How can a person be racist if they friends who are black?

[RAB910]

[leftstreet]

1. DURec

[Pachamama]

2. Great analogy....

[dalton99a]

3. Kick

[UpInArms]

4. Well done!

[StarfishSaver]

5. The same reason most African Americans have at least one slaveowner in our family tree

[onecaliberal]

6. BOOM!

[NatBurner]

7. ask sally hemmings

[cutroot]

8. They will say, "But he is one of the good ones." about their black acquaintance.

[dchill]

16. Grr.

[Beringia]

9. You can also be a racist against your own race or a human who hates other humans

[hunter]

12. As when the most vile homophobic politicians and religious leaders are homosexual themselves.

There are also misogynistic women.

The Republican Party is full of people like this.

[uponit7771]

13. +1

[cwydro]

18. Yes indeed, and I've seen that here.

A poster wrote about how they didn’t care for others of their race who hung out with white people, and they obviously did that because they were too “unhip” to hang out with their own race. I was gobsmacked.

Now, I’ve never been “hip,” nor have I cared one way or another about it, but I have had friends of many races. Go figure. I guess my “hipness” wasn’t an issue to them.

The poster didn’t call those particular “unhip” people “Uncle Toms,” but he/she might as well have.

[moondust]

10. Republican proof.

[BarbD]

11. Profound!

[Caliman73]

14. Ahh yes, the bullshit racist's defense...

If it weren't such a cynical troll question I would say that conservatives are just stupid (which many likely are). Racism is not overt hatred and active discrimination against people. The hatred and discrimination are cognitive and behavioral results of the mindset of racism. Racism allows you to dehumanize people based on the color of their skin.

The human mind is complex, and can hold contradicting ideas simultaneously, though psychologists theorize that this causes psychic discomfort (dissonance) and causes the person to make rationalizations. As others have said, "He's one of the good ones..." They create outliers while still holding the core belief that on a macro level, Black people are just inferior to White people. When more Black people get arrested and harshly sentenced for doing the exact same thing, the racist thinks, "well, it's because Black people just commit more crime" or "They must have done something to deserve the harsher sentence". They will likely not say any of that when their "Black friend" comes around, but they still hold those beliefs.

It goes to the binary thinking that is typical of conservatives. They either cannot or more likely choose not to understand complexity in behavior both on a personal and systemic level. For the world to make sense to them it has to be either or. You aren't racist unless you are burning crosses on Black people's lawns and trying to lynch them.

Racism is one way of defining human value and creating mental structures that shape the way to view behavior. It is the way in which when a Black person or Brown person does something negative, it has historically said something the about entire group of Black and Brown people but when they do something positive, they are rising above their group and conversely, when a White person does something horrible, they are an outlier, an aberration, but when they do positive things, they are representing the virtue of the group.

Racism does not necessarily preclude other mindsets and it can certainly be suspended and modified to allow for people to have personal relationships with individuals because racism is not necessarily about individuals but about how we see groups of people and categorize them as a whole.

[Goodheart]

15. I admit my speciesism.

I've heard some protest "I am not a speciesist! Some of my best friends have been dogs!"

To which I've replied: "I've had dog friends, too, but they're my inferiors. And if they don't like it they can go back to the pound they came from."

[TalenaGor]

17. lol

[Behind the Aegis]

19. I'll have to save this thread.

Given I am not black, I don't often hear this excuse, though I have on occasion. No, for me, it is "my grandparents were Jews", "He has Jewish family members", "I have plenty of Jewish friends" and "Well, this random Jew I found, agrees with me." Then there's the whole queer thing, which takes on a life of its own; "I have a gay parent", "My BFF is a gay", "I get me dicked sucked by a dude every now and again and I like it", " I regularly attend pride events/go to gay bars/meet with gays".

Yup, there is a certain lot, when confronted with their own bigotry, have to show off their credentials and as someone said above, there are plenty of people within a target minority, who are just as (or almost as) bigoted against their own kind as majority bigots are. Ahhh, internalized racism/homophobia/anti-Semitism/sexism/misogyny/etc...