Unknown Prejudice

Donald Rumsfeld famously divided all it was possible to know into four categories. Known Known - the things you know you know. Known Unknown - the things you know you don't know. Unknown Known - the things you know, but don't know you know. Unknown Unknown - the things you don't even know you don't know.

This works well with Racism and other forms of prejudice. Your Community are the people you know. They aren't a category. You know them personally and well enough to recognise them, and remember things about them. Especially if you pay attention to and are interested in the things that make them different from the category you are both in. If you are interested in something because they are, and only then because you become interested yourself.

Prejudice is when you don't know enough to know the individual. You know this. But it is all lumped into a category of known unknowns. You may be disinterested or even scared. 'Die Swart Gevaar' was an Apartheid Propaganda campaign to keep White South Africans afraid of if Black people were ever in power. White South Africans make up less than 10% of the population. Developing 'they are taking over' fear is a good way to prevent the effort needed to tear down the walls.

The Unknown Knowns are the common ground that can be used to tear down these walls. This can often be found in the history that existed before the walls were built. 

Afrikaans, for example, only became a political tool of the powers that be after the Anglo-Boer and First World Wars. WWI killed Imperialism and saw the birth of rising ethnic Nationalism. It was politically convenient to raise the status of Afrikaans as a white language. The reality is Afrikaans is the first language of more than 75% of the multi-ethnic Coloured (it is not a derogatory word in South Africa) population. It was a Kitchen language that mixed the Indigenous, Bantu, European, and South-East Asian flavours that gathered.

Other common ground is that both the 'Whites' and 'Black Africans' were systematically Christianised. In Europe this took place after the fall of Rome to 'The Barbarians' who were the ancestors of most South African Europeans. Rome itself was Christianised with Constantine being converted in 4th century. Boers means Farmers. The thousand years of Bantu migrations were in large part a farming expansion. Successive generations moving farms and cattle south. Many Europeans came to South Africa centuries ago fleeing the Wars of Religion. Another southward driver of the Bantu migrations was the Islamic North pursuing non-believers. A harrassed search for land of their own is a deep cultural legacy of most South Africans.

Ignorance is another level, quite different from Prejudice. You don't even hold any negative views. Everything is a blur. This is the type of racism that stops you from even being able to remember names or tell people apart. It is similar to seeing squiggles rather than words when you look at Russian, Hebrew, Hindi or Arabic. It is a form of illiteracy. Like people outside of Africa referring to it as if it is one country. They simply don't know enough. All of us fall into this form of illiteracy. We are human. Very few of us make the effort to become culturally literate. Particularly of cultures we don't come into contact with very often.

I haven't met many truly malicious people. Most of us have positive underlying drivers, that sometimes play out in very negative ways. The great thing with prejudice is you can chip away at if you want to. It is a fun process of meaning creation. Of seeing beyond categories. Of looking for flavour.