I apologize for the condescending tone that I didn’t recognize as such when I wrote it. I was tired and not nearly as aware as I should have been.
I do know that some people, and from both sides of the spectrum, do have engrained ideas about race. . .and also about sex, class, politics, religion. . . and of course those ideas vary widely. You have people who believe in the inherent superiority of one race over another as well as those who believe that race does not matter at all in that all are equal, and a host of ideas in between. And I do think, although this is just opinion here, all of us have a bias (and I don’t mean that in the perjorative sense, but simply as a recognition that an individual tends to have a preference for what he or she ‘shares’ and especially if those things are strongly in the worldview). And the stronger our bias, the less likely we are to consider other points of view.
I have family who while they would not come right out and say it in so many words have always felt that ‘black people’ in the last 30 years or so have had an unfair advantage over white people in, again, what is largely regarded as upper lower class to lower middle class socioeconomic. What this means is that in this area specifically there are more black people who are ‘competing for’ the same jobs that white people are competing for, and due to quotas of some kind, that some white people are PERCEIVING that a black person with fewer qualifications is being given a job that would have otherwise gone to a WHITE person with ‘more’ qualifications.
Now, again, that is a view that is only seen by SOME people in that group and over the last 30 years.
Whereas you have some black people in that socioeconomic group who are looking at the last 110 years or so of US history and seeing that, in their view, ONLY in the last 30 years or so have black people been given the least little ‘reparation’ to compensate for those decades of repression. To some of them, quotas or otherwise are not only too little too late but not even worthy of being seen as ‘help’, and they get extremely angry at hearing how dismissive white people are. They feel that as black people they are being treated badly all over again, and not even with the supposed ‘help’ that white people are claiming black people get across the board.
That’s what I was meaning with ‘engrained ideas’; there are a lot of them, and across the board, and some diametrically in opposition. And I can understand HOW pretty much anybody ‘thinks’ in any of these cases even if I disagree with many of the conclusions.
