Prejudice has got a bad name in the West. I think that’s unfair.
That’s because I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t prejudiced. I accept that it’s natural for a person to pre-judge other people.
The difference lies in the form of pre-judgment the quality of the bias, if you will.
Prejudice among ex-Soviets is as raw as it is rife. I have come to appreciate it.
In that spirit, I recently raised a vodka glass and damned a billion people. How could I have done otherwise?
The ex-Soviet woman who made the toast was celebrating a birthday and did a hearty imitation of a Chinese by putting her fingers to the outer corners of her eyes and tugging. Failure to clink glasses on my part would have spoiled the revelry. It would have been priggish.
And I was teetering on priggishness.
A moment before I was defending Muslims against the woman’s blanket assertion that all people born Islamic are no good. ‘Uncivilized, uncultured, aggressive,’ the woman said to the affirmative nods of the other ex-Soviets at the table.
Before that I was defending Ukrainian as a language worthy of cosmopolitan tongues. ‘Worthy of the barn yard!’ shot back a one-time Soviet film director.
‘You’re a democrat,’ the woman, a former teacher, told me several times.
I didn’t know what that meant. But I let it go, and let the whole inane conversation go by damning the Chinese. I have lived in Kyiv too long not to be used to the local drivel. It is primal, it can be ugly, but it is pure.
There is something captivating about hearing an educated ex-Soviet freely vent astounding ignorance and loathing of people and things at odds with his tiny mental universe. The lack of introspection and inhibition is marvelous.
I once asked an ex-Soviet friend why he paid so much for a fake document to overcome a bureaucratic knot and got back: ‘Because the official who sold it to me is a Jew!’ An acquaintance once explained to me why the Ukrainian economy is in the toilet: ‘Because Kuchma is a Jew!’
I know of a young Ukrainian Jewish girl who, after emigrating to the U.S., told her American boyfriend what she considered her new homeland’s greatest flaw. ‘It was President Lincoln, he ruined everything by freeing the blacks.’
Even the most tolerant ex-Soviets I know draw the line at Chechens, those congenital gangsters and terrorists. Every Chechen infant is beyond redemption.
My view of such nonsense might be less dispassionate if my complexion were darker. For one thing, I would have a lot less ex-Soviet friends. And I suppose being harassed at every street corner by the police would arouse in me a certain anti-Slavic prejudice.
It so happens that people in Ukraine, bar die-hard communists, like Americans. White ones, at least.
I’m comfortable with that fact.
Of course, there can be no denying the nastiness, and occasional thuggishness, that flows from the ex-Soviet brand of prejudice. Yet I haven’t come across many outright hate-mongers, perhaps because, in the light of day, cowardice usually gets the better of bigotry.
Comments made with alcohol on the breath, or simply under the breath, are not often given voice when money, prestige or criminal prosecution are on the line.
I know of only one exception to this general rule. Tolerance-mongers tend to be shameless in promoting their particular over-simplified view of people and
things. Their smugness is such that they can condemn, in the most generic of terms, the genuine attitudes of other people toward other people. Their self-righteousness is such that they cannot fathom their own mental bankruptcy. But I let it go, because I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t a hypocrite.
Bill Reynolds is the Post’s associate editor.
