Prejudice For and Prejudice Against: My Life Experiences

  This is a collection of stories about my experiences of being on both sides of prejudice from 1944 until 2023.

During World War II my mother became Civilian Personnel Director at an Army Air Force Base in Jackson, Mississippi.  When she was due for a promotion and increase in salary, the Lieutenant who had to approve her promotion told her no “skirt” was going to make more than he had as a shoe salesman in civilian life and blocked her promotion. My mom came home fuming. But it turned out that the Army Hospital in Jackson was looking for a Civilian Personnel Director.  Mother applied for the job.  Though it was against the regulations for one arm of the service to proselytize from another, the Medics had mom officially declared a war time emergency, so she got the job and the promotion.

At seven years of age, my Dad having to go away to be in the army added to the prejudice I had from fear of bombs in black-outs and the newsreels at movies describing the cruelty of the Germans and Japanese.  But while my mom was still working on the Army Air Base, part of her job was showing movies that the army made to boost the civilian employees’ morale.  I heard her weeping when telling my grandmother about having to show a movie the army had made.  It showed Japanese soldiers coming out of a cave surrendering with their hands up and the American soldiers setting them on fire with flame throwers and watching them burn alive.  She said the other civilian personnel cheered.  

 Even though everything I saw or heard convinced me that both the Japanese and the Germans were horribly cruel, it seemed wrong for us to act like them.

The first and the only protest I ever participated in was after we had moved back to St. Louis. It wasn’t about an important issue, just my sense of an injustice by a mean old lady. When I was twelve, I was a bench warmer on the eighth-grade girls’ basketball team. After home games we always went to a small store near our school for cokes. They had a couple of large booths and we would all cram into one. After one game, someone accidentally knocked over a bottle of coca cola which not only spilled, but broke. The woman who owned the store yelled at us and told us to get out and never come back. I felt it was very unfair since we apologized and cleaned up the mess. After we went outside, I talked my teammates into staying to tell other kids to boycott the store.  But when we told two boys not to go in because the woman was mean and unfair, they went in anyway. Then, as they were leaving, they threw their candy wrappers on the floor, calling her a witch and slamming the door. Not what I had wanted at all. The boys with their physical response had hijacked our peaceful protest. Before we could decide what to do, the woman told us she had called the police. The rest of the team took off. Self-righteous me stayed. Sure enough, a very large policeman appeared. The policeman listened to the lady and then admonished me for inciting the boys to cause trouble and wrote down my name and address. I was warned to stay away from the store. I was struggling to not cry or throw up, scared that as a newspaperman my dad would see the police report. The policeman was going the way I was and when we got away from the store, he tore up the paper with my name on it, handed it to me and said, “Don’t worry. She calls us every other day about something. Just stay away for a while until she gets over it.” I was very grateful to the kind policeman. My inclination to protest what I considered unfair was tempered by realizing that while I might protest peacefully, I couldn’t keep others from being violent.

About this time my parents hosted a Great Books discussion group that included a young black man. I knew my Dad was against racial discrimination because the only time he ever paddled me was for using the “N” word. But I saw for myself that the young black man could hold his own intellectually. That probably did more to make me question prejudice than anything.

When I was fourteen, we visited my grandparents in New Orleans.  I got to take a bus and go shopping on my own downtown.  When I got on the bus, there was only one unoccupied seat halfway toward the back. I sat down, but the driver didn’t start the bus. Finally, the black woman sitting in the window seat asked me to let her get by so she could stand up.  I looked around and realized that all the blacks were sitting in the back, so I just said, “Oh no, I’ll stand up.”  But even when I was standing, the driver didn’t start the bus.  The woman stood up and whispered, “Please sit down or we won’t be going anywhere.”  So, I sat down, and she stood.  I was embarrassed and angry, but afraid of making things worse. 

 When I was sixteen my dad was now City Editor of the Houston Post in Texas. When the schools were still segregated, he wrote an editorial supporting a black woman for the school board so the black schools would at least have representation. She didn’t win, but about 2 am on election night before Dad got home, our doorbell rang. I got halfway down the stairs before what sounded like an explosion sent me running back up. Someone had put a homemade bomb in the foyer of our apartment. It wasn’t as powerful as bombs people make today, but it had enough force that both the confetti packing, and razor-sharp pieces of slate stuck in the walls and door. The FBI never found out who did it, but they thought it was a response to dad’s editorial. I struggled to understand how anyone could hate so much that they would try to maim or possibly kill someone who had never done anything to harm them. My feeling of being safe in my world was shattered that night. I began to understand that I had experienced just a tiny bit of the fear people in minorities felt all their lives.

 When I was 30 living in Nashville, my husband I were having a dinner party for our church going social group of doctors and lawyers, and college professors. One of the wives who did volunteer charity work at a hospital bragged about rudely refusing in front of the parents to carry a “Nigger” baby to the car. I was so disgusted, I decided to volunteer at the NAACP headquarters interviewing people for job applications. Then I would go back to my own neighborhood and try to get retail stores to hire some of the people qualified for the work. This was before laws on diversity in hiring. Of course, I had absolutely no success getting any of the merchants to hire anyone black, but I continued to volunteer twice a month at the NAACP headquarters. So, when the poor people’s march on Washington came through Nashville in 1968, I was answering the phone there. The young black men, who were activists in SNCC and CORE, were much more aggressive than most that followed Martin Luther King, Jr. They were hanging out in the office waiting to get back on the buses. Their hatred of whites, even those of us trying to help black people get equal rights, was so frightening that I became convinced that violence was unavoidable. The thought of what that would be like, not just for my own children, but the innocent young children I had tutored in a black school, broke my heart. While Martin Luther King, Jr. was not perfect, his faith in the non-violence of Jesus saved us from a bloody race war. I don’t think white people appreciate what he did for us also.

My husband was a very kind and ethical man, but he was influenced growing up in a very Southern environment to be prejudiced. I don’t think he was comfortable with my activism at first and it did take about seven years for him to decide prejudice was wrong. But once he did, he acted on it. He was President of the first all-white Architecture firm in Nashville to hire a young black architect long before any diversity laws.  To me, it takes a rare combination of intelligence and humility to recognize when you are wrong and true courage to act on that in a culture that has not yet accepted that.

Prejudice doesn’t look past the surface. It doesn’t recognize that all races, genders, nationalities, religions, and social groups are diverse within their own group. 

In 1993 at the age of 56, I was in a wheelchair when traveling in the Czech Republic, in Austria, and Lucerne, Switzerland. In Prague I was blocked from getting out of the rain onto a covered sidewalk by several middle-aged women who also literally hissed angrily at me as we had to go past them in the street.  In German speaking Lucerne we encountered a taxi driver at the airport, who wouldn’t take us even though he had a large car with a huge trunk for the wheelchair. His rude refusal made the second taxi have to drive over a median to get around him to take us. At that time prejudice was so strong against people with handicaps, they were kept in their family’s attics and were never taken out. The only handicapped accessible bathrooms were in the airports and the McDonalds. But, when we were in the airport on the way home from Lucerne, we and another tourist family with someone in a wheelchair were very rudely separated almost out of sight from the seating area with our families left standing for forty-five minutes until everyone else was on the plane. When we got home, we read of someone in Germany actually winning a $20,000 lawsuit against a hotel for ruining their vacation by allowing a handicapped person to eat in the dining room. I wept at being rejected by people who had no idea if I was a kind person, an intelligent person, or even a person just temporarily hurt in an accident. Since I grew up during WWII and was aware of the horrors that Germans inflicted on Jews, gays, and the handicapped, when I experienced hate based on prejudice by people who spoke German in the 1990’s, my own latent prejudice against Germans surfaced.  But when writing about this, I realized that most of the people I encountered on that trip were not unkind.  Only a few were actually mean.  Intellectually, I believe that many Germans are kind, good people, and some died resisting the Nazis, but I still have to struggle against assuming they are all cruel and hostile toward people different from them. That’s what prejudice does; it prejudges people without actually knowing them. I also began to have some idea of how important it is to Germans to be physically strong. Everywhere in Germanic countries in good weather whole families were out climbing mountain trails.  A young woman from Germany that I worked with in ministry for years told me that she would rather die than be in a wheelchair. Often fear underlies prejudice.

Power, prejudice, and a violent temperament are an explosive and dangerous combination. In the late 1940’s when we lived in St. Louis, Missouri, my dad was investigating an unarmed Mexican being beaten to death in his jail cell and no one questioning it.  In Houston, Texas in the early 1950’s he was writing about the Texas Rangers getting confessions by tying standing prisoners to heaters so if they got tired and slumped, they would be burned. Obviously, some of both the Police and Rangers were honest and kind because they were the ones giving dad the information. Most law enforcement officers are good people in not only a hard and dangerous job, but one with frequent temptations to abuse power.   There needs to be a system that instead of protecting those that abuse power, rewards those that don’t.  In times of civil unrest, being the police takes extraordinary character, courage, and self-control.  When you need exceptional people for extremely difficult jobs, you need to pay them exceptional pay.

When I began to work as a Director of Religious Education for the Chaplains’ Division at Fort Campbell, I had some prejudice against the “Military Establishment.” But I saw that now that we have both men and women in the military and posts and bases all over the world, our military families represent the United Nations. And because the military life is hard on marriages, you can even have all sorts of blends racially and ethnically in children in one family through remarriages in different countries. On posts or bases there are no ghettos to live in or private schools to keep races or ethnic groups apart. Seeing most of the people, particularly the youth, get along across so many differences gave me more hope for world peace than I had ever had.

              Also, the respect I received from the Protestant Chaplains, particularly the Presbyterians was incredibly different from the cavalier way the Catholic Chaplains treated women. I had done every ministry that women were allowed to do and completed over fifteen hundred class hours in Scripture, Theology, Religious Education, and Conflict Resolution,  When I stopped working at Fort Campbell, I enrolled in a Diocesan Ministry training program that was two years for women and three years for men wanting to become Deacons who are allowed to preach. Because of my Religious Education credentials and all the Ministries I had done at the Diocesan level the men wanting to become Deacons asked me to write letters of recommendation for them.  After three of them admitted they didn’t really understand or even like reading the Scriptures and dreaded having to preach, I realized that out of all the ministries I had done, bringing the Scriptures alive for others and relating them to everyday life not only gave me the most joy, but was what I did best. I felt so frustrated by the Catholic male hierarchy’s prejudice against women, I decided to find a church where I could preach.  Out of the various denominations I had explored when searching and ones I had worked with in my position with the military, the most positive experiences were with the Presbyterian USA who do let women preach. Now for twenty years I have had opportunities to experience the joy of preaching what I call “sermons from the molehill” as a member of that denomination. I still read and find spiritual wisdom in some Catholic writers along with writers of other denominations. And I realize that the Catholic Church doesn’t have a monopoly on prejudice against women.  But I thank God for the opportunities I’ve had to do what I love and feel called to do.  And I am convinced that prejudice against any group delays the Kingdom of God from flourishing on earth.   

However, an experience in my job in the Chaplain’s Division also made me aware of my own prejudice FOR some groups. I had never realized that we can be prejudiced FOR people, which affects our perception of reality also. I was going with one of my volunteers to get her teen-age son out of the stockade. He’d done something silly, not serious, but her husband was overseas, so I was being support for her. As we were sitting in the waiting room, four tough looking white MP’s came in all roughly manhandling a very muscular black soldier who was dragging heavy chains with manacles on both wrists and ankles. I immediately felt sorry for the black soldier and felt the chains were over-kill. But when I got back to work, the gentle, pretty eighteen-year-old private that worked in our office was there sobbing. She was a committed Christian, who had become so depressed by the cursing and fighting in her barracks that she had hiked down the busy highway while it was still daylight to spend the night in a motel to pray and have some peace. That morning, she was hiking back in the dark to be at roll call at dawn. There was very little traffic, and she was attacked and raped at knife point in the ditch along the highway. Her attacker was the soldier I had seen in chains. He had fled over a fence back onto the post when a trucker spotted them and slowed down. But in fleeing he left his wallet behind, so he was caught. I could only hold her and cry with her. We cannot assume either evil or good for anyone because they are different from us or belong to an oppressed people.

In his forties, my very religious brother finally accepted the reality that he was gay and wanted to love someone in a committed intimate relationship.  He experienced extremely difficult challenges because of being gay.  I was sad for him, not because he was gay, but because of the handicap and even danger of it in our society.  He and his husband have been together almost forty years. Many years ago one of my sons also accepted that he was gay.  Again, I worried about how difficult and even dangerous prejudice would make my son’s life.  But he moved to California and found acceptance and a wonderful relationship that has stood the tests of almost thirty years.  Because I have learned of a great-great aunt that was gay over a century ago, I think it must be an inherited trait. I had never heard anything about this aunt until looking at a cousin’s family photo album. When I asked who the beautiful woman dressed appropriately for the very early 1900 hundreds was, my cousin said she was a great-great aunt who became a pediatrician and started a clinic for poor children in California. I was astonished.  First, because I had never heard of her and second, at how intelligent and strong she must have been to become a doctor back then.  When I asked why I had never heard of her, my cousin said, “See the woman in the background of the photo?” I nodded. “She lived with her all her life.”  It blew my mind that my family kept this amazing woman a secret because she loved and lived with a woman all her life.  Living with someone all your life is an achievement in itself.  In fact, I truly believe that marriage is the ultimate school for learning to love another imperfect human being. And to me, learning to love unconditionally is the purpose of life.

Now in my eighties, I have a transgender grandchild. Being gay has become less dangerous, but transgenders are still bullied, humiliated, and even physically harmed. I love all my grandchildren.  And as a born-again Christian who accepted Jesus as my Savior and Lord and experienced that incredible “no small print” love, I pray for grace to follow Him in loving all God’s children.

To me, Jesus calls us to love and treat others as He loved and treated them: heretic Samaritans, the unclean woman, gentiles, lepers, tax collectors, the woman with five husbands, and even the soldier of the hated conquerors.  He came down the hardest on the Pharisees who had turned the Law into an idol. But even when they killed him, He prayed, “God forgive them. They know not what they do.”

All races, ethnicities, nationalities, genders, religions, handicapped, and professions have people of all kinds in them spread out between loving to hating, compassionate to judgmental, gentle to violent, honest to dishonest, understanding to judgmental, prejudiced for to prejudiced against, and every other dichotomy. 

There are both loving and hateful people in every group with most of us somewhere in the middle. And God loves us all.