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OPINION: It was the sweatshirt that left me dry.
It was used by an elderly relative, whose name I couldn’t immediately recall, on a friend’s Facebook post.
It was the words on his shirt that caught my attention. I’m a fan of a good catchphrase, and this was a beauty. I wanted it on one T-shirt, several in fact, in a significantly larger size.
“Prejudice is an emotional commitment to ignorance.” It’s a quote from Nathan Rutstein, journalist and author, who died in 2006.
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Seven words. And yet it was immediately obvious that there were many things that could be gleaned from that sentence. In general, I hate recent days’ buzzwords, there is no learning here, but unpacking is one that is growing me. It is appropriate here.
I shared it on Twitter, as you do, and quickly learned that the woman in question was American diversity educator Jane Elliott, whose work I had met before. She first conducted her famous experiment, which consists of separating white people based on eye color, “to give you an idea of how it feels to be treated unfairly on the basis of a physical characteristic over which you have no control”, the.
However, it is a good base from which to look at the components of my new favorite saying.
Appropriately, on the day he first performed his exercise with his class of third graders, he also taught them the Sioux prayer: “Oh great spirit, keep me from judging a man until he has walked a mile in his loafers.” .
It is a sentiment that we are so familiar with today, and so central to the concept of prejudice. We are talking about the noun form of the word here, defined as “a preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or actual experience.”
JOSEPH JOHNSON / THINGS
The Muslim community and the locals of Cass Bay planted bushes to beautify the area where 51 trees were planted in memory of the victims of the mosque shooting.
In other words, it could mean forming opinions, about anything, in a vacuum of knowledge. Forming an opinion based on reason or experience presupposes some relevant knowledge. So forming one without either of the two implies doing it in, of course, ignorance … the other end of the quote.
The definition implies that it could be anything about which we are forming an opinion. However, prejudice is usually about people, isn’t it?
We prejudge people based on their ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, socioeconomic status, language they speak, and more. Our lack of perception makes us susceptible to accepting the ignorant opinions of others. Because sometimes it is easier to agree with the opinions of others. The difficult mahi is learning to really understand people and what motivates them for ourselves.
I deliberately used mahi there, not to annoy people who don’t know what (work) means, although I hope the number is dropping, but because next week is Te Wiki or te Reo Māori, which most readers will recognize immediately as Maori. Language Week.
It is an important week and you will see much more of you than usual in Stuff and in our newspapers, as it should. It is not just an official language of New Zealand, it is the language of the tangata whenua. It is a taonga and should be treasured.
However, it is also a week that can bring prejudice and privilege to the surface, and if it does this this year, I’d like to think that we can use that to improve race relations, rather than entrench divisions. From Pākehā’s perspective, it would help if we understood that the emotional work falls on us.
I moved to Christchurch just as Tūranga, our new central library, was opening and generating a lot of mail. One letter, which I believe arrived on Te Wiki o te Reo Māori, spoke of difficulty understanding in te reo instructions, an understandable concern for many. However, what stuck with me was a line that spoke of the possibility of learning the language more and ending “but we don’t want to.”
Imagine turning that around, imagine Maori, who in the past were beaten for speaking their language in school, said the same about English, what would be the reaction. The bloody Soweto riots of 1976 were sparked by young black South Africans protesting against the imposition of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction. Language is also a provider of privileges.
We do not have to learn from you, but refusing to try feels a bit like a commitment to ignorance of the reality of our country.
ALDEN WILLIAMS / Stuff
Two weeks ago, the sentencing of a man whose bias led to a devastating assault on Christchurch’s Muslim community was sentenced, in a courtroom at the city’s Justice Precinct, to life in prison without parole.
Which brings me to the last element of that motto: emotion. It takes a commitment to an emotional element, something that grabs you in the gut, to defend a position that is not defensible, like racial superiority. Look for a YouTube video of Jane Elliott talking to Jimmy Fallon if you want to see a compelling description of what she calls “the myth of the righteousness of whiteness.”
Reflecting on this in my native South Africa, I wrote two years ago about “the fear, the clinging to non-existent ‘obvious’ straws, that makes some whites try to duplicate their ill-gotten historical advantages, to project themselves as superior, as supreme” . The emotional commitment is great.
But to see the clearest example of the damage that an “emotional compromise with ignorance” can do, we must look here at home in a Christchurch courtroom just two weeks ago. Prejudice kills.
