Two for me:
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The moment you feel tipsy it’s time to ease down. You have a stomach full of booze that’s going to make you more drunk even if you stop immediately.
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If you think people are good, you’re probably right and if you think people are bad, you’re probably right.
People are good IMO.
I grew up in a racist town, and was indoctrinated on racism in my youth. It never sat right with me, but even so, I still struggled with racist thoughts that would jump in to my head when I encountered indigenous folk.
Someone said to me though that it’s not the first thought that jumps in to your head that matters, because that’s what you’ve been trained to think. What matters is what you do after that thought has appeared.
And that’s stuck with me. It helped me be aware of the impact of indoctrinated hate, whilst also not getting tied up with guilt over my inability to completely purge myself of the indoctrinated bullshit.
It allowed me to retrain myself, and to make sure the shit I was raised with doesn’t get passed on to my own kid.
Thank you for sharing your perspective on this. I think we could heal if more people felt they could openly discuss how they grapple with it.
This is really deep.
I also gotta say: I reserve more respect for anyone who changed their attitudes to something I admire than someone who always held them. Me? I’m pretty progressive. But it’s not like I can take credit. I share similar views to most people with my upbringing. Holding these beliefs is about impressive as a ball rolling down a hill.
Questioning your beliefs and going somewhere else? That’s an achievement.
To be clear, I’ve always been progressive. I was never overtly racist in the way so many of my peers were growing up. But their overt racism impacted me and filled me with assumptions and unchallenged beliefs that it took years to identify and challenge.
I was born in Moree (the destination of the Freedom Ride (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Ride_(Australia)), and racism still shapes the town today. I don’t think it would be possible to grow up in that town without being shaped by racism in some way.
Fixed link and good one for not just going with the flow.
Wait… I thought the significantly higher than average percentage of Aboriginal people in Moree would cause the population to be less racist in general. Your experience implies that is not the case.
There’s diversity, where you have a lot of different types of people, and then there’s places with a high concentration of a minority group
The first one makes people less bigoted, because you can’t avoid dealing with people when they’re everywhere. Your not going to last long in NYC if you don’t want your food touched by them. Either you deal with it and get used to it, or you’ll find it hard to eat
The second one doesn’t force those normal human interactions. Instead, you have exposure. You see them around, but don’t have to treat them like people. You might not interact at all.
So every time you see them, it reinforces the racism
You see it all over the American South, people around the black communities aren’t less racist, they’re giga-racist
Those are words of wisdom that have always stuck with me too. The fact that your first thought can just be a hair trigger gross thing. But who you are is the reaction to that thought, and the actions you take then.
I was raised by racists and generally not-good people and I learned from an early age to lie lie lie. So recently when a friend was offering me money for something, my trigger thought was to ask for a few hundred dollars more. And just. Gosh, ew, no, no, that’s awful. I still feel bad about the fact that my initial thought was that, but the reaction that follows are where my morals actually lie.
Not an easy lesson to learn, but a very important one, IMO