Riots in Missouri - Part 3

[The Question]

America's not a racist country. We're pretty forward-thinking and very much a colorblind people.

1: That is just demonstratively untrue.

2: Being "colorblind" is itself kind of racist. It usually ends in the dominant group ignoring the problems that are unique to the subordinate groups.

 

[Victarion]

Barack Obama is proof that we are no longer racist.

 

[SuperT]

You're joking, right? You can't possibly truly believe a single word you just said in your last two posts.

Being "colorblind" is one of the worst things white America has ever adopted. Good grief.

 

[SuperFerret]

Eh, I would say that Obama's election is a sign that there's less racism out there, but it's still far from an endangered species.

Being "colorblind" is... well, it depends on what you mean. If you're taking different races to be exactly the same with different window dressing, you're blinding yourself to a hell of a lot. But, if you're "colorblind" in the way that you don't care about said window dressing when dealing with an individual, I don't see the issue.

 

[Victarion]

You're joking, right? You can't possibly truly believe a single word you just said in your last two posts.

Being "colorblind" is one of the worst things white America has ever adopted. Good grief.

I'm serious here. Colorblind isn't bad at all. It means you look at the merits of the individual's achievements and personality. Not their skin.

 

[bullets]

Barack Obama is proof that we are no longer racist.

That's really not proof of anything. All Obama's election proves is that more people chose to vote democrat. That statement is almost racist in itself. We may have improved as a society in race relations , but the bottom line is that racism still exists today.

 

[The Question]

Barack Obama is proof that we are no longer racist.

No, he's not.

For starters, he receives an enormous amount of disproportionate criticism that is absolutely dripping with racism. Like, I'm not a fan of his, but even I can see that a lot of his most vocal critics either don't like him simply for being a black guy in office, or they dislike him for partisan reasons but they use that as ammunition against him.

Second, he isn't proof that we are no longer racist because, despite the fact that we elected an African American man to the presidency, we're still incredibly racist.

Without affirmative action, not-whites are still significantly less likely to be accepted into college or a place of employment when their qualifications are otherwise identical to those of their white peers.

http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html

http://www.chicagobooth.edu/capideas/spring03/racialbias.html

None-whites are much more likely to live in poverty than whites.

http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/factsheet-erm.aspx

While segregation in public schools is officially banned, the fact is that most of our schools are still racially segregated. School districts are routinely drawn in such a way as to separate white and non-white members of a given community, and they are usually drawn in such a way that the property tax-based school funding disproportionately benefits the predominantly white schools.

http://america.aljazeera.com/articl...tlerockusschoolssegregatedbyraceandclass.html

Non-whites are more likely to receive much harsher sentences in court than whites who are convicted of the same crime in roughly the same circumstances. Studies also show that non-whites are more likely to be stopped, questioned, and searched by the police than whites are in otherwise comparable circumstances.

http://www.nccdglobal.org/sites/default/files/publication_pdf/created-equal.pdf

This is especially true in the war on drugs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/opinion/sunday/racially-biased-arrests-for-pot.html?_r=0

In fact, there are drug laws that treat possession and use of drugs that are more commonly used in the African American community as a much more serious offense and mandate much harsher sentencing, even though they have no appreciably worse effects than drugs more popular in white communities. The sentencing disparity between powder cocaine (more popular among whites) and crack cocaine (more popular among blacks) is pretty transparently racist.

https://www.acslaw.org/sites/default/files/Taifa_-_Crack_Powder_Disparity.pdf

And then, there's the obvious racism in our words and our culture. The people who think that having to pay police overtime or getting stuck in traffic jams is worse than black men being murdered. The countless news pundits who go out of their way to blame non-white victims of violence and murder for their own deaths and paint them as thugs instead of entertain the notion that there are still racist people in the world. The constant use of the word "animals" to describe non-white communities that are in a state of strife. The fact that there are still people in places of authority and power who think that black people are genetically predisposed to being less intelligent and talk about it casually like it's a bit of trivia they picked up from wikipedia.

http://www.salon.com/2014/09/28/lat..._ok_to_say_racist_sh_t_in_front_of_me”/

The fact that this nonsense is still a day-to-day thing.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...casual-racism-encountered-day-minorities.html


America's made progress, don't get me wrong. Things are better than they used to me. But America is still pretty ****ing racist.

 

[cronosred]

but the bottom line is that racism still exists today.

From people of all color.

 

[bullets]

From people of all color.

Yes. In not excluding anyone with that statement.

 

[Victarion]

@TQ: Do you have any JStor or PLoS articles with those stats?

 

[The Question]

From people of all color.

I don't see how that statement is particularly useful. Yes, people of all races can be bigoted. But racism in an institutional, systemic, oppressive sense exists to the benefit of white people and to the detriment of everyone else. An individual black man who has prejudices against Koreans is obnoxious, but it isn't a widespread social ill that results in people being oppressed.

 

[The Question]

@TQ: Do you have any JStor or PLoS articles with those stats?

A few of them. Why does that matter, exactly?

 

[cronosred]

I don't see how that statement is particularly useful. Yes, people of all races can be bigoted. But racism in an institutional, systemic, oppressive sense exists to the benefit of white people and to the detriment of everyone else. An individual black man who has prejudices against Koreans is obnoxious, but it isn't a widespread social ill that results in people being oppressed.

 

[The Question]

Ooh, what a cutting rebuttal. You sure got me!

 

[Victarion]

A few of them. Why does that matter, exactly?

I don't want anything slanted to support a covertly racist, nor colorblind in the sense of everyone's homogenized, perspective. I more trust these sources given I've relied on them for much of my research.

 

[The Question]

I don't want anything slanted to support a covertly racist, nor colorblind in the sense of everyone's homogenized, perspective. I more trust these sources given I've relied on them for much of my research.

Well, why don't you rest the articles I linked and then decide for yourself wether or not they're unduly slanted?

 

[MessiahDecoy123]

The majority of white voters did not vote for Obama. Only 39% did.

and even if Obama got 59% of the white vote, like Mitt Romney did, it doesn't take a majority to make racism problematic as shown by the Apartheid from South Africa.

 

[cronosred]

Ooh, what a cutting rebuttal. You sure got me!

If you consider certain things a white person does as racist but then turn around and say it's not racist when a person of color does the exact same thing is being hypocritical.

 

[The Question]

If you consider certain things a white person does as racist but then turn around and say it's not racist when a person of color does the exact same thing is being hypocritical.

Well then, it's a good thing I never said that.

Seriously, I never said that. I said that racism that benefits whites to the detriment of all other groups is a huge systemic problem and ruins hundreds of thousands of lives, and is therefor a much larger concern than racism in the form of individual non-whites holding prejudiced views, which doesn't benefit anyone and is not expressed in a widespread and systemic way.

It's not hypocritical to say that one thing is more of a problem than another thing when it very clearly is.

 

[SuperFerret]

Systemic racism is a huge problem, and one that this thread is (supposed to be) focusing on. It's not about the guy on his couch who distrusts people different from him, but about the way the social system is set up and run.

 

[MessiahDecoy123]

America's not a racist country. We're pretty forward-thinking and very much a colorblind people.

Racism just changed from overt to covert.

Racists realized they were much more effective pushing their true agenda when it's hidden from public scrutiny.

If someone publicly joins the Klan or a Neo Nazi group they couldn't get elected mayor of a small town. If they agree with the Klan or Neo Nazis but don't disclose that view to the public they can become president of the United States.

 

[Kar]

Key witness on Darren Wilson trial lied?

 

[The Question]

Here's something a friend of mind had to say about the complaints that protestors blocking traffic is a bad idea and is hurting their message. He articulates how I feel much better than I can:

I could go on a whole moral tirade about how if you care more about paying for police overtime and sitting in traffic than you do about mass racialized police violence undertaken in your name, then maybe your values are skewed. But there's a point that I don't see often made explicit: the organizers know that trying to appeal to people whose values are that skewed is a waste of time. They know that the myth that civil rights protests are supposed to be about begging white people to pay attention and be nicer is fatally, perniciously wrong.

The protests are about demonstrating that if things go on this way, we can and will make business as usual grind to a halt.

 

[Breogan]

Things need to change, but I'm not joining in the 'Burn this b---- down!' or this chant -
[YT]dj4ARsxrZh8[/YT]

 

[Breogan]

Key witness on Darren Wilson trial lied?

She wasn't "key" to anything, they took all that was given, have you read some of the others? Her outrageous testimony like others was flat out dismissed.
LOL!
Same as all whose testimony contradicted the evidence, or whose "version" changed as they were told the evidence. That included the many version on which the media built the story on for you.