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My bigotry when I was young certainly did not come from my family. It came from private school and my failure, for whatever reason, to use my brain to challenge that shit.
I guess the question is, at what age do we hold people accountable for their words and actions?
I went to state schools in SE London in the 70s and 80s and I heard some shit, and I was around some pretty repellent kids, but also some right darlings.
The worst racism I heard was from teachers at my ex grammar school (state comp) eg. You’re pretty clever for a n***** aren’t you XXX?
This from a maths teacher to my friend I’d been sitting with leaving a lesson.I think this cricketer said some moderately daft stuff when he was pretty young, I wouldn’t cut him any slack for it but I also wouldn’t go looking for a fight over it. I absolutely agree that an apology should say something like ‘I said some racist and sexist things, I used to be a bit of an idiot when I was a kid’. The daft idea that there is some binary of racists and non-racists (or whichever prejudice you choose) needs to be addressed. We are all capable of othering, judging, condemning people based on some attribute we think they have that we don’t possess. Race, ability, sex, gender, sexuality- whatever.
The worst violence, misogyny and homophobia in my school was from the boys whose parents had come from the West Indies. In the early 80s these lads were definitely the dominant social and cultural group.
There were a few who made my life a misery, I ran into one in my early 20s - he was slightly incongruously (for those times) working behind the bar of the local punks/freaks/squatters/bikers pub, I cringed inwardly expecting the same old shit. ‘Hey man, I was a cunt at school, I’m sorry, what’re you drinking?’
I was chatting with a (black) friend in Deptford around that same time, talking about some guy I’d known at school who I referred to as half-caste, she was like ‘you shouldn’t call him that!!’
‘ but that’s what we all said, he would’ve called himself that’
...People can change and sometimes they need a bit of persuasion, but we all have feet of clay.
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absurdbird
My bigotry when I was young certainly did not come from my family. It came from private school and my failure, for whatever reason, to use my brain to challenge that shit.