So in the Romney/NAACP thread magellan01 basically calls Black people racist for voting for Obama despite the fact that Blacks overwhelmingly vote Democratic.
The existence of the NAACP, BET, college BSA, Miss Black America and things like that just fuel the fire. All those things were responses to racism and under-representation. I’d also like to point out Black people have no equivalent to the various White supremacy organizations and websites. Not to mention a New Deal Democrat.
In the past magellan01 might have used ‘reverse racism’ instead of just racism because for most of American history racism flowed one way. But now, and I see this mostly from conservatives, any accusation of white racism must be challenged and bonus points if you work in how Black people are just as racist if not more so.
I don’t know about the matters in the OP, but I do think teh amount of racism among black people is comparable to racism in other groups. The difference is, they hold less powerful positions so other races don’t suffer as much from black racism as the other way around.
That having been said, I’m white and I happened to stumble upon a recent movie about Queen Latifah as sassy beauty saloon owner. The racism in that movie made me very uncomfortable. I just chalked it up as an interesting learning experience (“oh, so this is how that feels to be the butt of stereotypes”) but yes, rather unpleasant.
Well I detected the sarcasm but my first association with chirp is birds. I thought he was going for “You’re saying a whole lot of nothing.” Chirp being a relatively small sound. I’ll remember for next time.
I’d guess that sheer numbers is also a factor, especially given how bigoted people often go out of their way to harass the target of their bigotry. A look at Wikipedia lists the black population as 12% of the US. Let’s be optimistic and say that only 10% of the non-black population has aggressively racist attitudes towards blacks. That means that black people are up against nearly their own numbers in people expressing racism toward them.
I’m a black woman who grew up in Atlanta (where the movie was set), so I should be able to defend that movie, but I can’t. In any other film, Alicia Silverstone’s character would have been celebrated for being different and allowed to have her own style. Just like Queen Latifah had been in Kevin Bacon’s salon’s. But instead, the message seemed to be that in order to be accepted as “down”, you have to “fix” your hair and your clothes. If you don’t, we will continue to give you the cold shoulder and be completely justified in doing so!
The movie wasn’t all bad, but I agree that there was racism in it.
Blacks are the “real racists” in the same way that atheists persecute Christians in America. It certainly happens, sometimes obnoxiously and particularly on an individual level, but many of the apparently systemic or organisational examples are just attempts to block the overwhelming flow of persecution coming the other way. And if that flow has diminished somewhat in recent years, that’s a good thing but it doesn’t mean they can quit just yet.
And often the people shouting loudest about how badly the majority are being persecuted are either butthurt about not being allowed to run roughshod over everyone else anymore or harboring some secret fear that once the minority group gains power they’ll do to the current majority all the crap that the majority had previously done to them. IM unscientific O, anyway.
I don’t totally follow the premise of the OP, is it: “white conservatives reflexively talk about black racism anytime white racism is brought up?” If that’s the premise I’d disagree. Black-on-white racism certainly comes up “frequently” in such discussions, but I know of many conversations even on these boards where threads on racism don’t go in that direction at all (even if a few posters might bring up the argument.)
Anyway, xenophobia is from any reading of history an extremely common if not pervasive trait in societies. These boards are American centric so we talk more about white-on-black racism, but to me that’s really just a typical “dislike or fear of the strange or different”, so it’s just part of that larger story of human xenophobia.
It’s different from society to society, but it really does appear to be almost omnipresent. The Romans weren’t really racially prejudice so much as they were culturally. Anyone with the exception of the Greeks who wasn’t Roman was considered a barbarian, but the Romans didn’t appear to think less of say, Egyptians and Northern Africans than they did of Gauls. If anything they probably respected the Northern Europeans less because of their relative lack of civilization in comparison.
In Europe for about a 1000 years race took a major backseat to religion and culture, so you would have people even from the same general “ethnic” group (ex. Germans or Slavs) hating each other because of cultural and religious differences that to an external observer are very minor. For there to be xenophobia in a society though the society itself needs to have a cohesive concept of “self” and then they need to be exposed to an “other.” So it would typically be seen in societies like ours with a majority population that sees itself as part of one cultural group but with smaller groups within society that see themselves as part of a different cultural group. The majority culture will be xenophobic but of course so will the minority culture, but the majority culture is typically the only one that can impose its will and discriminate. (Although South Africa proves that isn’t always true.)
In a recent bloggingheads.tv stream (~5mins) that I intermittently follow involving Glenn Loury (Brown University) and John McWhorter (The Root, What Language Is); Glenn and John talk about how the conservative movement tends to (unknowingly) drive out black/African-American right intellectuals by refusing them the comfort of ethnically identifying as black/AA.
In particular Glenn talks about how on the right everyone had their “circles”, but black self-identification was somehow seen as counter-conservative/leftist (or even “racist”) and suspect.
I dunno, many years ago a man I knew went off the deep end and made a website claiming that some of the east coast native American tribes were actually well developed kingdoms settled by Kings from Mali and these kingdoms were utterly destroyed and all records of them wiped out to prevent it from being known that Blacks originally owned North America. So there are definitely Black Supremacists out there.
A man I once knew who was a Vietnam vet, who in my experience only associated with white people (I’d been to any number of parties at his house where he was the only black person there) and only dated younger white women; suddenly took a turn and declared that white people were the source of all evil in the world and that ‘people of color’ knew no evil and lived in perfect harmony until The White Man taught them to lie and kill. I didn’t see him again for close to 10 years until he showed up at another large party that was 95% white and then went on about how his friends gave him grief for going to a ‘white’ party, but he was there to help us forget, just for one weekend, how ‘white’ we all were. :rolleyes:
When I lived in North Minneapolis, a young child still wearing a diaper stumbled up to me under the approving eyes of his older brothers, spat on my foot and said “fuck dat, white boy”. Kid wasn’t old enough to have experienced jack, but he’d sure been taught to hate white people.
I cannot begin to tell you what other vile hatred I’ve heard spewed by black people. Anyone who claims that black people cannot be racists is either ignorant or willfully stupid.
Are they “the real racists”? Now that’s just silly. Every group has it’s racists, and white America has plenty to go around. To deny that is to deny reality.
There is a definite community of black supremacists, with its share of kookery. One bizarre theory is that whites and other “races” aside from black were created by a mad scientist as minions. This gives the bonus of arguing who is less contaminated.
I don’t think you’re alone in noticing it, but perhaps mistaken in thinking it’s something new. “Blacks are the real racists/nobody cares when blacks are racist” has been a trope of the Right for a long time, along with “Democrats/liberals are the real racists, with their bigotry of low expectations! We just want to treat blacks like everyone else!”
Blacks always were racists. Just like hispanics, asians and every other type of human out there. The difference is that blacks have never (in the US anyway) been able to generate the numbers for the systemic racism that effected them in the past. So, while an individual black or even a black community might be racist against, say, hispanics or asians (or white folks), it really has little effect in the broader sense. However, when white folks perpetrated systemic racism in the past it most certainly DID have broader consequences.
If you want to see this in effect, and assuming you are white, try going and working in Japan, and let me know how it works out for you. And then consider…that’s actually not on par with the systemic racism that effected blacks (and other minorities) in the US in the past. But it will give you a taste, anyway.