I wanted to understand why racists hated me, so I befriended Klansmen
I&#x27;ve tried this, and sometimes it&#x27;s worked. When it has, it&#x27;s usually when I&#x27;m part of the group that&#x27;s hated by someone. As in this article, or in my personal experience talking with people biased against atheists or liberals, I was able to make headway by demonstrating that I am not the idea of what they hate.<p>I have had absolutely no progress with this when talking about homophobia, racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, or anti-immigrant biases. I&#x27;m a straight white male with no Jewish heritage in sight and an nth generation German-Irish American. I&#x27;ve tried, in earnest, to apply the same &quot;killing them with kindness&quot; philosophy to folks to people who hold abhorrent views towards groups that aren&#x27;t like me, and it&#x27;s failed miserably. The cop-out from the other party is that being liberal, I&#x27;m brainwashed or following my mainstream media marching orders or something to that effect. That my impression and my testimony that black people aren&#x27;t lazy, that women are not less capable managers and programmers, et cetera., is irrelevant to the person I&#x27;m arguing with. I&#x27;m not black&#x2F;Latino, I&#x27;m not a woman, I&#x27;m not able to demonstrate those things in a way that is convincing.<p>This is deeply disconcerting to me, because it seems allyship helps in some cases (LGBT movement) but from testimony I&#x27;ve heard at conferences, the best way to change a homophobic or transphobic person&#x27;s mind is to first, be their friend or family member, and second, come out as LGBT. The monumental success of acceptance of the LGBT movement seems to be almost entirely from encouraging people to come out to their friends and family members. Without downplaying it too much, I think that the language of allyship is primarily helpful at convincing people in power that they can be part of that movement, but it wasn&#x27;t useful in changing people&#x27;s minds.<p>My question to Hacker News is: why should the burden be on me, someone who is opposed to the KKK and the resurgent white nationalism in this country, to befriend people? And is there any evidence (or personal testimony from other commenters) that this sort of thing works when not part of the targeted minority?<p>Because I am exhausted. Again, I want to reiterate: &quot;killing with kindness&quot; was tremendously successful for me when I was dealing with people that didn&#x27;t like some group identity I shared: liberalism, secularism. But it utterly fails when I try to talk to say, a racist friend of a family member who calls Colin Kaepernick &quot;caperdink&quot; and Barack Obama &quot;obummer&quot;. Kindness doesn&#x27;t seem to work when as a white man, they expect me to be kind.