How to Love People, Regardless of Race, Creed or Color

By Firman Brown

The aftereffect of the book is the enhanced capacity for diversity, which comes from examining and redefining key parts of popular history, language and perceptions learned since childhood.

 

Written with an impartial view of the past, this text shows how current ideas, perspectives, fears and realities came to be.  By examining common global human attitudes and emotions in specific survival situations over time, it shows how groups and individuals have become who they are.  The standard premises used to solve contemporary social problems have lacked insight.  In studying the terms that we use to define our world we find clarity by understanding the mindsets that created them.  The resulting new understanding can socially bring us into the 21st century.

 

This is my planet where I live with my people.

 

 

Thoughts From Our Readers:

”This book is clearly about why a divided America does not get along and how it can.”

-A. Cottingham,

Program Manager and
Teen Life Coach for Student Services; a character development and self-esteem program for resident teens in Northeast Ohio.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 13, 2007
• ISBN: 9781467082549

Firman Brown

He was born in 1956 and was taught by his parents to love everyone, no exceptions.  From 1957 to 1961 his family lived in a multi-ethnic neighborhood (a social engineering project) in Cleveland, Ohio.  It was there that he and his 7 siblings learned to see people as “people just like us from different cultures,” not races.    Since he was age 4 they attended the Church of Christ 3 to 5 days a week.   His family moved into what turned into an African American neighborhood 5 years after their arrival in 1961.  By sixteen he began seeing that most people had a problem loving people of other ethnic groups.  He relocated to attend California’s ethnically diverse Santa Monica High School and College, earning a business degree.  He continued his studies with Music, also becoming a certified computer programmer.  But his personal pursuit for answering human behavior questions led to an ongoing 20-year multidiscipline study that included History, Geography, Sociology, and Economics.   He currently lives with his family in southern California and has worked for a major multiethnic corporation for over 29 years.

Book preview

© 2007 Firman Brown. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 9/10/2007

ISBN: 978-1-4343-0710-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4670-8254-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2007902881

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents

To those who waded the stream between you and I

Foreword:

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Bibliography

About the Author

 To those who waded the stream between you and I

To my parents who love me: who wisely chose what part of their journey to share with me. To my siblings: who are both trailblazers and spiritual collaborators. To my wife & family: for sharing time, clarity and dreams. To my friends and acquaintances: for sharing enriching personal experiences and perspectives.

Foreword

Foreword:

When you lay down, you lay your body down; your body usually goes to sleep if tired. You are the life of your body, separate from your body. When you look in the mirror, you look at your body in the mirror. When you lay your body down and close your eyes to rest, you can look inward to your inner self and meditate. You can see yourself, just like in the mirror but instead of a body reflection, what you see is your spirit reflection. You hear your thoughts and ideas from your inner point of view, the voice of your soul.

This form of introspection is how we see what motivates our attitudes and emotions. With the language we learned as a child we have memories from our day, make plans for tomorrow and recall what we forgot to do today. We also have memories of our feelings about what happened today in our lives, about people we saw with our eyes and other outstanding experiences. We have memories of sadness and joy about people we’ve known since childhood one moment, then memories about people we just met in the next moment. This is because our inner self, exist in timelessness.

When looking into yourself, you may or may not feel good about the past choices you’ve made. You still have the option to live your life based on what you want to see and feel when you look at your true self (leads to happiness), or based on what you want others to see and think when they look at your physical body, car and home (leads to depression). Over time humans have struggled to survive in the physical world that we are attached to through our bodies, while slowly we are evolving in our awareness of our inner self. We are most conscious when we see our inner self and project the best of our thoughts, attitudes and emotions in the physical world. It is then that we honor ourselves and realize our true power.

Chapter 1: Ethnic Boundaries Failed To Budge Before WWII

Chapter 1

Ethnic Boundaries Failed To Budge Before WWII

One generation after World War II, America began being civilized to African Americans. The great crisis of Hitler’s Nazis marching on our England and our then called League of Nations, now the United Nations, meant that in 1939 we would supply arms to the other European countries to fight the Nazis. We had two years of badly needed economic growth (after our horrific Great Depression of 1929) before we would join the war using Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941 as the catalyst for fighting. The relatively small population of Japanese Americans had the largest amount of people put in internment camps.

This is possibly because they had not integrated into the American melting pot like the Italian Americans and (since colonial times) German Americans had and also because of their smaller population. We were at war and (socio/emotional) suspicion ran high. They, uniquely so, could be eliminated as a spy or terrorist threat. Regrettably, many true Japanese American families suffered. There was an unrecoverable measure of loss economically, emotionally and socially…even the influences of a generation were lost. A potential for fear and bitterness was created.

It then became the choice of each family and each individual for every generation following (in the booming 1950s) to choose optimism and faith or fear and bitterness. Those who had reasonable faith helped to create the climate of success experienced in the economic, social and emotional realms. Those who could not see their way to grow with reasonable faith hopefully helped in other ways. That choice is a classic human choice. It has been relived over and over by every ethnic group…by every tribe…by every family since our beginning. This is one of the ties that bind us all together in human experience.

Do we commit to the brotherhood of our ethnic group or do we commit to the brotherhood of our planet? Are people good or bad because of their geographical location? Are humans more capable of finding truth because of their physical characteristics? Is it true that the greatest factor shared by people who look like us, is fear like us? That after 40,000 years of evolution is it fear that motivates us the most as opposed to love or intelligence?

Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of African Americans lived in the South throughout the escalated torture after the Civil War from 1865 to 1945, as they had in year’s prior and oddly as they still do to this day. Those who survived had tolerated too much. Those who were killed could not tolerate enough, either by choice or by force. Very few were in between. Today, roughly 40% of the African American population doubts their acceptance by other Americans and does not expect to get the rights of American citizenship.

In our society, which is ethnically focused, people imagine other ethnic groups as one solid common-valued group. The American public gets that image from the media. People do not see other ethnic groups as individuals until they’ve met enough individuals to realize that individuality. Still, what the majority of African Americans over all else applaud is self-knowledge, self-mastery and the ability to function well in the worst circumstances.

This is a result of the pre-civil rights generational fear, or a survival tradition. Their self-comfort and confidence thrives around other African Americans and is rooted in their knowledge of survival skills and the African American counterculture. Naturally, they doubt other Americans acceptance of them (until they’ve met enough individuals to realize individuality) and doubt their ability to survive or thrive in mainstream society. Time will tell if they choose to live in the present or the past.

After World War II, America was the only country that made money from the war. We were a hungry country and we utilized our materials, our workforce, and our will. We developed technology and embraced creativity and made the most of our opportunity to grow. This time it came from a world war. Europe suffered great economic, emotional and social loss. World War II was very profitable