In fact, you could tell those little black whippersnappers (to the dismay and consternation of the white whippersnappers) that on a per-capita basis they’d be more likely to be successful.
In as much as sports is concerned, the field is not level at all is it? It is decidedly in favor of the black athlete is it not?
Now I focused on one area of society (and fully intend to explore others) to make the case that not only does “institutional racism” not exist in that industry, but that the civil rights struggle won!
Rather than paying homage to Jackie Robinson, and Larry Doby and Curt Flood and the thousands of others who toiled in deprivation and obscurity paving the way for Michael Jordan to be a centi-millionaire, world wide superstar,and role model, and declaring the civil rights battle won as far as these industries are concerned, you’d tell the 4th graders they’re screwed.
Even in the face of stunning successes—successes Jackie Robinson couldn’t have dreamed about----you’d still say that they’re not evidence of victory, but evidence of continuing racism.
I said that the disparity between representation in fields of physical and mental prowess is a striking symptom of racism. You continue to twist what I said to your own obscure end.
Anyway, you’re going to go field by field, and you just happened to start with rappers and sports professionals. Ok. Great. I look forward to your next installment. Let me know when you get to business, medicine, research science, the legal profession, or any other white collar job obtainable by those who aren’t extraordinarily gifted.
In one sentence from one poster, this answers the OP’s query, doesn’t it?
According to the raindog, not only is racism dead, but blacks are more likely to excel in this society than whites. Put away those pesky stats, says he. Blacks are better off than whites.
I’m starting to understand where the disconnect is coming from. It’s called reality.
Well, no it doesn’t. The line you snipped said that on a per capita basis a black 4th grader is more likely to be successful in the field of sports than his white counterpart.
Given that blacks are overrepresented in those fields, I think it’s a lay-up. (silly pun intended) You want to share some of those pesky stats to refute my claim?
And a little challenge to you with the face: Find an instance where I said “racism is dead”, in this thread or any thread I’ve ever posted to, ever.
While you’re at it, show us where I’ve ever said, “blacks are more likely to excel in this society than whites.”
No, I had you figured right the first time. I can’t wait for your argument that shows white racist America marched those kids right down the hall past the science labs and onto the basketball court. (presumably for our enjoyment, given the demise of the minstrels)
Read it again folks: Richard Parker maintains ,* “…disparity between representation in fields of physical and mental prowess is a striking symptom of racism. …”*
Great.
To set the table, please understand that it is not enough to show disparities exist. To make a case of racism (like you have above) you’ll need to have some compelling evidence that those disparities are the result of racism.
OK. That’s fair (sort of). So we can now tell a room full of black fourth graders that in a limited number of professional sports, if they happen to be lucky enough to have the speed and coordiantion and a frame that will accept the development of a certain amount of body mass as muscle, then they will have a non-zero chance to make a living for some portion of their lives as an athlete.
Well! That certainly proves that racism is a thing of the past. So, let’s see, we have a bit under 2700 players plus coaches and trainers in the major league sports, so we’ll just round that up to 10,000 to include the minor leagues (pretending that there aren’t any white guys and foreign players in those leagues). So, out of around 35,000,000 people, 10,000 have actually gotten into a position where, one in four of them can make a lot of money. Thus we can walk right into that classroom and tell every one of those 25 kids that they have the amazing opportunity of a 1 in 3,500 chance to make money as an athlete.
Oh, you’ve never said it was dead: you constantly suggest that it is simply something that people inflict on all those unfortunate white folks.
Acknowledging that there are places “where it ain’t” is a good start. However, that puts you in conflict with Richard Parker, who depite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, still sees racism even in success.
Can I infer that you agree that “institutional racism” doesn’t exist in the fields of the Arts, Entertainment and Sports; or exists in such miniscule levels as to be a non-issue?
Please answer that, so we can move on. I’m interested in seeing ‘where it is’; not “where it ain’t”.
Hmmm. Let me re-iterate, and amplify, what I actually did say. And you tell me what issue you have with it, k?
"Institutions " are non-sentient constructs, a group of people. Institutions are not racist, however the people in them, including the people who run them, (and make policy) can be racist.
To the extent an institution can be called racist, one of 2 things must be present:
2a) A stated policy, or set of rules by those governing the institution that are racist in nature. In another thread I believe you noted deed restrictions as one example. Poll taxes, stated policies that discriminate in hiring, and the like are clearly examples.
2b) In the absense of a stated policy—either written or verbal—by those governing an institution, a practice of racism that is clearly open, notorious and wide spread by members of that institution. Open enough that is well known to all or very many, including those governing the institution. (who take little action to eradicate it) And wide-spread enough to be considered a “defacto” policy, in the absence of a stated policy to that effect.
What part of that are you struggling with?
I didn’t say that other posters, by and large, said “no black person can succeed in this country.” On the contrary, I’ve always maintained that racism doesn’t have the pervasive, crippling effect the SDMB denizens claim. I don’t recall saying that as a general theme, however I have called out specific posts, and posters whose post egregiously overstate the effects of racism. (like miss elizabeth’s comment, that was, in fact, all encompassing)
Then challenge them, and I will respond as time allows.
I think you didn’t think about this before you posted it.
Within the modern fields of Sports, the Arts and Entertainment, and using C.J Walker as an example, **I would have in fact made the claim *that within the fields of Sports, Arts and Entertainment “both blacks and women were clearly no longer suffering the effects of any sort of discrimination by 1920” as long as the demographics and circumstances for both blacks and women, in Walker’s field of endeavor, mirrored those in Post #183.
*
Did they?
Tom, in 1918 was C.J. Walker representative of other female or black entertainers; or was she anomaly? What percentage of the performers of her day were black? What percentage of them had earnings similar to hers? Was she received the way, say, Oprah Winfrey is? Was she representative of performers of her day? Of course not.
Against my better judgement, I’m going to toss something into the ring.
I imagine that a lot of the responses from white people in this racism debate in the end boil down to “Well, what do you expect ME to do about it?” And since they aren’t denying black people jobs, or keeping them out of college, or screaming racial epithets, they don’t feel much of a need to do anything.
Of course, there’s the answer that what’s needed is for them to “feel bad about racism”. There’s an argument from some people that they’re superior sorts of people because they feel bad about racism. Except I find this to be an ineffective sort of posturing. It’s masturbatory. If you really feel guilty about white privelege then do something constructive. Feeling guilty is the stupidest sort of reaction, unless that guilt prompts you to action. The bank robber who feels guilty about robbing a bank but keeps the money anyway isn’t morally superior to the bank robber who feels no guilt. In fact, they’re WORSE. IMHO.
And of course, it all starts with slavery, and from that the racial caste system that was developed to justify slavery. And after slavery was formally ended, Jim Crow, both de facto and de jure. I guess it’s hard to remember that just one generation ago we had not only legally permitted segregation, but legally REQUIRED segregation. And that gets back to the intergenerational transfer that Hippy Hollow mentioned.
But intergenerational transfer is a funny thing. Take my family. My grandmother and grandfather grew up on farms in North Dakota. My father and his brother both had sucessful blue-collar jobs, my dad as an electronics technician for the phone company and my uncle as a mechanic and draftsman. And me and my brothers and sisters all went to college, my older brother is a teacher, I’m in computers, my brother is in computers, one sister is a librarian and the other an artist. So we’re the first in our family to go to college. Except my uncle’s kids had an opposite trajectory. Welfare, boyfriends in prison, early marriage, divorce, and so forth. So we have three generations from farm to blue-collar to white-collar. Or three generations from farm to blue-collar to appearing on “Cops”.
So what does this have to do with race? Well, it’s that intergenerational transfer isn’t a smooth path. And then that gets back to the whole “What exactly do you expect me to do about it?” question.
On the first level, repealing Jim Crow, and not advocating for a return to Jim Crow is a pretty good first step. Not, you know, yelling racial epithets at people of other ethnicities would be nice.
But beyond that? Aside from not being an asshole in one’s personal interactions with other people? I’m kind of reminded of that famous scene from “Malcolm X” where the “guilty blonde well intentioned white liberal” asks him what white people can do to help, and he coldly says “Nothing”. I wouldn’t agree that it’s strictly nothing, but I would agree that it’s a lot less than well-intentioned white people might like to imagine. Not tolerating racist speach or actions among your peers is about it.
Oh, one more aside. People from Alaska get affirmative action? Since when? Why did nobody tell me this? I know there are programs for Alaska natives…but not “Alaskans”.
I know you don’t believe racism is limited to overt acts, so I’ll assume that this is just rhetoric and leave it without response.
Yep. I said that.
Yes, I am making the case that the disparity is symptomatic of racism. The prima facie evidence of this racism *is *the disparity, which cannot fully be explained by reference to class. Since you are making the claim that institutional racism is dead, it is your burden to dispute this prima facie evidence offer some compelling explanation for the race disparities. I look forward, non-sarcastically, to your effort to do so.
If I may, I am a little sad that I got sucked into this debate. I respect some of what you’ve said in this thread. I think as GDthreads go on there is a tendency to polarize and mischaracterize positions. I see this thread going in that direction, if not already there. With your permission, I’d like to step out now and continue to lurk.
If the alternative were “feel good about racism” then I’d agree. But the alternative always seems to be “feel nothing about racism. Deny it exists, or claim that it’s all against white people. Claim that you can’t say anything or interact with anyone without being called a racist. Say it’s all PC and racism is a thing of the past.”
One group of people is walking across a beach. Another, smaller group, is walking across hot coals. Some members of the group walking across the beach say that the sand is pretty hot and occasionally uncomfortable therefore they know exactly what the hot coal group is going through and it’s not that bad so stop whining about the burns.
Why? In a general discussion, with you making statement even broader than theirs, I see no reason to point out tiny corrections to their minor points while you are doing such a masterful job of blowing the argument off the rails.
I already noted in my first post to this thread that I suspected that more whites were clueless than racist regarding the racial aspects of aftermath of Katrina. As long as there are posters claiming that racism is simply an imagined claim by blacks and liberal whites to oppress whites, minor errors of exaggeration among those who recognize racism are below the threshhold requiring response.
I wll let Richard Parker address whether you have distorted his actual statement, but I will note that there is no contradiction in seeing a limited success as a sign of oppression. Sports have traditionally been the first venue of escape from poverty. Looking at boxing we see it dominated, at different times, by Irish, Italians, Jews, and Puerto Ricans, as well as blacks. It is only when a group has sufficient success in non-athletic endeavors that they no longer aspire to “escape” through sports that their numbers tend to drop within the sporting world. Entertainment supplies a similar venue of escape. So, yes, dominance of a restricted area of sports or entertainment does demonstrate that oppression is probably still occuring on the larger community.
If a larger percentage of black kids think that they can only escape the ghetto through sports, then more of them will put out the effort to use that route, just as their Irish, Italian, etc. predecessors did.
Within the fields of “Arts, Entertainment and Sport,” I have no idea whether racism continues to be an issue, as I rarely follow the internal politics of any of them. Dominance of those fields by any group, however, is a decent indicator that racism is still applying pressure in the fields of business, technology, and other areas outside “Art, Entertainment, and Sports.”
I am not struggling with any of it. I simply note that you have errors in your claims and in the other thread I noted that you created scenarios to support your claims.
In order to claim that institutions cannot be racist, you have to use an explicitly narrow definition of “institution” (which you carefully do not define). I would hold that institutions can be racist, but would further note that “institutional” as used in the phrase “institutional racism” does not have to refer to a specific formal organization. The word institution often refers to deeply entrenched practice or custom or patterns of behavior, rather than an organization, itself. The “institution of marriage” does not refer to Ohio Revised Code, TITLE [31] XXXI DOMESTIC RELATIONS – CHILDREN, but to the overall tendency of societies throughout human history to provide some sort of regulation, in statute or custom or both, to regulate the relationship of non-related individuals who choose to cohabitate. The “institution of marriage” incorporates Title 31 as well as it incorporates Book IV, Part I, Title VII of the Roman Catholic Code of Canon Law, along with incorporating any number of other laws and regulations of various states and religions along with the unwritten (but well understood, within the group) customs of various preliterate peoples.
In the same way, institutional racism includes the various underlying customs, patterns of behavior, and assumptions, spoken and unspoken, regarding race relations.
So I deny your point #1, outright. You are simply using a limited definition to make an irrelevant claim.
Point #2 then goes on to assume that any racist acts or behavior must be deliberate and carried out by an individual with malice aforethought. I deny this, as well.
As I pointed out in the other thread, black police can act on institutional racism and black and white police can behave according to institutionally racist ways even when the individual bears no personal racism and when he or she may not even understand the racism underlying their actions.
The crime of DWB is based on a belief that people who are “out of place” are likely to be intent on doing evil. Black cops are liable to absorb that belief from their surroundings and black and white cops may each simply believe they are following good police instincts. Every once in a long while, they may actually make a good bust of an evildoer who happened to be a black guy in a white neighborhood. The fallacy of confirmational bias will tend to get lodged in their memories to reinforce their belief that such behavior catches crooks while they very humanly ignore the hundreds of stops that resulted in nothing but aggravation to the innocent driver.
Another clear example of institutional racism is the nonsense of U.S. laws surrounding cocaine. I do not in any way believe that any Congresscritter ever thought, “I bet we could really get a lot of black kids off the street if we locked them up for using crack.” In a moment of idiotic panic, the Congress passed laws making the sale of crack ten times more harsh than the penalties for powder cocaine. The next year, evidence was presented to Congress that the addiction studies that had prompted their overreaction were wrong and that addiction rates are roughly equal between the two sources of the drug.
Now, while there may be one or two DEA guys who harbor desires to lock up as many black kids as they can, I doubt that they are driving policy. Instead, the agency (needing to make big points with the DoJ and the Congress in order to keep up their budget) targets crack distribution harder than powder distribution (that does not show up as such big scores in the press or sentencing statistics). The local office, feeling the pressure, and knowing that it is easier to get a conviction against a kid with an overworked public defender than against a stockbroker with a private attorney, further concentrates its efforts on inner city kids while exerting less effort running down suburban powder. Why do the folks in the inner city keep using crack in the face of the laws? It is cheaper and they cannot afford the powder.
The result is a law that results in a disproportionate penalty to people of one race. Now, it can be argued that no congresscritter could survive proposing a reduction of penalties on crack, but what prevents them from proposing harsher penalties on powder? It could be a matter that they really don’t care how the laws harm black kids in the inner city. It might be a matter that too many of their (white) friends are snorting powder. It might be a matter thet they think they are “saving” the black kids, as though those kids needed to be more “proptected” by harsher laws than the white kids do.
Regardless of the stated or unstated reasons, the enforcement punishes blacks disproportionately to whites and in the 20 years since the evidence has become available that there is no logical reason that the “white” drug and the “black” drug need to have separate penalties, no one in Congress has seriously tried to rectify the discrepancy.
Well, I misread what you said at first. But the correct interpretation really is no better. You wrote:
There are disproportionately more white doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists, veterinarians, architects, and corporate executives than black ones. In fact, whites as a group make more money than blacks.
Why do I suspect you’d have a major problem with us telling black kids that whites are more likely to be sucessful in those fields on the basis of those numbers? Victim! you’d be screaming at us.
Why it is okay for you to say something like this when the subject is rap and sports, but you’d jump down my throat for saying that success in other professions is decidedly in the favor of whites?
You dismiss anything that doesn’t fit your worldview, and gobble down without scrutinity anything that does. Can you try any harder to look like a white person in denial?
