A reader shifts gears on the subject:
Here’s my example of race influencing being spectacularly stupid: the phenomenon of date/acquaintance rape. I’m a middle-aged white woman who grew up in a city torn by the racial tension of the late ’60s and affected by white flight (I joke that my parents were the only white people who moved INTO town, six months after the riots). By the time I got to junior high, my 8th grade graduating class was 425 kids, of whom about 20 were Hispanic and 5 of us were Anglo. The rest were black.
From the age of 7 to 10, I was bullied in a horrible, passive/aggressive and rejecting way by a white female classmate who was the definition of a frenemy. Around that age I also got jumped by a group of black girls from round the way, which frankly was a lot less emotionally damaging. Two of my best friends were African-American boys who at the age of 12 were already what Fox News likes to call “hulking.” As you can judge from the variety of “urban violence” and “urban friendship”, it came in all genders and colors. So I was never taught either by my own experience or certainly by my parents to fear any one group, but instead to keep aware of my surroundings and have a healthy skepticism about the purported “safety” of any place or any persons.
I ended up at a small rural college that was 98% white.
While I did drink, it was always with close friends of both genders whom I knew extremely well. I never got drunk at a frat party because it was filled with young men at the height of influence of hormones and peer pressure and general dickishness whom I did not know. The only thing I did know about them was that they were “nice boys from good families”, which is a lot of words to say white. This one attribute made many of my fellow co-eds feel totally safe to get completely bombed out of their minds in their presence, because those boys were not the males they had been taught to be careful of. They had been taught that a rapist is a big black guy in an alley. And sometimes, bad things happened because of this belief that corn-fed guys out of the Lands End catalog were not capable of sexual assault.
Before you think that the above is meant to indicate I am some paragon of post-racial centeredness, I am definitely not. The biases inherent in living in our society are difficult to escape, and I am no exception. Long after I graduated, I was the victim of an attempted date-rape by a man I had been seeing for a couple of weeks. He was white, and a doctor, and Jewish. Imagine all the racial/class level/educational/religious stereotypes of “this dude is totally safe and ultimately harmless” swimming around in that description. And I fell for every one of them.
The Dish 