ten years old but new to me

[rmd]

'granny gets a vibrator' has a post full of links that led me to this 10 year old article about 'new racism' or 'aversive racism'. it's interesting reading and looks at some of the ways racism manifests in white folks who consider themselves egalitarian and not-racist.

i may have to go poke around and see if things have changed over the past 10 years.

Comments

[lil-brown-bat.livejournal.com]

Interesting article. The trend pointed out in the article, of "not more negative, less positive", makes a lot of sense to me, because I see a lot of it: the desire to believe that one's own group is better/more virtuous/more deserving/more enterprising than others. The way I see this playing out isn't entirely race-based -- there's a great deal of class division here, too -- but race is a big, obvious, in-your-face "like me/not like me" divider. Class is nearly as big and obvious, though, and I'm sure that many so-called "upper middle class" (read: affluent) whites feel a certain virtuous glow for feeling more kinship with people of color who are in their social class than they do for working-class whites. Anyway, I think that when faced with disparities, people who are relatively advantaged need to believe that their advantage is entirely the product of their own virtue...or that it's a matter of factors beyond their control. They have to believe one or the other, or they have to struggle with their own self-image as people who believe in basic fairness.