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Betty's avatar

Hi Allison! Thank you for writing about this very important topic and apologies in advance for a long, long comment.

TLDR: How can you navigate confronting your biases if your support system is encouraging you to keep them?

I was in a year long relationship that recently ended precisely because of this. As someone who is perceived as racialized in the city/country I live in, I experience things someone who isn’t wouldn’t.

It was incredibly hard to have these conversations with my ex and see her slowly beginning to accept her own biases only to revert back to believing she didn’t have any over and over again. I’m lucky to be mostly surrounded with people that are not only willing to confront their own biases but that are always actively looking to find new blind spots and open to learning about them. She wasn’t.

The complicated truth in my ex’s case (and other people’s cases, I’m assuming) was that after reading a number of books and even joining a couple of seminars on the topic of systemic racism, she would revert to her “everything is fine, the world is actually fair now” mindset. Her family and friends all shared a similar vision of the world, where these things are only a problem for people who are either too sensitive or in very specific isolated cases where there is a “bad person” who is an “actual racist”.

I don’t think she has bad intentions, I think she’s surrounded with people that have no practical need to see these things because of their privilege, and she was worried that she’d lose those people if her mindset suddenly shifted. She was aware that after learning about these things she would need to have some hard conversations with her friends and family, but when she did she would come back convinced that, actually, she was right to believe these problems weren’t real all along.

We’re not in touch anymore, the harm is done and the healthy thing for me was to distance myself from the entire situation. However, the whole experience was incredibly informative. In the past, I had always seen the act of breaking these patterns as an individual effort that would sometimes result in the ripple effect of other people learning too. Now I see people can get stuck in these beliefs because of their context and the fear of losing loved ones. A lot of people who perpetuate this type of thinking do so in a community-based way, where they reassure each other that everything is fine, actually.

Do you have any thoughts on navigating confronting your biases when you’re a part of a support system that isn’t willing to do the same? Especially for people who are doing this as adults and expected to keep a calm and collected front?

Thank you for reading. And thanks for always striving to learn and share that knowledge with the people around you. It’s helped me grow a lot over the years. Best wishes!

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Zachary Zane's avatar

Loved this. Thank you!

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