© Elliot Essman 2005. All rights reserved.

These pages contain the complete 2005 revised text of Building Yourself, public speaking trainer Elliot Essman's guide to living the successful life.

Elliot Essman Public Speaking Training
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• The chief object of education is not to learn things but to unlearn them. G.K. Chesterton (1874–1936)

Racial prejudice is the first thing we usually think of. It's better to admit we have it at least in some form, even if we'd never say or do anything nasty to a person from another ethnic group. Here you'll find positive prejudices as well as negative prejudices. They're two sides of the same coin. “If you're X then you must be Y” is the way people think. In my life I've encountered positive prejudice all the time, while I can count the nasty remarks I've heard about my background on one hand. But I hate the positive prejudice just as much as the negative. Each kind puts me in a box. They make me “a member of X group,” instead of myself.

In the other direction, I have always had difficulty relating to people who don't speak English properly (I'm talking about native speakers here). I simply cannot explain what a visceral reaction I have when I hear a double negative, for example. This is an extremely hard prejudice for me to eradicate, even though I know I am limiting myself with it, and selling other people short.

It's good to have sensibilities, to have taste, to have personal values. And this means we have some prejudices. What is important is to keep the prejudices within reasonable limits. If we don't, when we get older, what began as a question of personal taste can harden into an inflexible way of thinking. We each become islands, comfortable with a few set things and increasingly at odds with the rest of the world. We may feel superior, but what good does that do us?

Psychologists have done studies about prejudices. With just a little prompting, within a few hours they can train college students to unconsciously consider people with brown hair to be more trustworthy than blonds or to believe people with glasses are more intelligent. These experiments show how prejudices invade every aspect of your life. You'll never get rid of them all, because you won't recognize them all. But you can get at the major ones, the ones that can keep you back from the mainstream of human life. You do that by adhering carefully to the advice given by the preceding nine sections of this chapter on “Strange.” Remember that the word “strange” is always relative. It is my sincere hope that you'll come to use it much less frequently.