Aesthetic Realism - Opposition To Prejudice and Racism

Opposition To Prejudice and Racism

In one of his earliest essays, “The Equality of Man” (1923), Siegel criticized writers who were promoting eugenics, the theory that intelligence is inherited and some people belong to superior breeds or races, while others are born inferior. He argued that thus far in the history of the world, people have not had equal conditions of life, to bring out their potential abilities, and he asserted that if all men and women had “an equal chance to use all the powers they had at birth, they would be equal.”

According to Aesthetic Realism, racism and prejudice of all kinds begin with the human inclination towards contempt, “the addition to self through the lessening of something else.” Students of the philosophy assert that the racist attitude is not inevitable, but can change if one learns to recognize and criticize contempt. In public forums, individuals of diverse nationalities and cultural backgrounds have described how, through study of Aesthetic Realism, their racism and prejudice changed, not into mere “tolerance” but into a respectful desire to know and to see that the feelings of another are “as real, and as deep, as one’s own.”

On an international level, proponents advocated the study of contempt and good will, as described by Aesthetic Realism, as “The Only Answer to the Mideast Crisis,” in a 1990 advertisement on the op-ed page of the New York Times. To oppose prejudice they recommend that persons of nations who are in conflict “write a soliloquy of 500 words” describing the feelings of a person in the opposing land.

The UN commissioned filmmaker Ken Kimmelman, a consultant on the faculty of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, to make two anti-prejudice films: Asimbonanga, and Brushstrokes. Kimmelman credits Aesthetic Realism as his inspiration for these films, as well as his 1995 Emmy-award winning anti-prejudice public service film, The Heart Knows Better, based on, and including, a statement by Eli Siegel.

Another noted speaker on the subject of Aesthetic Realism and how it opposes prejudice and racism is Alice Bernstein, whose articles on the subject have been published in hundreds of papers throughout the country, including in her serialized column, “Alice Bernstein & Friends.” Mrs. Bernstein is the editor of The People of Clarendon County (Chicago: Third World Press, 2007), a book that includes a play by Ossie Davis re-discovered by Bernstein, together with historical documents, photographs, and essays about Aesthetic Realism, which she describes as "the education that can end racism." The late Ossie Davis, noted actor and civil rights activist, stated: “Alice Bernstein has dedicated her life to ending racism in this country. ... is writing an introduction based on what she has learned about people and history from Aesthetic Realism which she has studied for decades."

A production of The People of Clarendon County—a Play by Ossie Davis, & the Answer to Racism, presenting Aesthetic Realism as the educational method that explains and changes prejudice and racism, was staged in the Congressional Auditorium of the US Capitol Visitor Center in Washington, DC on October 21, 2009, with introductory remarks given by House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn.