English Journal.

Before the essay: It seems that I talk about my mother very often here. I have to justify, to myself, that I don't hate my mother. She is a great mother and teacher of life, how to be with other people. But I do feel uncomfortable about many things that she does and think. I feel uncomfortable about even more things with my dad, especially his temper and illogicality, but the only reason that I talk about my mom so much more here is that...I think it is that...she is more influential in my life.

My mom is a racist, period. She thinks White and Black Americans’ characters are just as white and black as their skin. She doesn’t overtly show favoritism towards Whites but she surely has strong dislike for the Blacks. And by the way, the Hispanics are considered to be in the Black team too. Of course, a racist like herself can’t live without a laundry list of prejudices, and among many of those is that Blacks and Hispanics are lazy.

Lazy is just an one-word summary of her numerous complaints—they always want to work as little as possible and earn as much as possible, they always don’t want to learn and therefore always mess up at work, they are rude and not focused, they are stupid probably because they did not work hard enough when they were in school……As you can see, most of these complaints are associated with work, and therefore I can safely assume she developed these prejudices while observing Blacks and Hispanics at her workplace. I am sure she is well aware of the fact that there are indeed very successful and respectable Blacks and Hispanics out there somehwhere, but somehow she still has some kind of innate disgust for these two groups of people. And I think that is what made her more than just a person holding prejudices. (Once I responded to her racist comments--that she denied were racist--by asking her..if it's Obama, is it ok for me to marry a Black person?--No, not even that. She answered briefly.)

I do not deny that many Hispanic and Black Americans are indeed immensely lazy as I’ve observed everywhere. But people of all races and nationality can be and are lazy. Some Whites are lazy, some Muslims are lazy, some Asians are lazy, some Chinese are lazy. Some Hispanics are more hard-working than most Chinese, and some Blacks are more successful than most Whites. Making a conclusion like “Blacks and Hispanics are lazy” based on observing a small group of people being lazy is like saying a drug is effective just because one experiment done on three people provides positive results.

The scariest thing about prejudice is when one is so overwhelmed by the generalization that he or she begins to deny exceptions. Everyone holds some sorts of prejudice against others, and that is normal, because our brains are made to think andhave opinions. However, it is always important to remember that there is always someone who is a total counter-argument to one’s prejudice. This may sounds paradoxical but it's just a way of double think. And double think is especially important here because it prevents us from being devoured by our own inevitable flaws in rational thinking.