Originally Posted by
Frogacuda
I'm not so sure about this. I don't think someone has to teach you to be racist. If there's a group that talks and acts differently that you, but who doesn't get humanized through more intimate personal relations, you're going to to develop a bias against them. It's just how our brains are built to see patterns, and if someone has only a certain kind of contact or only notices things that are different, those biases will be negative.
The cure to racism is integration, even more than education or anything else (though obviously, as you said, higher education often forces you into a more integrated environment). One of the biggest things propping up racism as an institution right now is the economic segregation of schools that often leads to a huge amount of defacto segregation in socialization from an early age.
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