Today, Nobody is Actually Racist

Well, I take that back. There are a few people that genuinely hate people based on the tone of their skin.

But I would argue, that for the most part, most people don’t care what skin color you have. In that respect, they’re not racist. However, I would say that most people something else: cultural-ist.

In other words, they hate people not for their outward appearance; they hate them for what that outward appearance implies. While years ago, people saw Africans and immediately knew they were of a lower class, nowadays the stereotypical mid-western white man sees a black man and hates that he brings a poisonous culture to his children by means of rap music, sagging jeans and the thugs and gangsters.

It is the slightest of semantics, a remote shade in the gradient of social discourse, but I think it’s one of the most important distinctions we can make. Because once we recognize the problem isn’t with our refusal to accept people who look different, we realize just how insecure we are with others who act differently than we do.

And correctly diagnosing the problem, puts us on a better path to finding a long lasting solution.