Prejudice and Bigotry.

Comments on the previous post, the current rows in football and the Stephen Lawrence trial have set me thinking about prejudice and bigotry generally. Particularly the reference to the comments made by Dianne Abbot. While her comment is quite true about divide and conquer as it has long been accepted that if you divide various factions the group that stays together will ultimately win following the unity is strength principal.
Prejudice and bigotry along with intolerance take many forms and most people will have suffered to a greater or lesser extent, for example remarks about someone’s weight can be just as hurtful as a remark about their race or sexuality. Equally a remark about Tourettes aimed at a political opponent may not hurt the recipient but will be offensive to sufferers and their relations. In todays world we have to be so careful about what we say and to who we say it as it may be taken the wrong way.
Racism is not the preserve of white people against black it takes many forms, apart from the N word in relation to black people we have many other derogatory terms for the French, Germans, Spanish, Portugese, Italians, Irish, Welsh, Scots, Asians and any other group who do not conform to our rigid view of ‘normal’. Equally other cultures have the same attitude to other cultures. My son lives in West Ealing and a walk along the Uxbridge Road demonstrates how one culture shuns others, there are clearly defined sections for the various national shops selling a variety of goods from their home countries. Personally my wife and I love it, a whole variety of different foods and clothes to try and enjoy. These folks also choose to live together in clusters, groups, enclaves or ghetto’s depending on your point of view.
Before anyone starts jumping up and down and starts complaining about foreigners coming here and refusing to live as we do let us look at Brits abroad, if you go to a lot of countries you will find expats living in the same area, opening shops and bars selling British goods, not bothering to learn even the basics of the language. A lot of these people have emigrated saying that the country is not ours anymore with all the foreigners living here now. They in fact are no better than those they seek to criticize.

The purpose of all this is to encourage everyone to try and live their lives in a less judgmental and more tolerant way accepting that everyone is different and that we should be tolerant and celebrate those differences rather than thinking that our narrow definition of normal is the only way.
I can do no better than paraphrase Martin Luther King who said : ‘I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character’.
‘By the content of their character.’
‘I have a dream that my children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by their race, colour, creed, religion, sexuality, illness or appearance but by the content of their character’.
It is a great shame that, nearly half a century later, people like Abbott and Cameron still seem to fail to understand this simplest of statements.