Comments on: On Trusting White People

By: runasim

runasim — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 04:13:44 +0000

That's a great story, T-Steel.
It may also provide the prescricption for racial problems: intermarriage.

Of cource, that would eventaully lead to blandness.
Diversity and differences may cause trouble, but they also contribute to the splendor of cultures..

By: T_Steel

T_Steel — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 03:33:41 +0000

My grandmother, lily white (born and raised in France) met my very black, Haitian born grandfather back 1945. They were married (secretly) 6 months after meeting. They've been married 63 years. And they say they still don't trust each other because of their race: the race to the last piece of apple crumb cheesecake back in '59 which all kinds of dirty tricks were played (which eventually led to their dog Princess eating it off the floor).

That's an old race joke in our family minus all the colorful details! (*sorry couldn't help myself*).

Continue on...

By: runasim

runasim — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 02:39:55 +0000

This is a subject with which I can't seem to go in a straight line. My rhoughts keep going sideways and in circles.

There is a prelude to race relations, and that is: how do we react to strangers?
Then come race relations, the birds of a feather syndrome, and other sociological tendencies.
Finally: what does it take to transform a stranger into 'one of us' in our perceptions?

Trust is the leit motif throughout.
I don't think trust between races can be understood without understanding the role of trust in all human interactions.
At the same time, ,the barrier of race is not like any other barrier between strangers. Physical features brand strangers as such from the first to the last minute. when they are no longer perceived as strangers, but have become one of us. instead.

The default position of mistrust between races is well laid out in this article.
But I don't see it as a separate species of human interactions.. I see it as an aggravated example of human interactions..

By: schraubd

schraubd — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 02:20:36 +0000

No, because the violence is not racialized. Blacks don't fear Whites because of some statistically measure of violent activity (one could use that to fear anyone -- men, Christians, heterosexuals... -- aside from simple statistical proclivity, nothing in the identity group makes them more prone to violent activity). Rather, it is because the violence and power we're talking about is explicitly racialized: it is because we are White and they are Black that the threat emerges. This isn't to say Whites are inherently violent or bigoted -- it's that the risk under discussion occurs not in tandem with an identity axis, but by virtue of it.

By: AustinRoth

AustinRoth — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 01:24:38 +0000

So, does the likelihood that currently a White being the victim of a violent crime from a Black being 5 times the likelihood of being a victim of a violent crime by a White make a default position of distrusting all Blacks excusable for a White?

Of course not.