RE: Women without color! Racial Injustice - LOH 144

Hi to you,
my way of responding to your text is inviting you to make a little mind experiment.

Let's say, you find yourself in a situation where, for example, you see a beggar outside the shop on Christmas Eve, my theses is, that a thousand and one reasons will play into your reaction as to whether you give him something or walk past him.

It could be that you have no cash, so you keep walking. It could be that you are completely preoccupied with yourself and don't see him at all. It could be that you're pissed off about something happened shortly before and you're thinking, "You bum, go beg somewhere else!" or it could be that you're in a mild mood and you stop and give the beggar money because it's Christmas. How much you notice and disregard a person depends most strongly on your situational mood, condition, attention and inattention. Less on HIS skin colour and external characteristics. Less on how you or him ticks "in principle" because principles in every day life play less a role than we usually think they do. We humans are spontane creatures and we often decide through our moods and not based on our principles. If you make a principle a demand what you mostly get is resistance or obedience.

Isn't it also true that if you were asked afterwards, after leaving the department stores', "why you didn't or do give money to the beggar sitting outside?", you would have difficulty finding explicit reasons? But if someone demands "Give me an answer!" that can be intimidating and you answer what you think is politically correct?

The moment the person asking you brings up skin color, he reduces the complexity of every situation. He narrows the question of why you were attentive or inattentive to a mono-cause. That is manipulative and it doesn't do justice to the multiple reasons of what goes on in individuals.

I agree that when people start "explaining" to children what the world they are growing up in is like, instead of letting them see it for themselves, they are committing the first of many mistakes. Children are constantly observing their fellow world and environment. Unless they are blind, they have eyes with which they can see in the neighbourhood, in kindergarten, in school, in real time and they just draw how they see this world. Let them draw what they see and not what you would like them to see, or worse what they "ought to see".

Greetings to you.