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Prejudice is a Predator
… but if it bleeds, we can kill it
Anna: When the big man was killed, you must have wounded it. Its blood was on the leaves.
Dutch: If it bleeds, we can kill it.
The dialogue reference is from the 1987 film, Predator staring Arnold Schwarzenegger in the lead role as Dutch. In Predator, Dutch leads a team of special ops soldiers through a South American jungle in search of an enemy unlike any they had seen before. Unknown to them, the enemy (an alien life form) had the power to camouflage and make itself transparent. For the many of us 80s kids that watched this movie back in the day, the Predator appeared undefeatable, until the point in the movie where this single line of dialogue became the turning point in an otherwise impossible mission.
Prejudice, like the predator in the film appears the same way too. It is global, and so overwhelming and persistent that it is almost impossible to imagine a world without it despite John Lennon’s best attempt at making us see otherwise in his song “Imagine.” Prejudice starts when we are yet too young to understand it and intertwines itself into the very framework of our identities until both become one. It often comes first to us as a gift from nurture as invisible lines are drawn in the sand to separate us from them. My earliest recollection of my acculturation to…
