Reply to I definitely said a lot of racist & problematic things in the 90s

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[quote=Anonymous]I am shocked at how naive I was (HS in early 90s - grew up in Ohio.  I thought that the biracial students at my private school went there because they would have had bad experiences because of their race at the public schools.  I definitely assumed that all black people were good singers.  And that all Asians were super smart.  I also assumed that the East Asian woman who lived in my group house in college was a bad driver because she had reduced peripheral vision. (She did crash into things a lot.)  My personal favorite is when I was a swim instructor and I was teaching three black kids how to swim and one of the students had scraped their knee on the pool wall and the flesh was white.  It was this huge revelation for me that we are, and I quote myself, "Basically all white underneath!"  I don't remember saying or doing anything overtly racist or homophobic things - but I probably did.

But I'm not going to beat myself up about it - I was young, had limited exposure to people different than me, and a lot of the concepts that we discuss now weren't even acknowledged at that time (e.g. white privilege). I can't be held responsible for not knowing what no one knew.  I didn't decide where to live so I wasn't responsible (as a kid) for my lack of exposure.  These were just the circumstances I grew up in.  The idea that anyone should have acted in the past in a way that understood future concepts is ludicrous.  However, if I still believed and acted on those beliefs, there would be no excuse given that I have long lived in minority-majority neighborhoods most of my adult life and have had so many more experiences with people different than me.[/quote]

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