Everybody is Racist

Tonight I start my long planned series on words that have been used to the point of meaninglessness. I know, I know! You thought I just threw back a couple of shots of Jack Daniels and let 'er rip, right? Nope, not like that at all. I actually put a lot of thought in what I'm going to write about. (Depressing, ain't it?)

Well nevertheless, here we go...

The word 'Racism' gets a lot of media play these days. People who favor the new AZ law about checking immigration status; they're racist I've heard. And a prominent media personality recently questioned whether President Obama is a racist.

As an aside? Mr. Glen Beck is a Mormon, and they're not allowed to drink coffee. Yet, Mr. Beck appears highly caffineated to me, any time I see him. So let's all be thankful he's not allowed to drink coffee.

Everybody is racist, dependent on how the word is defined. What the heck does 'Racist' mean anyway? Does it mean we all harbor preconceptions about people who don't look the same as us?

If that's what 'Racist' means, than yeah, we're ALL racists. I don't blame you for feeling shocked. See, I have scads of free time, insatiable curiosity, and a three pound sponge between my ears where a BRAIN would come in handy, IF ya know what I mean?

So I know lots of things that don't appear on the surface, to be worth knowing. Science has already proved that we're ALL racists.

Children with Williams Syndrome have a mutated gene. It expresses in many ways, facial, organ problems... and hyper-social disorder. A Williams Syndrome child isn't afraid of strangers; you can't get it into their heads to fear strangers.

In a large sampling size study, four year olds were shown pics of kids, and told one of these kids had done a bad thing. So guess which kid? Four year olds, some of whom had never seen some of the ethnicities in those pictures. They chose, sampling errors aside, 100 percent a child of different ethnicity as the 'evil doer.'

The Williams Syndrome kids were all over the map. Their mutated gene disallows them from seeing 'others' in photographs. This means, unless you have Williams Syndrome, you probably instinctively are wary around other ethnicities. It's in our genes.

Was a time probably in human history, when that was a survival trait. It's like the appendix really. Vestigal organ (NO, I didn't have to look that word up!) and vestigal genetic trait.

So we're all Racist in some small way. All these people hurling the word around have made it absolutely useless. What do they think the word 'Racist' actually means?