I don’t think it must be equally true. But - at least WRT the specific issue he raised - it *happens to be *equally true. More so, in fact.
FTR, the reason I stopped that particular discussion at that point, is because I don’t believe this guy couldn’t figure out what stats I meant. I think my point was made and I’m not interested in playing games about it.
Yeah, I think that’s the best approach as well. I have gay friends who use some inventive slurs describing other gay people. And I’ve heard women call other women “bitch,” as in “Bitch, you crazy.” I wouldn’t, and frankly, don’t want to do that.
You know of White people cheated by Black bankers and systemically treated badly by Black teachers because of their race? For instance, I have a friend whose father was told repeatedly that he didn’t qualify for a mortgage even though he had a well paying job as a Pullman porter for decades. When he retired he learned that the same local bank offered mortgages to White people who made less.
The treated badly by White teachers… A professor I know was among the first students to integrate a public school in Georgia. She was denied the opportunity to take advanced math classes by a teacher (who also told her on a daily basis that she smelled). There were other examples too. In both cases it was clear the reasoning behind those decisions was based on her race. Given that this woman is a science prof at Harvard U, I would wager that her teacher’s reasoning was way, way off.
I’ll add my own family anecdote – my 90-something year old grandmother (a wonderful lady!), a German-born Jew, escaped Germany with her immediate family in the 30s to Canada. Most of her extended family were killed in the Holocaust. To this day, she is very distrustful of Germans, and holds other negative views about Germans. As understandable as these feelings are, they’re still bigoted/racist (if Germans are a ‘race’).
Holding a racist view is not the end of the world, and does not even necessarily make one a bad person – but I think the world would be a far better place if people who held these views understood that, yes, this is actually a racist view to hold, and one should strive to not hold racist views.
I agree with this.
And I would add that a big part of the reason is because of the connotation. When one black guy calls another black guy that, the second guy knows that the context the first guy is using it in is a race-neutral one. Meaning that the first guy, black himself, is not looking down on him for and denigrating him about his skin color. When a white guy says it, that’s not so certain.
That’s why you’ll have rare cases where a black guy might be comfortable with use of the term by a good pal. Because he feels he knows the guy really well and knows that he has no racial animosity and means it in the same context as he himself uses it.
But you never know what people are really thinking. IMO it’s not worth it. And the same goes for all the other examples.
This is not a factual statement.
Oh this post was in response to FP’s response up thread. I’m using tapatalk on a smartphone and I thought it was going to quote him/her.
FP, by the way, I’m a scholar on issues around Black education. So I’m pretty familiar with most of the NCES and BOJ data. Seriously, what stats are you referencing? Are you aware of issues of discrimination in sentencing, school push-out, and even categorization of crime? Just want to make sure we’re debating honestly.
There are a lot of misleading and inaccurate statistical measures that people use. Causal inferences, etc when none are to be made.
OK.
I assume you’re aware that regardless of whatever happened in Strom Thurmond’s time, at this present time the stats would show the relative incidence of black men committing violent crime against white women is higher than the relative incidence of white men committing violent crime against black women.
I’m aware of course that some of that is due to discrimination in sentencing etc.? But are you seriously claiming that all of it is?
But even if that is in fact your claim and even if you’re actually correct about that claim. All that would mean is that this hypothetical white father is unaware of the extent of discrimination in sentencing etc. I don’t see how this makes his prejudice any less “understandable”.
You’re trying to have it both ways here.
No. But those are not the things that white racists typically complain about WRT blacks, so you’re missing the point.
There’s no difference between a black guy who “hate[s] and distrust[s] White folks by default” because he was cheated by white teachers and bankers, and a white guy who hates blacks by default because he was robbed and beaten up by black kids and muggers.
Right, but this is what I’m saying. Your point is that the context happens not to matter. Hippy Hollow obviously believes the context is important, and wants you to clarify what statistics you’re referring to, beyond the obvious implication that black males are statistically more likely to be violent.
You think any further back-and-forth about it is playing games. This seems to be because the big bullet point – black males and violence – is enough to establish a formal symmetry; prejudice because of other violence / prejudice because of other violence. My point is that this is the line of demarcation. You’re right now doing the “these are the same” thing.
Did one of these guys have a mohawk and lots of gold chains?
I’m not saying it’s impossible to make any sort of distinction. But if you want to make a distinction then go ahead and make your distinction. Starting off by asking in wide-eyed innocence what stats I might be referring to, when this is obvious, is not the same thing as making a distinction - that’s playing games. As a general rule, at least.
It now seems that Hippy Hollow is a scholar around issues relating to black education, so it’s possible that his level of involvement in these stats is such that he feels the need to be overly precise, and wasn’t really playing games all along. But that was the reason for my reaction at the time, and not because I feel no distinction can possibly be meaningful as you claim (though as it happens I don’t think there are, in this particular case).
How about the fact that the white behavior in this case was not just individuals behaving badly, but part of an integrated legal and social white supremacist structure? That kind of context is trivial to you?
Hippy Hollow was doing just that - drawing a distinction - in the post that you first responded to, though F-P. That’s why I brought it up. You quoted him saying exactly why he thought they weren’t the same.
Yeah, man, I can’t stand it when I’m cheated by a black banker, and it seems to happen so often! (Hint: never.) And as for being mistreated by my black teachers, well, don’t get me started. (Hint: I didn’t have any.)
Or maybe you mean this: people tend to take anecdotal incidents about another race and blow them up into conclusions about many/most/all of the people of that race.
The difference is that white anecdotes about black people tend to focus on (possibly imagined) financial status or criminal activity, while the black anecdotes about white people tend to focus on oppression. So it’s similar yet very different.
That’s why I asked what stats you are referring to. Take a look at this article by Tim Wise. He approaches the claim of black-on-white crime and using Dept of Justice data, as well as analysis by criminologists - and the very important issue of encounter rates (Whites and Blacks are not randomly distributed in the population), this is a more accurate depiction of what’s actually going on:
The entire article is here.
Being unaware of these issues is a vestige of White privilege, because it’s in fact not accurate data. Again, if there were systemic, long-standing, legal and social policies that contributed to his prejudice, I wouldn’t say he’s not prejudiced. I would say he is prejudiced, but his understanding and experience living in this society contributes to those beliefs. He has work to do as well, but rarely is the opposite situation understood. People like to act as if Black Dad and White Dad’s experiences are parallel. They’re not, and it’s disingenuous to pretend as if they are.
Actually, I think you’re missing a 400-plus year point. The White guy can’t say that there is a system that prevents him from receiving justice from his injuries. The incidences you describe are essentially Bernard Goetz-type fantasies. But as I stated, I can give you a number of examples of discrimination experienced by Black and Latino students from White teachers - and their discrimination impacted these students’ life opportunities. (It’s also true that some Black and Latino teachers inflicted the same damage on kids of color - Ray Rist has written about the impact of teacher expectations in a Black school in Harlem staffed by Black teachers.)
Jimmy Chitwood made this point earlier. If you’re going to ignore historical and societal contexts, and in particular the role of White supremacy in the judicial, legislative, correctional, educational, and financial structures in this country, this is never going to make sense to you. You have to either accept it, or carry on thinking that there’s a lot of folks of color walking around with unnecessary bitterness. Your choice.
Pretty much, yeah.
I mean, if there was any actual evidence for this, then maybe I would think differently. If you could show that people react differently to experiences with other ethnic/religious/whatever groups based on whether it’s part of an integrated structure versus collective individual experiences, and that in the latter case it does not tend to cause xenophobia, then you can argue that white racists are extra-special bad guys and blacks get more of a pass. But everything I’ve seen in human nature and experience is that the latter case also causes antipathy to other groups. So I think this notion is being concocted this notion for the sole purpose of keeping the anti-racist focus solely on whites who dislike blacks on away from blacks who dislike whites.
[I should add: it’s theoretically possible that the supremacist structure could add to it. But it’s not fundamentally different. A lot of things could impact things one way or another. How badly did you suffer at the hands of the other race? How often? And so on. To account for that, you would then have to measure each individual guy’s life experiences versus the depth of his feelings. But the point is that there’s no fundamental difference between the two situations. Based on human nature both situations would tend to cause these types of feelings, and there’s no reason to make any sort of general distinction between one being “understandable” and the other not.]
No, he wasn’t.
He did not draw any sort of distinction between white perceptions about blacks being based on experiences with blacks and black perceptions of whites being based on experiences with whites. He just focused on the latter and ignored the former entirely. Which is why I brought it up.
This is represents an astonishing level of head-in-the-sand bullshit. For dive centuries, American blacks lives in a society in which white racism kept them poor and terrorized, in which whites could likely rape and murder them with impunity, not to mention rely on a structural society that prevented them from economic and educational advancement.
Even after the formal end of slavery, Jim Crow essentially criminalizes black life, with laws for example that made it illegal to walk near railroad tracks, to engage in commerce after dark, to talk too loud, or drink in public.
Blacks were subject to the threat that at any moment, a white person could essentially end their lives with trumped up charges and enslave them to a chain gang or other prison labor. For decades, the entire economic development of the South depended on forced labor arising from bullshit laws.
And all this to you is nothing more than a matter of “X doesn’t like Y” and “Y doesn’t like X” being exactly equivalent? You’d have to be extremely ignorant or self-deluded to think so.
[Stereotypical Father Mode]Not a chance. Any guy they bring home, regardless of race-religion-politics-etc, will be, in no uncertain terms, a “worthless bum” and nowhere near good enough for your baby girl.[/Stereotypical Father Mode]
That was a joke. I don’t have to be told how sexist that was, my daughter done did that. 
I’m self-aware enough to accept that I’ve had racist thoughts and even expressed them a time or two in my lifetime. This I regret and have striven to improve. Scaled from a low number to a high number, I’m confident I’d barely move the needle.
So what professional bloviator cooked up the whole “conflating racial with racist” bullshit defense? That’s cropped up several times in this thread already, and it’s such a cop-out. If you have to frame a defense of your remarks with any variant of “that’s racial, not racist”, then you really need to read the OP again and be more honest with yourself as you answer the questions listed. Or maybe I just missed the dozens upon dozens of occasions when participants in these forums used racial and racist terms interchangeably. Maybe the racial/racist divide isn’t just another angry shaking of fists at all that pesky political correctness that has so burdened our day-to-day’s with all that “words have meaning, use them responsibly” junk.
I realize I’m conflating anti-PC with pro-racism. I kinda meant to.
“Racial =/= racist” is magellan01’s signature comeback, but I’ve seen it from others. It’s complete bullshit, of course. But it’s why threads likethis one exist.
Yes, I know that’s why. Because he addressed the issue in an asymmetrical fashion, in other words, and you refuse to engage it on those terms.
Which is your prerogative; what I’m getting at is actually that this is a more productive conversation when that happens, considering the alternative, which is to bicker over semantics and statistics irrespective of the fact that the outcome of those arguments is of literally no consequence considering the larger divide.
There’s nothing whatsoever in the stats you cited that supports anything you’ve said. WADR, you come across like a guy who has this article in his pocket as a ready response to the next time someone mentions blacks and crime and you whip it out without even thinking of whether it makes sense in context.
That guy is focused specifically on racially motivated crime, which leads for him to equalize based on “general differences in rates of criminal offending”, which is not appropriate here, since we’re not discussing bias crimes specifically. This argument cuts the exact opposite way, in that his argument is that blacks commit crimes at 2.5 times the rate of whites. Which would itself make this hypothetical white father more “understandable” than the hypothetical black father.
Similar for the “encounter” issue. All he’s saying is that encounters/opportunities will favor more black-on-white crime. But that only gets him to the real numbers in combination with the general disparity in crimes discussed above.
Again, these are relevant to his point about racially motivated bias versus fear of violence in general, in which his numbers cut the other way.
[OT: his final point, in big bold letters, that “any given black person is 2.75 times as likely to be murdered by a white person as any given white person is to be murdered by an African American” is ridiculous, since it’s a function of the fact that there are about 5-6 times as many whites as blacks in this country.]
Even if you grant that being unaware of these things is a vestige of white privilege (which I don’t), it doesn’t make the guy any less understandable.
This is just some sort of greater-victim game and is irrelevant to the issue of people’s views of other groups being formed by negative encounters with members of those groups.