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Richard Smith
Charlotte, thank you for sharing what is obviously a personal and potentially hurtful experience. Short of doing my family laundry in public, I too experienced a profound shock upon learning about prejudice in my own family. I was born in Salt Lake City, in a house a stone throw east of the Coachman restaurant on State and 1300 South. My mother, a devout Mormon; was too prejudiced. Her mother, my grandmother, with her mother, my great grandmother, had left Denmark in the dead of night to come to America after being converted by Mormon missionaries. My great grandfather and another daughter learned the next morning of my great grandmother's decision. I'm not sure why but they ended up in Preston, Idaho.
My mother, after a divorce because her husband wandered with more than his eyes, met and became attracted to what my grandmother said was a man who was too good looking to be allowed to live and that he could sell "shi#" to a farmer. I have no idea what possessed my mother but my father was a polygamist and although his first wife said no way, and divorced him, my mother became his 3rd wife. It didn't last long and when I was 2 1/2 years old my mother "got out".
It was during, what was to become the State of Utah's last polygamist witch hunt, and although too young to remember a lot of it, we lived minute to minute always waiting for the "warning" phone call to come. When it did, and it came several times during my young life, the bags were always packed and ready to go to avoid the Sheriff. The Mormon church which had made a secret agreement with the State of Utah to pay for the additional costs related to tracking down and arresting the polygamist father's throughout Utah, but found that all it really accomplished was to break up families, and send the state's welfare costs over the top. Although my mother never took a dime from state coffers, nor did the other "sisterwives", the State of Utah and the Mormon church decimated thousands of families. Today there are over 30,000 polygamists in Utah.
One time we found ourselves in Albuquerque, New Mexico, another time in Porcatello, Idaho. Pretty tough on school schedules for my older 2 sisters and a brother. My dad spent a couple years in prison along with many other polygamists.
The reason for the long story is because regardless of what life threw at my mother, she took it head first and single handedly raise 5 kids. She scrubbed other people's floors, and rented out 3 of the 4 bedrooms in our home, one of them her own (she slept on the couch and kept her clothes in a box behind the couch) to disabled military men. My mother, even after being excommunicated from the Mormon church, and then having to fight the church to allow me and my younger brother to be baptised, she remained faithful and dedicated to the Mormon church. Inspite of what I consider to be an incredible difficult road to travel, we always had food for every meal and a safe, and dry place to sleep, my mother was prejudice. I think this is what's called "white privilege" today.
How do you explain being prejudiced? I had no clue that my mother felt the way she did toward other races until I was in my 40's and her in her 80's. One time we were at Chuck A Rama, and as a large female waitress walked by, talking about how much her feet hurt, I was shocked to hear my mother say, "well, if you would miss a meal or two, they wouldn't hurt as much!" Wow, I really didn't know how to feel, that was just one of her prejudices.
My mother had been raised on a farm in Idaho, her and her husband's wedding gift was a small piece of land and enough gunny sacks that, after filled with dirt, became the foundation for their first home. Her dad didn't believe a woman needed an education so the 6th grade was the highest grade she completed in school.
I've learned in recent years that both my older sisters and older brother also carry prejudices but my younger brother and I don't, that I'm consciously aware, of but I'm still young.
I think being prejudiced can come from being discriminated against and/or seeing it demonstrated by a peer or someone significant in your life. I probably don't handle it well because I don't want to be around my older brother, whom I love very much, because his attitude towards others, simply because of race, is sickening. There are good, bad and contrary people in every race, religion, in both the seen and unseen worlds, but except for the suit we wear, everyone of us comes from the same spirit or intelligence source. Incidently, that spirit or intelligence doesn't need your acceptance or recognition to be.
There is a cure for it and I totally agree with Jim that if you dwell with or in it then it will consume and define you, but if you accept that we are all independantly, at different levels of understanding and that it is an individual problem, not an ethnic or other group problem, by forgiving and loving it will naturally go away.
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