Racism and Friendship.

[Joe Wordsworth]

Would you stop being friends with someone because they were racist? I had that sort of put to me as a topic, recently. A guy said he simply is not friends with racists or bigots, and I--of course--said "but assuming you didn't know, would you be when you found out" and they said they wouldn't. They don't want to encourage the behavior.

Whatchu think?

 

[Stella_Omega]

I decide case-by-case. There are many many aspects of a person, and I don't like to judge people in binary terms.

Bigotry looms large for me, as a personality aspect because it indicates a lack of imagination and empathy. I can assume that this lack will show up in other ways as well.

And I will not 'encourage' the attitude-- I'd challenge this person whenever their prejudices came to the fore.


So there's a question of whether they'd want to stay friends with me.

 

[cloudy]

I decide case-by-case. There are many many aspects of a person, and I don't like to judge people in binary terms.

Bigotry looms large for me, as a personality aspect because it indicates a lack of imagination and empathy. I can assume that this lack will show up in other ways as well.

And I will not 'encourage' the attitude-- I'd challenge this person whenever their prejudices came to the fore.


So there's a question of whether they'd want to stay friends with me.

ditto this. I couldn't have said it any better.

 

[Salvor-Hardon]

I want to be like Stella when I grow up.

And living in the south... I challenge some bigotted thoughts roughly once or twice a week, either on race, gender, or sexual orientation. I find that the really hard core bigots don't want to be my friend.

 

[impressive]

I'd drift (if I cared) or run (if I didn't) away. I'm quite prejudiced against bigots, and I make no apologies for it.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

I don't know any hardcore bigots, just some ignorant ones and they don't mean anything about by it.

 

[cloudy]

I don't know any hardcore bigots, just some ignorant ones and they don't mean anything about by it.

I'm not trying to start anything, but "ignorant" means that they don't know any better, and in this day and age, everyone certainly knows better.

 

[fifty5]

ditto this. I couldn't have said it any better.

You've had proposer and seconder, so I'll just vote for the motion.

I can only think of one exception - and I lust to get inside her knickers, so I'm not entirely rational here. In fact she's screwed up on so many fronts (step parental abuse intention, though she resisted any consummation) that I have to cut slack for her anyway. Plus she has some justification: drugs in my town are monopolised by one subsection of the immigrant population. However, she's an exception to prove the rule.

Acquaintances are sometimes different. If there's no real friendship issue, I have been known to cop out of making a challenge I think I won't win anyway - as long as it doesn't show up as action within the common area.

 

[cantdog]

I had a grandmother with some ideas about african Americans which were enough to make you cringe. She was born around 1910, and spent a couple years in the American southeast as a child of eleven to thirteen.

Her reactions reflected another era of the world, and since she'd moved home to Maine, she never had any further experiences with african Americans to revise her impressions. Maine is still one of the whitest states of the Union. Town she was living in, the only non-whites she could have met were native Americans who worked at the plant. Even her job at Bath Iron Works during the war wouldn't have exposed her to any people of color. No one could have even been slighted or offended!

She was otherwise a fine person, but it was embarrassing when she said that stuff. I'd protest, but the protestations of a child weigh little, and once I was grown she had already lost a good deal to Alzheimer's. It was she who brought my father's abuse to a stop, she and her husband. She could have believed in Martians, man.

Of course, that's not a friendship issue.

I worked with several racists, but they didn't let it affect the job. I got heated with them only rarely. They weren't friends, of course; we just had each others' lives in our hands. That's not necessarily the same thing. It helped me decide they wouldn't be friends, I suppose.

Friendship would likely not have happened anyway; they belonged to a different tribe. I seldom socialize much with co-workers; we always seem to have little in common.

I'll tell you what did happen, though. A friend from my youth, one I went to middle school with, and high school, developed, it turned out, a real negative attitude about poor people. He went out of his way to make life harder for anyone who was indigent or desperately poor. I not only ceased to see him socially, I actually told him off with some heat. It was likely his training that did it. He went to school to be a shit to poor people, got a certificate. Just doing his job. But I did drop him.

 

[impressive]

I had a grandmother with some ideas about african Americans which were enough to make you cringe. She was born around 1910, and spent a couple years in the American southeast as a child of eleven to thirteen.

Her reactions reflected another era of the world, and since she'd moved home to Maine, she never had any further experiences with african Americans to revise her impressions. Maine is still one of the whitest states of the Union. Town she was living in, the only non-whites she could have met were native Americans who worked at the plant. Even her job at Bath Iron Works during the war wouldn't have exposed her to any people of color. No one could have even been slighted or offended!

She was otherwise a fine person, but it was embarrassing when she said that stuff.

Sounds like my grandmother. Well, she didn't think any less of people of different races, but she grew up using terminology that most would find offensive. The area in which she grew up was overwhelmingly white. The ethic group that got the most hassle were the "WOPs"

She fell in love with one of them thar eye-talians and snuck off to marry him. They each went home afterward. Being good Catholics, they wanted to be allowed to have sex. Later, they married in the church and told their families they'd been married for years.

Anyway, grandma came to visit me after I got out of college. I picked her up at the bus terminal in DC. She'd never seen that many African Americans before. Hot summer day -- windows down -- and she's pointing and shouting ('cause her hearing was going, even back then), "Oh, there's a darkie! There's another one!" I wanted to crawl under the seat.

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

I'm not trying to start anything, but "ignorant" means that they don't know any better, and in this day and age, everyone certainly knows better.

I would disagree with that. I don't think everyone necessarily does.

 

[cloudy]

I would disagree with that. I don't think everyone necessarily does.

Disagree all you want *shrug* but with all the info that literally assaults people every second of every day, it'd be damn hard for you to make a case that anyone doesn't know better.

 

[cantdog]

I agree with Joe on this one. One can, actually, insulate oneself. Fundie Christians do it. There's enough TV and radio out there that a person could just immerse herself in it, and never see or hear anything that didn't come from one preacher or another.

One of the features of the information age is that niches exist.

Some people get all their news, all their health and beauty tips, you name it, within the bubble of Christian broadcasting and publishing.

 

[MagicaPractica]

I have a little problem with my brother's girlfriend in this respect. She's very nice in many ways but can be quite narrow minded. I gently disagree or challenge it when something comes up. Doesn't happen too often, but it does bother me. I try not to get outright pissed at her but take the gentle route and let her know I don't find it acceptable or agree.

 

[cantdog]

I have a little problem with my brother's girlfriend in this respect. She's very nice in many ways but can be quite narrow minded. I gently disagree or challenge it when something comes up. Doesn't happen too often, but it does bother me. I try not to get outright pissed at her but take the gentle route and let her know I don't find it acceptable or agree.

Family can be touchy.

 

[cloudy]

I agree with Joe on this one. One can, actually, insulate oneself. Fundie Christians do it. There's enough TV and radio out there that a person could just immerse herself in it, and never see or hear anything that didn't come from one preacher or another.

One of the features of the information age is that niches exist.

Some people get all their news, all their health and beauty tips, you name it, within the bubble of Christian broadcasting and publishing.

True, but nowhere in the bible does it say anything about skin color. Even those who get all their news, etc., from that type of source are still exposed daily, in thousands of different ways, to information that would preclude total ignorance.

 

[cantdog]

Yeah. Okay. But they could easily be homophobic, or have a thing against muslims or something.

There are people who can't read at all, functionally, and would be left only with what people say. I think it could happen. But it's a stretch, I agree.

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

Disagree all you want *shrug* but with all the info that literally assaults people every second of every day, it'd be damn hard for you to make a case that anyone doesn't know better.

My younger brother is eighteen, and a pretty naive kid--raised in a fairly sheltered manner most of his life by our mother. Dave is... well, not stupid or slow, but very "young". He's eighteen, he's about three grades behind where he's supposed to be and he's more like a fourteen year old kid--as social development goes.

Now, he's a sweet kid. Much warmer and friendlier than I ever was. And he's not handicapped, exactly, I mean he's creative and reads a lot and whatnot... but, he doesn't entirely realize he has some racist tendancies.

And have them, he does.

He's a little scared of black people, teens his age mostly. He has some opinions about the black community, and they lean towards it being cruel and mean. He's culturally very new to the South and its a bit of a change from sunny California. He's nice and polite to everyone, he's actually a little easy to pick on because of that, and has had a lot of time in his own head to mistake correlation with causation. The black kids at school who pick on him, who are loud and brash and laugh at him, aren't doing it because "black people do that"--but because rude people do that. In this case, the rude people happen to be black. But, its hard for him to distance himself from those things--he doesn't have a lot of perspective.

He was raised in a strongly Hispanic, Los Angeles, xenophobic home. I remember what it was like. It's a great series of predispositions, racisms, and "us and them" style habits between the Hispanic and other communities. He spent much of his life like that. Lots of it grew habitual.

Now, that's not to say he's evil or into lynchings or anything like that. But he's got some racist tendancies, and its due to an ignorance--a lack of objective experiences.

You can dismiss my disagreement, you can be cocksure of your general and blanketedly absolute answer... but you're wrong. Not everyone "knows better". Dave can learn better, and the right environments and experiences will help that--but right now, he doesn't. Many people are raised or live in environments that don't actually teach them better. The world is more diverse than you're describing.

..........

And I realize I don't talk about personal things often, certainly can't imagine the last time I ever mentioned anything about my family (if I ever have). But as often as you excuse yourself on the basis of "some things are personal" or "walk a mile in MY shoes"--I think I'm a little more justified in doing the same right now.

I think you're being grossly ignorant and awfully naive about how people are, how they develop, and what effect one's environment can have. And, truth be told, its because of my brother--whom I love and know to be a genuinely good person (much better than I am), who simply doesn't know better, and if we all followed your headstrong bullshit then we'd write people like him off as "they know better, so thus they must be horrible people" rather than taking time and understanding from outside the box maybe that people can change, maybe there are behaviors or beliefs that have reasons grounded in more than just a binary "they're good or bad people" and a little objectivity over time can help that.

I don't like having a personal reaction, I think my point stands regardless of it--but this kinda upset me.

 

[Stella_Omega]

We lived in Marietta GA for about 8 months, back in '89. My beloved most favorite couple were deep-south-type southerners. In talking to us one day, Marvin said the 'N' word. They both of them got very upset, very embarrassed, and assured us Yankees from California that they din't mean nothin by it, it was just how they talk.

I believed them, and let them both know that I would never hold it against them-- I had alternate evidence to go by. Along with their own teenage son, another boy was living with them, and had been living with them in an unofficial foster situation for some four or five years. He was black. And I never saw any preferential treatment between one boy and the other from the parents.

 

[cloudy]

And I realize I don't talk about personal things often, certainly can't imagine the last time I ever mentioned anything about my family (if I ever have). But as often as you excuse yourself on the basis of "some things are personal" or "walk a mile in MY shoes"--I think I'm a little more justified in doing the same right now.

I think you're being grossly ignorant and awfully naive about how people are, how they develop, and what effect one's environment can have. And, truth be told, its because of my brother--whom I love and know to be a genuinely good person (much better than I am), who simply doesn't know better, and if we'd all follow your headstrong bullshit than we'd write people like him off as "they should know better, so thus they must be horrible people" rather than taking time and understanding from outside the box maybe that people can change and a little objectivity over time can help that.

I don't like having a personal reaction, I think my point stands regardless of it--but this kinda upset me.

Think what you like of me, Joe...I honestly don't give a rat's ass.

Nowhere did I say your brother was a "horrible person," so take your little hissy fit, and shove it up your ass, mmkay?

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

Think what you like of me, Joe...I honestly don't give a rat's ass.

Nowhere did I say your brother was a "horrible person," so take your little hissy fit, and shove it up your ass, mmkay?

For someone who keeps making the point over and over that you don't care a bit about what I say, you waste an awful lot of time on it. Somehow, and this is absolutely goddamn amazing, you totally missed the point of that post.

How dense are you?

 

[cloudy]

For someone who keeps making the point over and over that you don't care a bit about what I say, you waste an awful lot of time on it. Somehow, and this is absolutely goddamn amazing, you totally missed the point of that post.

How dense are you?

How fucked up are you that you have to pick an argument every single time I post in the same thread you do?

I think you're a pretentious little fuck, but I'm not constantly picking a fight with you.

Grow up.

 

[fifty5]

True, but nowhere in the bible does it say anything about skin color.

No, dear one, but there is a lot about, "the chosen people" which, crudely speaking, is the archetype of racism.

Black and white are easy to distinguish, but they are rare. Most real situations seem to me to be coloured - in a wide variety of colours.

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

How fucked up are you that you have to pick an argument every single time I post in the same thread you do?

I think you're a pretentious little fuck, but I'm not constantly picking a fight with you.

Grow up.

So, that dense, then. And why are you still talking if you truly don't care? Do you not actually see the contradiction and irony there or are we back to the density?

If you weren't saying things that are disagreeable, maybe people wouldn't disagree.

 

[BOSTONFICTIONWRITER]

Wow!

How fucked up are you that you have to pick an argument every single time I post in the same thread you do?

I think you're a pretentious little fuck, but I'm not constantly picking a fight with you.

Grow up.

Gees, Cloudy, I think I'm in love. We speak the same, albeit foul language (lol).

By the way, is that really you in that AV?

Pow wow, er, I mean, Wow!