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My unpopular opinion is simple:
Racism and bigotry are learned at home. As an adult, keeping them is a choice.
Nobody is born hating another person because of race, religion, nationality, or background. A child enters the world curious. Children notice differences, but adults teach them what those differences are supposed to mean.
Sometimes the lesson is direct. A parent warns a child about “those people.” A relative tells a joke and everyone laughs. A family member speaks about another group as if its members are all dishonest, dangerous, lazy, or inferior.
Sometimes the lesson is quieter. It is in the voices that suddenly change when certain people walk by. It is in the neighborhoods children are taught to fear and the people they are discouraged from trusting. It is also in the silence of adults who hear something cruel and say nothing.
Home is a child’s first classroom, but it is not the only one.
I have seen this in ordinary moments. At a cash register or out on the sales floor, I have heard a parent turn to a child after an employee helped that child and ask, “What do you say?” The child answers, “Thank you.” Yet when the same employee helped the parent, the parent said nothing — no thank-you, right in front of the child.
That is how teaching really works. Children do not always do what parents tell them to do. They watch what parents do and learn to do the same. Words give the instruction, but example gives the lesson.
The same is true of respect — and prejudice. If children hear us demand courtesy from them while we treat other people as invisible or unworthy, they notice the contradiction. If they see us treat every person with basic respect, they learn that, too.
Learned at Home — and Everywhere Else
When I shared this opinion on Facebook, many people pushed back. They said prejudice is not always learned from parents. They argued that it can come from school, work, social media, personal experiences, or what they described as pattern recognition. Others said human beings naturally feel safer with people who seem familiar.
There may be some truth in those arguments. We learn from almost everything around us. A person can grow up in a respectful home and still absorb prejudice somewhere else. Another person can be raised
around bigotry and spend adulthood rejecting it.
That is why I keep returning to the second half of my statement: keeping it is a choice.
Wherever prejudice begins, adulthood brings responsibility. We can question what we were taught. We can examine whether a judgment is based on a person’s actual behavior or on a label we placed on an entire group. We can decide whether we are thinking for ourselves or simply repeating what we heard.
We cannot choose every influence from our childhood. We can choose what we pass on.
As human beings in today’s society, we also follow trends. One person says something, it starts trending, and before long it is everywhere. But upbringing still matters because a child rarely behaves very differently from the family around them. The strongest lessons are usually the ones we learned when we were little and growing up.
I know this from my own upbringing. I was constantly taught discipline, and I never heard my mother or father describe people as “that immigrant family,” “that Black family,” or “those rich people.” As adults, my siblings and I follow the same example. If someone says something derogatory or insulting to me, I judge that person as an individual — not as a representative of an entire race.
Travel Put Faces Where Labels Used to Be
Travel has a way of challenging our assumptions because it turns categories into people.
I have traveled throughout the United States from my home in Florida and visited many other countries. Along the way, I have met people whose language, food, customs, faith, and way of life were different from mine. Some conversations were brief — directions at a rest stop, a meal shared in a small town, a few words with a stranger on a trail. Others lasted longer and stayed with me.
It becomes harder to speak carelessly about “those people” after you have looked a person in the eye, heard their story, accepted their help, or watched them care for their family just as you care for yours.
Travel does not erase our differences. It teaches us that differences are not the same as dangers.
Before I learned French, I would ask a French friend, “I’m making tea. Would you like one?” My friend spoke English, but would answer, “If you want.” At first, I thought that sounded rude — as if my offer did not matter. After learning French, I understood. My friend was translating “Si tu veux” word for word. In French, it is a normal way of saying yes; in English, the literal words sounded dismissive. That small misunderstanding taught me how easily we judge people before we understand their language or culture. If we stop at the misunderstanding, we soon turn it into a label.
I have seen the opposite side of human nature while traveling. People who had very little themselves have helped me in many ways. Back home, I have also seen people at a register help someone who could not pay. Yet there are others who would criticize that person aloud and bring race into it. The difference was not race. It was the character of each person and the choice each person made in that moment. That personal moment matters because prejudice often survives in general statements. It becomes weaker when we remember an actual human being.
Travel Alone Does Not Cure Bigotry
Of course, simply visiting another place does not automatically make anyone open-minded. A person can travel around the world and notice only the things that confirm what they already believed. They can stay inside comfortable places, speak only to people like themselves, and return home with the same labels they carried when they left.
The journey changes us only when we allow it to.
We have to listen more than we lecture. We have to ask questions without assuming we already know the answers. We have to be willing to discover that a story we repeated for years was incomplete — or completely wrong.
That kind of honesty takes humility. It is easier to defend an old opinion than to admit we need to unlearn something.
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A Lesson from Michigan’s Election
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A recent example came from Michigan, where Abdul El-Sayed won election to the United States Senate. Before and after his victory, too many people seemed to react first to his name, his faith, and his family’s background. He was reduced to labels before many people bothered to learn who he was.
My curiosity got the better of me. I did some research, and what I found left me in awe.
El-Sayed graduated from the University of Michigan with highest distinction after studying biology and political science. He became a Rhodes Scholar and earned a doctorate in public health from Oxford. He then earned a medical degree from Columbia University and taught epidemiology there.
At 30, he was appointed to rebuild Detroit’s Health Department, becoming the youngest health officer of a major American city at the time. His work included lead testing in schools after the Flint water crisis and free eyeglasses for children who needed them.
He later directed health and human services for Wayne County, serving about 1.8 million residents. There, his work included wider access to life-saving Narcan, air-quality monitoring, and a medical-debt relief program that wiped out debts for many families.
You do not have to agree with El-Sayed’s politics. That is not the lesson. The lesson is to do the work before judging: read the record, examine what a person has actually done, and disagree honestly if you still disagree. A label is easy. Research takes effort.
Unlearning Is a Daily Practice
Unlearning bigotry does not happen because of one trip, one conversation, or one article. It happens through repeated choices:
- Judge people by their individual actions, not by the group they were born into.
- Question a stereotype before repeating it.
- Correct a cruel joke instead of laughing just to fit in.
- Teach children curiosity instead of fear.
- Listen to experiences that are different from your own.
- Admit when experience has taught you something your upbringing did not.
This is not about pretending every culture is the same or agreeing with everyone we meet. We can disagree with ideas, criticize harmful behavior, and protect our families without turning an entire group of people into an enemy.
Respect does not require agreement. It requires us to recognize another person’s humanity even when we disagree.
Teaching curiosity instead of fear matters because curiosity asks questions, while fear shuts them down. A curious child learns to ask, “Who is this person? What do I actually know? Is this story true?” A frightened child learns only to stay away.
When curiosity is missing, fear becomes easy to use. Some people take advantage of it through fearmongering: they exaggerate or invent a threat, blame an entire race, religion, or group, and then present themselves as the answer. The goal is not always to tell the truth. It is to gain attention, votes, money, power, or control.
That is another way racism can work. When someone knowingly spreads a false story about a group of people to frighten others and gain power, racism has become a tool of control.
For example, a false story spreads that families from one background are dangerous. If nobody checks it, parents repeat it, children absorb it, and those families begin to be treated as a threat. The person spreading the story gains influence because frightened people look to him for protection. The lie created the fear, and the fear gave him control.
This is why examples matter. They let us see the pattern step by step: first the label, then the fear, then the control. Curiosity interrupts that pattern because it asks for evidence before judgment.
It is sad that some grown adults, including older adults, believe these stories without questioning them. Many older adults grew up when research meant going to the library and reading books, so finding information took real effort. Today, information is freely available at our fingertips, yet too many people do not use it to check what they hear. Instead, they listen to whoever speaks with confidence, accept it without evidence, and take it to heart.
AI has made the problem even harder. With only a few words, someone can create a realistic video or an image that looks like a billboard, a headline, or a photograph and attach almost any nasty message to it. I have seen people share material like that as if it were genuine, without asking who made it or whether it ever happened. Guidance on how to check sources and recognize manipulated media is freely available, but many people still do not use it. Reading carefully takes effort, and for some people reading itself is genuinely difficult, which makes a dramatic picture or short video easier to accept than a written explanation. That is why a picture or video can no longer be treated as proof by itself.
The Person We Choose to Be
Every morning, we meet the person we chose to be.
Some people inherit prejudice and spend their lives defending it. Others inherit the same lessons and decide that the chain stops with them. That decision may be the most important journey a person ever takes — not across a state line or an ocean, but from assumption to understanding.
The same determination can break other family cycles. Imagine a person raised by parents who never attended college, in a family where the other children followed the familiar path and did not go either. Then one child says, “I am going to break this cycle,” and, through determination, becomes the first to attend college. Thousands of families have stories like that. A beginning can shape a person, but it does not have to decide the ending.
Happiness does not come from continually being angry about what we do not understand in another person. It comes from learning, accepting, and understanding — from replacing suspicion with knowledge and fear with curiosity. When we choose that path, it changes more than our own well-being. Imagine the future of the country we love if we elected people because of what they stand for — their character, their ideas, and what they have actually done — not because of their color or where they come from. Imagine communities where daily problems are met with understanding instead of suspicion, and disagreements are handled without turning people into enemies. That would not solve every problem overnight, but it would move us, step by step, toward more peaceful communities and a more peaceful world.
So here is my question for you:
Do you believe racism and bigotry are mainly learned at home, learned through life experiences, or both? And do you think travel can help people unlearn them?
Tell me in the comments — agree or disagree.
— Fowzer
#reflectiveexplorer #TravelIdeasUSA #HumanConnection #TravelReflections #UnpopularOpinion
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— FowzerThe Reflective Explorer
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