zodiac24 Apr 2005

Only a few decades ago, it was considered perfectly enlightened to say things like, "I love blacks; they're such great athletes and dancers. They've such gleaming white smiles! And they're always very polite and docile."

What's changed since then? I doubt very much Americans' biases have changed very much. And besides, the speaker of the quote above might easily have scored a bias FOR blacks on -=Dark_Angel=-'s test. Still, I doubt even Dovina would feel very comfortable about saying something like the above today.

What's changed is the vocabulary for talking about blacks, women, or groups of any kind of people. Someone decades ago realized that despite the above's seeming pro-black bias, it was still mildly offensive or denigrating to blacks, especially ones who, I don't know, fly fighter jets or own small stores of some kind, and the word got around. Most of us probably didn't hear it expressly in school or whatever. And I'd go even further and say our current aversion to saying such things doesn't come naturally to most people. However we learned it, we did have to learn it somewhere, even if just from TV or casual conversation.

There are still tons of things that are slightly denigrating to blacks, though most people don't see how until they're told. Perfectly unbiased people accidentally say them all the time without realizing it. Most of what I'm trying to say is that, with all the best intentions in the world, Dovina has. Mostly, like you said, from naivete. I don't think she's really a racist.