Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

Mark Twain

I often hear nowadays, people being accused.

“He’s a racist.”

“She’s a racist.”

“Trump’s a racist.”

“So and so’s a racist.”

What I have yet to hear is: “I am a racist.”

So let me be the first.

I am a racist.

Yes.

I see the ugly thing, creeping around my soul like a roach in the kitchen. I squash it, but sometime later, there it is again.

I know there is a nest somewhere, eggs hatching, a source deep within me, hidden away where it’s easy to deny. There is where I’ll find the library of my false beliefs, the lies I tell myself over and over, so often they become grooves cut into my gray matter, like fissures in rock where the water runs down, cutting deeper and deeper, until fissures become swales, and swales become canyons.

When did the first racist raindrop fall? I don’t know. As a child, for sure. How many drops of poison does it take to pollute the vessel of pure water of which we are born? When, exactly, does a person become a racist, and who gets to decide?

I don’t know, but then, neither does anyone else.

I don’t believe in permanence. That’s one thing the Buddhists have taught me.

Everything changes.

We can become aware of that library of false beliefs, that nest of nasties that colors our perception of things, often for the worse. Awareness alone brings change. We can cut new grooves. My challenge as a human being is not to deny that I am a racist, for that would be as foolish as denying I have cancer when I really do. My challenge is, rather, to stop the cancer from metastasizing and poisoning the whole man.

I doubt I will ever fully eradicate my racism. Unfortunately, I suspect some vestige of it will always be with me. But what I can do, and what I do do, is expose myself to experiences that lessen my racism, those being travel, kind and honest conversation, and breaking bread with “the others” whenever I can. These experiences, like wind and rain, smooth rock and, over time, lay low even the highest mountains.

So when I hear the angry crowd shouting, “He’s a racist,” I want to ask:

“Who among you is not a racist? Stand up then and take a bow…for you are surely a god.”