Let’s face it; racism in this country is a reality and a hideous evil. There is a great line from John Merrick, the Elephant Man, in the movie by the same title. Physically distorted, emotionally tormented because of his glaring differences, he tries to justify the cruelty of others by saying to a physician, “People are frightened by what they don’t understand.” Fear drives racism. It is a vicious fuel for all kinds of heartlessness. The simple truth is, far too many white people are terrified of black people. Terrified. And at the heart of that irrational fear is a gaping lack of understanding. There are too many of us who don’t want to understand others different from us. We’ve been white in this country so long we think the whole world is white, or should be. And we tremble with alarm that we just might someday no longer live in our dominating white world. We might then have to actually live along side of people who are a different color than us, have different cultural tr