My dad owned and managed a hardware store. Outside of stocking shelves and ordering merchandise, a good chunk of his time each day was spent chit-chatting with customers. Dad was generally well-liked and greatly respected, so these conversations often strayed beyond water heaters and sanding paper.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
One day Dad came home from work shaking his head over a particularly puzzling interchange. This would have been the early 1980s, I suppose.<\/p>\n\n\n
A customer had expressed apprehension over rumors of a new Toyota factory coming to Shelbyville. “I don’t like the idea one bit,” the man groaned. “I don’t think it’s good to have foreign-owned businesses in town.”<\/p>\n\n\n
Dad, level-headed and thoughtful, was quick to reply: “Well, what about the fiberglass company –\u00a0 Knauf? They’ve been here for years and they’re German-owned.”<\/p>\n\n\n
The customer was having none of it: “This is completely different. Toyota is owned by the Japanese.”<\/p>\n\n\n
Dad was confused. “So what’s the difference? Knauf is German and Toyota is Japanese.”<\/p>\n\n\n
“It’s totally different,” the man explained. “The Japanese fought against us in World War II!”\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
\ud83d\ude0f<\/p>\n\n\n
That’s what you might call tragicomedy.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
That conversation stuck with me – I suppose because it demonstrated important truths about this sinful inclination of the human heart towards prejudice.<\/p>\n\n\n
\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0First, prejudice is not rational.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Second, prejudice is highly selective.<\/p>\n\n\n
\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Third, for the sake of holding onto a particular prejudice, it’s a whole lot easier when “they” look physically different from “us”.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My dad owned and managed a hardware store. Outside of stocking shelves and ordering merchandise, a good chunk of his time each day was spent chit-chatting with customers. Dad was generally well-liked and greatly respected, so these conversations often strayed beyond water heaters and sanding paper.\u00a0 One day Dad came home from work shaking his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1814"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1815,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1814\/revisions\/1815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}