“I am reading Killer by Jonathan Kellerman, a mystery novel that started well. I hope I’m wrong about having guessed the ending. On page 141, I hit a paragraph that resonated with me, one I decided to blog.

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“In the old days, that resulted from being a gay detective when the department supposedly had none. It’s been years since his locker was stuffed with nasty porn and carved with swastikas. Nowadays the department has regulations that bar discrimination of anyone by anyone based on anything, anytime. What that does to internal attitude is anyone’s guess.”

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Eduhonesty: I believe this paragraph captures one source of the fear that has been erupting since the election. What is hiding below the surface? Already a few ugly reminders of the tenacity of prejudice have popped up to create anxiety. I am not sure how many of these racial incidents have been kicked off by the election and how many might have occurred anyway. We are looking for incidents now. We will find them.

However, I’d like to make my observation from years of teaching. The kids of today are not the kids of yesterday or one-hundred-years ago. Most of them abhor prejudice. Most of them have been educated by teachers who worked diligently to make sure classes were safe and kids respected each other. All that anti-bullying, Character Counts and Positive Behavioral Incentive System work has been paying off.

I also believe that if we bring the dregs of old attitudes out of the woodwork with new election results, America may be better off. You can’t fight the attitude hiding in the closet. But you can raise hell once that attitude comes out of the closet. I exploded at a class exactly twice in my teaching career and I’m sure the kids remember those events well. One occurred when almost no one tried the homework. The other occurred in response to an overtly racially-prejudiced remark. America must have zero tolerance for racism and prejudice.

But prejudice peeking out now is prejudice that can be addressed, prejudice that can be tackled. We are not the worse off if our closet racists start talking. We need them to talk. If we can find our racists, we can talk with them. We can help them learn tolerance and respect for alternative lifestyles, choices, and characteristics, differences that might incite prejudice if left to fester unaddressed.

Again, let’s look on the positive side. Honest expressions of anger and even bias leading to honest dialog between people who disagree could be one of the best results from this election. We have to begin talking. Too many scary ideas have been stuffed into lockers, hidden from view, as adults and children avoided conflict.

That conflict has come out into the open now. Let’s use this time to find out what others are thinking. Let’s listen to each other. Let’s get out of our echo chambers, the echo chambers that led to all those faulty polls and stunned reactions. We may encounter many teachable moments along the way.