What you're really doing with "we're all racists" is just trying to get an emotional response out of people. If young people are socialized early to see themselves as part of a group discounting race, then "we're all racist" becomes illogical and certainly irrelevant.Quite right. It can be 'us two against those two' or 'our country against theirs'. And every step in between. And every mixture of people you can possibly imagine.
What I don't get is the argument that says that it's wrong to say that we're all racist. People bristle. 'Hey, some of my best friends...' You have to start with that understanding, and the acceptance that you yourself have those tendencies, and work from there.
I remember going to watch my grandkid playing rugby. He mentioned one of the guys in the team with whom he was friendly. He pointed to a group of kids. 'Which one?' I asked. 'The one wearing red socks'. Out of 5 or 6 guys, he was the only black guy. But he differentiated him by his socks. That's great, I thought. He's colour blind in that repect. But...at some point he's going to encounter racism. Do we just let that happen? Or do we prepare him for it? It's a reasonable question to ask.
It's a false notion that to be non-racist means one must be blind to the fact that skin color exists. I can make note of a person's eye color without being an eye color bigot. If someone describes me as an "older black guy with a gray beard and eyeglasses," I'm not going to be any more offended by "black guy" than I would be about "older," "gray beard," or "eyeglasses."
I was watching an interview back in the 90s of some prominent white writer who had adopted a black daughter. The white interviewer asked him if he'd ever used "the N-word" in her presence, and he assured her that he had. The interviewer was shocked. The man had to explain, how was he going to teach her how to respond without allowing her to hear the word in a context not intended to harm her?
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