what is the deal with this continuing racist behavior of whites

[Buckeye_Democrat]

24. I'm sorry for your anxiety.

I had a bad dream the night after seeing riot videos from Milwaukee. I dreamed that I was in a mostly African American neighborhood and people were trying to kill me because of my skin color.

That was the first time that I had a nightmare like that, and I was able to dispel the anxiety quickly after I awoke. I live in an area with more African Americans compared to the national average, but there's still mostly white people around me. (I don't have much privilege in many ways, but I'll acknowledge that my situation would probably be even worse if I was black.) If I imagine myself as an African American who has witnessed past and present hatred and violence towards them, it seems likely that such concern would exist in my mind. I get all kinds of privilege for my skin color, such as being able to travel most places to mostly see other white people who I doubt will dislike me because of a silly trait like skin color.

I'm very sorry about the situation. I can only assure you that most white people that I've met don't seem to have any animosity toward African Americans at all (at least here in SW Ohio)! A problem is that they exist at all and that African Americans can't really know which ones have animosity right away. I often can't tell either unless one of them speaks to me privately and thus reveal themselves.

As for the causes, media might play a bigger role than I used to think. Some of the most racist people that I've met at jobs aren't white. Here's a couple recent examples...

I was telling a man and woman from Sri Lanka (who moved to the USA because their son became a medical doctor here) that we're ultimately all related to each other and that humanity originated in Africa. Both of them strongly denied that possibility. I assured them that scientists who study archaeology, biology (DNA markers) and other related fields have established it as fact. They again denied that possibility. The man said that I might've descended from Africa if that's what I want to believe, but they did NOT! I first wondered if they had an old myth about the origin of their people, but other comments were made by them that made it clear that they simply didn't want to be related to Africans. Coincidentally, the man easily had the darkest skin color in the entire factory. He was darker than any of the African American workers there. (Not that his skin color really means very much in ancestral terms, although the recent or distant ancestors of everyone was likely very dark at some point in the past.)

There was a Vietnamese-American who also worked there. He first came to the USA in the 80's, and he sometimes spoke of his idiotic "theory" about people from around the world and which ones looked most like primates (in his mind).

What I found interesting was that the Vietnamese guy would sometimes speak openly about his "theory" with African American workers around, and they just laughed about it! If that came out of the mouth of a white co-worker, I suspect the reaction would have been very different. I'm guessing that's related to the somewhat recent history in this country and which skin colors were more of a threat. The Vietnamese fellow was so incredibly skinny and small, maybe he wasn't seen as a threat at a personal level either?

Anyway, I'm not sure why the man from Vietnam or the couple from Sri Lanka developed their sense of superiority. They watched news from around the world in their youth, so I'm guessing that the origins of their screwy ideas started from that somehow.