I grew up in a religion-saturated, racist, homophobic family. Being submerged in the environment, I began to take on the beliefs of my family, although a faint glimmer lurked within that something wasn’t right with having so much hatred bottled up inside. This doubt was so faint and obscure, however, that I never questioned it. I idolized my parents; they could do no wrong. I wanted to be just like them when I “grew up.” It wasn’t until much later that I realized, in some ways, it is my parents who have never quite “grown up.”
Ignorance is a cruel thing. Discrimination is not a game either side can win, but, unfortunately, it is all too often passed on in families, like inheriting your father’s prominent nose or your mother’s weak chin. But unlike chromosomes, hatred doesn’t have to be forever ingrained in our genetic identities.
Growing up, I remember the biracial couple who moved in several houses down from ours or rather, as my father called them, “the oreos down the street.” He claimed that the neighborhood was surely going to hell in a handbasket because “once you let one in, they’ll soon take over,” fearing his house value would soon decline. I recall the time my grandmother made my brother get out of the hotel pool when a few African-American kids jumped in, claiming there’d be “oil slicks” in the water. Or the time my mother became irate because I was walking with a black friend when she came to pick me up from school, hissing that I had embarrassed her by consorting with “that black boy.”
The elders in my family had a stereotype for every kind of person, it seemed. For the longest time, I equated homosexuals with pedophiles, for we were taught at church that “sodomites” were sinners who were going to burn in hell. If someone was cheap or thrifty, they were a “Jew.” Women who fought for equal opportunities were “feminazis” and “dykes.” Guys who were interested in fine arts were “fags.” The “Mexicans” were a lot of illegal immigrants who multiplied like rabbits, draining the government of needed tax dollars. The solution to Cincinnati’s soaring crime rates? Easy, my dad claimed, “just cage all the blacks in and let em’ kill each other.”
As I grew older and moved away from my surroundings, I began to see the world without the oppressive blinders of hatred on. I started college, first at NKU for three years and now at RWC for the past year. College opened up an entirely new world for me, one I had never encountered before. The more diverse friends I made and the wider scope of people I met, the more I learned of others’ beliefs, leading into a class lesson on tolerance and acceptance. I soon stopped equating people as being “black,” or “gay,” or “different” and began to think of them as Paul, or Ryan, or Amanda. People who had always been spoken about so abstractly in my family became real to me as I began to see the actual person behind the stereotype, finding that they didn’t add up to the visions of my parents.
We are all more similar than some of us care to admit. We all eat and sleep, and most of us are not independently wealthy and must work to survive. We all crave companionship, we worry and obsess over problems, we have strengths, and we have weaknesses. We hold many of the same fears of disease, war, and death. We love and we laugh; we cry and we suffer. In short, we are all human.
As a society, we’ve come a long way in our collective evolution of cultural diversity, but we’re not at the finish line yet. It isn’t until we all realize that each other, regardless of race, color, creed, gender, body size, location or class, is all we have on this rock in space we call home that we will be able to transcend the hatred that still lingers amongst us so prevalently. It is by focusing on our similarities, rather than our differences and finding that common ground we all share that this wave of change can be realized. We all have to be the first domino to fall, thereby sparking a wave of global change.
Hatred is self-destructive, I have found. It is a parasite that eats away at you, festering in mind and heart, until it eventually devours the host. It is only by letting go of this malice towards others that we can hope for balance and well-being in our own lives.
There are no perfect grades in this class on tolerance, no acing the test or graduating with a 4.0. I find that lessons instilled since childhood still surface to the top, but like bubbles in water, they can be popped with an educated consciousness that they are wrong. Acceptance of others doesn’t always shine through for me, but I try to recognize it and transform it. In the end, that’s all that we really can do.
Helen Keller once said, “The highest result of education is tolerance.” I agree. I went to college to learn but, paradoxically, it is what I unlearned that I consider to be the crowning accomplishment of my education.