Prejudice Is More than We Think It Is

PIKESVILLE, Maryland — Prejudice is defined as a preconceived opinion that is not based on reason or experience. It is favoring or disliking something without good reason. It is irrational. It destroys people, both the person feeling and doing it and the person or group affected by it.

After being the second actor to play the Chinese detective Charlie Chan in movies 22 times from 1938 to 1946, Sidney Toler (1874-1947), a Caucasian, ended his career with his last appearance in the 1946 Charlie Chan comedy-drama The Trap. He had, as he should have, top billing. The Black actor Mantan Moreland received, as he should, second billing. Both actors are excellent and fun to watch.

Like other Charlie Chan films, The Trap is a crime drama and a comedy. Sidney Toler does both. In this drama, he investigates the strangulation of two women but often does so in a humorous fashion. Mantan Moreland makes a more significant contribution to the humor.

Neither Sidney Toler nor the Caucasian Warner Oland, who played the Chinese detective in forty films before him, nor Roland Winters, another Caucasian who did so after him six times, were criticized for making their faces appear Chinese and speaking in what they considered a Chinese accent. Yet Mantan Moreland suffered prejudice because he was Black.

Mantan Moreland (1902-1973) was in 15 Chalie Chan films from 1944 to 1949. He was well-known and liked for the humorous ways he portrayed a bulgy-eyed, cocky, jittery man. However, by 1950, the movie industry began to become sensitive to depicting Blacks in what they considered demeaning ways.

Ignoring the Caucasians who acted as Chinese, the industry unjustly ostracized Moreland and the other famed Black humorous actor, Stepin Fetchit, probably because of prejudice, and ridiculed their numerous portrayals. Stepin Fetchit was the first Black actor to have a successful film career, one that began in Hollywood in 1927.

After a long, successful career, Moreland only had a few minor opportunities to act again because of the ostracism.

Prejudice is retaining an idea and not giving it up despite being unreasonable. Frequently, this occurs because the individual thinks, perhaps unconsciously, that it is too hard to analyze what I am thinking and too hard to change. Without further consideration, the individual is happy with his unreasonable idea.

A typical example is teachings taught to people when they are young. These ideas are easy for children to understand. They help control the child and keep the child from danger. But they are only childish ideas. Intelligent people realize they must learn the truth as they grow older.

An example of such a teaching is that God has emotion and sometimes becomes angry, especially when we misbehave. This is both childish and nonsense. We know nothing about God other than what God created or formed. A child needs this false lie. But adults need to stop worrying about God’s supposed emotion and seek instead to focus on themselves and society, to bring each to become all it can be.

Another example is that we must surrender ourselves to God and rely on God to help us with health, safety, wealth, and more. People are told that God is present, sit back and pray, because when God hears prayer, He is stimulated to help.

Still, another is to listen to clerics who describe various things about God when a rational person knows we can know nothing about God. The Torah states this in Exodus 33:18-23, where God tells Moses that he is unable to see or understand God and that he can only know what God created or formed.

The rationalist Maimonides stated in his Guide for the Perplex 2:48 that God did not say or do all the things attributed to him in the Hebrew Bible. They all occurred according to the Laws of nature. He explains that the Torah attributes them to God because God created the laws of nature.

We must understand that we all, without exception, have prejudices, ideas that we need to change. It is part of human nature. They are at least as destructive as the prejudices against Blacks. In each case, lives are not lived as they should.

This is why many religious and secular scholars, clerics, and philosophers have stressed the need for continued education and they stressed that people must use their intelligence.

Those thinkers who say people should rely on faith, take leaps toward faith when they are in doubt, and rely on childish beliefs are doing a disservice to humanity.