Post #2477830

One knowledge that gets transmitted generationally is racism and other bigotries. Could we just forget racism? Black people need to teach their children how to be safe, so the question here is better formed as "can white people just forget racism?" Once phrased like that, this seems like a re-wording of the proposal that white people become 'colourblind.' Alas, we know this doesn't work. (I won't be providing a citation here, but there is quite a lot of scholarship documenting that this idea fails in practice.) There are two major points of failure. The first of which is bias. Unconscious bias is a form of received knowledge, but, as the name suggests, it's not one that people know they know. IT is possible for motivated people to reduce the amount of bias they carry, but part of this process involves becoming conscious of the bias. It's not forgetting but enhancing one's memory that is required. Indeed, it's not enough to simply change one's attitudes to fight systemic bias. To illustrate this, we can discuss a solved bigotry, left-handedness.