I think you’re misunderstanding. Look at the poll. “Very, very racist” would be a step below “extraordinarily racist”. (Edit: in terms of a value judgment, being less racist than “most racist” is certainly “better” but I don’t think MrDibble just means the rating below “most racist” as in worse.)
That makes no sense and I should probably get some caffeine.
And three of the other top 4 front runners are minorities.
This is the dichotomy. Actual racial bias in the US is going down, and has been for a long time, yet the importance of race is increasing. Everything, and I mean everything, is now viewed through the context of race. This is a perfect example. Police brutalizing citizens isn’t news nor is it debated often on this board. What is, is (white) Police brutalizing black citizens. So now it’s see as a racial divide as opposed to a divide between authoritarian/non-authoritarian view points.
I said “not terribly racist”, because of the things Tamerlane mentions, and the fact that the vast majority of the racism in the country is probably not actually racism per-se, but classism that’s getting wrapped up as racism due to the strong associations of black people with poverty and poverty behaviors. When people go home after work from the inner city to the lily-white suburbs, it’s not because they don’t want to live by black people or hispanic people, it’s because they don’t want to live by poor people and the crime that typically attends poverty, or they don’t want their children going to schools where the lion’s share of resources are spent combatting issues of poverty instead of academic excellence. But if you’re somewhere like say… Dallas, those poor people are overwhelmingly black or hispanic, so people confuse it with racism.
Plus, even as abhorrent as it was, the slavery era still pales in contrast to ethnic cleansing and genocides, both of which have happened elsewhere in history.
So in that light, I think that the actual racism out there isn’t as bad as otherwise claimed.
Who favor some pretty racist policies.
Actually, I think that the proliferation of cameras have captured systemic racist violence in a new way. In the past, white America could dismiss the claims of minorities who had been victimized by police as exaggerating. Now, as we see in this very thread, people have to twist themselves into new kinds of knots to avoid seeing the obvious racism in our justice system.
I voted “pretty damn racist” not because I think racism is some all-consuming debilitating presence equal to what was experienced years ago, but because racism is still costing people their lives in this country. We are far from being out of the woods.
Cops routinely get away with killing black people because of some non-zero probability that they might be a threat, no matter how absurd the situation. So you see 12 year-old boys gunned down and a gaggle of professionals coming up with tortured explanations for how this outcome was justified. Same with the Utah fellow dressed in cosplay gear who was gunned down for no good reason. To an extent the mainstream is starting to question this pattern, but only after delayed phase shift in public consciousness. Even still, for the most part, we still accept this crap out of habit.
But compare and contrast this to armed maniacs like the one in Colorado who kill and maim both cops and citizens, and yet still manage to be apprehended without being gunned down. Or the young chap who shot up the Colorado theatre a couple years back. Or the recent Waffle House guy. Why are the trigger fingers so twitchy when it comes to potential threats, but so restrained when it comes to known ones?
It’s this pattern (and patterns like it) that make it hard to say we’re anywhere close to a post-racial America.
I’m not entirely sold on that poll. I’m not sure it was constructed well (here’s the Washington Post’s presentation of the data - )
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/11/17/white-americans-long-for-the-1950s-when-they-werent-such-victims-of-reverse-discrimination/
For example, I don’t think it’s reasonable to separate the results for the Tea Parties from the results for the Republicans.
But aside from that, the fact that some white people think they face the same sort of discrimination as faced by blacks is, in itself, a manifestation of racism. As the article you quoted points out:
It’s a statement of fact that white people have more advantages in America - we hold more positions of authority, more elected office, more chances for higher incomes and better education. We have more money. We have better life expectencies. 96% of our senators and 4/5 of Representatives are White.
There is simply no way to support the statement that white people, on the whole, face the same sort of lack of opportunities that non-white people do. Imagining themselves the victims of a conspiracy of non-whites and race-traitors is deeply, deeply, racist.
I said the US is pretty damn racist. It’s getting better, and I’m grateful, but history didn’t stop in 1960. It might not start to get seriously better until all the people who were alive in 1960, die off.
Nobody asked, but I would also say, the US is very, very, sexist. It went unremarked at the Post that women all do way worse than men of the same race. And I have no doubt that one could find any number of poll responses from men saying that they face just as much discrimination as women do. People at the top hate it when the underlings get restless.
Is it a manifestation of racism that some nonwhite people in that poll agreed?
The most racist people I have ever meet are black men.
Pretty damned racist and potentially getting worse during the Obama presidency, especially here in the south. Whites who relied on manufacturing have been growing more bitter since the recession and seek someone to blame for their hardship. Apparently the easiest targets are the black president, their stereotypical idea of welfare-reliant minorities, and immigrants taking their good jobs. There has ever been a latent racism here; now it is coming out into the light and it freaks me out.
Now I’d like to address the above comments about whites leaving/avoiding black neighborhoods. I grew up in an all white area, and I mean ALL white. I didn’t have a single black friend until college.
I’ve actually been outside a vehicle in a black neighborhood twice in my life. The first time I stopped at a gas station, was politely told by a young black man that I should give him a tip for him washing my window (he didn’t wash my window, nor would he) and before I could leave I was blocked in to my space by two cars full of black men. Luckily the guy I “tipped” interceded and told them I was alright and they let me leave, which was good because I needed to change my pants.
The second time I was going to a baseball game and we walked through a predominately black, poor neighborhood. A very large black man waved at me from across the street, so I politely waved back. He then started screaming obscenities at me and threatening to kill me and do unspeakable things to my girlfriend. We skeedaddled.
I say this to note that fact that white people sort of stand out in black communities and, as any people who have been systematically mistreated for hundreds of years for the color are their skin are justified to be, some of them are bitter and hateful toward white people in general. That’s not to say white people have the right to separate themselves and pretend it’s not their problem, I just find it ridiculous to think that a white person should move to a black community and invest themselves in improving it when it very well could be dangerous to their very lives and their are alternatives. My black friends laugh at the notion of a white person moving to the ghetto because they always wanted out. They don’t see a willingness to change within their communities and find it insulting and condescending that white people think it is their moral obligation to come in and “fix it.”
There’s a very high-minded white man here at work who actually did move to a black community with his wife. I think he lasted about 6 months. His house was broken into 3 times and his car was vandalized. I’m sure he made an effort to embed himself in the community, but I can’t imagine a less well-equipped individual to do so. He has ideals but can’t seem to fuse them with the reality that these folks have led more difficult lives than he can imagine and don’t necessarily want or need his help.
kopek, I like what you’re saying in post #29, but to me it seems utopian. White people simply stand out as targets in black neighborhoods, and (according to a black friend who once begged me not to go home with him to see his family in Memphis) there are black people who think white people deserve what suffering they get because they don’t have to suffer simply for existing. You can’t expect people to expose themselves to needless danger and persecution, even in the pursuit of high ideals, when there is a simple alternative.
I picked “not particuarly racist” because there was no option that said “it doesn’t make all that much difference”.
The problems of the black community in the US are mostly not caused by white racism, and can’t be fixed by blaming them on white racism. Black people get shot disproportionately by police because black people commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime. Black people are disproportionately poor because they have disproportionately high rates of single motherhood, especially teen-age single motherhood. White people are afraid of black criminals not because of racism, but because a black person is eight times more likely to commit a violent crime against a white person than vice versa. Black males between 15-34 commit more than 30% of rapes, murders, manslaughters, assaults, and robberies, yet whites are twice as likely to be shot by police as blacks. (Cite, cite, cite, as if it were going to do any good.)
Regards,
Shodan
Such as?
The tricky part comes into explaining why all of this is true. Is it because the system today is racist or are we seeing the effects of past racism? By that, I mean is the relative poor success rate for black people due to racism or because black people are much much poorer than white people? Without the ability to do double blind experiments, it will always ultimately come to opinion.
This just isn’t true. For example being black is an advantage in college admissions. There is a huge official push to combat informal racism. Virtually every university, major corporation, and both political parties have programs to increase their diversity by preferentially recruiting and promoting minorities. Whether that is enough to offset the racism that exists is again, a matter of opinion.
We could pick apart all of these stats, but most of them come down to two simple facts: (1) we disproportionately police black Americans; (2) two centuries of plunder made and continue to make black Americans disproportionately poor and underserved.
It is a tenet of modern racism that racism ended in 1960 and now it’s mostly failed black morality that leads to social problems.
Considering that senators represent states, and that representatives represent districts, these aren’t at all unreasonable percentages, considering that white people make up about 70% of the US population. Even in states with a high black population like Mississippi, there’s still a white majority, so having white senators doesn’t seem all that unusual. And 4/5 is just 10% higher than 70%- enough to be attributed to some combination of gerrymandering, low voter turnout and other factors that aren’t necessarily strictly racist or the result of some kind of white privilege.
I think there’s a notion that the black population is far larger than it is, because it’s somewhat overrepresented in the media, and because in many large cities, it’s a large segment of the population. But in the nation as a whole, it’s about 12%.
This sounds nicer, kind of plausible. I don’t think it’s really true.
Oh, there’s prejudice against poor people, to be sure, and there’s overlap and confusion, between that and racism. But poor white people are treated much better than poor black people in many contexts (the police encounters mentioned being one).
Also significantly–non-poor black people still often get the shit, in countless ways that white people can easily miss.
Being white, I have the privilege of passing various standards and barriers without necessarily noticing that they exist. Most of the time. There’s a thread somewhere where I talked about being treated poorly in a “nice” restaurant, because my date was black. There was no way anyone could have construed her as low-class; she was, honestly, the best-dressed person in the place, and carried herself impeccably. Didn’t matter; we were, unmistakably, unwelcome. It was a minor incident, in the scheme of things, didn’t even ruin our night, but it was instructive in its clarity. There was nothing she could have done to be ‘good enough’ for them. And there was nothing I could have done about it, except not bring her in there.
It’s hard to judge this sort of thing on a continuum. If we had open apartheid, it would be easy to say that we were an extremely racist society. But we don’t, and so almost all the evidence will be anecdotal.
I could tell you that my (white) wife and (brown) I live in a strongly Republican suburb but have never faced any prejudice from our neighbors, as far as we can tell. I could tell you I’m better paid than my equally qualified white co-worker.
I could also tell you that when we went to a country club about half an hour away to scout it as a wedding venue in 2009, we were given a very distinct impression that our wedding would not be welcome there. Since we are both well-groomed professionals and they hadn’t asked for any information from us yet (and they advertised as a wedding venue) it was fairly clear we were being singled out as an “interracial” couple.
Mississippi is more than one-third black. Absent racism, shouldn’t we expect one-third or so of its Senators, over time, to be black?
Why do you conclude that the big disparities in police shootings of black people are entirely explained by disparities in crime? In many cities, such as Ferguson MO, black drivers are far more likely to be pulled over to be searched even though these searches result in less contraband found than for white drivers searched. Do you believe that it’s not possible that some sort of systemic racism, whether due to individual beliefs (conscious or unconscious), training, or something else, are involved?
Considering that, through nearly all of American history, it’s entirely reasonable and would be uncontroversial to conclude that black people were probably disproportionately mistreated by police due to their race, it seems very likely to me that some of the factors that caused this in the past may still be present today.
I’m saying this from the actual numbersfor incarceration rates.
No, you’re right, my bad, “one better” is right.
This statement is false (based on the limited stats available) – more white people may be killed by police than black people overall, but due to the large differences in population size, individual black people are far more likely, statistically (up to 21 times, if young black men are compared to young white men), to be shot by police than individual white people, based on the limited stats we have.
“Twice as many whites are killed by police as blacks” is not at all the same as “whites are twice as likely to be shot by police as blacks”.