| > 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. |