Set aside the drum corps team, let’s make it a clogging team. If you proposed a clogging team at your school, I know I wouldn’t mind. Especially if white kids were traditionally underserved in your community and were struggling in school and the clogging team would be likely to help this population succeed.
But black people and white people have had historically different experiences in this country, and you can’t just Ctrl+H race words and have an analogous situation. To do that you gotta go back: were the white kids from families that faced centuries of brutal repression, and whose parents still experience institutional racism on a regular basis, and who have family traditions of justified suspicion of racism with public institutions? If not, you’re not in an analogous situation.
But if you already had a drum line, and you proposed a new drum line and said, out loud, that it was aimed at minorities without other details, I’d be suspicious. Perhaps it’s just a way of accommadating a musical style that blacks like - which is fine. But perhaps it’s just racial segregation. After all, we used to have all kinds of separate (but equal) clubs and facilities, and we decided it was wrong.
If you’re saying that this justifies unbalanced racial policies, like exluding whites from certain things but never blacks, I disagree completely.
Of course not. How exactly is their “right” to be a majority to be enforced? Shootings or mass sterilization of the minorities to keep their numbers down? Forced mass deportations?
Upon further thought, it might be code for “the Israelis have the right to disenfranchise/ethnically cleanse non-Jews to keep Israel a Jew-run state”.
Really? Turn it back around on you: do you disagree with the idea that racism against blacks is rendered different, by history, from racism against whites?
Yes. And racism against Vietnamese is different from racism against Koreans, as long as we’re talking about how historical events inform modern-day society and its racist aspects.
So what do you want to do with that conclusion? Is there a hierarchy in play here, where some racism is worse than others? Or are they separate but equal?
A hierarchy? Sure, if you want to phrase it that way. The more a person has suffered from racist attacks (verbal, institutional, physical, etc.) during their life, the more of an impact each additional attack is likely to have.
Consider if there are 1000 jobs available to me, and 1 job that’s not available because of my race. Bob has 1 job available to him, and 1000 that are not available because of his race. Which of us is hurt more by each case of racism?
You might be tempted to say that we’re hurt equally by each instance, but that Bob is hurt 1000 times more than me. But that’s wrong. I’m not hurt at all, since I’ve got a good choice of jobs. Bob is hurt much more by each of those 1000 instances than I’m hurt by the single instance, since his options are more circumscribed than mine.
If Bob grew up hearing about Jim Crow, and if he grew up being taught how to behave around police so he wouldn’t accidentally get himself shot for pulling out a cell phone, he’s got one set of circumstances. If I grow up learning that the police generally treat people who look like me well, I grow up with another set of circumstances. And if we each encounter a cop who acts like an asshole to us because of our race, we end up having very different experiences. Sure, we both get pissed at the racist cop. But I’ll probably have no reasonable fear for my life, whereas Bob will.
The difference between racism against black people and white people in the US is very stark. I’m not prepared to make statements about racism against Asian people, because frankly I’m not educated enough on the topic to say anything helpful. But the basic idea remains: past experience with racism, including family histories of experiences with racism, signify.
So it isn’t all about races now, it’s about individuals with individual differences in life experience that would, at most, correlate with the race society perceives them as.
So can you take that farther? Can you not differentiate between a black person from Alabama and a black person from Montana? Or a black person from rural Georgia and a black person from a suburb of Atlanta? How should we use the knowledge we have about regional differences to end discrimination?
Not moving forward yet. Do you agree or disagree with what I’ve said about racism?
Edit: Derleth, same goes for you. I’m not getting paid by the word here, and I’m not getting class credit for answering your questions. Why don’t you put forward a position of your own, or take a position regarding what I’ve said, instead of asking me more and more lists of questions?
I don’t think we understand each other enough for me to say yes or no. But I’ll say this: Of course some groups suffer worse racism than others. Same applies to individuals within groups.
Now why’d you bring it up? I don’t think it’s relevant. Why do you?
If you wish to be spoon-fed, here: Class is more important than race in every respect I’ve seen race being brought up. OJ Simpson got away with murder because he’s rich. An absolute ton of people of other races, however you want to name them, get screwed by the system because they’re poor. ‘Privilege’ comes down to ‘I’m rich enough I can ignore that’.