And that their culture perpetuates those conditions.
I don’t think a distinction between “what people do” and “culture” is useful.
What do you suggest that I do to change black culture?
So racism, or “the system”, or “whiteness”, or whatever you like to call it, is getting better, right? Or is it your contention that “whiteness” isn’t related, and that it is something else?
I don’t benefit from black illegitimacy, or black crime or poverty. Just the opposite - I am a taxpayer, so I have to pay for the prisons and the police and Medicaid and SNAP. I didn’t get my job because some black guy was prevented from applying. I got my job because my qualifications and experience and skillset put me ahead of the other candidates, including the ones from India and the Asian guys and the Jewish guys and the white guys. I am not happily married because some black guy impregnated and abandoned his girlfriend. My son didn’t graduate with a 4.0 because inner city schools are shitholes where nobody studies and everybody has to pass thru metal detectors to keep the guns out.
You aren’t getting it. I don’t throw any litter into his back yard. I just point out when he does it.
I don’t stop anybody from using a condom. I don’t make anybody abandon his children. I don’t force anybody to act out in school. I don’t compel anybody to rob his neighbors.
:snicker:
The usual garbage - if I say No, I don’t think black people are inherently inferior, that means Yes, I think they are predisposed to be trashy. If I say I am not a racist, that means I am a racist.
Re-quoting you above to show that I am directly addressing you.
Typically the entire definition of a “race” is adapted due to immigration because who is considered “white” is a tool of power and so even when it is about Religion it is re-framed to be about race. But this will even happen with socioeconomic concerns but still re-framed as race.
This happened with Finns, who were denied citizenship because they were trying to unionize minors. The US government denied citizenship requests for some Finns during a period when only ‘whites’ could gain citizenship under a claim that the Chinese exclusion act applied to them.
Hispanic or Latino isn’t even a race, but it is perceived to and the whole debate is framed around it due to historical hate of Catholics. Which is a similar reason that the Irish were called ‘brachycephalic’ and considered part of the “alpine” race.
But all of this is a diversion, this is a thread about people of African decent, our slavery past and the fact that our fellow citizens are suffering under that same discrimination.
You seem to care more about these statues than you claim.
Culture doesn’t spring fully-formed from the brow of Zeus. Culture is a response to the environment that a group lives in. An environment that rewards education and hard work will result in a culture of education and hard work. Notice the chain of causality there, because you have it backwards.
Every single group of mistreated minorities has “culture” problems that go away when the group is removed from the source of mistreatment (or is so undifferentiatable from the wider group that they eventually blend in).
Look at it this way (and I assume you’re not one of those stupid assholes who think there are genetic behavioral differences between blacks and whites): Why do these people behave this way. Forget the “culture” shit, that’s not an explanation. Why are there these cultural problems. What’s causing the culture differences?
Again, you keep repeating the same falsehoods. :dubious:
And that post you quoted? The subject was a revolutionary war statue. Concerning, confederate monuments? If you would stop finding irrelevant links and posting the opposite of what you quote you’d know that I said they don’t bother me. These are simple sentences to parse. I’m not sure where the disconnect is occurring between your eyes and brain.
No it is you avoiding uncomfortable topics in a thread about us white men being complacent with systemic and overt racism because, due to no fault of our own, we lack the emotional tools to address bigotry and racism due to an odd issue where we view honest discussions or justifiable outbursts by those who are subject to racism as personal attacks.
You can retreat into a fearful hole of Trump like retorts about “False News” or you can man up, develop a thicker skin and address the problem.
To eat crow, in trying to try and amplify the OP’s voice, or to try and get people to talk about the problems or the challenges I have lead to the same result.
Huey Freeman, I am sorry for the hijack, I meant to try and help people move past their fear and discomfort in discussing the topic and I failed. I will try to only find examples to try and amplify your intended subject in the future vs battling white complacency in the future.
No, our culture perpetuates those conditions. Their “culture” adapts to the conditions that we have created and maintained.
Not making a distinction between what people do and your perception of their culture is pretty much the definition of prejudice.
Who asked you to?
Yes, absolutely, we are getting better. What lead you to think otherwise?
Now, that we are getting better doesn’t mean that we don’t have a long way to go.
In 1870, with the slaves free, people like yourself said, “We’re better than when we had slavery, right?”, and refusing any responsibility for the difficulties they may face.
Your house is cheaper because until recently, black people were not allowed to apply for homes in your neighborhood. You had less competition for your job because a large portion of our population has barriers put in place for getting an education to get a job like yours. You had less competition going to school because a large portion of our population is discouraged from even attempting to do well in lower schools.One of your skillets was probably sharing a similar cultural experience with the hiring manager.
Now, are these advantages ones that you needed to get where you are, maybe not, but they did help. And all those small advantages do add up over time, putting you into a much better position than someone who did not have the blessing to be born with your level of melanin in their skin. At the same time, those disadvantages also add up, and someone who has worked just as hard as you is going to be left far behind. Someone who has worked much hard than you, without your advantages, may be barley keeping up.
You should be a bit less impressed with yourself, you didn’t hit a triple, you were born on third base and think that that makes you better, while you mock the “losers” who actually have to work their way up with your contemptuous amusement.
Well, now you are just broad brush insulting people of other skin color for no reason other than that you choose to insult people for being of a different skin color.
Did you marry someone who grew up in adverse circumstances, or did you yourself grow up in such? Did you go to a school where you have to go through gun detectors (and that’s a whole different thread that those who talk about gun detectors in schools are also the ones who fight hardest about dealing with the gun problem). If you had to live that life, do you think that you would have gotten where you are today?
If so, then you are lying to yourself. If not, then how can you be so shitty to people who do have to go through these disadvantages?
I am getting it. You are for one, only pointing out when “he” does it (of course, you are creating an analogy here that equates all black people to one, which is in itself a bit prejudicial of you), but not pointing out when your neighbor does it, and flat out denying that you do it, even though I just watched you throw your Milky Way wrapper over his fence.
Goody for you. Did anyone say that you did? No, they just say that you benefit from a situation that other people are harmed by. Did you make a person not use a condom? No, well probably not. But, did you personally benefit from the policy of packing black people into poorer areas of town, yes, yes you did. Does the environment that we create due to those policies that you benefited from have detrimental effects on the people who we force to live int that environment? Sure it does.
Now, as to why exactly a person will have a child out of wedlock due to poverty is complicated, but it is a common thing. The more wealth a group has, the later people wait to have children, and they have fewer. So, it would only stand to reason that creating impoverished conditions would increase the level of irresponsibility.
As has been stated several times though, the number of black children born out of wedlock has been decreasing, so they are doing something right there, aren’t they? Why do you continue to shit on them?
Ah, threes your contemptuous humor again. You really like to pull that out, rather than acknowledge that you are in the wrong.
The usual straw man, except your attempt at mind reading doesn’t make any sense at all. Being trashy would be inferior, so if you are predisposed to think they are trashy, that is because you think that they are inferior, which would be racist in this context.
If you agree that the environment that our culture has created for them is a large part of the problem, then that’s not racist at all.
It’s odd that you have a problem understanding this. If you say that someone of another skin color is inferior due to their skin color, then that is racist. Are you relay going to argue that?
Now, you keep saying that black people are inferior, but you then try to say that if isn’t because of their skin color, but some other nebulous thing. What is that nebulous thing that you think makes black people inferior? Identify that, and then we can determine if your reasons for thinking that black people are inferior are racists or not.
Are these not examples of the difficulties of being black in America? We are exposed in this very thread to the attitudes that perpetuate the problems.
Now, what I have found is that, as a cis straight white guy, when the topic of race or gender or sexuality come up, my best role is to shut up and listen. Unfortunately, my other role is to try to get other white guys to shut up and listen, and so it often become a bunch of white guys arguing about things that do not directly (negatively) affect them, while all the actual minorities are driven out of the conversation.
If their culture adapted, they wouldn’t be poor. Asians and Jews are better examples of adaptation, because their cultures are successful rather than dysfunctional.
The only problem with this is that none of it is true.
My house is not cheaper than in the inner city; it is a lot more expensive. And my neighborhood has never been restricted. I know, because the developer lives down the street from me. (I heard the same from the black families in the neighborhood.)
No one was discouraged from doing well in any school I ever attended, or heard about. At least not from any of the teachers or administrators, who universally wanted everyone of their students to do well and succeed. I have heard horror stories of blacks attacking each other for doing well in school - “acting white” - but that kind of “crabs in a bucket” is part of the toxic culture already mentioned.
And my hiring manager is from India. I don’t speak Bengali.
No, and that’s the point. I grew up in a culture where people were expected to pay attention in school, obey the law, support their own children, and earn their own livings. I am perpetuating that culture to the best of my ability. Other people perpetuating a different and less adaptive culture don’t affect my success, or the success of those who share that culture, except to serve as examples of how a toxic culture can screw up your life.
If it is shitty to say “don’t try to blame the fact that you abandoned your family or had two children before you were twenty by two different men or fucked up in high school or robbed the neighborhood liquor store”, then unless and until you can point out how it was my fault, you will have to live with it.
As mentioned, no, no I did not.
Their toxic culture, which perpetuates their situation instead of encouraging them to overcome it. Try reading for comprehension, you preposterous buffoon.
Fuck you for continuously calling the culture of members of my family, wonderful and hard working Americans, “toxic”, based on nothing more than the color of their skin.
You’re repeating yourself over and over without listening or understanding what people are telling you. You don’t appear to be substantively engaging with anyone, you just want to repeatedly and ignorantly denigrate an entire race of people.
When I first joined this board you would occasionally say witty things. Maybe not as witty as Elucidator, but still relatively witty. You haven’t said anything clever in a long time–you’ve degenerated into an angry old racist man.
I hope you improve, but you probably won’t. Cognitive decline is a one-way street.
That may be true, but you weren’t harmed by it either. Black people, OTOH, are. Little black babies in poor neighborhoods aren’t born with murder and thuggery in their genes. They are faultlessly born to single mothers who maybe don’t have enough money to properly nourish them, and maybe they grow up without a good role model for a father (and maybe even not that good a role model for a mother). They grow up in a neighborhood patrolled by criminal gangs, and if they don’t choose a side by the time they’re a teenager, they’re more likely to get killed, because hey, nobody’s got their back. They attend inner-city schools which are shitholes, and because they’re perpetually hungry and paranoid, and nobody they know makes it out of the ghetto anyway, they give their homework a low priority. Drug use is epidemic among the upperclassmen - their role models - so soon they start doing it, too, and drop out of school and into a life of crime to support it.
A fortunate handful are able to escape this morass and achieve the potential they were born with, but the vast majority are not. If you were born under those circumstances, how high do you think you could achieve? If you were born under those circumstances, and failed to achieve the potential greatness you were born with, would it be your fault?
You benefited from a system designed to nurture and reward productive talent. The black kid from the inner city did not. This is not the same thing as saying you benefited from the crushing of that kid’s potential. This is also not the same thing as saying that that destructive system is your fault.
You can’t take a Crip or Blood with a stack of felony convictions and no diploma, and just hand him a job as an IT engineer; that’s asking a bit much. But as a voting taxpayer, maybe you could lend your support to social service programs that help low-income single moms raise well-nourished, well-disciplined kids. Maybe you could lend your support to programs that encourage fathers to make a commitment to the well-being of the children they’ve created. Better sex education and access to birth control so girls and young women don’t get pregnant so young/often. Better funding for inner-city schools so they aren’t such shitholes. Fund more policing to get gangs under control, and train and discipline the police so that they develop a sterling reputation for treating people fairly; black people just might be a little more willing to submit to detention or arrest if they believe they won’t get shot or beat to a pulp (e.g. tackling a fleeing suspect to the ground is reasonable; repeatedly punching and kicking him in the head afterward is beyond the pale, as is sodomizing him with a bathroom plunger).
Colleges these days are looking for applicants who are engaged in extracurricular activities; kids in rich suburban schools have easy access to those activities, but in those shithole schools, there’s no marching band, no debate club, no French-language class. IOW, those kids don’t have access to the same opportunities as the kids in the 'burbs; when they fill out a college applications, they end up having to leave a lot of blanks. So maybe college admissions officers ought to consider not just what extracurricular activities a kid has participated in, but what opportunities he’s had to do so. If a kid survives an inner-city shithole school with a 3.0, maybe he’s worth taking a chance on, even if he doesn’t have a glowing resume of extracurricular stuff.
Imagine for a moment that you wanted to change that culture of yours from within. How much pushback do you think you’d get? Do you think inner-city black people get pushback when they try to change their culture? Do you think women get pushback when they try to change their culture? How much pushback are you willing to tolerate? If you were an inner-city black kid, or a Pakistani girl, would you be willing to risk a bullet to the head to change the world around you?
Again that is NOT what you are doing. You quote people. Lie about the quote when the quote is right above your lie and than post irrelevant cites while mixing in a lecture.
If you want to discuss an issue honestly a good start is not being disingenuous about another’s point of view.
On the topic of the thread, yes black people have it harder, on average than wypipo. To what extent is it the evil racist or part of their own culture is debatable. I don’t think reality is binary. Should society do more to help? I think so. I am not opposed to class based affirmative action. I think that would help. I think decriminalizing drugs would help. I think parenting classes would help. I don’t think blaming the racist white man will do any good.
What the fuck are you talking about? Point to a post of mine if you have a problem with it. Or do you also think the culture of my family members is toxic if their skin is dark?
I don’t know your family. I live next to black people and their culture is just fine. I’ve lived next to different sets of black people and their culture was atrocious. I’ve lived with black people and their culture was frankly better than mine.
But that’s not what people who refer to toxic black culture are referring to and you know it. Just like white trash culture isn’t directed at all whites. These terms are mainly aimed at the lower classes of a group whose behavior and/or value system are counterproductive