"You think you know who you are?"

...
"You've absolutely no idea" (from the thought-provoking movie Crash)

Have you thought lately on how prejudiced you are or can be? Especially when it concerns the matter of another race of people? Or even when it just concerns the matter of people that "look" differently than you do?

We've made our own lives so complex, so profoundly shallow, so irresponsibly ego-centric, we may have just forgotten what it means to be a person. We can argue about morals, morality, right, righteousness, God, etc till the cows come home. But until that time comes, when fraught with danger and faced with hurdles we stop resorting to racial slurs and epithets against any one or more perceived communities, we maybe all are doing a Jim Crow, albeit to every discriminated race.

And economic progress and how long a country has been free has apparently nothing to do with it either. India has been and still continues to be victim of its own prejudices; Australia, France, Britain, Germany and the US also boast an ignominous record. Yes, statistically the developed nations maybe have a leg up on the rest of the world, but the fact still remains - almost everywhere is a prejudiced society. Many places, we've managed to hide it under a veneer of sophistication that passes off as tolerance and acceptance.

I am not sure where we can start to unlearn the prejudices that we've learnt, but I suppose, by accident or by design, we have begun moving along that path of accepting diversity, because we're atleast acknowledging that there are problems. And the new economic realities also seem to be spurring this acceptance along.

To quote documentary film-maker Bill Brummel's words - "Imagine we are all the same. Imagine we agree about politics, religion and morality. Imagine we like the same types of music, art, food and coffee. Imagine we all look alike. Sound boring? Differences need not divide us. Embrace diversity. Dignity is everyone's human right." (Starbucks' The Way I See It #61)