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  1. Steve Cameron says

    I heard an interesting theory about why racists don’t think they’re racist a couple months ago on the Best of the Left podcast. It goes that many racists think that supposed racial differences when it comes to intellect, athletic ability, proclivity to criminal behaviour, business sense, honesty, etc — all the usual ideas — are actually all true and (especially to the extent there may be some statistical signal there) much more extreme. They think that there’s no such thing as institutional racism, so forget about socio-economic differences or racist laws or policies to explain any supposed deficiencies in a group. And they think that everybody knows this and thinks this way, but most people are just too polite or nice or politically correct or just plain deluded to ever mention it.

    So to them racism is only something aggressive and deliberate, something that includes explicit racial slurs at the very least. To them it’s a naked and blatant hatred of somebody because of their skin colour and often the language they speak. That’s why “I can’t be racist: I have friends who are X” seems to be a good defence against the charge to them. That’s also why their racist joke or comment isn’t racist since it’s not “hateful” just demeaning and dehumanizing.

    And because people often share some assumptions about differences between ethnicities, especially positive ones like certain groups being better at sports or math, it’s easy for them to mistakenly think people agree with them more generally. That’s probably why Eric Trump recently said that 95% of Americans agree with his dad’s racist tweets (well, that and Eric’s an out-of-touch, entitled rich jackass).

  2. Akira MacKenzie says

    So to them racism is only something aggressive and deliberate, something that includes explicit racial slurs at the very least. To them it’s a naked and blatant hatred of somebody because of their skin colour and often the language they speak.

    That’s more or less my analysis. Each and every time the topic of race comes up, the conservatives I know will claim that lynching was horrible, that state-sponsored prejudice is “bad” (even though they’ll still insist that business should be allowed to discrimination in the name of “property rights” and “freedom of association”). However, they’ll outright dismiss the very notion of systemic racism as “political correctness run amok,” then point to the meager improvements in the lives and of non-whites, as well as the success stories of a few outliers, as PROOF that racism is somehow “over.”

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