Racism is a religion and or dogma of hate wrapped in a bubble of fear.
Misogyny is a religion and or dogma of hate wrapped in a bubble of fear.
Homophobia is a religion and or dogma of hate wrapped in a bubble of fear.
Etc.
Ran in to two old faces on FB from decades ago, definitely not BFFs today, those two meet with me in past time with me as the connecting factor of the two. They each called me a friend but in the end they were not friends to me because they were more like people that thought I was like them. The only thing we really had in common was my being white. And while they disconnected over the years they look like they have connected again in old age.
The thing is that they thought I was a fool or stupid to be a good team player in my job at a bank because I was willing to be a good team player where there were blacks on my team.
Up to that point, I thought they were okay as acquaintances. I have been leery since of anyone since who say they are my friends. etc.
The thing is that these people raised in an envelope of white privilege and relative middle class northern comfort were so literally rabid when it came to being racist in their what I saw as unfounded fear of all black people without knowing the person but only the race.
And these people were raised in the North, not the South. Where did their fear of Nat Turner come from? I was aware as a child of my people, family and a distant fear of race, the colored moving in and ruining a neighborhood. I never heard of a fear of the Coloreds stealing jobs. There was plenty of work back then. Which supports my own theory that no family really becomes dysfunctional until the primary bread winner loses a job. etc.
That parts of North Philly were the first to go bad economically starting in the 1890s when one of the first waves of African-Americans migrated north to get away from the institutionalization of hate in the Jim Crow Laws of the South, followed by another wave in WWI to follow jobs and WWII etc. They were no different than the original Europeans who settled on this continent to escape religious prosecution in Europe.
That one Christian Church in Philly by the demographic change in neighborhood at the turn of the twentieth century even wrote into the covenant of the church property that it could not be sold to a "colored congregation" when that congregation surrendered the deed to the local mother church authority, so angry at the unfairness of some citizens trying to achieve the American Dream embodied in the phrase "the pursuit of happiness". This when it abandoned its digs in North Philly.
Another thing I have become aware of in recent studies that the backbone of American Vaudeville Theater for a hundred years from the 1840s to the 1940s was Minstrel Music and Blackface "comedy" by white men in black grease paint was to display African-Americans as stupid, lazy and dishonest.
Like commercials non-stop in every Vaudeville performance. A hate tax and or hate reinforcement ad nauseam.
That the bubble surrounding the core hate are always fears. Pick up the likes and dislikes of the crowd and feed on them and sell more snake oil to that crowd. So aptly demonstrated by the Neo-Nazi/GOP party presently.
That hate is traditionally described as the opposite of love which may be true. Hate too can be misunderstanding. That the fear, the bubble makes us safe in our own little corner of the universe.
That at the core the hate is within us as well as misunderstanding or understanding and or love.
So when I think of all this hate thing going around these days in America and the Western world as well, it, the visceral, rabid racism I witnessed in so-called friends decades ago is learned and learned from within the family situation.
That like Fred and Ethel, my old "friends", finding "luv", more likely companionship in old age, is a feat of birds of a feather flocking together, sharing a combined bubble of fear about fear to the exponential and or hate. So it goes.
Shrug.
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