Prince

This isn't really on-topic, but I guess that doesn't matter much since the person who started the thread has been banned and won't be reading this anyway.

I'd like to hear some advice or opinions on this, nevertheless.

I moved to the States from a small European country, with a population of about 5 million, consisting of mostly Evangelist Lutheran white people. I lived in a city of about 200,000 people, making it one of the largest cities in the country. I only saw a "dark coloured individual" perhaps ten times a year.

Most of what I know about American history is based on books I've read, and movies and documentaries I've seen. And I think a lot of that information is correct for the most part. However, when it comes to modern day American culture, I am often painstakingly clueless or prejudiced, and I blame this on the television.

Here's a few examples. Around Christmas there was an event downtown that my wife and I went to. A young man, possibly of Puerto Rican heritage, came up and offered us a free taste of some sort of pasties they were selling. The first thing that popped into my mind was, "what if there's drugs in these?". I felt badly about it afterwards.

A couple of times that a black individual has made a delivery, tried to sell me something (door to door kind of thing) or something like that, I've felt quite reserved. There was this one time that one of our windows didn't latch, and I expressed my concern over it to my wife, saying, and I quote, "what if some negro crawls in through that in the middle of the night?". She was quite surprised that I said that, and I was too.

I guess this is largely because on television America is often portrayed as a dangerous place to live, and the local news seem to just re-enforce that mentality. And how many times did I see a white guy being busted for breaking and entering on NYPD Blue? Not very often at all.

I've always considered myself to be extremely open-minded, and definitely above racism. And I still don't consider myself racist, but I am obviously prejudiced, whether I like it or not. And I don't.

I am not used to ethnic "minorities", having lived among a chiefly white population for all my life, and I guess on some strange level I am afraid of them, to a degree, even though I consciously know that they are just people, like me. I guess only time will ease this fear out of me, at least I hope so. Meanwhile though, I fear that it will somehow show through and make me look worse a person than I really am...or prohibit me from becoming a better person, somehow.

Any thoughts?

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