How to connect with others without considering racial differences?

Question:

How to connect with others without considering racial differences?

When you look at another person, that is the first thing you see.

But how can a person overcome all the baggage associated with a particular race to not stereotype them...mostly in negative light?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: It can be surprisingly hard; when I was young I didn't notice race first, I just knew people all looked different to varying degrees. But then as I grew up, the darn media kept bombarding me with the differences between everyone. "It doesn't matter if you're black or white" or "You should treat people of all races equally." While those are good messages... the fact that they kept being shoved in my face, forced me to NOTICE that there were differences! If it weren't for that I wouldn't have. :(

Then there was history class, always bombarding us with slavery stories and stuff. Never pointing out that the Africans were selling their own people into it, making it only seem like every white-man's fault even though only a select few states in the South were doing it. Guilt guilt guilt! It got me to the point where if I see a black person, I actively think: "Oh, an African American. I'd better not look at them or they'll think I'm staring. But if I don't look at them at all, then they'll think I'm ignoring them. But I'd better not look anyway... Oh crap he's saying hello. 'Hello!' I'd better smile while saying that. There we go. Yay, now they know I'm not racist."

Isn't that sad? I view everyone equally, and I do NOT want to think that way at all, but society forced it onto me. Seems that by your question it's done the same to you too. :( It's too hard to avoid...

But the best we can do, is 1) Acknowledge that there ARE differences between cultures, but 2) at the root of it all, we're all human, and share way more similarities than differences. Every person likes a greeting, interaction, entertainment. These should be shared with everyone, period. No race involved. Just keep your preferences to fairly socially-acceptable levels, and you can interact freely with people of ANY race, gender, religion (most anyway), sexual preference, etc.

This world could definitely use more unity. It'd just be so much better if everyone would forgive, the media would forget, and human beings could just be human beings.