The saying that travel broadens the mind is very true.

A lots of older people who are travelled and have experienced and embraced different cultures tend to be more open to immigration etc and not be racist.

There are many who are so racist who believe anyone "foreign" to be a threat as they have preconceived notions in the head and when they get older they don't care what they say.

I know quite a few older people who say the most inappropriate things which can be very hurtful but I read sometime ago a very interesting article that did confirm that there is a part of the brain that governs this behaviour and when one ages, this part does not operate so well.

Then again especially kids can be very cruel and and mean to any other kid that is different for whatever reason, may it be dark skin or red hair...

Yes, and we've both obviously lived with that
"ooooh look at her, she rusted !!"

..... but they pick it up from their environment, it's acquired, not innate.

True, I hope that when (and if) I have children, I will teach them to be tolerant, for that I still have a lot to learn though. If you want to change the world, start changing yourself, that will make you children better...and your grandchildren.
A lot of times parents preach with words but their actions say otherwise...

Up to a certain age children absorb everything from adults and other children and have no real opinions of their own.

Young children are also not concerned with their identities. They don't try to answer the question who am I?" or try to define themselves through similarities and differences to others.

But as soon as they get drawn into that, they do start defining themselves. Boys vs girls, football teams, interests and many other things can be defining.

??

seeing it's mostly people who travel who tell you that, maybe it's just another way that the haves can express their superiority over the have nots, and so perpetauted their narrow-minded superiority?

Or turning it around, if a person who has never travelled says "the reason I am so narrow minded is that I have not travelled", wouldn't that person be expressing a broad minded opinion, and so contradicting themsleves.



think about it

I suppose you are right, but I also think they notice differences and express them.

they're unashamedly honest. But thats not the same thing ...

I think ignorance begets racism, not age. Age begets only joint pains and incontinence, not bigotry.

I'm not sure that travelling or contact helps, necessarily. It is more complicated than that. I have seen these situations:
1) People have had no contact with outsiders (or people different from them) and have curiosity and no real strong bias in any direction. They may have stereotypes, but if you talk to them they will quickly set them aside.

2) Places where people have had contact with people different from them all their life and due to conflict with outside groups have more racial/ethnic/religious bias and hatred due to this.

3) Places where people feel ethnically/racially/religious superior to outsiders or they generally fear outsiders to the point of hating them although they have had limited to no contact with outsiders on a personal level.

I can give specific examples of all those situations I have seen inside my home country and abroad (this is the forth nation I've lived in including my home country).
You can even see this inside of America. In the American south the more blacks there are in a given state the more right wing the whites are (tend to vote Republican, be more Tea Party)...this is a indisputable fact, and while there are various reasons besides race to vote Republican (I've voted Republican myself on a local level before) or be a Tea Party member, racial polarization does have a role in this region.
In the 2008 election, you can see that Obama lost worst with whites who lived around many blacks (in the South), whites who lived with almost no blacks in the northern part of the Midwest (the center part of the U.S.) Obama won pretty big. He also won big in New England, which also has few non-whites.

Sometime contact breeds conflict.

Very interesting post with good points.

Concerning the above point, my impression of the American South is that whereas there are a high percentage of Blacks in the southern states, they don't generally live in the same places as Whites, so how much contact is there really? How much of the opinion of either race about the other is based on real experience and how much is just some prejudice mixed with scare stories. I'm sure there are mixed neighbourhoods where different races live side by side but I don't recall having seen very many. And maybe I'm the victim of some media stereotying here, but the way white racist types are normally presented are as living out in the sticks somewhere and probably having less exposure to Blacks than the average white in the same state.

I don't know about that. Martin Luther King said the worst march during the civil rights era was in Chicago, not in the South. Blacks and whites didn't live together, but they most certainly worked together (with whites tending to be socially superior in that situation, so segregation was not complete social segregation but it was social domination of one group on the other)...in Chicago there was just seperation by tradition, not law...so I think it was worse.

Still...how well did most of the whites know the blacks in this situation? Probably not well, about as well as a King knows his servant...but I do believe that "contant" can be a negative thing.


As far as AGE. Old people die, young people change. I think some cultures propetuate such mythology about their superiority (China, Switzerland, Germany) that they are more likely to be xenophobic...whereas others in the exact same situation are not...(Thailand). That' s just my personal belief. I know people will disagree with my example countries, but I wonder how many of those folks have lived in other countries as visible minorities?

Racism belongs to all human beings in different levels, although we do not often think about it that way.

It is a specific kind of negative prejudice against a group of people wich we have already classified in our own minds relating it to certain habits, behaviors and attitudes which in fact belong only to our own experience (or lack of it).

It affects all human beings as it is a characteristic of our thought.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/...ice-and-racism

«The tendency to classify our experience into categories is a fundamental and universal aspect of human cognition. We create concepts in order to make sense of the endless complexity we encounter in our environment. This is a necessary part of human thought, allowing us to process information efficiently and quickly. If we did not create categories, our entire life would be a buzzing mass of confusion. In social categorization, we place people into categories. People also reflexively distinguish members of in-groups (groups of which the subject is a member) from members of out-groups. Furthermore, people tend to evaluate out-groups more negatively than in-groups. In this way, social categories easily lend themselves to stereotypes in general and to negative stereotypes in particular.»

The only way to fight racism and building prejudice is to know more about the group we think we know, the more real knowledge about other people's cultures, beliefs and values the more one can overcome prejudice and misconceptions.

In a way what Sky says is very real: children have less prejudice than adults because they are still building the knowledge they receive from their experiences. As adults we should only try to understand our own prejudices and make an effort to know a bit more about what we really do not know so much about.

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Was it worth? Everything is worth, If the soul is not small. Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935)