I feel this fits under the Great Debates since it deals with racism which is an ever present topic in this forum.
K, did anybody watch the first episode of the real world? I did, and that country guy who was branded racists did not get a fair show IMHO. It seemed to me(me being the key word) that he was trying to sympathise with Malik and Coral. He was saying that inner city black cities were not as good as they should be and as a result the kids were not getting a good education. Now he did not word it very well. But, He never ever said that blacks were dumber than whites. He said that most were less educated because of the system. Know what I mean?
Sry about the repost, but the connection timed out 
Maybe you need a new server or somethin…
No, sorry, we don’t know what you mean.
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We have been discussing nothing BUT the fact that we need a new server for months now. K?
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For future reference–“trust the CGI” to grab your post, even if the operation times out. Check the thread or the forum to see whether it made it BEFORE you re-post. That will save the moderators from having to lock your extra threads.
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The trouble is, only those of us who happened to catch the first episode of “Real World” will be able to respond to your OP. If we don’t know who the “country guy” and Malik and Coral are/were, we have no idea what was said, and therefore we can’t discuss it.
However, you may certainly rephrase the OP (which BTW stands for “Original Post”, and means the first post in the thread, the opening shot, as it were), and try to make it more general. Give us a serious topic to debate, not “Didja catch the first episode of that TV show?” Tell us what YOUR thoughts are. Tell us how YOU feel about whatever happened on the show, and make it more general. Leave out all references to Malik and Coral, and just talk about the ideas.
Sorry to sound like I’m bustin’ ya, but you seem like promising material with some good potential, so I’m exerting myself. Anybody else, I’d just click the Back button and move on. 
I watched it. I don’t agree with what he said and yes the way he worded it made it sound like a page out of the KKK Bible (if such a dumb animal exist) but think Coral handeled it the wrong way. She just blew up at him instead of trying to find out where the hell that comment came from or WHY did he beelive such garble.
I don’t think he is the racist one,but his uncle has some issues.
as for that “system” sthick, it’s nonsense. I grew p in the “system” although my math skills are sub par,I tend to think I did fairly well in school.
Just to be precise, what you are trusting is actually php not cgi. The old software used cgi, which is a different technology that does many of the same things. But that was over a yeaar ago, and some expressions never die, even after becoming anachronistic. Fifty years from now there’ll be threads debating the origin of the expression “trust the cgi”, and we’ll start delving into long-lost (and sometimes wholly irrelevant) sources much like in the “mad as a hatter” argument.
[aside]There was a rather involved debate on the origin of the phrase “mad as a hatter” in which Duck Duck Goose and I took part, and which led to her reading Pendennis in search information on the British hat industry circa 1820. I later discovered that the work we were looking for was by Thackrah, not Thackeray. The debate did have the upside of providing DDG with the last two lines of her sig.[/aside]
And, no I didn’t happen to catch the show, so I have nothing useful to say about that either.
One of my earliest SDMB memories is of Gaudere’s GD reminder thread, “Post only once, please–trust the CGI!” I lived in mortal terror for a long time that I’d accidentally double post and be drummed off the boards…
So, what’s my sig got to do with it, again?
Oh, never mind…
Saw the episode in question. (My wife, to my chagrin, is addicted to “The Real World.”)
Mike was trying to empathize. He did it in a really stupid way that came off as racist. If he had half a brain in his head, he would have apologized right away and said, “Okay, look, I’m a dumb cracker. I know what I was trying to say, but it came out all wrong for reasons I don’t understand. Instead of trying to restate it and risking pissing you off even more, I’m going to keep my mouth shut for a while. Eventually maybe I’ll learn enough from you guys to discuss this intelligently. Please don’t blame me for my limited background.”
He didn’t, though. You can sort of see where he’s coming from, but I still want somebody to tie him down and wallop him with a Clue Stick.
Assuming my wife continues making us watch the show, it’s going to be an interesting couple of months.
I haven’t been watching the show, but I saw profiles of the new cast in several magazines. Just to clarify, Mike may have some rather . . . parochial attitudes about race, but I hope the show is not giving the impression that he’s some small-town guy (the use of the phrases “country guy” and “dumb cracker” lead me to believe this). Mike is from Parma, Ohio, which is the single largest suburb of Cleveland. It is a decent-sized city with a population of 88,000 people (the 9th largest in Ohio) and a population density of more than 4,000 people per square mile.
Parma does, unfortunately, have a rather sad racial history (Ukelele Ike and City Gent can back me up on this one). It’s comprised mainly of Polish and Italian families, many of them current and former UAW workers. The city of Parma was sued by the Department of Justice back in 1980 for violations of the Fair Housing Act, and the court found that Parma had " . . . engag[ed] in a series of actions undertaken for the purpose and effect of excluding African Americans from living in the virtually all-white suburban community . . . " A settlement was reached in 1995, but it hasn’t changed much. The atmosphere is still very intimidating for nonwhites. As recently as 1997, a black family that had moved in to Parma had a cross burned on their lawn.
The irony is that if one were to hang around Parmatown Mall (which is a HUGE mall), one would see lots and lots of public and Catholic school kids (there are about a zillion Catholic schools in Parma) walking around wearing and speaking the trappings of hip-hop culture. I guess it’s OK to appropriate their culture, as long as they aren’t your neighbors.