Hey, Melissa Harris-Parry - you're wrong, you're stupid, you're ugly (on the inside).

The BBQ Pit
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Alright so I came back in the topic, I can’t resist a good argument or a trainwreck :smiley:

I’ll say it because no one else is saying it: Yes, its true. Some people can and SHOULD get away with doing bad things because bad things were done to their group. You can reject that all I want, but if someone punches my brother, its an offense to me and I’ll punch him back. You have hundreds of years of racial oppression on blacks from whites so its ok for black people to make fun of whites. Now what you shouldn’t assume is that I think anything black people do in response is ok, nor do I think they should take it too far beyond a certain degree. But yes, a black person calling a white person redneck, cracker, wigger, or whatever, should be ok. I’m fine with that, I WANT them to get that privilege because it is impossible for me to just ignore hundreds of years of oppression and tell black people “Ok its the 21st century and its a clean slate, everybody just forget where you came from” because its not a clean slate and blacks are still oppressed by many white people and by the institutionalized system we have in place. So if that means a white person has to endure a bit of taunting and laugh it off, then so be it.

The alternative, to me, is much much worse. Either forcing minorities to behave like perfect gentlemen is, to me, ignoring the still ongoing racial inequalities and our shared history of racial oppression. Another alternative is to work towards a more equal society which, while it sounds great, is impossible if it comes with the condition that minorities must forgive and forget all past racial inequalities and the ones still ongoing. So the result is yeah, white people have to suck it up. They are generally richer, healthier, better educated, in power, etc. so stop acting like babies and suck it up

So I don’t know why you wrote what you did and gave everyone else an “out” such as this. MHP tried to do humor. She failed, but her intentions were still humor, so its ok. Right? Or don’t you mean what you said?

Morals are relative so yeah, what’s wrong isn’t always wrong. Its ok to verbally mock someone of a race that, in the past, has severely oppressed your race.

Murder is too severe. Human beings are remarkable in that they can hold multiple levels of nuance for one position. In the case of murder, the crime itself is too harsh to override racial prejudice in the past. In the case of humorous mocking of someone, its not. That’s not hard to figure out. If someone punches my brother, I can respond with a punch but I can’t kidnap and murder his family.

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Sigh, I’ll answer your stupid murder question but only because I’m bored.
A (white) klansman hanging a black man up on a tree til he chokes to death is
WAY worse the a black guy killing a white dude because he raped his sister.

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Interesting response. In my scenario I explicitly put you in the role of the victim. But you looked at the situation from the bully’s point of view.

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Seems that most of the controversy around MHP’s words (and those of her panel members) has been focused on the race aspect of the comments, rather than the adoption aspect.

Here’s a little kid who may see this clip someday. And he may see it at a time when he’s too young to understand exactly who his grandfather is and why this bit of banter has to be understood in a larger context. What he’ll see, at a time when he might well wonder why he looks different from his brothers and sisters, is a bunch of people on television, who obviously (to him) have some kind of credibility, talking and laughing about how he’s different from his siblings.

That, to me, is pretty shitty.

Also, this is Mitt Romney’s grandkid, for pete’s sake. Romney is fair game, of course (even though he’s fading into irrelevance), but using his grandchildren to poke fun at him is juvenile and mean.

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No. -Mitt Romney

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Hypocracy -n. Government by marketing departments.

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I know everyone thinks that, but I can’t tell you how pleasant it was to hear “Uncle Dewey, play with me” from my nephew. So I look at that picture of Mitt Romney and all of those grandchildren and imagine the fun he must have with them.

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This is stunning. It’s a justification of racism, along with many other things.

But I punched your brother because he’s white and I’m black, so it’s okay.

Right?

So racism is still okay.

Do you realize how insulting that is to them?

This is the crux of your flawed argument. You think that asking people not to be racist is the same thing as making people forget all past or current inequalities. You think the answer to racism more racism.

You’re a racist. How’s that feel?

Yes, humor is different.

Do you read what you write before you post it?

No, it’s not. Your use of racism to justify racism is really sad.

BULL.

YOU said racism is okay sometimes. Why not with murder? Why is only mocking okay?

Yes, humor is different. But I’m asking about other things for a reason. It seems you changed your tune when I upped the ante.

But if a black man punched your brother, let alone murdered him, and justified it by saying your brother is white, you’d be on the other side of this issue.

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Do you have a substantive response?

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You dodged yet again. Pathetic.

Imagine two murders, identical in every way except the races of the victim and murderer.

Are the not equally wrong? Or can black people kill white people and it be less wrong for the only reason that they are black and the victim is white?

Yes or no? No more dodging.

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Let me try a new approach.

Someone articulate WHY racism is wrong. Spell it out.

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Well lance strongarm you debating skills and persistence have certainly convinced me I see no need to extend the debate any further. Keep up the good work. I have no reason to debatejayjay’s observation seems to be spot on.

It might take others a bit longer to take up that position, so please keep going.

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The obvious answer is they are equal of course, but what’s comical here is you seem to think this somehow proves your point. It does not. Again, you fail to grasp the nuance.

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Its not a justification for racism. It is a RESPONSE to racism. Your mistake is in assuming that everything happens in a vacuum. What you should be considering is the long history of racism and current institutionalized racism that exists and basing your answer on that. What you seem to be doing is to ignore everything that happened pre-2013 and saying that her comments are indicative of racism in general. That is wrong

Depends, was he making racist remarks? Again, you are failing to consider the context of the situation. If my brother was antagonizing you, making racist remarks, then I would actually have no problems if you punched him. You probably expect me to still defend him? No, I look at things from a contextual point of view. There are times when he deserves a punch in the mouth, and there are times when he doesn’t. Just as there are some responses to institutionalized racism that is ok or does not rise to seriousness, and then there are times when a response is not ok, like when the response is too extreme. Context matters

In the right context, many things normally off-limits are ok. I can’t murder a person. But if I were wearing a uniform and so was he, and politicians in my country declared war on his country, then it is ok for me to shoot him in the face

To me, expecting them to simply forget hundreds of years of racism and to ignore continuing institutionalized racism is more insulting. While ideally, we would like everyone to behave nicely to everyone else, in reality it is impossible. Allowing blacks to “own” the N-word for instance, is the least bad option out of a myriad of worsening options

I think that asking people to forget all past inequalities is impossible. If some small amount of racism is allowed in order to mitigate further racism, then I am ok with choosing the lesser of two evils

Given the alternative that we pretend no racism touches anyone’s lives now and is not a continuing problem, my suggestion is the easiest to swallow out of all alternatives. In answer to your question, I’m not a racist and I don’t know you, so your words have no effect on me

  1. Why, and 2) What do you think should be MSNBC’s response to MHP?

I have absolutely thought out and support moral relativism. I have no problems with what I’m saying nor do I think you have the capability to convince me otherwise. So I ask you then, what problems do you have with my statement that morals are relative?

Its not sad, you simply disagree with it. But like the brother puncher example, it is ok to respond to some slight with a slight of your own in context. I would not support racism just for the hell of it, nor would I forgive it from white people. But for those whose race have been oppressed and are still oppressed in many ways today? It is an acceptable response

Murder is ok sometimes, as in the uniformed soldier example above. In times of peace or between allies, that would be called murder. But on the field of battle, its not. And I have answered your question on mocking. Let me quote what I said because apparently you didn’t read it:

“In the case of murder, the crime itself is too harsh to override racial prejudice in the past. In the case of humorous mocking of someone, its not.”

I don’t care that you disagree with that, you’re free to do so. But I do care that you didn’t fucking read it because that answers your shitty question. If you want me to explain, expand, or use a hypothetical to see if I change my position or to enlighten me, say so. But don’t ask me a question that I answered already in the same fucking sentence that you quoted. If you ask me the same thing again, I’m just going to quote myself again without this extra exposition so don’t ask me the same god damn question again

I did not change. If you mistakenly believed I have, then that is your error and not mine. I’m happy to explain your seemingly confusion, but you have to say what you want me to do

Depends on what my brother did. I can think of a few reasons that my brother deserves to be punched or killed, its not hard.

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Let me take a stab at what I think you’re not seeing:

You believe that all outside factors are equal in MHP’s panels statements vs. generic racism by a generic white person towards someone of color. You believe that the ONLY difference is the race of the participants.

This is your mistake.

All things are not equal, there is context to be considered and nuance to be seen. You are not seeing that so therefore you infer that had someone at, for example, Fox News, said similar things about a hypothetical Obama family adopted white grandson, the racism would be equally vile.

You are so focused on ONLY what was said and who said it that you do not grasp the larger institutionalized racism that exists in the country, and you are ignoring the history of racism and who the victims and perpetrators are. You either think these things don’t exist or don’t matter, and that is your biggest mistake.

Consider this: It is 1962, blacks are segregated from doing many things in public by law. A black comedian makes fun of the child of a white politician. Is it as odious as what MHP did? An honest person, a normal person, a person who is not myopic to the larger context would answer no, it is not the same. But a person living in 2013, possibly having seen the fire hoses, the race riots, and the police dogs on marchers only in history books or black and white footage on TV, thinks it doesn’t matter and makes the mistake that because he can’t imagine that it matters, then it really doesn’t matter. That person is you, and you are wrong. It does matter. And what happened in 1962 is not so far removed from now that it renders everything that happened then irrelevant. It may not be as bad as 1962, but its bad enough that a joke should not be seen as racism the same way as the racism of our grandparents’ era

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I’ll call you a fucking idiot, for one reason: SHE DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING RACIST. She didn’t make any comment on it at all. Someone else said it.

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[aside]

They had never seen it written before they started using it and now they got used to the wrong way.

And they can waste no time looking for a dictionary or running a spellchecker before throwing it down because you HAVE to hurry up and call hypocrisy immediately as soon as you think anything even looks remotely like what they think it is, because, like, it’s the ultimate put down.

[/aside]

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Well, didn’t she say something about the adopted kid marrying North West so that Mitt and Kanye end up as in-laws? Or something like that.

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That may be. I’ll concede that I haven’t watched the clip. Just read about it in passing. But, even if she did say that, that line seems conspicuously absent from the OP’s diatribe.

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Why is the thought of marrying North West racist?