inspired from the above thread, I’ll go first:
I put a cardboard sign that said “Colored” on a bathroom at school when I was 15.
At about the same age I asked an asian man at the mall who was carrying a small dog, if he was getting take out.
Oh I also went to school on Halloween dressed as a nazi at about the same age. In my own defense; I had no interest in doing it, until I was told that I couldn’t do it; then I felt obliged to call the teacher’s bluff.
I presumed that the concept of race had any basis whatsoever until well into my thirties.
I called someone the same race as I am, an evolved ape. we are both dark skinned.
I genuinely don’t think I ever have, never quite understood it… why say something shitty about someone’s skin colour or culture?
Perhaps because growing up my friend group as a child and teen consisted of a young black lad called Solomon, a pakistani lad called Kishan, a Vietnamese kid called Nam and 2x fellow white lads… so it was just normal.
But in my younger years, I was xenophobic towards Germans.
My grandad was my hero and had served in the BEF in WW2 and struggled for years after with shell shock and survivors guilt.
I hated Germans for a very long time.
Then I worked with one lad caller Nikolas who was brilliant and we had so much in common, since which I’ve visited Germany on occasions and have obviously moved on.
I still feel silly about hating them to this day, it’s all very daft.
I just did that stuff to be mean to people, it is like the lowest hanging fruit. When I was younger, I was mad at the world for being born, and was getting some payback the laziest/easiest way possible.
a lot of human beings find it annoying when other human beings look and act different from the people they grew up with. what better way to “kick them out of the tribe” than by coming up with slurs related to what they look, act, or speak like?
I have my own “conjecture”:
I’m of the highly uneducated opinion that racism is a form of the McNamara fallacy. In that humans tend to unconsciously over prioritize what they can count/see/measure in their decision making process. And the easiest thing to measure about a human is typically the color of their skin (it can be done at long range more or less instantly by just looking at them).
I once caught a peer/friend of mine (not a math slouch) trying to find a function to would match the shape of the DOW(big stock market), with the goal of seeing where that function goes in the future (to bet on the stock market). I managed to jar him back to his senses. He was massively over prioritizing what he could measure (the past), because he can’t measure (or even know what to measure) to know the future…The point is that even he was vulnerable to this effect in a field he knows very well. We all are, on any subject.
I wouldn’t make too much of adolescent oppositional/defiant behaviors. Not everyone had them, or at least not much, but it’s not rare either. If it’s a phase you mostly grow out of, it doesn’t likely mean that you’re just constitutionally disposed to those forms of assholery.
I once heard a shrink opine, only half-jokingly, that “all adolescents have borderline personality disorder” and I think there’s some truth to that, lol.
Back in 2022 (or so) I took a trip to Peru with my brothers and while hiking up Machu Picchu met an African American woman from Texas who I got along with really well. We supported each other up the hike and became friends. Incidentally I started “code switching” which is defined as a kind of social behaviour where one person adopt mannerisms of people from other cultures in an attempt to fit in with them more. In this case I found similarities to her thick Texan accent and my own Canadian accent. So, admittedly, I started talking like her a little bit - like accentuating things the way she did (pretty much unconsciously in an attempt to relate to her more). Imagine a white Canadian guy saying “oh, I hear that!” When a black American woman says something like “this trail is steep!” - code switching.
Four days later on, at the end of the hike, my brothers, a family friend and the group from Texas all jumped on a train to travel back to Cusco. I had a few well deserved beers on the train and together with a couple of the girls from Texas as well as with my Brothers friend, we shared a great conversation about the field of healthcare, gun ownership in America vs. Canada. Etcetera
So, when we got back to the hotel my brother called me a racist and a Nazi and basically disowned me right then and there. As it turned out, the family friend had accused me of direct racism towards the Texan girl while on the train, on account of my code switching (which I was doing unconsciously at that point - mind you he never brought up the allegation with the woman herself, he just took it upon himself to accuse me of racism to my brothers - very noble).
This cast a dark shadow on the trip. However, we’d all made such good friends with the girls from Texas that we went out the next day to a coffee shop in Cusco. I could not utter a word. I felt so betrayed. I had this horrible feeling like I was unable to even speak lest the tone of my words betray some kind of inherent racism.
After the coffee meetup, Cassy (which was the name of the black woman) caught me outside to ask me what was wrong and why I hadn’t talked the whole time. I took the chance to ask her if anything I’d done or said on the train had come off as racist. I specifically referenced the code switching. I remember her exact reply:
“I’m from Texas. I know what racism is. That wasn’t racism.”
A part of me felt immensely better that at least she had not been offended, but the damage was done. The family friend (a white male) had taken it upon himself to get offended on her behalf and then oust me as a racist to my brothers. They’ve never apologized. They’ve never changed their minds. Our relationship has never been the same. I avoid family get togethers. Etcetera. And that is the most racist thing I’ve ever done.
It sounds like they were looking for an excuse to be offended or to ostracize you. And to gaslight you. So ultimately they did you a favor – you now don’t have to waste your time or energy on them.
You were right to ask the supposed offended party if they were actually offended – they are the only one that could validate that.
You make several excellent points, although I think that there is a lot more nuance that should be explored on this topic.
When I was working on my B.S. in nursing, I had to write a paper on racism . . . where I decided to argue the following points:
Pease consider that humans were hunter-gatherers for several hundred thousand years before we developed agriculture, and there was (and is, although in a different way) competition over food, territory, shelter, and so forth.
We might feel guilty about taking the nieghboring tribe’s food away from them and allowing them to starve, so in order to assauge this guilt, we need to dehumanize them.
In order to dehumanize them, we need to see their differences as defining characteristics, so things like skin color, hair texture, and facial anatomy are obvious choices.
So . . . I believe that racism is a holdover from when we were hunter-gatherers that had to compete for resources.
To support this idea, please consider the Uncanny Valley phenomena that was discovered by Silicon Valley computer experts who were working on robots (although Isaac Asimov seems to have predicted the Uncanny Valley several decades before it was actually discovered when he theorized [in his science fiction] about a “Frankenstein Complex” attached to robots).
Please see below:
If any of these points seem to suggest that I am justifying racism because it’s “natural” or–somehow–justifiable because it’s built into our genes, then please think again.
It was entirely natural for our caveman ancestors to engage in cannibalism, subjugate women, and live to the ripe old age of forty.
Also, flying in airplanes, talking on radios, and doing brain surgery to remove tumors are also unnatural, so if we argue that racism is natural and should be embraced, then we should also give up airplanes, space travel, modern medicine, etc. to avoid being hypocritical . . . which also means that about 75% of humanity would die without modern agricultural science, and never mind the death toll from giving up modern medicine.
And these points demonstrate that racism is hypocritical . . . which isn’t Earth-shattering, as racism and hypocrasy always seem to dovetail neatly together, both back in the Pleistocene and now.
P.S. Please note that I added slight changes to this post after the fact to correct minor grammer and stylistic errors.