It’s not logical. It’s a purely emotional reaction like all fears, hatreds, and the like. I can’t tell what’s gone through this man’s head. The one thing I’ve seen a few times in my life is similar to the irrational hatred of police (not the legitimate ongoing concerns, not the wariness or standing on your rights, but the proactive hatred). A few bad actors ruin your perception, and the human response is to react to the whole group based on the worst individuals you’ve met or heard about.
It’s a similar response to how abuse victims react around otherwise-decent people who resemble their abusers. I want to make this explicit: I am not suggesting that racists are victims. I’m illustrating the human tendency to react to individual actions irrationally and apply that experience to the group or category, regardless of evidence to the contrary. Plus, a lot of these people are raised in environments where the media they can consume has a habit of demonizing non-white people. They absorb that perception and it’s reinforced by the people around them. Sometimes it can be shaken when they meet an arbitrary number of people who are decent human beings that are part of that group - but the moment there’s any sign of reinforcement of the old pattern, they’ll likely fall back to it.
It’s not logical. It’s a purely emotional reaction like all fears, hatreds, and the like. I can’t tell what’s gone through this man’s head. The one thing I’ve seen a few times in my life is similar to the irrational hatred of police (not the legitimate ongoing concerns, not the wariness or standing on your rights, but the proactive hatred). A few bad actors ruin your perception, and the human response is to react to the whole group based on the worst individuals you’ve met or heard about.
It’s a similar response to how abuse victims react around otherwise-decent people who resemble their abusers. I want to make this explicit: I am not suggesting that racists are victims. I’m illustrating the human tendency to react to individual actions irrationally and apply that experience to the group or category, regardless of evidence to the contrary. Plus, a lot of these people are raised in environments where the media they can consume has a habit of demonizing non-white people. They absorb that perception and it’s reinforced by the people around them. Sometimes it can be shaken when they meet an arbitrary number of people who are decent human beings that are part of that group - but the moment there’s any sign of reinforcement of the old pattern, they’ll likely fall back to it.