Donald Honchell,
Chicago, IL
Bias is based on fear and jealousy. It seems best expressed to me in the film Mississippi Burning. There, the Gene Hackman character (a local) was asked by the Wilem Dafoe character (the outside agent) the reason for southern problems. Hackman responds with what his daddy told him: son, if you ain’t better than a {n-word}, who are you better than? We feel superior by discriminating against others to show power and control. Frederic Douglass wrote in the Atlantic Magazine in December 1866: “the thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion. It remains now to be seen whether we have the needed courage to have that cause entirely removed from the Republic.”
