol and tobacco manufacturers. Drugs and alcohol finish off the rest of the family. Lack of a family creates a need for a surrogate sense of belonging to a family—like gangs."
A little simplistic maybe?
To follow through with this example of circuitous thinking I give you this thought:
We most often fail to find solutions because we don't know where to start the conversation—and most often we want it immediately! And our cognition of it all fails from where learning language and empathy begins—in childhood, not in adulthood.
So we must start the transformation with the raising of children, ALL children. From there it should be obvious that the priority of a society is to take what peaceful measures it can to reform all the agencies that are barriers to this end. ALL families then must have livable incomes and access to equal educational opportunities for their children if we are to have any hope of a peace-loving society.
Only then, in other words, can adult language even begin—one day—to suffice to solve the other critical problems, such as how to recognize logical fallacies and assert viable paths to beneficial results in domestic life or in industries requiring extensive specialized vocabularies or the myriad language barriers of international diplomacy.
Nurturing critical language and thinking is absolutely paramount and must start consistantly from the birth of a child.
Now, following through with that mandate, as many of you know several years ago our US government attempted to fix our educational inadequacies (to address a nation's prowess!) with what they called No Child Left Behind, and quickly there after, sensing a failure again, attempted to transform the entire nation all at once for all k-12 grades with a teacher weighted agenda called Common Core. This in effect disrupted the flow for all students past 1st grade with revised lessons which ultimately penalized teachers for a disparity created by this transformation of testing into a teacher performance review program.
Any such overhaul of lessons should have focused on student learning and should have begun gradually with kindergarten then next year with first grade then next year with second grade and so forth so that there would be a continuity established of a step by step progression of the lessons from kindergarten to graduation 12 years later. Education is foremost about about individual self- esteem, then like the building of a campfire, will eventually allow new families to withstand the larger forces that would otherwise jeopardize a nation's guiding light. The reputation is a mere perk.
Anyway, your families with young children presumably have a good chance to initiate some degree of hope for a better future America if you in the least can keep your conversations civil and exemplify eventual resolutions of conflict. If we have to start somewhere it might as well be at the universal beginning.
And now I am going to show you how visual thinking and language use are critically intertwined. In fact, so critical is explicit language use that death can ensue without it.
You may have seen the viral video of a police officer killing a pest control employee in the hallway of a hotel. To the officer's credit he believed the guy may be armed. Yet this is a perfect example of a lack of visual thinking and communication-skills on his part.
First he instructs the guy to lie flat on the ground with his fingers linked on his head and his feet crossed; then he instructs him to put his hands stretched out in front of him; then he instructs him to rise to his knees with his hands up (at this point the guy's feet uncross and the officer once again gets angry and reminds him he will shoot him if he makes another mistake); then he instructs the guy to crawl to him at which point the confused guy goes down to hands and knees to "crawl" and gets shot immediately multiple times!
So, certainly because he's threatened to shoot the guy if he makes a mistake it behooves the officer to be explicit in his commands. Yet, instead of saying "with your hands still above you shuffle toward me on your knees only."—for, anyone hearing the word crawl would think "hands and knees"—he says "crawl." This is both a failure of visual thinking and language use and proves it can have lethal results if one is incompetent at it... and this is just one example of why I harp on about visual thinking and descriptive vocabularies as being so very fundamental to a thorough education.
So what does all this have to do with racism? Well, it should occur to you that if at last we have managed to address the economic barriers to stable conversant families and equal educational opportunities for all children (with an especial focus on critical thinking as in visual thinking and descriptive vocabulary usage) then how prevalent might fear be if ALL our children can experience intelligent conversation and enjoy the full benefits that an open mind and sociability can bring?!
(the video is very disturbing!)
