Dear Editor,

In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, the narrator notes that, like the South in the Civil War era, northern states also hated black people but happened to hate slavery more.

Given a fair chance, a black child can achieve greatness. Nonetheless, black people have been brutalised for centuries and were told they were not welcome in the US — even though they, as a people, had been violently forced to the US from their African home as slaves and have received little or no reparation or real refuge since.

Human beings can actually be consciously or subconsciously perceived and treated as though they are disposable and, by extension, their suffering and death are somehow less worthy of concern, even by otherwise democratic and relatively civilised nations.

While no human life should ever be considered disposable, one can also observe this immense injustice with the many Canadian indigenous children who’ve been buried in unmarked graves.

A somewhat similar inhumane devaluation can also be observed in external attitudes, albeit perhaps on a subconscious level, towards the daily civilian lives lost in protracted devastating war zones and famine-stricken nations. The worth of such life will be measured by its over-abundance and/or the protracted conditions under which it suffers. These people will eventually receive meagre column inches on the back page of the First World’s daily news.

Meanwhile, racist/xenophobic sentiment is typically handed down from generation to generation. If one deliberately rears one’s very young impressionable children in an environment of overt bigotry — especially against other ethnicities and races — it is, in my opinion, a form of child abuse.

Not only does it fail to prepare children for the practical reality of an increasingly diverse and populous society and workplace, it also makes it so much less likely those children will be emotionally content with their multicultural surroundings.

Children reared into their adolescence and eventually young adulthood this way can often be angry yet not fully realise why, then they may feel left with little choice but to move to another part of the land, where their own ethnicity/race predominates, preferably overwhelmingly so.

Parents should do their young children a big favour and not pass down bigoted feelings and perceptions. Ironically, such rearing can make life much harder for one’s own children.

Frank Sterle Jr

Canada

fgsjr2013@gmail.com