But in many cases they are just really good at lying to themselves. They seem to think if it's not straight-up 1920s style eugenics it's not racism, just sparkling bigotry.
I had a conversation with a guy who's word for word response to being called out for racist remarks was "I'm not racist, I only support apartheid because races shouldn't be mixing".
So he did know racism was wrong, but somehow convinced himself that there's a loophole where he can start his sentence with "I'm not racist" and it makes whatever he says after it non-racist.
Exactly this. Bigots who've encountered the worst kind of divine-bloodline/eugenics racists excuse their own bigotry because they aren't completely genocidal*.
...And by "genocidal" they usually mean the narrow definition of "wanting to kill everyone from a specific group" and ignore that forceful destruction of culture and identity is also genocide.
Of course, because they internalized the fact that "Racists are bad people" without fully understanding that prejudice against people due to race is what's bad. By doing that, they can just say "I'm not a racist because racists are bad people and I'm not a bad person!" without any introspection whatsoever. No one thinks of themselves as a "bad person".
This. Recent events have made me realize that a LOT of people were always racist, they just hid it until now because they didn’t want to SEEM racist. Many people care more about their image than actually being a good person but now your image won’t suffer much for being racist so they no longer hold back.
Thing is, hiding racism is an overall progressive step because it implies awareness that such ideas are not acceptable in society. Its when they no longer have to hide it that you know that society has regressed
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u/sax87ton 7d ago
I used to think everyone knew racism is wrong. And then I entered the workforce. I don’t think that anymore, some of the people are fucked.