I grew up in a town that was extremely diverse. My high school was 15-25% black, we had a large percentage of Filipino, Indian, and Hispanics as well. Let’s call it 55% white 45% minority.
We all got along amazingly well. We went to parties together, we even fought against other towns a couple of times together.
It’s amazing what happens when you don’t focus on race.
The other day, I was speaking to my son and I happened to describe one of the boys he was playing with (because I didn’t know his name) as “the black boy” to make him understand after I used 5 other descriptors, who I was referring to. My son (7 yrs old) looked at me, I shit you not, and said “what do you mean?”
Racism isn’t inherent in people. It’s learned. And while you can say it’s the racists who teach it, I’m starting to realize it’s actually the fake anti racists today who teach it the most.
By the way- this “55% white” was a mix of Italian, Irish, Polish, Russian, German, and Jewish. So even the “whites” were amazingly diverse and got along.
I agree with the gist of this, with some caveats. Racism is mostly taught by racists, of course, but always crying wolf about race does a lot of damage. We live in a new age of perceived racism that just doesn’t have the same definition of “hate” that it used to, and it’s weird. It creates a whole bunch of nonsense arguments.
Another thing I’ll add is that TRIBALISM is absolutely inherent, and that often surfaces as racism depending how insular your community is. This is why segregation is bad and diversity is good, so we have nice stories of humanity (and in fact America) like GSC shared about his son.
This is absolutely a political strategy. It’s the opposite strategy of Pubs screaming about immigrants.
If we back up, we can agree with both sides that:
Real racism is bad.
Rampant immigration has downsides.
And we can also oppose both sides that:
Everything shouldn’t be about race.
Immigration has upsides.
So if all the political football players just get off that team mentality and start discussing these issues honestly, instead of the knee jerk screams of BAD and GOOD, the country will be a better place.