In a society where we can't help but get information and points of view outside of our immediate peers and world view because of traditional media(radio, tv, film) social media, advertising, and the internet I do consider those people that you would consider benignly ignorant to be willfully so. I don't think anyone can get away from the vast sensory input of the media machines I listed earlier without a conscious choice. They are simply too ubiquitous. I'm quite amazed how much we are willing to excuse in this so called information age.
You also just said to me that ignorance is the opportunity to educate. I can only imagine that you would suggest it because that's what you feel would be optimal. I said teacher because that's generally what we call someone who educates. Do you feel I've attacked you or been hostile or is that just a more general remark in your second paragraph?
It seems you do not understand what I posted at all. let me use an analogy for you. A person has 5000 channels on their TV. Channels 2356, 3400, and 4589 has such differing views that it will change their mind if they watch it. problem is the family is only used to watching channels bellow 1000 so the person never watched all of the channels they possible could so never come across it.
My suggestion to really understand people. To really understand "how" people can be so closed minded in this nation, is to simply travel around in this nation and see how people live their lives. Ask questions. I have done so in the south my next adventure is to try in northern states, but again there are people who may have access to the information but never felt the desire to look it up because they didn't know they were missing anything.
To put in perspective how strong this for some people. I had taken a trip to New Orleans and decided to look around and talk to people. After I crossed the bridge to Algiers I ended up talking to a lady that lived there in her 30's. I asked her what were some good places to look at in the city and she told me she didn't know, because she never crossed the bridge. Thinking she was kidding with me, I asked if she ever left the state. She stated no. When I asked her why, her response was to shrug her shoulders and tell me that all of her life all she ever wanted was in that area of the 15th ward so she never thought about making a trip or leaving, never found the reason to need to.
Yes, there are wealth of information out there. There is a huge world out there that people can travel and experience different arts and cultures, but some people choose not to take advantage of that because some have the mindset of staying with familiar sources and cannot grasp why people would want to. Being a curious person myself it took me a while to understand that the person wasn't "wrong" or "broken" just had a different outlook. When you realize that not all people seek out new information and experiences automatically because of familiarity then you can understand what it means for someones behavior and mentality to be crafted by the environment they are in.
I think people not being ignorant should be optimal, but we don't have the luxury of that in this nation. The next step is to talk to people who have fixed views and hopefully inspire them to seek alternate views. You don't need to convince someone that their familiar views are wrong, just remind them that there may be more perspectives out there. And that was a general remark in my second quote. I mean being civil is to talk to others for understanding would help go along way.
This isn't an argument.
Prejudice, discrimination and antagonism are indicators of racism, and no they don't always indicate happy feelings, but they do NOT necessarily imply hatred. The intent behind your actions are completely divorced from the outcome and how they affect other people. As I said, someone can be completely well-meaning in their intent and still be incredibly racist.
Let me give you a very basic example: slavery. Of course, a lot of white people hated slaves in the South at that time, but if you asked many slave owners how they felt about slaves? Oh, they loved them as children. They took care of them. Only disciplined them when they "had to." To these people, slaves were just as children and they were proud to be able to make them productive. Now, of course as we all know, this was all bullshit. Slavery was completely, 100% racist regardless. But for a lot slave owners, that hatred component wasn't there. They owned slaves and thought they were good people.
To think that Rachel's (or anyone's) actions have to carry a specific hatred in order to be considered racist is not only completely wrong, it's actually dangerous. This is the kind of thinking that contributes to the underhanded racism that we're fighting today. Because too many people think that unless someone's wearing a KKK hood and/or shouting "FUCK BLACK PEOPLE", then it must not be racism. Racism is a lot more sly than that. Rachel could have been completely innocent in her motivations, but at the end of the day she made a mockery of an entire race, and she made us inferior by even thinking that because she had some adopted black siblings, liked the culture, and went to an HBCU, that she had licence to not only be black, but to be an expert on blackness to other, real black folk. There's a huge argument that can be made that Rachel's actions were completely racist, regardless of what the fuck she felt.
Because a lot of supremacy groups ARE hate groups. But besides the fact that this does nothing to argue that racism has to carry hatred. Example: most MRA groups aren't considered hate organizations, even though many (most) of them are extremely misogynist and racist.
Of course this isn't an argument.
When you say Prejudice, discrimination and antagonism are indicators of racism, and no they don't always indicate happy feelings, but they do NOT necessarily imply hatred. My obvious question to that is what other feelings do they bring up then?
To your second part, about people "loving" slaves, that is the difference between institutionalized racism (law of the land) and personal racism. If those people actually loved them they would have set the slaves free. I did hear that happened in the past So I do believe it existed. But some people always viewed their slaves as less than human so you can say akin to animals but worse, maybe they would have allowed a least a dog in the house. To show how true this may have been though is after slavery was abolished. The difference between love and hate manifested itself strongly then. You will have a hard time getting me to believe that human beings that could have possible beat or kill other human beings, sold children like cattle, broke families up in the name of profits and/or actually looked at their slaves as objects instead of people actually cared for them.
And cultural appropriation, especially due to having adopted and married black people is far from "mocking". Nothing she did seem to try to ridicule or deride the black race. And again, explain to me, using the definition of racism, how you can logically come to the fact that she was being racist.
Check it out..