Even though millionaires are the most prominent cases, I’m sure that regular folks get fired all the time for an offhand comment that wasn’t meant to be hateful but made a company nervous.
You got the cards? Then lay 'em down. I wanna see 'em.
What I actually want to know is if you support McCarthyism when it comes to speech about race. Do you want people to have to be careful about what they say, or do you want people to speak frankly about race?
I practice what I preach on the issue. There have been anti=semetic threads on SDMB and I’ve engaged these folks civilly and attempted to refute their arguments without accusing them personally of being haters.
You might want to ask Jerry Sandusky about that.
Sandusky isn’t a filmmaker. While college football might have seemed like a great career option for meeting kids he can boink, filmmaking has that virtue plus if your movies are really good, most of Hollywood will defend you.
Music too. Thriller was obviously so awesome that it bought Michael Jackson a dispensation.
Why is there any need to choose? Generally when this sort of thing blows up, what’s involved is someone like Paul Ryan not “speaking frankly” but using racist dog-whistle euphemisms. It would be possible for a racist to expound his views frankly, and in decent language that would pass any PC test – just use 1960s-vintage National Review articles on segregation as a model – but who active in politics today would dare to do that? And what is wrong with that state of affairs anyway?
We don’t want people to just say hateful things, but accusing Paul Ryan of dog whistle tactics is exactly what I"m talking about. Do you really think there are enough racist whites lapping this stuff up that this actually benefits the speaker?
Rather, what you’re doing is just playing “gotcha”. Ross Perot made the mistake of saying “you people” several times in his NAACP speech in 1992. Gotcha! Racist! Um, no. Perot was unfamiliar with the connotations behind that phrase, there was no malice behind it. Likewise, Paul Ryan said what he said in the context of helping poor people.
But let’s address the legitimacy of what Ryan said. Not the truth or falseness behind it, that’s not what I mean. I mean bringing the subject up for debate because a lot of people believe it. Don’t we want these issues to be debated out in the open, frankly? Or do we want to just shut down all discussion by treating the very subject as racist to discuss
Are you talking about Roman Polanski? 13’s pretty creepy, but it don’t count as “child rape” in my book. And Woody Allen’s case is not even worth mentioning here.
:dubious: Of course there are.
It is racist to discuss, in exactly the same sense that creationism and flat-earthism are stupid to discuss as if they were worthy of any serious discussion of a kind not entirely directed to their refutation or dismissal. Any discussion of it should proceed from that assumption.
Then tell us why you think black men aren’t working. It can’t just be a racism thing, black women are working:
http://www.dol.gov/_Sec/media/reports/blacklaborforce/
Black women are more likely to be in the labor force than white women or Latino women. Black women are more likely to be in the labor force than black men.
Now discrimination and the legacy of Jim Crow and slavery certainly account for a lot of black unemployment. But I don’t think that can account for the fact that women are doing more work than men. That’s a legacy of culture, of black men not having positive role models due to the absence of fathers.
Of course, that’s racist of me to discuss, but I’d be interested in your theories on why black men are less likely to be working than black women.
Those things are not mutually exclusive. Speak frankly, and don’t say racist stuff.
You might have noticed that I don’t call other dopers “haters” or “racists” (public figures may not get the same sort of discretion from me). I might say that a certain statement or view is racist, but I try not to call individuals racist. But that’s just me.
In Polanski’s case, you should. He raped that girl, according to her testimony.
How does one speak frankly about pathologies in the black community without sounding racist?
Cool. But I don’t see much overt racism from public figures. What little I’ve seen has come from individuals. I don’t know about you, but sometimes as a white guy you hear things from other white people that are really racist, but which they think they can say around you. But this is far from the majority of people, and almost everyone I’ve encountered like this has been over 40. I just don’t think there’s much to be gained anymore from “dog whistle” politics, and I don’t think there’s been much to gain for at least 20 years.
Don’t forget that it’s racist for the Dept. of Labor to collect and publish the data you cited above as well.
So it’s, what, “teen rape?”
If you’re going to use phrases like “pathologies in the black community”, then you probably shouldn’t be talking about it. Talk to individuals as individuals, and about individuals. You’ll rarely go wrong if you just talk to people as people and about people.
Don’t be paternalistic. Don’t pretend you have the answers. Don’t lecture. If you do any of these things, you will probably say something really stupid.
Key word here is “overt”. No, there’s not as much overt racism from public figures any more. But there’s still a good bit of non-overt racism, like what Ryan said.
Yes, I’m sure Perot knowingly and deliberately used racist language while trying to get votes from the NAACP. Makes sense.
Rather than pedophilia, it’s called pederasty, and I do agree there’s a difference, but rape is pretty awful and rape of a young teenager even more awful still.
And abuse of your own child, that’s the bottom of the moral barrel as far as I’m concerned.
lance – can you do any better than adaher’s attempt to answer my question in post # 358:
Sure.
You’re a rapist!
Seriously, it’s weird to ask for “someone in history” as if it has to be a famous person or famous case.
But a google search on “falsely accused racism” easily picks up many case of people explaining the harm they’ve suffered from this happening to them. Their reputations were ruined, they lost jobs, etc.
You don’t seem to understand what’s going on here. False accusations of racism, like rape, are wrong for two reasons:
-
They harm the person accused - because being accused of doing evil is, you know, bad. If you think racism or rape is wrong, you should think being accused of it is a serious thing.
-
It dilutes real cases of racism, or rape, hurting those who were really harmed and making it harder for them to get justice.