Quote:
Originally Posted by CuteOldGuy
WPF read a paper (or had it read to him). Now he's an expert. Hey WPF, I read a paper once. It was identical to a post you made here, that you passed off as your own.
He read a paper.
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Maybe is wouldn't hurt you to read a little more you ignorant racist SOB.
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/...e-bit-racist-0
The implication is clear. We may all be racist and sexist and ageist at heart, but this is not our doing—we have merely internalized what we have been hearing and reading and seeing our whole life, that is, we are thirsty sponges, and we pick up the patterns that culture happily spoonfeeds us, and we haplessly store it all in our thirsty
memory banks
, gladly retrieving the connection and filling in the blanks.
One conclusion from this study is clear. For most of us, the racist/sexist/ageist inside us may not be a monster of our own making; s/he is not a reflection of who we are, but a reflection of where we've been. Being faster to
associate ‘black' with ‘violence' doesn't imply that you are a hardcore racist, it sadly just means you're American.
This conclusion is both reassuring and sad.
Reassuring, because now we can understand why we are all a little bit racist (and sexist, and ageist). And
understanding is half the battle against it.
Sad, of course, because we
indeed are all a bit racist (and sexist, and ageist). There is power in knowing, fortunately. Those
gut feelings do well up from time to time—you walk through town late at night, a tall black man approaches, you feel like crossing the street, and you realize you wouldn't have this feeling this if the man were white. See these gut reactions for what they are: Responses you've acquired from too much exposure to your culture. What's important is ultimately not what you feel, but how you deal with those responses, how you transcend them to meet your neighbor as a real human being rather than as a member of a category.
Sad too because it shows how much influence the media might have on our implicit knowledge structure.
Doubly sad, perhaps, when you consider the state of these media, and how little sense of responsibility there seems to be concerning these issues. (On the contrary, maybe: The more media pundits play into preconceived notions, the larger their audience, the higher their ratings?)
Maybe triply sad because results like these could be easily misused to excuse inexcusable behavior. The consequences of bias and prejudice and hate are all too real, even if their origin must at least in part lie in the surrounding culture. Society's influence on its individual constituents, however, does not absolve these individuals from their own personal responsibilities.
Perhaps this, then, is one more reason for joy: Now that we know the Beast is there, and It's not our fault, we can at least look It squarely in the eye, and scare It away, or else tame It
and call Yssup and myself race baiters when we point out how racist that is. Tea logic at its best. 
