African American
In reply to the discussion: "That awkward moment when I realized my white “liberal” friends were racists" [View all]Erich Bloodaxe BSN
(14,733 posts)Most schools don't ever address it head on, and 'The Civil Rights' movement is taught as history, not an ongoing struggle. So for a lot of folks, this is probably the only place they see race issues brought up in any depth, with it being 'cartoonized' into a binary 'bad people are racist' 'good people aren't', and everyone sees themselves as 'good', so they can't possibly be racist. So all this talk about nuance and shades of racially biased behaviour and support for racist ideas built into our institutions is terribly uncomfortable. You see the same things in every comment thread under a privilege diary, with the denial that 'white privilege' exists from certain posters, or the endless attempts to want to get rid of the phrase, and just call racially bigoted acts 'racism' because they want that good old binary 'racist/not racist' so they can internally place themselves in the comforting 'not racist' category while feeling morally superior to those far fewer in number people who are happy to wallow publicly in racially bigoted speech and actions. With the added 'bonus' that if 'racism' is confined to those extreme actors, it's a 'much smaller problem'.