Very revealing post from another board I frequent.

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50. We've got to be carefully taught

When I was a child I thought if "Negroes" (as we called them) would just talk, dress, and act right they wouldn't have so many problems. Of course I meant if their parents just taught them to imitate "white" everyone would accept them. It was the same for "hillbillies", "poor white trash", Italians, "retards", gay persons, "Japs", Chinamen, Germans during the wars ( despite all my family having immigrated from Germany). Though I lived in a small town where almost everyone was poor and I never really knew any of "those people" there was always some group lower on the ladder than we were. Only a few years before in my town a cross was burned in front of the Catholic church and KuKluxKlan were elected to the Indiana State legislature.

After leaving that environment I saw the fallacy of such beliefs but I still couldn't understand why there was so much hate and discrimination. I was shocked when I moved east that "Portugees" and Puerto Ricans were looked down on and when I moved west American Indians were mostly seen as lazy alcoholics. And immigrant workers had no rights. And in Colorado the KuKluxKlan had also dominated the State legislature. When I went South I found out that Americans (many of whom are still fighting the Civil War) not only looked alike, they were brothers. And I wondered how the Troubles in Northern Island went on for so many terrible years when to me Catholics and Protestants look and act alike!

How did the Troubles finally decrease? Belfast is the most segregated city in the world. They built walls, just as Israel is doing, just as we are paying millions to do along the border between Mexico and the US. I am old now; I know walls never bring the kind of peace that changes hearts or minds. But I have hope that when we carefully teach our children to understand and embrace differences real peace and integrated communities will have a chance.