racism = bad

Growing up I’ve attended schools with either diverse groups or a high emphasis on cultural and ethnic understanding. What I’ve also witnessed growing within these open-minded groups, is a paralleled annoyance and cavalier attitude towards race. To me there is no difference between the educated and uneducated prejudices and attitudes. A large public school black kid will crack racist jokes at a white kid as nothing more than entertaining himself or others around him, while that same white kid may make racist jokes about blacks behind closed doors the minute his school presents something on tolerance. I wouldn’t consider either of these instances as racist, but I would agree that they are both ignorantly indifferent and fed up with an attitude that tells them they cannot be racist and it’s bad. Both of these kids harbor prejudices developed from the systems they grew up in, but these were learned by their places in life. The scenario I’m most familiar with, being a white kid, is the latter. It is frustrating to think about because in many cases it doesn’t necessarily bother me. Unless it’s completely unnecessary and racist, I’ve sat in on my fair share of jokes and comments that were just meant as side comments and in my opinion you can try and understand them as much as you want, but to some extent they will always exist.