yeah, I get what your saying, but we need to bring racism out in the open.
Sure, it’s a dirty word. But what better word do you have for this? Let’s not shy away from it because it a dirty word. If you act differently when you see other drivers, does that make you oliversmarch, who can’t honk cause their black or do you shake you head at “asian” drivers like meanoldlady? Nobody with a brain wants to think that they are racist, but…
Confront your prejudices. A lot of those prejudices are racial based, aren’t they?
When shopping at Wal-Mart, I used to always get in the shortest line at the checkouts. Then I started noticing something. Very often, if there was an African-American family in the line in front of me, they would need to pay with food stamps and the transaction would take MUCH longer. Surely, it wasn’t always the case… sometimes families that fit the profile would sail on through, and other times, families that don’t fit the profile would hold up the line with food stamps. BUT it is certainly quite common that AA + kids = foodstamps. I’d say > 75% at Wal-Mart.
So now I avoid those checkout lines. I am certainly racial profiling. Am I being racist? Or just practical?
What’s interesting to me is that in my case (and this is pretty much in the past - I really don’t register race as much as I used to), the black guy-white girl registered with me more than black girl/white guy.
So not just racism, but fear of competition (which is nonsense, because I’m married, and girls of all races would be available to me if I were single, not just white girls. But my lizard brain doesn’t reason well).
Black guy and white girl is also much more common than black girl and white guy, which makes me think that there’s some unconscious racism going on even among the cool kids.
What utopian affluent society do you live in that doesn’t have white trash and Walmarts with reasons to stock XXXL clothes?
But on the topic of stereotyping, it’s becoming less common in the age of Facebook that you have to avoid standing behind the old lady, because you know she’s going to pay by check and move items slowly.
Some forms of racism are more irritating to me. Some types, like being afraid of black people, or thinking all black people are bad, or having a negative gut reaction with blacks mixing with your kind, fly right under my radar. They’re so overtly wrong and bad that I just file them under general dumbassery and move on. It’s the more insidious racism, the sometimes seemingly benevolent kind, that is more likely to raise my hackles. I’m not trying to pick on olives, and am sure she’s a nice lady, but I complained about that as opposed to whatever else, because it personally bothers me more. Subtler types of viewing different races as “others” is still subversive, but much harder to stamp out.
You’re lying and yet you don’t know it.
Then you justify it by hiding behind the fact that you’re mixed. You and millions of others think the same way.
Mst comments in here shared this agreement that differences are what make the world go around, yet daily we’re trying to make everyone in the world exactly the same.
Ironic.
To me, that’s akin to the hundreds of dopers with IQs above 200.
People may exist who have no racial biases. There’s a study that shows that children with a specific form of mental retardation don’t show racial biases (though they do sexual ones). Most people, however, begin to show signs of it at a very early age. And it doesn’t have to be the ingroup against the outgroup. Black children, just like white children, can show signs of bias toward whites, thinking they are more attractive or smarter or better, wanting the white doll instead of the black doll because the black doll is ugly.
And this isn’t just in the US. I read an essay the other day by a black Bahamian teacher talking about her black students saying black people were dumber than whites.
So, while I can’t say that you have racial biases, I find it more than just very likely. Lots of people won’t acknowledge such things, which is what science is for.
To make the username you use look better to other people. You’re “anonymous” but that does not make your name disconnected from what others think of you, and does not mean that you (the general you) would be comfortable if others thought bad things about you. People in general are social and want to be liked and respected. Go into a “What is your IQ?” thread and see how many people claim to have IQs that don’t even exist. Why do they do it? Because they want others to respect them and think they are smart. Or, in some cases, they believe it.
When I say “won’t acknowledge these things,” I meant mostly within ourselves. People don’t want to think they have racial biases so they will believe they don’t. Even people who vigorously argue that some races are better than others will deny they have biases or that they are “racist.” There is what people want to believe about themselves and there is the truth. These two things are not automatically identical.
So, what do you have to gain from it? Feeling better about yourself and having people on a message board like or respect you more.
Lying about what? That he doesn’t have any negative visceral reaction to seeing people of any race? Or that he doesn’t have any visceral negative reaction to mixed race couples or mixed race kids? I find it hard to believe that someone has no racial biases of any kinds, but I don’t find that particular claim – of not having a negative gut reaction to any particular race or race mixing – hard to believe at all. Feel free to make yourself feel better about your own racism, but don’t kid yourself about such a non-controversial claim being such a clear lie. It isn’t.
Far from perfect. But not racist, as I understand it.
But that particular comment wasn’t about me, it was about the logic of your statement that everybody is racist and it was something that they should fix. How can that be? If racism is fixable, then surely some people would have fixed it, before you clued them in. Therefore it isn’t universal. Or do you think that you are the first to bring the Word?
Logically, either everyone is irredeemably racist–or not everybody is racist.
Obviously I subscribe to the second view. I do not believe that racism is innate, or unavoidable at birth. I do believe that most people learn some form of racism or other as they grow up, the specific nature and degree of this varying widely according to cultural and family contexts. And I believe that some people who learn racism are later successful at getting over it.
I’m going to pipe back up again, even though I thought I’d just stay away from this thread.
By the time I was 6 years old my parents’ circle of friends included people from: Scotland, England, Northern Ireland, India, South Africa, Canada, The USA, Poland, Fiji, and Australia just to name what I can recall off the top of my head.
I really probably didn’t even know what racism was; I never learned to be racist.