Race Relations

[nex0s]

There's been a plethora of race related posts on my flist today.

Afer engaging briefly in theferrett's post, I found myself getting mildly irritated. I get irritated when I talk about a race-related incident and I keep getting told "well maybe it wasn't". Well, maybe it was

Comments

[lyonesse]

0. that's my favorite kind of cookie! WANTS!! :)

1. i'm quite certain that well-intentioned people can have racisms (and other badly formed thinking processes) internalized. i'm pretty sure that i have a measure of anti-semitism from my dad, even, because i think *his* attitudes towards jews (as a ww2 refugee) were kind of awful, and i developed some awful if antithetical ideas as a result.

2. but i think the best a person can do (and therefore i include all "well-intentioned" people in this) is to (a) try to become self-aware about presumptions in general, (b) try to understand other people's presumptions and bigotries without necessarily imputing bad intentions to them, and (c, the big one) try not to be a jerk to other people, overall, no matter what.

[ayalanya]

a well-intentioned white person, yes. my mother comes to mind - she doesn't have any problem with black people, no. she indicates this through careful use of "african-american" and if she's relating an interaction with someone she'll always mention if they weren't white. because, y'know, she talks to people who aren't white.

i guess i sort of understand - her parents were *really* racist, and she relates a story about dating...i think a guy from mexico. her cousins told her never to bring him home to the parents or even tell them about him. she might be trying, really loudly, to seperate herself from that. it's just...it still comes off as racist to me. also? having grown up with it, i'm a lot more conscious of skin color than i would like to be - such as, i have to fight the urge to be more deferential to black people than to white people, because it's what i always saw my mother doing.

[dr_memory]

I think you've got a dropped html tag obscuring some text there.

[nex0s]

Thanks!

N.

[la_directora]

I personally think that anyone who claims to have no racist ideas is just fooling themselves. We are all socially conditioned to distrust, and sometimes dislike or even hate, the "other". The difference is that "well intentioned" people actively work to combat those feelings. And, yeah, some people have fewer racist ideas than others. But I can't imagine someone can get through this life with NONE.

I think the people that say this assume it's bad to have the thoughts at all, and that's why they deny it. But sometimes we can't help our thoughts. It's how we turn them into actions that are the most important. At least that's what I think.

[bunnygoth]

Amen to that.