Racism - What I don't Understand
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Jon Russell jonruss63t...@yahoo.com
Are we supposed to be a colorblind society? Or, are we supposed to recognize racial background? If the former, don't we denigrate what it means to be of color in this country and deny an individual's heritage? If the latter, aren't we perpetuating and promoting ethnoracial differences?
Food for thought. Chew away.
(Applies to all -isms actually) Don't forget to just say NO to playoffs.
The CheeseHusker
Czar Christopher I pu...@tbbqfubj.arg.invalid
Here are my sincere thoughts about this: No, we are not supposed to be a colorblind society. Maybe, in a few generations, we'll see enough interracial mixing to produce a nation full of Halle Berrys and Derek Jeters. (We could do a lot worse.) Until then, though, our race is part of who we are, and I think it's incumbent upon us to acknowledge our differences honestly.
There is no shame in perpetuating differences. The shame is in denying opportunity on the basis of those differences.
I think that race should be something akin to what religion has largely become in this country. Whether one is Catholic or Baptist or Jewish or agnostic generally has no bearing on one's access to employment, or his/her ability to rise through the ranks in his/her career. (Education is a different matter, though for complicated reasons.) However, we still acknowledge the differences between those religions, and the enlightened among us cherish the diversity.
I think that any honest American has to concede that we're still a long way from getting to this point with race. It occurs to me as I write that maybe Trent's experience is closer to the ideal I describe, because minorities are well represented in the military (to put it lightly) and seem to co-exist with whites there about as peacefully as Catholics co-exist with Methodists --
not perfect, but not especially bitter, either. I would love for the country as a whole to reach that point.
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Czar Christopher I rec.sport.football.college "His insufferable smugness would be much more credible if he weren't such a drooling simpleton." --Daniel Seriff
woodru ...@cableone.net (Trent Woodruff)
It's all a matter of appropriateness.
It's appropriate to CELEBRATE an individual's heritage when no value judgements are being made.
It's NOT appropriate to consider an individual's heritage when a value judgement is being made (hiring or providing similar opportunities).
That is the difference, as I see it.
Trent Chairborne "Nine of Diamonds" Ranger ...To be a great NCO, you need three bones: a backbone, a wishbone and a funny bone.
Bill Lang wjlm...@bitememindspring.com
Czar Christopher I, Shoot straight you bastard, don't make a mess of it!
The most difficult part is that we don't wear signs that say "Baptist" "Catholic" "Mormon" "Heathen" etc. It's harder to apply the stereotypes at first glance. Even the most "enlightened" among us have to admit that the stereotypes p*** through their mind.
Fortunately, we're judged by our actions and words, not our thoughts.
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mutt Prove that you love me And buy the next round.
lein j...@spammer.die
Yes.
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John Leinaweaver
RJ re_john...@hotmail.com
On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 04:51:03 GMT, Czar Christopher I A nation of entertainers?
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Bob
Czar Christopher I pu...@tbbqfubj.arg.invalid
What do you think rsfc is?
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Czar Christopher I rec.sport.football.college "His insufferable smugness would be much more credible if he weren't such a drooling simpleton." --Daniel Seriff
woodru ...@cableone.net (Trent Woodruff)
The military has long been at the forefront of racial acceptance (that isn't to say was easy for the military to make happen), happily.
Sadly, we still have a few other "acceptances" that we're not being particularly honest about.
Trent Chairborne "Nine of Diamonds" Ranger ...To be a great NCO, you need three bones: a backbone, a wishbone and a funny bone.
woodru ...@cableone.net (Trent Woodruff)
This is a good point. If you get to know someone enough to know that they're an agnostic, for instance, you've probably gotten to know them well enough to realize that idiotic stereotypes don't apply. The same isn't the case with something as apparent as race usually is.
Trent Chairborne "Nine of Diamonds" Ranger ...To be a great NCO, you need three bones: a backbone, a wishbone and a funny bone.
woodru ...@cableone.net (Trent Woodruff)
You're entertaining. (Believe me.) Trent Chairborne "Nine of Diamonds" Ranger ...To be a great NCO, you need three bones: a backbone, a wishbone and a funny bone.
"Greg Sumner" gsum...@nwlinkNospam.com
Somebody email me when football season starts.
--
Greg Sumner Go Huskies!
"Dave Fried" fr...@uiuc.edu
I think things would be best if we ignored people's skin color or the shape of their eyes, but at the same time allowed people to celebrate their cultural heritage.
Race is a social construction, while culture is not. We make the mistake of ***ociating, for example, first-generation Africans with African Americans descended from slaves 200 years ago, just because they both have dark skin and nappy hair. We ***ociate Pakistanis with Indians, Chinese with Japanese, Jewish Europeans with Russians, etc.
Each of these people may belong to a different, distinct culture that will never fully ***imilate into some kind of "American average", and each should have the right to be proud of that heritage. It's when we say that Cubans and Brazilians should be treated as one group because they are the same "race", or when we ***ume that they will act or should be treated the same way that we create a problem.
--Dave
deemsb ...@aol.comnospam (Bill Deems)
15? Try, oh, 200+.
Bryan S. Slick brya...@slick-family.not
:>No, we are not supposed to be a colorblind society. Maybe, in :>a few generations, we'll see enough interracial mixing to produce :>a nation full of Halle Berrys and Derek Jeters.
: :A nation of entertainers?
A nation of entertainers that run on at the mouth when they win an award, on a tangent that no one buys, and with over-rated breasts that cause a CNN Breaking News event when they're shown in a movie.
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Bryan S. Slick, bryan_s at slick-family dot net "To those who have fought for it, freedom has a flavor the protected will never know."
Bryan S. Slick brya...@slick-family.not
:Sadly, we still have a few other "acceptances" that we're not being :particularly honest about.
Unfortunately, I have to admit that for the time being, the other "acceptance" you're talking about isn't very practical. The large majority of people I've ever spoken with about this issue are all HEAVILY against said "acceptance". We could be forced to attend EO cl***es for the rest of our careers, and some will still be all in favor of incidents like occurred a few years ago.. I think at Fort Jackson? (can't remember exact location.. G.I. Party to beat on a homosexual led to his death)
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Bryan S. Slick, bryan_s at slick-family dot net "To those who have fought for it, freedom has a flavor the protected will never know."
Bryan S. Slick brya...@slick-family.not
:It's appropriate to CELEBRATE an individual's heritage when no value :judgements are being made.
: :It's NOT appropriate to consider an individual's heritage when a value :judgement is being made (hiring or providing similar opportunities).
: :That is the difference, as I see it.
Perfection in crystalization, thy name (for this topic) is Woodruff.
Affirmative action has always been, and will always be, offensive and unjust.. just as the reverse is offensive and unjust. Different sides of the same coin.
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Bryan S. Slick, bryan_s at slick-family dot net "To those who have fought for it, freedom has a flavor the protected will never know."
Colette Marine p...@abegujrfgrea.rqh
The US has been fixated on race for over a century.
I'm not being flip, either. Our obsession with race in this country can be directly traced to post Civil War migration, at least (if one's brain snaps shut at the thought of tracing it back to slavery). People like to think it was *so* long ago that it has no bearing now, but it's just not true when you consider that one of the most important ramifications of post-emancipation changes was *where* newly freed blacks were allowed to settle (in small, homogenous groups) and what kind of infrastructure they had and were allowed to have over the next several decades (brutally sub-par). The net result is that there are people who are active parts of the workforce right now, *today*, who were victims of racially restrictive housing covenants, and all of the related educational and occupational foo that went along with them. The generations directly affected by this stuff aren't dead and gone. They're still here. The pushing and pulling is still here and has been with us all along, so it should be small wonder that we're still fixated on race.
Frankly, we're still only just beginning to get to a point *economically* where we might hope to stop fixating on race.
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"There is *always* a need for more barely-covered titties. You can quote me on that." - Czar Christopher I ROT-13 to e-mail
"andrew smith" a...@mindspring.com
Until I am allowed to personally rate Halle Berry's breasts they shall remain unrated.
a.
Mike Dahmus mheyhowyoudoinah...@io.com
On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 12:39:40 -0500, Tony Rice Tony, answer me this one: How long ago was it that places like Dallas (and probably Raleigh) still had restrictive covenants prohibiting the sale of properties to black people? Was this practice dead and gone 100 years ago? You sure seem to act like it was.
My high school in south Florida had race riots in the 70s after forced integration.
Not the 1870s.
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Mike Dahmus m dah mus @ at @ io.com
alicam ...@yahoo.com (Tom Enright)
"Covenants"? Is that sort of like when the government says something along the lines of : "you can't sell this broadcast license to a white-owned station" or "we cannot allow a white-owned business to fill this order"?
-TOE
Colette Marine p...@abegujrfgrea.rqh
Part of the reason that happens is because, without an understanding of how the problems of the present developed, it becomes extremely difficult to solve them. For example, I can't begin to count how many times I've heard, "Well, why don't they just move then?" or "It's their own fault if they didn't bootstrap themselves out of a bad neighborhood" and on and on. We can't fix the problem while ignoring the origins of the problem.
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"There is *always* a need for more barely-covered titties. You can quote me on that." - Czar Christopher I ROT-13 to e-mail
Mike Dahmus mheyhowyoudoinah...@io.com
Well, to people over 35 or so, those _are_ the problems of the present.
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Mike Dahmus m dah mus @ at @ io.com
alicam ...@yahoo.com (Tom Enright)
Could you please offer an example of this. I am honestly interested, because I hear this often and I don't fully understand. To me it always seemed like victimology.
It seems to me the problems that face the community today are the result of what occurred in the 1960s more than the 1860s.
-TOE
alicam ...@yahoo.com (Tom Enright)
I undestand what you wrote, and it makes sense, but my original question stands: Noting the problems you listed, how does knowing the origins of the problem help resolve the problems?
-TOE
"Steve Jaros" sjar...@crsme.net
In a 'historical short-run' sense, yes - i.e., if we're trying to improve the performance of a group of 6 graders who are failing at school, well then we have to know *why* they are failing at school, and that cause must of course lie in what has gone on in the past. But the recent past, i.e., what has been happening at home or in the cl***room over the past 2-5 years and up to the present such that these kids haven't learned what they needed to learn by grade 6.
But beyond that, in a historical 'long run' sense? I don't agree. One reason is because that cause can't be fixed - it's over and done with (if it isn't over and done with, for example if slavery or jim crow still existed in the USA, then of course it wouldn't be a 'historical' cause but a short-run contemporary one). For another, focusing on historical causes can be either a distraction or something that provokes p***ions that aren't helpful in solving the problem. Memory can be a pest - just look at all the places around the world where people are at each other's throats because they remember all-too-well some "cause" from 100, 400, or 1000 years ago.
Dwelling on the past can exacerbate grievances, etc. And for a third, it's hard to measure the here-and-now impact of a historical cause - it's tangled up with many other historical causes.
But let me give you an example of the short vs. long run cause issue: let's say a child is failing in the 6th grade. So we investigate to find out why.
We determine that the main cause is that the child is habitually late to school. This is a proximate cause - can it be corrected? Probably. We can try to determine why the child is tardy, and try to end that problem. So we investigate further and find out that the reason the kid is late is because her parent, who is a poor single mother on welfare, doesn't get her up early enough, doesn't make sure she gets dressed, eats, and gets out the door in a timely manner.
Additionally, our social workers tell us that poor single mothers often lack the parenting skills to make sure their kids get to school on time - they are too distracted by their misery, or are on drugs, etc. to be mindful of the need to do so. So can something be done to correct the secondary cause?
Probably. We can contact the parent and try to educate her on the need to get her kid to school on time, regardless of what other priorities she has.
It's entirely possible that the parent's behavior can be corrected. Perhaps not, but it is possible.
Finally, let's say we bring in a historian who tells us that the welfare mother is a member of a racial group that was, up until about 30 years ago (but no longer), legally discriminated against in life opportunities such that there's a good chance her poverty has been inherited from prior generations as a legacy of this discrimination. Can something be done to correct this tertiary cause? No - the discrimination that her racial group experienced is an historical fact. There's no way to travel back in time and replay American history such that discrimination never happened. What can be done about that has already been done - i.e., laws were changed to legally put an end to the discriminatory social regime. Therefore, it's hard to know what the "here and now" benefits (i.e., what will help today's 6th grader) will be from focusing lots of energy on exploring the details of that history.
(3) historical discrimination >>> (2) poverty >>> (1) poor parenting skills be expended on the latter two. We're far more likely to be able to impact them.
It's true that people do say things like this. But i'd argue that this is typically not a reflection of ignorance. I'd bet that more times than not the speaker does know that it is much harder to rise up out of a bad neighborhood than a good one. The speaker is a) noting that there are causes at work beyond the socio-economic ones (there must be, because some racial minorities do indeed work their way up out of the ghetto, the trailer park, etc., and b) they are protecting their own interests, i.e., they fear (with good reason, given the behavior of government the past 40 years) that if they concede the point, the next thing they know they or their kids will be being dunned (in the form of higher taxes, affirmative action, etc.) to 'correct' an historical injustice they had no role in perpetrating.
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"if federal judges have the final word over its meaning, the Constitution would be a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please".
- Thomas Jefferson
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