fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #6598 ]

[ SECRET POST #6598 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6598 ⌋

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But if you've never ever had that experience of being wrong and educating yourself, how can anyone including you know for sure that's the way you'd react instead of clinging to your belief that good people are never bigoted and you are a good person, and so you couldn't have been wrong?

This makes zero sense. If you've never experienced a time where you said something bigoted, how can you know you're not bigoted? What?

If you've never experienced making a mistake, how do you know for sure that you'd apologize for it and learn better instead of pretending it never happened or that it was the others who were wrong? If someone has never had any reason to say "sorry" and change for the better, how do you know for sure they would do so?

It's more a philosophical thing. Would you rather rely on a person who admits they made a bunch of mistakes as a newbie, decades ago, but learned better and fixed them up, or the person who claims they've never made a mistake? I'd choose the first one, personally.

Making mistakes is a different thing, though. Have I made mistakes in my life? Absolutely, and I always own up to them. I admit I screwed something up, or was wrong about something, or whatever, and apologize.

I still maintain I have never used any bigoted terms that I'm aware of. If I say a (what I think is) totally innocuous term in front of someone from a group whose culture finds that term offensive, I will absolutely apologize, but it's never happened (or if it has, the person didn't have any reaction to it and didn't point it out).

Right and saying "I may have by accident but never on purpose, that I'm aware of, but if it happened I'd absolutely apologize and change" is different from "I definitely have never done it even by accident, and how can all of you have done it and then apologized changed!?" which is what some people are saying.

Do you see where people are coming from with that? lol

Yeah, if it's accidental then it's different. I guess I was thinking more about people who knew words were wrong to say and then said them anyway. I know there are at least a couple comments here saying things along the lines "yeah, I knew it was wrong but I didn't care" and those are the people I have issue with. If you knew something was wrong but did it anyway, then, uh...you kind of suck.

Tbf according to science the brain takes until like age 25 to fully develop. This includes things like empathy and other-and-self awareness; not that teens are incapable of all those things but people develop at different rates and they are going through those years at very much not an adult level. If you've talked to high schoolers they are definitely slamming through adolescence and hormones and are generally emotionally confused messes that are desperately trying to figure everything out and lashing out when they feel vulnerable.

Doing it knowingly and intentionally as a grown ass adult is a different thing, of course.

I don't know, I just find it really hard to accept that. Your brain doesn't have to be FULLY developed to know right from wrong. Racism is not something that comes out of nowhere, it's something that is taught. And if a kid grows up in a very racist environment, it's the parents' job to teach them to not be racist. So maybe I guess I should blame the parents instead of the teenagers.

I grew up in a racist environment with a racist father and I realized I was experiencing white privilege as young as the single digits. It's a matter of upbringing and if someone chooses to agree with the messages they're taught, not some pseudoscientific claim of when someone is mentally mature. Plenty of people under "25" aren't racist and too many people past that are.

Very much depends on the kind of racism displayed, though. Is it easy to tell your dad is racist if he's tossing slurs around everywhere? Yeah. It's much harder if your parents are subtly racist in the "they're not like us" and "always trust 'your people' over others" and "meritocracy is real and people who claim racism are making excuses" sense and claiming they aren't racist while being very polite and never uttering a slur.

It's been interesting to me to see the people who say they learned better being way more open and understanding of other people's upbringings than the ones who claim to never have even accidentally done a wrong.

never have even accidentally done a wrong

I specifically said people who knew things were wrong and did them anyway, and then you started defending them because apparently up to 25 you get a free pass for having no conscience.

I don't see anything like that in the comment I replied to?

"It's much harder if your parents are subtly racist in the "they're not like us" and "always trust 'your people' over others" and "meritocracy is real and people who claim racism are making excuses" sense and claiming they aren't racist while being very polite and never uttering a slur."

Those things are incredibly racist and it's not even a question. Society is way past the point where we've realized you can be racist without using slurs. A so-called "polite" racist is still a racist even if they claim they're not.

...did anybody say those things weren't racist, besides these example racist parents that were called racist?

Okay, so I don't think we're having the conversation you think we're having. The point was not "this isn't racism," the point was that "to a 15 year old with parents like this it's not as obvious that their parents are racist, and harder to tell that their parents are racists when they coat it with a veneer of politeness. Especially since most kids don't want to think their parents are racist."

Are those things racism? Yes, obviously.

Is it more insidious and harder for a teenager to pinpoint as racism, especially if their parents aren't teaching them that it's racism? Also yes.

Biases are taught and not all of them are obvious, especially to young people.

Okay, I guess I misunderstood, sorry. Yes, that makes sense.

Biases are taught and not all of them are obvious, especially to young people.

That's exactly the point that I and a few other people are trying to make in this thread. Some of us weren't taught them, which is apparently super hard for some of these commenters to comprehend. It's like they think "oh, I said bigoted things when I was young, therefore everyone else must have too, and if someone says they didn't, I don't believe them". They refuse to believe that other people had different experiences than them, so it's kind of funny to me that they're the supposedly more open-minded ones.

I don't know if you were the person I was responding to or not, but you don't see the issue with someone being like "my dad was racist and I could tell immediately, so other teens must have also realized and simply agreed with what they were taught" while not taking into account that racism can be very insidious and hard to tell is racism if you aren't taught otherwise?

All I was saying is it is often not as simple as that. If every racist or type of racism were completely overt, it'd be much harder for well-meaning teens to get indoctrinated. Whereas lots of people look back and go oh my god, that was racist all along.

No, I'm not them, luckily my dad isn't racist. But unless someone is homeschooled by said racist dad/parents and never allowed to leave the house or read a book or watch TV, they are going to encounter other people who do not have the same beliefs as their racist parents and realize that maybe their parents aren't always right.

AYRT

I agree with you. It's a matter of how you were raised, and at a certain point, of having a mind of your own and being able to think for yourself and not just assume everything you were taught is true.

DA

And that point is not at 15. It's normally not even until your 20s, i.e. the time during which you leave the environment you grew up in. If you never leave, then it's much much harder to change these things in yourself.

AYRT

And I disagree with you. I'm not sure where the line is, but it's absolutely way before someone is in their 20s. If you want to say 18, which is when most people leave for college and are exposed to new things that they haven't been before, I'll go with that. I personally feel like it's younger, but I'd be willing to agree with 18. But 20s, no way.

SA

Also, 18 is considered a legal adult. Old enough to vote, join the military, get married without parental permission, etc. Yet you're telling me people legally able to vote are not old enough to think for themselves? So does that mean we should raise the voting age?

AYRT

Also, 18 is considered a legal adult. Old enough to vote, join the military, get married without parental permission, etc. Yet you're telling me people legally able to vote are not old enough to think for themselves? So does that mean we should raise the voting age?

People who are 18 are not mentally equipped to handle the military (and honestly, I think marriage as well). They can think for themselves, but they're just beginning to, so they're going to make a lot of mistakes. We all grow up with biases and -phobias baked in. It's absolutely telling when people say they've never had any biases in their life because they of necessity have so all they're saying is that they've never actually confronted them. When you're 18, you haven't had the time to do most of the work needed to start overcoming those biases that you were raised in.

So I very strongly disagree with anyone who says that you should have your biases gone by the time you're 15. That's some all-talk-no-action "allyship" that's less than worthless because it's obvious you haven't actually put in the work on yourself and you would rather say that you're a "good person" without actually having done anything.

And of course you completely ignore the question about voting. The running of the country surely shouldn't be decided by people incapable of thought, right? What should we raise the voting age to, in your opinion?

And you disagree all you want, it doesn't make you right. I know plenty of people who had figured out by 15 that racism is wrong. Hell, I know 10 YEAR OLDS that realize racism is wrong and would never think to call someone a mean name because they were raised by empathetic parents who taught them that calling people names is wrong. Just because you apparently only know a bunch of juvenile delinquents who weren't raised right doesn't mean decent kids don't exist.

Re: Purity test time!

(Anonymous) - 2025-01-30 20:56 (UTC) - Expand

>Tbf according to science the brain takes until like age 25 to fully develop

Not always true. This is a pretty new concept, I never even heard of 25 being the maturity marker until I was 28. https://www.iflscience.com/does-the-brain-really-mature-at-the-age-of-25-68979

DA

Like the article suggested when people claim the brain is not developed until 25, it's not the brain per se they are talking about, but the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is that part of the brain heavily associated with rational thinking and impulse control, the two thing that SHOULD characterise an adult human.
Also it's a medium parameter, most probably based on neurotypical subjects. But yeah, it means that people under 25 are usually way more impulsive than older adults because the prefrontal cortex is not 100% matured as it COULD be in latter adulthood.

(btw re emphathy: "the involvement of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, temporoparietal junction, and the medial temporal lobe in self-reflection and autobiographical memory places these key regions as necessary for cognitive empathy."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21071616/
so the prefrontal cortex seems to play a part in that, but in cognitive empathy.
I personally think you can have high empathy levels even if your prefrontal cortex is still pretty immature)

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