Great thread, Liamson... Very interesting subject.
I see prejudice as wrong thinking, and depending on the situation, I believe in confronting it rather than enabling it.
I understand respecting elders, but if someone is holding a belief that is Biblically wrong, the Bible doesn't say we should let it slide due to age or fear of disrespect, although we all do this at some point.
I was in the library one afternoon and asked a group of kids about 10 years younger than me to please settle down (I was probably 19 and they were around 9). One of the boys looked at me and turned to his friends, saying "All Chinese people are bossy." I simply looked straight at him and just said, "I'm not Chinese."
I wish I would have had a chance to confront the kid who was shouting insults at my friend's mixed-race children, but he had slipped back into a crowd of other school kids before I could see who it was. I was white-blue-orange-red hopping mad. People will say, "They're just kids, they don't know any better." This kid was around 8. He knew better. And, my philosophy is, If they don't know any better... then someone had better be teaching them.
I used to be tongue-tied when people made comments to me (one woman told me if I ever had kids with my white boyfriend at the time, it would have to be out in the country where no one would ever see them), or when kids "slanted" their eyes at me in public (even though I was an adult), but now I have things to say.
When I was in a doctor's office (in my early 20's) and an elderly man (he was in his 70's) leaned over to his wife and said, "I bet she doesn't speak a word of English," I just looked at him and said, "I speak English very well, thank you..."
I've had regular discussions/disagreements with white friends who see blacks in a certain light and I've had some very heated discussions with black friends who see whites as automatically having all the advantages in every situation. (I worked in a store where, whenever we caught a shoplifter who was not white, we were automatically accused of racism.) Never mind that many of our staff were of different races... and more than half our white staff had children/family members who were of other races or mixed.
It's ironic and sad to me that although I am of a different race than my family via adoption, certain older family members consider some races "approved" and some not. When I once brought home a date of an "unapproved" race to a holiday dinner, I told my family in advance, young and old, "If anyone so much as looks at him wrong, we are out of there. I am NOT subjecting him to that kind of nonsense."
The reason I took him was because I wanted him to meet some of my family who would be there who WOULD be accepting. The members of my family who were accepting were lovely to him, including having bought him a small pile of gifts so that he'd feel included and have things to open along with everyone else. The members of my family who didn't approve... Well, at least kept their opinions and thoughts to themselves.
I can't change people's minds... But that doesn't mean I have to cater to them either. (I feel this way about any sort of prejudice, whether racism, sexism, etc., though I do agree that we have to be wise about discerning our battles. I just also believe that the reason some people believe a certain way is because others have always been too afraid to stand up to them.)
