Not quite sure why this has come to mind but. Used to know a bloke in Bath, ran a pub (The Bell). Black, significantly RP accent, dreads but shortish, tended to wear knickerbockers with, I think, long socks and sandals.
The black bit never really tended to enter minds nor descriptions of him. The knickerbockers did.
I guess that’s what we might call displacement, no?
“knickerbockers”: known in my childhood as shitkeppers.
Here’s a thing. A while back I found a website for the ‘old boys’ of the grammar school I attended. There was a school photo of all the boys & teachers. The senior years at the back, the youngest at the front. The classes were grouped together, so I could identify the boys who were in my class*. Amazing after all these years I could recognise so many & even put names to some**. And there, standing with all, the other’s in my class was this black kid. Not you’re full on spade you’d have difficulty finding in poor light but definitely African features with the curly hair. I could remember him. Even his name. He was one of my group of friends. But that was the first time I ever realised he was “black”. Ugly fucker, but never black. Never thought of him that way. The only “discrimination” I remember at the time was Jewish. A third of the school was Jewish. But that was discrimination in the sense that you have two different cultures & you’re aware & have to allow for the differences.
*Of course there was one face notably absent. No surprise. Accurately reflects the attitude I had to school.
**Except the one went on to be a very famous footballer. I know I went to school with him & he was even in my year. But I have absolutely no recollection of him whatsoever. Probably all for the best.
I don’t think people are all that interested in skin tone at all. Other things being equal, they barely notice it unless used as a descriptor when asked. If you have met a large number of black bastards, then it’s simply because you have met a large number of bastards who happen to be black. It might be that black people are more inclined to be bastards than other people are. Who knows?
Steve Sailer offers another insight into US society.
“There’s a telltale Pareto ratio that can help you discern between the two types of mass shootings. If you see a toll such as eight dead and two wounded, the mass shooter was likely a nonblack monster wanting his fifteen minutes of infamy. In contrast, a much more common mass-shooting outcome like two dead and eight wounded suggests the shooter was a black guy angry at somebody who dissed him and, at the moment, didn’t care how many bystanders at the block party he winged trying to kill him.”
Lewis Hamilton and Megan Markle.
A lot of people were happy for them and didn’t know or notice that they were ethnically different in any way. Then some peeps said BAME – this is the category we place such people in, so when you say something cruel about them, then we can say that’s ‘cos subconscious bias.
@BiS Looking back at my (privileged) schooldays, we had only one back boy in my year, but he was very popular. And still was 40 years later when I met him again at a school reunion. He’d been a lot more successful than me!
Rather more uncomfortable now, was a prevailing “laugh at Jews” (rather than ani-semitic) culture. The ironic thing was that, looking back, we certainly had some lads who were probably of Jewish descent, but they went totally unnoticed (at least to the rest of us….) and were never even identified as being Jewish, and certainly not victimised. As schoolboys we didn’t know the half of it, we didn’t realise….. But not a proud memory.