> If I had been a black kid? No way. I can’t imagine that the teachers of a white, white, white suburban Boston high school would have patted me on the head for all of that. Opening unlocked doors would have been taken as breaking and entering. If I told them that I’d put in a lot of time to decipher the mechanical workings of a common school lock and how to exploit its weaknesses, they’d have assumed the only reason I’d have gone to all of that trouble was because I planned to steal stuff, not because I was intellectually excited by an intriguing puzzle.
Too polarized and emotional. There is a problem, yes. But that doesn't mean that all teachers will treat a black or brown child differently from the white one. And also America is not the worst case. Here in Ukraine almost everyone hates black and brown people.
Of course America isn't the worst case - but the point is kind of at the heart of the matter, and minimizing the issue just because the issue is even worse elsewhere is nonsensical.
When on vacation in Poland, I had the opportunity to meet some Ukrainian emigrants. And they asked me in Polish, in earnest: "...so, are black people dangerous? I hear there are a lot of them in America."
Absolutely. (Although bear in mind that the term 'African-American' for someone with brown skin is American-centric, and other countries don't use it. Luckily WA understood you.)
On the other side of the coin, while visiting Dallas on work from Europe, I was asked, quite seriously, whether I was worried about the the Muslim campaign to control Europe by outbreeding the natives (or something, I'm not good at remembering this stuff). I don't think they'd ever met a Muslim in their life.
There is a large Muslim population in the Dallas area. The problem is a combination of (self or social) segregation and poor integration of the immigrant communities.
Not knowing members of your society just because you have preconceived notions about them is pathetic, but painfully real.
> When on vacation in Poland, I had the opportunity to meet some Ukrainian emigrants. And they asked me in Polish, in earnest: "...so, are black people dangerous? I hear there are a lot of them in America."
> They had never met a black person in real life.
So their only impression of what African Americans are really like is presumably formed via American media?
Here in Ukraine almost everyone hates black and brown people.
I knew some Ukrainian girls over the years and they seemed to me like good people with no racial prejudices towards people of other ethnicities and they blended very well with non Caucasian people.
Maybe you're hanging out with neo Nazis and ultra nationalist nutjobs and then extrapolating this to all Ukrainians?
Maybe Ukrainians that you meet in a foreign country are naturally going to be more cosmopolitan than the larger percentage remaining at home in Ukraine.
Too polarized and emotional. There is a problem, yes. But that doesn't mean that all teachers will treat a black or brown child differently from the white one. And also America is not the worst case. Here in Ukraine almost everyone hates black and brown people.