If everyone suddenly stopped talking about racism, would the next generation feel discrimination anyway?

Question

It is my personal belief that if the next generation of humans grows up without knowledge of what racism is and how people have mistreated other cultures in the past, it would be something completely useless and non-existing...we would all be equal..or...
is discrimination something that we are simply born with?

Answer 1

Possibly. I don't think it's inherent, but we have race-based laws and social groups that encourage it. The laws and policies can be repealed, though the notion of racism is such a useful political weapon that this isn't likely to happen in the near future. Not in the US anyway. We can always hope, though.

Group conformity is common here also. It's clearly racist when it demands that people act and think like other people who have the same skin color. I've heard Hispanic people calling each other "coconut," meaning they're "only brown on the outside," if they don't conform to other Hispanic people or spend too much time with people who aren't Hispanic, and I think we've all heard people being called "Uncle Tom" if they don't act or think "black" enough. You can't really do much about this except talk about out how mean-spirited and bigoted it is.

I agree that racism is largely a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I think it also comes from people making arbitrary distinctions between themselves, so they'll have something they can use to fight with, blame each other for, or compete with each other, much like the "Big-Endians" and the "Little-Endians" in "Gulliver's Travels." It's absurd, and not all cultures have had problems like this, but our culture is so obsessed with classification and competition that it's not likely to go away completely for a while.

Answer 2

how are you going to get all the people who are racist (like the ones showing obviously racists attitudes in their questions on yahoo answers) to raise their kids without passing that prejudice along? How are you going to make people stop showing their attitudes around kids? We are not born with it, it is learned from parents, teachers, society. But there is no way not to exist inside that society. How will you make this situation better using your life's energy to combat racism and discrimination?