​HAND-ME-DOWN HATRED

 ​Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
I don’t want your hand-me-down hatred.   Starlette Thomas
 
I ought to know better than to try to expand on Starlette Thomas’s take on anything.  She has one of those gifted minds that can find the nugget of insight in any situation and offer it up in an unforgettable way.
 
Take this notion of “hand-me-down hatred.”  I have nothing against hand-me downs in general – we have dishes, pots and pans, furniture, artwork, and a few pieces of jewelry that are entirely serviceable or carry with them sweet and lasting memories. Every one of our kids drove hand-me-down cars.  And there isn’t an article of kids’ clothing that doesn’t have a travel itinerary. Reuse and recycle are tactics to address rampant consumerism.
 
But hand-me-down hatred? This is not some riff on the Guess Who from 50 years ago. It is a recognition that without focused critiques of how we think – individually and as a society – the parts of our lives that lead to undesirable outcomes continue to come out undesirably.
 
I have written before of how hard it is to recognize the embedded prejudices that seem innocuous to those of us who hold them.  A friend of mine once told me of driving along Georgia Avenue in Washington, DC, just past Howard University, one of the premier historically Black universities.  He was a White liberal pastor, active in civil rights causes and purposeful about relationships with people of all kinds.  A car filled with black teenagers pulled up next to him at a traffic light, and the kid in the front passenger seat motioned to him to roll down his window.  He was terrified, he said, and began imagining the headlines in the newspaper the next day.  Reluctantly, he cracked the window.  “Pardon me,” said the kid, “would you have any Grey Poupon?”  The carload dissolved into hysterics and drove away. 
 
Where did that fear come from, he wanted to know.  The attack he imagined in his moment of surprise and serendipity was outside of any experience he ever had.  It was statistically beyond unlikely.  And he was quite certain that if the car had been filled with White kids his reaction would have been very different.
 
The incident happened many years ago, long before the terms “systemic racism” and “White privilege” entered common usage.  But just because they did not have names that were modern terms of art does not mean that he had not inherited a visceral reaction to young men of color, despite his conscious intentions.
 
It is certainly racism, but not only racism.  Ethnic identity, religion, economic status, body type, sexual orientation and gender identity – all of these and more resonate in particular ways that defy the best opinions that good people have about themselves.  It is easy to be critical of people who are overtly prejudiced against others unlike themselves.  But once we have done that, we have to ask the question about how it is that such biases are allowed to continue.
 
I do not have the answer, but I do have an answer.  We live in a society that has greased the chute that delivers the predispositions of one generation to the next.  Is it intentional?  I think no person of conscience wants to believe that the disdain of one human being for others is the life’s purpose of the prejudiced.
 
But my pastor friend was nonetheless filled with all the predisposition he needed to consider a group of goofy kids to be malicious rather than happy.  How many news broadcasts and front-page stories had to highlight race (or any of the other aforementioned characteristics) before autonomic bias becomes resident?  All his earnest and faithful hard work to rise above the undesirable inclinations of his own heart were not sufficient to resist the hand-me-down hatred that reinforced unspoken but unmistakable mechanisms that keep it alive.
 
You are looking to me for a suggestion about how to dismantle our hand-me-down hatred of other races, other identities, other people.  Would that I had it.  All I know is that it is not something that can be accomplished alone. 

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