Before talking about whether or not racism is learned, it is critical to understand what it means to learn a trait such as racism. Learning in this situation is being shaped by the experiences of one’s life rather than being told who to hate and why. Learning racism comes from experiences rather than rhetoric (though the rhetoric shapes the hatred once it is developed through experience).

First, both Danny and Derek Vinyard are clear examples from American History X that racism is a learned trait. The film shows flashbacks of two separate incidents that exemplify his increased learning of racism. First, as a naïve child (at least in his father’s eyes), he excitedly describes Dr. Sweeney’s class and the literature they are engaging in. His dad presents his own thinking about the matter (that his white son should avoid black thought at all costs), and Derek learns this response and accepts it as truth from his father. A much more formative event in Derek’s life is the murder of his father. Imbued with the rhetoric that defined his father’s worldview, Derek saw truth in those words when looking at the loss of his father. The hate comes out of Derek’s mouth so naturally as though the words were constantly part of his surroundings, but finally they have made sense to him.

Danny’s racist maturation progresses not from traumatic experiences but through the repercussions of them. Danny had the two critical male figures in his life stolen from him while still at a formative age. His father was murdered, and his brother was sent to prison. With the help of the rhetoric started by his father and carried by Derek, this was seen in Danny’s eyes as minorities taking these men from his life (the men who killed his father and the men who initiated the events which lead to Derek’s violent death). Again this allows the rhetoric which has been a constant hum in Danny’s background, come forward and clarify the world as he sees it.

The documentary Eye of the Storm presents a similar discussion, but first it is important to note that what happened in the video was not racism but the root of racism which is power relations. When students were told they were superior to other students that lent to them the idea that they had more power granted to them. This ‘’traumatic’ experience allowed them to bring forth all of the ideas they had formed about relationships in power structures, even by the time they were 10 years old. Witnessing the world, as it exists today, defined by power relationships, the students were able to quickly fill the role they were given after the sudden experiential opportunity to display what they had learned. It came out so thoroughly and bluntly in the third graders because they had only the inferior perspective their while lives. When they were given the sudden opportunity to be superior, all the negative traits they witnessed came out as they were finally allowed.

In How Race Is Lived in America, we can see exactly how difficult it can be to unlearn racism. The multi-ethnic, Atlanta-area church demonstrates this difficulty. The usher is a man that has obviously learned to live with a racist world-view for whatever reason. He has been put into a situation now that challenges the rhetoric and the previous situations in his life that made this world-view possible for him. Both the man’s wife along with African-American members of the church recognizes the leaps that he has made in becoming more hospitable to others, and his progress in removing racist language from his speech. However they all recognize, along with he, how hard it has been and how far he still has to go. Furthermore, it was a struggle that may have inevitably failed, as the task may have been too difficult. Though progress had been made to unlearning his racism, the pressure was too great and he and his wife eventually decided to look for a church that wouldn’t challenge his world-view quite as dramatically.