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Racism a Waste of Effort – Beauty Really is in the Eye of the
Beholder
I hate racism. Nothing but bad comes from it. Nothing noble has ever emerged from those who submit to its evil.
Some of my compatriots I use to hang with are still prisoners to the clutches of racism.
One of them has spent his whole life hating “niggers”!
I bet that most of you cringe when you see the word expressed so
raw. I hate the word. I hate hearing it… I even hated writing
this foul atrocity.
But the sad and horrific fact is, my former compatriot simply hates “niggers”.
However, before you judge him too harshly, let us examine why he hates them.
One reason is that his parents are racists. I could not but wonder why this was. I
thought that perhaps some member of their family had been harmed
by the race of people they so eagerly hate.
I was desperate to find out what transgressions had been done to
my friend and his family.
On further inquiry, to my amazement, no one in the family has been directly hurt in anyway from people of African-American descent.
I had foolishly thought that in the city of Chicago, from where they
originally hale, they had faced adversity from the race that
they vilify. The fact is, they have never been robbed, beaten, raped or humiliated from this group of people.
Why then do they feel such hatred for a group of people that have never harmed them?
The father could tell you a few isolated incidents as a young man getting into physical scuffles with men or boys from this much maligned people; but from what I gathered he had to physically defend himself more often from people of his own race.
Both father and son like to bring dramatic stories showcased in
the news about people of this race committing heinous crimes. I
would argue with them till the cows came home, pointing out that people of all races or ethnic groups were more prone to crime and violence if they suffered poverty and deprivation.
Their feelings of distaste for this group of people was so singular that even the thought of a exemplary man from this race dating a white girl would put them in a fit of apoplexy.
When I tried to take them to task by asking them how anyone of any race could be a better choice for a woman; they would stumble and mumble their concern for the potential hardship for a mixed race couple.
Ironically, my
former compatriot is now a grandfather and his granddaughter is finishing up in her last years of college. She is brilliant as well as beautiful and she has been blessed with falling in love. She has fallen for a handsome, intelligent, articulate well-educated young man with aspirations to medical school. He is polite, compassionate, moral and most of all; he madly in love and devoted to her.
The problem for my former buddy is, in his mind her new
love interest is a “nigger”.
My former mate is against the relationship and although he has not said anything to her…
however, she knows well the bigotry the runs deep in his psyche and it hurts her to the bone.
So she has distanced herself from
his illogical hatred.
True to his nature, he refuses to acknowledge that possibly there are exceptions to be made; or perhaps
that the hatred which he is so invested in, is causing an
unnecessary rift between him and his granddaughter.
Is his bigotry hardwired in him from years of imprinting that all blacks are bad or at best should be kept at arms length?
Was he simply too helpless to ignore such conditioning?
I am not convinced.
My own father and many of my relatives are also racists. In fact, with the exception of my mother, most of them
are very suspicious of other races.
My Dad, had no sound reasons for his prejudice and to this day he holds on to his bigotry as strongly as my former childhood friend.
Many of my Italian relatives like to use words like nigger, kike, slope, Mick, Jew Bastard,
chink, Moolenan or Moolie. All of those words and the tone that they were used always made me cringed when I was a kid growing up.
When my parents divorced, we moved to North Carolina to be closer to my mother’s relatives.
It was there that my one of my uncles and his wife and the kids at my school use to view all
Eyetalians as “niggers”. Even at that age the irony did not escape me, nor did the hurt. My uncle like to point out the finer points of racism; it was my father who was a “nigger”, my mother was the
“nigger” lover, and we were dismissed as mulattoes.
Evidently, all of these people are invested in their hatred.
It is all a waste.
The sad fact is, if individuals can not or will not expunge such
illogical hatred from their psyche... it is unlikely that they
can truly expect people in other countries from waging wars that
could be prevented, or expect terrorism to disappear; these are
after all also acts of illogical hatred.
If you have time, check out the two articles I posted regarding what I believe to be a vision from holy people.
These two stories happen when I was entering boot camp and if you go to the link Marine Corp Boot Camp, you can read an incident that has profoundly had impact on my life in a good way.
Years Later, I experienced a mystical opening with my former lover.
It was an eye opener to be sure…regarding beauty and racism.
Beauty Really is in the Eye of the Beholder
It seems like centuries since I was in love. On rare occasions I can travel back into time to
the state of grace I was fortunate enough to experience…if not for the briefest of times.
I met a woman through a mutual friend of ours and I was
instantly drawn to her the way raindrops have an affinity for
each other. She was young – seventeen years my junior – and she
was beautiful. Neither of those were the reasons that I fell so
hard for her. I have been with women of extraordinary beauty and
intelligence more than a few times in my life, and many of them quite a few years younger than
me. In fact, two other of these fine and remarkable women were
also considered prospects for becoming my life mate and yet I
had not fallen for them like I had for the woman I am now
thinking of.
It wasn’t because she was a fantastic lover. I have been with women as gifted…none better, but as gifted.
No, our attraction was beyond normal understanding and awareness. It was magical.
With her my normal ego boundaries expanded, became unlimited and permeable.
I felt as if I was tapped into her energy fields, and sometimes merged with her psyche.
Whenever we walked side-by-side, I could feel our energies merge into a sphere that was exclusively ours. If by chance we were walking and a person, dog, or tree happened to come between us, I sometimes felt a slight diminishment of the
ecstatic tendrils of energy and at those instances I hated the offending object or person that had dared to allow whatever fate to split our merged energies however brief
of time it may have been.
There were those rare instances when giving her a massage that I would feel her energy bouncing off my hand in the injured small of her back startling both of us in the process.
Even when we often made love…and I mean often, (sigh)… it was if our nervous systems would merge. I would become she and she would become me until it was just the we of one. On occasion I would be her seeing, feeling and saying simultaneously
everything with her as if we were engaged in a Vulcan mind meld.
When she hurt, I hurt. When she laughed, so did I. When she brimmed over with love, my universe was complete.
This is how we were before our fall from grace.
Before the fall however, early in our relationship, we went to a beautiful tropical country for two weeks. We were like young head-over-heels
in love newlyweds visiting the Mayan ruins in mutual wonderment and canoeing the rivers in search of something other than papaya to eat…such as iguana. We even had a little fright with Killer Bees and fun with manatees.
Finally, the
honeymoon was over and during our journey back to the States…back to the mundane,
(although whenever or wherever I was with her nothing was
mundane), we found ourselves in some exotic airport in between flights.
The love of my life was staring at a rather large black man. He was tall, big boned and built like a refrigerator. His face was very broad and his nose as well. He was so black that he was almost indigo.
She murmured to me, “My God Vinny. Would you look at him? He is beautiful.”
I am not a jealous man by nature, and although her statement did not fill me with resentment, I was in fact perplexed. You see, I also suffer from the sin of prejudice.
I don’t mean racial prejudice, but, I have a discriminatory taste in what I think is beautiful or handsome and what is not…or even course.
My ideal of a handsome black man is the actor Sidney Poiter, Denzel Washinton, or the bodybuilder Serge Nubret…and dozens of other handsome black men that would have satisfied my narrow band of appreciation.
I saw that her eyes became even more luminous and my love for her compelled me to reach for both of her hands with both of mine; while she continued to admire who I felt to be a very course looking black man.
Suddenly…I felt our nervous systems merge and even though my face was facing away from the object of her admiration, I was able to see him with her eyes; with her filters. It was at that instant that I did indeed see how beautiful he was. Not in a sexual way…at least not for me, but in a way that an artists appreciates a wonderful model.
In an instant…all the way to the cellular level, I was grateful for this gift of sight that had somehow been bestowed upon me.
Just as suddenly, I was looking back at my love from my own eyes, my smile threatening to split my face. I nodded my head in affirmation, “I see, I said.
My love expanding all the more…causing me to choke with joy.
This entire experienced reminded me of the two dreams I had
right about the time I joined the Marines.
It was then that I felt that I was transported to faraway places
to meet a holy man and then a holy woman.
It was they who tried to share with me that race and ethnicity
is an illusion and that we are all the same....all God!
To check out those experiences, CLICK HERE
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