points at orphaned quote tag above cosmosdan’s post
Same way it (almost) happened to you!
So if it can possibly be accounted for with something else it couldn’t possibly be racism?
Often a good education is nearly impossible. The wife and husband in the same home raising the children together is another problem. All too often a kid has one parent or is raised by grandmothers and aunts. There are a lot of strikes against a black person trying to get ahead. People who say there is no longer segregation or that blacks have equality are dreaming. It has never been true.
In the Detroit area we have 8 mile road. It was made famous and it is real. Many northern suburbanites do not cross 8 are are terrified at the thought. Many schools in rich areas have practically no blacks, unless they are good athletes. I have met many rich kids who blanch at the thought of going into Detroit. To suggest that blacks and whites have achieved equality would require living in a vacuum.
I agree. The government has done all it can do to eliminate institutional racism There’s nothing more the government can do to lesson the human tendancy that favours lighter skinned people over darker skinned people. Its really colourism that exists within the black community as well.
Colourism is as implacable as the tendancy to favour tall people over short people and good looks over ugliness. most people just aren’t even aware that they are guilty.
The latter doesn’t get much attention and neither does colourism within the black community but the fact that we can draw a line between white and all the shades of black lends itself to the concept of a duality that can either be a foundation to construct an institutional racist society or a target for the relentless criticism of the other side.
Its high time to stop developing stats on racial disparities. They may have been helpful in the past, but today they only fan the flames of resentment and division that doesn’t help anybody.
I don’t see why we can’t have a frank discussion about race. This thread is going great.
Frankly, there is no excuse for blacks not to succeed in this society. I know of plenty of blacks that are doctors, lawyers, astrophysicists, professors and so on, many of them have scratched their way from the gutter to the top.
Frankly, there are plenty of valid reasons why so many blacks haven’t found the success they would like to find. Black slavery in this country was indeed unique, particularly in the aftermath. Jim Crow kept it’s claws in until the 60s, so people comparing put upon, looked down upon, hosed down, hated and despised blacks to Asian immigrants are just being straight up silly. I mean black hate was really laid on thick and written into law. When children are taught to hate with a passion another human just because they are black, to the point where it is completely normal in art, movies and children’s entertainment to treat blacks as subhuman, I think we have a pretty unique situation on our hands. If we are going to be frank, let’s just be honest about that right there. Racism against blacks in this country was on a whole other level than racism against Asians.
Blacks have to, as we say, do the damn thang! In spite of all kinds of reasons for us to fail, we have to succeed, anyways. Or else, we’ll just be a bunch of losers with a good reason. That’s worthless.
I think it will be better for everyone, from drug dealing blacks to pathetic middle-aged white men looking for someone to put down so that they don’t feel like failures…everyone would be better off if we worked to rectify some of the reasons that blacks aren’t succeeding to the degree that that would like to.
So many things have been put into place to fix things…I don’t know how successful those things have been. My family, who briefly when I was a child had to try out the welfare program, decided we despised it and to this day we think it is an obstacle to poor folks, rather than a help. So, that is one program designed to help that I don’t think is helpful (things may have changed).
But hopefully, for everyone’s sake, we can work it out so all the poor people can be as successful as they would like to be, accounting for hard work and education and just good fertile ground.
I think fertile ground is sometimes underestimated. If your mom was raised by a mom who was raised during a time and place of legal racism…I mean the kind of racism that was considered so right and true that the police would come and back a racist’s right to discriminate against you, using dogs and hoses…well that kind of thing is going straight into the psyche of the woman who endures it, and to her child and her child too. Don’t think it just all washes away when the laws are changed. It’s ingrained.
I never wanted to be one of the ones on board for Obama’s hopey-changey train, but I will admit to my own cornball heart that deep down, I believed that having a black family in the white house just might bring a bit of hope and change to poor black folks who have been damaged by black racism in the minds and memories of their parents and grandparents. Maybe some fertile ground could be laid down where struggling black folks can heal up and start to really not only see the cream of the crop rise, but have all of the crops thrive. Because, let’s face it…we all can’t be cream.
Huh? The what?
If we don’t keep stats, how do we monitor whether racial discrimination is occurring?
I thought you agreed above that blacks should be compared to thier white neighbors? Who are those who ACTUALLY SUFFER
As someone who believes in personal responsibility I understand
“Stop Whining , get off your ass, and get to work”
My objection is your mis-placed assumption that it covers everything and it’s** all** supposed bigotry and mostly imagined.
Did you happen to check out the link in post 52.
As someone else just pointed out. it’s incredibly naive to think incidents of racism can be easily solved in the courts.
Anduril, it’s good that you take time to watch documentaries about race. In one of the best of these – the multi-part series Eyes on the Prize – Leo Lillard, the father of one of my students, was interviewed several times for his insight into race relations. What you were learning second hand we live out here. Hearing it third hand from you means nothing to me.
And I have only been witness to the suffering of blacks and the other non-white cultures that I live among. I can sympathize but I can never know how much they have been hurt in the past or in what ways they are hurt now. No documentary will let you feel that.
I do know that one of our state officials just referred to Muslims as a cult. He is running for governor of Tennessee. If he wins the election, he will be living ten minutes from the largest Kurdish population outside of Iraq. That is the neighborhood that I live in along with blacks, Asians, Mexicans, Hispanics, and other whites.
[quote=“cosmosdan, post:140, topic:548161”]
I don’t know either. I apologize.
What exactly is “a frank discussion on race”? Having frank discussions on things really isn’t what countries do. If there’s a problem with racism in this country, then lets fix it, but how do 300 million people have a frank discussion about anything? You have a frank discussion with Uncle Arthur about how he always gets drunk at Thanksgiving, or a frank discussion with your family how you won’t be able to go to Disneyland for vacation this year, but it just seems like a bullshit term when you’re talking about an entire nation, most of whom I never talk to about anything.
Just a thought; Maybe nobody ever expected 300 million people to actually participate.
This is at least twice we’ve had this assertion that black people “prey on” their own community.
What does this mean? Do white people not cheat, steal from, or sell drugs to other white people? Would it somehow be better if they were selling drugs to a Latino community? Do suburban white kids never buy drugs from black drug dealers?
This idea that there is something unique about African Americans in terms of committing crimes within their own community is absurd. The implication that all members of the community “prey” on one another is offensive, and the alternative suggestion that someone who is ready to violate laws and commit offenses against others should do so in an African American-ly civic minded way seems like a foolishly impossible standard to hold an entire community or race to.
Seems like a lot of these racists issues could be resolved by just thinking things through logically, starting from a premise that all people actually share broad common values, even if individuals within a group may demonstrate variability.
There are certain memes around that we shouldn’t assume are factual simply because they are repeated. Isn’t it factual though that there is a startingly much higher rate of single mothers and absentee fathers in the black community? I’d say that can be interpreted as preying on itself.
compare that to the relationship of crime to welfare.
This must be one of those issues that could be easily remedied in court. Except the courts are the problem.
Thanks for the history, tomndebb.
Just a couple of thoughts I want to toss out there. I could imagine the argument that even including the examples you name and more that undoubtedly happened, I suspect that a relatively small percentage of blacks were actually subjected to the extreme, violent prejudice of the type you describe (not to minimize the subtler racism I believe most blacks experience daily, unless they have styled their lives to insulate themselves against it.) Is the perception of violent racism and the usupration of property akin to the policemen’s locker room? Where 1 cop gets shot at, and all 50 of his brethren internalize it as tho they had been shot? I don’t wish to denigrate the reality of the perception of the 50 cops, but an outsider might reasonably observe - look, only 1 of you actually got shot at.
Also, at the risk of moving the goalposts yet again, we are up to the 40s and possibly 60s. But hasn’t society changed considerably since then? Aren’t certain blatant institutionalized forms of discrimination more difficult today than 50 years ago, and do not injured parties have recourse to some redress - however incomplete? Tho there may still be various ceilings beyond which minorities cannot pass, and areas that remain closed or very difficult for them, haven’t a lot of other opportunities opened up? I guess what I’m getting at is, how many generations does it take for a group to cease having its mindset dominated by a history that no longer exists and - I suggest - could not occur. Does anyone really expect a resumption of white on black middleclass riots?
As with the holocaust, at what point does the history cease to dominate the present. I’m not saying to forget it, or to just “get over it.” But at what point do even combatants stand down their arms and direct their efforts in more fruitful directions?
Final point. I believe racism - and most if not all forms of bigotry - are largely the result of ignorance. And we see on these boards how difficult that struggle is! 
But unfortunately, I believe human nature is such that a good percentage of people will always look for an identifiable “other” which they can believe to be beneath or threatening to them.
My cultural heritage involves several countries and regions, all of which were considered mutually exotic at the time my foreparents left them. I’m conscious of that heritage and try to learn as much of it as I can. But I’m not Italian-Spanish; I’m Spanish. I’m not Catalan-Navarrese, I’m Navarrese.
Preserving one’s heritage is not the same thing as using it for a fence.
Then stop calling for a national conversation about race. Find the people who need to get together to talk about it, and have them talk about it. In other words, why are Donna Brazile and Cokie Roberts bringing the need to the attention of the viewing public? Shouldn’t they be bringing that need to the attention of people who actually have power to do something in this country? You know, people like Donna Brazile and Cokie Roberts.
Just another thought;
maybe they’re suggesting we recognize the need in hopes a small percentage out of that 300 million will make an effort. We all have the power to do something , some great, some small.
[quote=“Hentor_the_Barbarian, post:152, topic:548161”]
A whole bunch of white people have stolen my pension, robbed my colleagues of jobs and sent my hoped-for retirement dancing off into the blue work-to-you-drop yonder.
First of all, most of us don’t have the power to do anything substantial. Over 99% of the American public is powerless to affect anything.
Secondly, this isn’t a call to make an effort to do anything other than talk about race. If either of the ladies mentioned in the OP had said “We need to do something about racism in this country”, or “We need to figure out how to reduce racism in this country and then do it”, I could get behind that.