Prejudice

I grew up in Sackville, N.B., which had few non-whites, so I don't have much experience with the culture of racism.  I remember that in my Grade 2 class there was a brown-skinned boy a local minister had adopted when he was a missionary in Indonesia.  At my age, it didn't occur to me to think of him as non-white.

But there are different kinds of prejudice.  People in a small town sometimes look down on a nearby village because they want to see a community with a lower status than their own.  In Sackville's case, it was the village of Midgic.  People joked about how Midgic kids were bringing lice into the schools.  There was a disused airplane runway out in the country, and it got called Midgic Airport.

I remembered this later on when I was reading Ignazio Silone's novel Fontamara, about a backward village in fascist Italy whose water supply gets cut off.  There's a scene where an enraged mob from the village confronts the people in a neighbouring town.  At first the townsfolk are afraid of them, but then someone says "Don't let them in, they'll spread lice!" and they all laugh at the villagers, who go away humiliated.  I guess it's a worldwide sentiment.