"Sh! Prejudice Is Listening"
Author's Note
Delivered in Rockvile, MD, my pre-Wilmington home.
In Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Shylock, though cast in the role a villain, forever reminds us that Jews and Christians are alike as members of the human race. What he says can be extended to all human beings, for we are all members of one humanity.
I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?
I would guess that the majority of the citizens of Rockville would say they believe in religious toleration and brotherhood. However, the problem of religious prejudice still exists in America and in Rockville. Anti-Semitism exists. It is not as obvious as racial prejudice, but it exists. Both are fed by culture patterns that are clearly recognized as morally wrong. Both are fed by insidious emotions and attachments to grotesque stereotypes.
Religious discrimination is bad enough, but today I am concerned with what is even more pressing: racial discrimination. Children have to be taught racial prejudice, and they begin to learn it early. By the age of three, children are conscious of differences in skin color, and by five or six, children have begun to accept the social definition of themselves. There's a book that discusses the root cause of hate and fear in children towards members of other races, when and how it develops, the harm it does to all, and some practical suggestions as to what can be done about the problem. Something must be done about it both in children and adults, not only for moral reasons but for practical ones. The name of the book is Prejudice and Your Child by Kenneth Clark, Associate Professor of Psychology at the City College of New York. It is worth reading as we think of raising our children in this important time of change in their lives. It is also helpful in pointing out not only the harm of racial segregation and discrimination, but also the absurdity of it.
Judge William Dozier, in a case awarding damages to an American Negro who was refused service in a barber shop, stated this quite clearly: the absurdity of racial prejudice.
Racial discrimination is … unfair, not based on any provable scientific basis or differences in mentality or character, destructive of our national productive capacity and injurious to our influence in world affairs. Ironically, discrimination is also absurd, for every American is in a minority status in some aspect of his color, appearance, nationality, speech, occupation, religion, associations, memberships, or beliefs, and thus subject to the same intolerance he feels and exhibits toward other minorities. Scientists affirm that racial discrimination and segregation injure the hater as well as the hated. Segregation and other forms of overt discrimination provide public approval and reinforcement of private prejudices. Just as prejudice stimulates discrimination, discrimination stimulates prejudice.
Judge Dozier, in that last sentence, points out the vicious circle we find ourselves in where communities or groups foster prejudice by drawing color lines, these acts of discrimination breeding more and more prejudice.
And the prejudices are maintained even to the faces of those whose achievements stand out far above the average. Isn’t it just a little ridiculous that some white people of average intellectual attainments feel that they are justified in behaving in a condescending or patronizing manner toward outstanding intellectual leaders of other races?
This brings up a quarrel I have with the word tolerance. I believe in tolerance. It is a Unitarian principle; that is, Unitarians cherish an attitude of tolerance which is willing and happy to accept varying points of view, differences in religious beliefs, the attitude that encourages all to live and let live.
But tolerance does not mean that Unitarians are wishy-washy. It does not mean that they are tolerant of intolerance. It does not mean that they should tolerate harmful practices, bigotry, or racial prejudice. What is more, who wants to be simply tolerated? None of us! If others disagree with us, we would like to know it. If they feel superior to us, let their superiority show in deeds that ennoble, that raise the sights of humanity. The one who is really superior intellectually will be above defending his competence by running someone else down. None of us likes to be merely permitted to hang around – tolerated – and thought of as an odd duck.
If others disagree with us or we with them, let us say so and tell why. As I see it, there is no place in the Unitarian principle of tolerance for condescension or snobbery. We should speak out against tolerant action and for equal rights. There has been progress in this, and many Unitarians have had a hand in that progress. If that progress is to continue, then we and all who are for it must continue to speak and work for it.
Some people ask, “Why don’t the churches speak out?” We remember that the church is the people. We as church people must speak out, and we are, to a considerable extent. Take the question of fair housing, for instance. Look at the response of Unitarians and others in last Thursday’s Montgomery County Sentinel to the attack made upon us for our part in sponsoring and participating in meetings on open occupancy housing. The clippings are posted on the bulletin board at the rear of this room for those who have not seen them.
Look at the Unitarian church members and ministers who have taken a clear public stand on racial issues on the side of decency and democracy, not only churches in Washington and Maryland and in the northern states, but churches in Richmond and Norfolk and Atlanta and Jacksonville. Unitarian churches all over the country have spoken clearly without pulling their punches. Unitarians have a long history of speaking out and acting on what they think is right. We have been attacked before, but have grown in strength of purpose and dedication to the natural rights of man.
Unitarians were among the leading abolitionists before the Civil War. Theodore Parker, a Unitarian minister who had been ridiculed, called an atheist and an infidel because his view of God was a natural one, because he rejected the miracles of Jesus as proof of the validity of the ethics of Jesus, because he said those ethics were part of the natural universe and would be true even if it could be proved that Jesus had never existed. This Unitarian minister, Theodore Parker, spoke and worked for abolition because it was right, because he felt it as a demand laid up him by his god, nature’s god. In 1851 he addressed the Boston ministers:
O my brothers, I am not afraid of men, I can offend them. I care nothing for their hate, or their esteem. I am not very careful of my reputation. But I should not dare to violate the eternal law of God. You have called me “infidel.” Surely I differ widely enough from you in my theology. But there is one thing I cannot fail to trust; that is the infinite God, Father of the white man, Father also of the white man’s slave. I should not dare violate His laws; come what may come; should you?
We would not use Parker’s language today. Our theology is in many respects different from his, I am sure, but there is no misunderstanding about where he stood. Last Sunday night at our Rockville meeting on Unitarian history I mentioned a comparison of Theodore Parker and Ralph Waldo Emerson. I think it bears repeating here. Both Emerson and Parker removed idols, but their methods were different. It is said that the poetic and inspiring Emerson could take an idol down and do it so beautifully that it appeared as an act of worship, while Parker used a double barreled shotgun to shoot the idols down.
As individuals we may be temperamentally inclined to act in different ways about idols or social justice. But I think there is something in the conscience of the kind of person who becomes a Unitarian that will cause him to act for brotherhood, not matter how small or large his contribution may be. It is everybody’s problem.
A Unitarian minister in Atlanta, Georgia, Edward A. Cahill, a Director of the Department of World Churches of the American Unitarian Association, wrote an article for the May-June issue of Unity magazine called “The Sin of Moderation.” In this article he quotes Ghandi:
Sometimes in the night this truth awakens me – that of all the sins, the most unforgivable is the sin of weak decency, the sin of cowardice of the righteous, the sin of the just man silent in the presence of injustice.
Unitarians, I think, find this appealing. We want to be decent, but not decent weaklings. We want to move wisely through the use of reason and intelligence; but the use of reason does not imply that we stand still or follow an ostrich policy with regard to prejudice, racial or otherwise. Always some will say the time isn’t ripe. Of course it isn’t. The time is never ripe if we decide that we are too small or insignificant to speak or act.
There are restaurants in our area, right in Rockville for that matter, that refuse to serve people because of race. I had many purchases at one of those restaurants before I knew of its policies. I have not been back to that restaurant since I learned of its policy of discrimination, and I will not go back until they serve all people.
One of our members called to my attention a sermon delivered by the late Dr. A. Powell Davies in which he said he would not dine in any restaurant which practiced racial discrimination. And while Dr. Davies pointed out that we as Unitarians do not tell others what to do, he invited all to join him in withholding support of eating places which continue to put prejudice into such blatant practice.
I couldn’t agree with Dr. Davies’ sentiments more heartily. I happen to know that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is acting calmly and wisely in cases of discrimination in Montgomery County. They are in touch with the attorney for one of the restaurant chains, a branch of which has refused service to Negroes in Rockville. There are people who accuse the N.A.A.C.P. of being an extremist organization. I disagree with that, and not just because a Unitarian minister, John Haynes Holmes, minister emeritus of the Community Church of New York, was one of the founders of the N.A.A.C.P.
I agree with Mr. Cahill of Atlanta that the N.A.A.C.P. is doing a good work. He reminds us of the length of time since the Emancipation and the very slow progress towards equality. In view of that, it seems to me that any extremism of the N.A.A.C.P. has been one of extreme moderation and non-violence. They have acted non-violently and have worked through the courts to make their gains. What other way is there for a minority to act? In a democracy where minority rights are respected in theory, the N.A.A.C.P. has acted legally, with patience, and with non-violent persuasion to make democratic theory a reality.
Countless are the barriers to free and equal rights. They even extend to amusement parks. I have been told of one such park near at hand in Maryland where Negroes are refused entrance.
Again, the poetry of Langston Hughes, whom you have heard me quote before, speaks to us with a burning poignancy. He is a soft-spoken man, but what he says gets to you. It goes all the way to the center if you are sensitive to injustice. One of the poems I have heard Mr. Hughes read is called Merry Go Round.
Where is the Jim Crow section
On this Merry Go Round,
Mister, cause I want to ride.
Down South where I come from
White and colored
Can’t sit side by side
Down south on the train
Down south on the train
There’s a Jim Crow car.
On the bus we’re put in the back…
But there ain’t no back
To a Merry Go Round:
Where’s the horse
For the kid that’s Black?
It may seem presumptuous of me to read Mr. Hughes’ poems. He has lived them, felt them, and put them down for us to see. But I have felt them, too. I think we all have. Every time we have had our feelings hurt, every time we have been rejected through no fault of our own, every time we have tried so very hard to get someone to understand but they have turned away in contempt, every time we have looked for fair play but have been greeted with deviousness or haughty disrespect, every time someone has tried to make us feel a little less than human; we have felt what Mr. Hughes is talking about.
And suppose you met with this kind of thing nearly every day. But do not think that minority groups – whether they be Negroes or national minorities, Jews, or Unitarians – do not think that they want pity. No. They – we – want fairness, equal opportunity, the right to choose as freely as any other American.
We can do our part to lessen prejudice and work for its final demise. Our contribution may be small, but it can be felt:
- We can leave restaurants that discriminate racially, and we can let managers know why.
- We can refuse to attend theaters which discriminate on the basis of race.
- We can refuse to use insulting names of any group. Every time we refuse to go along with such hateful words or register disapproval when they are repeated, we make a mark for a better community.
- We can request a policy of non-discrimination where we spend our money. Some firms discriminate because they think it pleases us. We can be sure that they know it doesn’t.
- We can extend a cordial welcome to any racial or cultural group, in our church and in our neighborhood.
- Some of us do and more will wish to support the work of such organizations as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
- Some of us do and more will wish to be active in supporting open occupancy housing.
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All of us can exercise common decency and humanity with all peoples, recognizing a man as a man.
We can act in dozens of ways to cut the roots of prejudice. Some may feel strange, being sensitive to those things at first. They may wonder, “Well, what are my motives here? Am I really so interested in the welfare of the other fellows?”
But such doubts need not stop us. How else do we learn to act for what is right than to simply start acting that way? That’s the way we build fairness into character. All too often those who are on the unpopular side of an issue, even if they are convinced that they are right, have the feeling that they are all alone, or almost so. They feel that they have very little support. But this isn’t true. There are many who would support us if we make the move. There are many who support us already. They want to share in this kind of personal faith, a faith that is acted upon.
Oh, we will meet with opposition as we did from the pen of a guest newspaper columnist. And when it comes, we will meet it forthrightly as we did in that case. Such causes as ours were never easily won, but Unitarians have long been identified with the national dream of equality. May we always continue to be identified with the religious dream of brotherhood.
