Lucy Tobias

I went to work a few years back at a mid-size newspaper. Like most reporters, I’m a newspaper junkie, reading it every day. Have to, just to keep up. I noticed the editors, not the cop reporter, wrote up any late night murders or mayhem. Having been a cop reporter for four years, and then gave that up for environmental reporting, I wondered why.

Turns out the cop reporter refused to give his home phone to any editor. That was amazing to me. If I’d done that, I would have been fired. Night calls are part of the cop beat. But then, I’m a white woman, very low on the totem pole. He was African-American, very high on the diversity totem pole.

To this day I think letting that happened made us all smaller, every one of us, and our journalism profession. No one won that one. We all lost. The reporter lost integrity by not doing his job, even if he did go on to a better-paying job at a bigger paper. Management lost credibility by bending criteria to fit a diversity profile. The rest of us were reminded, quite forcibly, that the playing field is not level.

And you know what? We could have been dead wrong. There could have been good reasons why he didn’t give out his phone number.

I’d forgotten that incident, because life goes on and you don’t want to carry that kind of frustration around. It is too heavy. Then I went to see “Crash” recently.

Have you seen the movie “Crash”? It is relentless. One of the best films I’ve seen in a long time. Ebert gave it four stars and he NEVER gives four stars. Well, hardly ever.

“Crash” works as a title. Several different story lines crash into each other. Cars crash into each other too. There are wrecks everywhere. The common thread uniting the wrecks is prejudice. Lots of prejudice. The prejudices crash into each other and the fallout is spellbinding, scary and real.

It is not a movie. At least it doesn’t seem that way. It is real life. They are us. Their days are our days, like a black police detective whose mother uses drugs. He hides this fact from his white girlfriend. Or a white couple walking back after an evening out tries to get in their SUV and is thrown out. The car is stolen by two black youths.

The couple immediately wants the locks changed at home. Wouldn’t you?
A locksmith comes to do the deed in the middle of the night and the wife rails that she wants the locks changed again the next day because the locksmith has tattoos on his body and she thinks he’s a gang member. The locksmith puts the keys on the table and then goes home to his wife and little girl. The look he gives her on the way out speaks volumes.

There’s an invisibility cloak involved in the story too, but I won’t give that part away except to say there are times when an invisibility cloak would be wonderful. But so far, finding one has eluded me.

I walked out of the film stunned by the way each drop of prejudice was like a stone thrown into a pond. It had ripple effects that changed lives bigtime. And are we immune? Does it just happen on film? Heck no. “Crash” won’t let you off the hook. You know they are talking about things very close to home. Prejudice is like acid etching away solid metal – it is corrosive and we all have it, whether we learned it at home or find it along life’s way.

Prejudice happens because we don’t know each other, or even ourselves – our heritage, someone else’s heritage, and someone else’s dreams. If you don’t know yourself, or the persons around you, what’s to respect?

In that story about the cop reporter, I don’t know why he wouldn’t give out his phone number because I never asked. Maybe he had good reasons. I just seethed and assumed it was a race thing.

Prejudice grows by assumption. The word “assume” breaks down into making an “ass” out of “u” and “me”. And that’s how prejudice grows. We assume we know what the person next to us is going to do because of what? The clothes they wear, their hairstyle, tattoos, language? The words “you don’t know me” resonate here. Any teenager knows that to be true.

Finally, prejudice grows through silence. It is not enough to not laugh at a racial joke. Step up and say something. Silence condones agreement. It means the joke teller is a bully who can get away with belittling other people.

There’s a nifty little booklet called “101 Ways to Combat Prejudice” and it is free. You can download it at the Anti-Defamation League’s Web site. ADL and Barnes & Noble put together the pamphlet in 2000, following a rash of high school shootings. It is part of a campaign called “Close the book on hate”.In addition to ways to stop hate, there is an extensive reading list.

On the back page of the pamphlet is a pledge. It starts with these words:
“I pledge from this day onward to do my best to interrupt prejudice and to stop those who, because of hate, would hurt, harass or violate the civil right of anyone.”
Amen.

See “Crash” and sign the pledge. Dignity towards one another will save us. And we need saving. Prejudice is growing. We are deep troubled waters. We all know what water can do. It can turn into a tsunami.

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for further reference : www.adl.org has “101 Ways to Combat Prejudice.