You guys can use me as a case study. I currently don't consider myself racist at all. I find it kind of fascinating that it's so obvious I'm racist to most of you. Because of this, I can understand if I have a lot to learn.

Anyway, I get really scared when I see an Aryan looking group of people out at night. A wrong turn on a street full of them would scare me much more. I don't lock my doors when a non-white race walk by my car. I have 1 close black friend who I'd die for. I have other black acquaintances whose company I enjoy.

Once again, I just don't understand why I'm racist but I mean if you guys say so maybe I'm being shortsighted.

Irrational? Stupid? Maybe. But racist just doesn't make sense.

bump

http://deadspin.com/report-c-j-spill...-in-1194813119

Dude, we can only work with the information you give us. I think the implication most of us took away from your first post is something like: you had a bad experience with black people once, ergo, you are now afraid of taking a wrong turn lest you run into more unsupervised blacks.

Sounded racist (or probably more correctly, bigoted) to me but maybe you didn't give us enough detail. Maybe you're just scared of everything and everyone? Could be. We don't know. You write some stuff, it gets judged. You write more, maybe that changes the judgement in the end.

So far, you actually are lining up with something close to what tomdemaine was referencing, which is just how irrationally afraid of black people can you be before someone leaps to your defense and declares it well-considered, fair, and legitimate? "Like, okay, so, there's the REAL racists, like people who never met black people and are afraid of them, granted, but here, these black people, I got mugged by one once, and they lifted $20 off of me, so I'm scared of them all now, but this is super rational, I mean it's so rational I even have black friends and am scared of some white people, so like my fear of blacks is even more credible? Did I mention my black friend?!"

You did. You're still probably racist. I dunno though, maybe you've got some new cool information about this. Maybe you meant something else in your first post? Could be. But then we're still kind of playing that game tomdemaine is talking about, which is like, people navel-gazing about just how to frame their fears and dislikes of blacks without raising the ire of people? Seems like we're going there.

And TheNonPareil, before you feel like especially victimized, this is like every single thread on racism on the internet. There's one group of people who seem to understand what it is and why it's bad, and then there's other set of observers that seem some combination of surprised or bewildered to discover being afraid of a hooded black kid walking around your neighborhood at night isn't naturally stress-inducing, and then they want to throw out all these random anecdotal things about encounters with black people that are stressful for them and vet themselves for racism.

And that whole process seems to naturally self-select some people who believe some often contemptible stuff about black people, or Muslims, or Hispanics or whatever. Again, because the kind of people surprised to hear George Zimmerman shouldn't naturally be suspicious of Trayvon Martin have internalized a whole lot of associated beliefs and memes of a similarly racist nature. We had a legendary thread on the Politics forum that was kind of just like this wherein Fox News commentator Juan Williams expressed his fears that "Muslim garbed" people were on his plane and tons of people just thought fear of Muslims on planes is innate in humans, like Just The Way It is, and not the product of their own agency.

One of the common threads in general in like the grand conversation about race in America isn't to outright deny racism exists. Everyone agrees it does. The common thread seems to be to deny literally anyone's agency in fostering and perpetuating it. Using your story as an example, lots of people have taken figurative wrong turns in their lives and found mean people at the end of the street, but only some decided to store and index the thought as "black" instead of "mean" in their memories.

If you're willing to concede that you are both irrational and stupid, shouldn't you expect there to be things that don't make sense to you that are nevertheless true? (P.S. racists have this weird moral ranking where "racism" is like the worst character trait imaginable so we also see people jump through ****ing amazing hoops trying to prove that their hatred of black people might be stupid and irrational and reprehensible but DON'T YOU DARE CALL IT RACIST, so your eagerness here to be stupid or irrational is what we in the biz call a coincidental indicator)


DVaut is playing along a little more but I'll just cut to the chase. That you asked that perplexing brainteaser of a question about wrong turns was really all the information we need for this particular "case study".

You are not racist if you are afraid of being robbed at gun point a second time.

Dvaut and Fly, please explain how not wanting to be robbed at gunpoint makes one a racist? If you are still confident that being afraid of being robbed makes one a racist, how would either of you feel if the same event happened to you? What if the group that robbed this poster was comprised of white people? Would he still be a racist for not wanting to be robbed again?

I mean I guess I just don't know any better. I am ignorant about the subject in general. I really don't think I understand racism. If I was like alone at night or something, I definitely would be scared to walk by a hooded black guy on the street but I would be equally as fearful of a hooded white guy on the street. To me, I have this inherent view of what a "scary person" is. I didn't make a conscious decision to have this view, but it exists nonetheless.

I always thought racism meant you don't like someone because of their specific race. I don't not like anyone because of their race, but I would say I am biased against you if maybe you grew up in a bad neighborhood (poor?) and look sketchy. Idk, but I certainly don't see a black person in the grocery store and associate him with the group that robbed me. It's nothing even close to the same feeling. The robbery was probably the scariest moment in my life. And if I were to ever make a wrong turn again, and find myself in a situation where there are 10-15 people (black or white) I would be once again very scared. So yes, if it were 10-15 black people in a poorish neighborhood there is no doubt I would be very scared. But the same goes for 10-15 Aryans. Idk, I guess I still don't see how this constitutes racism. To me, it just means I am scared of bad people.

I have a hypothetical question for Dvaut and Fly. Imagine that you are on business trip in faraway land and it's 2 in the morning and you can't fall asleep so you decide to go out for an evening stroll. You brought with you on this trip a prized wrist watch that has been in your family for several generations. In which of these cities would you be more likely to leave the watch in the safe in your hotel room and which city would you bring it with you?
Tokyo or Johannesburg? Vienna or Monrovia? Seattle or Detroit?

what kind of moron would take a prized anything out for a random stroll at 2 in the morning in any city?

The only thing you should be fascinated with is the never ending obsession with racism the posters in this thread have.

If you went to a cupcake store with each poster in this thread you would literally be called a racist by probably 85% of them if you chose a white cupcake over a black cupcake.

I love the qualifier and how you equate just a group of black people to the ayran nation. I'd be just as scared walking into a group of white psychotic satan worshiping murderers or a group of white meth addicted rapists as a group of black people so how racist can I really be?

Ha...somebody doesn't want to answer the question and say Seattle.

Lol at going to Detroit for a business trip. Unless your business is stealing copper piping from abandoned homes, but the bubble already burst on that.

If he wasn't divisive he wouldn't have latched onto this injustice. Between the time I post this and the time you read this there will have been plenty of injustices nationwide.

Nobody outside that local community should have known who Trayvon Martin or George Zimmerman are.

Oh hey, a Race Realist.

Why does it make you so upset that some people didnt want to let this injustice stand and decided to try to so something about it?

This thread wasn't supposed to be subtle enough to actually catch any racists- but here we are. Way to racist you silly racists.

Round 2 of Racist 20 Questions is that they sincerely do think that everyone else is a racist piece of ****, like that the whiny PC libruls are just PRETENDING not to be terrified of black people, but deep down we know they are animals who are incapable of governing. So racists try to gotcha us into admitting that we also are racist, which somehow in their brain wraps around to making them not racist? (I notice that Moscow vs. Atlanta didn't make your hypothetical there! You're not smart!)

Yo, dip****s, everyone is afraid of getting robbed in ****ty neighborhoods. Even the black people(!!!!). That's what makes ****ty neighborhoods ****ty. One important difference here is that in nice neighborhoods, black people have to be afraid of the next George Zimmerman and the million petty Mike Bloombergs out there. You don't!

Silver, I know you're real stupid so I don't expect you to remember anything, but that **** was like last spring.

How the **** have you constructed a narrative where Obama "latched on" to this injustice and that's how people learned about it, like without Obama saying anything nobody would've known?

That's not how you learned about it. That's not how I learned about it.

A polite request to all the 1488 types here. Can you please not make it so obvious with your usernames? It's getting boring. In the old days you'd have to read a few posts/threads from someone to guess what their agenda/ideology is, but nowadays as soon as I see your username I can tell straight away what your comment will be. Sure, it makes it easier to put you on the ol' ignore list quickly, but you've taken the fun out of guessing. I would really appreciate it, and in return, I promise not to mate with any Aryan women any time soon.

Thank you!

Silver Man just tried to argue against the notion of news and information and learning. This country sure went to hell when we started knowing stuff and telling people about it.

Next time you know a thing - keep it to yourself before people get upset.

Also - since when is The Presidency a non partisan office discouraged from advocacy. The idea that Obama is supposed to hush up and avoid upsetting those people who are the very target of his message is so ****ing backwards. (And if course not how these clowns really feel - Obama's actions aren't wrong - his skin color is and rather than just admit that's how they feel instead they try to find fault in everything he's done)

To kinda bridge our last few threads together, that's like the absolute proof that the real issue here is that Silver_Man just does not want to hear anyone talking about racism.

Again, it's not like black people needed Obama talking about Trayvon to learn that they were second class citizens. "Oh ****, now that Obama has latched onto this Trayvon thing I suddenly remembered that my Dad went to segregated schools until 8th grade and I can't walk through the streets of New York without getting stop and frisked! Kill whitey!"

The racism is what divided us, Silver_Man doesn't care about **** being divisive. What he cares about is hearing about it, and Obama mentioning it lead Newt Gingrich to turn it into a partisan issue and suddenly Silver_Man couldn't check the Drudge report with seeing some **** about some uppity so-and-so whining about that Trayvon kid.

If one was truly racist, and say had prejudice towards black people, wouldn't that person be prejudiced towards ALL black people they meet?

And my next question is, if I am a racist because I am scared of people (which could be an irrational fear or a fear that my upbringing instilled upon me-right or wrong) that I deem scary (a bunch of black people on an unknown street), but have 0 prejudice towards any black person I encounter in the course of my normal life, then why is this so bad?

Society has made me believe that certain segregated communities are dangerous and I don't want to be the one to go strolling through all of them to prove the bias wrong.

No, cf. the rest of your post.