To be White is to be Racist... Period

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2016/10/19/to-be-white-is-to-be-racist-period-a-high-school-teacher-told-his-class/

The lecture at the Norman, Okla., high school was intended to heal the racial divides, a student said.

The discussion’s premise: White people are racist.

All of them.

So did you read it, and do you agree or disagree?

I think I posted this to begin a discussion... an honest one if possible. The floor is yours.

I grew up the first ten years of my life seeing a de jure system of racial elevation of white people and disenfranchisement of black people. As a seventh grader I had a teacher who was in the reserves give me a half hour lecture of how Japanese and Vietnamese were sub human and had no value of life. I grew up watching world war II TV shows like Combat, or movies like the longest day where a White European nation killed people who were Jews, gypsies, and non white. I saw the KKK on TV who actively attacked people who believed in equality and equal protection for all citizens.

In this slant growing up white, I had the opinion instilled deeply into my perception of the world as a child that blacks and hispanics were less capable, and that White People were special and privileged. I went to high school with black and mexican students. I had a few friends who were incredibly talented and intelligent. They were black. One is now an actor who has struggled in his career, but at 64 is getting great roles and is quite successful now.

Yes, being white in the 1950s created a presumption which had to be actively countered by a person growing up in that era.

PkrBum wrote:I think I posted this to begin a discussion... an honest one if possible. The floor is yours.

C'mon, I asked you first.

For anyone who wants to learn about themselves.  Please don't post your results as they are easily manipulated.

Statically, only about seventeen percent of white Americans have little or no automatic preference to whites or blacks.  Only twelve percent show a slight to strong preference of blacks to whites.  This is part of the results and explained at the test.  It is free and you can choose to register or not.  It’s fun, but I have also seen people go off the handle which is why it comes with a warning.

It’s NATURAL to discriminate and be prejudiced; almost exclusively we all grew up with people like very much like ourselves.  It is natural to trust those people more than people who are not like us.  Obviously we also pick up racist attitudes and beliefs from our parents too.  We discriminate and use prejudice every day.  There is nothing wrong with those feelings.  It is what we learn and what is in someone’s heart, and what we DO with those feelings that matters.

If you are curious about yourself, take this test.  It is NOT based on questions which you could answer the way you THINK you should.  Actually it is fun.  You can chose from a number of different tests but they only take about 15 minutes.

This web site presents a method that demonstrates the conscious-unconscious divergences much more convincingly than has been possible with previous methods. This new method is called the Implicit Association Test or IAT for short.

WARNING!
It does carry this disclaimer:
I am aware of the possibility of encountering interpretations of my IAT test performance with which I may not agree. Knowing this, I wish to proceed.

Project Implicit

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/