Attainable Tolerance

Grace Evans
Age 16
Kirkwood High School

"Be the change you want to see in the world."
                                  -Mahatma Ghandi

When I was six years old, my sister and I were obsessed with paper dolls. We had hundreds of cut-outs of historical and fictional characters ranging from the Kennedy family to Little House on the Prairie characters. One day, my mother gave me a set of Annie Oakley paper dolls that included Annie, Buffalo Bill and his fellow cowboys, and her Native American friend, Sitting Bull. Sitting Bull was dressed in little more that the feathers on his head and a cloth around his hips, his skin was dark brownish-red, and even on paper his piercing eyes seemed to bore into my skull. Although my mother raised me to not judge people by their appearance, Sitting Bull was unlike anyone I had ever seen and he scared me. I kept him hidden under my socks in a drawer. Many years later when I was cleaning out my dresser, I found the Sitting Bull paper doll wedged in a crack of the drawer’s wooden frame. I felt a burning shame in my stomach as I realized my own young prejudice, yet a tiny part of me still felt uncomfortable staring into his dark, intimidating eyes.

Prejudice like my own young racism is born of a fear of the unknown. We are raised believing that the people around us define normal. The abnormal, the unknown can seem quite scary. People with unfamiliar appearances, ways of life, and principles can seem threatening in their foreignness. If a child goes to college having only ever known people of the same race, lifestyle, and exclusive values of his or her family and community, he or she will probably feel uncomfortable when exposed to different kinds of living. Feeling uncomfortable about someone can lead to disrespecting and discriminating against them. Of course, many of us recognize these prejudices within ourselves and try to eradicate them by denying their existence. However, hiding from our own feels is about as effective as stuffing a paper doll in a sock drawer; on the surface no one can see the problem, but it’s buried deeper in our psyches.

As society progresses towards equality for all, the deep-rooted emotion of universal prejudice dies a little with each new generation. Still, only a liar could confidently say that he or she has never felt a pang of superiority or inferiority to a person based on their race, gender, sexual preference, age, religion, amount of money, physical ability, etc. In a community working towards complete acceptance, respect, and tolerance, every member would have to accept his or her own feelings of prejudice in order to eradicate them. Anyone can work towards personally achieving this goal. Counseling, support groups, and journaling can help even the most racist, ageist, homophobic misogynist work through his or her own prejudices. By working through personal problems we can eliminate negative prejudice in our communities, one person at a time. Since common values are the basis of society, a prejudice-free community cannot simply occur, but can be attained through conscientious decisions agreed upon by every single member of an open-minded yet ethical community to accept and embrace diversity.

A highly respectful, prejudice-free community would not be one without race. There would still be gender. There would still be age. There would still be wealth, sexual preference, and physical ability. For without these traits, humans would be nothing but mindless drones devoid of the diversity that makes us such a unique, sophisticated, powerful race. A prejudice-free community would consist of emotionally healthy individuals embracing one another’s diversity. In such a community, an old, poor, healthy, straight, Muslim Caucasian man could live next door to a young, Hispanic, Hindu, lesbian millionaire in a wheel chair and rather than be divided by their differences, they would be able to embrace them and befriend one another. Every public school would receive ample government funding and every private school would offer infinite scholarships on the basis of simply academic effort, so that every child would have equal education opportunities. Real estate values would jump higher in racially diverse neighborhoods, encouraging people to make neighbors with people of different ethnicities. The job market would exist plentifully so that anyone would be eligible for any job they wanted, and every occupation would have a union to ensure fair treatment for all employees. Children would be encouraged to attend as many different religious services as possible and then decide for themselves what path to choose. Regardless of sexual preference, equal marriage rights would be available to all. The law that every business and public place must, as much as physically possible, provide equal access to people of all abilities would be strictly enforced. Most importantly, in a prejudice-free community social relationships would easily blossom between people no matter their age or beliefs or what they looked like. If we as individuals and our government and society as a whole can work towards these standards, then a highly respectful, prejudice-free community will come to be thought of not as an impossible utopia but as an eventually achievable goal.

A team is only as strong as its weakest link. As in any group, organization, or community, so long as one single person retains feelings of superiority of another based on their differences, a community will not exist completely free of prejudice. Of course, controlling what people think and feel contradicts the desire of anyone searching for acceptance and tolerance, so for an entire community of people to exist one hundred percent respectful and prejudice-free may be a goal nearly impossible within this century. However, by each of us doing the best we can to work through our own personal issues and thus set example for everyone around us, we can gift future generations with the potential to create a highly respectful, prejudice-free community.