> If they're all keeping their racist opinions to themselves, I might waste a bunch of time being their friends
I have several friends who I know hold some less-than-sociable opinions, and they do tend to keep them to themselves.
I don't quite know how to frame what I'm about to say, but I feel it's equally dickish to think that becoming someone's friend is a "waste of time" just because you don't agree with their opinion.
To be fair being racist is more than an opinion, it demonstrates your character. It reveals part of who you are and the framework with which you deal with the world. I agree that it is valuable knowledge in determining who you want to create lasting bonds with.
I'll agree with the latter assertion (framework), but not with the former (character). People tend to default to conformism when they don't know any better.
By that standard the older the man, the worse he is and you'll arrive at the conclusion that nearly everyone flawed character in the olden days when racism was mainstream.
But we need not even go any further than Charles Darwin:
"The variability or diversity of the mental faculties in men of the same race, not to mention the greater differences between the men of distinct races, is so notorious that not a word need here be said."
"Nor is the difference slight in moral disposition between a barbarian, such as the man described by the old navigator Byron, who dashed his child on the rocks for dropping a basket of sea urchins, and a Howard or Clarkson; and in intellect, between a savage who uses hardly any abstract terms, and a Newton or Shakspeare. Differences of this kind between the highest men of the highest races and the lowest savages, are connected by the finest graduations."
Or you could take the route which others have taken, and show them why their ideas are wrong through your actions. There are plenty of examples of extremists being converted through friendship.
They don't need to be rational for it to work. They can both either become more rational over time, or you can influence them in irrational ways. Both often go together hand-in-hand in good diplomacy (e.g. letting the other save face even if they don't "deserve it").
I think there is something to the idea of "safety valve". That is allow some venting in order to prevent full-blown animus.
However, the difficult part is two-fold. One how to define the line of unacceptability (for example, calling for actionable violence against someone) and how to enforce that line and keep it steadfast (unwavering in the face of both antagonists --the ones for more control as well as the absolutists).
The internet is a terrible safety valve to vent at, because it's too easy to pretend what you say doesn't have consequences. One tweet by a dude having a bad day can help normalize stereotyping to 50 people. And there's always that other guy who takes things too far.
I know that people might intend Twitter or blogs to be for friends, but it's mass media nonetheless.
See, philosophically stereotyping doesn't have to be a "bad thing". When I went to school there we "polack" jokes, blond/e jokes, yo mamma jokes, etc. They were not "mean" or meant to denigrate people.
They were ways to "break the ice" as it were. But nowadays people are super sensitive, unless it's a majority or almost majority population, or it has power, unless it has power but it's also seen as being singled out by another more powerful player... it's become tragically political.
I know some foreign parents who have a preference for their home country and will tell their kids that <some thing> from their home country is better than <same thing> from neighboring but "rival" country. In a way this is stereotyping --but I'm seeing you say these parents should not talk to their kids about having some favoritism to their home country because this kind of connection building can "stereotype" the people from their (ancestral) neighboring country.
> They were not "mean" or meant to denigrate people.
I don’t know how things were where you lived, but where I grew up, those types of jokes were definitely meant to be mean and hurtful. I speak from experience when I say that the repeated mental abuse from peers taken as a child can have long term effects on one’s psyche.
The old tradition of mammals to kick one in the group - usually the social weakest- to feed him to the wulfs. By now we are the wulfs - and still they kick.
Sure, that kind of stereotyping by parents teaching their children to be bigots is probably harmful overall! Harmful neighbor country rivalries last centuries, probably because of just this kind of reinforcement. Then every now and then you get a Kosovo or a holocaust.
I think those are misattributions. Civil wars break out both among same ethnic groups as well as different ethnic groups.
Wars can then force people to see other stereotypes as characteristics of bad things. Kind of like the caricatures of Nazis and Japanese Imperialists. When Japan went into Nanking, they didn't need some psychological trick to enable them to go on their campaign any more than the US or USSR needed psychological tricks to bomb Dresden or East Berlin.
I have several friends who I know hold some less-than-sociable opinions, and they do tend to keep them to themselves.
I don't quite know how to frame what I'm about to say, but I feel it's equally dickish to think that becoming someone's friend is a "waste of time" just because you don't agree with their opinion.