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In his book, The Coming Race - 1868, Lytton wrote: "Colonization is civilization ~ If we, the superior race, take the land of other races, THE ROOTS OF INTOLERANCESir Edward Lytton, co-founder of the British colony of British Columbia
we must utterly destroy the previous inhabitants."
Ignorance is the prime base from which intolerance grows. The best short and concise sentence that I've read to support such a statement is provided by Michael Levine in "Lessons at the Halfway Point":
"If you don't personally get to know people from other racial, religious or cultural groups, it’s very easy to believe ugly things about them and make them frightening in your mind." Reader's Digest (Canada Edition) November 1996, P. 48-9.
For an example of how ignorance motivates a person to be intolerant, I'll use an incident that happened to me in the 1960s. It indicates that the perpetrator had a deep belief in the demonized picture of First Nations Peoples. One cannot come to any other conclusion than that it was a result of Canadian society’s willful ignorance of First Nations cultures and white supremacist thinking. Caucasian colonial, and some modern propagandists did an extraordinary job dehumanizing our ancestors by the use of demonizing propaganda. The incident was among the most racially demeaning experiences I've ever encountered, and, related to my racial origins and human rights activities, I've encountered tons of them.
In the late 1960s I was hired as assistant paymaster by the female paymaster of a construction company. Over the course of the first week or so, from various locations around the office, I often caught her studying me out of the corner of her eye.
In due course, I was called into her office for a chat. This is how she began: "You’re an Indian, aren't you?" I responded: "Yes." She followed with this: "If I had known it when you applied I wouldn't have interviewed and hired you. However, you're here, and seem to know what your doing and are competent. Seeing that no one else seems to have caught on that you’re an Indian and objected to you being here I'll agree not to tell anyone and, providing you agree to keep it to yourself, I'll keep you on until such time as someone does make a fuss about it."
After the distasteful discussion I returned to my desk, where I sat and stewed for about ten minutes, then, although I was getting married that weekend, I returned to her office, walked in without knocking, and told her that she could shove the job up her unmentionable.
American Indian Genocide http://www.danielnpaul.com/AmericanIndiansGenocide.htmll