Fear of being exiled from elite society - woke prep schools

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You are still not getting what I mean at all. I don’t mean I am supposed to be white. I mean I and everybody else is supposed to be not a racist. That is what League_Girl the person I was replying to said is a privilege

Yeah but its easy when you have millions of dollars to protect you

I mean how hard is it not to be racist? we move in an online community where members are perpetually judged because they are "nuerodiverse", so if we expect NTs to not to be prejudiced then it behooves us to also be non-judgemental to others.

Supposed to be and expected to be are two different things. It is pretty hard not to if not be a bigot, be without prejudices because it is a natural human tendency to fear differences. If it was so easy why after decades of efforts violent, peaceful, through laws is there still so much racism around?

The people who have overcome these fears do not have a privilege, they have combination of a gift and willpower. I do not expect people to no degree of racism, but I do expect people to try and not be bigoted.

Lot of racists don't even know they are racist. They think they see truth and facts. Telling them they are racist and banning them and exiling them will not fix them, they will just silence themselves and find their own echo chambers.

They can learn to very well mask themselves like they always had. They just don't want to revert back to pre 2016 when they used to be silent. Racism has never been tolerated in my life time as far as I can remember. Growing up in Washington and Montana, I never once ever saw anyone in my life time say anything or do anything racist. Though my brother did encounter a racist teacher in 7th grade and faced racism because she assumed he was Native because he had Native friends. In her mind, white people didn't hang out with another race.

I used to think racists were the minority but they are the majority

Yeah they have always been so oppressed because they can't speak the "truth" and "facts." They can mind as well be oppressed again. They did just fine. They can still vote, still go to college, still get jobs, never have to worry about being judged by their skin color. They don't know how privileged they are.

I'm also very privleged because I never have to worry about saying something racist or fear I will be called racist. I don't have to be scared of losing my job and don't have to fear what if anything I say is racist.

Perhaps we need programs for these people so they can fix their brains but I doubt they will take the program.

While everyone is prejudice in ways, I don not believe everyone is automatically prejudice towards skin color. I exist. I thank my naivety and childlike views on color of skin by seeing it as having different eye color and hair color so it never occurred to me to make judgments on color of skin. That is how kids see skin color too. If a kid is mean to them, they are not going to think "oh all black people are meanies" they will just think "that kid is mean, I don't like him."

Only way for a kid to be racist is if they are taught it but I doubt they really understand it. They are only echoing what they have heard and been told.

I once got a unexpected compliment about my kids playing with this special needs kid who had some type of deformity. I was told "you have such good children, they have been playing with my son and it's so good to see him finally having someone who accepts him and isn't afraid of him, you did a good job." I was confused by that comment and the mom explain other kids have always been afraid of her kid and won't play with him. Honestly I didn't even do anything to get my kids to accept kids with disabilities, I just never went around bad talking about other people about their appearances and making critical comments about them. So my kids never learned "different=bad." That is the reason why kids bully those who are different because their parents teach them and then they wonder why their kid is a bully because "I never taught him to bully anyone, how can that be?" Also kids are watching us, they absorb what we say around them and take it literal.

And I also never made a big deal about skin color nor bring it up when talking about a person if they do a bad thing. Also I think it helps that when kids are around diverse kids, they never learn to be prejudice against skin color. There are lot of diverse kids at my kids' school, some even speak another language and some of them are white. And Oregon is supposed to be a very white state but I see different people all the time of any race.

I do believe we can all be naïve about different skin color by assuming they have the same life experience as us and the same privileges as we do. I do believe we may all act insensitive towards their race and culture by mistake because of our ignorance. Lot of color activists seem to have a problem with people not taking the time to educate themselves on race and I can understand that. But when they say we are automatically racist because of our ignorance on skin color, I think people just get defensive and then not want to bother learning because they have their own view on what is racism. Some have even decided to do the reverse racism thing by saying they are the ones being racist by making it be all about skin color and saying to the allies that we are the ones being racist. So that is where the term "white fragility" comes in.

Thanks League Girl

I think on WP this philosophy is much better coming from you than from me as members conflate my views with my NT privilege.

I think my own interest in this topic stems from my daughter having to deal with both her condition and her race at school. She handles it like a champ but I'm always anxious for her.

I think I need to reframe this thought process away from race alone (as that seems to be a trigger word nowadays) and maybe reframe this as implicit bias.

I think the purpose of exercises like CRT and the 1619 project is not about making children feel guilty. Kids are not stupid, they know their forbearers did bad things anyway, but they need to learn (using Daddy63's language) critical thinking that the legacy of those times where inequality was legislated in law still exist.

The education system is not just designed to shove facts into their brains, its also designed to help them understand that they may be carrying implicit bias (intentionally or unintentionally internalised from parents or wider society).

The fact that adults undergo cultural sensitivity training in the corporate sector means implicit bias whether against religion, race, culture, creed, gender or ability is carried in most of us. Education is one of the few opportunities we have to deprogram our minds so as to treat everyone with the same level of compassion/empathy as fellow human beings.

Ironically the very thing the right claim the left is trying to do (divide society by race) is the very thing they perpetuate when they protest against children learning at school.

When I think of Cyberdad....."NT privilege" doesn't enter into it at all.

I wonder if he might be one of those who has one foot in NT-Hood, and one food in Autismhood.

Maybe the "best of both worlds"?

I accept WP members will always treat my intentions with suspicion. I'm literally the only NT regular on WP (you'll find me any hour of the day ) so I feel privileged to contribute to different perspectives on a range of issues and occasionally jumping in to provide advice,

There's an interesting line in Westworld where Anthony Hopkins character is talking to an humanoid automaton named Bernard. Bernard was coming to terms with discovering he's not human.

Hopkins reassures Bernard that “There is no threshold that makes us (humans) greater than the sum of our parts, no inflection point at which we become fully alive. We can’t define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there’s something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts (automatons) do, seldom questioning our choices, content, for the most part, to be told what to do next.”

In many ways this could be a discussion between an NT and a person the spectrum except the autistic person is actually more flexible whereas we NTs are more like automatons.

Many people on the spectrum believe NTs are more capable because of the way our brains are wired. Infact, the opposite is the case. Every person on the spectrum is wired in a different way that makes them unique and different. Yet NTs are very fixed in our ways are programmed by society, We like to think we are "special" but we are literally cognitive clones.

This makes the urgency for children to learn critical thinking, that we are not cognitive clones and that we shouldn't conform so rigidly to norms all the time.

You never saw any racism growing up, Wow. Either you saw it and did not realize it, or you truly have been privileged. I grew up in a neighborhood where people did not sell to blacks because “the property values would go down” and where the n-word and not the euphemism was used in casual conversation and where it was understood that if you sold your house to a black family you and your house would be targeted, maybe firebombed. I was called k*e more then I care to remember. Our synagogue was “decorated” with swastikas on most Jewish holidays. No concept of hate crime back then the custodians washed the paint off and that was that. A recent Newsday investigation showed that on Long Island in the real estate industry racial steering is still widespread, perspective black buyers told that house in the white neighborhood has been sold that has not been, white perspective buyers in black neighborhoods cautioned about the “gangs” there. And I still on occasion hear “Jew you down” and “Jewish Lighting”

There was this guy, friend of family, every other word out of this guys was a curse, or an ethnic or racial slur, or a stereotype. Today even most anti woke people would want this guy excluded from everything. If you were in trouble no matter who you were he would help you more then most people would. Was this guy a racist?

The above does not mean I am close to being an expert in being a black person in America. It does mean that I find all these wokes lecturing me and people like me about our white privilege, our white fragility, telling me how I am so ignorant I don’t even know I am a racist both condescending and insulting.

I am not naive, I know a bunch of these parents are racists who have found a more acceptable way to be racist, who are making stuff up or who are sheep for made up hyperbole. But a lot of these accusations about anti racism training that is toxic has been documented and not refuted. A lot of these parents are while not perfect are not the boogyman and don’t want their naive kids to have that racist stigma put on them.

I grew up in a neighborhood, never saw anyone say anything negative about skin color. Only thing I saw as a child was about being gay. The way kids would talk about it implied being gay was something bad and I didn't understand why being gay is a bad thing if it hurts no one. I also experienced xenophobia as well as a child from other kids close to my age. Never heard any kid at my school say anything bad about having a different skin color and never saw kids in my neighborhood or at school say anything negative about it nor implied being black or a different skin color was bad.

Yes I would say not seeing any racism in my school or in my neighborhood was sure a privilege, never saw it in my school either in Montana. Only that one teacher in my brother's school was racist and I only heard of her. I hope that was the only time my brother ever saw racism.

I was raised under the spectre of what may be termed the "typical racism of the times."

It was taken for granted that people who were not white were not welcome in the neighborhood I grew up in. This was the way it was until things started to change in the 1970s. And this was a Jewish neighborhood; I feel like Jewish people should have known better.

I really didn't care either way---but I did have some racist notions until I actually started hanging out with nonwhite people starting about age 10.