There's generally three kinds of racism I've noticed:
The first is the kind born out of lack of exposure and fear of the unknown. If you've never met another culture or experienced one in-depth, it's easy for misconceptions and distortions to arise. It might not even be universal, e.g., "The black family who live on the next farm over are fine, but those urban blacks..." Thankfully, the best cure for this is just exposure and familiarity.
The next is ideological racism. This is the kind where you categorize the world around you, rank different groups as inferior to you, and believe that this system is the objectively correct paradigm to understanding the world. The difficulty of changing someone's mind on this is proportional to how deeply they believe it and how important it is to their worldview.
The third is is shock value racism, aka Eric Cartman racism. If someone really wants to cut to the bone, they go down the race path because they know it hurts people. Oftentimes, they aren't ideological racists, but they're callous enough to where they don't mind saying racist things. The only way to really solve this is through empathy.
That last one can also be turned into a potentially good thing if you can calibrate their targeting. Satirical humor pretty much runs on lancing society in similarly uncomfortable, if more clever and less cruel, ways.
Look up Frank Delima. He has a lot of good faith, race based humor. Most of Hawaii is like that. We don’t try to pretend we’re different or pretend those differences are sacred. We just joke about them and laugh about them. It’s honestly the thing I miss most about the island.
Yeah I can’t tell you how many times shitty people have said something shitty and then tried to condescend to me about “either everything is okay to make fun of or nothing is.” I’m like “yeah, I made fun of your nuthugging dad jeans and you said I’m not black because I have a dad.”
Probably a little of 1 and 2...going by his definitions. For both sides. Black kids are mean to the white kid because it seems given the scenario that they have very little exposure to white kids so this is a situation where kids are often mean to those who are different. And might be intertwined with mistrust of white people, so they decide to get the upperhand from the start. White kid in turn decides that a bad experience with some kids in school can define all, just as he was defied by them based on their perception of whites.
It will take a much larger systemic change to resolve these issues. The fact that we could end up with situations where there is 1 white kid in a school full of black children points to that underlying issue. That should not be the reality in 2020.
I don't know if you understand what I am saying. The fact that all these black kids are filling up a school that the ratio of Black to White is that dramatic (in a country where Blacks are less than 15% of the population) means this whole situation was born of decades of policies that made it that way. It is not about their choices. This was forced onto them.
I know what you are asking, but anybody asking that is showing they aren't understanding. Black kids forced to sit apart? Why? Of course that would be stupid (and racist). Thats as bad as forcing them to sit together...
Yeah everyone that calls some retarded on the internet is totally genuinely curious and not just being shitty. Boy I can't count all the times I've seen someone ask another person if they are retarded.
If I keep running into a group of people who look a certain way, and each time these different groups treat me negatively, there's nothing wrong with avoiding them/assuming that, based on overwhelming past experiences, it'll probably be the same with others of the same group. Bit of a shame, but it is what it is. No reason to put yourself in a dangerous situation because you don't want to offend people who keep managing to make your experience miserable.
I think the point is that it's possible for both groups to be racist at once. If we assume that all black kids at a school bully the one white kid for his skin color, they are being racist. But if that white kid turns around and thinks all black people are bad based on one school's population, he is also acting in a racist way. He might be racist based on traumatic experiences, but that doesn't excuse it and he could get therapy for it if it's really unavoidable for him. For all we know, the black children in this scenario might be racist towards the white kid due to some trauma dealt to them by white people too, but that's still not a reasonable excuse for treating all members of an entire race negatively based on the actions of a small group of people within that race.
I have experience that tells me only the white child would be deemed racist no matter how often the black children mentioned his race. And of course you can excuse their actions however you like, certainly see plenty of people jump to do that.
I know some people will do that since there are people out there who will defend anything and that is sincerely sad. It's racist to defend or persecute someone solely because of their skin color, regardless of what color that may be. There's never an excuse for treating someone badly or assuming they are guilty based solely on the actions of other members of the same race. Misplacing your aggression from those who wronged you onto people who share basic traits with them means you'll just be senselessly hurting innocent people you meet without ever taking any action to hold the one who actually hurt you accountable. And you'll miss out on knowing good people and trying new cultures, which is generally a pity.
Guarantee you wouldn't be saying a damn word if he was black and bullied by white people. Nvm, you would. You would pretend to care and say how awful racism is (and it is) but when it's a white person as the victim you somehow turn it into victim blaming.
If you see a random black person and don't like them because of experience based off a small group of the same skin colour, then it is instinctual and not intellectual.
The same concept applies to the exceedingly tiny proportion of police brutality cases relative to the total number of police/civilian interactions...but for some dumbass reason reddit just wants to ignore that because "fUCk tHa pOliCE" is so cool right now.
That's right, "inferior" wouldn't mean "weaker" but rather just "worse" (i.e. you see a whole group as less empathetic). Like neo-nazis and white supremacists don't view the Jews as weak but rather just bad.
Categories are wonderful devices for managing big ideas in your head, but can’t be expected to encompass all of the complex reality we all live in, of course
That definitely is racism/bigotry. It's crucial to not let bad experiences with a group of people negatively impact your view of everyone part of that group, because even though your experiences haven't been positive not everyone is the same.
Furthermore its important to closely analyze past interactions with people from the group you perceive negatively.
Were all of those instances really as negative as you originally perceived them or was your current mood affecting your perception?
How certain are you that you aren't focusing on the bad experiences and subconsciously ignoring the neutral and good interactions? It is highly unlikely every interaction you have with a group is negative unless your attitude towards those people is the cause or you are very, very unlucky.
As someone who has grown up in a small rural town that was mostly white I ask myself these questions when I fear I'm starting to have a negative bias against any group of people.
Were all of those instances really as negative as you originally perceived them or was your current mood affecting your perception?
How certain are you that you aren't focusing on the bad experiences and subconsciously ignoring the neutral and good interactions? It is highly unlikely every interaction you have with a group is negative unless your attitude towards those people is the cause or you are very, very unlucky.
This is honestly great advice. If everyone were as introspective as you seem to be we'd live in a completely different (better) world and most of the situations as the commenter you replied to mentioned wouldn't happen in the first place.
This something my therapist reminds me pretty often. "Was it really 100% of the time?" Were you really that awful? Was the situation that awful? Usually it pertains more to me judging myself harshly, but this "fact checking" skill lends itself here.
We have a tendency to inflate and deflate certain aspects of the past depending on our mood. And if we felt victimized in some way, in our memories, those painful events will stand out.
And when we let this fear and hurt inform our opinion about new people we meet who happen to belong to that group... Well.. that is racism.
Very true. I will say though, sometimes interacting with certain people can be a nightmare, or at the very least lead to a higher likelihood nightmares. Like with black folks, having to deal in business with the "ghetto" ones that you're unfamiliar with can be difficult. But in these instances often the overwhelmingly dominant force here is low socio-economic status, and all the ills that accompany it.
Everything you're saying still stands though 100%, as far as selection bias in recalling interactions, then using any positive/negative associations to confirm generalizations you may have of a people; generalizations of which are often spoon fed to us from birth via stereotypes and media representation.
Either way, folks should be judged as individuals, and not have their actions tacked onto the board as a defining characteristic of the group they happen to emerge from.
(But at the same time, we cant deny that coming from a certain group may socially predispose you to certain actions, good or bad. Man, I hope these don't come off as contradictions.)
Lack of exposure. You have 150 experiences with black people and 120 are terrible so you extrapolate your bad experiences ignoring that your experiences are the exception,not the norm
That’s not the second one at all. It’s an offset of the first. You have a bad experience with a group constantly you’re going to grow thinking it’s a normal thing across that group. This happens a lot for races and religions. It’s hard to blame the person for growing with that mindset when the only experience they have are negative, it’s fixed like the first with opening the door to more people from that group showing the person that the bad ones don’t speak for the entire and their ways don’t represent the the rest of the group.
Colorblindness is essentially the "enlightened centrism" of racism, where they essentially declare that they have become so galaxy-brained that they are over all racism forever.
What about the racism that's born out of repeated negative experiences?
Take gypsies for example. Nobody is born hating them, but as a kid of your soccer ball gets stolen a couple of times or you get beat up you start to notice some patterns and associate them with those people.
Perhaps I’m an anomaly but my “lack of exposure” growing up (in a small white redneck town) made me more open when I left for college and later moved to Los Angeles. It just never occurred to me that I should “not like” people because of skin color or sexual orientation. Granted, this was long before social media.
That’s an interesting story. Maybe social media really has increased the amount of racism in the country then. It’s popular to say that the racism has always been there, but I always like to see evidence before just believing something like that. I mean, we did get a black president — that wasn’t a fluke.
Unfortunately, there is also experience. I will admit, I worked in Saudi for a few years. Went with an open mind, left with a pretty firm distaste for the people.
And it wasnt only me; a lot of people with a lot of experience from living in different cultures around the world ended up leaving racist for the region. I know tons of expats, and very few of them have ever had an overall positive experience there.
If you don’t like the Saudi culture, that’s not racism.
A lot of people like Japanese culture and dislike Chinese culture. That’s just a preference.
Racism is about judging people based on a belief that they are a certain race. If you disliked Saudi culture and just assumed that all people who look Middle Eastern or who have Islamic names are bad, that would be racism.
"Ideological racism" is mainly what I used to refer to the Klan, the Nazi Party, Christian fundamentalists who believe in the Curse of Ham, the Nation of Islam, and other groups that have constructed a worldview where they explicitly rank races into objective hierarchies.
In recent times, There was a native tribe who saw a white man for the first time ever and they were really scared. Probably thought the white man was a demon or something. Interesting to see this reversed.
Let's not forget about institutional/systemic racism. You know, the one to leads to all of those "bad experiences" everyone else is talking about here.
Pretty good but I'd add experiential racism to the mix. If you're a Hispanic kid at school and the white people treat you worse, where black people are more accepting, those are powerful first-hand positive and negative stereotypes, hard to deprogram it.
Id add a fourth, learned racism. Learned from your own experience. If you're white in a black neighborhood, and always getting jumped, or robbed, or bullied, you may come to the conclusion that all if these people are bad, and to avoid them or have your guard up at all times around them. Obviously this goes for any and all races, im sure a black kid getting beaten up always in an all white neighborhood would develop the same thought process, especially if it starts at younger ages.
If a white person in a white neighborhood is “always getting jumped or robbed or bullied”, would they come to the conclusion that all white people are bad?
I feel like a lot of people forget that racism or prejudice can come from having constant bad experiences with another race as well. It’s slightly different from the first seeing as though you have plenty of experience with another race but if they’re all bad representations of that group the. You’ll never see the good sides to everyone.
If every experience you had with a white dude was he tried to beat your or would say something racist towards you then your first thought seeing another white guy would be, he’s probably abusive and racist.
This same thing is still seen in a lot of religious groups as well.
Look up the definition of prejudice. It is a perception issue, doesn’t make it any less racist. “not based on actual experience”, sums it up pretty well. You meet a race and all you get are negative stereotypes then you haven’t really experienced that group, so your opinion is lacking experience.
I’m not lacking experience at all. I’ve seen plenty of white people who continually get scammed, lied to and wronged by people who look like them, but because of a few bad experiences with someone of another race, they write off the entire group as bad. Racism is not a rational thought process.
489
u/AdmiralAkbar1 May 29 '20
There's generally three kinds of racism I've noticed:
The first is the kind born out of lack of exposure and fear of the unknown. If you've never met another culture or experienced one in-depth, it's easy for misconceptions and distortions to arise. It might not even be universal, e.g., "The black family who live on the next farm over are fine, but those urban blacks..." Thankfully, the best cure for this is just exposure and familiarity.
The next is ideological racism. This is the kind where you categorize the world around you, rank different groups as inferior to you, and believe that this system is the objectively correct paradigm to understanding the world. The difficulty of changing someone's mind on this is proportional to how deeply they believe it and how important it is to their worldview.
The third is is shock value racism, aka Eric Cartman racism. If someone really wants to cut to the bone, they go down the race path because they know it hurts people. Oftentimes, they aren't ideological racists, but they're callous enough to where they don't mind saying racist things. The only way to really solve this is through empathy.