[wpietri]

I'm sure you do hate it. Many people hate recognizing that their own behavior has been harmful to others.

> the act of touching hair cannot itself be deemed aggressive without knowing the context

I have never in my life had random people walk up and start petting me. Be honest. If I walked down the street feeling the hair of each man I passed, how long do you think it would be before I got punched?

So white people already know perfectly well you don't just go around touching strangers. It's just that some will make an exception for black people because they are seen as other/lesser.

I would add that your notion that a microaggression is ok due to white ignorance of the experience of black people at the hands of white people is itself a racist notion.

And giving an example in Japan doesn't change much for me, as as Japan is a notoriously racist place. (For those unsure, a quick Google of "racism in Japan" will help. And I think you could understand that what's harmless to you as a high-status foreigner is not always going to be harmless for other people. Especially, say, a marginalized group whose inferior status was established America's founding and persists to this day.

[garfieldnate]

When reading your original post, I thought there was an implicit assumption that any case of a white person feeling a black person's hair was automatically classified as a racist "micro-aggression". Re-reading your original post, I think I probably misunderstood you, but I'll explain my thoughts a bit here since we have a thread started.

>Many people hate recognizing that their own behavior has been harmful to others.

I've never felt a black person's hair. I'm generally not a touchy person.

>I have never in my life had random people walk up and start petting me.

I actually think we're talking about different things. In my mind I was seeing a friend ask another, "hey, sorry, I know it's weird, but can I feel your hair? I'm curious what it feels like." The friend says "yes" or "no" and the interaction goes on from there. There are countries/cultures where strangers will touch others, but it's a pretty foreign concept to me.

>your notion that a micro-aggression is ok due to white ignorance

The word "aggression" implies willing injury or intimidation of another person. Hurting someone's feelings on accident is also bad, but it doesn't make sense to label them the same way. You're absolutely right to say that the context was completely different in Japan, and that's exactly the point. You can't unilaterally label an action like touching hair as aggressive in all contexts. If someone thinks fuzzy hair is neat and they don't have any sense of a racial divide, then they would feel curly caucasian red hair or African dreadlocks and not think anything was different about the two actions.

If you classify all interactions between all white people and all black people in terms of their racial differences, then how do we properly get rid of racism? If in the US a white and black person have to keep slavery in the back of their minds during every interaction, how are they ever supposed to act normally or integrate? How do we ever expect to overcome our differences if we have to constantly remind ourselves of them?

I really like concrete initiatives for helping those that have been historically and presently disadvantaged: paying meaningful reparations, fixing police and the justice system, UBI, etc. But I dislike social notions that impede communication and drive wedges between people. After all of the actions that we take to help everyone in our society to thrive, the end goal has to be social harmony, and I think we need to be careful not to attribute all unpleasant interactions to voluntary aggression or racism.

[wpietri]

> I've never felt a black person's hair. I'm generally not a touchy person.

My point is not about hair. It's that it's the white people who have done very little reflection on this topic that have strong enough feelings that they have to argue endlessly about when it's ok to point out America's endemic racism. DiAngelo's paper on this covers the topic well: https://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/viewFile/249/116

> The word "aggression" implies willing injury or intimidation of another person.

No. People often do things without making choices fully conscious of roots of their feelings and the broader implications. Indeed, that's the human default. See Kahneman's System 1 vs System 2 work.

> How do we ever expect to overcome our differences if we have to constantly remind ourselves of them?

You already know the answer to this. Imagine a junior developer asking, "How can we ever get anything done if we have to be worrying about all the possible ways something would break?!?" Is that a problem while learning? Yes. Does it prevent progress? No, just the opposite.

America has always been a racist place. For a long time it was carefully and consciously structured that way. We have been making spotty, two-steps-forward-one-step-back progress since Reconstruction, where we removed many of the formal, legal supports. But that's just the most visible surface of the problem. What drove the laws was white attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors handed down over generations. Those still persist. (For more on this, see Kendi, Oluo, Mills, and Loewen.)

To truly end that, white people are going to have to step up, pay attention, and root those things out. It's a multi-generation project. One that, given the US Right's self-generated panic about teaching white kids about America's realities around race, we are backsliding on.

I get that this makes you uncomfortable. I also spent years avoiding the necessity to face it. Social harmony is a good long term goal, but we cannot measure progress toward that by looking at white comfort.