When I was teaching at Atlantic Community College from l968 to l983, the American people were living through wrenching times and intense trials. The Civil Rights Movement based on non-violence had reached a highpoint with the peaceful March on Washington in 1963, and passage of The Civil Rights Act of l964 and Voting Rights Act of l965. However, in the same decade, deadly riots exploded in the Watts district of Los Angeles (1965), Detroit and Newark (1967) where the main victims of the burning cities were the black residents. Finally, 1968 witnessed the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy.

I approached the Dean of the college to talk about the need for a course on Race, Ethnicity, Prejudice and Discrimination. He asked me for a book to read and I gave him “The Concept of Race” by the anthropologist Ashley Montague. He read it on a plane trip to California and suggested on his return that I prepare a syllabus. In the years that followed, “The Individual and The Group” became my signature course with a second term on “Minority Groups.” Researching and teaching subjects that were exploding around us was an unbelievable experience for me and the students. The basic textbook for the course was “The Nature of Prejudice” by Gordon W. Allport, an eminent psychologist at Brandeis University.

Today, a rising anti-Islamic tide appears to be sweeping the country. Sparked by the proposal of a Muslim group to build a community center in the lower Manhattan area near Ground Zero, people in other parts of the country are questioning having mosques in their cities and neighborhoods. Only Utica, N.Y., appears to have welcomed the transformation of an abandoned church into a mosque and has seen it as a catalyst for building communal relations.

What are the root causes behind the anti-Muslim rhetoric, anger and protestations? And how does this connect to the latest Pew Research Center finding that 18 percent of Americans believe that President Barack Obama is a Muslim, up from 11 percent after his inauguration? As I consider these two very troubling questions, I keep returning to Gordon Allport’s definition of ethnic prejudice: “Ethnic prejudice is an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization. It may be felt or expressed. It may be directed toward a group as a whole, or toward an individual because he is a member of that group.” And I remember the importance of forces that foment prejudice and spread disinformation to serve their own needs and purposes.

Let’s look back at the aftermath of 9/11 when President George W. Bush emphasized that the terrorists who flew their planes into the World Trade Center and The Pentagon were not representative of all Muslims. He clearly identified those l9 men as terrorists and sought to protect Muslim Americans from any related suspicion and anger. He proclaimed Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda as the enemy, not the entire Muslim world. After Barack Obama became president, he gave a landmark speech in Cairo, reaching out to the Muslim world to establish improved ties and understanding.

What we have seen since Obama was elected is a segment of our society who do not accept the legitimacy of his presidency. The Birthers have created a myth that he was born in Kenya and no amount of documentation of his birth certificate from Honolulu can dislodge this inflexible belief. They are reinforced by Rush Limbaugh who sends his five million radio listeners a steady beat of “Imam Obama” as “America’s first Muslim president.” Another strident voice was added in late August, when the evangelist Franklin Graham told CNN’s John King, “I think the president’s problem is that he was born a Muslim. His father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father, like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother.” He then added, “The teaching of Islam is to hate the Jew, to hate the Christian, to kill them. Their goal is world domination.” There are no facts to support Graham’s statements about “seed,” but his name carries weight since he is Billy Graham’s son and CNN is considered a reputable cable news channel.

According to analysts of prejudice in our society, only about ten percent of our population qualify as “bigots” - completely fixed in their antipathy toward one or more groups. Others hold varying degrees of prejudice. In all cases, prejudice is an irrational phenomenon, closely tied to emotions. The essence of prejudice is that it is not open to logical argument or conflicting evidence. Facts have little effect. And the causes are complex. They can stem from psychological roots in the individual personality. But often, prejudice is transmitted through cultural conditioning, as the song from “South Pacific” told us:

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid of people whose eyes are oddly made.

And people whose skin is a different shade. You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late. Before you are six, or seven or eight.

To hate all the people your relatives hate. You’ve got to be carefully taught.

I used to tell an apocryphal story to my students at ACC: “There was a man who was convinced he was dead. He slept in a coffin. He never wanted to eat. He drove his family crazy with his insistence. Finally, his wife took him to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist asked the man, ‘Do dead people bleed?’ The man thought about the question and replied, ‘No. Dead people do not bleed.’ Then the psychiatrist took up one of the man’s fingers and pricked it with a needle. Blood formed on the tip. After a few moments, a huge smile spread on the man’s face as he exclaimed, ‘Oh, I get it. Dead people do bleed!’” People with a fixed belief, especially one that is prejudicial, are not open to facts, even those they witness with their own eyes. They change facts and rationalize in order to hold on to their inflexible belief.

We saw last summer during the Tea Party rallies, posters with President Obama portrayed as a “Lyin Kenyan” or white faced as the Joker in Batman. He was crudely drawn as Adolph Hitler and labeled a Nazi or a Socialist. Because he placed health care as a priority for the American people, they were categorically against it. Health Care became an epithet - Obamacare. Anger at him as our first black president was rampant. It was not hard to see that those people were in denial, a term psychologists use to describe people who will not accept reality. Many commentators avoided coming out and saying that racial prejudice was at the root of the signs, the slogans and the shouts to “Take back our country!” To those of us who have studied and taught what prejudice is ... there was no mystery to what we were seeing and how to describe it.

The scourge of racial and ethnic prejudice does not fit the values upon which this nation was founded and has grown. Many of us felt we had reached a turning point in our history, when Barack Obama was elected president. Let us make sure that political forces on the right - feeding on hard economic times - do not send out false messages to distort the truth, play on people’s fears and prejudices, and succeed in halting the progress we have made.

Joyce S. Anderson is the author of “Courage in High Heels,” “Flaw in the Tapestry,” “If Winter Comes” and “The Mermaids Singing.” She can be reached at JSAWrite@aol.com.