When you characterize a perfectly easy-to-understand analogy as "equating" you leave room for only two possibilities: 1) You're bad at analogy, or 2) You're mak

When you characterize a perfectly easy-to-understand analogy as "equating" you leave room for only two possibilities: 1) You're bad at analogy, or 2) You're making a bad-faith argument. I don't see how that trick would work ever, but of all places, it won't work here. The thing to do would be to argue the point, not to argue a fake point based on pretending not to know what an analogy is. Moving on. I actually liked the idea in your first paragraph. Too bad you had to spend the middle one alienating me. Finally, it's not a 180 someone would be turning. Things are never, if you'll pardon the expression, so black and white. Surprisingly, racists are actually complex human beings with whole lives and shit, not some shallow caricature of pure evil who needs to turn 180° to be "good." Probably I'm some kind of heretic already just for suggesting a racist might not be pure evil, and I reek of, and it smacks of, and the vibe I'm getting is. But yeah I'll bet it's more like a 10° turn in most cases. And it's a turn of a vessel that, at age 18, really doesn't have much weight or momentum to it either. And yes I firmly believe exposure to the people they're biased against is one of the few things that will change them or make them see that racism makes no sense. Call it osmosis if you like; it's how humans learn from each other. Shrieking & judging just makes them hate you along with whomever they already hate. I've certainly done enough of that myself, though on other causes, but with predictably bad results. I still like the "prove you've reformed" thing though.