I grew up in a lily white county where being any other color would be grounds for verbal harassment or much worse. Adopting two little Korean orphans cost the adopting white family their business in 1952. In the early 1980s a doctor was needed and the call was answered by a very dark ethnic Indian who had a poor accent. To my surprise he was readily accepted along with his family. The needs of the many…

Since race and color wasn’t a reason to put down someone or group, most people (has to be a vast majority against a few), the locals had to find something else. During WWI, the Americans were bombarded by anti-German, state-sponsored propaganda showing soldiers bayoneting babies and other atrocities. German immigrants were being beaten and killed across America. My county had several German Catholic families farming on the edge of the county. That gave them two strikes in a mostly Baptist ethnic English majority population. There was still some bias in the 1960s from the older residents. My niece and nephew come from an extremely strong Baptist upbringing and married German Catholics. People can change.

It is easier to be prejudice against someone who is different race, color, or has different features. Even babies start to develop biases based on perceptions of those around them. As they grow older the biases become embedded, hence anti groups like the KKK and other white supremacist groups are formed. Their profile of acceptable people is extremely narrow.

Today’s protests of treatment of minorities may actually have a reverse effect by giving fence straddlers the feeling, like President Trump, all protestors are criminals and sub-human. It will take years to find out if the protests end up having a positive or negative overall effect. Often results aren’t the anticipated ones.