Thoughts About Prejudice and Discrimination

     I was rewatching an episode of "Poirot" tonight. It's one of my favorite series to watch and rewatch. It was produced by ITV starring David Suchet in his most iconic role as the titular detective, and dramatizes all of Agatha Christie's original Hercule Poirot stories very, very well. You can find them on YouTube if you know where to look. This episode was called "The Dumb Witness," referring to the witness of an attempted murder who couldn't speak because he was a dog, a fox terrier to be precise.
     In this episode there is a character who is a doctor who happens to be Greek. That is, he is not only of Greek ethnic origin, but is from that country. And because he is "foreign" to the rest of the people around him in pre-World War II England, he is treated with suspicion and even referred to as "a foreign devil." He is not the first "foreign" character in this series to be treated this way. Poirot himself who is Belgian and speaks with a heavy French accent, peppering his sentences with French words and phrases, is also frequently treated with disdain by many of the English folks he encounters and has to get the truth from in order to do his job as a private detective.
     What stuck out to me about this is that this is clearly a prejudicial attitude among her fellow English folk with which Agatha Christie was familiar. One group of Europeans was not only prejudicial but discriminatory against another group of Europeans for no other reason than their ethnic and cultural backgrounds. It is reminiscent also of the prejudicial attitudes which the Irish and Italians encountered when they migrated to the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Consider that for a moment. There was a serious suspicion and distrust among the English, not because someone had a different physical appearance from them per se, but because they were from a different cultural background. The English felt themselves better than the Greeks, and those of Anglo-Saxon descent in the United States felt themselves better than those of Irish or Italian descent (or Jewish for that matter).
     Where we're at in the United States in the 21st century, it's kind of hard to imagine one white person discriminating against another. We tend to discriminate based on color of skin, first language spoken, whether someone has Eastern or Western facial features and so on. But there are so many people of mixed European descent in the U.S. now that it's hard to fathom being prejudiced against someone because their ancestors were Irish, Italian, Greek, or even Eastern European. Yet, at one time this was normal and accepted even if it wasn't kind or gracious. We tend to lump everyone with light colored skin and Occidental features into the catagory of "White" and leave it at that as though we were all some homogeneous group and always had been.
     Most of my ancestry is from Britain, either from England or Scotland. A DNA test several years ago confirmed that. But I do have just a bit of Cherokee in me as well. It's not a lot. 1/16th in fact, having come from a great great grandmother whose last name was "Bear" as far as I've been able to research. It's enough though to have given me near black hair when i was younger, a Cherokee eye shape and cheekbone structure, and a complexion which can get darker than most "white" folks with enough sun; all things I couldn't have inherited from my very British ancestry. I am 15/16ths of European descent. 15/16ths "white." The vast majority of my DNA is in fact Anglo-Saxon and Celtic. I am so "white" in fact that the current Cherokee nation wouldn't even dream of admitting me into its rolls as a member. I am simply not Cherokee enough.
     But all of my "white" ancestry wouldn't have mattered one whit in the 1800s. The only thing President Andrew Jackson and the U.S. army would have seen was a man with 1/16th Cherokee ancestry, and that would be enough for them to confiscate any property I had and force me and my children to walk from the Cherokee ancestral lands to Oklahoma. Aptly called the "Trail of Tears" thousands of people died on that march.
     Ironic. The current Cherokee tribal government will only see a "white" man. Whereas at one time, all that "white" men would see was a Cherokee. The former President of the United States encountered a similar phenomenon. His mother was "white" while his father was from Kenya. For many "black" people in the U.S. He was too "white." For many "white" people in the U.S. all they saw was a "black" man.
     What do I make of all of this? Honestly, the first thought which comes to my mind is that prejudice has nothing to do with the person who is being discriminated against, and everything to do with the prejudiced person. It has nothing to do with ethnic background, color, cultural origin, disability, religion, or anything else someone might use as an excuse to exclude another and treat them poorly. It is simply the choice to see someone as different, and because they are different, somehow they are lesser than the observer and can be misused and abused with impunity. "They are different, so therefore they don't really have any rights like I do. They are different, so it doesn't matter if I treat them like animals. They are different, so they aren't really 'human' like me."
     There's an Isaac Asimov story with Elijah Bailey and Daneel Olivaw where Elijah lands on a planet and encounters a security robot. This robot immediately treats him as a threat, and tries to harm him in spite of the three laws programming which says that it can't allow a human being to be harmed. What is learned is that the owner of the robot programmed it to only recognize those who spoke with the accent of the planet as "human" and thus protected by the three laws. Anyone else wasn't human at all. Another thing which comes to mind is certain tribal people which I have heard about that don't recognize anyone outside of their socio-cultural group, those that speak their language, act and look like them, as people, or human. They may not be animals, but they're not human according to them. It really wouldn't surprise me to learn that this kind of thinking goes back to when "modern humans" shared the earth with other hominids like Neanderthals, Homos Erectus, and so on. It didn't matter that we were all descended from a common ancestor. They were different, and that was enough to make them somehow threatening, inferior, or "bad."
     Prejudice and discrimination like this, as I think about it, stems from our common human malfunction to categorize what we like or agree with as "good" and what we don't like or don't agree with as "bad." We then attempt to hoard what we see as "good" and attempt to push away or destroy what we see as "bad." Apparently, this includes other human beings who are simply different from us. In this respect, it is just as much a product of our malfunctioning human mind as theft, rape, overeating, and other vices and offenses which are produced by it.
     Jesus Himself is clearly of Middle Eastern descent, a pure blooded Israeli Sabra. In how many churches which profess to follow or worship Him would He be looked on with suspicion because of His non-European ethnicity and culture? Were He to walk in the doors with regular street clothes, would He be given side glances and whispers because He might resemble "those Middle Eastern Terrorists" they'd seen on T.V.? Because He is different from them would His mere presence be offensive to them? I mean, after all, He's a Middle Eastern Jew!
     Prejudice doesn't care about color, language, belief, or ethnic background. Prejudice just cares that the other person is different in some way and uses that as an excuse to abuse and take whatever it wants from him or her. It has nothing to do with and has no place with a disciple of Jesus Christ.