Dear Chilliwops,
Some events, or series of events, can shape who you are without you even realizing it.
When I was a little kid my pop was a big man. He wasn’t just a big man physically but he was big in what he did to help others. I remember there were at least two Italian families in my town that didn’t speak good English and consequently encountered all sorts of difficulties. One such difficulty was the ugly face of racism.
In the post-war period, including the 1950s and 1960s when I was a kid many people came to Australia from southern Europe. Italians faced the same sort of racism being experienced by Asian families and other new Australian arrivals today. Boat people or refugees for example.
Italian, Polish and Greek families frequently visited our home when I was a kid. They sought help from my pop because they had nowhere else to go, nobody else they could turn to. Needless to say, my pop was there to help these families. I witnessed his empathy for them. He wasn’t a community leader, a politician, a minister of religion or hold any similar position. He simply had the reputation of someone who would speak up for justice and speak up about man’s inhumanity towards man.
I remember too how my pop organized a team of people to build accommodation for homeless aboriginal families in our country town. Without even realizing it these examples of helping disadvantaged families, many of whom were the subject of racist attacks was shaping my attitude towards racism. Today I am so proud to think back on the good my pop did without seeking recognition. For him it was just the right thing to do. He lived with a clean conscience.
As a young man one of the best documentaries I saw (and indeed have ever seen to this day) was a series on commercial television called “King”. It was a black and white documentary about Martin Luther King Junior. I was really moved by the passion of this man and his commitment to ending racism in the United States of America.
“Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away at its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true,” said Martin Luther King Jr.
If you see acts of racism please stand up for the person who is being vilified, for if you don’t you are accepting that unwarranted vilification. I know you don’t want that so let them know that you do not accept racist attitudes, comments or acts. Tell them you will stand by them. If you have the slightest doubt about this and think the racist may have a point, put yourself in the shoes of the person under attack. Imagine what it would be like to be constantly the subject of verbal abuse or racist attacks. The abuser, the racist, is an ignorant person. The hatred within them eats at their soul. They are consumed by a sickness.
There is simply no logic to a racist’s behaviour. It is unintelligent.
When I was a teenager I read a book entitled “Black Like Me.” It was written by the journalist and novelist John Howard Griffin and was published in November 1961. It is a story of how, with the aid of a dermatologist he had darkened his skin and then visited cities in the south of the United States of which he had intimate knowledge. It was at the time of racial segregation.
Griffin was asking the question, “What is it like to experience discrimination based on skin colour, something over which one has no control?” He believed that no white person could truly understand what it was like to be black.
He wrote of the unwarranted hatred he experienced even though he had not changed, he was the same person. Only the colour of his skin had changed. It is a graphic description of what it is like to be different and to be subjected to racist abuse.
“Nothing can describe the withering horror [of the hatred] ….. you feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity of it terrifies you,” he wrote.
Griffin was deeply saddened that fellow human beings “could give the hate stare, could shrivel men’s souls, could deprive humans of rights…”
I recommend you read the book.
We are all born and live under the same sun; we all have the same emotions; we all deserve to be treated with the same respect and dignity no matter what the colour of our skin, our cultural or religious background.
As Martin Luther King once said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” By this – “the content of their character” – he probably meant how they will treat others, whether they will adopt good human values, whether they will demonstrate kindness to others (perhaps random acts of kindness), and whether they will treat everyone as equals.
People who express racism, condone racist comments and actions or sit idly by and tolerate that behaviour without doing anything about it damage themselves. They carry bitterness within, bitterness that will eat at them. They don’t recognise beauty and nor will they truly experience inner peace.
I cannot express it better than Martin Luther King and so I conclude my letter with his words. “I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.”
Love always,
Your Popple.
*Anton Clever is well into his seventh decade … a former teacher, soldier, farm hand, lawyer and businessman (not in that order). He has travelled extensively for business and for international clients. More recently he has started writing … currently a thriller (which will probably not be worthy of publication, he says) and has written but not published a series of “postcards” from various places (specifically, Victoria, Papua New Guinea, France, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Iran) referring to experiences in those places. He has also written for several magazines on unusual subjects but matters worthy of debate.
