Valid point. I was speaking in an overall sense. I hadn’t read that particular link when I posted previously. I agree 100% that the actions of the hotel employee were very much an extreme overreaction to a black man making a phone call. In no way was I trying to downplay the incident, or even attempt to justify it.
[superdude]how dare you link to that story without apologizing to me, a white man, for not explicitly stating that there are good white guys around[/superdude]
What’s important for you as a white man is that it’s not important that “not all white people” don’t think or behave in such a manner. What’s important is that a white man like you understand that even if a minority of white people have that mentality, they can cause disproportionate harm, because the police, the prosecutors, the judges, the bailiffs, the jailers, the prison wardens are mostly white, and the institutions have inherited a system of white supremacy.
You’d look better if you wouldn’t defend yourself. “Hey, I never owned any slaves!”
Understood. But whether you owned or didn’t own slaves, blacks today are paying that price.
What would be the solution for this? Unless we achieve equal population distribution among the races, meaning 20% Asian, 20% Hispanic, 20% black, 20% white, 20% Polynesian, or some variation thereof, there will always be disparity in occupation.
Which brings up another question. Suppose, I dunno, let’s say Hispanics, let’s say Hispanics grow immensely over 100 years and in 2118 make up 60% of the population, and white people got White Plague and died off to just 12% of the population. Would white people begin anew the argument made by minorities a hundred years prior about how, “Even if just a tiny percent of Hispanics are racist, they cause immense harm because they make up most of the positions of power”?
At some point, don’t we all sort of have to concede that maybe this line of thinking is untenable, and that the most reasonable approach would be to stamp out racism where we see it, but that this whole problem of having “too many” of a race in the population will never end?
Or is this a uniquely American problem, with our white supremacist past? At what point is that considered no longer a factor? I’m assuming that in Germany, police, prosecutors, judges, bailiffs, jailers, and prison wardens are mostly German, yet nobody suggests it only takes one Nazi to cause great harm, and that Germans have inherited a system of Nazism.
Yes, it’s a uniquely American problem because Americans have never dealt with the issue of race sincerely. We still use a Constitution that, despite amendments, still exists – the same Constitution that deemed African Americans were 3/5 people before 1865, and after 1865, allowed white terrorism in the South with impunity. But worst of all, in modern times, when African Americans were trying to join the middle class, the US government essentially deemed federal assistance of any kind as an undeserved black handout, thus questioning the fitness of those who inherited a life of injustice.
What’s needed is a revolution of sorts - an economy in which we use capitalist gains to redistribute wealth to all people of all income levels. The solution is that the oligarch class, the Silicon Valley class, will have to start paying money in taxation to support education, food, and housing of the poor and working poor. And if they aren’t willing to do that, then their board members should be rounded up and put in jail.
Dude, you’ve some points going on in your current melt-down, but repeating flat-out incorrect stuff doesn’t help your case. The constitution never said Blacks were three-fifths people, like some ingredient for “people pie”. It said the enslaved population would be counted at 3/5 of the total number; this was obviously to get the slave states to sign the new document.
How many non-slave blacks were there in this country when the constitution was ratified? If that is your point, that “blacks” and “slaves” were not congruent groups, then it seems like a relevant question, and I believe that it was a small percentage. Remember that when the constitution was ratified, slavery was not limited to the south.
My reaction to your post, due to facts like this and others, is that you are drawing a distinction without much of a difference. Asahi’s solution may not be practical (or it might in some form) but his description of the problem, as far as it goes, is spot on.
That’s one thing that always struck me – if you watch documentaries about the Klan or whatever, it always seems like white surpemacists or skinheads are like, the WORST example of the white – hell, HUMAN race out there.
(It’s like they’ll interview some Klansman and he’ll have this huge beer gut, half of his teeth are missing, the other half are yellow, his eyes point in different directions, etc)
And that is the whole point. When they are at the bottom, and they know that they are at the bottom, they need someone to be below them. Race is as good* a reason as any.
Except that I’m not advocating that the State nationalize resources and centralize the economy. The bulk of economic production and consumption ought to remain in the hands of the private, free citizens of the land. But the wealth that it generates should be distributed more equality and, most of all, invested wisely so that ordinary people have true freedom. A people cannot be free if they’re worried about crime, worried about being harassed and shot by law enforcement, worried about debt, worried about not having affordable access to healthcare, worried further about just one weekend in the hospital forcing them into bankruptcy. People in perpetual poverty or in perpetual danger of becoming hopeless poor are not free. Moreover, a society in which there is such disproportionate income and wealth will eventually become oppressive politically, not just socially.
The principal difference between the United States and Germany is that Germany attempted to pay for its sins. We may argue whether Germany has been effective or sincere but no one can say Germany did not take concrete steps to right the wrong so the Nazism. We can set aside the reparations and pimping out the State of Israel with an alleged "nuclear program", Germany has laws that expressly forbid Holocaust denial and other forms of anti-Semitism. The United States doesn’t have the courage to go through soul searching required to come to terms with its racist past. Racism is so integral to fabric of this country, that I’m certain the U.S would self-destruct if it tried right the wrongs of its past.