My own denials of rationality.

[thesummerqueen]

I have never known anyone like this.

I have.

There were several of them in my high school and I met several of them when I worked retail and did office work in construction, where the complaint was against both white people ("they hold us down") and Mexicans (all Latinos were Mexican and stole the jobs from the black people). They could paint it however they wanted politically, socially, whatever - it was a racist thing.

Elsewhere on the forums we discussed black history month and I think I related a story about some black dude that started preaching to me in the halls of high school about how slavery was still going on, blah blah, trying to make anyone who was white feel guilty. None of my family owned slaves - we weren't even in this country until after the civil war. Half of my family is Jewish, the other poor Romanian farmer-types who didn't fare much better financially than black people post-Civil War. He decided my skin color was enough to figure I was a WASP descendant of some sort bent on holding people back. Well hold on a second here - my family came to America because we were escaping the coming genocide of OUR "race" - slavery and all that was horrible, awful, etc, and so was the mass murder of an entire race of people. Isn't judging me by outward appearances alone racism as well? He didn't even bother to ask me - hence why I fucked him over with the comment I gave him back.

He wasn't an isolated incident. I will agree that they are a small number of people who act that way, and I loathe that sort of attitude no matter what your race or religion is, but he and several others just in my school DID (do) exist, and that was just one high school in one town in America. They wanted reparations, several generations removed. And believe me, it was a small number compared to all the other black people I've had contact with, friendship with, or intimacy with even, but just like people lay blame on shitty atheists, a small number of people claiming to have representation of any subgroup can fuck things over for the larger group in other people's minds and if my dad had had more influence on me than my mother I'd probably have been just as racist as him solely because of those assholes who got in my face and shouted for their mule and 40 over a century after the war that freed them in the south.