Racism: A Disease of the Mind (eBook)

Adeleke Adefioye (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2020 | 1. Auflage
236 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-0983-3669-1 (ISBN)

Infos

A narrative nonfiction. It's a plea against racism and tribalism and a call for a peaceful coexistence of all races.

Humanitarian, creative writer and data integration specialist, Adeleke Adefioye has always shown a genuine interest in human welfare. He is passionate about humanity, justice, equity and fairness. As a fresh college graduate serving his home country Nigeria, he won a Commendation Award as the most responsible and the most constructive corps member as well as a Merit Award as the most outstanding corps member. Shortly after college, he started his first career as a broadcaster with a state-owned television station where he worked as a talk show host, studio continuity announcer and newscaster. He later moved to the print media having discovered that he couldn't suppress his instinctive aptitude for writing. As a journalist, he wrote extensively on politics, information technology, business and energy (power/oil and gas). However, he changed career having successfully completed an MBA degree upon relocation to the United States of America. As an astute team player, he won the maiden edition of a firm-wide Slayer Award at the financial firm he currently works for. In 2020, Ade, as he is fondly called by friends and colleagues, was nominated to The National Society of Leadership and Success by the University of Phoenix. His inordinate desire is to see a world with improved standard of living for all humans and a world where all races and nationalities coexist peacefully.

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The primary aim of this book is to promote love, eradicate racial line, ensure a harmonious relationship between the police and the citizens, restore global peace and unite humans.

Textauszug

Chapter 4:
Getting It Wrong

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

– Plato

Illogical Reasoning: Mental Indolence Scenario

Brett is a thirty-year-old man. He is the first child of his parents. He grew up on the North Side of town with his two other siblings. Their dad is a practicing Christian. He did a good job instilling Christian values in their minds. Unfortunately, he left out one of the most important Christian values: love.

In addition to the Christian values, Brett’s dad also gave his kids a series of life lessons as they grew up. Social interaction was one of the series. Every now and then, he told them about people of a specific race to be avoided. According to him, people of the race in question were a societal menace whose favorite pastime is fomenting trouble and committing crime.

Expectedly, Brett and his siblings grew up with a fully developed mental image—a very subjective mental image—of a race maliciously presented to them by their dad. Every one of them had an individually pre-established specific behavioral pattern for people of this race. They eventually attributed this stereotype to everyone across the board as long as they were people of the race in question.

Long after leaving their parents’ home, Brett and his siblings still had special places in their hearts where this stereotype was safely preserved and continually nurtured. Brett eventually became a police officer. From a very tender age, he had always wanted to be a law enforcement agent.

While in high school, he would go to the police department to pick up the latest edition of the department’s monthly journal. He never missed any. It was one of the ways he kept himself abreast of all the activities of the local police officers. He read about new tactics in combating crime, crime watch, crime detection and periodic drills for officers. He paid rapt attention in the most focused manner to appointments, promotions, hierarchy, recruitments and administration columns of the journal. He read everything about the police department.

Whenever they had dinner on the family dinner table or out in their favorite restaurants, Brett hardly talked about any topic aside from law enforcement. His parents were always astonished by how much their “little boy” knew about the police department.

He liked the uniform, the branded patrol vehicles, their dispute resolution prowess, the respect they command in the community and the selfless service they offer. As a matter of fact, he liked everything about the police. So Brett’s parents and siblings were not, in any way, surprised that he ended up being a police officer. In fact, they would have been very surprised if he had chosen a different career.

Like Brett’s family, there is this other family on the other side of town who are people of the race stereotyped by Brett’s dad. The name of the first child of the family is Marvin.

Marvin is a 27-year-old man. He is the first child of a family of four. His dad, a retail worker, loves and provides for his family. He was always available while they were growing up. From baseball to basketball practice, from family outdoor events to indoor games, Marvin’s dad was always available. He taught all his kids their first lessons about life. One of those life lessons had to do with social interaction outside of the home.

He prepared Marvin’s mind as well as the minds of his other siblings for an inevitable reality. He didn’t mince words telling them how best to view certain people of a specific race as foes and adversaries. To Marvin and his siblings, dad was a symbol of authority. They believed him and began to see people of the race stereotyped by their dad as enemies. To them, people of this specific race were devilish and satanic, and as a result of this misguided perception, Marvin and his siblings always felt there were scores to settle with these “devilish and satanic” people.

From an adolescent age, Marvin always displayed a unique musical talent. He was everything his dad wasn’t in terms of attention to details, music collection and love for rhythm as well as a good ear for beats. At age fifteen, Marvin was already a multi-instrumentalist. He plays the guitar, flute, drums and piano. Amazingly, he thought himself how to play these musical instruments.

For hours, he would lock himself up in his room. By the time he unlocked the door, he would emerge with a pile of sheets of 8½ by 11 paper in his hand. Believe it or not, those pieces of paper would have on them well-arranged lyrics that had the potential of being in the top twenty albums on the billboard chart ranks. For real, Marvin was that good. His parents had noticed the potential in him and did the best they could to help preserve all his original works from when he was a child.

As days rolled into months and months into years, Marvin’s talent grew and matured. It was an amazing no-holds-barred kind of talent. In junior and senior high schools, Marvin scooped up various awards as he won all the organized talent shows in and outside of school. Before he finished high school, he had become a local champion and a celebrity of a sort with a long string of awards and accolades.

Shortly after school, Marvin left home in a determined bid to actualize his age-long ambition of becoming a successful recording artist. He moved to a city considered the nerve center of entertainment in every sense of the word. Armed with his demo tapes, he approached a couple of recording companies. He had prepared a list of his dream recording firms long before he left his hometown.

He had not gotten midway into his prepared list when he began to receive invitations for auditions. His first audition was an eye-opener to certain things that he never knew existed in the music industry. Marvin was specifically dazzled at the state-of-the-art equipment inside the studios. It wasn’t anything like the mini-studio exclusively set up for him in his parent’s basement, nor was it anything like the best studios he had visited within a 100-mile radius of the city he grew up in.

After the first bouts of auditions, Marvin got a great offer for an unbelievable record deal. He didn’t have to consult anyone to make a decision about the offer. It was an opportunity-of-a-lifetime kind of offer.

As soon as he signed on the dotted line, the first call he made was to his parents. With a modest pride, he told them about his achievements and how life-changing the deal he got would be. His parents had never been more proud of him. They literally hopped for excitement and congratulated him endlessly with a thunderous ovation. His mom in particular. She danced, danced and then danced until her husband requested to know what music she was dancing to. Apparently, there was no music playing anywhere in the house. It was a dance of joy and excitement, and doesn’t require any music for the most part.

This didn’t come as a surprise when he called to inform his parents. They’d always known that Marvin would be a huge success someday. They had no idea when it would happen, but they just knew it would happen someday and somehow.

In an attempt to celebrate the deal and obtain his parents’ blessings for the kick-off of his musical career, Marvin informed them of his plans to drive home the next day. Again, mom was the first to let Marvin know his plans to come for career kick-off blessings was a great idea. She didn’t hang up until she announced to her dear son that she would prepare him his favorite home-cooked meal.

For Marvin and his parents, that night was the longest night ever. Marvin stayed awake for the most part of the night, as he couldn’t wait to hug his parents and listen to them tell him how proud they were of him. In the same vein, the parents couldn’t wait to have him back home and look straight into the eyes of their once-little boy as his life was about to change.

Since Marvin’s parents couldn’t fall asleep out of excitement, they decided to use the opportunity for something else. They went straight to what used to be Marvin’s room. It was a makeshift room in the basement next to the home studio they had set up for him at the time he completed his elementary school education. They scrubbed, cleaned, dusted and made it habitable again. They replaced the sheets on the bed. They didn’t stop at Marvin’s old room; they also cleaned other parts of the house in readiness to host their soon-to-be-a-celebrity son.

Marvin hit the road soon after he woke up. Obviously, he’d had a long night and also had to contend with an almost-all-day drive. The excitement of about-to-change life was enough of an antidote to the stress that came with the trip. He made intermittent stops for gas and snacks—one of the habits he picked up from his dad.

Marvin’s dad would snack in between everything all day. He kept repositories of snacks everywhere. At home, at work, in the car. Everywhere. He would snack in between meals, tasks, phone calls—literally in between everything. Weird enough, every time he woke up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, he would snack on either nuts or cookies before going back to bed.

Like his dad, Marvin was also huge on snacks. Not as addicted as his dad, though. As he drove home, Marvin couldn’t get his mind off the fact that his life was about to change. For years, he had fantasized about the opportunity he just had. He was confident that his first album would no doubt be a huge commercial success. He began to mentally draw up a list of the things he would do for his...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 9.11.2020
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Partnerschaft / Sexualität
• ISBN-10: 1-0983-3669-0 / 1098336690
• ISBN-13: 978-1-0983-3669-1 / 9781098336691