← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · kminta
Thread ID: 19395 | Posts: 10 | Started: 2005-08-02
2005-08-02 22:53 | User Profile
[I]For the majority white posters on this forum, I'm sure you act this way or know someone who acts this way when interacting with nonwhites. As a black, I encounter this from whites everyday: this two-faced facade of the friendly white who pretends not to have a racist bone in his body, but is, in fact, bigoted to the core.[/I]
[I]Thank God for the Internet and forums like OD. Without these tools, how else could we intelligent people vent our frustrations at political correctness and our ever-deteriorating society in a civilized manner?[/I]
[B][URL=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/30/AR2005073000567.html]Closet Bigotry[/URL][/B]
By [I]Richard Morin[/I]
Sunday, July 31, 2005; Page B05
Not that many decades ago it was easier to identify bigots: Just listen to them. In those bad old days, people felt free to say all sorts of ghastly things. But in these supposedly more enlightened times, a new study suggests that even racists have learned to keep their toxic opinions mostly to themselves.
In fact, whites with more negative views of blacks and minorities are more likely than those with more racially tolerant attitudes to go out of their way to appear friendly and open-minded when interacting with African Americans, according to a team of psychologists led by Jennifer Richeson of Dartmouth College and Nicole Shelton of Princeton University.
This faux friendliness has a startling consequence: These researchers found that blacks would rather interact with less tolerant individuals than those with more accepting views, which "could lead blacks to make the unfortunate decision to avoid future contact with low-prejudiced whites," the psychologists wrote in the latest issue of Psychological Science.
Their work is the latest twist on one of the hottest recent findings in the study of race relations. Last year, two Canadian researchers reported that more racially prejudiced individuals appear to be more careful about what they said and acted more friendly and warm in conversations with blacks than people with lower levels of racial bias.
Richeson and Shelton wondered if those efforts to appear friendly have any impact on blacks. So they recruited 96 college students and gave them a test measuring how racially biased they were. Then each was told they would have a brief 10-minute conversation with another participant, and then answer a few questions about the interaction. Some students were assigned to be in mixed-race pairs, others were paired with someone of their own race.
To mask the intent of the study, each pair of students was told to select a topic for their conversation from a basket. In fact, all of the topics were the same: "Discuss your opinions on race relations."
When these researchers analyzed the answers to the post-conversation questions, she found that more intolerant whites were perceived by blacks as friendlier and more engaged in the conversation. Moreover, they found that blacks reported they would be more willing to spend time with these whites than more accepting whites.
The results underscore the increasing difficulty blacks and whites have in finding their way through the minefield of race relations. "It may be necessary for whites to appear engaged during interracial interactions, irrespective of their levels of racial bias," Richeson and Shelton wrote in their article. And for blacks, it illustrates "that detecting who is and is not prejudiced against one's group during brief social interactions can be quite difficult."
2005-08-02 23:36 | User Profile
These types of studies miss the point, at least from a political perspective, to the extent that politics influences the interpersonal. Politics is about the power and relations of groups, not individuals. This study focuses on the behavior of individuals. Individuals are irrelevant, which is why it makes no sense to be disrespectful toward Black individuals that one may interact with at work or school, for example. The manner in which an individual White like myself interacts with individual Blacks has no effect on whatever political gains I would like to see take place in society. These are entirely different planes of existence that don't meet.
I'm always amused when topics like this come up, because it leads to the comment about me that I "don't act like a 'racist' would be expected to." Well, I donated to David Duke's campaign for the U.S. House when he was running for the Livingston seat. What would I be expected to do--yell at every Black person I see on the street "Hey, I'm voting to make sure that you get sent back to Africa someday!"? What good would that do?
2005-08-03 03:23 | User Profile
[QUOTE=kminta][I]For the majority white posters on this forum, I'm sure you act this way or know someone who acts this way when interacting with nonwhites. As a black, I encounter this from whites everyday: this two-faced facade of the friendly white who pretends not to have a racist bone in his body, but is, in fact, bigoted to the core.[/I]
I have a feeling that almost every "nice" black person I meet is two-faced in this same manner. Although, they can't talk very long without letting out a little bit of racism. Not a mean racism, but clearly an open bias.
I have no desire to offend blacks I meet.
2005-08-03 15:57 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Happy Hacker]I have a feeling that almost every "nice" black person I meet is two-faced in this same manner. Although, they can't talk very long without letting out a little bit of racism. Not a mean racism, but clearly an open bias.[/QUOTE]
HH, there's no doubt that what you say is the truth.
But, I'm polite to all people in public, almost to a fault. Can't help it.
2005-08-03 16:02 | User Profile
Whites should just eyeball and give dirty looks to darkies.
2005-08-09 16:36 | User Profile
It's practically an universal truism that sniveling, bootlicking attitude doesn't command the respect of anyone, not even of those who are receiving that flattery and mock-affection.
It is quite natural for Blacks to despise White liberals, those proudly "rootless cosmopolitans" who still mostly lack the faith in their ideology to actually live in a Black neighborhood - really, who wouldn't look down on such phonies?
I have been reading [B]Malcolm X[/B]'s autobiography lately (I'm a firm believer in the principle "know thine enemy"), and I found an excerpt worth quoting, and directly relevant to the subject of this thread:
(It's a Finnish translation; I translate it back to English. Boldened text mine.)
[COLOR=Indigo][FONT=Arial] [SIZE=3]"Yes, I want to take away that saintly halo from liberals that they are so hard striving to get! Northern liberals have for a long time pointed their accusing finger towards the south, but they get enraged when they are revealed to be the most hypocritical people in the world!
[B]"I believe that my life mirrors this hypocrisy. I do not know anything about the South. I am a creation of northern Whites and their hypocrisy[/B].
"[B]Mr. (Elijah) Muhammad has always given recognition to White southerners. One can say one thing for the Whites of the South, that they are honest[/B]. They bare their teeth to the Blacks; they tell them, straight to the face, that southern Whites will never accept the deceptive "integration." Southern Whites tell Blacks that they are going to fight with all their strength even against a superficial equality. The benefit of this is that southern Blacks have never had any illusions about the opposition that is facing them.
"[B]It could be said that many southern Whites have patronizingly helped several individual Blacks. But northern Whites put out forced smiles, with thousand schemes and lies about "the equality" and "integration" in their mind[/B]. If Blacks would some day demand genuine rights to themselves, northern liberals would startle away from them with as much sense of guilt and fear as southern Whites do.
"[B]In fact, the most dangerous and threatening Blacks of America are those that the northern folks have shut into ghettoes[/B]. It's a system of northern rulers to talk about democracy while Blacks are kept on the other side of the corner, out of sight. [/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]
Petr
2005-08-09 17:17 | User Profile
[QUOTE=PaleoconAvatar]These types of studies miss the point, at least from a political perspective, to the extent that politics influences the interpersonal. Politics is about the power and relations of groups, not individuals. This study focuses on the behavior of individuals. Individuals are irrelevant, which is why it makes no sense to be disrespectful toward Black individuals that one may interact with at work or school, for example. The manner in which an individual White like myself interacts with individual Blacks has no effect on whatever political gains I would like to see take place in society. These are entirely different planes of existence that don't meet.[/QUOTE]
Very well put.
The political conflict is between groups and group identities. The farther away any relationship is removed from the group conflict, the more the personal traits of the individuals involved govern the dynamics of the relationship. Conversely, the more the social setting is based on groups, the further individual interests recede and group defense comes to the fore.
I found that to be true way back when in the Navy. I served on an aircraft carrier. In the galley it was definitely black vs. white and it didn't matter if you were friends with a black sailor or not, you just didn't eat together or even make a lot of eye contact. Same thing in the workout room. OTOH, in the separate work spaces everybody could basically relax and relate as individuals.
I was reading about the Armenian Genocide, which marks its centennial this year. There are lots of stories of Turkish and Armenian friends - even whole families who lived side by side as neighbors for generations and who loved and helped each other all their lives - being swept up in the groupthink of horrific mob violence. Trusted neighbors slaughtering children in front of their weeping parents. Old friends raping wives and burning homes.
When that tribal defense subroutine switches on in our brains, all of that individual love and concern gets swept away like so much kindling in a forest fire.
We all have this group defense instinct. In fact, we all have an instinct for genocide - to kill and wipe out completely groups with which we are at war. Genocide is no accident. It isn't "evil" in the sense that people will it. It's more like a bad industrial accident, caused not so much by the people involved but rather by a confluence of myriad bad decisions over time that created the conditions that required only a nudge - a nudge that was sure to happen sooner or later.
That's just the way Nature has constructed our brains. We relate to individuals as individuals, and that's all fine and good to say that's the way we should always treat people. "Treat people as individuals and let the racial chips fall where they may" was my slogan back in the 1980s when I was a libertarian sort of a Reaganite.
But I've since come to see that such a view takes no real accounting of human nature. The fact is that we exist not only as individuals but we also exist as groups - human societies are indeed organisms and individuals truly are but cells in that organism. While we mostly preceive ourselves only as individuals (and don't get me wrong, we really are individuals, too), when the human organism is threatened, our individual brains are hardwired to react in defense of our group, the best of our own personal concerns and individual relationships be damned. All of our best individual intentions are pushed to the side as our brains enter what might be called "group defense mode."
And there's nothing we can do about it, because that's just the way Nature and Nature's God designed us.
Nationalism is all about recognizing this fact of our natures and arranging our lives around our natures, instead of trying to shoehorn our natures into the constraints our corporate elites set for us.
We simply cannot ignore our deeply tribal nature, or at least we ignore this particular fact of life at our own peril.
2005-08-09 17:34 | User Profile
[COLOR=Sienna][FONT=Arial][B][I] - "When that tribal defense subroutine switches on in our brains, all of that individual love and concern gets swept away like so much kindling in a forest fire." [/I][/B][/FONT][/COLOR]
I do not think that this necessarily applies only on [B]group[/B] conflicts, but in individual, intra-racial cases as well - it's simply the "[I]Lord of the Flies[/I]" scenario - once the environment gets harsh enough and the thin layer of cultivation and social mores is stripped away, there are few things that fallen men won't do to their fellow-men to save their own skin, or just use an opportunity in indulge themselves in sadism...
Jews famously use those [I]sonderkommando[/I] Jews (that killed and brutalized other Jews in concentration camps to save themselves) as examples of selfish depravity of men who are put before ultimate choices.
Petr
2005-08-09 17:43 | User Profile
Re; Closet Bigotry
For the record, I do not have anything against, nor have I ever had any hatred of closets! :biggrin:
2005-08-10 06:33 | User Profile
[QUOTE] [QUOTE=Happy Hacker]I have a feeling that almost every "nice" black person I meet is two-faced in this same manner. Although, they can't talk very long without letting out a little bit of racism. Not a mean racism, but clearly an open bias. [/QUOTE] That is exactly how I feel when I have to deal with them, though I would say, yes I agree that they express their "bias" a little more openly towards whites than whites will towards them, probably because it is much more accepted for them to do so.
[QUOTE] I have no desire to offend blacks I meet.[/QUOTE]I do not try to go out of my way to offend them(call them a nigger,etc) but I have never been especially good at being pleasant in a phony way to anyone. I am not rude, neccessarily to someone I don't like, or don't want to be around, but I can not bring myself to be friendly either.(unless I absoultely have to, work environment,etc) When I don't like someone they can usually tell. And I often hear that people have described me as "aloof" or something similar.