I would like to see if I can spark a conversation and perhaps a better understanding of racism and prejudice in general.

Let me just say, up front, there is only one race when it comes to humans and that is the human race. No matter what we may look like on the outside we are all the same on the inside. If you are white and you need a blood transfusion to save your life, it doesn’t matter what ethnicity the donor is as long as their blood type is the same.

The simple truth of this is that a member of any ethnic group can create a child with a member of any other ethnic group and that child will be perfectly normal, except of course for any genetic anomalies that have nothing to do with ethnicity.

Having said all of that, the simple truth of the matter is that ones attitude towards members of other ethnic groups is mostly dependent on where in the country or where in the world you are born, just like religion. If you do nothing to escape the prejudices, bigotry or religion you were born into, that is the person you will become.

The key to becoming a better person and escaping these attitudes is education. Obviously, education doesn’t work for everyone as there are some highly educated people who are still bigoted, I suppose because of their need to feel superior to other groups of people. How much better a world we would live in if we would but chose to lift ourselves out of these learned prejudices we will probably never know because to many people in all parts of the world chose to embrace these attitudes and live their lives in that way.

The term is willful ignorance and it is all to prevalent in our country, this is, in large part the cause of the divisions we are witnessing in our country right now. We can only hope we don’t chose a leader that will take us further down this path. Just sayin’.

Larry Benson

Enumclaw