First thing's first: KEEP. THIS. SHIT. CIVIL. If you can't talk about race without resorting to childish insults and rude generalizations or getting angry at people who don't see it your way, leave the thread.
With that said, I bring you to what can hopefully be the general thread about race.
First, a few starter questions.
- How, if at all, do you feel your race affects your everyday life?
- Do you believe that white people (or whatever the majority race in your area is) receive privileges simply because of the color of their skin. How much?
- Do you believe minorities are discriminated against for the same reason? How much?
- Do you believe that assimilation of cultures is better than people trying to keep their own?
- Affirmative Action. Yea, Nay? Why or why not?
Also, a personal question from me.
- Why (in my experience, not trying to generalize) do white people often try to insist that they aren't white? I can't count the number of times I've heard "I'm not white, I'm 1/4th English, 1/4th German, 1/4th Scandinavian 1/8th Cherokee, and 1/8th Russian," as though 4 of 5 of those things aren't considered "white" by the masses. Is it because you have pride for your ancestry, or an attempt to try and differentiate yourself from all those "other" white people? Or something else altogether?
edited 30th May '11 9:16:04 PM by Wulf
Oh, bother.
From the article:
“People had this broad concept of ‘racism doesn’t exist at Google and sexism doesn’t exist at Google’,” she said. “Just because your officemates aren’t saying racial slurs out loud doesn’t mean they’re not racist.”
Zhang added: “They care about getting good press, but they don’t actually want to put in the work to understand racism and sexism.”
Way too many people in the USA don't seem to get this. We did a pretty good job hammering in "Racism is bad"...but we did a shit job when it came to teaching what racism is.
Disgusted, but not surprised
Tell Me, Have You Seen the Yellow Sign?
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
The racism is much more emphasized in the article.
edited 19th Aug '17 5:08:48 AM by CenturyEye
Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our lives
The law in the night
Tech industries jobs have some problems when it comes to diversity, but the biggest problem is how it requires a lot of time and money to actually get the qualifications needed to enter the field.
It is pretty expensive to achieve a Computer Science degree, which hits the Latin Americans and African Americans disproportionately when compared to the more well off Asian Americans and the average white family in the US coastal areas.
Higher access to technical and college education would help solve the gap between Asians, whites and everyone else. Also a good basic education too, since in order to major in Computer Science and even technical jobs involving I.T. you require to be fairly good with math and logic.
Even in my Computer Science classes, in Brazil, had like one black guy in a class of 40 people.
Now combine the low amount of people who aren't Asian or White with the requirements to work in the tech sector with implicit racism and you have why there are so few of them working in the tech industry.
edited 19th Aug '17 7:02:41 AM by AngelusNox
Inter arma enim silent leges
Oh, bother.
One can imagine just how pissed off someone who overcame systemic obstacles to get a job at Google would be to have to put up with constant discrimination and condescension due to their race and gender.
And keep in mind the first woman in that article was Asian, the "good" minority according to white people. Google still managed to make her feel like shit.
As an Asian-American man, that pisses me right the fuck off.
Disgusted, but not surprised
The law in the night
I should have crossposted this earlier but here it is, from the US politics thread.
A great opinion piece from the NY Times about white nationalism and US history.
I'm going to folder it because it is a rather big wall of text.
My dad often gave me the advice that white nationalists are not looking to recruit people on the fringes of American culture, but rather the people who start a sentence by saying, “I’m not racist, but …”
The most effective tactics for white nationalists are to associate American history with themselves and to suggest that the collective efforts to turn away from our white supremacist past are the same as abandoning American culture. My father, the founder of the white nationalist website Stormfront, knew this well. It’s a message that erases people of color and their essential role in American life, but one that also appeals to large numbers of white people who would agree with the statement, “I’m not racist, but I don’t want American history dishonored, and this statue of Robert E. Lee shouldn’t be removed.”
I was raised by the leaders of the white nationalist movement with a model of American history that described a vigorous white supremacist past and once again I find myself observing events in which I once might have participated before I rejected the white nationalist cause several years ago. After the dramatic, horrible and rightly unnerving events in Charlottesville, Va., this past weekend, I had to make separate calls: one to make sure no one in my family who might have attended the rally got hurt, and a second to see if any friends at the University of Virginia had been injured in the crowd of counterprotesters.
On Tuesday afternoon the president defended the actions of those at the rally, stating, “You also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.” His words marked possibly the most important moment in the history of the modern white nationalist movement. These statements described the marchers as they see themselves — nobly driven by a good cause, even if they are plagued by a few bad apples. He said: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists.”
But this protest, contrary to his defense, was advertised unambiguously as a white nationalist rally. The marchers chanted, “Jews will not replace us”; in the days leading up to the event, its organizers called it “a pro-white demonstration”; my godfather, David Duke, attended and said it was meant to “fulfill the promises of Donald Trump”; and many attendees flew swastika flags. Whatever else you might say about the rally, they were not trying to deceive anyone. Continue reading the main story
Almost by definition, the white nationalist movement over the past 40 years has worked against the political establishment. It was too easy for politicians to condemn the movement — even when there was overlap on policy issues — because it was a liability without enough political force to make the huge cost of associating with it worthwhile. Until Tuesday, I didn’t believe that had changed.
We have all observed the administration’s decisions over the past several months that aligned with the white nationalist agenda, such as limiting or completely cutting off legal and illegal immigration, especially of Hispanics and Muslims; denigrating black communities as criminal and poor, threatening to unleash an even greater police force on them; and going after affirmative action as antiwhite discrimination. But I had never believed Trump’s administration would have trouble distancing itself from the actual white nationalist movement.
Yet President Trump stepped in to salvage the message that the rally organizers had originally hoped to project: “George Washington was a slave owner,” he said, and asked, “So will George Washington now lose his status?” Then: “How about Thomas Jefferson?” he asked. “Because he was a major slave owner. Now are we going to take down his statue?” He added: “You’re changing history. You’re changing culture.”
Until Trump’s comments, few critics seemed to identify the larger relationship the alt-right sees between its beliefs and the ideals of the American founders. Charlottesville is synonymous with Jefferson. The city lies at the foot of Monticello and is the home of the University of Virginia, the school he founded. Over the years I’ve made several pilgrimages to Charlottesville, both when I was a white nationalist and since I renounced the ideology. While we all know that Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence, which declared that “all men are created equal,” his writings also offer room for explicitly white nationalist interpretation.
My father observed many times that the quotation from Jefferson’s autobiography embedded on the Jefferson Memorial is deceptive because it reads, “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these [the Negro] people are to be free.” It does not include the second half of the sentence: “Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.”
Jefferson’s writings partly inspired the American colonization movement, which encouraged the return of free black people to Africa — a goal that was pursued even by Abraham Lincoln during the first years of the Civil War.
The most fundamental legislative goal of the white nationalist movement is to limit nonwhite immigration. It is important to remember that such limits were in place during the lifetimes of many current white nationalists; it was the default status until the 1960s. In the 1790s, the first naturalization laws of the United States Congress limited citizenship to a “free white person.”
Legislation in the 1920s created quotas for immigration based on national origin, which placed severe restrictions on the total number of immigrants and favored northern and western European immigration. It was only with the civil rights movement of the 1960s that the national origin quota system was abolished and Congress fully removed the restriction favoring white immigrants.
I’m not offering these historical anecdotes to defame the history of the country. I’m not calling for Jefferson’s statue to be removed along with the Confederate memorials. I do, however, think it is essential that we recognize that the white nationalist history embedded in American culture lends itself to white nationalist rallies like the one in Charlottesville. If you want to preserve Confederate memorials, but you don’t work to build monuments to historical black leaders, you share the same cause as the marchers.
Until Tuesday I believed the organizers of the rally had failed in their goal to make their movement more appealing to average white Americans. The rally superimposed Jefferson’s image on that of a pseudo K.K.K. rally and brought the overlap between Jefferson and white nationalist ideas to mind for anyone looking to find them. But the horrific violence that followed seemed to hurt their cause.
And then President Trump intervened. His comments supporting the rally gave new purpose to the white nationalist movement, unlike any endorsement it has ever received. Among its followers, being at that rally will become something to brag about, and some people who didn’t want to be associated with extremism will now see the cause as more mainstream. When the president doesn’t provide condemnation that he has been pressed to give, what message does that send but encouragement?
The United States was founded as a white nationalist country, and that legacy remains today. Things have improved from the radical promotion of white people at the expense of all others, which has persisted for most of our history, yet most of us have not accepted the extent to which white identity guides so much of what we still do. Sometimes it seems that the white nationalists are most honest about the very real foundation of white supremacy upon which our nation was built.
The president’s words legitimized the worst of our country, and now the white nationalist movement could be poised to grow. To challenge these messages, we need to acknowledge the continuity of white nationalist thought in American history, and the appeal it still holds.
It is a fringe movement not because its ideas are completely alien to our culture, but because we work constantly to argue against it, expose its inconsistencies and persuade our citizens to counter it. We can no longer count on the country’s leader to do this, so it’s now incumbent upon all of us.
Student of Story
In a series of since-deleted Facebook messages, Republican state Representative Jason Spencer told former Georgia state Representative La Dawn Jones that “people in South Georgia are people of action, not drama,” and if she doesn’t understand that she “will go missing in the Okefenokee”—a wild, 438,000-acre swamp.
The original post has been deleted from Spencer’s Facebook page. In the early hours Wednesday Spencer sought to clarify his statements in a separate post that has also been deleted.
In his clarification Spencer wrote that he intended to warn Jones “that her safety could be at risk just as if a toddler was about to put a fork in a light socket” if she came to South Georgia to remove Confederate memorials.
The feud was sparked when Jones criticized a selfie Spencer took Monday at the Jefferson Davis monument in South Georgia near Irwinville.
From 1861 to 1865 Davis was president of the Confederate States as they sought to keep the right to own slaves. Davis was captured in Irwinville by the Union Army. There is a monument nearby to commemorate the site and Spencer grew up a 30-minute drive north from there.
"This is Georgia's history. #Deal With It” he wrote on Facebook this week alongside his selfie.
“Yes get it in…before it is torn down. Are state and tax dollars going to this? If so I need to take a closer look at the state budget. I'll deal with it but don't want to pay for it,” Jones responded.
“Continue your quixotic journey into South Georgia and it will not be pleasant. The truth. Not a warning. Those folk won't put up with it like they do in Atlanta. It best you move on,” Spencer fired back.
Man, it sure is a good thing the debates around the statues only have to do with a love of history and nothing else.
edited 31st Aug '17 11:04:25 AM by TheWanderer
| Wandering, but not lost. | If people bring so much courage to this world...◊ |
Crass. If memory serves this kind of statement is not unprecedented from Georgia Republicans, either. Remember David Perdue's (junior senator) prayer?
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
So I got a question. This forum trends pretty Leftward I think. How far left I have no idea. But this seems as good a place as any to inquire about this.
I read some tweets by a guy who basically said we need to stop being so tolerant of racists. Here they are.
◊ He's a fairly well-known Internet guy but it's not about him.
What I'm confused about is that I hang out with a lot of Leftists people because I myself mostly have Progressive ideas. So I'm very much in with the crowd he's lambasting about treating racism and such like it's all economics and social conditions. Racist Guy isn't a bad person naturally, he would be perfectly lovely if he hadn't been screwed over by neoliberalism.
Yet these same people will be perfectly okay with punching Racist Guy in the face.
Now, I don't give a shit about Racist Guy being punched. I'm more curious about the contrast here of sympathy vs. no sympathy. Woe is poor Racist Guy for being out of a job and that made him racist but who cars about that, let's beat him up.
I'm not saying anyone here holds these views. Truth be told, this started on another forum but I figured I'd probably get a more rational answer here.
edited 1st Sep '17 5:06:06 AM by Nikkolas
Oh, bother.
Here's the thing: racism isn't caused by poverty. If it was, no rich person would ever be racist.
Obviously, that is very much not the case.
The narrative that economic anxiety is the root cause of bigotry is horseshit.
I won't go out of my way to punch bigots. I'm not a violent person. But I'm not going to make excuses for them. I'm not going to blame "neoliberalism" for their bigotry. Newsflash: bigotry has been around LONG before neoliberalism was even a thing. People who think that bigotry will go away if the economy improves are deluding themselves.
Moviebob's point seems to be that a lot of progressives are rather naive when it comes to racism. I'm inclined to agree.
From the tweets you posted, he's not even really arguing for violence. He just thinks
is not actually the case for a lot of racists.
edited 1st Sep '17 5:27:02 AM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprised
I'd also guess, though I have no research to back it up, that middle class and above people like to pretend the problem is not with them, but those other (poor) white people.
Anyway, no reasonable person "becomes" racist because of losing their job or because of economic woes. Most likely, they were already racist, but then they doubled down on it due to economic paranoia and buying into bullshit sources. Now, most people are somewhat racist. Because racism is so invasive and ingrained into our society, it is almost impossible to not have it seep into you. Hence why combating racism requires education and unlearning the behavior; if you don't, it will continue to grow. No matter if you have money or not.
edited 1st Sep '17 5:35:07 AM by SilentColossus
I'm inclined to agree with him as well. But I wasn't saying he was the one calling for violence. His tweets were posted on another forum where the people sneered at him for using "alt right talking points." These same people believe that economic hardship does lead to bigotry yet are okay with the poor getting punched.
It seems like a double-standard to me is what I was getting at. There are a lot of people on the Left who will, with one hand, console the poor for being racist because it's not their fault the government ruined their lives. But then they'll use the other hand to punch them for being bigots.
edited 1st Sep '17 5:34:32 AM by Nikkolas
Oh, bother.
Okay those people are just fucking morons high on self-righteousness. They want to have their cake and eat it too: they want to seem so much more "enlightened" because they think they know the truth about racism, but they also want to come across as badass heroes via punching racists.
Fucking faux-progressives.
Disgusted, but not surprised
Really? Because from the left, I've been seeing we must racism is due to being poor and because of that we must basically infantile them or else they'll vote for Trump again.
Then again, several segments of the left also say that BLM is divisive while we must hear the racists out or whatever nonsense.
Pronounced YAK-you-luss
It helps to think of racist organisations like organised crime (and boy oh boy, there is indeed a huge overlap). You can understand the environmental factors that might have led someone to join it, but when the mob rolls into town, polite discussion about how their path is misguided is out the window, and you either call the cops or, if the cops are subverted, take matters into your own hands.
Racist ideologies (as opposed to, say, a shapeless dislike of and distrust of non-white people, which can be talked out politely when it's mild but is just as dangerous and even more unpredictable when it's extreme) are based around the idea that certain people are subhuman, and so you should cull them or turn them into livestock. Neo-Nazi/neo-Confederate ideology is both violent and geared towards creating a constant state of violence - there is no way to peacefully promote it, because peace is not the end goal, and therefore it is extremrly difficult and extremely dangerous to try to talk someone down from it - fascism in particular simply does not value communication and negotiation, so you'll generally get roped into a bunch of deliberately meaningless word-games while they try to figure out a way to insert a brick through your skull. To quote Jean-Paul Sartre:
How can one choose to reason falsely? It is because of a longing for impenetrability. The rational man groans as he gropes for the truth; he knows that his reasoning is no more than tentative, that other considerations may supervene to cast doubt on it. He never sees clearly where he is going; he is "open"; he may even appear to be hesitant. But there are some people who are attracted to the durability of a stone. They wish to be massive and impenetrable; they wish not to change. Where, indeed, would change take them? We have here a basic fear of oneself and of truth. What frightens them is not the content of truth, of which they have no conception, but the form itself of truth, that thing of indefinite approximation. It is as if their own existence were in continual suspension. But they wish to exist all at once and right away. They do not want any acquired opinions; they want them to be innate. Since they are afraid of reasoning, they wish to lead the kind of life wherein reasoning and research play only a subordinate role, wherein one seeks only what he has already found, wherein one becomes only what he already was. This is nothing but passion. Only a strong emotional bias can give a lightning-like certainty; it alone can hold reason in leash; it alone can remain impervious to experience and last a whole lifetime.
The anti-Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith; at the outset he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons. How entirely at ease he feels as a result. How futile and frivolous discussions about the rights of the Jew appear to him. He has pleased himself on other ground from the beginning. If out of courtesy he consents for a moment to defend his point of view, he lends himself but does not give himself. He tries simply to project his intuitive certainty onto the plane of discourse. I mentioned awhile back some remarks by anti-Semites, all of them absurd: "I hate Jews because they make servants insubordinate, because a Jewish furrier robbed me, etc." Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.
If then, as we have been able to observe, the anti-Semite is impervious to reason and to experience, it is not because his conviction is strong. Rather his conviction is strong because he has chosen first of all to be impervious.
"The Left" is not a monolithic bloc, and it contains any number of idiots, including brocialists who are near as misogynistic or racist as the right-wingers they oppose, Unicorn Brigaders who are too obsessed with hunting for a messiah to actually deal with real problems, and the odd Communist apologist or rabid America-basher. So it shouldn't be surprising that you will find a spectrum of opinions on racism among the left, especially online, and that some of those opinions will be stupid.
A procrastination in of itself
There's also the Black Block, both online and IRL, who are the same as some right wingers and just latched onto whatever ideology allowed them to justify their violent tendencies, but with a left wing ideology latched onto.
Here the thing, I recognise that all racism is created, that beyond very rare and specific medical conditions people aren't born to hate, I have sympathy and pity for thosue who have been lead astray and turned into hatful bigots.
But their redemption is not my top priority nor does their abuse in the past mean they're not accountable for their actions now.
I truly belive that everyone can be redeemed, everyone can be bought back from the dark, but I can't redeem everyone and even with those I can redeem others will often have to take priority, their victims need for protection is more important than their redemption.
edited 1st Sep '17 9:48:39 AM by Silasw
"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran
Exactly. And redemption is a two-way street, you can't redeem someone if they don't want to be redeemed.
Pronounced YAK-you-luss
I would be really, really cautious about calling the Black Bloc exactly as bad as the actual, genocidal fascists. They may be unhelpful, but there's a pretty obvious difference in ideology and threat level.
Basically, the main difference between the Bloc and other antifascist factions is that they consider the fascists they fight to be an outgrowth of the American sociopolitical system (a natural byproduct of modern capitalism, basically) rather than an unwelcome intrusion on it. As a result, they consider police and corporations to be similarly fair game - the police, to them, are the state-backed guardians of fascism, while the corporations are its financiers. There's some obvious logic to this, particularly in the age of Trump, where the soulless hypercapitalists and the frothing white supremacists of the Republican Party have become more overtly entwined than at any point since Reagan, and have dragged the rest of the country along with them. I mean, there's no more potent symbol of America's historical marriage between racism and capitalism than the Confederate statues that this whole mess has flared up around. It's certainly worth remembering that Trump isn't some aberrance within the Republican Party, just someone sufficiently riddled by narcissism and Alzheimer's to say the quiet part loud, and that getting rid of him and the Nazis he's empowered will not get rid of the people and the structures that created and nurtured him.
The problems are twofold. First off, you're obviously picking a fight with a much bigger enemy, and will likely do so with rather less allies. You can make a reasonable argument that the Black Bloc's abilities and resources are hopelessly insufficient for its goals, and that it should aim a little lower if it wants to accomplish anything at all - in fact, that it may end up with the disparate elements of the American capitalist system uniting and radicalising in self-defence. The second problem, of course, is that it involves vigilante violence against a much broader range of targets, which obviously means that there's a much greater chance that innocents will be hurt in the crossfire.
Neo-Nazis want to subject the world to an endless, joyless cleansing process, constantly killing aesthetically displeasing people because they find the act of killing (and being killed) beautiful. They act accordingly. Neo-Confederates want to rebuild an agricultural society where human beings are the livestock. They act accordingly. The goals of the Black Bloc aren't nearly that insane or that fundamentally opposed to reality - they're just arrogant fuckers who can't grasp how to divide and conquer properly. They're unreliable allies, and often more of a hindrance than a help, but they have saved lives, and they do at least theoretically have something to bring to the table.
Oh, bother.
I'm not a huge fan of antifa, but IMHO if they are a problem, it's one that is dwarfed by far by the problem of Neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.
edited 1st Sep '17 12:10:06 PM by M84
Disgusted, but not surprised
, I could've misread their post but I don't believe that Silasw was saying that the black bloc are equivalent to Fascists.
Pronounced YAK-you-luss
He edited his post.
One thing I should mention is that my post above was slightly inaccurate in that it described the black blocs as a discrete organisation with a discrete ideology. It's really more of a protest tactic - wearing face-concealing clothing and body armour, moving as a group, and using force. A black bloc is the muscle of a protest, designed to smash or intimidate people the protesters don't like, protect less heavily-armoured (and identifiable) protesters from anyone who might do them harm, and engage in high-risk, disruptive protesting tactics. They're particularly associated with communists and anarchists, who tend to have a particular knowledge of black bloc tactics, but members of a bloc can come from pretty much any ideology if they don't mind getting their hands dirty and their faces bruised.
It's especially worth noting how attractive it is to be part of a bloc in an antifascist protest. The masks and uniform colours are not only there to intimidate (because you're protesting to tell genocidal lunatics they aren't welcome), but to make you less individually distinctive, which is useful for avoiding police harassment and near-essential in the age of doxxing. Armouring up is useful because fascism is inherently violent, and if, say, a chubby twentysomething with way too many Confederate flags in his bedroom decides to drive his car through you, it's nice to bounce instead of splash. Finally, an understanding of formation tactics means that (a) you've always got someone watching your back, ideally with a first-aid kit, and (b) if a bunch of heavily-armed skinheads or their even more heavily-armed relatives in the local police department try to charge you, you'll hold rather than be trampled.
It's not good PR, and you may well end up next to some swivel-eyed loon who wants to pick a fight with the entire town up to and including the pigeons, but it does ensure you'll have a life worth living after the protest.
What's precedent ever done for us?
In my case I dont have much to bring to the table since im not american, but I find the whole "punch a nazi" just childish, more concern with feeling good that actually stoping the alt right, specially when you share the same political space as couminst-american bashers or guy who think they can overthrow the goverment for X,Y or whatever.
about antifa and the black block....I feel they are violent idiots but so far they arent neo nazis, of course that is hardly a complement a this point.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"
A procrastination in of itself
I don't have a huge problem with turning up to a protest armed/armoured for if it gets violent, my problem with the Black Block is that they turn up specifically to start violence, often at protests they don't care about.
It's like how the Socalist Workers Party keep turning up at protests to hand out leaflets, but with more kicking and face smashing.
A big part of this will come from my own expeirance with a street protest I was on, we had a very good peaceful protest going and then a bunch of idiots with weapons and shields turned up and started attacking the police, they weren't there to address the issues, they weren't there because they cared about the cause, they were there because they wanted to get in a fight while feeling intellectually superior to the guy who gets in a fight at the pub.
I ended up building a toilet in parliament square and offering cranberry juice to some riot police.
edited 1st Sep '17 3:22:52 PM by Silasw
"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran
Economic hardship is not the sole cause of racisim but there isn't zero correlation either.
For the sake of these examples assume no family history of racism, i.e. they didn't just inherit it from their parents. I'm also talking about conscious, intentional racism not unconscious stereotypes and systemic bias.
People who are downtrodden (and chances are, poorly educated) are susceptible to being convinced that <group> is to blame for their problems. Another way it can spread is similar to how conspiracy theories spread; just latching on to it because it seems to explain things in their worldview and then holding onto it with cult-like faith. This method is pretty agnostic when it comes to social class; Steve Bannon probably fits here. There are also cases where racisim is brought on by plain old longstanding enmity between two groups
Then you have people who take up racism because they are rich and powerful and want to both justify and stay in power. The basic tendency to self-justify wealth and power are probably a little bit wired into us. This is how a lot of racism starts, it's pretty likely how it started with white slaveowners in the American South, with European colonizers toward their colonized people, with Imperial Japan toward Korea, etc.
In the first through third categories redemption for them is likely possible if difficult. In the last, or in any of the first when they manage to get their hands on power, it's much less likely they will go down without a fight.
Fair enough, probaly deserves a crosspost at the very least then considering what the whole google mess started over. :/