JULY 20 ― Every single one of us has prejudice in us. We are all capable of being just as cruel as the people we point out and say are wrong. Knowing this, many of us try to identify those prejudices in ourselves and deal with them.

To this day, I have never forgotten something I did more than 10 years ago. When I’m critical of others I often remember this encounter with my own ugly xenophobia.

In the area of the US that I grew up in there is a lot of animosity towards people of Mexican descent. It really doesn’t matter what their legal status is in our country, or whether they were raised here or not, the general assumption is that they crossed the border illegally and they are here taking "our” jobs.

I have not been around the area for much of the last 10 years but from what I have heard little has changed and the prejudice towards those from Latin America, particularly Mexico, is still intense.

A little over 10 years ago I was, ironically, getting ready to move overseas to serve medically fragile children, a place where I would be the foreigner who didn’t know the language or the culture.

In the getting ready, I remember selling many of our belongings and having a Hispanic family come to the sale and I remember laughing because I charged them for something I was planning to give away for free. I remember even feeling good about taking advantage of the people that I had believed had been taking advantage of me and my country. 

This experience, these actions by me, horrify me to this day. It may have been something simple, but it was something I did to someone simply because of where they were from.

It wasn’t until I moved to China a few months later and for the first time in my life experienced discrimination because of my colour and nationality that I began to fully realise my own heart and attitudes when it came to other races or nationalities or even religions.

To be fair, over the last more than 10 years of travelling the world while I have faced and experienced discrimination due to my colour, often I am treated BETTER than I should be simply because of it.

This has been a source of great sadness to me, but it has also given me a perspective and a different way to view things than perhaps many people have.

The times when the discrimination has been negative has given me insight into the pain that other people of colour have experienced throughout history which many white Americans, or perhaps even white Europeans, are not able to fully understand.

To be discriminated against for something you have no control over, the colour of your skin, is something that is difficult to even put into words. It is because it is so unreasonable and feels so unfair which makes it even more difficult to bear. It is irrational and makes no sense when you are the one being discriminated against.

People of colour in my country are crying out about this pain, and many white people, people who would never consider themselves racist, are telling them that what they are experiencing isn’t true. I am really struggling to comprehend this.

I am a white woman married to a black man. I have seen racial intolerance and bigotry directed at him and at times, us. I would say my husband is the last one to point out racial injustice when it is directed at him, even though he feels it, and because we don’t live in the US full-time his experience is not exactly the same as those who are crying out in this country for justice.

We don’t have to understand everything that is happening from personal experience to acknowledge that people are hurting and we have a responsibility to stand with them in their hurt and demand justice with them. The hurt that is within the black community is NOT specifically due to the shootings of unarmed men, though this has been a catalyst for which this hurt has boiled to the surface and been expressed.

The hurt is there because of a longstanding history of inequality and racism and not being considered even human, much less as good as the white communities around them.

To not understand this is to not understand the struggle, the movement, or the hurt. We don’t have to fully understand the experience to understand the emotions and pain associated with the movement which includes a long and difficult history which has prevented the black community en masse from being able to move forward with equal capacity.

What we cannot do, when an experience is not our own, is tell someone else that they aren’t experiencing it.

In medicine we often ask people to rate their pain on a scale of 1-10. If two patients arrive in the emergency room with identical broken arms and one says their pain is a 9 and the other says their pain is a 4, I don’t get to tell the person feeling close to the worst pain in their life that they aren’t experiencing that level of pain and don’t need medication to reduce it. My job is to make them comfortable knowing that each person experiences the same situation differently.

The killing of unarmed black men in our country is not as simplistic as relating it to the pain scale we use in medicine, to do so would be to sound as if I am making the black community seem weak, I am not.

In fact, the black community in our nation has some of the strongest men and women with a depth of character and experience under their belts that many of us cannot even begin to fathom. I am simply making a comparison about how we cannot begin to say that someone isn’t experiencing something just because we have not.

The racial tensions and xenophobia in my country are not confined to a black lives matter hashtag. They continue to include discrimination of Hispanics, fear and intolerance of Muslims and those of Middle Eastern descent and many, many more.

All of us have the ability in us for hate and prejudice; but we also have the ability to say that we will stand up for justice and equality and peace and reject all forms of discrimination around us so that we can truly say we live in the "land of the free and the home of the brave.”

Black lives matter shouldn’t be merely a hashtag. It should be a given. But black lives mattering means more than a protest in an urban centre, it means accepting, facing, and humbling ourselves to deal with our own ugly history and showing that black lives matter, not just when a black brother is killed, but in every aspect of our society.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.