It doesn’t take a genius to see that people in this world are at war with one another. Whether it’s because of skin color, religion, immigration status, or ethnicity, someone always seems to have a chip on their shoulder and a reason they believe justifies hatred toward a certain group. While racism can affect anyone, the reality is that some groups face far more cruelty than others, carrying a heavier burden. Contrary to popular belief, the problem is not just one group or one religion, and the solution isn’t either.
Take me, for example: a white and hispanic christian woman. I’m sure you’ve already made assumptions about me based on that one sentence alone. Prejudice is common.
Because I am married to an Indian Hindu man and have an Indian daughter, I’m able to see the differences between certain groups, religions, and races that many other white Americans may never fully understand.
The truth is, cruelty does not stop at one race, one faith, or one nationality. Immigrant communities all know what it feels like to be profiled, doubted, blamed, or treated as less than. Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, and Christian communities have all seen hatred spill into real life… into insults, exclusion, violence, and even attacks on places of worship. When people are driven by ignorance and fear, they do not just wound one group; they weaken the whole idea of human dignity.
We live in a time when misinformation spreads faster than truth. People hear a few stories, see a few headlines, watch a few reels, and suddenly believe they understand entire populations. Even I have fallen victim to this when I normally know better. But a handful of scenarios never define millions of people.
The fact remains: the actions of a few immigrants do not make all immigrants dangerous. The mistakes of a few people in one religion do not make the whole faith corrupt. The behavior of one race does not speak for every person who shares that skin tone. That has always been clear to me.
Without education, people keep clumping races, religions, and cultures together until prejudice starts to feel normal.
And the consequences are real. Hate does not disappear; it shows up when mosques are attacked, when Hindu temples are targeted, when churches are vandalized, and when communities are forced to live with fear because extremists have decided they are the enemy. It shows up when people assume a Black man is dangerous, when a Latino family is treated like they don’t belong based on the language they speak, when an Arab woman is stared at like a threat, or when an immigrant is blamed for everything wrong in society.
The older I get, the more I understand that wanting the violence in the world to stop is only human. But maturity and wisdom is seeing that this violence isn’t coming from just one source. Violence only breeds more violence, and peace cannot be built on the same pain that broke us in the first place.
People and their experiences are far more complex than the labels others place on them or the situations we see on social media.
As a married woman to an Indian Hindu man and a mother to an Indian daughter, this is not just an issue I can observe from a distance. It is personal. I know what it means to love across cultures and to see how quickly people can judge what they do not understand. How quickly they decide whether people like my husband “belong” or not, whether the clothes we wear are “too different,” or whether the food we eat is “gross.” That is why it matters to speak up.
The best way to fight division is not with more division, but with truth, empathy, education, and grace for the people who are still learning every day.
Because at the end of the day, no matter what we look like, where we come from, or what we believe, we all bleed red.
mamashonestjournal 