In another post oldscratch said
Can a society be racist even if it contains multiple races and many individuals who are not racist?
I guess the best way to start is to define what is meant by “society” and to then go on to how it is racist.
It will be no suprise that I am skeptical of this, but what the hell, I feel pretty open minded today. Anyone care to start?
Unfortunately, today I have very little time left to debate.
For starters though I will throw out the http://www.m-w.com definition of society.
*Main Entry: 1so·ci·e·ty
Pronunciation: s&-'sI-&-tE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -ties
Etymology: Middle French societé, from Latin societat-, societas, from socius companion – more at SOCIAL
Date: 1531
1 : companionship or association with one’s fellows : friendly or intimate intercourse : COMPANY
2 : a voluntary association of individuals for common ends; especially : an organized group working together or periodically meeting because of common interests, beliefs, or profession
3 a : an enduring and cooperating social group whose members have developed organized patterns of relationships through interaction with one another b : a community, nation, or broad grouping of people having common traditions, institutions, and collective activities and interests
4 a : a part of a community that is a unit distinguishable by particular aims or standards of living or conduct : a social circle or a group of social circles having a clearly marked identity <move in polite society> <literary society> b : a part of the community that sets itself apart as a leisure class and that regards itself as the arbiter of fashion and manners
5 a : a natural group of plants usually of a single species or habit within an association b : the progeny of a pair of insects when constituting a social unit (as a hive of bees); broadly : an interdependent system of organisms or biological units *
I suggest that we use this part as our starting definition another b : a community, nation, or broad grouping of people having common traditions, institutions, and collective activities and interests and that we take America as the society in question. I think that’s a good starting point. How about you Mr.Zambezi?
Sounds good. We will be talking about the whole of american people and institutions. Fine with me. I will try not to fall into the same old arguments and tackle this afresh.
[sound of steam whistle blowing in the distance. Coyote takes off sheep suit]
“see you tomorrow Sam”
“See you tomorrow Ralph.”
I suppose the steps to proof would be:
Specify those common traditions, institutions, and collective activities and interests (hereafter referred to as the Things that, when taken together, uniquely describe American Society. IOW, come up with a list of Things which are indisputably American.
Demonstrate how any of those Things imply a form of racism. IOW, show how racism is an indisputable component of at least one of those Things.
Draw your conclusions
Not only is this gonna be a mighty long thread, I don’t think the word “indisputable” is in the SD vocabulary (or at least the GD subset). But hey, I’ll pull up a chair.
(And BTW what a great 4th of July Weekend topic).
FWIW, I’d like to throw out the possibility that there are racist institutions (implying that a large group may buy into racist ideology via belief in an institution) without there necessarily being racist societies.
Now that I’ve muddied the waters a bit I’m gonna go have a beer myself…
I would just like to bring up a famous “quote” by “Mayor Marion Barry,” who said “All laws are racist. Even the law of gravity is racist.”
I think this is a good question. I don’t have any good responses now. I just have vague feelings that I don’t think will be in legible form for at least a day. Anyway, may I ask this question in a different board or forum?
In particular the first four post. (Mr. Z’s two, oldscratch’s and ren’s) You phrased the question and scope better than I could.
In other words, this is a nonsensical question which would lead the discussion into circles within circles within circles. You need to tighten up the question to get any fruitful and insightful debate. Or you can rephrase it [Is American society racist?], but where would that lead you? Probably would lead to a list of racist apologies or examples of racism that we have heard over and over again for a long time. What’s the benefit of that? We would only hear insensitive remarks [the Marion Barry quote for example] that won’t be within the spirit of the SDMB ie: fighting ignorance.
Frankly, I’m a bit disappointed that some SDMB folks still feel a need to discuss this topic. Am I naive in believing that we as a culture have accepted the idea that yes, our society is racist, but we are trying to work on that? A bigger question, and certainly more relevant today rather than yesteryear, is how are we doing? have there been improvements? has mainstream, civil society been somewhat successful? Maybe this thread proves that I am naive and little progress has been achieved. That saddens me to no end.
I think I understand the question very well and MHO is that this society is not racist but many individuals (of all races) are racist.
Society, as a whole, expresses itself very clearly in the law and in other ways and says loud and clear that racism is not acceptable.
Individuals may have racist views which they should be allowed to have as long as their actions do not break the law.
From old 2nd amendment arguments.
I don’t think society as a whole is racist, yet each particular sub-grouping of the society (racial, geographic and financial) carry their own unique racist baggage. I can’t point to anything scientific or such, but several anectdotal incidents come to mind.
When I first moved to Dallas from Ft. Hood, Texas, a friend of mine (from Puerto Rico) helped me move as he had a pickup truck. While there, he met another friend of mine, whose fiance was also Puerto Rican. We all got together that evening for dinner, but there was an underlying tension throughout the meal.
I asked my friend Gonzo (familiar of Gonzalez) what the deal was, and he informed my that my friend’s fiance was a four-letter word, as he was of Indian extract and she was blond haired and blue eyed, and she was intensely uncomfortable being around him.
While at a club in El Paso, my eye was caught by a beautiful senorita, and I approached her to ask her to dance; to my disappointment, she politley refused. Later, one of her friends caught up with me, and she asked me if I was from around here (west Texas). I told here I grew up in southern Illinois, and she then informed me that down here, Yanquis and Mexicans don’t mix.
Even among same-race situations, I’ve run into similar situations. Believe me, I’m not trying to start another gun-control debate! Yet when normal, every-day white people find out that I’m a gun collector and a member of the NRA, they suddenly act differently, and seem to assume that I’m about to break out some chawin’ tobaccy, run up the Stars-and-Bars, scream “YEEEE HAWWW!” and shoot the place up. Even when I’m in the first-class lounge at an airport, wearing nice business attire and working on my laptop!
When my cousin’s husband died in '78, she moved herself and her son back up to Illinois from Florida. Somewhere in Georgia, her radiator hose let loose and she was stranded on the side of the road for several hours before a bike gang pulled over. Her reaction was “OH MY GOD THEY’RE GONNA KILL US!” before they patched up her radiator hose, refilled her radiator and gave her an escort to the nearest auto garage, to make sure she made it there safely.
There are so many different cultures in this “melting pot”, and Hollywierd certainly does a good job of negatively portraying every stereotype in the absolutely worst possible light, that when we meet someone else from a different “sub-culture” in our own country, regardless of the skin color, we seem to assume the worst.
The cure? Maybe some defamation lawsuits against any negative stereotypes in the media. Maybe if the news media did a better job of showing us the positive rather than harping on the negative, we may not have such a myopic world-view when it comes to other groups of people.
Maybe if we just got out and met some “other” people once and a while.
I can see how some minorities can perceive institutions as being racist, especially things like expensive, prestigious colleges or big-name established firms, which have traditionally been the bastion of the priveleged whites of anglo-descent. If they are, then they are the more insidious form of racism.
At least with the Klan, a minority knows where they stand; it’s evil, but an up-front and in-your-face evil. There’s no deception, no polite words, no pretense of friendship or accomodation.
But when confronted with the bland, impersonal, concealed racism of “polite” society, they don’t know where the “Glass Barrier” is, if it actually exists in their particular situation. Is the guy being nice to their face telling “nigger”, “spic”, or “wop” jokes in the locker room of his all-white country club? Or is he truly a decent human being and being friendly because he genuinely likes them?
The uncertainy can be maddening, I’m sure, and the continuing strain of trying to navigate the racial minefield might lead to a deadening of the possibilities of opening up, maybe leading to a hostile, closed mind-set and a “confrontational” attitude, often stereotypically attributed to minorities in professional settings.
Almost all of us have or prejudices, whether we recognize them or not; we hear what our parents say as children; we see how others are portrayed on TV and in the news; we see how they act differently [than “us”] in public, how they dress, etc.
The better people say “Well, okay, that’s their ‘thing’” and take no special note; others may go “Ugh! That’s stupid!” and carry that attitude of distaste/disgust with us throughout our life, effecting every contact we have with anything different from what we consider normal.
Usually with negative repercussions.
ExTank
“Why a ‘Yellow’ Submarine?”
After months on the Dope, 1 of my posts finally starts an interesting thread. And Mr Zambezi doesn’t even give me my due. Instead he credits oldscratch. Hey Mr Z, look at scratchy. He’s as old as hell. He has probably paved the way to many good intentioned topics. Have some sympathy.
:wally
Actually I was thinking more along the lines of the racism in all of us. We have picked up unconscious attitudes about differences among people. I admit to having racist attitudes, and I feel that those who claim not to are simply unaware of them, or they are aware of them and are lying. I sometimes find myself identifying people unnecessarily as Black. As in: “Hon, you should have heard what this black guy said at work today, I was rolling”. The coworker’s ethnicity wasn’t relevent. I wouldn’t have identified the person as white. I identified him because he was different.
In the interest of fairness I note that this is what matt mcl was saying.
I agree with this statement; however, society also expresses that different “colored” people are different. To modify Professor Homan’s quote: They may be human but they’re not my hueman.
Societies are full of paradoxical concepts such as these. “Making money is good” but “rich people are unhappy” is another example of this.
Racist? No. Prejudiced? Yes.
‘Society’ is a construct based on millions of social interactions that constantly occur. It is an epiphenomeon, something that ‘comes out of’ a system that is not directly described in the rules of that system yet still exists with its own cause-and-effect webs. As such, the behavior of society is consistent with the behavior of people as a whole, which is to say the statistical sum total of all interactions that occur within a society’s geosocial sphere. Knowing that, we can say that if the ‘average person’, a patently nonexistent entity, is racist, society is racist. Since the ‘average person’ cannot exist assuming free will (assuming determinism negates this entire discussion), the question of whether society as a whole is racist is undecidable. Therefore, only at very small levels (the level of social group or ‘clique’) can the property of racism be assigned. The question to be asked here is, therefore, ‘Do the racist groups outnumber the tolerant groups?’, a simple enough question to answer once terms have been defined and heads counted.
I disagree with Derleth’s apparent belief that all people have an equal weight in shaping the nature of society. People like Bill Gates, President Clinton, Ted Turner, Alan Greenspan, and Jesse Jackson have a much greater influence on racial relations that the “average” person, and there is no way to come up wtih a simple numerical analysis of just how much larger that influence is.
People can ignore anyone. Do you listen to Bill Gates when it comes to voting? Or to Michael Jackson when it comes to food? In the end, it is the people themselves that make things happen. If the famous had that much pull, why would any of them lose fame? Where is Vanilla Ice now? It is collective buying power that makes or breaks fame. I’m not saying that the masses are organized. They are not. The masses, like any other advanced system, are governed by the magic of weighted statistics, which means that not everything has an equal chance of happening. Analyzing a complex system at too high a level leads to misleading assumptions of strong central control even though all behaviors can be described in more parochial terms at a lower level. For example, a computer’s actions can be fully described and understood at the level of machine code even though humans generally interact with them at a much higher level. People who have little contact with the inner guts of a machine sometimes believe that the computer is ‘intelligent’ and operating at a high level. Same thing with society. Reductionist analysis is very useful even though holistic concepts also apply. In summary, the people as a whole, a group with no real central control other than the state and mechanisms thereof, control how society functions because society is an epiphenonmenon of that group’s interactions. Plenty of those interactions cancel out, and most are too insiginificant to ever make much difference. However, humans are herd-mentality animals. Even without a leader, they act organized at a high enough level.
OK, I can see that I picked too big a subject. Can I narrow it down a bit?
How about this, since our country is based on law, and law tends to be a good indicator of societal value: Are teh laws of the US inherently racist?
I think if we can get this one down, then we can move on…
ANd, as you all know, I feel that our laws in and of themselves are completely colorblind in the most part, and some are actually racist in favor of protected classes. But of course, when I say “racism” I mean racism against blacks, and other ethnic minorities.
The laws may not be inherently racist, but they may well be culturally biased.
Consider the situation in my country, New Zealand.
The founding document of our nation is the Treaty of Waitangi signed around 1840, by both British settlers and indigenous Maori chieftains.
The spirit of the Treaty was to ensure an equal partnership between the two peoples. However, depending on whether you read the Maori or English versions, the legal and constitutional framework differed greatly.
Maori believed they would simply govern their people and the Europeans (or Pakeha in Maori)would govern theirs. The imperially-minded Brits, however, believed they would get to govern the whole country, lock, stock and barrel.
And the Brits were much more heavily armed than the Maori were.
So the present-day situation is that instead of having a bicultural system, we have essentially a monocultural Pakeha system. And up until the 1970s and 80s, Maori had a really rough time of it, largely through huge land grabs made legal by Pakeha government.
I think it would be too limiting to base this discussion on laws, as they could and have been interpreted differently depending on timing, place, etc. I think better proof would be found in our language, of which we could all agree that the American version of English is unique and a melding of different cultures. So do i think this society is racist? Sure lets think about some common terms such as Blacklisted, black monday, jewed down, pure as the driven snow, etc… Im sure everyone could contribute more expression just like these.
I am talking about current day America.
Teh laws do not distinguish color except for those that prohibit discrimination. OUr constitution gurantees rihts regardless of skin color.
Furthermore the application of those laws is done through a fair system that presumes innocence and is the same for people of all races and creeds.
I would argue that there is no formal institution that itself distinguishes race. Now, individuals can.
OUr current US culture, taken as a big glob does not condone racism at all unless it is aimed at whites (but that is a different thread.) In fact popular culture embraces “diversity” and looks down on racism. When is the last time you heard “nigger” on TV?
Show me one institution or evidence of societal bias towards racism. I am not talking about stats showing that blacks are poor. That could be caused by any number of things. I want to see how a social attribute of our contributes to racism.
And don’t give me that stuff about blacksheep and the lot. That promotes racism like “manhole cover” promotes sexism. THey are leftovers from a bygone era that noone gives much thought to.
Your etymology is flawed. words like ‘blacklisted and Black Monday’ have nothing to do with African Americans and more to do with black being the color of mourning and sadness in our society. No polite person would ever use the phrase ‘jewed down.’
Is American society racist? Of course, it is. Racial profiling, the unequal ratios of black and white prisoners sentenced to death, the unequal penalties for crack versu powdered cocaine, among other things shows that the law dis-
criminates by race.
Well-dressed black men driving an expensive car can count on being stopped by the police, while a white guy driving the same car sails by the same cop.
We view each other as members of a group, rather than as individuals. We’re all trained to think that way, and we have to catch ourselves. For the white folks, when a white guy cuts you off, do you think, “Can’t those people learn to drive?” What about when a black guy does it? Non-white folks, have you ever had a white guy cut you off and think to yourself, “Racist jerk”?
One problem in healing the racial breach here is that white folks have trouble putting themselves in others’ shoes. White folks don’t get followed in stores by clerks afraid they’ll shoplift. Whites don’t have to worry about getting redlined for a loan because they live in an “urban” neighborhood. Domino’s Pizza doesn’t make white folks walk out into the middle of the street to pick up pizza.(This actually happened in DC)Because white folks never face this, they tend to dismiss racism in our society.
On ther hand, African Americans and Latinos expect discrimination, so they see it where it may not exist. If a waiter is slow to get their order, it may not be racism, but just having a crappy waiter.
My point is that society has given us racial blinders that we have to learn to see around, we need to empathize with each other more and realize we are all Americans, members of a large and very dysfunctional family.
Yesterday, I brought this matter to the attention of Society. He categorically denies that he is racist, though he admits that he is sexist.
Oh, and gay, too.