Resolve to open your eyes to prejudice against minorities

Beginning a new year comes with it time to reflect on the past year, and the many documented incidents of how white Americans treat those unlike themselves. It is a topic brought to mind as I was listening to NPR’s “On the Media” story, “The Worst Thing We’ve Ever Done.”

We have seen that in the way we treat families seeking asylum and the scandalous treatment of families and children at the U.S.-Mexico border. The news media continues to share more realities that immigrants face when seeking asylum.

Treatment of those different from us — all of them pilgrim-looking people — is not new.

The NPR listed examples of how non-white people have been treated from the attempted genocide of Native Americans, slavery; and the continued oppression of African Americans after slavery with lynchings and other forms of terror to maintain the historical inequality.

As a nation, our treatment of nonwhites, that legacy of inequality, continues. Such bias and discrimination is not as obvious as slavery, nor has it been remedied by the adoption of civil rights. Such treatment surfaces because it is hidden in our unconscious and comes out in ways that we, whites, don’t even recognize. They are hidden biases and prejudices we all have.

It continues in the mass incarceration of African-Americans; just your reaction to that last sentence is worth reflecting on.

Bryan Stevenson, who created the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, spoke to Brooke Gladstone in the NPR interview and said that as a nation, we have not shown shame for those terrible events and have not made efforts at recovery, reconciliation and healing.

What efforts have you made as an individual to recognize this historical and continued inequality?

Those who are not white are well aware of the continued discrimination. Just ask the young African-American man removed from a Portland, Ore., hotel Dec. 22 while making a cell call to his mother in its lobby. While he had checked into the hotel, a white security guard told him he was trespassing. Police were called, and the African-American man was escorted out.

Like so many other incidents documented in cell phone videos, such innocent victims were going about their daily lives. It is sad that we have to witness such evidence to have our eyes opened to what minorities keep telling us. It is hard for a white person, like myself, to “get it” since such treatment is so out of the realm of our experience.

There are ways for us to become more aware: Speak to minorities and ask about their experiences; and become aware of your own biases and prejudices.

“Racial Sobriety” by Clarence E. Williams Jr. offers a variety of resources. “Waking Up White” by Debbie Irving is another book that will help you become self-aware and appreciative of what minorities experience. It explores her journey to understand her privileged life. Each chapter ends with questions for your own reflection.

We profess that we all are created in God’s image and likeness. Yet that is not how we treat one another. What is your faith without love for each of God’s creations? Nothing but a noisy gong!

Make a resolution for 2019 to live with your eyes wide open — open to the pain we, as individuals and as a nation, have caused those different than us.

What will you and we, as a nation, do in this year to promote equality, recovery, reconciliation and healing?

Sister Denise LaRock is a Daughter of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, serves on the Interfaith Welcome Coalition’s leadership team and coordinates IWCs bus station outreach.