That by not being ridiculously overtly bigoted, they have actually interrogated and rejected their own bigotry. The former is basic and mostly relies on social conditioning. The latter requires reading history and people who are criticizing things with which you may identify and therefore take very personally. The latter is not taught in school and school does not provide the tools (outside of literacy) to do so, so it’s a difficult, painful, abd regrettably rare thing to see, usually requiring sone trauma to change.
Going through the process of discovering I was trans and surrounding myself with trans people really made me re-examine how little work I’d done on issues of race, among other things. So many of the little passive aggressive things I found myself getting annoyed at cis people doing, I also found myself doing to people of color. Nothing particularly awful, but definitely inconsiderate.
In this regard I’m probably an ignorant simpleton, so what would be an example of common behavior that people think is fine but is in fact inconsiderate or offensive to others?
100%! And it’s structurally ingrained, so it involves a very un-fun process of relearning certain habits that don’t feel that bad until you force doses of empathy on yourself, the latter of which I think is in the neighborhood of your experience. It means you have to criticize, forgive, and change yourself, which I personally don’t enjoy even though it’s so important.
I lived in Japan for a couple years. I was close-knit with a bunch of other foreigners. We all needed the community to find English speaking doctors or working out our internet bill etc. We were all discriminated against by Japanese and every meeting at a bar would eventuate into everyone telling a story about how they’d been discriminated that week.
Because of this environment, we had so much more in common with each other than with Japanese. It didn’t matter nationality, sex, gender, race. While I was in that community, I was truly blind to those things. then I returned to America and almost instantly I could feel the racial undertones again. It’s almost never a conscious decision. You’ll just see how class and race are so interlinked and how people treat others they consider beneath them. It’s not something I can put a finger on but I can feel it.
If a group of white people are hanging at a bar and a black person walks in, everybody is more aware of it than they otherwise would be. I visited an unknown bar and realized I was the only white person. I wasn’t treated poorly, just differently. This divide will take a couple generations to heal but I think America will get there.
That by not being ridiculously overtly bigoted, they have actually interrogated and rejected their own bigotry. The former is basic and mostly relies on social conditioning. The latter requires reading history and people who are criticizing things with which you may identify and therefore take very personally. The latter is not taught in school and school does not provide the tools (outside of literacy) to do so, so it’s a difficult, painful, abd regrettably rare thing to see, usually requiring sone trauma to change.
Going through the process of discovering I was trans and surrounding myself with trans people really made me re-examine how little work I’d done on issues of race, among other things. So many of the little passive aggressive things I found myself getting annoyed at cis people doing, I also found myself doing to people of color. Nothing particularly awful, but definitely inconsiderate.
In this regard I’m probably an ignorant simpleton, so what would be an example of common behavior that people think is fine but is in fact inconsiderate or offensive to others?
100%! And it’s structurally ingrained, so it involves a very un-fun process of relearning certain habits that don’t feel that bad until you force doses of empathy on yourself, the latter of which I think is in the neighborhood of your experience. It means you have to criticize, forgive, and change yourself, which I personally don’t enjoy even though it’s so important.
PS happy pride!
Pffffft maybe you, but I don’t have cognitive biases! Anchor pricing doesn’t work on me either because, raises nose, I know all about it.
I lived in Japan for a couple years. I was close-knit with a bunch of other foreigners. We all needed the community to find English speaking doctors or working out our internet bill etc. We were all discriminated against by Japanese and every meeting at a bar would eventuate into everyone telling a story about how they’d been discriminated that week.
Because of this environment, we had so much more in common with each other than with Japanese. It didn’t matter nationality, sex, gender, race. While I was in that community, I was truly blind to those things. then I returned to America and almost instantly I could feel the racial undertones again. It’s almost never a conscious decision. You’ll just see how class and race are so interlinked and how people treat others they consider beneath them. It’s not something I can put a finger on but I can feel it.
If a group of white people are hanging at a bar and a black person walks in, everybody is more aware of it than they otherwise would be. I visited an unknown bar and realized I was the only white person. I wasn’t treated poorly, just differently. This divide will take a couple generations to heal but I think America will get there.