Jeremiah Carter is not born with prejudice against people who have green hair.  But from the time he is a tiny baby, Jeremiah is warned against them.  Don’t play with children with green hair.  Don’t talk to them.  Stay with your own kind.  You’re a bad boy, Jeremiah Carter, if you have anything to do with green-haired children.  Jeremiah learns not only from his parents’ words but also from tone of voice, facial expressions, and gestures.

As Jeremiah grows older, he learns that his parents and their friends and neighbors do not want people with green hair to attend his church, to live in his neighborhood, to go to his school, or playground, or camp. The adults in Jeremiah’s life, whom he imitates and on whom he depends, insists that the people with green hair stay in their place.  Everyone with whom little Jeremiah is acquainted believes that green-haired people should worship elsewhere, live elsewhere and be educated elsewhere.  As a child, Jeremiah very seldom even sees people with green hair. 

As to jobs, the family of little Jeremiah believes that people with green hair should do the heavy and the dirty work which people like Jeremiah’s parents need done but don’t want to do themselves.  The better jobs, in professions or businesses, should belong to people like Jeremiah’s mother and father.  If people with green hair do hold any such job, they should be restricted to working for their own kind, the people with green hair.

The people with green hair whom Jeremiah does encounter are those who do the heavy and the dirty jobs for his family.  Naturally, these folds do not happen to be the more able green-haired people.  Instead, they are the people who can obtain only this type of work.  They are not well educated.  They dress poorly.  They get dirty on the job.  So Jeremiah’s first actual childhood experience with the people with green hair helps persuade him that his family is right.  Green-haired people, he can plainly see, are inferior people.  They are uneducated, poor, dirty. 

The way things are, there can be almost no communication between Jeremiah and the people with green hair.   Jeremiah has no reliable way of telling what green-haired people are thinking.  True, he occasionally reads about people with green hair in his local newspaper.  But since conflict makes news, his newspaper usually reports on people with green hair who happen to get themselves in trouble with the law.  When the name of a person with green hair appears in the news, the local newspaper carefully places the words “green hair” after the individual’s name.  Jeremiah often comes away from his newspaper with the clear impression that too many green-haired people get themselves into difficult situations.   The conclusion that everything has conspired to teach him since infancy becomes confirmed.  People with green hair are people who do bad things.  Even the newspaper says so.

Since he has no way of communicating directly with people who have green hair, Jeremiah is an easy prey for wild rumors concerning “greenies,” as many contemptuously call them.  Jeremiah hears that people with green hair want to marry people with “superior” hair color and thus make everyone’s hair partly green.  Though people with green hair repeatedly deny this rumor and explain that all they want is to be treated like human beings, Jeremiah clings to the rumor and it strengthens his resolve to keep people with green hair in their place so that people like himself and his family will not be forced to live at the low level at which green haired people are forced to live.

Time moves along.  Jeremiah becomes a man.  He follows the patterns he has learned.  He marries Jill Patton, who has learned the same prejudices against people with green hair.  Eventually they become parents.  And what do they teach their children? “Don’t play with the children with green hair.  You are bad if you do.”

Jeremiah has learned to be prejudiced against people with green hair.   How did he get that way?  The total environment in which Jeremiah Carter lived encouraged prejudice against people with green hair.  He learned his prejudices from his parents, their friends and his neighbors.  He learned them from his limited observations.  He learned them from reading the newspaper.  He learned them from his separation from green haired people on his job.  He developed an unattractive picture in his mind, an ugly stereotype of people with green hair.  So, in turn, Jeremiah carried over the prejudices to his children.  Because they noticed and imitated their father’s feelings, Jeremiah and Jill’s children, too, became infected with the disease called prejudice.

Nothing ever broke the circle that closed Jeremiah Carter in with his prejudices against people with green hair.  Things are so arranged by his family that he found himself walled in by the circle almost from birth.  In turn, Jeremiah began to build a circle of prejudice around his own children from the time of birth.

1.      What groups might today have similar experiences to the green haired people?

2.      What groups in the past may have had similar experiences to the green haired people?

3.      Can you think of groups in other countries that may have the experience of the green-haired people?

4.      What is your personal reaction to this story?

5.      Have you ever felt that you personally or the ethnic group with which you identify, have been the green-haired people?  How did this effect you?

6.      Has your group been that of Jeremiah Carter?  How does that effect you?

7.      Other thoughts about this exercise?

8.      Now that your group has discussed this exercise, are there any new thoughts/perspectives that you gained?

9.      How do you thoughts remain similar/different from those of your classmates?

Reference:   

*This exercise was adapted from:

Hogan-Garcia, M. (2003).  The four skills of cultural diversity competence, 2^nd ed. Pacific Grove, CA:  Brooks/Cole-Thomson Learning,  59-61.**

** Hogan-Garcia adapted the exercise from:  Prejudiced-How do people get that way? William Van Til, pp. 10-12.  Reprinted by Hogan-Garcia with permission of Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, Tenth Printing, 1975.