re: #92 robdouth

I can’t get behind this. If you don’t teach a child one way or the other about race, they will ignore it. In that case, ignorance is bliss, but having gone through public school and a public university, their may be instances of individual denial, but not as a society. So much of schooling deals with race, every year an entire month is dedicated to the history of one race, so it’s almost impossible to deny.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t problems, but I whole-heartedly disagree that the main problem is denial.

I think you’re confusing emphasis with honesty. It is true that society in general, and the education system in particular, pay a great deal of attention to race. Much of this, most of it, is aimed at overcoming racism.

That is not the same as teaching people to honestly address their feelings and attitudes. Much of it in fact probably works to the detriment of healthy dialog. The lesson is often not so much that you shouldn’t be a racist, but that you shouldn’t be honest about it. This contributes to the kind of transparent denial we see in the poll results above.