High School Caucasian Club deemed 'culturally insensitive' by NAACP-double standard?

The BBQ Pit
181

It isn’t so much about having pride in your race as it is about not being ashamed.

I wanted my Black students to understand that their value is not measured by the number of Black Presidents that have been elected to office or by the fact that they are still paid less than a white man with the same qualifications doing the same job. I also tried to teach them to expect more from themselves than a lot of other people would.

I have intentionally used the designation “Black” throughout this thread and no one has yelled at me. No one ever corrects me one way or the other. ( I have also used “African-American” in other threads.) Those who say they get criticized for using the wrong designation are totally unbelievable. These are the people who have to make up things to be angry about.

If you want to read a book about white pride, read any history, science or literature book. Kids spend the day studying about the accomplishments of people who have had all of the advantages of believing in themselves.

Only in my life time have stories about anyone besides Luther Burbank and George Washington Carver been included.

It is clear to me in reading some of your posts that you have very little longterm exposure to the day-to-day lives of non-whites. Some of you have also resorted to the condescending language of someone who knows that is all he has left. It stands out like a sore thumb.

BTW, someone asked why schools can’t just have a club and wait and see what it’s about, more or less. Clubs have to have sponsors. I could see a club about a general topic such as “Improving Race Relations” or “Cultures of the World” – only with catchy names. But to go in with no real goal would be irresponsible, unprofessional and, in my opinion, unethical for any teacher/sponsor.

182

I’ve been away for a day, and look at what I miss.

And your point would be? The library also has books on famous black people and African American history, as well as Latino history, and history of virtually every other culture. But libraries don’t have many social events to help people get associated or interracting with others of like culture/heritage to help learn. Under your little “explaination”, no group needs a club, they just need to go to the library.

I believe I said the same thing.

Ummm…it’s been said several times over in this thread that white people have no culture. Read more than a couple posts before responding.

Why yes, yes I am. And not in the “little yellow bus” kind of way, either.

183

So, wait…Latino Pride is okay, even though it encompases many different races and ethnicities, yet Asian Pride is “as meaningless as ‘White’ pride” because “Asian” encompasses many different races and ethnicities?
Riiiiiiiiight. Your argument loses strength with every post you make.

184

That’s not my point, nor was it my question. My one and only point is that a double standard, ANY double standard, whether fair, deserved, or otherwise, that is entirely based on race, is racist in my opinion. Or do you just not recognize that it is in fact, possible to be racist towards a white person?

I said nothing about whether this was a good, bad, fair, deserved, or otherwise attitude, I merely pointed out that it is a race issue, no matter what spin you want to put on it.

[quote]
Originally posted by Zoe
It is clear to me in reading some of your posts that you have very little longterm exposure to the day-to-day lives of non-whites. Some of you have also resorted to the condescending language of someone who knows that is all he has left. It stands out like a sore thumb.

Was that directed at me? If so, it is clear to me, that you know nothing about me, my background, or who any of my friends are, much less any exposure I’ve had to them.

185

Of course it’s a race issue. And you can call it racist if that’s what you want to do, but when it comes down to brass tacks, there isn’t a white person in the world being oppressed by any societal pressure which makes it inappropriate to go about talking about or starting organizations meant to enhance “white pride” (even if that’s not meant as a code phrase for white supremacy) because you don’t need to enhance “white pride.”

186

I fail to see how that is relevant to any of the points I have made (namely, the proper nomenclature for dark-skinned Americans and the supposed “equal” treatment of African immigrants). **

Monstro raised the point about differing levels of achievement between the progeny of black immigrants and those of blacks with long ancestral roots in the US. I take it you do not dispute her factual assertion that such a disparity exists. And as I’ve noted, I don’t think that disparity can be ascribed to discrimination betwen the two groups on the part of nonblacks – short of wearing a sign saying “I am descended from slaves,” most nonblacks simply can’t tell the difference between the two groups.

So we know a disparity exists. We know that ordinary racial discrimination cannot explain it. So I wonder, enlightened soul that you are, what do you suggest is the cause of that disparity?

What does it say about the relative vitality of African culture relative to Jewish culture that the former can completely fall apart after a couple hundred years of slavery while the latter can survive a millennia of oppression? **

First of all: cite for the proposition that this asshole Benz dealer’s attitude is representative of the “average American”?

Secondly: do you think this asshole Benz dealer would have treated the child of immigrants any differently, especially if the kid had been shorn of his native accent?

Thirdly: if your principal measure of the success of your life is the approval of others, you will be unhappy. And always remember: living well is the best revenge.

If you yourself are successful, why do you care?

Hell, I was born in southern Louisiana, land of pig-ignorant coon-asses of the type illustrated in Adam Sandler’s “The Waterboy.” My group is painted as stupid, corrupt and parochial. It never bothered me, because I am none of those things.

187

Of course it’s racist, it’s based upon a person’s race! It dosen’t have to be “opressive” to be racist, that’s been my whole point all along, although IMHO, no good ever comes from treating people differently based upon race, no matter how noble the motives.

188

Hello? Have you read a fucking thing I’ve written? Let me repeat: stolen cultural heritage is the most glaring difference. SWlave descendants have been handicapped in a way that no other group has ever been.

“African culture” (which doesn’t exist, btw, Africa is not a monolithic culture. Egyptian culture has fuck-all to do with Ethiopian culture which has fuck all to do with South african tribal traditions) did not “fall apart.” It was fucking stolen. It was no longer there to give black Americans a sense of strength and cultural identity after slavery. They were forced to adopt the culture of their oppressors. That is not something that has ever happened to Jews.

Now, I gave my answer, so why don’t you tell me yours. Why do you think that black Americans have “shortcomings?”

189

Well, the first thing that this statement says to me is that comparing apples and oranges does not provide a legitimate basis for inspecting breadfruit.

The Jewish culture that has survived has been a single culture (with a few notable subgroupings) that has endured 2,500 years of external pressures that have been exerted at the group level.

The slaves brought across the Atlantic were not a single culture, but many diverse cultures, and the pressures that were exerted were deliberately intended to capitalize on the differences among them with specific sanctions imposed on the personal level to further efface the culture to which any individual might cling.

Even Jews have “lost” people to their culture in the face of extreme persecution.* As a group, however, they have been fortunate that no one has prohibited them from reading and writing or denied them access to the Torah (especially in Hebrew) or forbidden them to exercise their religion. The typical Western European attack on Judaism for 900 years has been to take away their property, them to send them as a group to some other place or to round them up and force them to live together in a ghetto.

  • Solomon Grayzel reckoned the number of Jews in the first century Roman Empire as 2.5 million in Palestine, 1 million in Babylonia, and 4 million scattered around the Mediterranean. After the two wars of rebellion and the intervening “diaspora revolt,” those figures dropped significantly both from war casualties and as people chose to switch faith rather than suffer persecution. On the other hand, those who were transported out of Palestine as punishment for rebellion tended to stick together and establish new communities where Judaism survived.
190

I’d also like to point out that Jews have never been enslaved as chattel* nor have they ever had their families systematically separated and scattered for generation after generation.

*Recent archaeological evidence does not support Biblical claims of any enslavement in Egypt.

191

Hmmm. Maybe, maybe not, but for the purpose of this discussion, has the fact that Jews as a whole believe that they have been enslaved as chattel had the same effect on them as if they actually had?

192

I don’t believe there is any “Recent archaeological evidence” in any direction that is worth mentioning. Or any other archeological evidence, for that matter. This sounds like just a bunch of empty pontificating: “hey, we dug around and we don’t see any evidence that there were any Jews here”.

OTOH, I do agree that the Jews in Egypt were not chattel - by all indications they had intact families and owned their own property. They were slaves in that they had heavy heavy work requirements - not in that they were property that could be bought and sold.

Hey, tomndebb, can I take your lack of a response to my previous post as an acknowledgement of your error?

193

Do you have a cite that would support your assertion that a history of discrimination isn’t enough to explain the differences between these two groups?

If black immigrants are arriving here like most immigrants–pretty wealthy and well-equipped–then comparing them to folks who have been historically oppressed for hundred of years is, in a word, stupid.

Most black immigrants from Africa are first or second-generation. They may get called “nigger”. Their resume may be snuffed occassionally. A police officer might round them up haphazardly. But that’s light years apart from what my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents experienced. If my great-grandfather had been schooled crappily because of his race or discriminated in employment or lynched without cause, that not only impacted his immediate family, but it also impacts me decades later. Not only do black people today have to deal with the shitna that comes with being black, but they have the burden of that past shitna on their shoulders too.

A black African with the wherewithal to immigrate may have his own sordid history behind him/her, but they don’t have that particular experience.

194

No. You can take it as a sign that I missed your earlier post.

The current figure of 700,000 African born is over 20 times higher than the figure in 1960 and is hundreds of times higher than in previous decades. As I noted in my post, the black people who have immigrated from Africa have tended (up until the last couple of decades) to marry people who were descended from slaves, so their tiny minority of descendants still qualify as descendants of slaves.

And, of course, African born still includes a huge number of whites.

No matter how we try to play with the numbers, the percentage of blacks living in the U.S. whose ancestors were never transported as slaves is well under 5% and is probably less than 3%.

195

Above addressed to Dewey.

196

No.

They still have their culture, don’t they?

IzzyR:

You should take a look at the the The Bible Unearthed by two Israeli archaelogists named Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman. They make a rather convincing case that much of the Hebrew Bible was composed as political propaganda under Josiah and that such events as the exhile in Egypt, the Exodus, the conquest of Canaan and the United Kingdom were fiction not history. The archaeology is pretty solid and these guys are not crackpots. Finkelstein is the chairman of the archaeology department at Tel Aviv University and Silberman is a very well respected archaeologist and historian. A lot of what they’ve published has been well-known in Israeli archaeolgy circles for some time but has not made its way into public consciousness because of the obviously incendiary religious and political ramifications.

You should check it out. It’s not quackery or BS speculation and it’s really causing a lot of debate right now in the archaological community.

Article on the book from Salon.

197

For starters, let’s be clear that I’m not referring to “black Americans” versus other groups, but rather to two subgroups that appear within the set of people referred to as “black Americans”: blacks who are here through their ancestor’s immigration versus blacks who are here through their ancestor’s forcible enslavement.

And frankly, I think the reason is largely cultural, too. But I don’t ascribe it to the past cultural loss of someone’s great, great, great grandfather being denied the ability to read and write or to practice whatever the hell religion his tribesman in Africa professed. I ascribe it to modern cultural ills.

Chris Rock has a blistering routine where he describes the different receptions his neighborhood gives to a young black male recently released from prison versus a young black woman who recently earned her master’s degree. The former is embraced; the latter shunned. And Rock is by no means the most serious person to make that observation.

I admit I have no ready solution to that problem. But I do believe that the relentless focus on the injustices of the past only serves to reinforce rather than break down those cultural barriers. It’s much easier to pass the buck to the long-dead than to look inward and put your own house in order.

198

When you say “cultural ills,” please be more specific. What is the cause of these “ills?”

199

OK. But at least you’re admitting it now. :slight_smile: Not in these words, of course, but you appear to be acknowledging that the 700,000 number refers to people born in Africa, not descended of people born in Africa as you earlier implied, and that your assertion about the number not descended from slaves being less than 1 in 50 was therefore incorrect.

Of course, you are now bouncing back with a new argument, based on some extrapolation of the figures. That’s fine too. :slight_smile:

How far back are you going with this? All the way back to 1865? I imagine you’re right that it has become a lot higher in recent years. Still, populations tend to grow over the years - it is my understanding that the number of slaves freed in 1865 was somewhere in the range of 4-5 million. So the impact of fewer people in those days would be a lot greater. Still, you would appear to be substantially correct according to this website.

Still, I would note that any children born to these 700,000 immigrants would not qualify as African born, but would be counted in the 34M number. I would imagine that bumps the number up quite a bit right there.

Well by that standard there’s a whole lot of white guys who also qualify as descendents of slaves. I’m not sure that I buy that, for purposes of this argument.

A valid argument. I don’t know about “huge”. But certainly some.

I don’t know about these numbers - they appear to be pulled out of your hat. But I agree with you that the number is relatively small.

I’m not part of this African vs. African-American dispute. I just happened to see you make an error and called you on it.

I’m not saying that these guys are crackpots or that their arguments are quackery or BS speculation. I just think the entire field of archeology stands on pretty weak footing - the amount that you can really know from all these digs is very limited, and is generally extremely speculative. At best. These archeologists do the best they can with the extremely limited info available, but that’s not much.

This is the case when they are speculating about things that they actually found - all the more so when they are trying to use absence of evidence as evidence of absence.

(As it happens, I recently saw an article about how some scholar found an ancient structure in Egypt that he felt was evidence of the Jews having been there. Something about the type of structure used, or whatever. But you know what - that was bogus too.)

200

It’s kind of interesting that you treat culture as virtually genetic, with the “immigrant” gene being recessive and the “bondage” gene being dominant. If there’s as much overlap between slavery’s progeny and immigrant progeny as you say, why don’t they adopt the cultural traditions of their immigrant forbears? Why does a drop of slave blood eradicate all other cultural factors in one’s family tree?