I grew up in redneck country and this was legitimately a problem occasionally. In particular you’d have people / families who consciously knew racism = bad, America fought against the Nazis for a reason, etc, but had a lot of subconscious biases particularly in ways that just prevented them from regularly intermingling with other races.
So they’d go decades just having their insular little neighborhood block parties and family reunions and such that never had a black or other non-white person and just never consciously consider the implications of that. Then one day their kid would bring home a new friend, someone new would move into the neighborhood, or even just a black guy would come to install the new fiber optic internet cables or whatever and suddenly they find out that their sweet beloved family pet hates black people.
and there were definitely some families out there for whom this was more of a feature than a bug, but there were also a lot of people that were suddenly confronted with the realization that subconscious and systemic biases are a thing by the surreal yet glaring realization that they somehow raised a racist dog.
That is very very interesting. Honestly, I knew gypsies before as a kid, but for some reason…this one teen kid was really black, and his lips pronounced, like a stereotypical black person, and I was scared/intimidated from him for some reason.
I grew up in redneck country and this was legitimately a problem occasionally. In particular you’d have people / families who consciously knew racism = bad, America fought against the Nazis for a reason, etc, but had a lot of subconscious biases particularly in ways that just prevented them from regularly intermingling with other races.
So they’d go decades just having their insular little neighborhood block parties and family reunions and such that never had a black or other non-white person and just never consciously consider the implications of that. Then one day their kid would bring home a new friend, someone new would move into the neighborhood, or even just a black guy would come to install the new fiber optic internet cables or whatever and suddenly they find out that their sweet beloved family pet hates black people.
and there were definitely some families out there for whom this was more of a feature than a bug, but there were also a lot of people that were suddenly confronted with the realization that subconscious and systemic biases are a thing by the surreal yet glaring realization that they somehow raised a racist dog.
That is very very interesting. Honestly, I knew gypsies before as a kid, but for some reason…this one teen kid was really black, and his lips pronounced, like a stereotypical black person, and I was scared/intimidated from him for some reason.