The Culture of Hate

At a recent family Sunday dinner my sister told me about an email she received from a group of band parents at her daughter's high school. The email was a racist blast of the victims of Katrina. Apparently the composer of the email had re-written the words of the Battle of New Orleans to include racial epithets. I was sickened by this. I was more bothered by my sister's apathetic response to the email. She did not respond to the sender with an email displaying her disgust. She did not explain to her daughter why the email was fundamentally wrong. She did however forward the email to someone who found it to be "funny and true." In my sister's defense, she sent the email on to this person thinking he would be as appalled as her. Unfortunately, he shares the same racist opinions as those who originally forwarded the email. Apathy is a horrible, horrible thing.

Yesterday, I was participating in a patient discussion panel with other students on Am Care rotations. We were discussing disease states and primary literature articles. The guy beside me kept expressing his outrage that the trials included people not from America. He felt that they were "fudging the results" and twisting the statistics to suit their cause. While this was a bit comical, you could've heard a pin drop in the room when he said, "Well this trial had 55% Hispanics. America is not 55% Hispanics, we're all white." This highly infuriated one of the preceptors, who responded with, "Well, we do live in America - the melting pot country. And actually, the only indigenous Americans are the Indians. Everyone else moved here." I think he quickly realized that he was not surrounded by his "white croonies" and quickly changed his opinion. I wanted to turn to him and say, "Do you want me to get your white hood out of your car for you?" The scary thing is, this boy is not an ignorant band parent - he's a well educated future pharmacist.

Racism comes in all shapes and sizes. No socioeconomic group is immune. From the poor, white, mountain-dwellers to the rich, white, socialites, hate has become part of the culture of America.