Prejudice

Subject: Prejudice.

Prejudice is a funny thing. In some cases it's ok, I'm prejudiced towards my own family, perhaps to the County I grew up in. When I'm overseas living in a foreign country I look to find people who I can reminisce with and share my prejudice. In the dictionary of course it has the connotation of doing harm, having a jaundiced view or a preconception which has no basis in fact. Synonyms include bias, partisanship, favouritism. Antonyms include neutrality, impartiality, if I am influenced by or predisposed then I am prejudiced.
The trouble is as humans we make judgement by having and holding opinions, opinions which we gain as we grow up and which are influenced by the environment we grew up in. If the people in the environment had a prejudice we were likely to absorb it into our own conscience.

Yorkshire is the greatest cricketing county, the Dales the most beautiful, the hospitality the most open and the beer the best. Each is a prejudicial view and would be contended by many but my bias, my partisanship, my favouritism are the weft which holds my tribal affiliation together. This we might conclude is good prejudice much like there is good cholesterol it's a prejudice which may cause one to make false claims or even heaven forbid, go to war and a great deal of prejudicial  jingoism has in the past whipped up our young men to go and fight battles for which they had little cause. But the prejudice towards ones own kith and kin, be it ones own family or the townspeople you grew up with is a mark of your feeling of security towards and with these people, their habits, ways of speech and thought.
In the polyglot world which has been created for us by political or economic expediency the word prejudice takes on a whole new perspective since much of what we thought we knew is replaced by the complexity of multiculturalism. The constituents which made for our sense of commonality, a sort of leavening agent, which modifies and moulds society to make it feel as one which we know intimately, is lost. There are no norms any more other than we should 'love one another' because, in some minds, the alternative is to hate. There is no centre ground no agnostic stance, instead we must put on a brave face go the extra mile and try to make sense of so many conflicting views.
My statements are loaded with prejudice because I can't be expected to canvas everyone's views to seek consensus. The fact of doing so would be to invite distrust, that I have an agenda to destabilise by the act of asking since in the asking lays the implicit danger of not agreeing with the answers I receive.
In my blogs on Black Lives Matter I am accused of distortion because I dare to put across a different view. Not that Black Lives don't Matter but the supposition that police are instinctively brutal when they seek to control black people. Also In seeking to place on record  a 'white working class view' regarding black people not getting their fair share in employment for senior positions and therefore demanding preferential treatment.
In this case my prejudice comes from my experience of growing up in a town where there were few opportunities, given the poor education we received but because we all were in the same boat we made light of it. We didn't bemoan our birthright instead we paraded it on our bikes in our beloved Dales or climbing the rocks in the Lake-district. We looked beyond the city grime and its unfairness and marvelled at our good fortune. We had our detractors, the parents of the kids who came from the better off leafy suburbs or the daily schism which presented us at work when managerial positions were inevitably taken by better prepared, private school educated people . There were no marches or public breast beating against the entrenchment of Public School advantages which money brings to the students who attend those  hallowed institutes. Instead we embraced the freedoms which this country provided and thanked our lucky stars we had been born here, but then I suppose we were prejudiced.