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Comment by ivape | Hacker News Reader

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This has been a growing feeling for me too, seeing many users on various platforms go from mocking the murders of non-white people to claiming that their political opposition is hateful due to recent events. I used to think that being accepted in society was just a matter of integrating culturally (which I thought was fair), but the way people have been emboldened to say the most awful things has been changing my mind.

I mean, we have to be practical in our condemnation. I feel we had that somewhere around the 2010s, where we accepted that you can’t change a racist 80 year old. Fine, I think America accepted that.

But how the living fuck did that prior generation PASS ON the racism (and it’s way more than that, misogyny, economic selfishness, or wholesale disconnect in their economics to the point they don’t even vote for their economic interest).

HOW? How did they take 1 year olds in 1990-2010 and make them like the previous generation? People are not understanding what a huge sin this was. You CANNOT raise the children in an ideology that was nationally condemned and fought over for decades. It was an utter failure, no one was watching the kids.

This shit is so deep rooted that I am at a loss. To put it clearly, this is how anticlimactic America has been the last 20 years:

1) Imagine watching American History X

2) And instead of Ed Norton coming to a rebirth moment of shedding his racism and turning a new leaf, he stays a racist, doubles down, and also raises racist children.

There. Reality.

It's really interesting to me that you seem to assume that non-racism is the default state, and that humans have to be taught to be racist.

Based on what I've seen in the world looking across all the countries I am familiar with, including the US, I have to say I think the opposite is true.

Anyone with experience teaching children could tell you that racism is taught. It's just not baked in for kids.

However it's also not a very interesting question imo. You will never "reset" a generation from any aspect of culture, and now that we're in the global information age it's triply impossible. We don't need to fool around with naturalist fallacy - it's enough to say that racism is bad and we should get rid of it.

I have experience teaching children. They typically don't experience the scarcity that leads to fear and tribalism among adults. Tribalism doesn't have to be taught.

Well luckily we are post scarcity!

Younger generations are probably more racist than their parents but not their grandparents. There are a lot of reasons this probably happened, and it wasn't something done to infants, but transpired over the last 10-15 years.

I think part of it is being raised on the internet right as the cultural backlash against progressivism, "cancel culture" and Obama started to accelerate across social media, and right-wing grifting became big business after Gamergate.

Yeah, that's the thing. Even if the Trump presidency ends and the next guy somehow actually undoes all the political damage (unlikely), how does the country recover from the social consequences? It won't happen within a generation.

Ideologically we're probably quite aligned. However I disagree with you. Having traveled a lot of the USA, I've found Americans to be surprisingly much less racist than I expected.

Absolutely there are nests of racist snakes, the KKK still continues after all and we have out and out nazis like Nick Fuentes getting page time in the NYTimes, so something is rotten in that country. Even still, compared to my travels throughout Europe, the USA has something unique about its diversity. It does seem like there's something different about the American identity superseding race and religion.

Compare to a country where your statement might be true, insomuch as it's a massive population of practically lost-cause racists: Israel. I've had several conversations with Israelis and my main takeaway is that the government has spent the last couple generations doing its utmost to convince everyone in the country that the planet is a zero-sum ongoing tribal war. The racism there is ingrained not just into the culture but into the law.

Having met people like that, I tempered my aggressively leftist America takes. America has issues but I've encountered way more flagrant and disgusting forms of racism in a year of travels through Europe than I did in decades of travel in the USA. I feel like I didn't know what racism really is until I left the USA.

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