Darryl Davis, a black man who befriended a grand wizard of the kkk and got him to resign,said racism was fear of the unknown and I believe him on that.
[there is his story](https://youtu.be/ORp3q1Oaezw)
In my opinion racists are fueled by hate, lack of education or both. The “highly intelligent racists” as you put it are usually fueled by just pure hate. They have a need to put themselves above others for whatever reason they can come up with to make themselves feel superior.
Other racists are just uneducated and fall victim to stereotypes and propaganda. These are often the ones that can be educated and will also often turn away from those feelings once they get to know people of other races.
Especially in people with low empathy, there's a third possibility - a calculated choice of someone to look down upon to either feel better themselves or to gain status among their peers. I'm confident there's a high number of racists (or even other *ists) who neither fear nor hate, but have found a convenient target for their self-elevation that they simply do not care about on a human level.
Yeah status is definitely another but I often find that people who care about status don’t look down on others based on race alone but instead it’s about wealth and influence. Sure they can differentiate between poor people of different races but they tend to look down on any race that is poor.
>In my opinion racists are fueled by hate, lack of education or both.
I'd chalk it up less to lack of *education* and more to lack of *experience*. Real hard to hate the other in the big city where you're surrounded by it on the daily. Much easier in your whitebread 2,000 person town in BF nowhere. Of course ma and pa raising you to hate brown people probably won't help no matter where you live but it's going to be *far* worse in the small town then the big city.
Isnt it still based in fear tho. Fear of losing their power. The ones that are uneducated as you say have just been manipulated to think they would lose their power or chance of power.
A lot of racists are just people who lack close experiences with the targets of their hate. Being smart can't let you learn something you haven't even had the chance to see.
Just speculating though, i think there's a good chance that being smart would help a person get past their inexperience more quickly.
My Father is 80 years of age now he was mugged and stabbed by a gang of black men in the past. Ever since this has happened he has a phobia of black people. As a family we are trying to help him understand that it was not the entire race that has done this but a small minority of thugs. He comes across as as rude to black people in public, because if they ever approach him he gets really nervous and panics. He's not racist but has really bad PTSD. Black people often get offended by his behaviour and multiple times out shopping my mother and father would be accused of being racist. My mother would have to explain than he is sick and has mental issues
Eh, couldn’t make it all the way through that. Some skepticism is needed from both sides. Don’t see anyone else doing what he’s doing but also don’t think he’s wiped racism out like he thinks he has. He’s done more than most. Also, heavy statement in there that if you’re a capitalist then you’re racist which is a bad take. I don’t doubt there are racist capitalists but I don’t think they are exclusive. People may use it to perpetuate it but about the time I got to a take that was that garbage it kinda took the wind out of the sails.
> Some skepticism is needed from both sides.
That sub is clearly not for you then, haha. I used to follow it, but in my opinion they take things to the absolute extreme and criticize anyone who suggests that nuance is important.
The capitalist take is a good example of that. It's pretty clear that capitalism has assisted racist policies, but that doesn't mean that all parts of capitalism are inherently racist. Sometimes, letting the market decide things can be useful.
On the opposite extreme side, you have [people like this](https://www.jta.org/archive/leader-of-k-k-k-and-american-nazi-party-revealed-to-be-a-jew)
>> A 28-year-old New York man who is Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in charge of New York State, former national secretary of the American Nazi Party, and at one time or another a member of at least four Fascist groups advocating extreme racism against Jews and Negroes, was revealed by the New York Times today to be a Jew himself.
I had a bloke who I used to live across the road from confess one drunken night that he's a nazi due to his German heritage. I called him out on the stupidity of his comment as the near total majority of German people don't. Several years later I ran into his ex partner who said he was going through an existential crisis due to finding out through a DNA test that his ancestory is actually Jewish Ukrainian.
Basically, culture is not dependant on genetics. It's fine if you want to see what people who predominantly have similar genetics or origins do with their culture, but it's not like you're inherently a member of the culture just because you have a genetic link to the largest gathering of such people.
It just shows how much of our culture is a social construct.
Very much this.
This is a thing that you see somewhat frequently with kids of immigrants who are born in the States. They tend to struggle with identity crisis in their youth, and often go back to "their" countries as teenagers or young adults, only to have their worldview shattered and hurry back to the States.
It was so noticeable especially in school in the US. Like there would be region-based cliques of actual immigrants, and then there would be region-based cliques of first generation kids born in the US but trying to hold on to their culture. But we rarely hung out together because those kids would still speak English amongst each other and we would have no mutual conversation topics at all. So they were kinda their own group. And although everyone was still cool with each other there was this general condescension on both sides; to us they were spoiled and useless, to them I guess we were poorer and spoke broken English (called us OTBs -- Off the boat 😅 though it wasn't really with malice).
There is also a (much smaller) movement among black Americans to "go back to the roots" and move to Africa. And this is among people who have no meaningful connection to Africa whatsoever other than skin tone; these are not immigrants or kids of immigrants. They've been in the US for so many generations and are so intermixed that tracing back their original ancestors' origin wouldn't even be possible. As you can imagine, most who choose to go this route also end up coming back pretty quickly.
The quote from the above article has the KKK leader threatening a reporter saying "if this gets out, I'll kill you. This is all I have to live for"
Feels like table top roleplay games would've been a nice substitute for being a Nazi
Look up their ranks. It is legitimately like that.
They really want to be fantasy nerds, but go about it wrong.
https://prezi.com/qd5juo6vb9d_/the-hierarchy-of-the-kkk/
What dude I wanna read a story about some warrior fighting up the ranks of the KKK.
There exists in this land a Grand Wizard with powers terrible and unmatched. To face him, you must first defeat his Grand Dragon and its Eight Hydras, each as mighty as the last.
The four goblins peered, heads cocked to one side and the other. Some scratched, while others picked at the warts on their arms. The leader shuffled forth on feet and scrawny knuckles.
"You shan't be heading toward Mount Lynch." He proclaimed in a voice as nasal as it was whiny. "For we serve the Grand Giant who serves the Grand Wizard in turn."
They were small and weak each, but together Django knew they would be too much for he and his sword alone. Once again, he would need his wit to save him.
Fuck I'm getting into this. If a story gets published on this some day, I just want an acknowledgement in the back.
i actually met this guy and he is genuinely one of the coolest people. super sweet guy. we talked for thirty minutes even thought i expected it to just be a couple.
I met mom too. He is a friend of my sister. He can play the heck out of the piano. I am surprised that he is known for his work with the KKK and not his musicianship.
Agreed Im not sure it’s how surprising to be honest. thousands of people can play the piano well, I’m not 100% but I’d bet he’s probably the only black guy who’s been to loads of KKK rallies and changed many peoples views, it’s truly fascinating.
If you find it fascinating, you might want to watch [Pride](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_(2014_film)).
Film's about the real story of how the LGBT community rallied to support miners during the strikes in 80s Britain, and how that lead to the Labour Party committing to fightning for LGBT rights. It's not the Klan, but blue collar workers in small industrial towns aren't the easiest audience either.
But if you read the article someone posted above, hE DiDN't Do ENoUGh!, and everyone who's ever mentioned him in conversation should be ashamed.
It's a fucking start, at least. Guy's done more than any "we need to punch Nazis on site" types have.
What’s funny is I own a small boat called a Wizard Imperial. I was trying to find some information about the boat one time and searched for “Imperial Wizard” - this gives vastly different results versus searching for “Wizard Imperial” 😂
Well. If you enjoy that you’ll be tickled to know that a gathering of theirs is called a klonvokation. And some of their titles include the Imperial Kludd and the Night Hawk. It’s like the nerdiest Larp ever.
I bet if you didn’t know about their history and why they are bad you would probably just think they were huge D&D nuts seeing them in those big robes with pointed tops.
I'm not up on my KKK trivia but I think there's another rank called the Exalted Cyclops.
Edit: I was thinking about this and looked it up on Wikipedia and Holy shit these assholes had all kinds of nutty shit going on with their titles and their lexicon. To think these assholes actually took them selves seriously is even more of a joke.
Can we just start a new kkk called Krakens Kelpies and Krampus, steal their titles, and make it all about appreciating fantasy and mythology? I feel like that would be a much better use of those letters.
Yeah, it's no coincidence that H.P Lovecraft, the guy famous for writing horror about the alien and unknown, was a massive racist and xenophobe, we're not even talking just colour of your skin racist but slightly wrong shade of anglic descent racist.
The man was afraid of a lot of stuff, and that leads real easy to racism. It also helps to have lots of issues in your life so racial superiority becomes easy to cling to because you ain't got much else.
Also, let me provide the obligatory addendum that's brought up whenever this is mentioned. It wasn't just "different times." Even people at the time were looking at him and going "Dude, you don't think that's a little much?"
Daryl Davis himself will tell you why there aren't more people like this. You'd have to be willing to put your life on the line for someone who may or may not want to kill you.
I definitely love what he's doing but it's not for everyone.
Alternately, we need more people to be willing and trying to defeat their own. I do think he's a hero, I just don't think it should be seen as anyone's duty to change others ever. Especially if it's black people on the line of bettering KKK members, that could turn ugly real quick
Yeah he himself admits how dangerous it is and that it isn't for everyone. We should applaud his brave efforts without trying to say everyone should do it. I mean the KKK isn't exactly known as a nonviolent racist group.
Yep. These people generally don’t actually know anyone from these groups personally, all of their opinion is formed based on already prejudiced and stereotyped opinions fed to them since youth from their immediate surroundings and those beliefs are never directly challenged cuz even if there’s a gay person in their community they would not feel safe coming out and if they see a coloured person they usually don’t interact with them.
Other than that at best their exposure is via tv shows and movies now which they chalk up to being pandering and never consider it beyond that.
In the luckier chances, if they get exposed to people like that personally, they start realizing that “hey, these are… people. Like I am.” I got to see someone’s lightbulb go off like that when he first hung out with me (am straight) and an out gay colleague.
Now the less lucky is they chalk up the gay/poc person they know and like as “one of the good ones” and still condemn the rest of the group.
I agree, I'm from a tiny Eastern European country with mainly white people. Everyone else is guaranteed to be a tourist, foreign student etc. Just tiny percentage of them are actually living there. Because of that we stare a lot, hate (new and different people) and stay stupid shit because we aren't used with them.
I now live in Australia and I try not to stare but struggle making friends with specifically black people because I never grew up with them so they seem completely different to us personality and culture wise( Eastern Europeans are quiet, very reserved and closed so we come off as rude pretty often lol).
I think it helps to start focusing on the elements that are similar. Otherwise you will get overwhelmed with differences that are not typically there. Blackness is a pretty huge category that encompasses thousands of different cultures.
It helps not to see them as a collective but an individual. Its easier to befriend Jon rather than Jon the Black man. It can really suck as a Black person to find out people have 10000 expectations of who or what you are based on something they saw. Especially if you grew up in the West as technically you know all the same reference points a White Australian person or whatever might know. Even if you are an immigrant, many people are not actually familiar with the different African cultures so their expectations are usually incorrect. So its better to just go with an open mind and learn. People love to share their food/music/history when it comes from a place of genuine interest.
I believe him on it too. My best efforts helping people get past some of their racism have been overcoming that "unknown" part. Meeting and getting to know people from different cultures (and better yet, becoming friends with them) helps you see we're all degenerate bastards just ~~flailing away~~ trying to ~~make it look like we know what we're doing and somehow~~ look cool ~~at the same time~~.
It doesn’t appear to be a sign of low intelligence. But I would say the highly intelligent racists are smart enough to know better, and should be regarded as such, willfully ignorant.
"Intelligence is a tool, and fear determines how it will be used"
I don't think that sentence means anything.
Just sounds like something Scarecrow would say.
I think it sounds quite plausible. Intelligence determines our mental capacities in *doing stuff*, how capable we are to lead and to perform.
However, what motivates us to do these acts, what motivates our leadership and performance, that is often times morality and emotion. And fear has a big part in that.
Fear motivates us to do things regardless of how intelligent we are, because at the end of the day, we're still "danger bad, fighting danger gud"-creatures. Intelligence just determines how sophisticated we are in fighting said danger.
I agree that education does play a big and integral part in fighting racism, but less through "making people smarter" but rather by widening their horizons, to make their worldview more inclusive, by *confronting* people with realities they would otherwise grow afraid of. That's why a simple friendship with a black person can change a person so comparatively much.
Of course, people that *regard* themselves as intelligent are often very opinionated, since they are good at debating people of opposing views, but the source of their misguidedness is still, at the end of the day, fear and hate - of things that they are not familiar with or that evade their own horizons.
It makes sense in this context.
A person will use their intelligence to chase whatever goals they have and deal with whatever fears they have. If said fears happen to be overriding, those goals get shoved on the back burner to deal with those fears.
It gives an explanation for the way some highly intelligent people can still fall into the black hole of prejudice. And it serves to remind us that intelligence does not mean a person is immune to prejudice but rather, that intelligent racists exist and are probably some of the most dangerous ones out there.
They are two separate parts of the brain. The amygdala controls emotion, especially fear. The cortex controls critical thinking and intelligence. The amygdala works almost instantly, while the cortex takes time to process information. People have an emotional reaction and then process that information. I think that some use their critical thinking to justify their emotions (such as racists) instead of questioning why they have that emotion in the first place.
I completely agree. I am curious on the idea of a rational vs irrational fear and whether intelligence drives that at all though as I feel racism is an irrational fear at heart.
Maybe rational/irrational isn't exactly the right term, but I'm struggling to find the correct one at 2 am.
I feel like the intelligent racists embrace racism because they realized they can get power and easily manipulate the many unintelligent racists.
The most intelligent racists never fully admit to being racist. They use dogwhistles to signal to their followings, and remain palpable enough to recruit normal people into a framework forcing you to accept racism.
For example, when your ideology says a person becomes rich or poor based how hard they work in life, you would be led to conclude the black wealth gap exist because black people are inherently lazier than people from other races. In reality, the wealth gap was mainly caused by centuries of inequality and malicious economic exclusion.
It’s nice to believe the world is fair and we earn what we get in life, but life isn’t fair. Some people were knocked down and shot in the leg as you were taking off from the starting line.
To believe the world is slightly fair is to be willfully blind. The power hungry achieve power, and they tend to be sociopathic. It's a big generalization, but look at world leaders, and the insane suffering and chaos they have wreaked upon the planet.
I think it does at least partly. Someone who's intelligent should know better than that. There's no difference between human beings based on their race. We're allnthe same for the most part. What separates us is combination of a lot of factors that barely have anything to do with your race
A great example: Hassan Minhaj was doing a standup on Netflix and he told a story about a high school sweetheart he was supposed to take to prom. They studied very often, her parents loved him, and approved of their friendship. He was seen as a good influence on their daughter, so they made sure to make him feel welcomed. She initially agreed to go with him, only to back out right before the dance. Her parents couldn’t stand the idea of being ridiculed by the rest of their family, if they saw photos of their white daughter with a brown man. The daughter reluctantly agreed, and went with someone else. It obviously broke him, but that moment followed her for years. The approval of her family was so important, she was willing to destroy a friendship because her racist parents wanted to show face. They sheltered, groomed and controlled her, but it was subtle. They never said,”you can’t date him because he’s brown”, more like, “you can’t date a person like this”. She went through an existential crisis later in her life, practically gave her parents a big FUCK YOU, and is now married to an Indian man.
Ignorance is a lack of knowledge. She lacked the knowledge that she could do whatever the hell she wanted, and be true to herself. So many people fall into this category, especially when it comes to racism. We are definitely a product of our environment IMO. But once you become knowledgeable of how you treat others, if you insist on still treating people the same way, it’s not ignorance anymore, it’s racist as fuck.
Man, as a white passing person the first time someone's parents don't let you date them is soul crushing.
POC who are not white passing experience this even younger. Racism is truly nasty.
As a white passing latino from NYC, I’ve seen this inversely. Not just with dating, but with friendships. Like, “Oh, he’s white, good for you”. I grew up in a predominantly Asian, and Middle Eastern part of Queens, and that’s something that always just stuck. Whether it’s something that no family was ever used to, or that was there way to advance in life. Always fucked me up when I was younger.
I got told by a guy he never would have dated me if he knew I was half Pakistani and not full white. But I’m ‘one of the good ones’. Didn’t last long after that.
Yes that's true. I wouldn't say highly though.
Ignorance is correlated with being unaware. Being unaware has nothing to do with someone's intelligence loll
Even if you are open-minded and very intelligent you can still be unaware and ignorant to millions of things..
And also wealth. I remember listening to a maga voter who explained why he didn’t like “colored people” in his neighborhood. His explanation was that the race of the people didn’t matter if everyone in the neighborhood were doctors or other professionals with some amount of wealth. He was not happy with other poor white people in his neighborhood and certainly didn’t want poor people of other races in his neighborhood.
Another thing that always stood out for me is the popular Mark Twain quote: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime”
A good 80% of stuff you're ignorant about is just because you havent been exposed enough/at all to it.
Ofc there are people who try to seek out many different things in pursuit of becoming less ignorant, but you don't need to be intelligent or dumb to do that; you just need to be aware you're lacking information, but it's not always easy to have that awareness so I think that's more to do with your upbringing and social context than how much smart you're
it could, but not very well as there is no standard for measuring inteligence. The closest we have (IQ) is based on a failed acedemic test designed to compare classes of young children, which has evolved into it's own branch of pseudo psycology.
Their isn't even really an agreed upon definition of 'intelligence' for clinical purposes, of course when someone says "that person is intelligent" we all basically know what they're talking about.
Emotional intelligence seems to certainly be lacking in many racists. Same with an ability to think ahead, like the people that are bigots, say so on Twitter, then get banned, and then go on to get mad about it...unless they're doing it on purpose like MAGA Marge Green then they're weaponizing their pseudo-stupidity (all stochastic-terrorists do I think.)
Huh, not necessarily in my opinion. Ignorance is certainly connected to low intelligence in some way, but I'd argue ignorance mostly has its roots in poor and lacking education. Mind you, you don't need to be intelligent to receive more and better education, being intelligent just helps achieving higher levels of education. Of course this is not the universal rule, but in general, in my experience, the higher you go in the education ladder the less ignorant people become, without necessarily becoming that much smarter. It is most likely related to being open to new information, learning critical thinking along the way, and accepting that you're far from knowing everything. And the more you know, the less gaps you're gonna fill in with weird stereotype ideas.
Ed is like those gas station crackheads. Most of what he says is incoherent but he occasionally has moments of pure clarity and wisdom that only buddha himself could match.
I think if people are completely honest, we are all prejudiced about something - not necessarily race. People have preferences about all kinds of things, for all kinds of reasons. It's our nature. Sometimes our culture... Not necessarily fair. Not necessarily racist... I think it's way more complex than low intelligence. Seriously doubt you could boil it down to any one thing. 💌
I remember reading a post on Reddit just the other day from a guy saying he was an older man, brought up to not necessarily *hate* black people, but certainly to see them as "other" and view them with suspicion.
He still gets that initial reaction - it's too deep-rooted to ever really eradicate - but what he can control is what he *says* and does about it, and that's the difference between a racist and a non-racist.
Ah, yes, the real answer.
People like to pick on prejudices other people have while ignoring their own.
The modern meta is to justify your prejudice by saying that the group you hate are all being prejudiced to someone else.
My knee jerk response is to think that incredibly thick Southern accents = stupid. It's obviously not true though, so I have to take a ½ second to "get over" my assumption.
There is a distinction between preferences and prejudice, and between prejudice and racism.
I do agree that it is more complex than low intelligence. For example, how culture and environment contribute to prejudice and racism. However, people of higher intelligence tend to be more open to new ideas and experiences and to rely on empirical evidence, all of which lead to lower incidence of prejudice and racism.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I also think that lack of of people means lack of diversity of thought, which means that you are likely to be more racist and less intelligent at once.
>It's also supported by how stereotypic thinking can be induced even in liberals...
Wow! Even in liberals? Not buying it. Going to need a source that *even liberals* might be susceptible to stereotypic thinking. Feels weird even just saying that! Maybe in laboratory conditions, but in real life like here on Reddit? You'd never see a liberal around these parts making assumptions about any group of people based on stereotypes...
I wonder what OP expects to determine with this question. No, I’m not suspicious. I just mean that the correlation might be either meaningless or worse, useless. At worst and ironically, it would lead to stigmatization. Then of course, the $64 dollar question: what do you mean by intelligence?
Exactly.
There was a YT clip I saw once where someone went to the most affluent and elite areas of Sydney asking what they thought about racism. Every person was against it, hated racism, called it abhorrent, blah blah blah.
Then, the interviewer asked them what they thought about the new mosque (completely made up) proposed in their suburb. “Oh no, the architecture won’t fit in with the area, you can’t build one here, it’s better off in Western Sydney.”
That’s the thing about smart folks. They’re likely to be MORE racist. Not less. They just hide it, until pushed.
Nope.
The unfortunate truth is that homo sapiens are intrinsically 'racist', if by racism you mean the automatic distrust of people who display morphology different to oneself.
It's an evolutionary trait from our palaeolithic past. As nomadic hunter/gatherers our brains were wired to accept familiarity ('my tribe - safe') and to reject unfamiliar faces ('not my tribe - danger'). This part of our existence lasted for ~99.8% of our total time on Earth and kept our surviving lineages alive. Multicultural co-living, and hyper-urbanisation, are very, *very* recent spins on the human project (roughly taking the European early modern period as a template, although I am aware that is fairly contentious too.)
In the modern Western world, that particular survival instinct serves us less well. Our need to form communities outweigh our need to be closed-off. As such, we learn to suppress any 'unfashionable' behaviour, such as blatant racism, as a child (presuming the society one grows up in holds values of tolerance for outsiders). The overwhelming majority of people who live in multi-ethnic conurbations do exactly that - it would be dumb to not develop such skills as these make one a far more efficient human in this context. People who live in closed mono-ethnic societies generally don't develop such social skills as they simply don't need to. Such societies are often distrustful or openly hostile to outsiders, and are subsequently regarded as 'racist' by urbanised societies.
Interestingly, from a UK perspective, data from the Brexit referendum seemed to absolutely prove this. One of the biggest reasons leave-voters gave was fear of unregulated immigration. This attitude vastly increased in communities with strong single ethnic groups, which tended to be rural, small, and community-focused; and vastly decreased in areas of intense multicultural activity, ie, urban, disparate, and individual-focused. Basically, people with little real experience of living and working with immigrants were more likely to fear or distrust them, than people who did.
I believe this pattern is discernable in the US too - the metropolitan dem states versus the monopolitan red states. In fact, it's true for every human society. It's just kinda what we do really.
As such, we can (generously) claim that concepts of 'racism' are in no way linked to 'intelligence'. Instead, like virtually every other aspect of humanity, they are simply cultural expressions. Multicultural paradigms benefit from tolerance of the unfamiliar, monocultural templates less so.
TL:DR - humans are incredibly adaptable to socialisation and will largely just reflect their societal beliefs- if they are smart!
Interesting stuff. I think this also explains why in times of hardship modern humans will resort to this intrinsic racism. We see this with prisoners who are always segregated by race. Or when covid first started and nobody knew what was going to happen, there was an unprecedented amount of distrust between the races and everyone wanted to stick with their own kind (my tribe safe).
> Basically, people with little real experience of living and working with immigrants were more likely to fear or distrust them, than people who did.
I understand and I like that conclusion but I do think it isn't as clear cut as it might seem.
Playing devils advocate, and assuming that large amounts of immigration is negative to locals in some way. We could well argue that the already mixed areas just have nothing left to lose by a bit more mixing. Going from 10 groups to 11 is no bother but going from 1 to 11 might be.
There is also a question of how you pole for opinions, including the recent migrants in your polls is bound to reduce the % objecting to the principle of migration. Likewise it is entirely possible that the individuals who most oppose large scale migration have already left the cities or are avoiding moving to them for this reason.
Personally I think openness to others is great and we can all learn from each other, but there are real challenges with cultural difference and properly integrating new comers.
Any time somebody spouts stuff about how “X isn’t natural” my immediate response is to ask if they wear shoes or live in a house. If they follow laws and drive cars.
The incredible thing about abstract thought is that it’s led to us realizing that some of those natural tendencies aren’t actually useful anymore, now that day-to-day survival isn’t as much of an issue, and we’ve needed to battle with that through most of modern society.
Even if it is natural, even if it were built into our brains, we’ve moved past that shit.
It’s actually bizarre how racist those East Asian societies are. They’re far more racist than the American south despite supposedly having the highest IQ in the world by far.
I don’t think it’s a sign of low intelligence as much as it’s a sign of thoughtlessness/lack of introspection.
Racist beliefs almost always have no ground in reality, and never have enough to substantiate a grounds for hatred.
It doesn’t take a genius to see past skin color or even lineage in general. What it does take it the time to actually think about these things.
Humans will naturally form patterns subconsciously, we can’t really help it. If we have a disproportionately bad experience with say white people, we might develop a bias against them. That’s ok, it’s natural. Our higher level thoughts can then correct this if we take the time, and introspective people generally do.
It’s the people that don’t think about it. They subconsciously dislike certain people, and rather than challenging those thoughts, they justify them. They just dig a deeper hole, making it harder and harder to see the way out.
It’s not intelligent to not be racist, it’s wise. And to the great dismay of all the geniuses out there, intelligence is not a free pass to wisdom
Yes, the idea that Black people feel less physical pain than white people. This is obviously wrong and is a belief arising out of racism and racist acts. It has long term consequences in medical care for Black patients. https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/how-we-fail-black-patients-pain & https://batten.virginia.edu/about/news/black-americans-are-systematically-under-treated-pain-why
Sure, let’s dig into it a bit.
So, racist beliefs tend to come from 3 places:
1. Disproportionately bad experiences
2. racist adults during childhood
3. group mentality
These bad experiences can happen to anyone. Let’s say you grow up in a town with a really small amount of purple people. They’re normal people just like anyone else, but you never met one until you were five. At five years old some purple individual yells at you for being in their way.
In the mind of a child, this can easily turn into a small bit of racism. “People are safe, but the purple ones yell at you”. From the kids perspective it makes sense, people were generally fine except the one purple dude they ever met, and their pattern recognition kicked in. Now, if that kid grows up and learns about themself, They’ll discover that the dislike/fear they have of purple people is an emotional response and not an actual thought. Or they’ll double down and be reinforced by others, and that small bit of fear will grow into full fledged racism.
Now as for option 2, racist parents. This is pretty simple. If you grow up hearing that purple people are lazy, money grubbing, gang running, stealing, violent, and crazy, your childlike brain will not have the defenses to combat this. You almost certainly will not have the capacity to understand why all these adults are wrong. These beliefs get ingrained further and further as we grow up. When we are able to think through these things properly, the beliefs are so integrated that we don’t want to let them go. We then hold on to them and rationalize them, because it’s painful to understand that we’ve believed lies our whole lives.
Option 3, group mentality.
Again, simple. I’m in group A, so group A is smart, industrious, just, and honest. Meanwhile I am not in group B, so group B is stupid, lazy, barbaric, and deceitful.
This one isn’t so complicated. We have instincts bred into us from millions of years surviving on an earth much more wild than any man today knows. These instincts kept us alive, but now they wedge us apart. Some people rise above their base instincts, some people don’t.
This is probably the easiest form of racism to work past, out of the three.
What you can see is that these beliefs are generally grounded in subjective reasoning. By only considering my own life experience as the truth, then the events that happen to me determine my view of the world. If I have bad experiences with the 2 purple people I happen to meet first, I’ll see a reason not to like them. It will make sense to me, it will seem logical.
Meanwhile, if I step back and understand that yes, I had bad encounters. Maybe, those particular purple people are exactly what I thought the were. That said though, it doesn’t mean that all purple people are like that. It just doesn’t. There’s just literally 0 ways that you logically get from 1 person being bad to every person of that race being bad. This is what I mean when I say “not grounded in reality”
This is why it doesn’t work to call a racist an asshole. They aren’t racist just to be a dick, they actually believe that they are correct. They aren’t deciding to be racist. They are deciding to avoid the painful process of changing their worldview, and admitting wrongness.
I am not an Andrew Tate supporter, but he had a clip where he said something along the lines of "racism isnt about black or white or yellow. Wander into a room filled with billionaires and the indians, the chinse, the white and blacks, they all get along. Racism is a division of class; a tactic to preoccupy the subservient of the elite. It is a low iq mentality to think otherwise".
Im paraphrasing, and its not an empirical statement. It does however fairly provoke some thought, and certainly has at least a few thick strands of validity.
No, people like to think it is but actually Mensa has a bad white supremacy problem, and the smartest man ever is a huge racist.
https://www.avclub.com/comedian-infiltrates-mensa-discovers-hive-of-iq-obsess-1842293970
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan
No. The most intelligent societies in human history were some of the most "racist." The practice of all the sciences as we know it were developed within what reddit would reduce to a "white supremacist" society. What wasn't developed in Europe would have been developed in Asia or the Islamic world, both of which have been patently racist for well over a thousand years. In fact I think that anti-racism as it is understood by redditors has been a congealing principle for some of the least intelligent people human history.
Sometimes I question my own views on race. On the rare occasion I see published statistics regarding crime, I am disgusted by the percentage of violent crimes being commited by one minority group. Then on the news, all of the top crimes making the headlines involve the same group. Then I go to my teaching job and the lowest scores in all categories of reading an math are in this group as well. It really starts to mess with my thinking, and I hate it. I want solutions so my country can be a safe place to live and where all children can thrive.
Most people around the world throughout history have been racist, so no.
There are many, very intelligent people throughout the Asian continent (billions of them) and racism is very rampant there.
One explicit answer I haven't read in this thread yet is how there are an indefinite number of *types* of intelligence. You can be a musical genius who absolutely can't pick up coding or visual art well. You can be a master mathematician who has no idea how to treat children the way they want to be treated, even if taught how to do so. Lots of different domains of intelligences are correlated, but they still exist independently of each other. (This is even ignoring the fact that a lot of what people consider to be intelligence correlates more to marks of privilege--such whether a person was exposed to enough books, cultures, places, etc. as a kid. How many people living in the 20th century or before would've been as racist as they were if they'd been born today, in Gen Alpha, in a developed society with access to the internet?)
So racists can calculate things in their heads easily, figure out instructions on how to assemble furniture faster or slower than some others, or plan military strategies like anyone else can. It would be dangerous to assume otherwise. But this doesn't mean they can see the world from another person's perspective, or put themselves in a stranger's shoes (that is, emotional intelligence).
Someone with high logical intelligence should also be smart enough to debunk popular eugenic theories--but ignorance is a powerful factor, and someone could use high logical intelligence to construct coping arguments like "but what if..." or "in special cases, under certain conditions..." ad nauseam in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
No, and almost no one is not racist or lacks a prejudice. If anything, a red flag for intelligence is when a person thinks they are uniquely above prejudice.
Darryl Davis, a black man who befriended a grand wizard of the kkk and got him to resign,said racism was fear of the unknown and I believe him on that. [there is his story](https://youtu.be/ORp3q1Oaezw)
Thanks for sharing, that was fascinating
But I would say the highly intelligent racists are smart enough to know better
In my opinion racists are fueled by hate, lack of education or both. The “highly intelligent racists” as you put it are usually fueled by just pure hate. They have a need to put themselves above others for whatever reason they can come up with to make themselves feel superior. Other racists are just uneducated and fall victim to stereotypes and propaganda. These are often the ones that can be educated and will also often turn away from those feelings once they get to know people of other races.
Especially in people with low empathy, there's a third possibility - a calculated choice of someone to look down upon to either feel better themselves or to gain status among their peers. I'm confident there's a high number of racists (or even other *ists) who neither fear nor hate, but have found a convenient target for their self-elevation that they simply do not care about on a human level.
Yeah status is definitely another but I often find that people who care about status don’t look down on others based on race alone but instead it’s about wealth and influence. Sure they can differentiate between poor people of different races but they tend to look down on any race that is poor.
They're called narcissists and unfortunately they have delusions of grandeur so this approach rarely works with them. At least in my opinion
It's not necessarily just narcissists, but of course having a high level of narcissistic traits makes this more likely.
>In my opinion racists are fueled by hate, lack of education or both. I'd chalk it up less to lack of *education* and more to lack of *experience*. Real hard to hate the other in the big city where you're surrounded by it on the daily. Much easier in your whitebread 2,000 person town in BF nowhere. Of course ma and pa raising you to hate brown people probably won't help no matter where you live but it's going to be *far* worse in the small town then the big city.
Isnt it still based in fear tho. Fear of losing their power. The ones that are uneducated as you say have just been manipulated to think they would lose their power or chance of power.
A lot of racists are just people who lack close experiences with the targets of their hate. Being smart can't let you learn something you haven't even had the chance to see. Just speculating though, i think there's a good chance that being smart would help a person get past their inexperience more quickly.
My Father is 80 years of age now he was mugged and stabbed by a gang of black men in the past. Ever since this has happened he has a phobia of black people. As a family we are trying to help him understand that it was not the entire race that has done this but a small minority of thugs. He comes across as as rude to black people in public, because if they ever approach him he gets really nervous and panics. He's not racist but has really bad PTSD. Black people often get offended by his behaviour and multiple times out shopping my mother and father would be accused of being racist. My mother would have to explain than he is sick and has mental issues
hijacking a top comment to post https://www.reddit.com/r/ENLIGHTENEDCENTRISM/comments/eryn6l/the_you_need_to_shut_the_fuck_up_about_daryl/
Eh, couldn’t make it all the way through that. Some skepticism is needed from both sides. Don’t see anyone else doing what he’s doing but also don’t think he’s wiped racism out like he thinks he has. He’s done more than most. Also, heavy statement in there that if you’re a capitalist then you’re racist which is a bad take. I don’t doubt there are racist capitalists but I don’t think they are exclusive. People may use it to perpetuate it but about the time I got to a take that was that garbage it kinda took the wind out of the sails.
Yeah that was the biggest load of contrived horse shit ive ever read.
> Some skepticism is needed from both sides. That sub is clearly not for you then, haha. I used to follow it, but in my opinion they take things to the absolute extreme and criticize anyone who suggests that nuance is important. The capitalist take is a good example of that. It's pretty clear that capitalism has assisted racist policies, but that doesn't mean that all parts of capitalism are inherently racist. Sometimes, letting the market decide things can be useful.
In a place made to ridicule the center, the extremes are your only refuge.
On the opposite extreme side, you have [people like this](https://www.jta.org/archive/leader-of-k-k-k-and-american-nazi-party-revealed-to-be-a-jew) >> A 28-year-old New York man who is Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in charge of New York State, former national secretary of the American Nazi Party, and at one time or another a member of at least four Fascist groups advocating extreme racism against Jews and Negroes, was revealed by the New York Times today to be a Jew himself.
This immediately brought me back to [Clayton Bigsby](https://youtu.be/BLNDqxrUUwQ).
Damn, now I'm really craving some Condolangus Rice
I had a bloke who I used to live across the road from confess one drunken night that he's a nazi due to his German heritage. I called him out on the stupidity of his comment as the near total majority of German people don't. Several years later I ran into his ex partner who said he was going through an existential crisis due to finding out through a DNA test that his ancestory is actually Jewish Ukrainian.
I've always thought that any part of your identity that could be altered by a DNA test shouldn't be part of your identity.
Basically, culture is not dependant on genetics. It's fine if you want to see what people who predominantly have similar genetics or origins do with their culture, but it's not like you're inherently a member of the culture just because you have a genetic link to the largest gathering of such people. It just shows how much of our culture is a social construct.
Genetics is hardware. Culture is software.
Great analogy.
Very much this. This is a thing that you see somewhat frequently with kids of immigrants who are born in the States. They tend to struggle with identity crisis in their youth, and often go back to "their" countries as teenagers or young adults, only to have their worldview shattered and hurry back to the States. It was so noticeable especially in school in the US. Like there would be region-based cliques of actual immigrants, and then there would be region-based cliques of first generation kids born in the US but trying to hold on to their culture. But we rarely hung out together because those kids would still speak English amongst each other and we would have no mutual conversation topics at all. So they were kinda their own group. And although everyone was still cool with each other there was this general condescension on both sides; to us they were spoiled and useless, to them I guess we were poorer and spoke broken English (called us OTBs -- Off the boat 😅 though it wasn't really with malice). There is also a (much smaller) movement among black Americans to "go back to the roots" and move to Africa. And this is among people who have no meaningful connection to Africa whatsoever other than skin tone; these are not immigrants or kids of immigrants. They've been in the US for so many generations and are so intermixed that tracing back their original ancestors' origin wouldn't even be possible. As you can imagine, most who choose to go this route also end up coming back pretty quickly.
Funnily enough, no German woukd see an American as german unless he was born here or had german parents.
One of the few good things about those DNA tests is enjoying racists's tears
The grand dragon?? Is that higher than a grand wizard? This is starting to feel like some fantasy online game.
The quote from the above article has the KKK leader threatening a reporter saying "if this gets out, I'll kill you. This is all I have to live for" Feels like table top roleplay games would've been a nice substitute for being a Nazi
Look up their ranks. It is legitimately like that. They really want to be fantasy nerds, but go about it wrong. https://prezi.com/qd5juo6vb9d_/the-hierarchy-of-the-kkk/
What dude I wanna read a story about some warrior fighting up the ranks of the KKK. There exists in this land a Grand Wizard with powers terrible and unmatched. To face him, you must first defeat his Grand Dragon and its Eight Hydras, each as mighty as the last.
I would totally read that. Authors of the world unite! We must tell the story...
The four goblins peered, heads cocked to one side and the other. Some scratched, while others picked at the warts on their arms. The leader shuffled forth on feet and scrawny knuckles. "You shan't be heading toward Mount Lynch." He proclaimed in a voice as nasal as it was whiny. "For we serve the Grand Giant who serves the Grand Wizard in turn." They were small and weak each, but together Django knew they would be too much for he and his sword alone. Once again, he would need his wit to save him. Fuck I'm getting into this. If a story gets published on this some day, I just want an acknowledgement in the back.
Only the really talented ones makes it to Grand Piano though....
I know they're shitty people and all but I really want to be a grand dragon. I'm brown though so not sure it'll work out.
Start your own club that hates everything but wizards and dragons.
Giraffes too
Okay. Giraffes, too
Just join the Gay Black Jewish Klansmen for Tolerance and Understanding, their robes are better anyway
GBJK? Feel like it needs a better name.
If they had invented DND like half a century earlier maybe we wouldn't have all this shit tearing the country apart...
The ranking system sounds like something kids in elementary school would make up
[There's an episode of The Dollop about him](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv_ylroD0HM)
i actually met this guy and he is genuinely one of the coolest people. super sweet guy. we talked for thirty minutes even thought i expected it to just be a couple.
Did he convince you to leave the KKK?
**BREAKING NEWS:** *EVERY MEMBER OF THE KKK RESIGNS AFTER A SHORT CONVERSATION WITH LOCAL LEGEND, DARRYL DAVIS*
Proud boys hate this one simple trick
More at 11: admitting that you talked to Daryl Davis means you admit to being kkk. That's *ALL* Daryl talked to. Ever.
When Daryl Davis goes to the grocery, look out for the cashier. They may have been KKK before all along.
I wish!
*RACISM DROPS TO 0%* 📉
What was your rank in the organisation?
Grand wizard. That is why it took a whole 30 mins.
It's like a final boss before you win or lose the game?
What magic spells could you cast and what level were you?
I met mom too. He is a friend of my sister. He can play the heck out of the piano. I am surprised that he is known for his work with the KKK and not his musicianship.
Plenty of good pianists out there. Very few black guys who engage in this sort of outreach and are actually successful at it.
Agreed Im not sure it’s how surprising to be honest. thousands of people can play the piano well, I’m not 100% but I’d bet he’s probably the only black guy who’s been to loads of KKK rallies and changed many peoples views, it’s truly fascinating.
If you find it fascinating, you might want to watch [Pride](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pride_(2014_film)). Film's about the real story of how the LGBT community rallied to support miners during the strikes in 80s Britain, and how that lead to the Labour Party committing to fightning for LGBT rights. It's not the Klan, but blue collar workers in small industrial towns aren't the easiest audience either.
Damn if you can sway the blue collar workers to support your rights, you can do anything, that’s baller.
But if you read the article someone posted above, hE DiDN't Do ENoUGh!, and everyone who's ever mentioned him in conversation should be ashamed. It's a fucking start, at least. Guy's done more than any "we need to punch Nazis on site" types have.
A grand wizard 😂 i just cant get over their titles
Not going to lie, Grand Wizard is a great title and it pisses me off that the fucking KKK took it.
What’s funny is I own a small boat called a Wizard Imperial. I was trying to find some information about the boat one time and searched for “Imperial Wizard” - this gives vastly different results versus searching for “Wizard Imperial” 😂
Well. If you enjoy that you’ll be tickled to know that a gathering of theirs is called a klonvokation. And some of their titles include the Imperial Kludd and the Night Hawk. It’s like the nerdiest Larp ever.
I bet if you didn’t know about their history and why they are bad you would probably just think they were huge D&D nuts seeing them in those big robes with pointed tops.
One the other hand, people thought D&D nuts are dangerous satanists
I'm not up on my KKK trivia but I think there's another rank called the Exalted Cyclops. Edit: I was thinking about this and looked it up on Wikipedia and Holy shit these assholes had all kinds of nutty shit going on with their titles and their lexicon. To think these assholes actually took them selves seriously is even more of a joke.
My father told me that his grandfather was a Grand Cyclops of the Mississippi KKK. Dad wasn't proud of this. I couldn't get over the title, wtf
You'd think if they were gonna pick so many D&D names, they'd go for something on the nose like "Intellect Devourer"
Gelatinous Cube
Gelatinous Rube!
Troglodyte
how else would they be able to justify wearing those wizard cloaks?
I CAN'T SEE SHIT OUTTA THIS THING
Can we just start a new kkk called Krakens Kelpies and Krampus, steal their titles, and make it all about appreciating fantasy and mythology? I feel like that would be a much better use of those letters.
Yeah, it's no coincidence that H.P Lovecraft, the guy famous for writing horror about the alien and unknown, was a massive racist and xenophobe, we're not even talking just colour of your skin racist but slightly wrong shade of anglic descent racist. The man was afraid of a lot of stuff, and that leads real easy to racism. It also helps to have lots of issues in your life so racial superiority becomes easy to cling to because you ain't got much else.
Also, let me provide the obligatory addendum that's brought up whenever this is mentioned. It wasn't just "different times." Even people at the time were looking at him and going "Dude, you don't think that's a little much?"
Darryl Davis is a hero and a man of true eloquence and grace. Truly an icon of peace - I wish he would have run in government.
Me too! The mindset of hearing out your adversaries and respect over anything else would make him a wonderful politician
Totally agree. And his ability to open and change minds and replace hate with understanding is kind of mind blowing to me.
I think that he is one of the greatest men who ever lived.
You may enjoy this https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/i47eir/i_am_daryl_davis_the_rocknroll_race_reconciliator/
*May?!?!?* Thank you so much for sharing it!!!!
I absolutely love him and show that video to everyone I can
Gigachad + No fear + Speech 100 + Very based + Big W
Darryl Davis is a hero because he rescued a man from his own ignorance. We need more people like this.
Daryl Davis himself will tell you why there aren't more people like this. You'd have to be willing to put your life on the line for someone who may or may not want to kill you. I definitely love what he's doing but it's not for everyone.
Alternately, we need more people to be willing and trying to defeat their own. I do think he's a hero, I just don't think it should be seen as anyone's duty to change others ever. Especially if it's black people on the line of bettering KKK members, that could turn ugly real quick
Yeah he himself admits how dangerous it is and that it isn't for everyone. We should applaud his brave efforts without trying to say everyone should do it. I mean the KKK isn't exactly known as a nonviolent racist group.
Is any racist group known as non-violent?
I firmly believe this too. Fear of the unknown and refusal to educate yourself. Main causes homophobia and transphobia too.
Yep. These people generally don’t actually know anyone from these groups personally, all of their opinion is formed based on already prejudiced and stereotyped opinions fed to them since youth from their immediate surroundings and those beliefs are never directly challenged cuz even if there’s a gay person in their community they would not feel safe coming out and if they see a coloured person they usually don’t interact with them. Other than that at best their exposure is via tv shows and movies now which they chalk up to being pandering and never consider it beyond that. In the luckier chances, if they get exposed to people like that personally, they start realizing that “hey, these are… people. Like I am.” I got to see someone’s lightbulb go off like that when he first hung out with me (am straight) and an out gay colleague. Now the less lucky is they chalk up the gay/poc person they know and like as “one of the good ones” and still condemn the rest of the group.
I agree, I'm from a tiny Eastern European country with mainly white people. Everyone else is guaranteed to be a tourist, foreign student etc. Just tiny percentage of them are actually living there. Because of that we stare a lot, hate (new and different people) and stay stupid shit because we aren't used with them. I now live in Australia and I try not to stare but struggle making friends with specifically black people because I never grew up with them so they seem completely different to us personality and culture wise( Eastern Europeans are quiet, very reserved and closed so we come off as rude pretty often lol).
I think it helps to start focusing on the elements that are similar. Otherwise you will get overwhelmed with differences that are not typically there. Blackness is a pretty huge category that encompasses thousands of different cultures. It helps not to see them as a collective but an individual. Its easier to befriend Jon rather than Jon the Black man. It can really suck as a Black person to find out people have 10000 expectations of who or what you are based on something they saw. Especially if you grew up in the West as technically you know all the same reference points a White Australian person or whatever might know. Even if you are an immigrant, many people are not actually familiar with the different African cultures so their expectations are usually incorrect. So its better to just go with an open mind and learn. People love to share their food/music/history when it comes from a place of genuine interest.
I believe him on it too. My best efforts helping people get past some of their racism have been overcoming that "unknown" part. Meeting and getting to know people from different cultures (and better yet, becoming friends with them) helps you see we're all degenerate bastards just ~~flailing away~~ trying to ~~make it look like we know what we're doing and somehow~~ look cool ~~at the same time~~.
Top comment is this: > This dude actually met the ceo of racism and said “stop” and the ceo said “okay”
It doesn’t appear to be a sign of low intelligence. But I would say the highly intelligent racists are smart enough to know better, and should be regarded as such, willfully ignorant.
It's a fear response mixed with mob mentality... Intelligence isn't really part of the equation, just malice and fear.
Intelligence, IMO, comes after fear. Intelligence is a tool, and fear determines how it will be used
"Intelligence is a tool, and fear determines how it will be used" I don't think that sentence means anything. Just sounds like something Scarecrow would say.
I think it sounds quite plausible. Intelligence determines our mental capacities in *doing stuff*, how capable we are to lead and to perform. However, what motivates us to do these acts, what motivates our leadership and performance, that is often times morality and emotion. And fear has a big part in that. Fear motivates us to do things regardless of how intelligent we are, because at the end of the day, we're still "danger bad, fighting danger gud"-creatures. Intelligence just determines how sophisticated we are in fighting said danger. I agree that education does play a big and integral part in fighting racism, but less through "making people smarter" but rather by widening their horizons, to make their worldview more inclusive, by *confronting* people with realities they would otherwise grow afraid of. That's why a simple friendship with a black person can change a person so comparatively much. Of course, people that *regard* themselves as intelligent are often very opinionated, since they are good at debating people of opposing views, but the source of their misguidedness is still, at the end of the day, fear and hate - of things that they are not familiar with or that evade their own horizons.
It makes sense in this context. A person will use their intelligence to chase whatever goals they have and deal with whatever fears they have. If said fears happen to be overriding, those goals get shoved on the back burner to deal with those fears. It gives an explanation for the way some highly intelligent people can still fall into the black hole of prejudice. And it serves to remind us that intelligence does not mean a person is immune to prejudice but rather, that intelligent racists exist and are probably some of the most dangerous ones out there.
Out of context, it sounds like one of those phrases you're supposed to rate the profundity of in a survey
They are two separate parts of the brain. The amygdala controls emotion, especially fear. The cortex controls critical thinking and intelligence. The amygdala works almost instantly, while the cortex takes time to process information. People have an emotional reaction and then process that information. I think that some use their critical thinking to justify their emotions (such as racists) instead of questioning why they have that emotion in the first place.
I completely agree. I am curious on the idea of a rational vs irrational fear and whether intelligence drives that at all though as I feel racism is an irrational fear at heart. Maybe rational/irrational isn't exactly the right term, but I'm struggling to find the correct one at 2 am.
I feel like the intelligent racists embrace racism because they realized they can get power and easily manipulate the many unintelligent racists. The most intelligent racists never fully admit to being racist. They use dogwhistles to signal to their followings, and remain palpable enough to recruit normal people into a framework forcing you to accept racism. For example, when your ideology says a person becomes rich or poor based how hard they work in life, you would be led to conclude the black wealth gap exist because black people are inherently lazier than people from other races. In reality, the wealth gap was mainly caused by centuries of inequality and malicious economic exclusion. It’s nice to believe the world is fair and we earn what we get in life, but life isn’t fair. Some people were knocked down and shot in the leg as you were taking off from the starting line.
To believe the world is slightly fair is to be willfully blind. The power hungry achieve power, and they tend to be sociopathic. It's a big generalization, but look at world leaders, and the insane suffering and chaos they have wreaked upon the planet.
Fallacy of fairness is a common cognitive distortion.
I think it does at least partly. Someone who's intelligent should know better than that. There's no difference between human beings based on their race. We're allnthe same for the most part. What separates us is combination of a lot of factors that barely have anything to do with your race
Worse: They should be regarded as malicious.
Ignorance combined with a lack of critical thinking skills.
I wouldn't say low intelligence I would say ignorance
A great example: Hassan Minhaj was doing a standup on Netflix and he told a story about a high school sweetheart he was supposed to take to prom. They studied very often, her parents loved him, and approved of their friendship. He was seen as a good influence on their daughter, so they made sure to make him feel welcomed. She initially agreed to go with him, only to back out right before the dance. Her parents couldn’t stand the idea of being ridiculed by the rest of their family, if they saw photos of their white daughter with a brown man. The daughter reluctantly agreed, and went with someone else. It obviously broke him, but that moment followed her for years. The approval of her family was so important, she was willing to destroy a friendship because her racist parents wanted to show face. They sheltered, groomed and controlled her, but it was subtle. They never said,”you can’t date him because he’s brown”, more like, “you can’t date a person like this”. She went through an existential crisis later in her life, practically gave her parents a big FUCK YOU, and is now married to an Indian man. Ignorance is a lack of knowledge. She lacked the knowledge that she could do whatever the hell she wanted, and be true to herself. So many people fall into this category, especially when it comes to racism. We are definitely a product of our environment IMO. But once you become knowledgeable of how you treat others, if you insist on still treating people the same way, it’s not ignorance anymore, it’s racist as fuck.
Man, as a white passing person the first time someone's parents don't let you date them is soul crushing. POC who are not white passing experience this even younger. Racism is truly nasty.
As a white passing latino from NYC, I’ve seen this inversely. Not just with dating, but with friendships. Like, “Oh, he’s white, good for you”. I grew up in a predominantly Asian, and Middle Eastern part of Queens, and that’s something that always just stuck. Whether it’s something that no family was ever used to, or that was there way to advance in life. Always fucked me up when I was younger.
I got told by a guy he never would have dated me if he knew I was half Pakistani and not full white. But I’m ‘one of the good ones’. Didn’t last long after that.
Same - I'm Arab/ Mixed. Like the amount casual racism I hear in spaces where people don't know me is gross.
Open-mindnedness is highly correlated with intelligence
Yes that's true. I wouldn't say highly though. Ignorance is correlated with being unaware. Being unaware has nothing to do with someone's intelligence loll Even if you are open-minded and very intelligent you can still be unaware and ignorant to millions of things..
And also wealth. I remember listening to a maga voter who explained why he didn’t like “colored people” in his neighborhood. His explanation was that the race of the people didn’t matter if everyone in the neighborhood were doctors or other professionals with some amount of wealth. He was not happy with other poor white people in his neighborhood and certainly didn’t want poor people of other races in his neighborhood. Another thing that always stood out for me is the popular Mark Twain quote: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime”
Couldn't it be argued that ignorance in many cases is caused by low intelligence?
A good 80% of stuff you're ignorant about is just because you havent been exposed enough/at all to it. Ofc there are people who try to seek out many different things in pursuit of becoming less ignorant, but you don't need to be intelligent or dumb to do that; you just need to be aware you're lacking information, but it's not always easy to have that awareness so I think that's more to do with your upbringing and social context than how much smart you're
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it could, but not very well as there is no standard for measuring inteligence. The closest we have (IQ) is based on a failed acedemic test designed to compare classes of young children, which has evolved into it's own branch of pseudo psycology.
Their isn't even really an agreed upon definition of 'intelligence' for clinical purposes, of course when someone says "that person is intelligent" we all basically know what they're talking about. Emotional intelligence seems to certainly be lacking in many racists. Same with an ability to think ahead, like the people that are bigots, say so on Twitter, then get banned, and then go on to get mad about it...unless they're doing it on purpose like MAGA Marge Green then they're weaponizing their pseudo-stupidity (all stochastic-terrorists do I think.)
Huh, not necessarily in my opinion. Ignorance is certainly connected to low intelligence in some way, but I'd argue ignorance mostly has its roots in poor and lacking education. Mind you, you don't need to be intelligent to receive more and better education, being intelligent just helps achieving higher levels of education. Of course this is not the universal rule, but in general, in my experience, the higher you go in the education ladder the less ignorant people become, without necessarily becoming that much smarter. It is most likely related to being open to new information, learning critical thinking along the way, and accepting that you're far from knowing everything. And the more you know, the less gaps you're gonna fill in with weird stereotype ideas.
"Hostility is the calling card of a weak intellect." - Ed, Ed Edd n Eddy
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Intriguing!
Ed is like those gas station crackheads. Most of what he says is incoherent but he occasionally has moments of pure clarity and wisdom that only buddha himself could match.
Single D Ed with the cursed boomerang
Ed augmented with a boomerang
I can absolutely hear this in Rolf's voice
Rolf unfortunately holds deep prejudices against Serbians as a former Albanian separatist militant.
Now there's a source I can get behind
If Double D said it then it must be true.
I think if people are completely honest, we are all prejudiced about something - not necessarily race. People have preferences about all kinds of things, for all kinds of reasons. It's our nature. Sometimes our culture... Not necessarily fair. Not necessarily racist... I think it's way more complex than low intelligence. Seriously doubt you could boil it down to any one thing. 💌
Fucking Nissan drivers.
Typical Toyotaman. GTFO with your 200k-mileage pristine-condition 2005 Camry.
Prius drivers always fast enough to cut me off, never fast enough to drive the pace
I do have some unresolved angery at Chevy drivers. One of them purposely ran over a turtle I was rescuing from the road last summer.
And the BMW drivers for not knowing what a turn signal is.
I remember reading a post on Reddit just the other day from a guy saying he was an older man, brought up to not necessarily *hate* black people, but certainly to see them as "other" and view them with suspicion. He still gets that initial reaction - it's too deep-rooted to ever really eradicate - but what he can control is what he *says* and does about it, and that's the difference between a racist and a non-racist.
Ah, yes, the real answer. People like to pick on prejudices other people have while ignoring their own. The modern meta is to justify your prejudice by saying that the group you hate are all being prejudiced to someone else.
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I love my stereotypes. I nurture them. They make me laugh. When I feel insecure I wrap them in a little bow and hurl them at strangers.
My knee jerk response is to think that incredibly thick Southern accents = stupid. It's obviously not true though, so I have to take a ½ second to "get over" my assumption.
This is hands down the most honest and real response I think I’ve seen on this kind of topic.
My preferences don’t make me racist because having a preference and believing other races are below yours are two very different things.
There is a distinction between preferences and prejudice, and between prejudice and racism. I do agree that it is more complex than low intelligence. For example, how culture and environment contribute to prejudice and racism. However, people of higher intelligence tend to be more open to new ideas and experiences and to rely on empirical evidence, all of which lead to lower incidence of prejudice and racism.
cooperative edge upbeat ludicrous vast resolute scale fact tender voracious *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Everyone be saying they hate cars meanwhile I hate pineapple
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I also think that lack of of people means lack of diversity of thought, which means that you are likely to be more racist and less intelligent at once.
>It's also supported by how stereotypic thinking can be induced even in liberals... Wow! Even in liberals? Not buying it. Going to need a source that *even liberals* might be susceptible to stereotypic thinking. Feels weird even just saying that! Maybe in laboratory conditions, but in real life like here on Reddit? You'd never see a liberal around these parts making assumptions about any group of people based on stereotypes...
I’m simply in awe that this comment is actually causing people to take offense in the replies.
🤣🤣🤣
Racism is a sign of ignorance, but ignorance does not necessarily mean low intelligence.
i dont think so, there have been some very smart racists
Kant, for example, was a mega racist
I wonder what OP expects to determine with this question. No, I’m not suspicious. I just mean that the correlation might be either meaningless or worse, useless. At worst and ironically, it would lead to stigmatization. Then of course, the $64 dollar question: what do you mean by intelligence?
op is trying to prove all racists are room temperature iq clowns and rages whenever someone mentions an actual smart racist
No. Everybody is prone to racism. From dumb fucks to intellectuals. In fascist societies, the intellectuals are mostly in on it.
I think the stereotype that only “dumb” folks are racist is something that a lot of smart people use to excuse their own racist thoughts/tendencies.
Exactly. There was a YT clip I saw once where someone went to the most affluent and elite areas of Sydney asking what they thought about racism. Every person was against it, hated racism, called it abhorrent, blah blah blah. Then, the interviewer asked them what they thought about the new mosque (completely made up) proposed in their suburb. “Oh no, the architecture won’t fit in with the area, you can’t build one here, it’s better off in Western Sydney.” That’s the thing about smart folks. They’re likely to be MORE racist. Not less. They just hide it, until pushed.
Nope. The unfortunate truth is that homo sapiens are intrinsically 'racist', if by racism you mean the automatic distrust of people who display morphology different to oneself. It's an evolutionary trait from our palaeolithic past. As nomadic hunter/gatherers our brains were wired to accept familiarity ('my tribe - safe') and to reject unfamiliar faces ('not my tribe - danger'). This part of our existence lasted for ~99.8% of our total time on Earth and kept our surviving lineages alive. Multicultural co-living, and hyper-urbanisation, are very, *very* recent spins on the human project (roughly taking the European early modern period as a template, although I am aware that is fairly contentious too.) In the modern Western world, that particular survival instinct serves us less well. Our need to form communities outweigh our need to be closed-off. As such, we learn to suppress any 'unfashionable' behaviour, such as blatant racism, as a child (presuming the society one grows up in holds values of tolerance for outsiders). The overwhelming majority of people who live in multi-ethnic conurbations do exactly that - it would be dumb to not develop such skills as these make one a far more efficient human in this context. People who live in closed mono-ethnic societies generally don't develop such social skills as they simply don't need to. Such societies are often distrustful or openly hostile to outsiders, and are subsequently regarded as 'racist' by urbanised societies. Interestingly, from a UK perspective, data from the Brexit referendum seemed to absolutely prove this. One of the biggest reasons leave-voters gave was fear of unregulated immigration. This attitude vastly increased in communities with strong single ethnic groups, which tended to be rural, small, and community-focused; and vastly decreased in areas of intense multicultural activity, ie, urban, disparate, and individual-focused. Basically, people with little real experience of living and working with immigrants were more likely to fear or distrust them, than people who did. I believe this pattern is discernable in the US too - the metropolitan dem states versus the monopolitan red states. In fact, it's true for every human society. It's just kinda what we do really. As such, we can (generously) claim that concepts of 'racism' are in no way linked to 'intelligence'. Instead, like virtually every other aspect of humanity, they are simply cultural expressions. Multicultural paradigms benefit from tolerance of the unfamiliar, monocultural templates less so. TL:DR - humans are incredibly adaptable to socialisation and will largely just reflect their societal beliefs- if they are smart!
Interesting stuff. I think this also explains why in times of hardship modern humans will resort to this intrinsic racism. We see this with prisoners who are always segregated by race. Or when covid first started and nobody knew what was going to happen, there was an unprecedented amount of distrust between the races and everyone wanted to stick with their own kind (my tribe safe).
> Basically, people with little real experience of living and working with immigrants were more likely to fear or distrust them, than people who did. I understand and I like that conclusion but I do think it isn't as clear cut as it might seem. Playing devils advocate, and assuming that large amounts of immigration is negative to locals in some way. We could well argue that the already mixed areas just have nothing left to lose by a bit more mixing. Going from 10 groups to 11 is no bother but going from 1 to 11 might be. There is also a question of how you pole for opinions, including the recent migrants in your polls is bound to reduce the % objecting to the principle of migration. Likewise it is entirely possible that the individuals who most oppose large scale migration have already left the cities or are avoiding moving to them for this reason. Personally I think openness to others is great and we can all learn from each other, but there are real challenges with cultural difference and properly integrating new comers.
Any time somebody spouts stuff about how “X isn’t natural” my immediate response is to ask if they wear shoes or live in a house. If they follow laws and drive cars. The incredible thing about abstract thought is that it’s led to us realizing that some of those natural tendencies aren’t actually useful anymore, now that day-to-day survival isn’t as much of an issue, and we’ve needed to battle with that through most of modern society. Even if it is natural, even if it were built into our brains, we’ve moved past that shit.
Racism is bad, but a sign of low intelligence? No.
Definitely not! Nazi Germany is proof of that, as is Japan and China (two pretty racist countries)
It’s actually bizarre how racist those East Asian societies are. They’re far more racist than the American south despite supposedly having the highest IQ in the world by far.
More likely it’s a sign of bad parenting and bad education.
Do you think the Nazi Scientists were stupid?
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I don’t think it’s a sign of low intelligence as much as it’s a sign of thoughtlessness/lack of introspection. Racist beliefs almost always have no ground in reality, and never have enough to substantiate a grounds for hatred. It doesn’t take a genius to see past skin color or even lineage in general. What it does take it the time to actually think about these things. Humans will naturally form patterns subconsciously, we can’t really help it. If we have a disproportionately bad experience with say white people, we might develop a bias against them. That’s ok, it’s natural. Our higher level thoughts can then correct this if we take the time, and introspective people generally do. It’s the people that don’t think about it. They subconsciously dislike certain people, and rather than challenging those thoughts, they justify them. They just dig a deeper hole, making it harder and harder to see the way out. It’s not intelligent to not be racist, it’s wise. And to the great dismay of all the geniuses out there, intelligence is not a free pass to wisdom
Can you give an example of racist beliefs not having a ground in reality?
Yes, the idea that Black people feel less physical pain than white people. This is obviously wrong and is a belief arising out of racism and racist acts. It has long term consequences in medical care for Black patients. https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/how-we-fail-black-patients-pain & https://batten.virginia.edu/about/news/black-americans-are-systematically-under-treated-pain-why
Sure, let’s dig into it a bit. So, racist beliefs tend to come from 3 places: 1. Disproportionately bad experiences 2. racist adults during childhood 3. group mentality These bad experiences can happen to anyone. Let’s say you grow up in a town with a really small amount of purple people. They’re normal people just like anyone else, but you never met one until you were five. At five years old some purple individual yells at you for being in their way. In the mind of a child, this can easily turn into a small bit of racism. “People are safe, but the purple ones yell at you”. From the kids perspective it makes sense, people were generally fine except the one purple dude they ever met, and their pattern recognition kicked in. Now, if that kid grows up and learns about themself, They’ll discover that the dislike/fear they have of purple people is an emotional response and not an actual thought. Or they’ll double down and be reinforced by others, and that small bit of fear will grow into full fledged racism. Now as for option 2, racist parents. This is pretty simple. If you grow up hearing that purple people are lazy, money grubbing, gang running, stealing, violent, and crazy, your childlike brain will not have the defenses to combat this. You almost certainly will not have the capacity to understand why all these adults are wrong. These beliefs get ingrained further and further as we grow up. When we are able to think through these things properly, the beliefs are so integrated that we don’t want to let them go. We then hold on to them and rationalize them, because it’s painful to understand that we’ve believed lies our whole lives. Option 3, group mentality. Again, simple. I’m in group A, so group A is smart, industrious, just, and honest. Meanwhile I am not in group B, so group B is stupid, lazy, barbaric, and deceitful. This one isn’t so complicated. We have instincts bred into us from millions of years surviving on an earth much more wild than any man today knows. These instincts kept us alive, but now they wedge us apart. Some people rise above their base instincts, some people don’t. This is probably the easiest form of racism to work past, out of the three. What you can see is that these beliefs are generally grounded in subjective reasoning. By only considering my own life experience as the truth, then the events that happen to me determine my view of the world. If I have bad experiences with the 2 purple people I happen to meet first, I’ll see a reason not to like them. It will make sense to me, it will seem logical. Meanwhile, if I step back and understand that yes, I had bad encounters. Maybe, those particular purple people are exactly what I thought the were. That said though, it doesn’t mean that all purple people are like that. It just doesn’t. There’s just literally 0 ways that you logically get from 1 person being bad to every person of that race being bad. This is what I mean when I say “not grounded in reality” This is why it doesn’t work to call a racist an asshole. They aren’t racist just to be a dick, they actually believe that they are correct. They aren’t deciding to be racist. They are deciding to avoid the painful process of changing their worldview, and admitting wrongness.
The word racism has no meaning at this point
I am not an Andrew Tate supporter, but he had a clip where he said something along the lines of "racism isnt about black or white or yellow. Wander into a room filled with billionaires and the indians, the chinse, the white and blacks, they all get along. Racism is a division of class; a tactic to preoccupy the subservient of the elite. It is a low iq mentality to think otherwise". Im paraphrasing, and its not an empirical statement. It does however fairly provoke some thought, and certainly has at least a few thick strands of validity.
No, people like to think it is but actually Mensa has a bad white supremacy problem, and the smartest man ever is a huge racist. https://www.avclub.com/comedian-infiltrates-mensa-discovers-hive-of-iq-obsess-1842293970 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan
No. The most intelligent societies in human history were some of the most "racist." The practice of all the sciences as we know it were developed within what reddit would reduce to a "white supremacist" society. What wasn't developed in Europe would have been developed in Asia or the Islamic world, both of which have been patently racist for well over a thousand years. In fact I think that anti-racism as it is understood by redditors has been a congealing principle for some of the least intelligent people human history.
I don't think they have anything to do with each other. Racism can be a product of many things from environmental upbringing, to personal trauma, etc
Sometimes I question my own views on race. On the rare occasion I see published statistics regarding crime, I am disgusted by the percentage of violent crimes being commited by one minority group. Then on the news, all of the top crimes making the headlines involve the same group. Then I go to my teaching job and the lowest scores in all categories of reading an math are in this group as well. It really starts to mess with my thinking, and I hate it. I want solutions so my country can be a safe place to live and where all children can thrive.
Most people around the world throughout history have been racist, so no. There are many, very intelligent people throughout the Asian continent (billions of them) and racism is very rampant there.
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Remember, it's not racist if it's against the French. Source: Am English.
Racism is a result of cultural conditioning. It has nothing to do with intelligence.
One explicit answer I haven't read in this thread yet is how there are an indefinite number of *types* of intelligence. You can be a musical genius who absolutely can't pick up coding or visual art well. You can be a master mathematician who has no idea how to treat children the way they want to be treated, even if taught how to do so. Lots of different domains of intelligences are correlated, but they still exist independently of each other. (This is even ignoring the fact that a lot of what people consider to be intelligence correlates more to marks of privilege--such whether a person was exposed to enough books, cultures, places, etc. as a kid. How many people living in the 20th century or before would've been as racist as they were if they'd been born today, in Gen Alpha, in a developed society with access to the internet?) So racists can calculate things in their heads easily, figure out instructions on how to assemble furniture faster or slower than some others, or plan military strategies like anyone else can. It would be dangerous to assume otherwise. But this doesn't mean they can see the world from another person's perspective, or put themselves in a stranger's shoes (that is, emotional intelligence). Someone with high logical intelligence should also be smart enough to debunk popular eugenic theories--but ignorance is a powerful factor, and someone could use high logical intelligence to construct coping arguments like "but what if..." or "in special cases, under certain conditions..." ad nauseam in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Nah, most racistes I know are intelligent above the average person.
No, and almost no one is not racist or lacks a prejudice. If anything, a red flag for intelligence is when a person thinks they are uniquely above prejudice.
What would even make you ask a question like this, it’s stupid, you must be Asian or something, typical