The incidence of prejudice that I want to analyze is a personal one that I had to overcome in order to survive in a foreign country. Last July I had the incredible opportunity to spend a month in Zimbabwe. My mother’s relatives live there, where she was born and raised. I knew of the huge black population of the area, but I had no idea of what was to come. Blacks in Zimbabwe out-number the whites by at least 200 to 1. You can go an afternoon and not see another white person. Being from an upper middle-class area of the Bay Area, I’m not used to being a minority. I have never had any reason to dislike or feel uncomfortable around blacks, but I was just not accustomed to it. The way that I was brought up was that I was taught to understand that crime and poverty were associated with blacks. The absolutely run-down city of East Palo Alto is near me, and a few busloads of their students were bussed in to my high school to even out the number of students. The kids from East Palo Alto were always the troublemakers at my school. They always had a chip on their shoulders and were looking for trouble. The stories I have about the blacks picking fights with the whites are endless. You may be familiar with my high school, it was the subject of the movie “Dangerous Minds”. The years of being at that school, and living somewhat close to such a poverty-stricken area like East Palo Alto had slowly made me prejudice against blacks. I couldn’t trust 90% of them at my high school, and that had been my only real exposure to them, so I was molded into feeling the way that I did. There’s nothing to blame but the circumstances in which I was raised under.I’d have to say that my prejudice was that blacks could not be trusted and that they were always looking for trouble. This obviously is a flawed perception because look at someone like General Colin Powell. Obviously he could be trusted or he would...
