WAGging along here, I’d say that there would be quite a bit of change, but the majority of people in the USA wouldn’t notice it. I’ve never suffered from racism, because I “pass”. My father, on the other hand, has been assaulted, followed, given “the stare”, etc., all because his eyes are the “wrong” shape and his skin the “wrong” color as far as some people are concerned. It was worst when the auto plants were getting closed down left and right in the Rust Belt, but it was there before and afterwards.
I’m not affluent, but I’ll bite.
I have no idea.
Racism is pretty much a behind-the-scenes dealsky nowadays. I have a list of weird anecdotes that can be attributed to racism (like the time I first visited my undergraduate advisor and he dismissed me as a retard on atheletic scholarship) but nothing that is 100% proof of The Man Holding Me Down.
I had a phone interview for a job just recently, and now the company wants to fly me out to see them in person. Nowhere on my resume is there a reference to my race (for all you anti-Affirmative Action freaks). I’d be lying if I told you I’m not worried about how they’ll respond to my appearance. I don’t look like your stereotypical ecologist. I’m optimistic and hopeful and all that, but the worry is there. Who will they be expecting to pick up at the airport? And when they see me, what kind of judgements and assumptions will be made?
I’m know white people have to go through that worry too, but to a lesser degree.
I am lucky, if I can say that. I was raised by middle-class parents, educated fairly well, and I am somewhat racially ambiguous, which means I look like every “non-white” ethnicity in the book. I know my experiences would be different if my complexion was just a tad darker, my nose a little less keen, and my hair just smidget nappier. I also know that being a scrawny female helps.
But I don’t know to what degree white racism has harmed my life, just like a white person doesn’t really know to what degree white priviledge has benefitted theirs. I don’t even think my parents–who were called dirty niggers to their faces and have experienced unequivocal instances of racial discrimination–could really quantify the impact.
Very little. Racism is just an extension of classism. Eliminating racism would just mean the racial distribution in each class would become more equal.
What about class and technology?
The technology is so complicated the rich don’t know what they are buying.
We may develop new classes. Those that understand tech and those that don’t.
Dal Timgar
I agree here. I think the issue is primarily one of class, and not one of racism. Even if racism were totally abolished with no questions asked, the problem would remain as one of class. Frankly, I think that access to proper education and health care are some of the most important factors. The Los Angeles Unified School District, for example, is an absolute joke. I am one of the lucky ones - my parents worked their asses off so that my sister and I could be raised as middle class, and moved out of the hispanic part of town to the more affuent areas. And the schools there are better. I have no doubt that if my parents hadn’t worked so hard (and been so fortunate), I wouldn’t be where I am today. Not all are so fortunate - my father’s siblings had bad luck such as health disabilities, divorces, etc get in their way.
So no, removing racism would not solve all ills. It would certainly be nice, though. I’ve been put in enough “uncomfortable” situations as is. Ironically enough, I’ve been discriminated against for not being hispanic “enough” if that makes any sense at all.
I’m no genius, this is just my experience. I live in a part of town now where more people speak Spanish than English, and it has a frightening effect in alienating people completely. Throw that language barrier in as culture.
So we have instances of culture, education, health care, and finally racism. All of these are difficult to overcome one at a time, but together… Well, lets just say that movements like Affirmative Action effectively patch the statistics and make people feel warm and fuzzy, but they do very little to cause real change where it is needed.
Al Sharpton would be pissed.
And we’d look for new excuses to hate each other.
I don’t think racism is a problem at all. It’s sheer classism. People don’t look down on people because they are black, they look down on them because black people as a percentage are more likely to be uneducated and poor(not stupid and lazy). I don’t think more state education is the answer. Throwing more dollars at a situation I think is far from the answer to anything, yet we seem to think it’s the answer to everything. Creating more community resources that would bind communities and engender communication would be what I would prefer to see. We have working models in my community that we are experimenting with that grew up out of the communal rave scene where people wnated sound systems and parties, but sound systems and parties were expensive, so people got together and organized them communally. We have taken this ethic a step further and we try to incorporate it into other aspects of our lives. I’ve lived in predominantly spanish speaking neighborhoods. I kind of understand spanish but I don’t speak it, and I don’t see it as being THAT much of a hindrance.
It’s the “US” and “THEM” approach that causes the problem. Poor white people ARE NOT at more of an advantage than poor black people, and that’s a common misconception. Just because they are white doesn’t mean anything. If a black man can make it in corporate America, he will. If a white man can’t make it in corporate america, he won’t, it’s that simple. Sometimes you can clean someone up of any color, and put them in a suit, and if their personality doesn’t jive with that suit, it’s not going to look right.
I say, don’t blame on race what is probably caused by much more subtle bigotries in people’s interpersonal relationships.
Erek
The black national movement of America is not racist. They only wish to preserve their own seperate cultural and ethnic integrity.
In Zimbabwe, the native black man, despite his majority status worries more about starving to death as a result of a dictatorial regime having dispossessed all of the white land owners.
I wish we lived in Mswasland were there was no racism. Unfortunately we don’t. Racism is a problem in America. I know plenty of white people want to pretend otherwise but it matters if you are white. Pay attention to what is going on around you. Every time the cop drives by without pulling you over, it could be because you are white. Every time the cashier takes your credit card without asking to see your ID, it could be because you are white. Every job interview you receive could be because you are white. It is easy for white people to overlook their privilege because not having to overcome potential racial stereotypes with every social interaction is taken it for granted. It is nonwhites denied this luxury that most notice how poorly America lives up to its egalitarian rhetoric.
This has what to do with racism in America, exactly?
Racism has little to do with the country in which it occurs or which ethnic groups are involved.
I don’t agree but so what? What has this to do with the brand of racism minorities face in America?
BrainGlutton, you mean well, but you are entirely too credulous re the prospective efficaciousness of the sort of residential re-distribution and relocation schemes you offer up as partial solutions. This is the same sloppy, undergraduate nonsense that has enthralled young, well-meaning people and academics for decades.
Black “disadvantage” in America, however you want to classify it, is quite unique and trying to understand and devise a solution to it using the paradigmatic lens of the Irish, Hispanic, Jewish etc. “experience” is kind of beside the point. Whatever the adjustment difficulties in the US for other immigrants were, the family structure still existed, even if it was only conceptually and at a distance to the struggles in the new land. These immigrants had no problem springing back to the “family” mold as situations improved.
On the other hand, the black family, and the black man, specifically and most importantly, was broken by slavery, and to a large extent he remains broken. For better or worse the majority of family advancement and cultural class enfranchisement in the US has come (and still comes to a large extent) from a male wage earners and fathers with high inter-family cultural status + a supportive female homemaking/child care taking unit. For centuries in the US, this is not the way the majority of black men and black families have functioned for entirely practical reasons given the context of their environments and the requirements for survival.
The only way that American black families are going to become fully class enfranchised is to become like other families. Whether one thinks this is a scouring and dis-respecting of the uniqueness and strength of extant female centered back family structures is irrelevant. Until the black family can somehow (and I have no idea how this is to be accomplished) re-empower the black man, none of this is going to happen. This will have to come from within and probably over a very long period of time, external, well meaning, social engineering attempts to do this are likely to have a poor record of success.
Just how true is this? How different is an attitude of “broken to the core by slavery” from an attitude of “racially inferior”? The former does find somebody else (bad white people) to blame for the state, but both are ultimately essentialistic statements of core inferiority–although the latter has a “path to redemption” built in (become more like white people).
I just don’t see it as the dominant social mode among <<insert term du jour>>. Yes, there are the shiftless, but they aren’t the rule. I see far more “hardworking taxpayer” folk among the <<insert term du jour>> than I do “lazy shiftless censored censored censored”.
Since the point I’m trying to make is being missed entirely, and you’re busy trying to morph a statement about the historically dysfunctional, post -slavery nature of American black family structures in modernity, into a kinda-sorta notion of “racial inferiority”, let me diagram my point more clearly.
In modernity, families that are capable of ascendant cultural class enfranchisement, economic success, and most importantly raising children directed in the same manner, have, until relatively, recently required a high inter-family status working father and a care taking mother. This is not a model that most black children, and more specifically black male children have as the standard model for their world view and ontological toolkit as to how they should make their way in the world.
Cosby’s Doc Huxtable aside, for better or worse, black men, are often seen as inherently flawed, transient and sometimes disposable commodities within the standard matriarchal centric black family, by both the mother and children, and ultimately themselves. There are exceptions to this of course, and strong black father role models are not unheard of, but they are the exception not the rule. This is not to entirely blame the aforesaid logic of a black matriarch in a high stress domestic situation, coping with a partner who is neither culturally, behaviorally, or emotionally trained, or able to assume the roles and responsibilities of typical middle class family fatherhood, with it’s huge investment of resources and inborn assumptions of what a man/father will do and how he will behave.
The man is this way, because his father was this way etc. etc., up and down the generations. Fathers train sons by behavior and example. If the example is dysfunctional or absent, the training will be dysfunctional. Slavery broke the back of black families over many generations. Matriarchal centered families wasn’t “a choice”, it was the only choice for survival.
So now here we are in 2004. Black families are still disproportionably mired in poverty, violence and the associated underclass. Economically successful families (not always but most often) need culturally trained, productive fathers willing to make huge investments of time and resources in their families and children. Until the state of the American black male and black families cultural mindset and structure changes to be more like the archetypal white/Jewish/ Cuban/ Jamaican/Asian models, its dysfunctional nature and poverty will continue relative to the demands of modern society.
I don’t even know whether this is true or not and I would wager that you don’t know either. But it does sound good, doesn’t it?
Wealth is something that is passed on in families, homes, insurance policies, investements and the like. White people have more wealth because they’ve historically had more wealth. Take two WWII vetrans one black one white. They both by a home, the black vetran’s home by default would not appreciate in value as the white vetran. Why? Simple, racist policies that still exist today insure that a neighborhood with whites will have higher property values than that of black neighborhoods. When the white vetran dies and leaves the home to his kids they’re looking at a very good little nest egg, the same can’t be said of the children of the black vetran when the home could only be purchased in an area where the property values aren’t allowed to rise because of racist policies. White people don’t want to move into black neighborhoods and historically it wasn’t because of crime it’s because the country was segragated that was the law about 50 years ago.
The relatively minor “wealth” that may (and this is by no means a certainity in many cases) pass to some middle class non-black children in the form of “nest eggs” etc after the death of the parents, is dwarfed in importance and real world impact, by the cognitive “wealth” that child receives in terms of the mindset and training by example, of the attitudes and behavior that are necessary for success in modern, middle class society.
As a side note, life in old age for a large portion of the American middle class is quite expensive. You would be surprised by how many children of middle class and upper middle class professionals were left with essentially nothing but some furniture after the funeral expenses were paid. I’m one of them.
This is simply not true. There are numerous studies that show that when a black person cleans up just as good as a white person and then tries to get a job or rents an apartment, discrimination occurs. This would not be the case if it was just that blacks are more likely to be targets of classicm.
Would anti-black racism go away if blacks, as a group, were financially better off? I don’t know. More than half of black people enjoy a middle-class existence right now, and yet most people (it seems to me) believe that black people are overwhelmingly poor and urban. I have a feeling this perception will remain for some time after the income of blacks come to reflect society at-large. I think the perception is just as much a problem as the reality.
Classism is definitely a problem, and I believes it intersects with racism in the case of black people. A black person may or may not be poor, but they are more likely to be viewed as poor than a white person. So in an encounter with a class-conscious bigot…even one who doesn’t believe in “racial inferiority”…,the white person would tend to get a fairer shake. Because a black person is perceived to be poor, he or she may also be perceived to be uneducated, criminal, morally irresponsible, and lazy. In other words, all the stereotypical traits generally applied to black people. Saying people notice class but not race is simply not true. I think people use race as a way to size up class, which sucks if you aren’t white or Asian.
The difficulty in teasing apart classism and racism can be illustrated in a little story. Let’s say you’re at the museum and you see two groups of middle schoolers. One class is all white and one class is all black. I’ll be the first to confess: I would assume that the all-black group is from an underachieving, underfunded public school. And then I’d assume that the all-white group was from a highachieving, elite private school. I would come to both assumptions after a cursory glance because race is an easy–though often wrong–way to sum up people and their economic station. My prejudice wouldn’t mean much if I were merely a passerby, but it could come into play if I were a manager at the museum’s giftshop, or if I were a tour guide responsible for showing the kids around. In the case of the latter, maybe I wouldn’t ask the black kids too many tough questions, and I would dumb down my language. Maybe I would take the white kids to see things that are targeted to more intelligent, sophisticated audiences. You could make the case that both racism and classism, but none of these two things alone, explain my behavior.
I think people have to be honest with themselves and constantly question the kinds of assumptions they make. It’s the day-to-day encounters we have with each other that will ultimately determine how successful we are at eradicating racism.
Undefined statements of agreement or disagreement are irrelevant.
Acts of racism are independant of race and country and they are also independant of which group constitutes the majority. This is comparable to the situation in the USA.
What about the real world impact of the cognitive “theft” by a system of slavery, followed by a system of segregation, followed by continued racist practices? Do you think that for a moment that hundreds of years of policies directed toward keeping blacks at the lowest rungs of society has no effect 50 or so years later? The disparity in real estate values and the resulting wealth that is generated over the years is substantial especially when you’re not the beneficiary of it. Keep in mind in most of the country, school funding is driven by property taxes, wealthier communities i.e. those that have higher property values have better schools because they are better funded.
Those middle class and upper middle class professionals still benefited from the wealth that existed that afforded them a good education because of where they lived and because of white priviledge.
The “White Nationalists” of stormfront.org, etc., say exactly the same thing about themselves. What’s the difference?