I disagree as a product of the southern education system. Worth noting that some...

wahern · on July 27, 2019

I had a very similar experience in middle school and high school in rural Florida, almost point-by-point. Yet I thought I had rather decent education.

So what if my 11th grade American History teacher gave a week-long seminar on the Civil War as "states rights", and explained to the class (nearly 1/3 of which was black) the lexicon of racial classifications--"now a _blue_ black was somebody who was really dark and because of the sun reflected on their skin...". I still learned 99% of the same American History as everybody else. Most of us were rolling our eyes in class, anyhow, and while these types of teachers are not uncommon, they're not exactly common, either. It's more like that they're tolerated because it's understood that they represent a persistent aspect of the local culture that isn't going anywhere. And for the most part for any particular subject you're learning from multiple different teachers at different times, so it's not like you don't learn the legitimate subject material. It's more like you're taught what today we call "alternative facts", and in practice they're really only taken in by the same segment of the population that's creating those facts. If a kid grows up steeped in this culture at home, the presence or absence of it at school is almost irrelevant. The important point is that they're at least exposed to the real facts--which they are, perhaps with the exception of sex education.

Combined with the fact that most people aren't particularly intellectually curious and don't retain much of the detail, it's sufficient that they're taught the proper material in broad strokes. And they are.

Plus, after having traveled the world some as an adult, most places around the world--even in places Americans look up to as more "civilized"--have similar issues where local biases and mythologies are taught as fact when they're glaringly, painfully wrong-headed to more objective observers. While most of the kids in my class were rolling their eyes, there are kids in similar classes in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and even Europe eagerly taking notes on some ridiculous and patently prejudiced narrative.

The weird thing about being American is that we've been having an intense, rancorous, open argument about ourselves and our prejudices for at least 50, if not 100, or even 200 years. Everybody else gets to watch it, too. You'd think Americans are the most racist, bigoted, backward people on the face of the earth. In reality, it's just that we were one of the first--and still one of the few--to recognize our bigotry and prejudices systematically. Not just by an intellectual, bourgeois elite. Even the most bigoted American won't take at face value a narrative that group A is intellectually, genetically, or morally inferior from group B. Every coal rolling white nationalist (not that these things always come together) have shockingly modern and sophisticated ideas about race and culture, even if cringe worthy. In most parts of the world people will treat claims that group A is worse than group B no more worthy of suspicion than claims that the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. Except for Americans--everybody knows how racist Americans are. Racism is an American problem. It's why they're talking about it so much.

To be clear, we are racist and we are biased. I don't want to say that we're any more or less these things than somewhere else; I'm not sure what value there is in that comparison.[1] But there's a level of self-reflection here that is absent or at least lesser in most of the rest of the world.

[1] I mean, we had slavery here. That's crucial. But so did most of the Americas. Slavery was at least as formative to Brazil as it was to the U.S., and any curious traveler to Venezuela, Columbia, and even Ecuador can see shadows of the same anti-black prejudices and ostracism we're familiar with in the U.S., entirely home grown and stemming from their native histories of slavery. It's just these shadows are often simply considered as the way things are supposed to be, though I think Brazil is more like the U.S. than other countries in how they've internalized a more sophisticated ability to reflect on these things.

komali2 · on July 27, 2019

> Even the most bigoted American won't take at face value a narrative that group A is intellectually, genetically, or morally inferior from group B. Every coal rolling white nationalist (not that these things always come together) have shockingly modern and sophisticated ideas about race and culture, even if cringe worthy.

I acknowledge your experience, but I'm not sure how to take this. Can you help me understand what kind of modern ideals about race and culture an avowed racist would have?

wahern · on July 27, 2019

So, for example, where once people might say that blacks are X, Germans are Y, or Jews Z because of intrinsic qualities--godly design, genetics, or whatever mechanism du jure--today such people might instead admit, at least to some extent, the historical accidents and cultural forces that assigned the supposed group traits.

So where once upon a time people claimed that blacks were more prone to criminal behavior by their nature, today they might say that rap culture teaches and perpetuates violence. They might admit that slavery and Jim Crow is at the root of black poverty, but then they'll say something like, "but now they have equality of opportunity", implying that any failures to advance are personal failures.

Jews are good with money not because they're greedy, baby eating Jesus killers but because they were relegated to that role by limitations on the types of work they were permitted it perform in Medieval Europe. (Even many liberals believe this, and while I suppose it's infinitely more true than Jews being baby eaters I think that narrative is much more self-serving and misleading than people realize.)

Such thinking often starts and ends in the same places in terms reinforcing hierarchies, but it's circuitous. These are narratives that people engage with more critically, as opposed to passively receiving and internalizing ideas about intrinsic traits. They tweak them to incorporate their own lived experiences, and the narratives are generally more dynamic. Crucially, they recognize the role of extrinsic factors.

Or take the narrative about how women's bodies can prevent pregnancy after a rape: it's obvious people who espouse this narrative are attempting to resolve some serious cognitive dissonance about a woman's autonomy. But that means they've already internalized the legitimacy of a woman's autonomy, it's just that they're not prepared to let it displace other deeply held ideas about women's role in society.

Even the most progressive Americans and Europeans struggle with the "problem" of the hijab. It's less of a problem for Southern conservatives--the hijab is clearly a symbol of male religious domination that should be opposed. It's just so weird. You would think Southern evangelicals would better understand how a women could legitimately and voluntarily take up such a strict cultural discipline. Where I lived many evangelical women, especially the Pentecostals, wore ankle length skirts, plain clothing, and kept long, straight hair.

This is all progress, I think. In many, perhaps most places in the world these aren't questions you ask. People will literally say that racism doesn't exist one moment and the next moment they'll explain how group A are the garbage collectors and group B the shop keepers as if their society was a carefully and perfectly constructed utopia. They tell you the sexes are coequal while finding the notion of a woman CEO preposterous. And I suppose in some way they're right. Can there be racism or sexism when people can't even conceive of an alternative world, or at least conceive of it as being anything other than farcical?

caseysoftware · on July 27, 2019

I'd wager those are exceptional cases, but even if they're the norm, being able to read is above and beyond many.

In Chicago, my peers were promoted to the point of graduation still being functionally illiterate. In Northern Virginia, my 4th grader was barely a 1st grader by ability - math, reading, and general knowledge - but kept getting promoted.