Modern racism as double standards rather than overt bigotry and segregation

Great Debates
1

In this video it shows what happens when a white male, a black male and an attractive white woman all attempt to steal a bicycle.

With the attractive woman, people try to help her. With the white guy people are suspicious but leave him alone. With the black guy people intervene, call the cops, etc.

And this makes me also think about protests against abuse and government brutality. When Cliven Bundy was protesting what he thought was government and law enforcement overreach (even when his followers were armed) he was a hero. But when black lives matters engaged in peaceful protests (or people like Colin Kaepernick engage in peaceful protests) it seemed many people, including some of the same people explode in rage.

Trump ran on a platform of blaming the problems in rural white america on other people (the government in various ways, the Chinese, liberal elitists concerned about climate change). But the problems in inner city black america are due to moral failings. The crack epidemic in black america was a moral failing that required harsh law enforcement to solve it. The heroin epidemic in rural white america is a health emergency that requires treatment, naloxone and economic opportunities.

Black community had unemployment of 10% for years, but when the great recession happened and the white community had a 10% level, it became a national emergency. Black juveniles killed people for years in the ghetto, but when white juveniles started shooting up schools in the suburbs it became a national emergency. etc.

So I guess my debate is this. Rather than saying racism is whether you say offensive words or not, or whether you openly call for segregation, etc. isn’t modern racism more when you take problems in one community less seriously, you are more likely to blame them, and you are more likely to promote harsh, brutal solutions (assuming you don’t get enraged that they even mention having a problem in the first place) compared to how you react to the more mainstream community?

Like is there an unwritten social totem pole, and the higher you are on it the more people defer to you, make excuses for you, take your problems seriously, assist you, etc. but the lower you are the more they ignore your problems, blame you for them, confront and insult you, promote brutal solutions to your problems if they admit they exist at all, etc.

I’m not a big fan of how some on the left decry things they don’t like as racism, I think it shuts down discussion. I also think pretty much everyone is racist or sexist. Anti-semitism is a bigger issues in the black and latino community than the white community. Lots of Chinese, Japanese and Koreans hate each other. So I don’t think racism is something that only happens when whites do it to blacks. Tribalism is something that is built into human nature, and everyone does it to varying degrees. I disagree with the left when they try to portray tribalism and social heirarchies as only happening through a western lens of hetero white christian men trying to oppress everyone who isn’t a hetero white christian man. People who aren’t hetero white christian men have their own oppressed groups too (Muslims in the middle east with gays and women. Blacks or latinos with anti-semitism, asian women who are racist, communists oppressing racial minorities, etc).

But instead of looking for overt signs of bigotry like we usually do (segregation, purges, overt clamping down on civil or human rights, etc), is modern tribalism the more subtle form of ‘our problems are serious and due to injustice, your problems are irrelevant and due to your own failings. Our problems need humane solutions and funding. Your problems need brutal solutions and personal responsibility. Our problems deserve attention, you should be punished for even discussing yours’. Is this the softer side of modern bigotry?

2

Yes.

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3

Obviously, sexism is a bigger problem since none of the men got offers of helping to steal a bike.
Your examples are awful. There is very little similarity between Keapernik and Bundy. The crack epidemic and the heroin crisises are much different. Mass school shootings are different than isolated shootings. The structural unemployment rate is different for the black community and the white community.

4

It can be, but one can’t assume so unless you can establish that the problems of the two groups are really the same and that the different attitude is unjustified. Is it really the case that Bundy is a hero and Kaepernick is a jerk simply because one is white and the other black?

They say “when the upper class sneezes the lower class gets pneumonia”. If unemployment is 10% among blacks even when we aren’t in recession, and white or Latino or Asian unemployment only gets that high during a recession, that would indicate that there is more going on than just the economy. As well as the fact that minorities are, well, minorities - a 10% unemployment rate in the general population is going to affect a lot more people than if 10% of 13% of the population is jobless.

Regards,
Shodan

5

I basically agree.

Regarding the woman in the video, though, I think this is a lot more than racism/sexism at work. An attractive young woman has a desirable commodity available for exchange - some people will help her because they’re hoping to sleep with her. If you had a fourth person out there in a three-piece suit with a Rolex, I think you’d see people offering to help him in the same way, though his desirable commodity is money/jobs/influence. You’re not going to stamp out this behavior as long as one person wants something from another person, but we can certainly work toward awareness of it.

6

Fundamental Attribution Error

That’s the central fallacy of modern conservatism. When other people fail it’s because they suck and deserve it, when we fail it’s all the forces arrayed against straight white traditionally-minded christian males. Introspection is a sign of weakness.

7

I wouldn’t say it’s so much a totem pole, as it’s more of a matter of otherness. For most of white America, the black community is composed of OTHER PEOPLE, who look different, who talk different, who ostensibly hold different values, and have different cultural norms and mores, and who are subject to(? - not sure of the right word choice) specific stereotypes about them.

So when there’s a drug epidemic and associated violence in the black community, it’s perceived as something that THOSE PEOPLE do, and it’s filtered through the lens of whatever stereotypes they have for them, since there’s not all that much interaction, and is viewed as a moral failing, because the underlying issues aren’t understood.

Meanwhile, when Ed Earl and Billy Joe have kids who are meth heads and prescription drug users, it’s still considered a moral failing, but the rest of the community understands, because they’re not part of the out group.

Just FYI, a lot of white America looks at the rural drug problem as being just as much of a moral failing of toothless hillbillies as it does the drug problem in black communities as being a moral failing of violent thugs.

8

The crack problem was a big deal in America during the late 80s and early 90s. It was not ignored or swept under the rug because it mostly affected black people.
Legislation was passed to address the crack scourge and to imprison crack dealers. One of the leading voices calling for this response was the Congressional Black Caucus. This has been swept down the memory hole and now people act like laws trying to get rid of crack were targeting black people.
So if white people ignore a problem that is because of racism and if they try to fix the problem that is racism too. Apparently, everything is racism. We played you a jig and you wouldn’t dance, we played you a dirge and you wouldn’t cry.

9

I think the issue kind of transcends race. It 's more a, “I will treat people well if I already like or am attracted to them. If not, not.”

So the attractive woman, as someone pointed out, has attractiveness and gender that elicits favorable treatment. In most people’s mind, she was a desirable person “We need more of her in America.”

When a black man, or a man in general, does the same, that doesn’t get the same treatment, because it was a “We need less of their type.”

In other words, it’s the cart before the horse.

10

But if you showed a black woman trying to steal a bike…yeah, not going anywhere.

11

Not to mention that a YouTube clip isn’t exactly a rigorous scientific investigation. It might be interesting to see the un-edited version of the video.

These things don’t always work out as planned. I remember the YouTube thing of the woman walking around New York that was supposed to highlight sexism. Then the makers of the clip got called racist because they edited to show the worst examples they could find of street harassment, and most of the worst was from black or Hispanic men.

Regards,
Shodan

12

I remember that criticism, but when I watched the video very carefully, I found several instances of harassment and cat-calling from white men (and several from non-white men). IIRC, there was a thread about it and I gave the timestamps of the white cat-callers.

13

I think modern racism also includes the old-fashioned racism (“I don’t like those niggers and spics”). But yes, I think racism is often manifested in the ways you describe, Wesley.

It’s a matter of empathy. People are more likely to feel empathy for people who 1) look like, 2) talk like, and 3) act like them and their family members. So when there’s a terroristic attack in Europe, Americans express grief and sorrow on their Facebook pages. But let the same thing happen in Africa or Asia, and there will be crickets. Because Europeans visually resemble the majority of Americans and Americans have cultural familiarity with European countries. At least the western ones.

If you feel empathy for someone, it becomes easier to care about them. It becomes easier to overlook or excuse their flaws.

The biggest double standard of them all right now? Obama versus Trump. Take all the personal flaws that Trump has (impulsive, arrogant, showboating, womanizer, foul mouth , anti-intellectual, lying, adulterer, shady businessman, likely cocaine user) and pretend they belong to Obama. Ain’t no way Obama would have been elected with that kind of profile. The Dems would have been a laughingstock for trying to elevate a “nigger” stereotype to the highest officer–and rightfully so! But the rich white guy can get away with such trifling behavior because HEY! HE’S ONE OF US!!

14

Yes. And also a matter of lazy habits of thought, sometimes due to explicit teaching in childhood–‘those people are all ________ ."’

This was the type of question used in some polling designed to explain the types of people who were Trump supporters as compared with Clinton supporters. If you ask people in a poll ‘are you bigoted,’ of course they will say ‘no.’ But if you ask them if _______ people are ‘more likely to be violent,’ they may well say yes-----and would resent any implication that such generalizing is bigotry.

To them, the generalizing is just ‘common sense’ and they feel confident that holding such views does not make them racist. (They are wrong, but that’s what they believe.)

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-race-idUSKCN0ZE2SW

15

Trump speaks like someone who couldn’t hack the 5th grade and has hair that looks like a batch of rotten cotton candy. These two attributes alone would have disqualified Obama from being treated like anything except a joke.

16

So the reasons Obama was elected was that he is articulate and has good hair.

17

No, but without those characteristics, he never would have had a chance, unlike Trump. The standards are different, as every black professional (including members of my family) I’ve ever spoken to has told me.

18

This doesn’t strike me as an example of the OP’s attitude of ‘our problems are serious and due to injustice, your problems are irrelevant and due to your own failings. Our problems need humane solutions and funding. Your problems need brutal solutions and personal responsibility. Our problems deserve attention, you should be punished for even discussing yours’.

Also that, as is often true, it will depend on how the question “are blacks more violent” is interpreted. If you interpret it as “are all blacks murderous savages” you can argue that saying Yes is bigoted. If you interpret it as “do blacks make up about 13% of the population but commit about half of all the murders” then possibly not.

Regards,
Shodan

19

There are lots of things in between, which are probably the ones that there will be more uncertainty and disagreement about.

20

There is no way to know that. Trump is not as articulate of Obama but he has other advantages, such as name recognition and a salesman’s persuasiveness. Each candidate is judged as a whole so there is no way to know what the specific standards are. For instance, Obama had two years experience in the Senate when he was elected and defeated a white candidate who had twenty years of experience. Does that mean white people have to meet a higher standard, or in that one particular case oratory was more valued than experience?