Daryl Davis¹, through conversation, convinced a number of Klansmen to leave and denounce the KKK. See “Accidental Courtesy: Daryl Davis, Race & America”².
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_Courtesy:_Daryl_Dav...
Anyway, this experience is the reason I roll my eyes when someone calls ____ a nazi. There are legit nazis in the world, and they’re a truly unpleasant bunch.
Used to play airsoft with a guy who had a totenkopf tattoo. He wasn't pleasant at all. Not sure anyone wanted him there but so long as he didn't break any of the rules they weren't sure if they could refuse him service.
Though as a counter my friends dad has a bunch of neonazi tattoos under his hair (he doesn't shave it any more) and was a very solid bloke who had a troubled path getting there.
Even the actual neo-nazis can reform.
And... unless you're in a marginalized minority group, you really aren't in a position to know how racist people are.
Oh yeah, I just remembered, we also recently had a president for four years who was overly racist. Remember his attacks on Judge Curiel? Remember Mexicans "are rapists"?
So yes you’re right anyone can empathize. But I don’t think that’s what OP is saying. You really cannot fully understand unless you live it. Just like you cannot understand true poverty in African countries, when you’ve spent your whole life living in a (relatively) rich one.
But I (a black African man) can never truly know or experience what the average Uyghur goes though day to day, because I just haven’t lived it.
So no, when we say that, we are not “excluding” anyone - in fact the more allies a minority has, the more likely they will achieve equality. But lived experience is different.
However lived experience can also introduces biases — for instance, would you trust a court of law to deliver justice if the victim was also judge and jury? That lived experience which provides sensitivity and also can make one too close to the matter at hand to see things clearly.
I think people with and without lived experiences can pull together and make positive contributions.
I say this because there are so many examples of solutions proposed by people with lived experience that are utterly counterproductive, because they shut out the voices of those without lived experience but who might have balancing views drawn from the broader human experience.
My experience is that people are more likely to share racist views with other people of their ethnic group but would likely never be overtly hostile to a person of a different race.
Also, I think if you are in a marginalized group it's extremely hard to disambiguate racism from general assholery.
If you don't get hired for a job you'll never know if it was because the interviewer was racist or because he just didn't like you
A great example was how shutting down travel at the start of Covid-19 was seen as racist. Yet, there should have been no issue as it was the only thing we can do in our global environment to slow the situation. Yet, the people in charge came up with that as racist.
"When Mexico sends its people, ... they're rapists." - Donald Trump
That time he said April Ryan (reporter) should "go set up the meeting" with the congressional black caucus for him.
Shithole countries.
The Muslim ban. Which for a while people around him tried to get him to pretend wasn't a Muslim ban, but really wanted to keep using those words, so he did.
I don't have any complaints about shutting down travel over COVID-19. It should have happened sooner, and I don't know anyone who ever disagreed with that. On the other hand, he did go out of his way to unneccessarily try and rename COVID the "China virus," which sure looked like racial scapegoating to me.
But, I would say that his mysogyny is much worse. And, his love for dictators. ("love" being his term)
Does this mean that it is not empirically measurable then? That would explain a lot because actual data is what I find missing from the claims of how prevalent racism is.
As for empirical data, there's tons. Maybe start with this Brookings report since it's on the topic of the OP (housing) https://www.brookings.edu/research/biased-appraisals-and-the...
"The question is: What explains this? We don’t know with any precision. In our paper, we reviewed literature on racial bias and pointed to its potential as an explanation, writing: “Our findings are generally consistent with the widespread presence of anti-Black bias.” We left it for future work to explore some of the relevant mechanisms that link bias to valuations and quantify their importance."
So the thought is that it MIGHT be bias (a bit presumptuous then to title the study "Biased appraisals..."). And we are waiting on future studies to actually provide the causal link.
But even if every bit of the 23% delta is caused by racial bias, we need to consider the trend. As far as I can tell every important sociological data point on this matter (employment, wealth, marriage, laws, etc.) has been improving decade after decade. I don't know what numbers this same study, or one equivalent to it, would reveal from say 5 or 7 decades ago, but I assume it would have been substantially worse.
All of which is to say that proposing a narrative that racism is rampant and getting worse does not seem to be supported by the data. To the contrary, it would seem that it is less than it's ever been and continues to decline.
EDIT: To be clear, I am not suggesting you or anyone here is proposing a narrative that racism is rampant and getting worse. But I think it's safe to say that proposal is prevalent in pop culture.
I'm not familiar with a narrative that racism is getting worse. My impression (and I thought this was in line with US liberal thinking) is that we are now beginning to admit that racism didn't go away with the end of slavery, it didn't go away with the end of segregation; it's still here. I'd say things are getting better, because many white people acknowledge racism instead of pretending it doesn't exist.
But it is already bad enough that Afroamericans had been kept from acquiring wealth by various means, judicial and extrajudicial for much of the last century. They are closing the wealth gap, but extremely slowly.
Ignoring that history is part of a basically racist system.
The dog whistle version of this, which you heard public figures using on TV, was "he doesn't look presidential."
The real point is that the conversation you described happens ten times over in most peer developed countries. If you think it's bad that a few people say this about Obama (who ultimately was elected President twice), imagine what it's like running for office as a person of color in France, Germany, the Nordics, Japan, South Korea, or Italy — it's nigh impossible. Whereas in America, the kind of racism you're describing has been relegated to retirees and people who generally lack power, in Europe, this kind of thinking persists in board rooms, popular culture, and even the British Royal Family (just ask Meghan Markle) — institutions with real cultural influence and power.
Ultimately, while racism continues to be a problem in America, it's much further along in solving that problem than pretty much any other developed country, save for maybe Canada, the UK, and ANZ.
An exception like "oh well you're one of the good ones"?
> I have never met a full-fledged racist (in U.S. here). Peronally, I think they are a very small insular group, if they exist at all.
Talk to old people if you want some disappointment then.
Yes. This includes most "old people". A lot of the talk an jabs or using racial epithets is superficial when you get right down to it. At least, in my experience.
They're very nice at the surface level. You wouldn't expect it, but oh boy was it there an it was deep.
I really, really do not believe that the racial epithets are superficial. It's not a uniquely old person problem by any definition, but it's extremely common.
When my grandmother was dying in a hospital, she had some dementia. I don't think she ever uttered a racial epithet to anyone in her whole life, but one day a hospital worker was trying to clean her room up and making a bit of a commotion, she sat up and told him to go away, that she did not like black people. We apolized to the man who seemed to understand the situation. My point is that people are complicated, sometimes they say things on reflex they would not say in a healthier more positive frame of mind.
People are concerned about existing as they were born as well. I think those people are less concerned about whether or not your grandma can be honest about her feelings towards black people.
> I don’t think she uttered a racial epithet to anyone in her whole life
I’ll start by saying this is an assumption and likely untrue.
As previously stated, lots of people who are racist are never overtly racist.
This is why I've never liked the notion of sneering at those who say "some of my best friends are race/ethnicity", as if that is proof of that person's irremediable evilness. Isn't it a good thing for people to, however superficially or insincerely, consider "exceptions"? To put another way, if people instead said "I consider race/ethnicity to be 100% bad", would this be better? Of course not.
As someone that moved to a very very racist part of the US in their teens (near a sundown town), this is by far the most scary statement you could write. I believe you would be far more concerned if you understood the enormity of it when you look at it in the converse.
This person you mention that creates an exception 'for one of the good ones' will also create an exception for their buddy when they lynch someone and they just forget to tell the police about it.
I recommend 'Neoslavery' by Knowing Better as a little chunk of more recent American history a lot of people would like to erase. Racism runs very deep in some places.
I don't deny such attitudes. But I would be suprised if such attitudes extended to a complete abnegation of local authority to prosecute a lynching. Even in a sundown town.
If George Floyd's murder had not been filmed Derek Chauvin would still be on the police force and not in prison. This is why you should watch the video attached in my previous reply. Especially in the south the local authorities were actively involved in gathering slaves (remember prison slavery is legal to this day in the US).
Second, George Floyd was not "lynched". It's even debateable if there were even racial motivations to the case. He ultimately died of a fentanyl overdose, and there is video evidence he was out of control at the time. Not to excuse Chauvin, but I'm not going to try to read his mind or judge his character on the basis that "he looks like a white supremicist" sitting in court.
Saying cases exist but we simply don't know about it, is dodging the question. You can't prove a negative. That's just being disingenuous. Where is the proof that lynchings are occuring but they are just being swept under the rug?
Neither of these things are true.
"An autopsy found methamphetamine and fentanyl in Floyd’s system at the time of his death. Investigators also found pills contained methamphetamine and fentanyl inside Floyd’s SUV and the backseat of a squad car officers tried to push him into.
"Schleicher pointed jurors toward the testimony of a forensic toxicologist who found fentanyl levels were “well below the ratio” of people who die from an overdose and a “very low” level of methamphetamine in blood taken from Floyd at the hospital."
https://apnews.com/article/trials-us-news-death-of-george-fl...
No, two autopsys and a jury determined that he died from a knee on his neck.
https://apnews.com/article/trials-us-news-death-of-george-fl...
> Nearly every one of them will create an exception once they have a reasonable conversation with someone from another race.
Shifting somewhat off race, one of my biggest hopes with some of the covid / work-remote urban-to-rural diapora is that- by finally having some reverse brain drain- less urban places might finally see & hear from some more diverse people. Some cultural mixing & injection of other people can (I hope) add some empathy & sense in places that have had fewer & fewer huddling together & weathering the slow-but-ever-ongoing worldwide march of economic-stratification.