One of the helpful, although painful, things I read during RaceFail '09 was that pretty much everyone is racist to some degree.
Yes. One of the most useful things I learned from my OU courses was that everyone has internal biases, whether or not they're aware of them and it seems logical that these will include a degree of racism. It's not a comfortable thing to think about yourself, but I daresay it has to be faced in order to become less racist.
usually people will accept goodwill if you've made some effort to educate yourself first.
I think I'm still in the educating myself phase. Trying to, anyway.
when the other party was pointing to an action and not calling down a condemnation of the person's whole character.
That's something I've seen a lot on Usenet - not with racism specifically, but often someone calls another person's ideas into question and they react as if they've been accused of some hideous crime.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2009-08-01 09:08 am (UTC)Yes. One of the most useful things I learned from my OU courses was that everyone has internal biases, whether or not they're aware of them and it seems logical that these will include a degree of racism. It's not a comfortable thing to think about yourself, but I daresay it has to be faced in order to become less racist.
I think I'm still in the educating myself phase. Trying to, anyway.
That's something I've seen a lot on Usenet - not with racism specifically, but often someone calls another person's ideas into question and they react as if they've been accused of some hideous crime.