But isn’t it also true whites overwhelmingly encounter other whites? If one lived in an area where he encountered whites and blacks the same number of times (and for the same duration), is the chance that he’s victimized by either group the same?
Well actually most murders occur among acquaintances. Stranger-danger homicide, which is what we’re discussing, is far rarer. So these comparisons are bunk: the quoted statistics match poorly to the application. But note that I was discussing using crude statistics in a boneheaded manner. A blinkered emphasis on race when navigating urban threats, such as they are, implies piss-poor risk assessment: other considerations are far more helpful. But some choose to protect their worldview more than their personal safety.
I don’t think there actually is blinkered emphasis, at least not in an exaggerated way… that is, I think very few people, even the one who are openly and proudly racist, would choose to cross the street to get out of the way of a middle aged black couple in their Sunday church best, if crossing the street meant they instead had to walk past a young white guy wearing extremely “urban” clothing and looking shifty.
I think the issue is more subtle than that… they’re walking down the street, see a young black guy wearing a hoody and other fear-inducing clothing:
(a) do they in fact cross the street
(b) when thinking about and recounting the incident, to what extent do they focus on race as being the triggering criterion?
What I’m saying is, by you mentioning that racists are impossible to “turn”, it’s just as closed-minded as saying black people are impossible to “make good”
I wrote what I wrote as an analogy, very similar to what the person in one of the first replies did with their “males commit more crimes” post. For some reason, you had an emotional reaction to it.
Is the OP non-racist now? Because I don’t think this bickering is fixing him. Not that I think anything could fix him, just as I don’t think he’s seriously asking to be fixed.
The OP might be interested in this:
“The Jane Elliott Study”
For some mysterious reason, sarcasm this study has never been publicized even though it has been known about for decades.
The OP, or at least the way it is phrased, highlights a problem that one often notices in these kinds of issues; that is a tendency by many people to make “racial” generalizations about pathologies they may observe in specific localized communities/populations. Of course this only tends to be done when one already has a negative predisposition towards that particular “race”. For example, no one ever says that there must be something wrong with Mediterranean people because of the mafia culture and high crime rate in Sicily.
Thus, it is easy to see that the question “should I be ‘racist’”, if taken literally, doesn’t follow from the OP’s statistics even if one accepts the faulty analysis and bad conclusions that people tend to make about blacks in Atlanta based on those stats.
As an example, the OP might be shocked to know that the people of Rwanda, despite their global repute, are actually some of the most polite and courteous and highly organized people in the world. In fact, it is their high level of social organization that made the genocide so efficient. The country also has a very low crime rate. Sierra Leone is another country which, despite its notorious civil war, had a pretty low crime rate both before and after the war. Even Nigeria, which has become notorious in recent times for its 419 and other criminal activities, had a rather low crime rate before it fell victim to cold war puppeteering and IMF shenanigans which destroyed any serious chances it had of making real economic progress and sorting out its much needed sense of nationhood.
My favorite example is that of Botswana, which has a stable democratic institution and low crime rate that many countries of Europe and America would envy. Yet, interestingly, this same country is right next to South Africa which has a notoriously high crime rate and makes perfect fodder for racist extrapolations about blacks.
I have no idea what you could possibly mean by the phrase “never been publicized.”
From Wikipedia:
It should also be noted that her efforts were not “a study,” but a class exercise with no controls or established protocols. He report of the event did inspire actual academic studies (with somewhat mixed results).
I have no criticism of her actions and I think that it provided interesting information about society and human reactions. It also did spur actual sociologists and psychologists to examine that aspect of human nature. However, your claim that it was “never publicized” simply makes no sense in the context of reality. If you mean that it has not been publicized recently, you might note that the original event occurred over 46 years ago.
You’ll have to forgive my tendency to be brash and impetuous at times. The woeful google results of the phrase “Jane Elliot study” - combined with the highly controversial nature of the experiment - gave me the impression that few people had ever heard of it. That phrase was simply copied and pasted from the article that I linked to. (“Jane Elliot exercise” doesn’t do much better either, though it gets better with “experiment”.)
On a more serious note, I had never heard of this ‘exercise’ myself (btw, what other “controls or established protocols” did she need in order to make her essential point?) until recently. I’m relieved to know that it did receive some publicity, though I share Jane’s disappointment that it had very little effect on society in general, thanks, in part to the fact that she happened to be teaching kids who were “too young” thereby providing a convenient excuse for people to use to condemn her for daring to ruffle their own feathers. Even though it was from a letter written by just one person, this quote is still very interesting: “How dare you try this cruel experiment out on white children.” So it is apparently okay to do it on black children. And it is in fact what has been done to them for centuries and still continuing.
What you said about other ‘studies’ showing “mixed results” is misleading, unless you are assuming that the basic purpose of it is to reduce racism (which would explain why you are giving undue importance to the nomenclature we give to the experiment). I didn’t see anything about other ‘studies’ showing different results in terms of the psychological and behavioral effects of positive/negative feedback and propaganda. It just says that there were “moderate” results in reducing racism and mixed opinions about the harmfulness vs benefits of such studies.
… any? At the very least, in order to conduct a study she would have had to select the pupils randomly. By the very nature of public schooling the kids assigned to one class or three classes or even an entire school cannot be a representative sample of anything except themselves.
I think the general consensus is that you should take each person individually, regardless of race or whatever. And then afford them the trust and respect that they deserve.
I’m not really sure what deciding to be racist means to the OP either.
I doubt anyone would seriously question the proposition that explicitly telling children they are better or worse than other children and subjecting some of them to systematic teacher-directed bullying will cause the students who are bullied and labeled “inferior” will cause them to perform worse than the students who are labelled as “better” and encouraged to do the bullying. What racists and apologists for racists will argue is that that doesn’t reflect how children of different races are treated. That’s why I think other, more famous experiments may be better for the point you’re trying to make.
I’m thinking of the one in which teachers were given a false list of students’ IQ scores (based on their locker numbers). Even though the students were not given the list and weren’t aware of it, and the teachers were presumably trying to teach all the students equally, the students nevertheless performed according to the unspoken expectations of the teachers, with students assigned a higher fake IQ doing better than students given a low fake IQ. Or even more on point, the famous experiment sited in Brown v. Board of Education in which black children identified white dolls as better, prettier, etc and wanted to play with those dolls preferentially compared with dolls that actually matched the children’s own race and skin. This despite the children obviously never having been told anything explicit about the dolls before.
Those experiments (and I admit I don’t know how scientifically rigorous either one was by today’s standards) demonstrate that even in the absence of overt, explicit discrimination, can respond to social cues related to how they are valued and behave accordingly, even to the point of internalizing negative ideas about their own race and identity and identifying with the socially dominant race.