The worst date you ever had?

@NickiHijab You’d love the American south. There’s a low key racism baked into just about everything.

@Straylight ooo fun. I have a variety to choose from.

@NickiHijab And it’s weird because for most of the older people there (also, the most racist) there’s a disconnect. Like they’ll blame social problems on black peoples and make super racist jokes about them, but it’s them as a nebulous, faceless other. Because many of them have friends who are black (or whatever non white race they were just joking about) who they seem to like and speak highly of.
And I don’t know if it’s just that they won’t say these things to someone’s face. It’s almost like the racism is just absorbed into their consciousness like a meme, even if those opinions don’t match the actual people they’ve met.

@Straylight
That's because it is. Conditioning of several centuries. Even if you know you're not racist, it is still very much possible to have implicit or unconscious racial biases. People might be aware of their explicit, declaratory biases, however some prejudices arise without thought, in snap judgments and that's because they have developed under pretenses that feel natural but are actually grounded in racism. It's the lack of critical thinking and being comfortable with following an archaic script of society that I don't really have the patience for anymore.

The token minority best friend defense also doesn't cut it anymore. How good of a friend you are usually ties into how good you are at following the implicit white standard which no one seems to acknowledge.
You can't live in a society that’s constantly giving you messages of white as the ideal and pretend it doesn't exist and the same applies for societies that have different proportions of majority and minority populations. At that point these 'friends' are simply your get out of jail card when it's convenient.

Making friends with somebody of another race is as indicative of someones non-racist attitude as much as me owning two wigs is indicative of me being bald.

I remember in high school with it being majority white, my friend would get asked why he was friends with us (two brown faces) it happened more than once by more than one person and his response was always "they're different"
Almost like he got lucky and picked out the only two good ones out of the millions of others that exist.

@NickiHijab I lived in Georgia for four years at college and while the campus was segregated because it was an HBC, I worked in a public library senior year, where I encountered racist comments all the time. The white librarian “praised” me one day by saying, “you’re such a good worker ! You’re not at all lazy, like most of your people are.” I had to excuse myself. It was about a month before graduation so I resigned. I’m pretty sure she was surprised. She thought she was paying me a compliment. 🙄

@bijouxbroussard Ugh, that's disgusting. You truly deserved better. And when I read segregated, it really put into perspective how this history of racism really wasn't that long ago.

@NickiHijab That’s true. I’ll be 62 in January. When I was in college the south was still segregated by custom. But when I was very small it was still segregated by law.

@bijouxbroussard looks like you have seen and experienced a lot of change over the years. You should write a post on it. Would love to hear 🙂