Racism

A dear friend, just returned from London and France, came to dinner.  We argued over Brexit among other things.  "These peasants up in the hills, they have to get used to it, foreign accents, strangers, the world is changing."  I countered with experiences I have had that left me cold about integration.  A New York City taxi driver, an Arab, who turned around in the seat to tell me that gay males should be castrated or better yet killed.  I told my friend I was not so keen on the guy's residence in the United States. "Oh, that's prejudice," my friend blustered.  "Yes, absolutely right.  I don't like people who threaten my existence."  A corner store near my house in Cambridge Massachusetts talking with the owners, two Greek persons newly arrived in the USA, speaking with heavy accents, and complaining about African-American school students who came into the store early in the morning before going to middle school nearby to buy something to eat.  "I don't trust them, they don't belong here and I don't like them in here."  Me to them.  "Wait a minute, you're just arrived in this country, can scarcely speak the language.  Those students have ancestors who came at the same time my family did--in the seventeenth century.  So don't pass judgement."  I see those photographs of rows of males standing at the railing of the ships transporting them across the Mediterranean to Europe.  Muslim males, acculturated to dominate their womenfolk and maybe worse, acculturated to a mosque experience requiring segregation of sexes and prayer five times a day.  I believe absolutely in the equality of the sexes and think obsessive religious observance is a denial of personhood and what the United States is all about.  And they hate gays.  This is not about racism.  It's about cultural survival.