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In reply to the discussion: If Darren Wilson is innocent, why are so many white people preparing for war? [View all]raging moderate
(4,297 posts)When I was a kid, after school, my brother and I used to watch them on TV a lot. I have come to suspect that such movies and shows created a subconscious conditioned Alert! reflex reaction to Black (and somewhat to Latino) people. Our family spoke respectfully of Black and Latino people, but our questions at home about such people were met by shallow platitudes, and questions about them in their presence were met by a tense "Sh-sh-sh, we don't make personal remarks about people! It's rude!" I guess they had seen those movies, too. We almost never saw Black people in our dingy poor little neighborhood in Chicago, a city that was so color coded that you could tell which subway train to get on by how the riders on it looked. But there, in those movies, they were portrayed as extremely stupid, unable to talk in complete sentences, stuck in the Stone Age, and/or viciously, irrationally irritable, like a bomb that had to be watched closely and handled carefully or it might explode. And Latino people were portrayed as only slightly better, but also the sort of people who would be better off doing the simple labor while the brave, resourceful, intelligent white people should take the responsibility of doing the "difficult high-level work" of supervision. And I suspect that many white people my age have this little conditioned reflex from things like those movies, a sort of involuntary unarticulated Alert! reaction. Now, if you read a bunch of different books and mix with a bunch of different people and watch a bunch of different movies, you have an opportunity to realize what immensely rotten lies were told in these movies, and to gain some insight into your mind and how crafty people may have found ways to push buttons inside you to make you more useful to them. Also, I am aware that some extremely wise, kind, sensitive, insightful Black people and Latino people have helped me grow along the way, and these memories act like a wave that lifts me out of that reflex. I monitor my thoughts, remind myself of reparative information, rehearse less delusional reactions, and basically say "Shut up!" to the auditory memories from that little crack in my mind. I wonder if other white people are experiencing these conditioned reflexes without realizing where the blasted things came from.