Read tomndeb’s post #64 in the original GD thread. I was going to make the same points he did, but I went back to check nobody else had made them to you first and there he was, reliable as ever.
As he notes the phrase “African-American” was intended to bring blacks closer together with the rest of the United States, by adopting a term similar to a hundred others already in common parlance back east. As tom points out they made an error based on their own parochialism, not realizing that the hyphenated-American terminology was uncommon outside of the rust belt. But I assure you terms like “Irish-American”, “German-American”, “Slovak-American”, etc., were a common part of my upbringing in the 1970’s on the East Coast. It wasn’t a divisive exception - it was the norm.
People who’ve been calling curlcoat crazy are certainly wrong, as there is nothing to indicate insanity.
People who have been calling curlcoat stupid are almost definitely right, but this is one of those exquisite cases where herculean stupidity is functionally indistinguishable from dedicated subtle trolling. I’m honestly not sure if this person is as stupid as it pretends, or a very good troll.
Just another reason why stupidity should be a bannable offense, in any case.
Shrug. I guess in the pit we are supposed to make posts that are just gratuitous insults without any worth? I don’t tend to be very good at that but I guess I can learn. For now, I will assure you that I am no idiot, tho I do wonder about your lack of ability to understand what I am saying, and/or read without bias, and/or own racism/sexism/whateveryourproblemism.
Try that reading comprehension again. If nothing else, I have learned that due to restrictions in Africa making immigration next to impossible, most black people here are actually descended from slaves. Most of what else has been said is people telling me that my opinions based on my experiences are wrong.
As for telling me to go read, do you actually believe everything you read? Maybe that is what your problem is. Do you also believe Fox News?
I have not attended school since 1975. People here are the ones claiming that I should know so much about black history because it is being taught in the public schools. I do not know for myself either way.
Well, that and a lot of abuse, but the abuse doesn’t stick.
So, you feel that it is not possible to have sub sets in society? Tho, I will give you this, there have been a few people I’ve known that were so radically pro-Africa and anti-America that I just had to ask why they didn’t emigrate to Africa. The answer was always that they didn’t want to live there, even tho it seemed like they couldn’t go a day without running down here and building up there.
Congratulations. You’re quite smug about finally picking up the one thing in that thread that is common knowledge to just about every other American (not all the children know yet). Hold your head up high, and keep the sarcasm coming, because you’ve earned it.
And you’re right. By all means, don’t go and gather information from different sources, in order to learn what you missed out on. Just keep wallowing in your own ignorance. And stop blaming your K-12 education. You haven’t been there since 1970 freaking 5. You’ve had over three decades to learn this stuff. Instead of taking the initiative, you just blame The Man for not giving you a good enough education. That behavior sounds really familiar, but I can’t put my finger on it… Your reluctance to read explains a lot, though. If you were this resistant to learning as a child, I have my doubts about just how horrible your schools were.
And you have no way of knowing whether you got anything from Affirmative Action or not. It’s not like they’re going to tell you they were filling a quota.
Whether or not it was intended to be divisive, it apparently started out that way - Homework Help and Textbook Solutions | bartleby - by the use of Afro-American to start with. Whether or not Jesse Jackson actually wanted to bring blacks closer to the rest of the US is to me debatable since he has not always seemed to be interested in peace and love between the races! Also, simply by dividing folks up by putting the country of origin of their ancestors, no matter where they came from, is by definition divisive, no? It seems that the only Americans who are just plain Americans are those whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower!
You are quite the fiction writer, and approaching the level of IQ that I have been accused of. For one thing, there was no smugness in what I wrote, nor have I ever blamed “The Man” for anything, so that is all invention by you. For another, simply telling someone to go Google something is certainly no way to know if that person is going to get facts. I am quite sure I can Google up plenty of sites that will tell me that blacks are genetically inferior and whatever else the Aryan Nation is currently pushing. With that sort of thing it is obvious to tell it isn’t truth, but there are plenty of great writers out there who can twist the truth all over. See PETA…
And, if nothing else, I actually have been wandering about the web reading this and that as this subject has progressed, but one cannot ask a website a question. It has become obvious that your mind has snapped shut, and you are getting boring so I will most likely ignore you from now on since you have no desire to simply discuss the subject.
As for whether or not I ever got anything from Affirmative Action, I worked in a female dominated area and never went to college, so it seems quite unlikely that I “got anything”. As for whether anyone is going to say if they are filling a quota, as soon as I gave up and got my disabled parking card, my employer at the time had me fill out paperwork for someone (state? fed?) to document that they had a disabled employee.
Well, here’s the thing: if you don’t know either way, you really shouldn’t go around making positive declarations about how things are. If you haven’t been to school in more than thirty years, then you don’t actually know how much black history is being taught in schools, and you in particular, you don’t know how much black history is taught relative to the histories of other segments of the American population. Thus, you’re in no position to make statements like: “Perhaps this is because black history at length is taught yet the history of every other non-British non-white people is glossed over, hard to say.”
Sure. But, and here’s the key: they’re still part of that society. Blacks recognizing that they have a history and experience in this nation that is, in many ways, unique to them, and wanting to celebrate that culture is not the same as wanting to be separate from American culture.
I find it honestly difficult to believe that you’ve ever had more than a passing conversation with a black person.
No? Then what did you mean when you said, “The response was because they are identifying with their slave ancestors. I said something along the lines of why in the world would they want to do that, unless they were still bent on being compensated for it…” Because really, I don’t see any other way to interpret that statement.
Did you read your own link? It’s saying exactly what tomndebb and Omega Glory have been telling you.
Well, you certainly seem quite proud of yourself for learning that to me. If *I *had to be told something that basic, the last thing I’d do would be sarcastic about it. You’ve blamed your lack of knowledge on your schooling countless times. Blaming the government run school system, AKA The Man, for what you don’t know rather than the fact that you couldn’t be bothered to learn the basic history about the about your own country until less than a week ago. As for the google thing, do you really need to be told to look to online encyclopedias, and such? Or to read a variety of different sources? If you’re unsure about the quality of a source you could check it using, again, google. Or go to a library and spend some time in the reference section. You already found your way here. If you needed to ask a question about something you’ve read, then go to the forum called General Questions, and ask. I’m sure you’ve seen it.
This girl (if she is female, I saw another poster using the feminine pronoun so I just went with it) is the queen of backpedaling. You can throw her contradictory quotes in her face all day long (as I attempted to do in post #16) and she will never acknowledge it.
How do you know that? I don’t think job offers made with the thought of advancing women come with a shiny “Thanks to affirmative action, you’re getting this job!” sticker on them. A friend of mine (who’s black and African - Ghanaian-American, to be precise - and is happy to turn every single conversation into a discussion on race and gender which means that talking to her can be exhausting even though I love her) recently told me that studies have shown that the group most affected by affirmative action are white women. I googled this just now and wow, I have no idea of the bias of the websites that popped up. But here’s something that does look like a valid source:
I’m not the troll, but I’d honestly be curious as to whether or not there’s a cite to back up your friend’s claims. I’ve heard the same claims but, IIRC, all of the cites I remember seeing have said similar things to the one you just presented. Namely, that X minority members and Y white-and-minority-women were helped by AA. But I’ve never seen a breakdown of Y to prove that white women dominated the statistics for that demographic.
How in the world do you call what you have quoted there a "positive declaration? Note the word “perhaps” in there.
Am I not speaking English here?
On the other hand, continually dwelling on that history and/or acting like Africa is Eden cannot be a good thing, right? I don’t care what people want to call themselves, I merely point out that in my experience (emphasized enough for notice yet?), those blacks who self identify as AA are acting as if it was their parents that were the slaves, or that they themselves cannot get a job, ride a bus or whatever.
OK. Not a whole lot I can say to that.
Since you didn’t leave enough quote in there for me to know what you are talking about, I can’t respond.
Ok, words of less than three syllables - oh crap, I already blew it. Anyway, this is my attempt to be very clear since you are just. not. getting. it.
I am not proud or ashamed of the fact that I did not know prior to this discussion that a vast majority of blacks in this country have slaves for ancestors. You said I couldn’t learn, I said I had learned that for one. You have decided that my refuting your statement about my lack of ability to learn is smug or sarcastic. It is neither, it is simply a statement of fact.
I do not blame anyone for my appallingly poor education, that also is simply a fact, and also a reason - the reason why I had no idea regarding #1 above. I seriously have no idea why you think I blame “The Man” for the fact that one school system was very underfunded and the other one had weird ideas about education.
Regarding my not “bothering” to learn basic history of the US, until this discussion I thought I had. Do you go about verifying that your basic education had all of the, well, basics? I imagine that if the discussion was on something that I am actually well versed on, you would be sadly lacking in some of the basics. Which leads us to …
I really hope that when you meet folks in real life who don’t know something, you don’t spend a bunch of time ridiculing them. I don’t really care, but I am rather surprised at the grade school mentality here.