Can kids be racist?

[Nerys Ghemor]

Yes they can. I am white/black and got it from both races in high school and even college. The whites would call me "half breed" and the blacks would call me "oreo" and neither group would have anything to do with me like I was some kind of disease.

I think your perspective was a good one to contribute to this thread. The way you took heat from both "sides" illustrates something else...that unfortunately, prejudice is a universal human characteristic. I think that the more parents, or potential parents, that recognize that truth and raise their kids with that understanding, the better off we will be.

 

[TedShatner10]

The son concerned is 32 years old and hasn't lived with me, at least not for any length of time, for more than 10 years, in fact he lives about 200 kms from me, so I have no idea who he hangs around with.

Clearly the wrong people. Peers are just as important as parents in forming the personality of a person. Does he live in a city or more rural area?

I was shocked when he started to voice racist beliefs in front of me about 6 or 7 years ago.

What group of people does he least dislike? I cannot remember seriously hating anybody for being part of certain social group, I'm no vindictive bully, the only people I have know to have held genuinely racist views from a early age have been sociopaths. I think racism is partially instinctive, it part of us recognizing certain physical features and behaviour, but it can be easily suppressed and is a evolutionary detriment.

Not so long ago and he was already well into his twenties. Australia has a strong undercurrent of racism, and not surprising if was founded as an isolated, tough prison colony on the bones of Aborigines. The Aborigines are still fourth class citizens and they have, with few exceptions, poorly adapted to a hostile industrialized civilization that had collided with their undisturbed world.

 

[An Officer]

^ I think you are absolutely correct about Australia. My cousin, who has been raised here in London, recently immigrated to Australia, and she has told me she has had several racist incidents already, and she has only been there a few weeks. She said the worst one was in a shop, when an inebriated white older man shouted racist slurs in her face, for daring to be in the same shop. She was so shocked she cried right there. She says she has never experienced anything remotely like that in the UK, not even from drunks, and neither have I. Drunks would have a very busy day indeed if they wanted to abuse all the non-whites in the city. Of course, for her, it wasn't only the drunks...

I think she's on her way home soon!

 

[TedShatner10]

I may be no angel myself and not that PC, but a young woman being subjected to unprovoked, random verbal abuse from strangers is fucking disgraceful. Australia seems to be almost as bad as South Africa and in some ways worse than North America in terms of non-white and non-Christian intolerance. The rightwing Australians seem to look down upon Aborigines as two legged animals and genuinely fear East Asians as sly invaders, which is completely ridiculous and something of a self-fulfilling prophecy considering the abrasive, stubbon attitude of racists.

Australians do not seem to be bad people on principle, but many of them always seem to have a chip on their shoulders about practically everything and self-contradicting: they distrust British people yet retain old British views about foreigners and colonialism, are rather rightwing in general but indifferent to their military heritage, supposedly conservative enough to attract fervent religious loons like Mel Gibson's dad, and yet have huge gay pride events. Quite an upsetting cultural cocktail.