But by 4th grade I'd be teaching about slavery, racism, etc, and the kids would be then learning about a concept that was utterly nonsensical to the non-racism-indoctrinated kids. So I'm wondering what would happen if I never taught about racism at all.
Assuming these kids are in the U.S., then you omitting the topic from their 4th grade class would only omit a tiny portion of what they encounter in their lives. If my 4th grade teacher omitted something from history class, I don't think it's possible that I've never learned about it (assuming it has some significance).
Coming to the US is what made me encounter racism. American society really is broken from within when third world countries can get around this but America can't.
I spent three years living and working in a third world county where I “stuck out like a sore thumb”. Most people I met assumed I was rich, despite living and working on the equivalent of a local secondary school teacher’s salary. And this was still a hell of a lot more than most people in the country were making, but my local counterparts did not have to constantly deny requests for money and things from strangers.
Perhaps a more apt comparison to racism in the US would be sexism in the country I worked in. Men would cat call women constantly to ask for (or demand) sex and marriage. This was just an accepted and normal part of the culture there. It was crazy.
Maybe other countries score lower in sexism. (btw America does too, we all know that :) ) However, it still doesn't take away the fact that the extent of racism in America is far too high for a first world country.
As much as it pains me to say this, at a societal level, I don't see any difference between my third world country of birth and America. The only difference between my home country and USA is interstate highways.
Unfortunately, that has been my experience. A lot of seemingly well-intentioned Americans refuse to accept their follies. They are completely unaware/unwilling to admit that the rest of the world is watching what's happening in America.
This is possibly due to the ingrained, "American exceptionalism" belief but I am willing to be proven wrong.
As a comparison, see this Brazilian admitting flaws in Brazil: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17735229
But Americans admitting racism? Nope.
They win by default in those dark places. Important distinction.
For years stormfront was a well known butt of jokes about racists, but it existed. What has changed is nazis have started using the new distributive platforms (youtube, facebook, twitter etc) to spread their word outside of the dark space.
All we need to do, is deny them that distribution. Motivated racists will still find their stormfront but they'll stop achieving the bycatch of people who didn't have the skills/motivation to seek out other racists on the internet.
Without distribution their views are repugnant but largely ineffective.
Now someday one of the racists on youtube might see a reaction video in the sidebar and they click it expecting "librul tears" but end up leaving with something to think about. Youtube videos aren't usually how racists find reform, but every little thing that chips away at the lies they've been told helps. If they were forced to watch their racist videos on a racist only video site they'd never have a chance to see anything else.
In every last story of a racist who changed I've ever heard, the thing that turned things around for them was something breaking through that racist's echo chamber. Forcing racists further into their own isolated groups is the opposite of fighting racism.
No they're not. The YouTube algorithm (for example) encourages people to slowly ramp up how extreme the content they view is little by little.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/youtube...
> but every little thing that chips away at the lies they've been told helps.
You're assuming they even see this content. The way "the algorithm" works makes it increasingly unlikely that platforms will even show you things that oppose your view.
And if they do... the backfire effect means they'll often reject your opposing view even harder. https://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/
The backfire effect is real, but it's obviously not impossible for a person to change their views on something. Even something somewhat fundamental. It can take a long time for a person to come around and they need to come to terms with the truth on their own but it can be overcome. Even the things they don't accept today will be in the back of their mind when they come across something similar in the future. It's not easy to make that kind of change, but people do it all the time.
The topic of radicalising people via mainstream social media to become nazis or fight for ISIS or whatever gross extremism they're susceptible to has been around for years now and it's pretty much settled that yes, you can radicalise people via these channels.
I think it's telling that America's potential for radicalization might be comparable to that of a former war zone like Iraq. We are not a healthy society. De-platforming will not make us a healthier one.
I was actually referring to the many British & Australian citizens that were radicalized and traveled to Syria to fight for ISIS.
Removing the ability to broadcast these vile ideologies in to mainstream channels will certainly reduce the incidence of those susceptible to radicalization discovering them and being converted.
My overall point is that we should be looking inward if vast numbers of people are being radicalized. It means our culture is simply not compelling enough to overcome the allure of these cults.
Oh I very much agree with you - there has been a fundamental change in as little as one generation as to what 'life' is for men, with traditional roles thrown out the window. Combine this with difficult economic times for young men and it's a recipe for this kind of thing.
For those who can't forge their own path they'll find someone that accepts them - sometimes good sometimes bad. Often these extremists offer belonging and self worth to those who have been unable to build it themselves.
There's a historical answer to this and it's found in the number of people who were convinced to join and vote for the Nazis in 1930s Germany. They were very good at propaganda.
That's irrational, resting on the assumption that good ideas which encounter opposition in public discourse thereby cease to exist.
This is just as true of good ideas as it is of bad ones, but that's far less of a problem because groups of people spreading good ideas among themselves isn't typically dangerous, although there are a lot of advantages to having diverse perspectives in every group.
There is also the idea that a lie travels around the globe while the truth is putting on its shoes, which spurred /r/AskHistorians to ban holocaust denial[2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebound_effect [1] https://www.skepticalscience.com/docs/Debunking_Handbook.pdf [2] https://slate.com/technology/2018/07/the-askhistorians-subre...
Reading that handbook, whenever a social experiment and its outcome was mentioned, my initial thought was: "Hmm, interesting. I'd like to reproduce that experiment… several times in fact, and fiddle with the parameters, to see, if and iff so what circumstances may influence the outcome."
Not to get too far off topic, but is this actually true in practice in the real world? Scientific studies have shown that the idea that gets repeated the most often is the idea that "wins". A bad idea gets repeated and spread every time it gets criticized. If the idea proves more "credible" than the criticism of it, then all that criticism does is contribute to the spread of the idea it's trying to kill.