How racist am I? When did you stop beating your wife?
Seems a rather childish simplification to me. I can't see how you overcome racial tension by labelling the white man the racist problem.
Oh yes, it's a complete mystery why we'd do that, given the hundreds of years of slavery, oppression, imperialism, and colonialism much of the world endured at the hands of white Europeans.
Dusty makes a valid point I think and the sarcastic reply isn't much of a response from where I'm sitting.
What's interesting to me is that slavery, oppression, imperialism and colonialism are all still being practiced in some form now. If you want to argue that those crimes are or were only done by whites against non-whites then you need to look more closely at both history and current events. Those in power believe that they deserve it no matter their race. Just as they believe the powerless deserve their lot regardless of their race. Egalitarianism is a very recent development and I suspect it's always going to have to struggle with our greedy primitive psyches.
I regularly deal with the racism of both whites and non-whites here in urban Los Angeles but I try not to let it bother me. I try to explain it to my white-looking half-latina daughter when non-white kids are racially cruel to her as kids often are to minority children on the playground. I tell her the race thing is just another way that mean people can be mean. And that mean people sometimes regret being mean and change their attitudes.
I'm honestly tired of the holistic-racism idea that because racism is inescapable it automatically confers benefits on whites while hurting non-whites. That's just nonsense in my white-minority world here. You can't say that personal responsibility is the greatest factor in non-white successes and that institutional racism is the greatest in non-white failures. It really starts to fall apart when you have to reverse the equation for whites. The widely-subscribed-to idea that both ancestral victimhood and oppressor status are inherited neatly ignores the reality of our mutual heritage. That we all came from Africa in the distant past but for example, my European ancestors came to America during the civil rights movement and participated in it. So I'm not a part of the problem and never have been. I've had plenty of non-white people accuse me of racism the instant we came into conflict over something completely non-racial in nature. It's so very convenient. The irony is they're the ones with the slaveholder or conquistador blood in them from centuries of race-mixing. And race-mixing is probably our best long-term hope as the nasty killer apes we are. Everybody get busy.
I didn't see the TV show in question but it sounds like a particularly poorly-executed version of an old experiment I am familiar with. A bit like a mini Stanford prison experiment based on race more than authority. But the element of authority is still present in that the leader encourages one group to treat the other badly. Actually without that being enforced by the rules there is no experiment. Stanley Milgram proved that most of us do what we're told to do. If that's not going to change then we need to make sure that those doing the telling are saying to do good things to eachother.