Sir, perhaps you should read my earliest posts. I grew up in the MS Delta...and I grew up racist. Every single white person I knew was racist.
Thing is, not a single one of us realized it. None of us recognized our racism for what it was. I only learned of it after traveling the world in the Navy, and then returning to see just how racist my whole family was. It was a shock.
I once attended an all-white "segregation academy" - they're still operational today. The year afterwards I went to a public school where out of the 480 students, maybe 20 of us were white...and that was the year that "Roots" first aired. Know what? I heard FAR less racist crap in the public school than in the all-white private school.
What I'm getting at is that I've learned far more about racism over the years than almost any other white I've known...
...and here's two valuable lessons, if you've got the courage to accept them:
1 - Religions and cultures can be wildly different, but the people - with all our incredible range of personalities - are all the same, all over the world. All populations have the same range of wants, needs, desires, emotions...and faults.
2 - In any given nation, there is *one* and only one socioeconomic race or ethnicity...and it is that race or ethnicity that *will* be the most racist, and will commit the most egregious acts of racism.
Think about that second rule. That's why the Han Chinese commit atrocities against the Uighurs and the Tibetans. That's why the 'normal' Japanese don't like the Ainu, the indigenous ethnicity of the northern island of Hokkaido. That's why the richer and more powerful Tutsi tribe tends to keep the less powerful (though more numerous) Hutu tribe under their control. That's why Hispanic Mexicans are sometimes cruel to indigenous Mexicans.
And that's why whites are the most racist and commit the most egregious acts of racism in America. We are socioeconomically dominant, and as is the case with the dominant race or ethnicity in every other nation on the planet, we are the most racist.
Guy, if I were a betting man, I'd wager quite a bit that you honestly believe that you are not racist, and that you harbor no malice towards Blacks.
Right? Right.
But I'd wager even more that you don't recognize your racism for what it is.
Again, I do not assume *any* malice on your part...but racism does not require malice. All racism requires are untoward assumptions about other races and ethnicities.
Think about it.
