Most "white" people today have very few interactions with African Americans, and the ones who do interact with mainly people in the service industries - waiters, cleaning people.
I grew up in Pittsburgh, in an integrated neighborhood. While we played with Black kids regularly, if you asked any one of us to list a number of adjectives that generally described "colored" people, most of those adjectives would have been negative. On the other hand, there were some of the "colored" kids who were well-liked and even admired by all, including us white kids.
According to today's definitions, we were all "racist."
And yet, reading the comments of the few posters here who identify as "Black" (one can never know), the same thing could be said of them, in reverse. If asked to list some adjectives that generally describe "white" people, those adjectives would all be negative.
But they are not racist, right?
The danger of blaming "inequality" on racism is that it breeds nothing good...envy, anger, disillusionment, despair.
But the fact is that BIPOC's who play by the rules and adopt middle-class values have every chance of success that most white people have (excluding the small percentage that are truly brought up in privileged homes).
I grew up in Pittsburgh, in an integrated neighborhood. While we played with Black kids regularly, if you asked any one of us to list a number of adjectives that generally described "colored" people, most of those adjectives would have been negative. On the other hand, there were some of the "colored" kids who were well-liked and even admired by all, including us white kids.
According to today's definitions, we were all "racist."
And yet, reading the comments of the few posters here who identify as "Black" (one can never know), the same thing could be said of them, in reverse. If asked to list some adjectives that generally describe "white" people, those adjectives would all be negative.
But they are not racist, right?
The danger of blaming "inequality" on racism is that it breeds nothing good...envy, anger, disillusionment, despair.
But the fact is that BIPOC's who play by the rules and adopt middle-class values have every chance of success that most white people have (excluding the small percentage that are truly brought up in privileged homes).