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I guess this depends on how you define “more”. The bigotry of ableism has been a part of the human experience for as long as humans have been humans. If by “a lot more” you mean the sheer quantity/number of it’s manifestations in society, then yes, anti-black bigotry is/has been much more noticeable in general than other forms of bigotry. But this is due, in big part, to the sheer numbers. Black people have a much more prominent role in society than disabled people.
Markedward writes:
> 82% of blacks are not direct descendants of slaves
Yes, they are. As iiandyiii pointed out, what this means is that some of their ancestors were slaves in the U.S. It’s not true, of course, that all their ancestors were slaves. A large proportion of that 82% have some ancestors who were white. In some cases that was because of intermarriage, but more often it was because of female slaves being raped. The other 18% of American blacks are descendants (at least partly) of ancestors who were black and who emigrated to the U.S. when they were not slaves, mostly from Africa and the Caribbean.
I want to be sure to be clear, racism has also been part of human life since day 1. I was referring specifically to the time period of slavery in the U.S.
A lot of the responses have questioned the premise and pointed out that’s is based on anecdotes. I’m surprised by this.
Turn over to Fox right now: they’ll probably be slagging off BLM, or the kneeling NFL players, or going on some rant about how white supremacy doesn’t exist and the guys protesting confederate statues are fine people. They, and the president, are speaking very similar language to the guys on the nazi sites right now, just sans the n-word. And meanwhile of course there are many rallies happening for both sides.
We could argue that the fact we’re talking so much about race recently is a positive sign; we’re finally wrestling with our demons. But that would still mean the OP is valid: why is this still something that needs to be grappled over to this degree?
I don’t assume that, the post was in response to a claim that ‘only the toughest and most skilled survived’ and that could have a knock on effect several generations down the line, which seems totally incorrect. Skilled at what? How would being ‘tough’ help, when the people oppressing you were armed, could legally abuse you, even getting the law to assist, and could retaliate to any attempt to stand up for yourself by killing you directly, or selling you into a situation with a high death rate? In quite a few situations, being good at keeping a low profile was probably a better survival strategy than being ‘tough’.
I don’t think it’s racist to think slave owners attempted to encourage docility among those they enslaved, of course they did, by getting rid of anyone ‘difficult’. I don’t in any way think they succeeded, or could have succeeded; as I said, human personalities are far more complicated than that, and the genetics contributing to them even more so.
Actually, racism is a fairly recent development in human history.
Xenophobia and other derivatives of tribalism are probably as old has pre-humans. (Various simians demonstrate similar actions.) However, the notion that a person is of less value, simply based on skin color or perceived “race,” as opposed to the notion that a person is of less value because he or she is “not one of us” seems to have arisen only since the sixteenth century. There are a number of examples of people of one perceived race being accepted by society, (at least to the extent of being celebrated as an"exotic"), without any pejorative values assigned to him or her throughout history.
Greeks and Romans recognized that sub-Saharan Africans were different without assigning any negative qualities to that difference. Differences between lighter skinned and darker skinned peoples on the Indian subcontinent tended to be couched in language of tribalism, not in terms of an inherent value based on their differences.
Mijin writes:
> . . . A lot of the responses have questioned the premise and pointed out that’s is based on anecdotes. I’m surprised by this.
>
> Turn over to Fox right now . . .
Looking at what is currently on a TV channel that you just flipped to is relying on anecdotes. I don’t claim to know the overall trends in racism in the U.S. There is certainly less than there was a hundred years ago or two hundred years ago. I think there’s less than there was fifty years ago. Is there less than there is five years ago? I would have to see some solid data and figure out the trends in it. This would have to include many different measures of attitudes, actions, and levels of inequality, using data from a number of different years and from all over the U.S.
I think you’re being obtuse in a number of ways, let’s go through them:
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Fox news is still the biggest cable news channel. It’s not just an anecdote to mention that this is a primary talking point there.
And I did not relay a story about one time I flipped to that channel; I was rhetorically asking the reader to take a look now; implying it’s something they’ve been talking about pretty solidly for the last few months.
I can link youTube FOX recordings of all of the kinds of rhetoric I listed, but do we really have to go there? Do you really dispute that they often take the kind of line that I said? -
You missed the part where I mentioned the president’s words, and alluded to significant social movements like BLM and white supremacy rallies.
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I don’t know why you’re talking about trends in racism. The OP states, in the very first sentence, the fact that the long-term overall trend is less racism. The question is, why is racism still so prevalent? Why is it apparently taking so long to fizzle out versus other forms of bigotry?
If you think I’m arguing racism is worse now than in the past, I’m not, so let’s not put up any straw men.
While most forms of bigotry, particularly black racism as described in this thread, are still prevalent, they are at least broadly hidden. Anti-atheist bigotry in the U.S. seems as bad (or worse?) than ever. Anti-atheism is still so widely accepted that they will spout their views in public, on TV, heck, even on the floor of the U.S. Congress or in the White House and brag about their bigotry as a virtue.
It may be more difficult for minorities or women to get elected to office, but for atheists to do so, they are usually forced to lie.
Fox News gets 2.1 million viewers in prime time. That is less than 1% of the country. Even if Fox News is as bad as you say, it would say nothing about the country in general.
BLM members and white supremacists are less than 1% of 1% of this country. They tell us less than Fox News.
A good proxy for racism is the unwillingness to vote for a black person for president. In 2015, 7% indicated that they would not vote for a black candidate for president. That is approximately the same number that indicated they would not vote for a Catholic, Hispanic, Mormon, or Jewish candidate. It is much less than those who would not vote for a gay candidate, a muslim candidate, an evangelical candidate, or an atheist candidate.
7% is still alot of racists but even that way overstates the problem. In polling there will always be some people who pick one of the options no matter how stupid it is. For instance a poll of Americans found that 4% thought that lizardmen are running the earth and 7% were unsure if lizardmen are running the earth. This is not because there are actually 21 million people who are unsure if lizardmen are running the earth but because there is a portion of people who will respond to a poll by picking a random answer. If you take the percentage of those types out the actual number of people who are too racist to vote for a black person for president is 0-3% of the population.
First of all, it is as bad as I say, and we’ve had a number of threads on just that topic. And secondly 1% of the country at a time. That’s high enough to cover a pretty big chunk of people watching fox news some of the time, directly or online. Finally 2.1m I think is a cherry-picked number from when fox briefly dipped between other news stations in the ratings battle.
You can say this about any civil rights movement. How many people go out and protest anything? But yes, protests tend to be indicators of public opinion.
I’d agree it’s a way of gauging feeling, and so are the things that I’ve mentioned.
You were the one who said “The skills required to survive slavery would be very different to the skills required to live in the modern world”, which as I noted is speculative horseshit. Slavery was a complex social phenomenon with many different circumstances and situations, and it’s ridiculous to assume that slaves developed any identifiable single skillset for coping with it. As I noted, the general attributes of intelligence, robustness and self-control are not less desirable for people enduring slavery than for us in “the modern world”.
Sounds to me as though you are misinterpreting “toughness” to mean “aggressiveness”, whereas AFAICT it seems to be more like what I described as “robustness”.
Not a chance. On the contrary, there have definitely been periods and places in American history where atheists were much more oppressively discriminated against than now. In parts of the American colonies atheist beliefs could actually get you executed on charges of heresy/blasphemy. In some states atheists have been legally barred from holding office.
None of that sort of legally entrenched discrimination is valid nowadays, although anti-atheist sentiments may still be openly expressed by some people. Even those sentiments are less restrictive than they used to be at some points, however; many openly atheist authors nowadays are widely published and read, for example.
Still doesn’t make it anywhere near “as bad”, much less “worse”, compared to some earlier phases of anti-atheist prejudice.
Sure, there’s overlap, but the skills required to live in the 1700s and 1800s in general are pretty different to those required the modern world. Intelligence, and robustness aren’t skills at all, they’re attributes. Self-control I’ll concede is partly a skill.
And my whole point was basically a rebuttal to the claim that being ‘skilled and tough’ was selected for during slavery. If you want to argue that slavery was not complex, and there was not one skillset that would help, argue with the person who claimed that was the case, not someone who was arguing that it wasn’t.
Tell that to the Jews.
Well, I think what you described as “the tendency to be meek, unimaginative, and do everything you were told without question” also counts as more of an “attribute” than a “skill”. To clarify the point thorougly, I suppose we would have to ask Little Nemo exactly what he meant by “skilled” in claiming “only the toughest and most skilled survived”. But if all we’re fundamentally disagreeing about at this point is the semantics of the term “skill”, then spat over as far as I’m concerned.
A new line of thinking for me comes as a result of seeing recent documentaries on murder and addiction in the USA, as well as having a greater appreciation for a UK gov initiative called Sure Start.
The thinking is something like this; slavery destroyed family, in a generational and educated sense: culturally, there were no roles models to look to, there was no one for new parent to gain understanding and knowledge from, children had no grasp of the emotional and practical value of family.nThat was ongoing for generations.
Then came the post-war welfare state, which by supporting single parent families implicitly encouraged the same.
Then came a kind of moral liberation whereby, certainly in the UK, single mothers, mothers with children by more than one father, felt less disdain.
All of society is has been and continues to move away from the nuclear family, it’s just that - for black Americans in particular because of what slavery did to their family - thee wasn’t a nuclear family in the first place.
Anyway, that’s my thinking at the moment 
Basically. I think other than that we’re agreeing about how slavery was complicated and didn’t act as a simple method of selecting one personality type.