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.
no subject
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.