(#5166) It is not natural to be racist

      All evidence to the contrary, innocence is natural not racism. When we first start out in life all of life is a wonderment. Nothing about racism, or also for that matter misogyny, is fearful or negative. We inculcate our young toward racist attributes. We even learn our lessons wrong from our own experiences. I had been done in by both paradigms through peer pressure and ignorant understandings. But I rose above such nonsense since neither has the blessing of logic. As a logical human being, I am able to categorize my knowledge into either camp of truth or fallacy. Even when emotion is in the mix.
     As to racism, as a child I was shielded from other races for various reasons, none of which I could control. But as I got older and more able to control my movements and decisions, I found that people of color are no different than me and in many cases were socially better than me. Because I didn't start from a racist attitude, I started with an innocence that gave everyone the chance to show themselves to me first before any relegation to a predetermined judgement. As I learned to be a better human being from my interracial relations, I could easily see that racism is a man made phenomenon and not a natural occurring event. We have to choose to become racist not actually become one through some physical/biological metamorphosis.
     Being afraid of what we don't understand is natural, but not moving past that fear is a choice that too many make because they don't know how or even want to try. But not moving past fear is a symptom of ignorance and failure. Our experiences too often help us to form our early prejudices whether valid or not but our experiences are from the moment not from an overall perspective. Our little worlds are not the know all of everything. They are just a moment in time where the emotion and pent up anger of being discounted as human beings takes form. Once we see the bigger picture our ability to analyze our experiences with a wider scope allows us to see the logic of human understanding from all perspectives. As such we can conclude that racism is not based upon any fact, instead it is based upon our own failure to hold ourselves to account to be better human beings.