How do we fix racism?

[bye]

Been thinking about this lately due to an attitude some seem to have on this forum that racist people are helpless and that making inroads to them is useless.

I often remind myself of this article, which is probably one of the most memorable reads of the past couple years. It's about how the son of the Stormfront founder sees the light and acknowledges his racist past, and how he begins to move forward and repent. It wasn't because of someone shouting at him and calling him a racist, which only fueled him in the past, but because someone of color genuinely talked to him as a friend and treated him like a human being, was inclusive of him despite him being distant.

There's also a clear connection between class struggle and racism, with often the most poor and uneducated parts of the country being the most racist. When it comes to addressing this, often you'll hear people advocate they don't deserve a better life or a vote because they are racist. That doing nothing seems to be the solution.

And you also have people claim that maybe we should just wait for them to die to their kids can grow up in a more tolerant world and therefore be less racist. This has proven to be nothing but a fantasy with kids adopting the same ideology as their parents.

So what do you think are ammiplcable solutions to helping reduce racism for future generations? I don't think it's possible to completely wipe it out, but clearly we can do more.

 

[Blue Skies]

Step 1: destroy fox news, 4 chan, storefront, gab, the_donald, and change Facebook/twitter laws
Step 2: standardize education across the country. kids in one state shouldn't have different textbooks than other kids
Step 3: fund more mental health initiatives
Step 4: deplatform online idiots who make money from saying racist shit

 

[DeusOcha]

Everyone living in a city. Serious though, I reckon most racist folk haven't any worthwhile/extensive experiences with minority groups whereas cities are natural hubs for immigrants/minorities to congregate to. It's by no means the only solution but I believe it to be a good stepping stone in tearing down flawed prejudices.

 

[Officer Big Mac]

Reducing income equality, increasing education and making it so that it's not rich, which is mostly white, with everyone else. Those who interact with people different from them at early stages of life are less likely to view others through the lens of racism.

How do we do this? If I knew I'd be running for president.

 

[Seesaw15]

Step 1: Don't have allies rationalize racism to PoC and actually call it out.

 

[lunarworks]

Racism is learned. Have kids exposed to people different from them from a young age, it develops tolerance. Of course, that doesn't help the problem with racist parents.

 

[Speevy]

I know it's a simplistic answer because you can do things to help like being a decent human being to other people and educating yourself on what racism is, but I don't think racism will ever be fully fixed.

 

[Soliloquy of a Dogge]

Make white people have to live at least 10 years of their lives as a subjugated minority without any of the privilege they're accustomed to.

Feasible? No. Would it help? Yes.

 

[Lunchbox-]

global warming will take care of it soon

 

[Nastrodamous]

stop coddling white people.

 

[sabrina]

It wasn't because of someone shouting at him and calling him a racist, which only fueled him in the past, but because someone of color genuinely talked to him as a friend and treated him like a human being, was inclusive of him despite him being distant.

Click to shrink...

It is not the role of the oppressed to appease their oppressors. Minorities are nice to bigoted members of majority parties every day and bigots still exist.

 

[Kevers]

Kill the racists.

 

[samoscratch]

Racism is learned. Have kids exposed to people different from them from a young age, it develops tolerance. Of course, that doesn't help the problem with racist parents.

Click to shrink...

This is it right here.

 

[onadesertedisland]

Education. Strong social safety net programs. Universal healthcare. And all of the other suggestions here.

 

[Jon Carter]

You'd be well on your way to fixing racism if you could somehow have people interact with people from different races. A lot of people aren't evil, they're just forming their opinion of others based on anecdotal experience. Look at how black people are commonly portrayed in film and TV shows. Imagine if that was your only exposure to black people.

 

[Soliloquy of a Dogge]

Education. Strong social safety net programs. Universal healthcare.

Click to shrink...

Again, racist whites vote against these initiatives because minorities will benefit from them too.

Back to square one.

 

[onadesertedisland]

Again, racist whites vote against these initiatives because minorities will benefit from them too.

Back to square one.

Click to shrink...

I'm all for not asking white people what they think about what is going to happen.

 

[onadesertedisland]

You'd be well on your way to fixing racism if you could somehow have people interact with people from different races. A lot of people aren't evil, they're just forming their opinion of others based on anecdotal experience. Look at how black people are commonly portrayed in film and TV shows. Imagine if that was your only exposure to black people.

Click to shrink...

White supremacism is a hell of a drug. You got these poor as dogshit white people that haven't a pot to piss in and they get to look down on minorities because they have less melanin in their skin.

 

[Nepenthe]

The key to solving a problem is to get the relevant collective on board with what the problem even is. Subsequently, you are going to have to get the majority of White America as a whole to admit racism against non-white folks is a modern day and devastating problem, and subsequently that they have the utmost responsibility in dismantling it since they benefit the most from it.

.....

lmfao, good luck.

 

[neon/drifter]

Step 1: destroy fox news, 4 chan, storefront, gab, the_donald, and change Facebook/twitter laws
Step 2: standardize education across the country. kids in one state shouldn't have different textbooks than other kids
Step 3: fund more mental health initiatives
Step 4: deplatform online idiots who make money from saying racist shit

Click to shrink...

These are all great but I'd like to add a step about having more exposure. I find a lot of racism easily breeds from a lack of exposure to other cultures. Some people have complex reasons that form their racism, but sometimes it's literally as simple as "I grew up for 30 yrs in a place with no people of color and my only education on them is movies and the media showing me them as gangsters or terrorists."

 

[sphagnum]

Kill the racists.

Click to shrink...

It's not that simple. Racism isn't just an individual moral failure - you have to stop the systems that propagate it.

I don't know if racism can ever be ended in full. I fear it might be like Pandora's Box. But I don't think it can be whittled down until capitalism is gone and replaced with socialism.

 

[John Dunbar]

everyone fucks everyone until we all look the same

 

[Lashes.541]

You can't, it's impossible unless humans go extinct. What you can do is curb it every step of the way.

 

[Deleted member 31923]

We don't. And waiting for old people to die won't work either. But we can hope racism declines a little each generation, much like religion.

 

[Kevers]

everyone fucks everyone until we all look the same

Click to shrink...

I found my new tinder bio. "hookup with me to help end racism"

 

[Cipherr]

Aliens.

You can't fix it, all you can do is redirect it. Give folks little grey people to hate MORE.

 

[Soliloquy of a Dogge]

I'm all for not asking white people what they think about what is going to happen.

Click to shrink...

So basically they have to be dragged, kicking and screaming like the infantile hateful toddlers they are, towards a better future for themselves and the minorities they irrationally despise.

Seems like more work would still need to be done.

 

[Speevy]

everyone fucks everyone until we all look the same

Click to shrink...

Would work long-term, probably a few short-term problems.

 

[Deleted member 25606]

Step 2: standardize education across the country. kids in one state shouldn't have different textbooks than other kids

Click to shrink...

I wasn't going to post in this thread I find threads like this informative and I get more reading and not talking, but I agree with this point, in fact I feel very strongly about it to the degree of making that point to people in real life as recently as last week.

I would like to add to that though I also believe the textbooks and standards for and the curriculum itself should be decided on by an unaffiliated with politics or corporation panel of top shelf academics, not by government appointed education branch people (Devos in particular is scary as fuck) or textbook companies based in Texas with right wing mindsets and standards that rename slavery and support White Christian Republican agendas.

 

[Deleted member 6230]

I mean first you gotta realize that Racism is a hierarchical power structure and work from there but most people even people who claim to be anti-racist don't

 

[SolVanderlyn]

I really hate to say this, but the realist in me thinks something as bad as WWII would have to happen for people to course correct themselves again. Social media and propaganda is just so powerful right now.

I wish people could just not be dumb.

Edit: Not like it fixed it the first time, but Nazis were cemented in popular culture as the bad guys and their views were largely recognized as evil. Evil ideology is surfacing again under a different name.

 

[Zorg1000]

I reckon most racist folk haven't any worthwhile/extensive experiences with minority groups

Click to shrink...

Yep, I grew up in a small midwest town with a 90%+ white population and it was full of racist people. All blacks are in gangs, all mexicans are illegal, all muslims are terrorists.

Pretty much everything they know about minorities, they learned in movies or on Fox news.

 

[Steel]

Been thinking about this lately due to an attitude some seem to have on this forum that racist people are helpless and that making inroads to them is useless.

Click to shrink...

Lemme stop you there. Saying that it's a waste of time for a campaign to try to reach out to racists is not the same thing as saying racists cannot change.

Anyway, you got a video like this that examines a segment of the problem:


The video itself is definitely by a lefty. But they also say that trying to deprogram racists is the least efficient way of combating the right. They always have a spigot of right wing media shouting at them far louder than anyone on the campaign trail.

Anyway, how do you solve it long term? Bring out the groups that vote for you, beat them into the ground electorally until they become irrelevant and have no authorities to hide behind. It's a pipe dream, I know, since there's a certain segment of the population that always votes against incumbents/the party in power because of some stupid edginess keeping the pendulum swinging.

 

[Greg NYC3]

everyone fucks everyone until we all look the same

Click to shrink...

If humanity lasts long enough this was always going to happen but I feel like racism based on skin color will just be replaced by something equally as dumb.

 

[linkboy]

We don't. And waiting for old people to die won't work either. But we can hope racism declines a little each generation, much like religion.

Click to shrink...

This.

It's not something you can fix, as sad as that is to say.

People are going to be assholes.

The best you can do is ostracize them from society and hope that things will finally click inside their tiny dumb-ass brain.

 

[onadesertedisland]

So basically they have to be dragged, kicking and screaming like the infantile hateful toddlers they are, towards a better future for themselves and the minorities they irrationally despise.

Seems like more work would still need to be done.

Click to shrink...

Well, yeah. There was a civil war over this and then they let the fuckers get away without getting punished.

 

[Order]

Acknowledge racism, but the majority don't actually want to do that.

 

[Kurdel]

I mean first you gotta realize that Racism is a hierarchical power structure and work from there but most people even people who claim to be anti-racist don't

Click to shrink...

Bingo.

Blaming it ALL on poor and uneducated people is an easy and lazy scapegoat. The question is way bigger then them, and the power they hold in society.

 

[Coyote Starrk]

Kill the racists.

Click to shrink...

That would leave us in a worse spot than we already are and would accomplish less than nothing.

 

[nitewulf]

Racism less education and schooling from a young age. Non racist parenting and upbringing. Exposure to art, culture, food, literature from diverse ethnicities presented in a open, loving, informative manner rather than Hollywood stereotypes. Filtering out propaganda.

 

[thesoapster]

There's no clear fix. We chip away at it over and over. The first step is encouraging environments where people interact with others outside their race. They realize their commonality. We're a lot more similar than some acknowledge.

 

[take_marsh]

Putting the lid back on Pandora's Box takes a fucking miracle. There's such a vast imbalance of power, education, and wealth involved. The whole system needs to be flipped, but like someone else has said:

I mean first you gotta realize that Racism is a hierarchical power structure and work from there but most people even people who claim to be anti-racist don't

Click to shrink...

 

[Soliloquy of a Dogge]

Well, yeah. There was a civil war over this and then they let the fuckers get away without getting punished.

Click to shrink...

Absolved them, coddled them and empowered them. Just less overtly... most of the time.

Shit really is tiring. Numerous institutions need to be burnt to the ground and rebuilt from scratch before we even begin to right the wrongs of the past 400+ years starting in America.

 

[Speevy]

Get rid of the internet, television, and radio.

 

[Steel]

Saying racism is a pandora's box implies that someone opened the box at some point, when it's obviously been there since the beginning. It's just something that needs an excuse to be activated.

 

[Deleted member 6230]

Saying racism is a pandora's box implies that someone opened the box at some point, when it's obviously been there since the beginning.

Click to shrink...

Someone opened the box for sure

 

[Vic Damone Jr.]

Make white people have to live at least 10 years of their lives as a subjugated minority without any of the privilege they're accustomed to.

Feasible? No. Would it help? Yes.

Click to shrink...

This. Though I think it's have the opposite effect, wouldn't make racists empathetic. I think it's scare them into an even more selfish and bigoted mindset. For fear of subjugation.

 

[Chojin]

Either we all sleep together until our offspring look the dame. Or more likely we find intelligent life outside of earth and cone together to hate them.

Or the dolphins rise up against us.

 

[Artdayne]

Transition to a socialist economic system where there isn't an inherent underclass to be exploited and invest in educating people out of that mode of thinking. It will probably take generations and I can't say it will 100% disappear but it would improve substantially.

 

[Soliloquy of a Dogge]

This. Though I think it's have the opposite effect, wouldn't make racists empathetic. I think it's scare them into an even more selfish and bigoted mindset. For fear of subjugation.

Click to shrink...

Hadn't really thought about it reaffirming their tribalistic mindsets in that way but yeah, think you're right about that being a good possibility.