I am sorry for people who have been trapped in a cycle of racism, in which their surroundings have branded into them a disrespect for other cultures and a misplaced anger, a fear of the other and a resulting hatred thereof.
To me a root cause of racism is a homogeneity of interactions during a persons first experiences in life. It is easy to hate something you don't know when you never even have to deal with it and never met a person that disagrees with you in this regard. To me, most racists, (as well as people with other prejudices) simply don't have a sense that other people are still just people.
So why am I talking about racism on a hockey blog? Thankfully it is not because some dumbass has thrown a banana at Wayne Simmonds or Evander Kane. Rather it's because I recently read Herb Carnegie's biography "A Fly in a Pail of Milk".
Carnegie was virtually the first black star player, but since he played his professional career during the 40s and 50s he was denied a place in the highest tier of professional hockey, the NHL. Most infamous is still an incident in which Toronto Maple Leafs owner Conn Smythe proclaimed that he would pay any man $10.000 to turn Herb Carnegie into a white man.
However, while the book brings up the racism Carnegie faced during the childhood and his playing career, it does a whole lot more than simply tell us that racism is a bad thing. It also shows why racism is a bad thing. The biography does a wonderful job at portraying Herb Carnegie as a genuine human being, with passions, ambitions, talents and feelings. The respect he has for his parents, the love for his wife and their elopement, his struggle to balance his hockey career and his home life, his dejectedness after the New York Rangers refused to put him on their NHL team rather than a farm team, his desire to teach children valuable lessons about life as well as hockey, his passion for hockey and for golf, his thankfulness for being given a real chance at a career when he applied for a job in sales after his playing career ended. They all provide a sense of humanity, and it illustrates that racism is bad because it robs a person of this humanity.
That black men like Carnegie were and still are disrespected and had and still have to overcome artificial cultural barricades is most unfair because they are still just people. Carnegie himself also seems to touch on the root cause of racism I explored earlier. As he explains, he never faced racism from any teammate, who I presume have gotten to know him quite well. Rather the most racism he has experienced were from strangers, people in the crowd and executives. People who don't seem to understand that even people who look different than themselves are still people.
While I don't think that racism can be cured by forcing a racist to interact with a person of a different race on a real human level, I think it is most definitely a stepping stone and definitely something that would help kids that are growing up to never become racist. However, even reading a book like "A Fly in a Pail of Milk" could provide such an understanding of a person of a different race as a person just like the reader, and this is genuinely a good lesson to learn.
