Hey, I can raise my own comment to the front page because it's my blog
I'm a responsible person and at the personal level, I choose to be responsible for racism - for any word from my mouth or act of my own hands.
At the race level, I would rather not be held responsible for racist acts performed by those outside my very small realm of influence.
Not a lot more could be asked of you. Some, but not a lot. Because your realm of influence may be greater than you think.
But what would happen if you changed how you expect others to behave?
Okay, this particular thread is officially taking a break from The Big Picture. But understand that talking race issues on the personal level is as different from doing it on the social level as quantum mechanics is from ballistics.
I've moved in several different circles in my life, so I've developed several different sets of expectations. What I do with those expectations depends on the situation. The more I deal with you the more I whittle away at the pretty formless block of general expectations we assign first impressions.
Okay, that's a fancy way of describing what we all do. Thing is, sometimes you get folks in the wrong bucket and you've got to be willing to move them where they belong (this is most easily done before the relationship develops roots but you can't always tell a relationship will be significant). And you've got to identify where your categorization went wrong and stop doing that.
I did not say do the opposite.
Because what can happen is, you put someone in a bucket, they do something "unbucketed" and you try to figure out why a guy who belongs in that bucket would do that rather than saying, oh, wrong bucket, or only one foot in the bucket, or he goes in the bucket when he needs to or any of the other likelihoods.
I don't think you want me to change that approach. It's what lets me have conversations like this sanely, why I don't call Thomas Jefferson a racist (though one or two of his descendants&hellip:). It's what lets me know you don't mean to be presumptuous by suggesting you have a better way for me to think about my life than I do. It's seen me through several career changes and several life changes.
That's the quantum mechanics.
On the personal level, I have no problems with rapproachments, new friends, any of that. But I'm clear that it's taking aspirin to prevent a heart attack, know what I mean? It keeps the patient alive, but he still needs to stop smoking so damn much.
