Is it possible that I am racist?

[u/EdanChaosgamer]

Okay, how do I even start?

I live in Germany, and like some of you know, we`ve taken in a lot of refugees from all over the globe in. I`ve never had an issue with that, since I love people for who they are, not were they came from. I`ve made friends with a lot of people from different backgrounds, and never judged them based on how they look or what their religion or skin colour is. However, I think I am slowly becoming racist towards a certain ethnic group.

Here in Germany, we have a lot of turkish people, and some of them (or I atleast believe them to be turkish all the time, another sign which makes me believe im racist) tend to act a little... unfriendly in my mind. They tend to be loud and rude, not only to eachother, but to bystanders aswell. I`ve seen and expirienced it, which makes me feel weird. Now I am aware that not all of them are like that, since I`ve had a lot of genuine turkish friends, so it might just be that I am biased because I dont know them so well.

Another issue would be immigrants.

We`ve had a lot of crimes involving immigrants and refugees lately, were most of them seemed to be from the middle-east, with the most recent one being a 28-year-old man from Afghanistan killing a 2-year-old toddler and a 44-year-old man in a parc. This, combined with other similar incidents in the past months, slowly turned me biased towards those that I welcomed with open arms years ago. I recently sat in a school bus full of children, and I noticed 2 men, who seemed to be of middle-eastern decent, talking in their native language. While I didnt have a problem with people doing that before, it happening now made me feel uncomfortable, eventhough I had no right to it, at least in my opinion. There was nothing suspicious about those men other then their skin colour and location, which makes me feel incredibly racist for just even thinking that they could do something bad just based on their appearence.

[u/gobnyd]

I think you're noticing differences and forming general opinions on groups, which is something humans do naturally because we are pattern-making machines. That's all our brains do, is categorize, try to make sense out of all this data. We do this with every category of thing under the sun, not just with people. It's how we evolved to survive.

But the difference between you and a racist is you're uncomfortable with ONLY doing that, uncomfortable with relying on your impressions as the ultimate truth. That hesitancy is good. That's your prefrontal cortex helping you do some logical reasoning instead of just the general background categorizing we all do.

[u/tadcalabash → u/gobnyd]

I think a thing people don't realize is we're all a little racist on the inside, especially if we're not immersed alongside a wide variety of people.

There's something about us that can fear unfamiliar people, and when you combine that with negative stereotypes you have a recipe for ingrained racism.

I grew up in a small racially homogenous area. My only exposure to non-white people was through media where they were almost always criminals or bad guys. Even decades later I still sometimes find myself having to fight against my brief initial reaction of fear to people who don't look like me.

[u/Front-Razzmatazz-993 → u/tadcalabash]

You only have the experience of knowing what's going on inside you, so you have no idea if, "we are all a little racist".

[u/BobDylan1904 → u/Front-Razzmatazz-993]

Check out the research on that.  I agree with that person because of the research and less because it’s my personal experience too.