A better world

I'm currently reading "The Help" by Kathryn Stockett. I'm enjoying it enormously. It keeps setting me thinking, & remembering life in the 1960s.

The novel is set in 1960s' Mississippi, in the years of increasing unrest between the blacks & whites of that part of the United states, the time of the emerging civil rights movement. 

I've never understood  discrimination. I can't understand how one person, or section of society, can feel they have the right to be superior to another. I can see society divides itself into all sorts of categories based on all sorts of criteria - colour, nationality, class, religion, disability, education, wealth, to name but a few - but none of these criteria get away from the fact that we are all people. Within any classification there is going to be a similar proportion of good & bad, of compatible and not so.

I can understand people being nervous, fearful, of the unknown, but then surely the reaction should be to learn more about the other people, not to denigrate them. 

I will admit I once sat eating some lunch in a park near Manchester University on the outskirts of Moss Side, a notoriously dangerous black part of town, when schools broke for lunch & the park was flooded with children, all black. I did feel threatened, especially when I was taunted for my white skin. There was a sense of being overwhelmed by them in a way I don't think would have struck me if,  for example, I was visiting black Africa where I would expect to be one of the few white people there. But it doesn't alter the fact I did not feel this was the basis for hatred, rather for a need to come to some sort of understanding of one another.
 
How white people in the south of the USA could be brought up by black maids, then somehow turn round & treat them like dirt is beyond me. (The same incidentally could be said about South Africa. It's just this novel is set in America so that's where my mind is at the moment.) Equally, during the war, how black people were considered good enough to fight & die for their country, the United States, & yet not good enough to mix socially, is incomprehensible to me.


On Sunday, on BBC Radio 4, I listened to the 15 minute programme "Witness". In this programme one of the participants told the tale of the protest of four black students in Greensboro North Carolina. They sat at the lunch counter in the Woolworth's store, an all white area, asking to be served. They waited all day, & for several more days.  It was done peacefully. One of the most moving things said was when he commented that as they sat there, he was aware of an elderly white woman at the other end of the counter, looking at them strangely. He feared the worse. When she came over he expected abuse of some sort. Instead she said well done, how much she admired them for their action & she just wished something like this had been done years ago. He never forgot her. It taught him the lesson that he was as prejudiced as he'd assumed she was, & not to just to go by appearances. Since then he has always assumed people were human beings with all the same complexities that implies regardless of their superficial differences of colour, nationality, class etc. I'd been reading about this incident just the day before so it rung all the more redolently in my ear.


It's a pity mankind can not rejoice in all our variations, instead of finding causes for discrimination & prejudice. If we could maybe the world would be a better place.