The last week of April brought together two horrible memories in modern human history. One was Holocaust remembrance week, the other the 25th anniversary of the Los Angeles riots. Both events have one thing in common: mob mentality.
The Holocaust didn’t just happen overnight. It can’t be blamed singularly on Hitler either. For centuries, before and after Christianity, Jews were a persecuted people. Migrating to Europe and regions that would form Germany met with even more persecution. For generations Jews could only hold certain jobs. Non Jews would not associate, trade, or do business with Jews. Sound familiar in our own American history?
Given where I grew up in Texas, I have known very few people who were Jewish. One was through college, a piano teacher from Queens New York. I have been privileged to have met a couple of Holocaust survivors. One was a Jewish Christian; another was speaking on a lecture tour, his premise about how hate turns into evil. He was 15 when his family was sent to concentration camps. He still bore a tattoo of numbers on his forearm. He said the Force put it there. When he was 19, his camp was liberated. He ran to a nearby house, was fed soup and allowed to shower. He weighed 80 pounds and did not recognize the old man staring back at him in the mirror. He ended up coming to Dallas and became prosperous in the scrap metal business, a trade his Nazi captors taught him as he had to take apart Allied planes downed by the Germans.
Words of hate
There was a phrase, a racial epithet, spoken throughout Europe that as a Texan I had never heard: dirty Jew. I cannot recall any member of my family or friends ever saying it … or for that matter even the word ‘Jew’ other than quoting the Bible or speaking of Jesus. We did not live in or near a known Jewish community. Our only reference was from TV shows like “All in the Family,” Jewish comedians, movies or news from major cities like New York.
I grew up in a part of Texas where Jews were never spoken against but were never known, too. They were a cultural mystery. Only after high school did I realize there were a couple of classmates who were Jewish and kept it to themselves as the rest of us openly celebrated Christmas with presents and music and loving sentiments.
In recent years I learned of the centuries-old offensive phrase ‘dirty Jew.’ I could not imagine why anyone would say it or think it. From my background, Jewish people were never ‘dirty.’ What could that have meant? What’s the reference? Why the word ‘dirty,’ meaning filthy? Why that judgment against those people, a religious people, a righteous biblical people? Why was it such a common thought throughout Europe and in some large multi-ethnic American cities with a notable Jewish population?
The only people who made Jews filthy were Nazi captors in the concentration camps where the only shower Jews may have been provided was a gas chamber to kill them. Now who were the real dirty people—with ugly thoughts, filthy mouths, stained heart and soul?
There is a phrase, a racial epithet, spoken throughout the United States, maybe more so in the South. I’ve heard it all my life. I have family and friends who still use the word, the description of a people. It is offensive to a lot of us in the middle-aged generation. Yet the word is a source of pride somehow among some black youth and had become a notable lyric in rap songs, however still bleeped from public air waves on radio.
When the Los Angeles street riots happened in 1992, following a not guilty verdict of white police officers who beat a black man under arrest, Americans were shocked. And that would have included me back then. Turned out, only white America was surprised. The black American experience is so different, so Bizarro World from white America, that it is and remains unbelievable. Why would blacks riot, shatter glass on cars and business strips and then loot and set them on fire?
For three days white America could not understand, called it a shame, a pity, very sad. Blacks understood. They may not have a Holocaust tattoo on their forearms. But they are born with a racial designation that has kept them down throughout American history—and many still insist keeps them down to this day.
Why can’t we all just get along?
Racial and ethnic segregation is created by the people in power. It is innate and cannot be helped. It comes from the brain, the primitive part of the human brain, the fight-or-flight part of the brain, the part that is fully developed in early childhood and never really changes despite higher education and continuous addressing of and focus on the issue especially at work and by law.
To most Americans, Los Angeles meant Hollywood, Beverly Hills, the movie and TV industry, posh, wealth, glamour. For decades it’s been portrayed as the best America has to offer: sun and fun, money and privilege, youth and promise, clean and beautiful. The other side of L.A. was never featured in the movies or TV shows because America did not want to see it. Maybe I’m talking 1950s America. But the same could be said of 1980s America. What we put before our eyes on TV or the movie screen was what the people in power wanted to see.
Twenty-five years ago I saw the L.A. riots through live TV coverage. I’ll never forget ‘rioters’ attempting to kill people, in particular that long-haired man dragged out of his delivery truck and smashed repeatedly with cinder blocks. He could have been killed. And we would have witnessed a real murder on live TV: blacks killing a white man.
Then a year or so later, we saw the trial of those caught on tape during the riots trying to stomp that man to death. And we had to listen to the defense use ‘mob mentality’ to explain how the human brain reacts in such conditions: that people caught up in a raging riot just go along with whatever the majority is doing–and in that regard are not responsible for their actions. Sound familiar in German history of the 1930s?
Anybody believe this? The L.A. jury did. The rioters were found not guilty of attempted murder. Even more incredible is that the man they tried to kill—seen on tape just like the Rodney King police beating—forgave his assailants in the courtroom. He held no grudge. He remembers absolutely nothing of his brutal beating and near death. Unrecalled memory is his blessing from God.
For the rest of us who saw it and remember, there is but one solution. The solution is: Think before acting. Don’t we teach children this lesson: If your buddy is throwing a brick on another guy’s head, would you pick up a brick and do the same thing?
From Nazi Germany to modern-day American street riots, people have the power of personal responsibility. We can blame people and circumstances for perceived miserable lives: from parents to teachers, schools, bosses, society, guns, gangs, drugs, police, racism, bigotry, poverty and prison. Yet there is no escaping the fact that each of us holds the power to control our tongues and thoughts, attitudes and behavior … before a hateful majority rules.