It has taken me 50 years to understand this quote. I was never raised to be racist. My parents always taught us that everybody was the same. At times I struggled with this concept when I saw the crime rate in the black community. In our news sources, it always seemed that a story about a murder would give a south St Pete address. Over the years I have worked with and became friends with many different people of different cultures and races and couldn’t relate what I saw in the news with what I experienced in my personal life. I have had a number of black supervisors and co-workers at different jobs and they were not any different than me. I get racially prejudiced feelings when I see riots, rapes, robberies, assaults and murders committed by blacks and yet I then think about the blacks that I know personally and they don’t fit in with the stereotype in the media. Could it be that it is a coincidence that the black people that I know, work with and interact with just happen to be the same as me and different from the rest of their race.? I don’t think so. This is where Martin Luther King Jr’s quote comes in. I believe I was judging people by the color of their skin with my own personal exceptions. If I knew you, I did not judge you. Everybody else was a criminal until I met them and they magically transformed into a respected friend or colleague. This is where the problem is. Blacks and whites don’t know each other. We don’t communicate, interact or understand except out of necessity. Both races are equally guilty of stereotyping each other. When something happens like Martin/Zimmerman everybody takes sides. It’s us vs. them. If a black kills a black, nobody gets upset. If a white kills a white, same thing. If a black kills a white, it’s all racial and the stereotype gets reinforced. If a white kills a black it’s all racial and the stereotype gets reinforced. If both blacks and whites would just give each other the benefit of the doubt and try to not judge one another but look at the content of their character instead of the color of their skin only then will we make progress as a human race.
Posted on: Tue, 30 Jul 2013 21:15:40 +0000
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