StemCell Therapy

Recently the mother of a 5-year-old boy in Louisville, Ky., told her young son he needed a haircut.

He asked if he could get the same haircut as his best friend, because Were going to trick the teacher.

The boy thought if he had the same haircut as his buddy, their pre-K teacher couldnt tell them apart.

Jax, the boy needing the haircut, wanted to get a buzz cut like his friend, Reddy, who is also 5. So he did.

The punchline of this endearing story is that Jax is white, Reddy is black. The difference in their pigment, apparently, never crossed the boys minds when they plotted to fool their teacher.

Would that we all could be that way, seeing each other as friends and fellow human beings rather than as black, white, yellow, red, brown, green, purple or any shade.

Children see only another person whom they like and want to play with, not a person of another race. Prejudice, it seems, comes only with age and experience.

In the classic Rogers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, there is a song in the second act that highlights this phenomenon.

Young Navy Lt. Cable has fallen in love with a Polynesian girl, Liat, but he knows he cannot marry her because of his familys prejudice.

At the same time, Ensign Nelly Forbush decides she can no longer love French plantation owner Emile because of his two half Polynesian children.

It is a short song with a powerful message, Youve got to be taught to hate and fear.Youve got to be taught from year to year. Its got to be drummed in your dear little ear. Youve got to be carefully taught.Youve got to be taught to be afraid, of people whose eyes are oddly made, and people whose skin is a diffrent shade.Youve got to be carefully taught.Youve got to be taught before its too late, before you are 6 or 7 or 8, to hate all the people your relatives hate, youve got to be carefully taught!

Over the years too many have learned those lessons too well.

In an article published in the St. Louis American, an African-American newspaper in that Missouri city, Roland Bob Harris, a St. Louis native, writes about his time in the Air Force, including his tenure serving at Vance Air Force Base in the late 1950s.

Segregation reigned supreme, Harris wrote. The blacks in Enid literally lived on the other side of the tracks. There were only two black policemen. They could only patrol in the black section of Enid. Enid was a very dismal assignment.

Thank God we have come a long way since the late 1950s, though we still have far to go.

For young airmen assigned to Vance today, this still may be a dismal assignment, but only because of Enids small size and long distance from a major metropolitan area, not because of rampant racism.

We could learn a lot from Jax and Reddy. Color shouldnt matter, period. Of course, neither should your country of origin, how you choose to worship nor who you decide to love.

Why must we be so quick to hate, so eager to distrust, so reluctant to love, so hesitant to accept?

We have, I fear, been carefully taught.

We can only pray thats a lesson Jax and Reddy never learn.

Mullin is senior writer of the News & Eagle. Email him at jmullin@enidnews.com or call 548-8145.

More here:
Blissful color-blindness of the young children ... - Enid News & Eagle

This entry was posted on March 5, 2017 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Blindness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |