I hate racial prejudice in all its forms. Maybe, in other blogs, I’ll go into that further. For now, I need to re-tell something I did the other day that drove home to me again that no matter how much I am repelled by that disease, I, too, suffer from it’s deeply seated roots.
I was having breakfast on a Tuesday with my wife at a local bagel place. I usually only go there only on weekends to get bagels and bring them home. On weekends, I always see the store staffed by a set of twins. I would estimate them to be in their mid-twenties. They are white (for that, I did not have to estimate). I always assumed twins ran the place.
At breakfast, they weren’t there. Maybe it was too early for them, I thought. But, it was mid-morning, not the crack of dawn. If you know my wife and I, you would know that it would never have been the crack of dawn. It was actually around the same time I get the bagels on the weekends. The only folks who were there were a couple of women. They were not white.
I was about to ask one of the women where the owners were. That’s when it hit me. Why would I assume the white guys were the owners and the non-white women weren’t? It might even make more sense for the owners to avoid working on the weekend. I stopped myself and didn’t ask anything and I still don’t know who the owner is.
My first instinct was racist. But, was it? In our racist nation, maybe it isn’t so unreasonable for me to assume what I did. Sadly, isn’t it more likely that the whites are the supervisors?
But, that doesn’t excuse me. My natural inclination to assume the racist scenario is one more anecdotal piece of evidence that racism, as much as we want to eradicate it, will continue to be tough a stain that won’t scrub very easily. Hopefully, when it raises it’s horrific head, we can, as my wife congratulated me for doing, recognize it and stuff it up our asses.
We were right 