It being MLK day and all, I thought it might be an appropriate time to talk about racism.
Nobody wants to be a racist – at least, nobody that I know. I certainly don’t. But I suppose it depends on how you grow up and the environment you were raised in.
And despite the best intentions of my parents and growing up and learning in diverse places of education, I’m afraid that I am a bit of a racist. While I don’t do things like shout slurs at people on the streets or become friends with people based on their skin, there’s something ingrained in my subconscious that causes me to notice skin tone and have it affect my judgment of that person’s character.
I think there are a lot of influences to this. People of certain races I’ve known in the past and the portrayal of different races in the media are perhaps the two major factors. I treat people differently based on their personalities; I wouldn’t tell the same story the same way to two different people if I know ahead of time that they’ll have opposite reactions. Does this apply more so if the people are of different races? It’s hard to tell for sure, but I may.
Additionally, if I meet someone for the first time, I am fairly certain that I do a bit of racial profiling somewhere in my brain. It’s not something as negative as: well, this guy’s obviously a thug. But I probably do have certain expectations, like an Asian person being logical, that I can attribute to nothing but their race.
What can I do to combat that? To treat each person as nothing but an individual and bring no racial assumptions or expectations to the table?
Maybe it’s because my parents and I (and I expect, almost all families) never overtly talked about race when I was young. Sure, there were vague affirmations, like “everyone is equal.” But this book excerpt in Newsweek (from the Freakonomics-esque book NutureShock) got me thinking. Let’s put aside the exact study and sample size for now and just focus on what questions come from this.
Babies are able to differentiate skin color before we can really even communicate to them effectively about what race is. And children tend to group themselves into homogenous groups; as a child, I’m more likely to seek those peers that look like me. So do we need to actively enforce the idea in children’s heads that different-looking people are just as deserving of friendship and respect? Is it a comfort zone that we have to break out of to talk directly and specifically to our children about race (or even specific races of their classmates) or would they learn it on their own if not for our subtle racist cues that we may unknowingly present?
And if I have certain connotations (be they negative or positive) with certain races already, how do I prevent those from appearing in my behavior around my child?