The Data of Hate

Instead I propose a curriculum where we teach our children the dark side of humanity and allow both white, blacks and asians express our racial and other prejudices openly and honestly. Then to encourage and train everyone to come up with a plan of their own to overcome whatever perceived prejudices in athletics, academics or artistic outlets offered in schools.

Instead of suppressing the human nature to discriminate and giving people a sense of their own agency to either confront their bullies, or to subvert the majority power or to overcome in a round-bout way the limitations imposed on them, we allow people to feel entitled to an abstract idea of "fairness" and "justice" which never existed in American society. And we end up with one hand, "diversity HR Managers," "social justice campaigners" who resort to the ideals of civil rights to rally people, but are actually oppressing people by feeding them a false sense of moral superiority. On the other hand, the "banally evil" professionals who pay lip service to "go along with it" but actually just operates business as usual.

Instead of acting "shocked" and "indignant" every time about racism, we should openly acknowledge it in ourselves and concede that it'll never go away. I believe ironically, the benefit of not suppressing that speech and shaming sites such as Stormfront will help the discriminated people to find power in themselves to overcome than the other way around ("white lady" going into the hood for Teach for America to rescue all the poor inner city kids).

Do you actually not know? Or are you asking rhetorically? The reasons seem pretty obvious to me, not sure why they would be hard to figure out.

I'm non-White and was in Montana for a while. At first interaction it was obvious some people didn't even like talking to me but when I was breaking the ice and forcing some conversation they were very good people. Even interested in learning about my background.

I put 'race' in here. It's a hard to define concept, and I don't necessarily agree that it exists, but don't have time for that level of discussion right now. However, it's a useful generalization. A lot of people do have a tendency to group together according to race. For most people that's probably a lot to do with familiarity and commonality though than any strong racist feelings.

The only difference with the intentionally racist groups, is where on this spectrum they consider their out-group to lie. Put in these terms, I think it's easier to conceptualize. Personally, and I don't want to get political about this, but as a vegetarian, I feel my boundary includes animals. I don't want this to sound like a holier-than-thou argument, it's hopefully an objective judgement.

I find it difficult to conceptualize including pets in the in-group, but excluding animals we use as food. It makes no sense to me, and just feels like a hard-wired level of compassion that I have. I cannot on an emotional level process the concept of desiring killing animals. But on a logical level, I can see people that do think like that, and I respect people's choices. Now in my ideal world, people would naturally want to think like me, but I have no desire to waste my time trying to convince people otherwise.

Now, if you take a view that just humans are separate from animals and that we don't have a spectrum of care towards living things around us, then it's very difficult to conceptualize racist attitudes as rational or at all fair in any way.

I'm not entirely convinced of his argument that there are not necessarily economic factors in this. I can afford to be a vegetarian, (financially, socially, etc) and I'm not in a position of desperate need, or war or any situation where I need to reconsider my position. I do know for sure though that in times of crisis, this in-group is bound to shrink.

I think the general tendency of liberal thinking to be about sharing with society as a whole, vs more right-wing tendencies to look after your own is also just about where you fall on this spectrum of care to those around you.

If you're anxious or under stress or impoverished, or in any other situation that would make you feel under attack or that you have to protect your own, then I think you are pretty likely to tighten your in-group to a smaller circle.