Interestingly, I haven’t heard that here. I wonder if it’s because MS has a lot of black elected officials? (According to wiki, we’ve elected more black officials than any other U.S. state). In other words, have folks here learned that black politicians != doom for whitey?
To some significant extent the question itself is an oversimplification of the issue as is illustrated even by the example in the op itself. Is a woman who is afraid that she may be discriminated against by Blacks in power the same as someone who believes that Blacks are inherently inferior to Whites? Is someone who harbors some broad disparaging beliefs about Blacks as a group, in the abstract, but who hires and socializes in the specific cases without any regard to skin color, the same as someone who intentionally does not hire the Black man or woman or socialize with them because of their skin color? Is someone who in the abstract doesn’t believe in racist concepts but as a matter of reality doesn’t happen to have many freinds or coworkers of a skin color different than him or her, and at a party is more likely to gravitate to those who look like him or her the same racist as someone who explicitly holds racist beliefs? Is someone who participates in a system that is racist in effect by virtue of its history despite the fact that they themselves hold no racist beliefs and that the powers of the institution hold no current racist beliefs the same as George Wallace blocking the doors?
To lump all of these cases together as “racism” is silly. I suspect that there are many fewer explicit racists in positions of power acting on their beliefs in today’s America and that most who would act on explicit racist beliefs are disenfranchised themselves. OTOH of course many of all colors hold some biases that effect their actions in subtle ways, including the racism that is intrinsic to assuming that an action is based on racism because the person who said or did it was White and the other was Black. Of course institutions have some racist effects just because of how they historically are, even if there is no current racist effect. Of course there is progress to be made.
It’s silly pretending that “racism” should only be reserved for hatred, discrimination, or violence.
A person who thinks that all black people in Newark, NJ are niggers and jiggaboos, but is best friends with a black guy, harbors racist thoughts.
A person who plays basketball on a predominately black team and has no problem occassionally driving into the black “hood” to get soul food take-out, but decides I’m not right for a job because my name is Keisha or Lashawn, harbors racist thoughts.
A person who concludes that my learning disability, speech impediment, or mental illness is due to the race I belong to harbors racist thoughts.
A person who doesn’t want to live next to me because they think my dark skin will drop their property value harbors racist thoughts.
A person who follows me in the store because I’m black harbors racist thoughts, even if all the shoplifters they’ve ever caught were black.
A person who is sad that their grandchildren will be half-black harbors racist thoughts.
A person who is afraid of black people because they were robbed by one harbors racist thoughts.
A person who assumes that black people will cause chaos if a member of their race is elected president harbors racist thoughts.
A little kid who thinks the white baby doll is better than the black baby doll harbors racist thoughts.
I will not sit here and dream up a totally new lexicon to describe idiosyncratic thought processes when “racism” works perfectly fine as a general descriptor. What is gained in the discourse by swapping “bigot” or “prejudiced” for “racist”? More fancy words to dissect, argue, and volley around?
As I said to Chief Pendant, I don’t think all racists are morally equivalent. There is a spectrum. There’s a fundamental difference between a violent KKKer and someone who doesn’t trust blacks because they’ve never met a nice one before. But to reserve “racist” for the KKKer while using a different term for the other downplays the major thing they share in common: prejudice based on race. What makes one person a “bigot” but the other a “racist”?
I don’t know why people think I’m picking on polite racists–like the white-haired church lady who thinks black people are fine as long as they speak proper English and comb their hair. The OP contains examples of the kind of racists I’m talking about. Like jerks with Obama monkey dolls and people afraid that black people will hang off the chandeliers if Obama gets elected. DSeid, are you telling me it’s silly to call these people racist?
In my experience, lots of people hold very racist positions, but the places where it comes out is kind of random.
For a period of time I worked three jobs, all catering to the tourist industry in a super liberal California beach town. Often I’d see the same people at each of the jobs. In two of these jobs people acted pretty much normal.
But in the job as a hotel desk clerk, like half of the people turned out to be raving racists. I’m not sure what it was about a hotel front desk, but people felt free to let me know they thought my boss was a “raghead” and that they were worried about all the “Mexican gangbangers” (mostly old men in cowboy hats and grannies walking their babies) living near the hotel and that they were hoping I could find a room on a sold out night for a “fellow white person” (oh yeah dude, sorry…let me just open up the special suite we keep in case a white guy shows up…). It was every night, all the time. Insane.
Yeah I think it is silly to lump all of of those together. More importantly though it is counterproductive. To lump the Black man who assumes that the White clerk who seems to be watching them closely as they go through the store is doing it because they are Black (a racist thought even if sometimes that is why) as the same thing as the man with the monkey-headed doll; to label someone who has some biases that they are not consciously aware of but that effect their actions in subtle ways the same as some one who overtly and consciously attempts to act on explicitly held racist beliefs, deters meaningful discussion and progress. Even when you qualify the condition of “racism” as a spectrum disorder.
Why?
Because the value of labels is that they provide a shorthand to communicate an idea and possibly a potential response. And the nature, the causes, and the … treatment plans if you will … of those different kinds of racially biased belief sets, are each likely very different. The shorthand fails.
It would be like me saying that everything that lives in the water is a fishy thingy instead of say actually categorizing the connections and interactions between the various members of a marine community. 
So it’s okay if a white person refuses to vote for black people because they’ve had bad experiences with black people, but if a black person who has experienced white security tracking them for no good reason in the past suspects it’s happening again, that’s racism. Why are the standards for demonstrating black racism against whites so much lower?
Is that to me Ensign? Because if so then you have not understood what I was saying.
At all.
Sure, “racism” along with religionism, classism, ethnicism, clannism, countryoforiginism and every other ism you can think of. Oh yeah, btw; not just “this country” but “the world” and “all of human history.”
It’s a trivial complaint to get upset about how many “racists” there are when you, for example, broaden the term “racism” so that it includes everyone who might make a group inference based on color, even if it’s applied to a particular daily experience or individual at a given moment.
Such broad stereotyping is the human condition and it would apply to nearly all of us, from all creeds and colors. So what? If I am walking down some streets in Chicago and I am approached by a seedy-looking young black man, my odds of getting violently mugged are overwhelmingly larger than if I am approached by a seedy-looking Asian. Makes me a racist? Fine. So is the well-dressed black minister also a racist if he is equally skeptical of being approached by the seedy black teenager. It’s one thing to harbor an intellectual notion of equal worth and quite another to assume that such a standard means ignoring common sense.
The implication is that such a casual, momentary tendency meets a standard of “racism” may make you feel better by pointing out all the racists in society but it’s hardly indicting when it’s so broadly defined. There is a qualitative difference between the malignant and mean-spirited bigot who wants his society to hold down a particular race and someone who is simply cognizant of practical daily differences in race (or any other cohort).
If you want to hold the conversation to current times, I’d be curious to know which country you’d hold up as a standard for doing things correctly, and perhaps let us know how the black population is doing in that country vis a vis other racial cohorts.
Let me ask you this as pointedly as I can:
Why do you think I’m talking about low-grade bigotry, DSeid? Go back to the OP. Are any of the examples I linked to not evidence of racism, in your opinion? If not, why are you wasting time finding instances of prejudice that don’t meet your definition of racism?
It’s like entering a thread about motorcycles and derailing the conversation by arguing that mopeds shouldn’t be included, as if anyone was really talking about mopeds in the first place. It is probably more conservative to describe the paranoid black guy as a bigot than a racist. Is that what you want me to say? OK. I will concede your sorry-ass point. But it doesn’t address the point of my OP. I’m asking if there a lot of motorcycles on the road. I know what the hell a moped is, so I don’t need them described to me. Just like I don’t need a motorcycle described to me in every other post.
Racists. I’m talking about men carrying Obama monkey dolls and people emailing each other Obama bucks. People who think there will be urban chaos if Obama is elected. You know, people that we don’t have to whip out the dictionary to describe accurately.
I repeat: Are these people racists or not? If your answer is yes, then stop calling me silly.
But we do this kind of lumping all the time with other descriptors.
A man that is 35 lbs overweight and a man that is 350 lbs overweight are both considered fat, even though the latter is much worse off than the other. The more precise term for the guy carrying the extra 350 lbs is obese, but it’s far from inaccurate to call him fat. Just a little less descriptive. Not the end of the world.
Racism is a word that works the same way for me. The person who hates black people is racist. The person who is fine with blacks in general (or so they think), but is uneasy with a black president because “black people are going to rise up and oppress Whitey”, is also racist. The former is a racist bigot, while the most that can be said about the latter is that they are a racist paranoid who is projecting what he/she might do onto others in a rather fantastical, crazytown fashion. But they are both racist. I’m confident in this conclusion because both mentalities have a high probability of leading to racial discrimination, which is the end product of racism.
Sometimes it’s problematic to not lump people together. To refer back to my fat man analogy, if both men are carrying more weight than they should, then that makes then overweight and therefore fat as the term is commonly used. So understanding that, why should we only reserve the term for the really really really fat while coming up with some cute euphemism for the other people? At a certain point, it becomes obvious that the only reason we’d have for doing that is to make us feel better about ourselves. If we have words like “obese” that can be used in conjunction with “fat” to distinguish the fat from the very fat, there really is no need to define “fat” so that only the very fat qualifies as such. It doesn’t take much of an imagination to see what could happen when we play with the language like that: people will have a harder time recognizing that their weight is a problem because in their eyes they aren’t fat, even though they really are.
First of all, I’m not “upset”. I’m concerned and appropriately wary, as anyone should be in world full of irrational behavior. And I’m not a naive, starry-eyed idealist. But upset? Yeah. Upset are the people who think Obama is a terrorist who’s going to be the downfall of America. I’m too laid back to be upset.
You are the one assigning morality to the word “racist”. Not me. I have no problem describing myself as a racist. I wasn’t raised in a colorblind society with colorblind parents. I was taught to view whites with suspicion. I was inculcated with the notion of white superiority in school and through the media. As a human being, I have formed inferences based on experience, some which are sound and some that are not. To say that I’m not at least vunerable to racist thinking is to make myself out to be an extraordinary, supernatural human being. It would take Jesus Christ himself not to be in some form racist growing up in this society. And just because I can talk about the racist in me and my family does not rob the word of its power. It just means that it applies to me and my family.
See how easy it is to view this when we divorce it from morality?
I liken it to mental illness. You’re a physician, correct? Many mental illnesses are actually spectrum disorders. You can be a little depressed and be classified as dysthymic. You can be very depressed and have major depression. If the dysthymic has bad thoughts about themselves, however fleeting, is it incorrect to label those as “depressive” thoughts? Perhaps I’m simply prejudiced, not a full fledged racist. But is it incorrect to describe my thoughts as “racist” if that’s in fact what they are?
And I agree with you! I don’t know why you think I would disagree with this, based on what I’ve said.
Do you think I’ve unfairly lambasted America? Do you think there’s something incomplete about me just talking about racism in my own country, in the society that I’m most familiar with? What does racism somewhere else have to do with the nature and intensity of racism here? What, I can’t wish for people to stop emailing each other Obama bucks without also wishing that Japan would treat its minority groups more equitably? What’s your angle here with this question?
Just curious. Would you mind categorizing those people for me, if not all of them racists? Label them however you wish, I just want to know which are the racists and which ones aren’t.
In your op monstro I find your featured lady afraid that she will become a second class citizen, to be fundamentally different than the man with a monkey doll. Do you not?
As far as how much of monkey-headed racism there is … well we all have to rely on anecdotes. But even those who use the word “Nigger” are apparently willing to vote for a self-identified Black man, so I gotta think that means something. You want to just rant that there are still some hateful idiots out there? Fine. My humble opinion is that those in power who have those hateful opinions mostly keep them to themselves and are constrained from acting on them mostly and that those who have little power feel more free to express them but act on them little. Decent data? Neither of us have any.
You with the face, I am a pediatrician and if I was going to have a meaningful discussion about obesity I would most certainly not lump all “overweight” and “obesity” together and expect to finish a discussion with any understanding of the problem(s). If monstro wants to rail about the racism equivalent of super morbid obesity and ignore the merely morbidly obese let alone those who are obese or overweight and perhaps on track for becoming obese, that’s fine. My apologies. But that’s a rant and not a discussion.
I don’t quite understand what you are trying to say here? Did you just toss out the old line “Blacks should just hush up. They should just be glad that they have it better here then blacks elsewhere.”
(Bolding for emphasis by me.)
Fair enough…under such a generous definition (doesn’t have to be immoral; doesn’t have to be malignant) I think I understand your point: We are all racists so there should be no insistence that racists are an insignificant minority.
Neither should there be any outrage over the pervasiveness of this sort of “racists” however. In other posts you seem to be using as a racist archetype someone who plays with a monkey doll. I don’t know what that is but I am assuming it’s something more rabid than this less restrictive use of the term which you apply to yourself.
To your other question about how the US is doing…we can take that up in another thread. It’s not fair of me to hijack this one. It’s an observation of mine that the US has done better than most countries in executing race-based remedies to make up for past wrongs. My ear is therefore less sympathetic when a modern young woman castigates a people’s entire history (by Monstro: “Racism has been the default mentality of this country since the beginning of its inception…”) without addendum to separate “then” from “now.” Particularly so if the title of her thread at first blush seems to imply that racism is a ongoing pervasive problem. The inference might be drawn from your quote here that it is an ongoing, unameliorated “default metality” perhaps even peculiar to the US. My point is that “racism” and all other such isms are an inseparable component of the human condition in general.
Yeah, the only tools we have are for parents to teach their children not to be racist, and to hope that those children can influence their friends not to be racist. And we also can make school and workplace rules that punish those who act on racist feelings. And of course, social stigma.
But all of these methods will take a while to work.
Do they have the same moral failings? No.
Are their thought processes driven by the same belief? That which says blacks are fundamentally different from, if not inferior to, whites? Yes.
I take issue you with your characterization of her remarks. You hear a scared old lady. I hear a woman who’s afraid of blacks being “uppity” and forgetting their “place”. I hear a woman who thinks black people can’t handle power, that there is danger and chaos (she used those words) waiting for society if we give it to them. I hear a woman who doesn’t want to give up her priviledge. It’s fine for others to live as second-class citizens. But its horror upon horrors if whites were to be put into that place.
I hear the kind of irrational fear that has been around since the first black person hit this continent. It’s no different than what people worried about in regards to Emancipation and the abolishment of Jim Crow.
We aren’t in the Pit, so I don’t know why you think I’ve been ranting. I haven’t advocating killing or torturing or imprisoning anyone. I haven’t really cussed that much or used very many exclamation marks. So I’m curious. What makes you think all I’m doing is ranting?
Oh, there’s plenty of data showing that those in power act out their prejudices in measurable, testable ways. We can argue whether these data show racists are a “tiny, insignificant” portion of the population, but don’t pretend there’s NO data and both sides are equally full of bull shit.
Oops. I showed some emotion with that last remark. Better calm down before I’m accused of rioting.
I had not noticed this post so my apologies. I had not meant to ignore it. Honestly I think that we have a deficiency in our vocabulary and that that deficiency handicaps intelligent conversation. But when everyone is racist then no one is racist, sort of.
Sure they are different, but I question why you think the difference is substantial enough to disapprove of them being in the same dicussion. Practically speaking, it doesn’t really matter whether someone is motivated out of a bigoted hate or fearful paranoia or mere dislike of pigmented skin…if their beliefs lead them to discrimate against someone like Obama because of his racial membership, then they really are not so fundamentally different at all. To Obama, they look perfectly identical: votes that he couldn’t have gotten because of his race.
Your position is all the more odd given what history has taught us about racism. Slavery was maintained largely in party because whites were afraid that black liberation would be concomitant with black vegenance. So the chains persisted not just because of hate and greed, but because of the same paranoia that governs that NPR lady’s thinking today. Few would question that these slavery proponents were racist, yet suddenly, when the subject turns to modern-day people, it gets all so confusing for us to find the right words to describe what we’re seeing and we have to wring our hands and pull out dictionaries.
I really have to wonder if that’s racism. Or, look at it from this angle, say that every time a store got robbed, it was by a biker. They’d come in, stuff things in their leather jacket, then run out, hop on their bike, and drive away. Now, would you be upset with the store staff if they were more cautious when they saw someone come in wearing a biker jacket, or someone who they saw park their motorcycle before coming in?