Yes. Having that attitude is exactly what makes you racist.
And it’s exactly that attitude that’ll get him shot and mugged by 48 white guys, while his head’s in the sand.
Assuming that it was not a whoosh the comment illustrates how even the most overt racist does not believe they are such because it is the (distorted) reality they perceive.
If it wasn’t so sad it would be interesting.
I actually laughed to myself when I read it because it couldn’t have been more racist and even dehumanizing by the metaphor used on top of it all.
Maybe his post was rhetorical. This could stay fun and interesting…
geezer1:
What are some proclivities of peoples of Sicilian decent?
I am reminded of Ronald Reagan’s observations of the demographic that wanted everything and were willing to work for nothing, “He looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane, smells like Cheetah, and carries a sign that says, ‘Make Love, Not War’, and is incapable of doing neither” . . .
If Reagan actually said that, then Reagan was surely an asshole.
The quote “A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane and smells like Cheetah” is attributed to Reagan on various websites, although of course that’s no guarantee of veracity (that said, it sounds like something Reagan might say). The extended version cited above only pops up on one messageboard and is nastier in tone (and also contains a sex joke) so I’m less convinced. And the “the demographic that wanted everything and were willing to work for nothing” quip belongs entirely to geezer1.
Is it just general groupings, or how specific does it get? Do I need to be aware of the difference between Mexicans, El Salvadorians, Cubans, etc? I’ll probably be needing a list so I know for sure what to watch out for.
I’m an Asian guy in California, so no longer an oppressed minority, but thought I’d share a few thoughts from the other side of oppression. This is kind of ranty and slightly tangential (more about political correctness than % of racists), so I’ll spoiler it.
First to directly answer the OP with another anecdote. I live in a part of California where Asians were once kicked out en masse at risk of death. Times have changed. The only time someone in the area was overtly “racist” to me was when an old white stranger came up to me in a small-town laundromat, saddest look on his face like he was about to cry, and guiltily confessed for the exile his forefathers ordered. I told him I wasn’t even born yet (and looking at the timeline, neither was he!) but he hugged me and apologized profusely nonetheless. That’s some serious white guilt there.
And that upsets me because we haven’t really become race-blind, we’ve just become more race-averse. Even the “incredibly liberal, PC” folks. Instead of truly not caring about race, we’ve learned that we must pretend we don’t care about race and be super polite about it and avoid making it a factor in any decision-making process. Except, of course, we don’t do that… for many people, race still affects our thinking; we’ve just become much better at hiding it. And in the meantime, the problems are still there and they’re that much harder to discuss because everyone has to be politically correct all the time. Even in this thread, the subject has morphed from “How often are people racist to you?” to “What’s a politically correct way to say ‘non-white-person’?” and “Here’s this dude afraid of black people – let’s taunt the racist!” instead of examining societal factors that might’ve lead to such a belief, and how they might be changed. We’re more worried about appearing non-racist than in actually harmonizing racial relations.
Another example: Like the blogger you linked to, I’m an Asian-American in Northern California. We’re the wealthiest demographic in California, the second wealthiest in San Francisco. We have very high education rates, very low incarceration rates, etc. And because of laws initially created to protect black people, we now enjoy comparatively massive legal and societal protections by virtue of being a “minority”. We often get university and employment slots at the expense of whites, blacks and Latino folks, and we gentrify every other colored race out of the areas we inhabit. We get the benefits of whiteness without the guilt and baggage; the benefits of minority-ness without the oppression. And this Asian Privilege doesn’t get talked about much because we’re a “minority” after all, and to speak ill of us would be offensive and racist. So now yellow is the new white, and black people continue to suffer, and whites are slowly becoming an minority unto themselves, but there’s nobody to protect them because they’re automatically the oppressor and never the victim, even if it’s Asians pulling the strings.
The point isn’t that Asians suck, but that racial discussion is made unnecessarily difficult by political correctness. We teach our kids that race isn’t a real thing, that it’s just some outdated concept made obsolete by modern genetics, and meanwhile the social problems are still there and now people are afraid to acknowledge them because doing so would make them racist. The unspeakable reality is that we’re all racist, but it’s not a binary thing; we’re not racist or not, we’re racist in different ways. We don’t all want to lynch every dark-skinned man. Most people are fine being in the presence of other races. Many are fine working with or near them. But fewer are willing to cohabitate with them, as in the unspoken premise of the OP’s blog article. Fewer still are willing to date or intermarry with other races, despite what they say or believe about interracial coupling.
I think the same attitude can be seen in this thread. There’s a guy essentially saying “It’s unfortunate, but I think black people are going to hurt me.” Frankly, that’s not an unusual attitude in America. Yet we’re more eager to silence the apparent racist than to engage and maybe eventually understand him. It’s more important that we prove our own non-racism to the world instead of making the races comfortable with one another.
I’m not singling anyone out because it’s not a gripe against individuals but against societal attitudes. I’m just as guilty as anyone else: I might be a little uneasy around a lone black man in a dark alley, and I’m also ashamed to admit it. Because that’d make me racist. But I’m also aware of statistical realities. So what should I feel? Conflicted. But I don’t feel conflicted. I just feel scared, and then I feel like I need to mask it with a nice veneer of political correctness. That doesn’t really help anyone.
The black guy is still oppressed. The white guy is still scared. The Asian guy is still rich. And we can all pretend like we get along… or we can talk about the issues in the open and actually try to deal with them instead of shutting people up every time they present their honest feeling about other races.
Warning: May cause offensive evacuations.
Excellent post, Reply.
Very eloquent.
Having read the article and it’s comments, one thing that jumped out at me was that the excuse given was never “no because you’re black” (not that I would expect it to be) but “no because I forgot to update my calendar” or “no because someone else just rented the place”. Now, it may be that the author’s friend was being denied because he was black, but it may also be that the stated reason was accurate, i.e. the guy really did forget to update his calendar. 3 attempts is not much to make a statistical analysis on; even the author notes that’s he’s had “no because my in-laws are in town”.
That being said, even if the situation is as the author states (the friend really was turned down due to racism), 3 people does not a racist enclave make. As noted in the comments, the author did not try to book a room with anyone that turned his friend down to see if the room suddenly became available. Had he done that, time to name’n’shame, but it would have proved his point. As it is, he has an anecdote he’s ascribing to racism when it could just be bad luck.
And that I think is the critical thing. The author is making a blog post about racism - he’s going to include the parts of his story that make SF look like the national meeting of the KKK. He does NOT include the black friend’s interactions at the restaurant, the airport, the hotel he eventually stayed at, etc. I imagine all those actions were perfectly cordial.
I am not saying racism doesn’t exist. I’m saying this blog post is a perfect example of bad statistics used to make a point.
A related anecdote: last weekend I was in Memphis with my family, and I took my son to the local natural history museum (at the Pink Palace, which I highly recommend outside of my anecdote). The traveling exhibit there was on Race in America. I was hoping it was going to be more along the lines of “Here’s how we struggled for racial equality” and “here’s how different cultures celebrate various holidays”, but instead it was a lot of “Look how downtrodden black people are” and “don’t you feel guilty for being white”. :rolleyes: I understand racism from 50 or 100 years ago is still affecting society today, but I’d like to know when I’m going to stop getting grief over the actions of people that weren’t even my ancestors.
I must say, I have learned something about the world today.
Before this thread I had never heard of AirBnB.
Are you saying it’s not surprising because you acknowledge his race played a factor, or because of statistics? Because given that, as you said, Blacks likely make up less than 10% of Airbnb users, I think they odds of that happening 4 times to a Black guy in a fairly progressive city by coincidence are pretty slim. Certainly far less likely then racism being a factor in at least one of those cases.
Probably “thug.”
36 replies and thus far, not a single answer to the actual question.
To answer the OP’s question directly, I really don’t think anyone is totally non-racist, but saying that masks what I actually mean a bit. Society and intelligence are complicated, we can’t hold nuanced views of every person we meet. People use all sorts of heuristic methods to ease reasoning about all sorts of things, and one of these heuristics is grouping people into a bunch of fuzzy sets and using these generalities to help make decisions when interacting with them in everyday life.
“Race”, as a perceived social construct, is definitely one of these sets. But so are things like height, weight, gender, level of education, style of dress, hair color, personal interests, wealth, group of friends and all sorts of other things. In many cases these views can become problematic if they begin to dominate your approach to interaction with these groups, but in general everybody is necessarily going to make some inferences based on first-impressions of others. I think it’s unreasonable to really expect otherwise. That doesn’t mean it’s unreasonable to expect people to try to not let it get in the way, and it’s certainly reasonable to hope people give others the benefit of the doubt, but I think expecting people to truly, deep down think of every person as an individual is a bit of a stretch.
This doesn’t excuse stupid stuff, of course. You really shouldn’t be afraid of some black guy on a website looking for room and board stealing your stuff, barring some outside factor like obviously being a meth addict. But I do think that at the core level of “making inferences based on trivial things like skin color” racism can’t be totally beaten, but we can work to make the strength of those inferences in our decision making as minimal as possible. Though this requires societal shifts and changes in cultural stereotypes as much as it requires self-policing, because a lot of these inferences are instilled by popular culture and unfortunate truths even more than personal experience.
People frequently say that the human mind is built to recognize patterns, even if those patterns aren’t, a priori, sound. And I think that’s really the key here.
Strange that no one has brought the Japanese into this discussion – to what do you “cauliflowers” ascribe the obvious social and mental superiority of the Japanese ?
Oh, CYMK, shame on you for your feeble attempt to be disingenuous in an attempt to suggest that persons of Sicilian extraction are gay, and your very transparent attempt to use the word “descent” (i.e.: go down) in such a libelous thought – attitudes such as this are what we must fight if we are to achieve true absence of homophobia and racism . . .
CMYK, on the off chance that I misunderstood the intent of your post, I honestly and sincerely apologize, but it seems so, well, so blatant, that it is hard to imagine
that it was not intentional, but perhaps you aren’t as familiar with definitions as I would have thought . . .