Prompted Blogging
Sep. 23rd, 2008 03:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
f4f3Someone asked me:
"Have you ever been a visceral racist?
Not being a racist per se, but having racist feelings/thoughts without agreeing with them intellectually, and probably feeling guilty for having them."
It’s a very good question.
I guess I’ve been guilty of stereotyping – at some level I expect groups of people with identifiable characteristics to behave in a certain way, and those groups can be football fans, comic geeks or Irishmen. My internal models say that at a football game fans will chant, at a comic convention we’ll fawn over Alan Moore and on Saint Patrick’s day an Irishman will get drunk. That probably does make me racist at some level, but I’m not sure that it’s helpful to class that sort of stereotyping with the comment I got from someone who should have known better that “Mexicans have problems with numbers”.
On the other hand, I grew up in a mono-culture, pretty much, and didn’t imbibe any racist stereotypes with my mother’s milk (not because they were pretty free from racism themselves – which they were – but because there were very few opportunities for racism in Maryhill in the 60’s).
"Have you ever been a visceral racist?
Not being a racist per se, but having racist feelings/thoughts without agreeing with them intellectually, and probably feeling guilty for having them."
It’s a very good question.
I guess I’ve been guilty of stereotyping – at some level I expect groups of people with identifiable characteristics to behave in a certain way, and those groups can be football fans, comic geeks or Irishmen. My internal models say that at a football game fans will chant, at a comic convention we’ll fawn over Alan Moore and on Saint Patrick’s day an Irishman will get drunk. That probably does make me racist at some level, but I’m not sure that it’s helpful to class that sort of stereotyping with the comment I got from someone who should have known better that “Mexicans have problems with numbers”.
On the other hand, I grew up in a mono-culture, pretty much, and didn’t imbibe any racist stereotypes with my mother’s milk (not because they were pretty free from racism themselves – which they were – but because there were very few opportunities for racism in Maryhill in the 60’s).
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no subject
Date: 2008-09-23 03:31 pm (UTC)Hee hee hee. Sometimes my teachers would say the same thing when I asked them questions, and it felt just as good.
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Date: 2008-09-24 07:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-24 11:50 pm (UTC)For much of my childhood I lived in Papua New Guinea surrounded by people from more cultures than most of the rest of the world combined. That probably made a difference, too.
I spend a lot of time annoying people by questioning their biased stereotypes. Most commonly 'men do X' for some X.