Vachon Imagined

I was first introduced to the reality of prejudice—and the ways it can live inside people—when I was seven years old.

My girlfriend Felicia was a Black girl I used to play with at the playground in her apartment complex. I remember being invited into her home and being welcomed by her family. They were kind to me. I never felt different because I was white, and they never treated me as though I was.

Maybe that was because we were children. Children are not meant to carry the weight of generations of pain, misunderstanding, and division. Whatever the reason, I remember feeling something I could not yet name. Looking back, I think it was the simple recognition of our shared humanity.

Years later, I still carry fears and assumptions that I did not consciously choose. They surface at unexpected moments. I cannot pretend they disappear simply because I leave South Carolina, read different books, or consider myself a thoughtful person. History does not vanish so easily. It leaves traces—in families, communities, memories, and in the stories we inherit before we are old enough to question them.

What I have learned is that prejudice is often less about what we know and more about what lives beneath our awareness. Sometimes it appears as fear. Sometimes as defensiveness. Sometimes as the instinct to silence a thought before it can be examined. We become afraid not only of what we might say, but of what we might discover about ourselves.

And so the question that continues to follow me is this: Am I reacting to you, or am I reacting to myself?

When I feel discomfort, suspicion, fear, or even offense, where does it truly begin? Is it something present in the other person, or is it something already living within me that I have not yet faced? And if I cannot immediately tell the difference, perhaps the more important question is not where it came from, but what I choose to do with it.

It is easy to locate prejudice, hatred, and fear in someone else. It is much harder to ask whether some part of what I see is being reflected back to me from within myself. We are often certain about the faults of others while remaining strangers to our own hearts.

For the person who seeks accountability, however, the distinction eventually becomes less important. Whether the spark originated in me or in you, I am still responsible for how I respond. I am responsible for what I cultivate within myself. I am responsible for whether I contribute to the world’s divisions or help heal them.

I cannot prove these things scientifically. I can only speak honestly about my own experience. I know what it feels like to enter a room carrying assumptions, and I know what it feels like to encounter someone carrying their own. We all carry wounds, histories, and inherited stories. Some are visible. Many are not.

Yet I have also seen something stronger than all of that.

Throughout history, people wiser and more influential than I am have pointed toward the same truth: what transforms us is not condemnation, but grace. Not avoidance, but honesty. Not winning a battle, but choosing compassion when conflict feels easier.

Perhaps this is one of the great spiritual tasks of being human: to move beyond the endless calculation of blame and into the deeper work of understanding. To look honestly at what arises within us without immediately projecting it outward. To recognize that every encounter offers an opportunity either to strengthen the walls of the self or to see through them.

No matter what another person stirs in us—whether comfort or discomfort, admiration or resentment—the answer remains the same. Love that persists through generations. Kindness offered without condition. Gentleness that enters a room and changes its atmosphere. Grace that interrupts the cycle of fear and retaliation.

These are not sentimental ideals. They are practical forces. They are what make civil life possible. They are what turn us away from selfishness, from division, and from the impulse toward war.

Those who persist in this work are rewarded in ways that cannot be measured by status, recognition, or approval. They discover a sanctuary within themselves that remains untouched by conflict. They find a freedom beyond the need to be right, beyond the need to condemn, beyond the need to fear.

And in that freedom, something remarkable happens. The stranger standing before them becomes less frightening because the stranger within has finally been met. What once appeared as an enemy becomes an invitation. What once appeared as division becomes an opportunity for understanding.

And there, beneath all our histories, our identities, our wounds, and our defenses, is the peace that has always been waiting for us—not at the end of the journey, but here, even now.