Quote:
Originally Posted by GeeTwo
At first blush, this makes sense. Looked at a bit harder - are you intentionally implying that because someone has an firmly held opinion worthy of defending, [s]he is guilty of something, or did that sneak in without you realizing it?
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No, I'm pretty confident his entire point was about how white people felt entitled to speak their mind about racism in a thread that specifically asked just people of color to do so. The way I read the post, the entitlement to express that strongly held opinion in any venue they can speak, even if they have been asked not to, is itself problematic. It's emblematic of a way racial issues are treated by people in FIRST - as an issue that people feel they have an iron-clad, rigid, inflexible understanding of and thus no need to listen to the actual people affected by it.
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I've been avoiding commenting on this thread because I think in general we should defer to people of color when discussing racism in the US, but I just wanted to add that racism isn't limited to overt and conscious discriminatory actions done by one person to another. Racism isn't just a person using racial slurs, explicitly excluding people on the basis of their race, etc. People can perpetuate racism without malicious intent or conscious awareness. Racism is a societal level problem that people perpetuate, in small ways, every day, not a problem of just picking out a few bad (racist) apples from the bunch.
So while it's great that none of you have seen any overt racism in FIRST on your teams (I mean, I certainly haven't seen overt, explicit discrimination either), I would encourage everyone to look deeper than that, and try to find subtle ways in which you may be perpetuating racist ideas without even realizing it, or making an unwelcoming environment for PoC, or allowing problematic behavior from students, etc. This isn't an easy problem to solve.