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Topic: What was your first experience with the issue of race?
Anonymous A started this discussion 13 years ago#24,641
I grew up in a small town of maybe two thousand people. The vast majority (95%+) were white and that was pretty much it. In elementary school, all of us were white as well and I had never met a black person in my entire life. One day (this was in first grade) a new student joined the class named Anthony, who was black. Anthony was confrontational, antagonistic and a real dick and I don't think anyone liked him. I certainly didn't. This was 20 years ago or so and I realize now that he was a bad person who just happened to be black, not bad because he was black but it negatively shaped my opinion of black people for a number of years. This is not to say that all the white kids were good - far from it - there were plenty of white bullies as well but the vast majority of the white students were nice people. So my 5 year old mind was presented with the following data: 100% of black people I knew were mean, and only 25% of white people I knew were mean. I really hated Anthony and somehow between first and second grade he vanished and went somewhere else.
I was never a hardcore racist or joined Stormfront or whatever. I wasn't even a mediumcore racist really, I just didn't feel comfortable around black people as a child. Since then I moved to a diverse, urban area and met many nice, kind black people and my childhood aversion to black people has gone away and I realized the error of my thinking.
Racism itself is kind of funny because it can't be defined. If I start a white supremacist group, it's easy to narrow it down to exclude blacks, asians, native americans, mixed race people and anyone with a lot of skin pigmentation. So if we're left with pale-skinned people, what's white? A lot of groups would exclude pale-skinned Jews of European descent and so we'll eliminate them for the sake of argument. Some go even further and proclaim only Northern Europeans to be true whites. But if the Aryans of Iran were good enough to impress Hitler himself, why shouldn't they be considered white as well? There's no objective definition of race and thus it's an absurdity to cling to and glorify it, and to vilify it. The best thing we can do as a species is just totally stop caring about it and thinking about it and talking about it. But we never will.
HaikerensGuide !0VegJ9Jl.Q joined in and replied with this 13 years ago, 1 minute later[^][v]#379,999
Probably when I moved to Detroit when I was 4.
Killer Lettuce !!iNo3FkiZx joined in and replied with this 13 years ago, 5 hours later, 5 hours after the original post[^][v]#380,054
My situation was sort of similar, grew up in a mostly white school/area with only two black kids in the school. They were just normal kids who weren't treated any different though so I never developed any racist tendencies from then.
Manson !Ru62LtUBRc joined in and replied with this 13 years ago, 4 minutes later, 6 hours after the original post[^][v]#380,056
As a child, I grew up in an under-privileged area. I attended an elementary school in which the majority of students were black or Mexican. I was one of the few white boys and was treated as such. A "rare" case of a white person being singled out and harassed, yes?
RandPaul2016 !4EB6xd.Oos joined in and replied with this 13 years ago, 22 minutes later, 6 hours after the original post[^][v]#380,058
I grew up in a poor neighborhood. My best friend in kindergarten was Pakistani(?). In primary school I noticed that all Aborigines and Islanders are very stupid.
TheSheep !kJ.A4PF7.k joined in and replied with this 13 years ago, 4 minutes later, 6 hours after the original post[^][v]#380,061
I used to watch NBA all day every day (cause I was expecting flips and fire balls... damn you NBA on gameboy hahaha) and I was impressed how all the black dudes played awesome and I thought every black dude was a dunking machine.
Then I went to a basketball game in Germany, and there was a black dude also playing, but he kinda sucked (that tactical Euro style basketball... not just zerg and dunk like NBA) so the first time I saw a black dude IRL I was disappointed.
(Edited 1 minute later.)
Anonymous G joined in and replied with this 13 years ago, 8 minutes later, 6 hours after the original post[^][v]#380,064
When i went to kindergarten at a public school and realized black people smell.
Anonymous H joined in and replied with this 13 years ago, 16 hours later, 22 hours after the original post[^][v]#380,329