But before diversity education, my attitude was that judging people by the color of their skin was as silly as judging by them whether or not they have freckles, and it was something I don't think I would have seriously considered doing. A few years later, I found myself very naturally judging people by their skin color and deciding how to talk to them with that fact being part of the criteria. I think that's a big step backward.
Now, it's possible that other factors were involved. For example, there just weren't that many black people in the suburb where I grew up, and those there were had been educated in the same schools I had, talked the same way white people did and about the same things, socialized normally with white people, had the same body language, and so on. In Boston, I encountered a lot more black people who talked differently, used different body language, went about in exclusively-black groups and seemed to be deliberately not only isolating themselves from everyone else but actively trying to look scary. It worked. But why did I learn to tend to associate that with skin color, when I had not previously associated anything with skin color, rather than, say, certain accents, or cargo pants? I do feel that part of the reason was that, at around the same time, I was being taught "It's normal to think about black people differently than you think about white people, and sometimes you should."
It's also been suggested that I was unconsciously prejudiced before, and diversity education just made me conscious of something I had previous been unaware of. I can't prove that isn't true, but that seems to be making the implicit assumption that it's impossible to be a non-racist white person. Need I bother to state all the things I think are wrong with that assumption?
I can believe that in the case of a person who is already accustomed to thinking of black people as inferior to white people, diversity education might be helpful. But in the case of someone who is not, I think it is actively counterproductive, and I don't think there's any way to make it productive. I think the whole concept is flawed. Any time you start talking about "black people" and "white people" as different categories - even if it's only to try to tell people not to! - it reinforces the idea that they *are* different categories. Isn't the point to get people to stop doing that?
no subject
But before diversity education, my attitude was that judging people by the color of their skin was as silly as judging by them whether or not they have freckles, and it was something I don't think I would have seriously considered doing. A few years later, I found myself very naturally judging people by their skin color and deciding how to talk to them with that fact being part of the criteria. I think that's a big step backward.
Now, it's possible that other factors were involved. For example, there just weren't that many black people in the suburb where I grew up, and those there were had been educated in the same schools I had, talked the same way white people did and about the same things, socialized normally with white people, had the same body language, and so on. In Boston, I encountered a lot more black people who talked differently, used different body language, went about in exclusively-black groups and seemed to be deliberately not only isolating themselves from everyone else but actively trying to look scary. It worked. But why did I learn to tend to associate that with skin color, when I had not previously associated anything with skin color, rather than, say, certain accents, or cargo pants? I do feel that part of the reason was that, at around the same time, I was being taught "It's normal to think about black people differently than you think about white people, and sometimes you should."
It's also been suggested that I was unconsciously prejudiced before, and diversity education just made me conscious of something I had previous been unaware of. I can't prove that isn't true, but that seems to be making the implicit assumption that it's impossible to be a non-racist white person. Need I bother to state all the things I think are wrong with that assumption?
I can believe that in the case of a person who is already accustomed to thinking of black people as inferior to white people, diversity education might be helpful. But in the case of someone who is not, I think it is actively counterproductive, and I don't think there's any way to make it productive. I think the whole concept is flawed. Any time you start talking about "black people" and "white people" as different categories - even if it's only to try to tell people not to! - it reinforces the idea that they *are* different categories. Isn't the point to get people to stop doing that?