You seem to think this is about government intervention only. Not so.
Societal pressures are already taking care of many of these issues. You seem to advocate (correct me if I’m wrong) the stance that we’ve done what we can culturally and additional societal pressures are no longer necessary. And that further gains can only be achieved through government regulation.
I argue the opposite. We’ve reached the limited of what government regulation can achieve and can apply additional societal (not governmental) pressure to further reduce racism.
Why does any type of regulation have to be introduced at all? Racism is less tolerated with each generation. Societal pressures are having an effect. So, calling out BS whenever you see it apparently works.
In my opinion, racism can and will never die. it is so inherent in our culture and view that nothing can stop it. We can suppress it via laws (title 7, civil rights act, etc) but we cannot eliminate it. There will always be supremists and 1st amendment protesters.
let’s take a few examples
a white woman killed by a black man
5 latino males standing in front of a jewery store
a white’s car is stolen in a predominately black neighborhood
although we rather not say it, our preconception is 1) "them darkies love white women. 2) those latinos are going to rob the place, 3) a black probably stole his car.
Although stuble, these is still racism. We might not go around lynching blacks and latinos but we’re still judging them based on their skin color via the subconscious of our mind
I don’t disagree with anything you said there, except that demanding total conformity to any social norm is going to make everyone unhappy. I’m willing to put up with the Louis Farrakhans and the… I am failing to come up with a white racist whose celebrity even approaches Farrakhan’s…in exchange for the right to dissent.
But I happen to believe we can achieve a bit more racial equality without ruffling too many feathers. Or at least reducing the overall level of feather rufflage. And that we can achieve even more equality with even less feather rufflage with each generation. And I happen to think we can achieve it without even “demanding” conformity. That such conformity in attitude will develop naturally.
This seems to be apparent in the current generation divide. The under-30 set mostly doesn’t see it as such an onerous burden to achieve this mindset, while older people see it as a cultural attitude imposed from outside.
You are free to disagree and may even be correct that it’s not possible. But it’s not a bad thing to try for a while.
Change that from “racism” to “xenophobia” and I would probably agree with you. Perceived race is hardly the only way that humans can use to identify in-groups and out-groups.
I’m sorry, but this strikes me as silly.
In point 1, I would first want to know who were the actual people involved before I made any judgment regarding the killer. I would certainly never presume that “darkies love white women,” and I doubt that it would even occur to me.
In point 2, I would make no presumption about the actions of the group unless they actually began taking things from the store. It would simply never occur to me to leap to a conclusion that any group of any sort outside a store was there with the intent to rob.
Point 3 is pretty much redundant. If a black person’s car was stolen in a predominantly black neighborhood, I would also tend to think that a black person, (probably a young male, as well), was the thief. In a white neighborhood, I would tend to guess that a car had been stolen by a (young, male), white person, regardless whether the owner was white, black, or lavender.
Xenophobia is a common human trait and in a society in which so much effort has been invested in using perceived race as the marker for in-group and out-group identification, that xenophobia will manifest as racism, but I doubt that racism, per se, is a universal human condition. I have been in situations where language patterns identified the in-group and out-groups and all the folks, black or white, included or excluded others based on whether they perceived the others as “Southerners” or “Northerners.” Certainly, styles of dress are often used to identify those “like me” or “unlike me” to a great degree in places where neighborhoods have been sufficiently integrated for long enough that perceived race is no longer a primary identification marker.
IMO you saw only the skin. I lived in Okinawa for 8 years. For the last 4 of those I was in my early teens and travelled over a fair bit of the island. One you get passed the obligatory obsequiousness of the folks that depend on business with the bases, you get a fair amount of racial hostility. Part of this I’m sure is the stress of dealing with young military men that have no idea how to behave as guests in another country.
Yes, it’s called the Tea Party. The trend is Tea Party member says something vile and racist using weasel “code words” when we all know what they mean, and then their apologists say:
It can’t be racist cus he said “urban” not the N-word,
and 2) Even if he did use the N-word it’s true so it’s not racist.
Even on this board I have been chastised by mods for calling someone racist who JUST said something obviously racist.
While a number of Tea Party folks have been racist, the popular theme on the SDMB, that they are all (or predominantly) racist and that their racism is the motivation behind their opposition to Obama’s policies, appears to be greatly exaggerated.
Aside from a very few, widely quoted, Tea Bag proponents, there has been very little in their overall effort that is even concerned with race.
I find the overwhelming number of them to be ill-informed, (or Fox informed, which amounts to the same thing), but the only time I have seen racist statements from them has been when some third tier local twit has his or her awkward comments dragged out for examination and ridicule by Daily KOS or some similar outlet.
= = =
As for being chastised for calling someone racist, the simple solution to that is to address the arguments a poster makes and refrain from attacking the poster.
I don’t even understand what you mean by 1, I’ve never encountered that stereotype.
For 2, that depends on a number of things. Attire and demeanor mean a LOT more than race in these situations, maybe if they were dressed really grungy, or like gangstas I’d wonder that, but that’s true of any race. A LOT of what appears to be racism is tied to attire, from my observations people act much differently around a black person with a suit and tie versus a black person with sagging pants and the local gang colors. The problem is that while there are a number of white people who dress like that, depending on where you live hispanics or black people (or both, or other) may be much more likely to dress like that (since they’re more likely to be poor and poor people are more likely to be involved in… less scrupulous subcultures) so what is a general fear of people flaunting around their gang signs appears to be racism until you realize that it’s not just minorities that triggers the unease.
For 3… that’s statistics, not that blacks are more likely to steal cars (though to to average social stratification, poverty levels, etc etc it may or may not technically be true), but because when your neighborhood is predominately one race statistically it’s more likely that someone of that race took the car no matter whether it’s black, white, or fuchsia people populating it.
None of this is to say racism doesn’t exist, but the examples you give are a bit silly.
Surely you are joking. After 8 years of Bush’s pet wars that our grandchildren will be paying off, suddenly Obama is barely in office before they are screaming from the rafters about “spending”.
I will admit that at the top the Koch brothers are just rich fucks trying to stay rich, but they are using the hoardes of overt and latent racists to do their bidding by playing around with racial imagery. I’m sorry “Take back OUR AMERICA” didn’t append “from our nigger president” so you could comprehend what the message is saying without saying, it’s apparently too subtle for you.
Neither of those things mean anything. I’m black AND white, so I trump you both, now what?
My point, which you seem to be ignoring, is that I know Tea Partiers (okay, I only referred to one, but I can think of several others) who are quite clearly not racist. Painting them all with the racist brush is unfair, unkind, perverse, and stupid.
I never said that every single individual tea party member is racist. But the party is. I know many black muslims that just want to raise their people out of poverty too, but the Nation of Islam is not even debateably not racist.
BTW I am not going to take your word for it either that they aren’t racist. “My best friend is black” is almost a laughably cliched defense racists use. My dad is a true-blue racist white man, he dislikes black people. Doesn’t stop him from only dating black women exclusively. Racism has more shades than you give credit for I think.
I’m sure no one is foolish enough to claim that all members of a group are bigoted in that way – I’m sure there were at least some members of the Nazi Party in Germany in the war years that didn’t actually hold personal anti-Semitic views – but the strategic behavior of the party is suspect.
The Tea Party claimed to be against excessive taxation – but once in Congress, its members started to argue against abortion rights, against environmental laws, and against civil rights laws designed to rein in the worst aspects of racism. Also, as noted, the grotesque flip-flop regarding the deficit seemed absurdly facile.
Yes, only a few members of the Tea Party actually attended rallies bearing racist placards – and that got policed very quickly by the organizers. But, for a few months, every Tea Part rally I saw had at least one blatantly racist placard in sight.
One huge problem, of course, is selective perception. If a white guy rips me off in a parking lot, I think, “Rotten guy.” If a black guy rips me off, I think, “Rotten black guy.” It’s bad; it’s foolish and fallacious, but it is part of the way (intrinsically flawed!) that we perceive reality.
A woman I know got raped. She said, in a moment of candor, that she was glad it was a white man who raped her, because, otherwise, she would have had racist thoughts regarding the matter. She knows full well that this would be fallacious, but she also knows that it’s the way our perception works. (Especially when fueled by far too many dramatic depictions of criminals in tv and movies.)