Thread: Am I Racist?

Ultimately, 'racist' is just a word. If you spend your entire life afraid of being called something bad, what are you going to do when something truly dangerous or challenging happens to you? You were doing what you thought is right, and that is really all one can do in the end.

Everyone who ever did anything of meaning has suffered insults and worse.

You can wait and see if she brings it up again (you shouldn't if this is a tender topic to you) and see if things revert to normal. Sometimes friends part, but usually not over a single situation where the rhetoric got out of hand. Minorities truly experience discrimination and disadvantage, but they also sometimes have a chip on their shoulder and are touchy when it is not to their advantage to be. Anger is transformed fear - what was she afraid of? Figure that out, and don't inflame that area any more, and things might go back to normal.

Flinging the charge of racism is convenient for people whose ability to articulate their thoughts and feelings has failed them, usually due to enhanced adrenaline. When I hear this, and am in a situation where I don't care about retaining or building friendship, I simply dismiss it as the childish nonsense it is. What about all our brown and black Americans who are suffering worse than us whites under the global onslaught? American Hispanics are way more likely than me to be the victim of identity theft, as the Swift raids showed. Urban black youth have the odds stacked against them when it comes time to look for summer or after school jobs - illegals are using entry level jobs to support families. So, to say that we oppose illegal immigration because so many of them are brown is silly.

I'm not sure I agree with the test of racism of do you ever wish [fill in the blank] would die or go away, etc. Sometimes we feel that way about family members or misbehaving pets, and the feeling usually passes. Only if it becomes a working ideology of ones life, maybe.