The main thing here is that you believe we have already reached our limit in what education can do to reduce racism whereas I think we are still quite far from reaching that limit. What I'm saying is this. While categorizing people is likely natural human behavior, the negative connotations that can be linked to it, are not. These are merely products of our society and I believe they can be reduced to the point that we can categorize people neutrally, the same way we do with other attributes.
Yes I believe segregation and job discrimination has drastically diminished (note: not vanished). Our entire perception of black people has changed from seeing them as complete savages, slaves and monkeys to only segregating them in certain parts (like bus segregation) and we have only recently reached the point where they have the same rights as any other human being. To say that laws are the only reason we see things the way they are now and are in a way forced to do so, is quite a ridiculous statement. While the natural process of new generations obviously has an impact on these changes and views there has to be some outside stimulus to provoke it. They don't randomly pop out of our asses.
And no the way racism is handled differs from school to school.
First you're saying the average, by far, is to not be prejudiced or spread that feeling. Yet then in your third paragraph you state they get different treatment, have to get higher qualifications and all sorts of disturbing stories that are still relevant today. Don't you think that if the majority wasn't prejudiced and is actually properly educated already, like you say so yourself, that all of these situations should be drastically lower?
Colorblindness and the taboo that revolves around racism outside the virtual world, are precisely what's perpetuating racism. Humanity has never achieved things by ignoring whatever had to be changed. I have already said I don't agree with judging the crimes itself differently, not going into that anymore, it's not relevant to my point.
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Diminishing returns. I believe we are at the borderline of what can be done just by education and society, yes. There is more that can be done, but it would start involving removing the spoiled elements from social interaction with good ones, to keep their line of thought from spreading. Medgar Evers said a long time ago that you can kill a man, but you can't kill an idea. While his intention was much more noble when saying that, the same is true for the bad ones as well. The only way to "kill an idea," or in this case an extreme version of a behavior, would be to remove the people having it so no one would even hear about it and have a chance of sympathizing with it.
I'm pretty sure none actively teaches racism or condones it, unless it's closed in a community that identifies itself fully with racist beliefs. What would you suggest in those cases, that the school gets closed? What would be put in its place? Would closing the school solve the already rooted racism? Wouldn't the community just feel hatred towards having that change forced onto them, and blame it on the target of their racism?
That's not what I said. I said "to not be prejudiced to that sort of extreme." The average person is prejudiced, just not a raving racist who will want to kill people outside their group if they can get away with it. It's still a fact that if people can hire an overweight black girl or a shapely blonde one, chances are the black girl will be passed, even if she has slightly better qualification. It doesn't means the company holds meetings in the basement to burn black people.
Again, diminishing returns. Ignoring would be not doing anything at all. But there's a point where you can't go much further just by your good intentions. You can't change people who don't want to change, and you can only go further by dealing with those.
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This is where we won't agree. I can't name anything in our society that simply stopped evolving due to some kind of limit. I will say this just to demonstrate how far things can still develop. We are witnessing a relatively new phenomenon of new generations born in different countries than their ethnic background feeling like they do not belong to neither their ethnic country nor their place of birth. Rather there is this new sense of belonging to the 'human race' as a whole. Our perception of nationality is slowly but surely changing and I am certain it will result in less ethnocentricity which ultimately is bound to affect racism too. I am not saying the negative connotations will completely disappear in 5, 10 or even 50 years. It takes many generations for something like that to evolve and a little stimulus can guide it in the right direction.
People want to change, but people don't want to be changed. And change in a dynamic world like this, is inevitable.
I remember an experiment where kids in class were told that blue eyes were vastly superior to brown eyes. These kids started discriminating the others and it became a huge part of their lives. Eventually the teacher said she lied and that in fact, the ones with brown eyes were superior. Suddenly the roles changed and it's the blue eyed kids that felt terrible. I don't know if it's effective, but this is just an example of a method that could make children realize how silly discrimination actually is. To answer your question, I don't know what would happen, all I know is I would not ignore the problem and raise new racist generations that come out of that school.
