There’s always an “other” in our minds, I feel, and it’s very difficult to free ourselves completely from negative feelings regarding the other. I don’t know if everyone can be called racist per se, but as some people have already mentioned, most people harbor some kind of prejudice against one or more groups of people. How you feel about your own prejudices, and how much you choose to act upon said prejudices is an entirely different matter.
Well, as a white adoptive mother of a black son, I’d say it’s pretty important to care something about skin color. Because being black is still a very different experience in America from being white (as you soon find out in a mixed-race family). Racism in different forms is still pretty prevalent. Security guards follow my son around stores sometimes, etc., until they realize he’s with me! It’s also important to have some sensitivity to the child’s experience of being a different race than his parents. We just don’t live in a color-blind society.
My son is 16 years old and I have a white daughter, age 15. One day I was sitting in my car in the grocery store parking lot and saw a couple of teenagers walking together across the lot. One was a black boy and one was a white girl. I flashed on what experiences they faced, with interracial dating, and whether the white girl was just trying to get a rise out of her parents… what the black kid’s parents thought about the girl, etc. These were just all quick flash kind of thoughts. Then it suddenly occurred to me that gee, they COULD be brother and sister, too! So I am not immune to pre-judging people, either.
I say yes, everyone is at least a little bit racist. At least in the US. In a society that groups people by race (as well as class, as well as gender), it is inevitable that people will see those outside their racial group as belonging to “the other”. Whenever that mental habit kicks in, it’s nigh impossible to be immune to forming prejudiced beliefs and leaning on (usually harmful) stereotypes.
To say someone is not racist but prejudiced makes little sense to me, by the way. It’s a distinction without a difference. Racism is manifested by racial prejudice. Racial prejudice would not exist without racism.
I don’t know if I’m ready–or even able, as I’m still waking up–to contribute anything to this thread that hasn’t already been stated, but **Anaamika’s ** post struck a chord with me.
I agree with others who’ve said that it depends on how one defines “racist,” but that’s not what I wanted to address re your post.
Just so you know, I’m not trying to pick on you or anything like that–honestly–I’m just really curious.
I *think * I get what you’re saying, but it doesn’t necessarily follow for me that, in **all ** situations, one would be able to treat Johnny and Jamie the same way, given that one feels differently about them based on race. (And by “differently,” I mean that one makes differing sets of assumptions about them–their character, their intelligence, their background, etc.). IOW, it seems to me that, in some situations at the very least, the impulse to differentiate in treatment based on one’s having different thoughts about each person would be be a difficult impulse to overcome, something that one might not always be successful in doing.
If you have a different point of view, I’d really be interested in hearing it.
Again, I’m not saying that you’re “bad”–I’m just trying to understand where you’re coming from.
It’s good that you caught and mentioned the swapping of the clothes in **Diogenes the Cynic’s ** example, monstro, 'cause I’ve always put myself in the same clothing as a White man when I tell people about the different treatement that I (sometimes, but not always) get as a Black man. (Not, mind you, DtC, that I thought you were trying to be slick or anything like that.)
Oh, and what **Hippy Hollow ** said.
If I hadn’t missed the editing time, I would’ve appended the following to my previous post:
At any rate, it doesn’t seem to me that, given even my human frailties, thinking differently about people of another race is a morally/ethically/whatever-term-you-prefer neutral thing to do. The possibility that feeling such-and-such way *might * be human doesn’t make it right, even if no one is necessarily harmed by it. What I mean is this: I feel miserable whenever I notice that I feel differently about someone of another race than I would my own (or, vice-versa), even if I never act differently towards that person.
I would. In that situation I’m not racist though. I just don’t trust groups of young guys. Which is prejudice of a different sort, but not classifiable under racist.
This is exactly the sort of idea your kind gets its jollies posting about.
Sailboat
I don’t even know what “racist” means anymore.
As I’ve spent more and more time around black people living in Baltimore for 11 years, I definitely have an assload of stereotypes.
But, most of these are things of the nature that
-
I wouldn’t expect a random black person to do them, but
-
if a person was doing them, I’d expect that person to be black.
But then, with all these things,
A) I think whites should be more like blacks on the issue
or
B) I don’t really have a preference
or
C) I think blacks should be more like the whites on the issue
But, to not have developed stereotypes is just to deny what you see every day. . .whether it’s about women/men, black/white, rich/poor. Is it racist? I don’t know. I don’t think it’s a very sophisticated definition of “racist” if it is.
I know I’m speaking in tremendous generalities here.
Exactly. Those are the people who feel so proud of themselves for having had the moral fortitude to marry someone from another race. It’s one of the more insidious forms of racism. “Look how brave I am to have overcome these barriers and married one of them!”
And the people who pretend that they “don’t think in those terms” when referring to people of another race/background are full of shit. EVERYONE thinks in those terms. I’m not saying everyone thinks about it every waking moment, just that one would have to be blindingly stupid to ignore the fact that some people have a different skin color/eye shape, whatever. The differences are cosmetic in nature (except for some very few medical distinctions) only, but they ARE there.
And to anyone who says “science says there is no such thing as ‘race’, we are all the same”, you know damn well what we mean. I’ve heard that one too many times.
Do you believe that everyone judges other people by hair color or hair length, or height or weight? Those are differences that are also visible on all people. The fact that people have distinguishing characteristics hardly makes an effective argument that everyone uses the identical distinguishing characteristics (that we happen to have tagged onto various ethnic groups) just because you may be familiar wirth splitters who make such judgments.
I am truly not racist whatsoever. I hate everyone equally.
I think it’s natural to have biases based on race, ethnicity, gender, orientation or any other superficial characteristic. We all have diferent experiences that color our views of people we percieve to be different from us. However, the important thing is to understand that those feelings are generally not rational and that people should be judged as individuals.
For example, I’m a fairly tolerant person, however to a certain extent my views are colored by the fact that people who were not white/European decent were either from somewhere else or a small minority of the people I happened to be around every day.
Rasict, in the classic hatred based on skin-color, no.
A little biased, perhaps, as in the example of walking down an alley at night? Maybe, but I’m more biased against the cultural meaning of the clothing than the color of the person wearing them. ANYBODY, white black asian or hispanic, wearing “thug” or “street” or “gangsta” clothing, is identifying themselves with a group that’s stereotypically is more violent and more prone to crime. So “rascist” no, but prejudiced against certain sub-cultures due to stereotypes (that in this case they seem to be proud of), yes.
I would say those differences are fairly important as well in terms of judgements (height and weight especially so).
My uncle is a police officer. We were discussing one day the political correctness of racial profiling.
He thought for the most part racial profiling is morally wrong. Having said that he also thought it would be stupid to ban it completely.
One of the prime examples he gave was that it sucks not being able to pull a car over when you spot three preppy white boys riding in a car with one tattered looking black man.
It sucks, because he knows from experience that almost always means the three preppy white boys are looking to score drugs and it’s the black man that’s going to score it for them. Not because he’s black. It’s because the whole picture itself just doesn’t look right.
(This done in an area of Dallas that is predominately black. So three preppy white boys alone already looks suspicious.)
I tend to agree with this. And yes I do feel slightly guilty about it but there you have it.
I agree with this. I had a non-trivial measure of satisfaction in watching the US hoops team lose in the World Championships and the Olympics. I guess you could call that a little racist… but it also might’ve reflected on the (seemingly abundant) thug-characters the NBA has. If all the players were like Tim Duncan, I may have been more patriotic.
In Hawaii, most of the humor is race-based, so I would say racism is strong here. Polack jokes become Portuguese (dumb stereotype), Mexican jokes become Filipino jokes (stereotypes on food and work), Jew jokes become Chinese jokes (stereotype on cheapness), Black jokes become Samoan/Hawaiian (crime/violence/unemployment stereotypes), etc. The interesting thing is, mainstream comedians and MCs refer to these jokes all the time. You can’t go to a Filipino party without a rooster crowing sound effect or a joke about eating black dogs.
A weekly had a special issue about saving money in Hawaii by being cheap. They called it the “Pake issue”, which means Chinese!
At least the haole jokes are the same as the mainland: we’re stuffy people who oppress others for money and don’t know how to have fun.
When Vonetta Flowers was in the two-person bobsled competition in the 2002 Winter Olympics, I told someone that I sat on my seat during the whole thing and that I jumped up and down when she won. He told me I was a racist because I wouldn’t have even noticed her if she had been white. And he was right.
I don’t know if this makes me racist (since everyone seems to have their own definition of that word), but it does make me racially biased.
I agree. “Race” is an artificial concept; some people are too young to have learned it, some people have never even heard of it. As well, I have trouble believing that every single person who has heard of the concept of race considers it important.
Am I racist ? Probably a little; America is immersed in the stupid concept, and it’s hard not to be contaminated a little.
Why? People tend to dress and look and act the part they want the world to see. If you’re in a poor black neighborhood and you see three well dressed white boys, the whiteness by itself might not be out of the ordinary (there are some poor white folk out there). The whiteness, plus the fact that they are wearing expensive, preppy Hollister clothes does seem out of place.
It’s not an artificial concept any more than being poor is. Race is simply a shared culture between individuals who share common genetic traits. A black man growing up in Harlem simply has different life experiences from a white man growing up in Connecticut.
The problem is that he also has different experiences from other black men growing up in Harlem. That’s why it’s easy but incorrect to use race as a shorthand to describe someone.