Racism

I hate racism. I'm sure the vast majority of people on earth would say that same sentence. Everyone can cite the horrors of the sin of racism and yet I am concerned that it still raises its ugly head in our modern world. Sudanese men, women and children are still today being taken as slaves. The Ku Klux Klan still survives. Political scandals are common when someone says something they think no one will hear. These are obvious and usually well publicised. My concern is for racism in subtler forms.
Racism is a mental problem. It starts in your mind. It has alot in common with gossiping. The racist and the gossip both feel inadequate. They feel it necessary to bring another person lower so that they can feel better about themselves. This may stem from hundreds or even thousands of years of repression in word or deed or it may be something you heard in the elevator this morning.
The problem is that racism is a bucket of acid. The bucket starts out with a small hole in it. It needs more racism to fill it up but the racism is the acid that makes the hole bigger. Pretty soon a person is consumed with trying to fill that bucket but it's never enough. The more a person tries to make himself feel better by putting others down the worse he feels. He may not believe it or even realize it. It also starts out very shallow. Rarely does one set out to become a racist. A small feeling of inadequecy may reveal itself with a small amount of racism.
I hear you. "Why spoil a friendly blog with such talk?" Mainly because I don't want racism to spread like the cancer that it is to me or my family or my friends. If someone is racist to me I may be tempted to be racist to someone else. It may make me feel inadequate and I may wrongly choose to bring someone else lower than me so I could feel better about myself. Then I wind up with the bucket of acid.
The age-old question is, "What do we do about it?" I'm not here to give all the answers but I have a place to start. The place to start is to do nothing. Yes, nothing. When you hear someone say something slanderous about another race or religion the worst thing you can do is to publicize it. When you read about the drunken tirade of someone putting down another group of people just remember that person has an inadequecy he is trying to compensate for and that talking about that tirade is just going to make other people feel inadequate and will fuel the bitter fire of racism. When a public figure says or does something that is racist the best way to quench that fire is not to feed it!
Again, I do not have all the answers. Not publicizing racism is not going to make it go away. If you ignore something it very well could get larger. Drastic steps may need to be taken to combat racism in the near future and if I can be a warrior in that battle I will. For now, though, I'm going to empty my bucket.