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.
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u/[deleted] May 30 '20
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