Contempt, I learned, is ordinary: a child teasing another child; a wife sarcastically interrupting her husband; a man thinking he is smarter and more sensitive than his neighbor. And it is the basis of our economic system in which a person’s labor provides profit for someone else. Contempt, Aesthetic Realism explains, is the cause of every injustice – from ethnic slurs and ridicule to the deadly forms of racism, bombs, war.  Ellen Reiss, Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, explains in the international periodical, The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, why in our failed economy, racism is on the rise: 

A person who is white looks at a person whose skin is darker and feels ‘I am better than you’ for one reason alone: people want to think well of themselves, and an easy way of seeming to think well of yourself is to make less of what is not you. Because contempt for a person looking different is always contempt for a world we dislike, racism can be more flagrant as people are made to worry about jobs and money. The big thing people have not known about racial prejudice is that it does not begin with race. It begins with the world itself, and how one sees the world. 

The purpose of Heather’s life – what she, as a tiny baby … was born for – as to respect the world, like it. That means, to feel things and people in all their difference from her were related to her too: they could add to her, make her more herself through wanting to know and value them. But within Heather and all of us there was and is another possibility: the false, hurtful dealing with sameness and difference which is contempt.

Heather heard someone use a crude, demeaning word about a person of another race. That word appealed to her. And the first time she used it … she had a thrill … of feeling that in one swift utterance she had put in its place not only a person but the world different from her … . The horrible way Heather saw black people continued because her desire to have contempt for a world not herself continued. Now she is 15. With some friends, she has spray-painted ugly words on a church attended by African-Americans in her town. 

     This fact, I am infinitely grateful to say, is true in my life. As a child, without knowing it, I hoped to be important by feeling superior to others and this desire made me unkind both to people I knew – like my sister, whose looks and manners were different from mine – and people I didn’t know. I deeply regret that I once called a little boy an ugly name because his skin looked different from mine. The memory of his pained face fills me with shame even after all these years. I don’t know how my life would have gone if my parents had not begun to study Aesthetic Realism, but I thank reality with all my heart that they did.  

     What my family had the honor to learn in lessons conducted by Eli Siegel, men, women and children are learning now in consultations in person and by telephone worldwide, from the faculty of the not-for-profit Aesthetic Realism Foundation in New York City: that our deepest desire is to like the world honestly, and every person is a rich opportunity to do this – new chance for self-respect.  

     In these magnificent sentences, Eli Siegel shows the exciting and beautiful relation of sameness and difference in people of all races: 

The very great technician, Nature, while working in a space of not more than 25 inches or so – that is, the human face – as come to have so many faces, feminine and masculine, child and adult. They are all different. We can assume that every Paleolithic face was different, also Neolithic, also Roman face, Chinese face, Greek face, Mesopotamian face; and just how it’s done is remarkable. Any person trying to imagine five hundred faces will find it very hard, but somehow Nature has been able to have a tremendous … inconceivable variety.

It will be found that black and white man have the same goodnesses, the same temptations, and can be criticized in the same way. The skin may be different, but the aorta is quite the same.

     And so I urge everyone to contact the not-for-profit Aesthetic Realism Foundation, at 141 Greene St., New York, NY 10012 (212) 777-4490; and see the website at www.AestheticRealism.org to learn how this can occur as soon as possible.  

*Note: Articles by Alice Bernstein on Aesthetic Realism as the knowledge that can end racism, as well as on the Aesthetic Realism explanation of what is really taking place in the economy, have appeared in newspapers nationwide. She and her husband, photographer David Bernstein, have the honor to study in classes taught by Ellen Reiss, the Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism.