Discrimination is not the same as prejudice. For example, Racial prejudice is not prohibited by our Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Discrimination in some cases is prohibited. There is a good reason for that. Robin DiAngelo makes the distinction clear in her thought-provoking book White Fragility: Why it’s so hard for White People to talk about Racism. “ Discrimination is action based on prejudice,” she says.

That’s why discrimination is not tolerated and prejudice is. It is an acknowledgement that we all unavoidably have prejudices, but we ought not to base our actions on prejudices. We have a duty to avoid such actions, even if we can’t stop such attitudes.

Examples of actions based on prejudices that amount to discrimination include the following: excluding, threatening, ignoring, ridiculing, slandering, maligning, and causing violence.

Sometimes the acts are clear-cut and obvious. When a police officer restrains a black man without any evidence that the man has committed a crime, based on a feeling that he might be guilty and wrestles him to the ground and places a knee on his neck just because he is black that is clearly bad. The officer will have discriminated against the black person if he would not have treated a white person in the same situation the same way. We will all have no trouble agreeing to that. Such a form of discrimination is easy to recognize. We are not entitled to feel great satisfaction in noticing that this is wrong.

The much more interesting discrimination is the subtle kinds. Many of us feel slight discomfort in the presence of people from certain groups. This is particularly true if we are in the minority. I suggest such a feeling is fairly natural even if it is not deserved and is based on prejudice. That is not discrimination. But if one acts on the basis of this irrational feeling, that is discrimination.

We ought to be aware that prejudice often manifests itself in action. The way each of us sees the world and people in it drives how we react to those people in the world. Here we must be careful. As DiAngelo says, “Everyone has prejudice, and everyone discriminates.” I suspect that is true. But we have to be careful to avoid this. Discrimination is always bad because it is always irrational. It is always based on a decision made before the evidence is given, or even contrary to the evidence. And if it is racial discrimination, it might be illegal as well as it might be contrary to the provincial Human Rights Code or Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But more importantly it is wrong. We ought not to racially discriminate.

Racism is the big subject in the wake of the recent incident in Minneapolis where a police officer kneeled on the neck of a black man lying on t he ground with his hands handcuffed behind his back for nearly 9 minutes during which time he died. Understandably, people around the world have been enraged.

I think it is helpful to start our discussion of issues surrounding racism by considering what some of the basic concepts mean. To begin with, what is prejudice? To answer that we should first consider prejudice and racism. They are related concepts but they are not identical. They are siblings.

A prejudice is a pre-judgment about another person based on factors other than evidence or facts. It is a judgment that we make when we have a thought, or feeling, or belief about another person based on the group to which that person belongs, rather than the behaviour of that person. For example, the belief that black people or indigenous people are dangerous. Prejudice includes thoughts or feelings such as accepting stereotypes or profiles of groups that are based on generalizations about the group rather than basing such feelings on evidence presented. That is why a prejudice is always irrational. By definition it is not based on evidence and reasoning.

As Nathan Rutstein said, “Prejudice is an emotional committment to ignorance.”

As soon as one thinks about it one realizes that such prejudgments are not rational. They can’t be. Rational judgments are those that are based on evidence and are not made before seeing the evidence! It is very common for prejudices to be shared within a group. As Robin DiAngelo said in her book White Fragility, “Our prejudices tend to be shared because we swim in the same cultural water and absorb the same messages.”

Yet it is impossible not to have prejudices. As DiAngelo said,

“All humans have prejudices; we cannot avoid it. If I am aware a social group exists, I will have gained information about that group from society around me. This information helps me to make sense of the group from my cultural framework. People who claim not to have prejudices are demonstrating a profound lack of self-awareness. Ironically, they are also demonstrating the power of socialization–we have all been taught in schools, through movies, and from family members, teachers, and clergy that it is important not to be prejudiced. Unfortunately, the prevailing belief that prejudice is bad causes us to deny its unavoidable reality.”

No one wants to be considered bad. So we can’t be bad. That does not mean we should succumb to prejudice. On the contrary, we must fight it relentlessly because prejudice is so irrational and so pervasive, and so powerful. We must recognize that to the extent we make any decision or harbour any belief that is based on prejudice we are acting irrationally and could be poisoning someone else to follow our prejudice or harming someone who is the object of the prejudice. That is why we should constantly be on the lookout for prejudices and constantly try to minimize them and to deny their ability to affect us. As philosophers say, we should always try, to be an ideal observer—that is one who is thinking rationally and impartially about what is observed even when that is hard. We will never achieve the ideal of course, but we should always be trying to move in that direction of the ideal observer. If we do that we will improve our chances of finding the truth, but it is no guarantee that we will find it.

No one likes to be accused of being prejudiced. If we are we must admit we are to that extent irrational. This is particularly important when it comes to racial prejudice because this is considered such a serious character defect in modern society. If we admit we are racially prejudiced we are admitting that we are bad and ought to be ashamed of ourselves. That is never a comfortable thing to admit.

And that is why people will go to great lengths to convince us that they are not prejudiced. This is an important idea which I got from DiAngelo. I do not think she has all the answers, as I will get to, but this, I think is a fundamental concept that makes a lot of sense. Prejudice is a prejudgment that is ultimately irrational. And that is why we should try to avoid prejudices. But we are not hopeless just because we have a prejudice it just makes us human.

The world was shocked by the recent death in Minneapolis of George Floyd as a result of a police officer holding him down in a prone position even though he was handcuffed, on the ground with a knee on his neck. He was begging to be allowed to stand up and repeatedly eeked out the words, “I can’t breath.” 3 other officers stood by and did nothing to help Mr. Floyd. Disturbingly, the police officer seemed nonchalant with one of his hands was in his pocket. As if this was not big deal. This was in broad daylight with people standing around. People in the vicinity were taping the incident on their smart phones. Around the United States and around the world people erupted in protest after seeing the videos. This is in turn led to rioting in many cities, even Fargo North Dakota and Steinbach Manitoba.

All of this is a product of the unfortunate entrenchment of racial superiority in North America. Racism is a problem not just in the United States but Canada as well. Once entrenched racism is very difficult to eradicate. Frankly, it takes a dramatic killing or a race riot for people to even take notice. The incident in Minneapolis has attracted a lot of attention.

Yet, I would submit that there is more important racism than that created by dramatic events. The reason is that most racism is invisible. People don’t notice it. The reason racism is so hard to notice is that it is so common. Racism lives everywhere. But people don’t see it. And that is a big problem.

It is easy to look at the police officer that killed Floyd as a bad person. Racists are bad. But glaring racists, like that police officer are not the big problem. The bigger problem is invisible racism, or systemic racism, or implicit racism. It is much more difficult to fight an invisible enemy than an ugly one.

There is plenty of evidence that we live in a society that subjugates non-white races in favor of the white race and those who enjoy the benefits of that oppression don’t see the subjugation because that would be contrary to their own interests. People in power never see their own power as anything other than a blessing. Anything that would erode that power is seen by the powerful as irrational or even insane. That is why whites have to work hard just to see the privileges they enjoy. They don’t look like privileges; they look like earned benefits. But we must learn to see that privilege and not just blindly accept it.

We can see an unconcerned white cop with his hands in his pocket and his knee on the neck of a hand-cuffed and prone black man and we can see that this is wrong. That is plain to see. That is a bad cop! But we are blind to the system that is all around us that privileges us while it subjugates people of other races. We are blind to the system that privileges us and our children and our friends while it disadvantages black people and indigenous people and others.

Invisible racism is invisible because we, the privileged, are blinded by our own privilege. We don’t see it because it’s natural. It’s the water in which we swim. That is what makes it worse than kneeling on the neck of a helpless black man. That evil is clearly visible. And it is clearly nasty. We don’t see our own privilege because that would undermine a system that benefits us. We don’t want to see or think about it. We are good people. We would never put a knee on the neck of a helpless black man.

If we don’t object to the system that invisibly benefits us, we are complicit in that system. We are then part of the problem rather than the solution. That is why to some extent even the dramatic incident in Minneapolis actually helps to blind us to the real problem. If we quietly allow a racist system to continue without openly dissenting there is no chance that system will ever be interrupted by us. Does that make us racist?

Steinbach has a reputation for being extremely conservative when it comes to social issues. As a result I was very interested in how a Black Lives Matter rally and march would proceed. I went last night (June 8, 2020) The first people I saw were a group of very conservative Mennonites. They are probably from the most conservative group in the area. I wondered what their point of view would be. To my pleasant surprise they were obviously supportive of the cause and consented graciously to me photographing them. I thought they might object to photographs, but they did not. In fact later I noticed they had their own photographer. I guess they are not as conservative as I presumed. Presumptions are bad as I have been preaching. Me bad (again).

I also noticed a black family who were comfortably seated with their signs. They also eagerly agreed to let me photograph them. There were quite a few black people at the rally. I did not know we had that many black families in town. Once more, I was sadly ignorant. But at least I was here to learn. I wanted to learn and support.

A number of the speakers were young people. In fact almost all the speakers were young people. Some of them gave very emotional speeches that made it clear, as if it was not clear before, that racism lives in Steinbach.

I did not notice any of our political leaders. Our Mayor, our Member of Parliament, and our member of the Legislative Assembly were all not in attendance (as far as I could tell). If I  am wrong and one of them was in attendance I hope someone corrects me. All 3 were eagerly in attendance at a grand opening of a fast food chicken restaurant a week or so ago where they participated without benefit of social distancing. Somehow the opening of a fast food restaurant was more important than a rally in support of racial justice.

I did not participate in the march because the crowd which had been fairly well spread out during the speech was bunching up for the march. It did not look safe to me so I went home. After all, I am an old man who lives with an old woman. So I have to be careful I don’t bring home any diseases. It might be our last.

All in all I was pleased with the event and the fairly large crowd that attended. Perhaps Steinbach is not as conservatives as I thought. As Bob Dylan, sang, ‘The times they are a-changing.’ Even in Steinbach, black lives matter.