What I think is getting obscured in all of the overheated rhetoric about race is the fact that all humans want a tribe. We want to feel like we belong to something greater than ourselves.
I'm Canadian, but I can imagine if I were to move to France to learn French it would be similar. Many people would be welcoming, but some might be impatient with my shitty French and say/do rude things. I'd probably end up affiliating with other Anglophones because we'd all be going through the same journey.
Expecting people to completely suppress this tendency towards in-group affiliation seems, frankly, unscientific. Most of the popular proposals aimed at "eliminating racism" seem likely to fail, or even backfire, because they treat racism like it's something evil people do rather than a byproduct of our tendency to connect more easily to people like us.
What I think is getting obscured in all of the overheated rhetoric about race is the fact that all humans want a tribe. We want to feel like we belong to something greater than ourselves.
I'm Canadian, but I can imagine if I were to move to France to learn French it would be similar. Many people would be welcoming, but some might be impatient with my shitty French and say/do rude things. I'd probably end up affiliating with other Anglophones because we'd all be going through the same journey.
Expecting people to completely suppress this tendency towards in-group affiliation seems, frankly, unscientific. Most of the popular proposals aimed at "eliminating racism" seem likely to fail, or even backfire, because they treat racism like it's something evil people do rather than a byproduct of our tendency to connect more easily to people like us.