Being that the year is 2012, I think I was living in a naive little bubble, figuring that racism and religious persecution was behind us. Sadly, we are no where near achieving that, as the Gavin Cato case in the nineties (we grew up in the nineties, remember?) shows.
I think the problem is that each and every one of us still places ourselves in a specific group-and many of us shy away from integrating those groups with others. For example, the Gavin Cato case was specifically divided into two groups- African Americans and Jewish People. There were no people, just labels.
This goes back years and years. If we look at the Orsi, we see that the Italian immigrants didn’t like for their children to marry (nonetheless associate) with non-italians. If they did marry a polish person or the like, they would no longer be welcome in their family’s home because they had weakened the “Domus”. This segregation and pseudo racism was not only encouraged but taught and passed along; it was accepted as custom and not racism.
Why do we do this? Why do we encourage and force ourselves to draw lines between eachother? All it does, as in the case of Gavin Cato, is provide a source for persecution and hatred. When Gavin Cato died in that car accident, the outlash against the Jews (and the retaliating outlash against the african americans) was appalling. But really what reason did these people have to fight eachother other than their minor differences?
The Jewish man that was killed had nothing to do with the Gavin Cato death, he was not the man who was driving the car. He was innocent and stabbed for no other reason than living in the Jewish neighborhood and being Jewish, even though many people may disagree with that reasoning.
The Gavin Cato served as a scary reminder to me that racism is still out there, that these things never disappeared and that there is still so much progress to be made. To be honest, it disturbed me deeply.
