I don't bother too much commenting about the "race" issues currently dominating our discourse since I don't think the conservative position is offered in anything close to good faith. Maybe that's a mistake, but I'm tired of fighting against fake outrage. Why bother when you know that whatever arguments you bring to bear are pointless?
But let's take a short break from this weariness and at least ask a few questions about two of our current controversies. I apologize in advance for simply saying what I mean instead of adopting the currently fashionable vocabulary that values nuance above all and drains meaning from everything it touches.
First, put aside all the nonsense about "critical race theory," which is just a phrase conservatives have picked up without knowing what it means. (If you want to know, Wikipedia is a click away.) What is it they're really upset about?
The answer, I think, is not discussions of slavery or racism per se, but discussions that implicitly or explicitly blame white people as a class for it. Now, you might wonder who else could be to blame for it, but put that snark aside. The fact remains that conservatives don't want to be made to feel endlessly guilty about racism, and they don't want schools to make their kids feel that way.
Question: given this reality, should the rest of us stop trying to make everyone feel guilty about past and present racism? Is guilt an effective motivator for change in the first place?
Second, the modern progressive argument about race mostly revolves around systemic racism, the idea that racism is less about individual bigotry than it is about racism embedded in our institutions. A good example of this is the redlining of neighborhoods in the middle part of the 20th century, which prevented Black homebuyers from getting loans to buy houses in good neighborhoods. This is the kind of thing we should focus on, not on raking individual people who display racist behavior.¹
If this is the case, it would be handy to have good examples that exist today. I have ideas of my own about which ones are most important, but who cares what I think? It would be better to develop some kind of quasi-consensus about this. So: what are the three most important current examples of systemic racism that would help non-progressives to see what we're talking about? Leave your nominations in comments.
¹Although God knows we do plenty of this too.
I don't have current statistics but back when I was teaching civil liberties there was a study that showed that blacks who killed whites were about 8 times more likely to get the death penalty than whites who killed blacks. It was also interesting that blacks who killed blacks were less likely to get the death penalty. The racial disparities in this were usually attributed to the unwillingness of prosecutors to seek the death penalty and also the unwillingness of juries to vote for such a sentence. Evidence like this was what ultimately led Justice Blackmun to refuse to support the death penalty even though he had earlier in his career.
During the early 2000s housing bubble, many banks were steering black borrowers to subprime loans even though they qualified for prime loans. I don't know the specific criteria they were using to justify it, though. It may have been something coded into their approval algorithm or racist loan officers. Maybe someone else has more info on the cause.
Here's a quick article on it: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-08-16/the-dramatic-racial-bias-of-subprime-lending-during-the-housing-boom
A really easy example is preferred college admission for relatives of previous graduates. That lets racism of decades ago confer a benefit today, without any admissions officers having to be personally racist.
I seem to recall Al Franken describing legacy admissions with a phrase like "affirmative action for the children of people like me."
It's not affirmative action though as it's just the default. Affirmative Action would be taking action to try and correct for that bias (towards legacy admissions).
Franken's Jewish. They have their own ethnic networks. There was a blogger named Cathy Seipp (who met an untimely demise) whose daughter, with very mediocre SAT scores (senior Seipp published them) somehow got a last minute admit to UCSD. Ron Unz has quantified this 'Jewish privilege'.
https://theamericanconservative.com/pdf/The%20Myth%20of%20American%20Meritocracy-Unz.pdf
How much advantage does a 'legacy' admit get you. I don't think they have ever existed in the U of California system. But now you get brownie points for being a first generation college student.
Have you considered looking into it? It’s quite common for private institutions, not so much for public institutions.
Another example would be preference for athletes in sports traditionally dominated by the upper class (crew, fencing).
UCLA actually abolished its male varsity crew about a decade and a half ago, part of its effort at Title IX compliance. And believe it or not, water polo was also threatened with the same fate.
Today, young mostly white dudes that want to participate in the traditional collegiate sport of crew have to buy their own uniforms, pay for their own training, etc. Or rely on generous benefactors.
https://www.uclamensrowing.com/history
But I'm sure that tons of white kids are getting fencing scholarships.
Actually more like three decades ago. Long enough ago that the legendary Jim Murray wrote a column about it. God, being GenX sucks.
The obvious one is the frequency with which black drivers are pulled over by the police vs. white drivers per capita.
This study from last year stuck in my memory. (I see that per Google Scholar it has been cited 153 times.)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0858-1
The National Crime Victimization Survey, which simply asks people if they have been victimized (a huge 'N' of over 60,000, btw) shows that blacks commit far more crimes than whites per capita. This has nothing to do with cops or the 'justice system'. If follows that blacks are just as likely to disobey traffic laws as laws against stealing, robbery, swindling, assault, etc.
When you pull over more people, you get hugger conviction rates.
Huh. Who knew it worked like that?
White kids smoke pot at home. Black kids don’t because their families will be evicted. Both are smoking pot, but the black kids get arrested and convicted.
Again, this is the crime *victimization* survey. Just asking people if they've been victimized and if so, a bunch of other questions, including 'perceived race of perpetrator'. Has zero to do with cops stopping people or the court system or anything.
1. The persistent and widespread pattern of environmental racism where pollutants of all types disproportionately harm the health of Black, Brown, Indigenous and poor people. Air pollution and toxic inequities can and should be central to how we talk about climate policy, e.g. https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/reports/fossil-fuel-racism/
2. The general stance of the police (not just the ever-present threat of overreaction and deadly force) but a more widespread and toxic treatment of certain groups as under suspicion and guilty-until-proven-innocent (racial profiling, stop/frisk, etc). The way the war on drugs is prosecuted differently in different neighborhoods.
Also, the disparity in both prosecutions & sentencing for cocaine users vs crack users.
How about the 13% 50% disparity in homicide perps?
Having a hard time focusing on the examples offered, I see.
Are there a lot of blacks who suffer from black lung?
there have been a couple of examples cited, of Black homeowners who, when getting an appraisal, find they're getting a low number; they ... "cleanse" their house of Black culture, and have a white friend meet the appraiser the next time, and voila! the appraisal comes in much, much higher.
I'm sorry, instead of "cited" I should have written "reported in the mainstream media"
I think it is very valuable and important to know what happened. To know about things like Tulsa, and the Wilmington coup of 1898. About Jim Crow and the Night Riders.
If these things make you as a white person feel guilty, then you have work to do as well. They motivate me to want to change things, but I don't feel much guilt about them myself.
I certainly am not interested in making other white people, who are usually about as racist as I am, feel bad. That may happen as a side effect, but it will probably fade in time.
James Baldwin said, "When the white man learns to love himself, there will be no race problem". I embrace that and endorse it.
You are 100% correct. Last I heard, teaching factual history wasn't considered 'progressive'. At least, not yet. And if teaching actual factual history makes someone feel 'guilty' ... world's saddest song on the world's smallest violin and all that.
I'm one of those wishy-washy liberals who believe that those who take no account of history are doomed to repeat sort of people, IOW, a pragmatician.
Pretty sure re-institution of slave in the US of A isn't on anyone's agenda, except maybe some immigrants.
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/2018/09/19/wealthy-southlake-couple-accused-of-keeping-african-child-as-slave-are-indicted-on-multiple-charges/
No? What about the constant Republican whine that "there shouldn't even BE a 'minimum wage'"?
Aren't liberal 'foundations' famous for relying on unpaid interns? Isn't that how the Huffington Post actually made money for its first decade of existence?
... should the rest of us stop trying to make everyone feel guilty about past and present racism?
I think the word "guilt" is carrying a lot of weight here. I would agree that a lot of people who don't want any kind of discussion of racism at least SAY they feel they are being made to feel "guilty," but it's not at all clear that anyone is actually trying to do that. (In fact, I find their immediate leap to "you're trying to make me feel guilty" something of a case of "fleeing when no man pursues.") To say that "the rest of us" are trying to make people feel "guilty" is to buy into a false frame.
I think instead the goal is to (1) force a little honesty about the facts on the ground -- absent any attribution -- which facts have been and still are being strenuously denied, and (2) motivate a discussion about what to do about them. And I think the REAL resistance to this is that society WILL have to pay some costs, absorb some changes, to do something about what is still an unacceptable situation in many different ways.
Put more simply: they don't want to help deal with the mess, so they're playing victim.
It's basically the same thing John Roberts said in his airy dismissal of any consideration of race, as though it had all vanished like the dew in the morning sun. We got ours, and you'll just have to swim for it.
I'm reminded of a KD blog post from April.
https://jabberwocking.com/black-crime-and-white-crime-in-the-united-states/
Except that KD didn't consider that blacks are, by the NCVS, more likely to commit more serious crimes. As you go up the crime scale, the disparity between black and white crime rates gets worse and worse.
And also that recidivism will get you more time...so if blacks are 2.7X more likely to commit violent crime, they will be more likely to do it again, and more likely to get convicted (rather than plea bargained to misdemeanor) and more likely to do more jail time.
1. Drug sentencing disproportionality and the overcriminalization of marijuana.
2. Cash bail requirements for non-violent crimes.
3. Zoning ordinances that allows polluting industrial zones to exist alongside *some* residential areas without buffer or controls.
4. Eminent domain use targeted specifically at poor neighborhoods.
5. Civil forfeiture that tends to discriminate against poor groups of ppl who do not use/trust banks (carrying large sums of cash, instead).
6. Educational systems that penalize underperforming schools while giving the rich more resources for meeting expectations.
White bloggers drawing up lists of the most important examples of systemic racism experienced by Blacks?
Magic woke fairy gouges out her own eyes.
You'd prefer White bloggers not giving a crap about systemic racism experienced by Blacks? /facepalm
The blogger isn’t drawing up a list. The blogger is invited those who like to to offer examples.
"The answer, I think, is not discussions of slavery or racism per se, but discussions that implicitly or explicitly blame white people as a class for it."
Not quite accurate, I think. Only those white people who think that slavery and racism are/were acceptable. It's a self identifying process, and it is easy enough to say (and mean) that one doesn't condone slavery/racism now or ever.
Telling conservatives about their own behavior seems hardly worth the candle. They know perfectly well what they're doing and why they're doing it.
What you have to tell them about is that they're idiots, something they do not understand.
_When Affirmative Action was White_ by Ira Katznelson is a great source.
Deals with things 60-70-80 years ago, and of course the 'affirmative action' was of the folks who created the institutions favoring their own, as is natural and not wrong by my lights.
That's a terrible way to think about institutions and communities. Racism mostly isn't about individual beliefs, but in your case it is.
You're very racist.
Yes, by today's lights I suppose I am. And that's okay.
"favoring their own, as is natural"
Except that they (you) misunderstand who "your own" is.
It was entirely understandable for early 20th century WASPS to want to see the institutions they created, like Harvard, Yale, etc, remain WASP. A few years ago Brandies had a big debate about retaining its Jewish identity. And you know what...I'd come down on the side of those who wished it would.
https://www.jta.org/2015/05/05/united-states/amid-chinese-influx-brandeis-considers-its-jewish-identity
"So: what are the three most important current examples of systemic racism that would help non-progressives to see what we're talking about?"
Right-wingers don't want help in seeing or understanding this. They want to continue in denial. They want to continue to say the Civil War was not about slavery, that "Irish need not apply" was the equivalent of slavery, that Martin Luther King was a right-wing conservative, etc.
It's a mystery to my why it makes them feel bad to hear that years ago, white people did horrible things. They (apparently) have a strong desire to defend those white people and the things they did. Wonder why.
It is also impossible to get them to acknowledge systemic racism because they believe that all outcomes are deserved. Black people earn less for the same job? Well, they are lesser people. Black people get longer sentences for minor crimes? Well, they are just dangerous people. And so on.
Kevin is looking for help talking to non-progressives. Right-wingers and non-progressives are not the same thing. You're right that most right-wingers are unreachable and don't argue in good faith but we don't win by convincing those. We win by helping those in the middle see the truth.
Black people, as a group, actually are more dangerous. UCR, the NCVS bear that out. What 'progressives' can't bare to hear is that yes, group differences are real and aren't all (or now, even significantly) the result of 'systemic racism'.
Shorter Mitchell Young: “Let’s get rid of all the black people.”
Again, I wish Kevin would figure out a way to ban the racists from his comments section.
I don't want to get 'rid' of black people. I want a safespace for white people. Give us Greater Idaho.
Why not the bottom of the ocean? You'd be in your depth.
So is Barack Obama black or white? And why?
He quite clearly self identified as black.
Yeah, remember when black people invented the atomic bomb and incinerated all those people in Japan? That's dangerous.
Yes, white people when riled up and united can do hugely violent things.
Here are some less condescending reasons why conservatives (not the pols who are shameless manipulators) object to all of this.
1) Most people live lives guided by myth. The myth that we are the 'good guys' is a deep part of our national identity. Progressives have their own myths (see #3), but conservatives believe whatever we have done is either set or condoned by God. Even slavery.
2) An aversion to change. Most 'real-people' conservatives that I know cannot really deal with change. They spend their whole lives trying to keep the life they knew as children and idolize that time. So they are invested in #1.
3) Conservatives believe people suck and always have. Why spend energy on acknowledging a period of our time when our country did horrible things? Every culture/race has done horrible things. I believe it's the assholes (violent, power hungry men mostly) with a group who move a population toward codified assholery. Progressives seem to believe that the downtrodden are somehow better than those on top. Take 1000 white and black people and I would bet equal proportions within those populations suck. It is just that the white, wealthy people who suck can manipulate the world around them to make many people miserable.
“Question: given this reality, should the rest of us stop trying to make everyone feel guilty about past and present racism? Is guilt an effective motivator for change in the first place?”
Yes, we should stop; and no, guilt is not an effective motivator.
And for everyone who wants to rush in and condemn others for being racist, I would ask (among other things):
How well do you really think you would put up with being made to feel guilty about your homophobia (past or present)?
Or your misogyny?
Or those long showers that you like to take?
Or the number of items that you fail to adequately recycle?
Or the number of plane flights that you have taken (which have contributed mightily to your “carbon footprint”)?
Or the amount of gas your car guzzles?
Or the types of food you eat?
Or your weight?
Or your lack of exercise?
Or all the ways that you have mismanaged your finances?
This list could of course go on forever.
And guilt will rarely if ever be an effective mechanism for motivating people to address, modify, or in any way deal with these various issues.
We should of course be honest: slavery has existed throughout the history of humanity.
So I’m not advising a cover up;
I’m simply advising realism.
And the reality of human nature is that people do not and will never respond well to guilt, condescending attitudes, ideological rigidity, or anything else along those lines.
It might provide us with a pleasant air of self-righteousness to loudly join the deafening chorus that currently seems to condemn everything as racist these days; but,
I don’t personally think that approach actually helps to solve any problems.
If we really want to improve the world, provide a positive vision for its future. If you really want to help or improve people: set a good example.
But everyone needs to start feeling guilty about all the guilt trips; cause they’re simply counterproductive.
Yawn. Fallacy of false bifurcation, otherwise known as the fallacy of the excluded middle. Got anything else you want to share?
Again: this reply falls into my category for comments that simply are not productive if one is actually interested in trying to make an improvement in the world.
Broach someone's world view, and they will not deal with it, or at least not well.
Then there are the subset of people who try to make any criticism unpatriotic.
Actually dealing with the consequences of past is hard. We have to grow up.
Who is racist? There seems to be a binary approach to this question and we have immense problems by not understanding that there is a range of attitudes.
NOTE: This comment is not about what "race" means. That's for another time. Let's consider everyday use of the word.
A person who advocates economic discrimination against someone of a different race would be considered by most to be racist. I would too.
But what about - and put yourself in this position - someone ends up in a place where there is *nobody* of their race in the area. If that person is discomfited, is that racist?
I think everyone would be discomfited*. So now we have a case where someone is reacting negatively to a "racial" situation. Absent a classification system, everyone is the world is racist by contemporary "woke" standards. That tripwire mindset mindset leads to endless conflict.
* if you are not discomfited, congratulations, you are exceptional.
I don't think that seeking the company of one's own kind or one's "tribe" is racism. To harm or disprage someone (even unintentionally) because of their race would be racism.
Would I be discomfited? Maybe. A little bit. It would depend on how people were reacting to me.
I know I am discomfited if I'm in a room full of white men, it has happened often. And I'm white.
You're lying.
White people create amazing societies.
People create amazing societies.
FIFY.
I must say I've been sick and tired of folks who want to place treasonous confederates in a place of honor, I'm sick and tired of playing this pretend game about the Civil War when my ancestor fought to preserve the Union and there's been precious little to honor the rank and file Union soldiers even though I live in the Washington DC area, the capital of that Union that was preserved.
Don't ask me to spare their feelings, I've spent far too long having to be quiet about this, no more.
LOL. When I was a contractor I used to stay in Du Pont circle, named not after the chemical company magnates but a Civil War US (Union) Navy Admiral. Nearby if I recall were statues, large impressive equestrian ones, to both Sherman and Sheridan (the guys who practiced vernichtungs krieg against the Southrons first, then turned it on the Injuns). And then there is the monument to the drunken waster of white men's lives, US grant (read about the Battle of the Wilderness sometime, and you'll see why the Union side lost half a million overwhelmingly white men). And of course at the center of it all, in mass and volume far far outpacing the Washington Monument, is that idolatrous statue to Father Abraham.
Lost Cause History rears it's ugly head again. No mention of a bunch southern white men losing hundreds of thousands lives defending the "peculiar interest", otherwise known as slavery, so that Lee could nobly strut around on Traveller. In this version Lee was a brilliant gallant gentleman strategist and Grant was a drunken lowlife brute. Only most modern historians believe Grant did very little drinking during the Civil War and was actually a far more innovative strategist than Lee. Also, he won. Thankfully. And while we're at it let's remember what Frederick Douglas said of Grant:
" a man too broad for prejudice, too humane to despise the humblest,
too great to be small at any point. In him the Negro found a protector, the Indian a friend, a vanquished foe a brother,
an imperiled nation a savior.”
As a good Yankee, in the true sense of the word, I had in mind the Union soldiers lives that Grant wasted.
Having a hard time understanding the words “rank and file Union soldiers,” I see.
That's actually a good point. There are precious few monuments to rank and file soldiers anywhere. In this however the South, particularly the deeper South, outstrips the north with anonymous statues of Confederate soldiers. Of course many if not most of these have been vandalized, destroyed etc in the violence of 2020.
Plenty of examples listed above with regard to criminal justice, policing, and housing/environmental justice issues. But like others (and I'm white), I think the concept of "guilt" when discussing this is a problem. I know that whites have been responsible for the perpetuation of racism on an institutional basis, but I don't feel guilt. I recognize that there are systemic problems that have existed since before our country's birth, and we should face the facts and not bury them. It seems like if you are worried about guilt you are expressing your white identity as something that needs to be defended. I guess I don't feel that white identity and don't see a need to be defensive. We fucked up. Let's fix it.
We fucked up by importing sub-Saharan Africans, that's for sure.
Ah. True stripes showing.
“Importing”?Ah, you mean kidnapping. Then venerating the criminals and treating the victims as subhumans who were better off as victims and blaming them for not being grateful for their treatment.
Yep you are racist slime. Last time I reply to you.
From my understanding of African (sub-Saharan), the vast majority of African slaves were not kidnapped by whites (Europeans, Brits, or Americans). There were bought from other blacks, who had enslaved them as a consequence of wars.
So yes, buying slave and moving them was importing them.
Interestingly, Northern African slavery typically involved whiteer whites being 'kidnapped' by less white Caucasians. See the whole 'Barbary Coast' thing...to the shores of Tripoli!
This sorta reminds me of something a former president said: "I don't give them Hell. I just tell the truth about them, and they think it's Hell."
Yet another reason Democrats need to start quoting some of their former presidents. I've been pushing for more FDR, TR, and JFK for some time now. Harry Truman had some good ones, too, particularly that one.
I don't think anyone has mentioned the wealth gap, which is maybe ten to one: https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining-the-black-white-wealth-gap/ Gobsmacking.
Here's another issue I remember hearing about quite awhile ago: different responses to resumes based on perceived race of job applicant. https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes-get-more-interviews
As a white liberal, I'd like to quit talking about who is racist and who isn't. A little truism I like to carry around is that we're all racist. Of course I mean "prejudiced" (someone somewhere said something like, "racism" is prejudice with the weight of society behind it.) Let us interrogate our own "implicit" (unconscious) racism, and then turn to the big problem: systemic, accumulated, socially implicit racism.
Many whites must feel angry because they don't personally feel like they are terribly racist, but the conversation is more about history or society as a whole, and for some reason they don't want to deal. This kind of abstract thinking is a little foreign to them, perhaps, and personal accountability is instinctive.
Hope this is helpful.
One thing which should be emphasized is how much wealth and political power (in addition to the countless lives) was robbed from black people over the centuries. This is why highlighting the many incidents in the past like the Tulsa Massacre and Wilmington Insurrection are so important. Look how conservatives have been framing criticism of blacks the past couple of decades -- in attempt to avoid accusations of covert racism -- by portraying "urban" problems as being the result of welfare dependence and absent fathers, essentially giving blacks (and/or welfare) the blame for their own problems. The challenge is then to show that the present is (to a significant extent) a result of these past crimes for which justice was never achieved.
Maybe a specific example like George Floyd could be illustrative. I have read that his great, great grandfather had acquired around 500 acres of prime NC cropland during Reconstruction. This land was simply stolen from him, first by a group of white marauders and then by a (white) justice system which refused to protect his interests. That land today, even ignoring the significant crop value, would now be worth several million dollars. How the consequences of this one crime long ago still play out! And this is just one of Floyd's many direct ancestors. Imagine the cumulative effects of similar crimes to the others -- and then this multiplied millions of times over throughout the country!
Before knowledge of these things has a chance of affecting public consciousness, of course, they have to first be taught in the classrooms -- and that's what conservatives are fighting. Many are grasping desperately onto a nostalgic past and refuse to let go.
LOL. Dude, this is the internet age. Let's assume the 'land theft' story is true. You can buy 400 acres in North Carolina for less than a million.
https://www.landflip.com/land/222932
It's easy to find extremes for anything, but especially for the value of land, which is dependent upon multiple factors. Being also familiar with the internet, I found that the site you provide shows the average value of all NC land listed at nearly $6000 an acre, which would mean the 500 acres could just as well now be valued at nearly $3 million or more. Of course, maybe it was on the outskirts of a growing city (it was supposedly near Fayetteville) and could have been sold for residential or commercial development and consequently have been a lot more valuable than even that. And again, I left out any crop value, which over the course of 140 years of harvests could have amounted to the creation of a small fortune for the family and its descendants.
Since your multiple idiotic comments attest to your being especially dense at your silly attempts at trolling, everyone else here has the unfortunate task of repeating what for us are obvious points, like the primary point of my comment (whose strength really doesn't especially depend on current land values) that all that property was STOLEN from Floyd's ancestor and that that instance was only one of a widespread PATTERN OF THEFT that occurred.
That's not entirely true. Most of us simply ignore him. Not because he's a troll, per se, but because he's so bad at it.
So stealing a million was ok?
"When lower-class whites are matched with lower-class blacks and other non-whites the degree of the non-white advantage becomes astronomical: lower-class Asian applicants are seven times as likely to be accepted to the competitive private institutions as similarly qualified whites, lower-class Hispanic applicants eight times as likely, and lower-class blacks ten times as likely. These are enormous differences and reflect the fact that lower-class whites were rarely accepted to the private institutions Espenshade and Radford surveyed. Their diversity-enhancement value was obviously rated very low."
So even the neo-Con wailing about how affirmative action hurts non-white Asians, white working class people are the true victim.
It isn't 1964 anymore.
https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2010/07/12/how_diversity_punishes_asians/
This ignores the fact that non-whites have already been subjected to societal (or systemic) discrimination for many years by the time they get to college application. The anti-white bias in admission can be regarded as compensation for this systemic discrimination, or as an attempt to assess the "true" potential of the students. With these assumptions whites only have an overall disadvantage if the systemic discrimination prior to the admission decision is ignored.
Of course there is actual non-racial discrimination in favor of wealthy through legacy and donor admissions.
LOL. Black kids have far higher scores on self confidence and are far less self-critical than white or Asian kids. That would point to a system that doesn't discriminate against them, but rather nurtures them.
I think that the evil white people should be quarantined into their own country, and no colored fol...oops, I mean 'people of color', should be allowed into there for their own (that is, the POCS) sake.
You’re disgusting.
Worse than that, he's _boring_. I saw better trolling back in the mid-80's when the sport was in its infancy.
Forget the past and focus on the future.
As the brilliant founding fathers said, keep creating a more perfect union with fairness and opportunity for all, in an atmosphere of honesty and openness.
America is an amazing experiment in creating a multi-racial democracy -- something never before attempted in all human history. Anyone who joins in creating this kind of country and contributes to it can feel proud of what they've done -- whatever happened in the past, whatever their individual ancestors did.
We're up against the superrich in Russia and China who want to see this experiment fail. Let's show them it can work.
Go ahead, try to demagogue that message, Tucker of the Preppies.
LOL. This has to be trolling.
The life of John Lewis was, in so many ways, exceptional. It vindicated the faith in our founding, redeemed that faith; that most American of ideas; that idea that any of us ordinary people without rank or wealth or title or fame can somehow point out the imperfections of this nation, and come together, and challenge the status quo, and decide that it is in our power to remake this country that we love until it more closely aligns with our highest ideals. What a radical ideal. What a revolutionary notion. This idea that any of us, ordinary people, a young kid from Troy can stand up to the powers and principalities and say no this isn’t right, this isn’t true, this isn’t just. We can do better. On the battlefield of justice, Americans like John, Americans like the Reverends Lowery and C.T. Vivian, two other patriots that we lost this year, liberated all of us that many Americans came to take for granted.
That's from Obama's eulogy for John Lewis
John Lewis, like Obama, was just an ethnic politician looking out for his own people.
Which ethnicity was Obama? And why?
Obama's ethnicity being black and white? So, Obama looked out for both black and white people? Interesting argument.
Crummy school systems. But then who would want to be a teacher in those places anyway?
Money doesn’t solve every problem.
It make no sense to feel guilty about all the awful things people have done to each other over the course of human history. The toll of misery, death, and destruction is incalculable.
When I think about what causes me to be "racist" I have to admit that it is the black criminal class doing all the work. The black folks I work with are perfectly nice and decent people, but there is no doubt a visible faction of the black culture which, for whatever reason, engages in all sorts of awful violent behavior. For sure there are plenty of white folks who do the same and I have the same contempt for them. But in the conversation about the challenges faced by black folks, criminal behavior tops the list of dysfunction. And we just don't really have a similar need for a conversation about the challenges faced by white folks. I don't know why that is. No one really cares about them, I think, but there are lots of poor white trash making everyone miserable too. They have no such "systemic" excuse to fall back on.
"Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye;
and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."
- Matthew 7:5
Well, you know, I haven’t shot anyone so that’s a degree of criminality which one cannot really explain away as being caused by anything but a serious flaw in either character or humanity.
But I’m also a pretty seriously anti war and anti military lefty and the degree to which this position is unpopular among democrats is the more serious hypocrisy. How can we claim that Black Lives Matter when we empower a military which wages endless war all over the world (and exclusively against people of color!)
In my city, the transit system. It is expensive to use, is unreliable, and does not get people from in the city to jobs. There are large swaths of the city with limited transit options. As large industrial parks in the suburbs are developing, current transit options require people from poor areas to spend several hours and at least one transfer to get to work. It makes it harder for the lowest income people, in my majority Black city, to escape poverty. The state runs the transit system. The newest additions, like light rail and subway, serve white areas. Buses serve Black areas.
I'll just mention one, because I think it is by far the biggest contributor. That is the sorry state of our very segregated schools. Schools that serve Black and Brown children have systematically fewer resources than schools that serve White children, and this is a big contributor to the gap in achievement.
In Europe, schools that serve children with greater needs get more teachers and better teachers. Here, it is just the opposite. I think its a shame.
I am pretty sure guilt has very very little to do with what's going on.