Agreed. The little creep may have thought he’d receive a get-out-of-jail card because his father is police chief but that very sincere and heartfelt letter from his father to the public indicates that he would have been very mistaken.
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If it were my dad, he’d be waiting a loooooong time.
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I’m not a father, but I imagine this tears at his heart something fierce.
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Immigrants have always been a natural constituency for Republicans, as many immigrant groups are from places that are more socially conservative and come here and start businesses and are attracted to the pro-business rhetoric. And the republican establishment used to keep its nativist tendencies a little more tamped down; It wasn’t that long ago that Tom Tancredo was basically laughed off the national stage. Republicans have been blowing this. They seem utterly convinced immigrants want to come here to turn our country into the socialist countries they left.
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FTFY. As you say, the GOP keeps pushing the pro-capitalist and pro-religious messages a lot of immigrants love, but then destroy all that goodwill because they can’t bloody let go of pandering to white Know-Nothing racists. A Sikh is more likely to leave southeast Asia not because he feels hard done by due to socialism but because he’s constantly threatened by the bigoted majority there.
I truly hope the Republicans keep blowing the opportunity to gain more constituents.
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You’re arguing for taught behavior by using examples of animals using natural instincts? Caring for young, even young not your own, is a pretty powerful instinct. You can see examples predators killing prey and then not killing the babies, even caring for them in extreme cases. You have ducks and geese feeding fish, as their gaping mouths remind them of baby birds (that’s the working theory.) Indeed it is thought the features of babies (big heads and eyes, smaller chubby appendages etc) has been hardwired into our brains to be perceived as “cute”. Anything with those features is more likely to illicit “aw” and caring for.
I’d have to agree with @Bernel that Xenophobia is partly hardwired into us. This probably kept us alive when something new and different often killed us (not just other people, but other animals). Kids are a little less affected by it, but they too often avoid “others” at a young age. This may not be based on just race, but disabilities, behavior, etc.
IMO, overcoming this bias is fairly easy to do with a little acknowledgment that it resides in yourself and you just need to manually override it. And for sure it can be COMPOUNDED either way through learned behavior.
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Potentially even more so if he is a good cop. It becomes a double shot at his heart that his son does this and it shames his service in uniform
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Ironically, conservatives would probably appreciate Sikhs if they knew more about them.
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Racism and Xenophobia can be two different things.
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Today’s winner, I think.
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I hurt for the victim and the father. Speaking only for myself, I think I would rather be in the place of the victim than the father. The victim knows he was in the right, and he faced a monster and survived. The father has to live with what his son has become. I know I can deal with the former. I don’t know where to start to deal with the latter.
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Sure, but once we make that distinction, xenophobia would have to be viewed as fear or hatred of a foreign culture and racism would be the hatred or fear of another race and arguing that fear and hatred of a foreign culture is natural while hatred and fear of a different race is not would take some Olympic level mental gymnastics.
It is because for safety’s / survival’s sake (evolutionarily) we are societal in a fundamentally tribal way. Everything not in/of the tribe is ‘other’. Civilisation is about overcoming tribalism. We are not there yet, but have made a few good steps on the journey. It wont be reached until our societal model is much more planetary than today
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To be clear I am talking more about how everyone has biases and that is perfectly natural. Nearly everything we decide to do in a day is more or less on auto pilot from our past experiences. The unfamiliar makes people feel uneasy - and this is with many things, not just people. If you have never encountered someone who acted weird or was weird or disabled different in some way or what ever and you never had a negative gut reaction, then you are better person than I.
I’ve been listening to some documentaries in Africa and Asia, and even though they are of the same race, the attitudes against others is no different. It is even worse in some areas, devolving into horrible civil wars.
I haven’t had a chance to read your linked story but the first sentence conversely reflects what I am saying, " The reaction to African-American faces was found to be weaker in people with racially diverse peers." The less familiar one is with different people, the more we perceive them as different.
This doesn’t excuse letting bias bloom into full out hatred and racism. This doesn’t excuse acting on your gut reaction. This doesn’t excuse secluding oneself from others or demonizing others. And certainly these biases can be reinforced by people we know, parents, and society, compounding the issue. But we can’t hope to overcome our biases if we don’t acknowledge it exists. But I am not just shrugging shoulders and saying, “It’s natural, so there is nothing we can do.”
Yes, I think that is a really good note. Overcoming tribalism. No longer seeing “others”.
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Have you read the father’s post on Facebook? I give that guy some huge cred for stepping up and talking about it. At least based on it, I would not be so fast to make the insinuation.
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No, we don’t know that at all.
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They named a city “Manteca?” Were they high?
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Message received.
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