Brigitte Bowers: Why can’t we stamp out the seeds of prejudice and bigotry?

I was born in 1958, a white daughter of blue-collar parents.

I heard racial epithets at school and home, though I knew the slurs said more about those who used them than they did about the people to whom they were directed.

I also was taught, somewhere along the way, that to be white was more desirable than to be brown or black. And then, in 1965, I met Mrs. Hansen, my second-grade teacher at Patton Elementary School in Alameda.

Mrs. Hansen was big and kind and dressed beautifully every day. She sometimes let me stay after school to help her set up for the next morning, and then we’d read together, me sitting on her lap like a favored grandchild.

One day, Mrs. Hansen gave the class a lesson in colors. I remember thinking it was an odd thing to do, since we were in the second grade and all of us had mastered colors in kindergarten. Still, Mrs. Hansen strode up and down the aisles of the classroom, flashing cards or pointing at objects and asking us to call out, in unison, their colors.

“What color is this triangle?” she asked, holding up a card.

“Blue,” we answered.

“The floor?”

“Green!”

“This apple?”

“Red!”

“My skin?”

“Black,” shouted everyone but me.

She stopped in her tracks. “Who said ‘white’?” she asked.

Everyone looked at me. It was a moment of profound humiliation. I had made a quick decision to spare my beloved teacher the agony of being told she was black and opted, on the fly, to tell her she was what I believed was a better color.

“What is my skin color?” she asked again, standing in front of me. I was too confused to answer. What was the correct reply? Of course her skin was black – a deep shade of black, undeniably black, not chocolate or brown – but I had picked up the idea that being black was a handicap. To tell my teacher she was black would be as unkind as to tell a kid in a wheelchair that he would never walk.

“White,” I repeated.

She leaned close to me and showed me her arm. “What color is this?” she asked.

“Black,” I said finally.

“That’s right,” she said. “I am black, and I’m glad I’m black. It’s a pretty color.”

She held up a circle.

“What color?” she asked.

“Purple,” we answered in unison.

I thought of Mrs. Hansen again last week. I was at a water polo tournament when I overheard a conversation between a man in his late 40s and a kid of about 15, a polo player who was resting in the stands between games. They were sitting behind me, and from their discussion I could tell the man was not the boy’s father. Maybe he was an uncle or a friend of the family. He quizzed the boy on his social life.

“I’ll bet you’ve got a girlfriend,” the man said. But the boy denied it.

So the man changed tack. “What are you taking?” he asked. The boy listed the usual classes – English, biology, freshman health and geography.

“Oh, and Spanish,” the boy said.

“Spanish?” the man asked.

“Yeah,” the kid said.

“Well, you know that you only need to learn one phrase in Spanish, don’t you?” the man asked.

The boy did not know this, though he might have been pleased to discover that learning a new language was going to be much easier than he had at first anticipated.

“Yeah,” the man went on, “all you need to know to say in Spanish is ‘Are you sure that’s your sister?’ ”

Then the man laughed at his own joke.

And that was when, after my initial revulsion, I thought of Mrs. Hansen. She would have made that man burn with shame.

The comment was offensive on so many levels – at once bigoted and misogynistic – but also chilling because it was such a crass thing to say to a nice kid.

I was so angry that I felt an almost irrepressible urge to punch the guy in the face, a reaction I do not frequently experience, and yet I pretended I had not heard what the man clearly intended everyone within earshot to hear.

He had thought himself clever, not boorish and mean, and a better person – someone like Mrs. Hansen – would have set him straight. But I did not want to sow the seeds of enmity within such an otherwise congenial group on that pleasant afternoon. I did not want to embarrass the boy who was taking Spanish.

I like to believe we have made some progress since my childhood, when white children – and children of darker colors, too – absorbed the lessons of bigotry that were fed to us as regularly as our breakfast cereal. Of course, there will always be people like the man who sat behind me at the tournament.

Or at least, that’s what we tell ourselves. We seem to agree that we will never conquer bigotry, not really, but I wonder why we accept this notion so readily. In a society that strives to eventually eradicate cancer, why do we believe that prejudice cannot also become, one day, entirely obsolete?

But here is a shred of hope: the boy at the water polo tournament did not laugh at the bigot’s joke. I think he might not have understood it. I think the joke was too archaic to hold meaning for a child of his generation.

And if that is so, then I can also conclude that the bigot is really a foreigner from the long-ago country of 1965, an alien completely out of place in the land of 2014.

This story was originally published October 12, 2014 at 1:17 PM with the headline "Brigitte Bowers: Why can’t we stamp out the seeds of prejudice and bigotry?."