Highway to Holocaust
Workers in New Orleans prepare to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee. Prejudice springs from two wells: ignorance and choice. Every person alive has some degree of ignorant prejudice. It comes from hard-wired framing mechanisms, ways in which we understand the world. Until we've had some experience of something, we've got no way to know what its characteristics are. Once we've had some experience, our minds make assumptions that then affect the way we view other examples of that object. If my first experience of a bar is that it's loud and smoky (as was the case of every one of the few bars I visited in early adulthood), my mind judges all bars to be like that--until I'm pleasantly surprised by a British pub, or an Oregonian brewpub, and then I can begin to realize that there's plenty of variety in the world of drinking establishments. It works the same way with people. Prior to my first experience of Catholic, Jewish, Asian, African-American, LGBTQ, ...