Originally posted by fm93
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Hold on. He talked about making choices, but where did he mention "being white" anywhere? I don't see that. What I do see is that he's saying "people who are white are making everyday choices that effectually lock in white privilege," but that's quite a far cry from "just by being white, you're oppressing people."
Sorry, that wasn't directed at you. I just got informed that I lost out on a permanent job here at work because they needed to increase the diversity of the permanent workforce.
I see. But here, you seem to have missed part of the historical dynamic--things like "black colleges" and "black churches" and "black businesses" exist in large part because historically speaking, people who were black tended to be excluded from the "mainstream" generic colleges, churches and businesses. Many black people think of themselves in that way because years of segregation and discrimination drilled into them the message that skin color mattered to such an extent that those who weren't white were separate.
Interesting. Every liberal I know believes that government welfare ought to only be a temporary fix, and that the ultimate goal is to become self-sufficient as quickly as possible.
This statement sounds as if a person must choose between one or the other. But surely you agree that that's not the case--rather, what's needed is balance. You don't want to talk so much about groups that you end up overlooking individuals. At the same time, however, you don't want to focus so closely on the individual that you miss what's going on overall with the group. Individual people aren't automatically defined by characteristics of a group that they belong to, but neither do individual people exist in a vacuum.
Not entirely sure what you're referring to by "love something"--what is being loved?
Okay. I think the issue I had with the rhetoric in that piece is that I see a lot of people acting like black people are all "using racism as an excuse or crutch" for their poor condition.
The problems with that belief are that 1) it implies that racism is never a possible factor (and I hardly believe we're warranted in concluding that), and 2) it's blatant broad-brushing and oversimplifying things. Some poor black people might feel defeated and believe that they'll never be able to overcome because racism will always prevent them, but that doesn't seem to me like "they're using it as an excuse to be lazy and not ever work hard."
I'm not sure about that. This source claims that there's a slightly higher percentage of welfare recipients who happen to be black than white, which means that there are slightly more black welfare recipients than white welfare recipients. And in more general terms, this table from the US Census website reports that the percentage of all black Americans who live below poverty is almost three times higher than the percentage of all white non-hispanic Americans who live below poverty (27.2 to 9.7).
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/0...n_6771938.html
Perhaps, but as noted above, where does one find the balance?
I'm sorry--this is too vague for me to be confident that we're talking about the same thing on this point. Do you have any specific examples of what you mean by this?
I see. My own life experiences have generally had me looking at the issue from another angle. I grew up in a fairly affluent suburb of a major city. Here in the suburbs, the public schools tend to rate as excellent, producing top-notch students and earning national awards and recognition. Many of them have excellent facilities with frequent renovations and come equipped with fancy interactive digital boards that fit OVER the traditional whiteboard in each classroom, even though the teachers never use them and most can't even figure out how to properly use them. Outside of academics, some schools in the area can even afford to have football stadiums that supposedly cost millions of dollars. Meanwhile, many public schools about an hour south in the city proper are in bad condition. They routinely rank among the worst schools in the nation, their facilities are in decaying condition, and the teachers need to cheat on standardized tests to allow students to move on. It has always seemed obvious to me that the affluent suburban schools don't need so much (especially the useless, completely ignored interactive digital boards and multi-million dollar football stadiums). That some of the what are clearly excess dollars really would be better spent on those poor, decaying inner-city schools. Yet some people in the affluent suburbs engage in rhetoric like "the government is STEALING our hard-earned dollars from us!" That, to me, seems like a gross and rather narrow-minded (if not a bit selfish) distortion.
These answers are compatible. The city residents believed that some cops murdered innocent citizens and that the justice system would fail the community and allow the cops to get away with murder. Many of those people who were killed happened to be black, and so some residents conclude that black people are disproportionately more likely to be betrayed by the justice system than white people. This understandably would lead them to feel that the lives of black people in effect matter less than the lives of white people.
But in some cases, such as those of Walter Scott and Eric Garner, the victims didn't commit any serious crimes when they were apprehended and then killed at the hands of the police. And in the case of Michael Brown, people initially thought that all he'd done was steal some cigarillos, which indisputably isn't an offense grave enough to warrant death.
I can't comment on Sharpton and Jackson, whom you and a few others so frequently mention, but I do recall seeing many black folks condemn the shooters of Officers Ramos and Liu in New York.
Even if it could somehow be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was literally nothing else that Darren Wilson could have done and that he was perfectly justified in pulling the trigger as opposed to using non-lethal force, at the time of the protests the details were too vague and muddy to argue that. It very understandably appeared at that point in time that the justice system was not at all operating correctly.
While looters most definitely should not be conflated with protesters and rioters, I see no reason why a distinction must be drawn with the latter two. Some rioters may have had ulterior motives, but it seems to me that many other rioters were doing so as a specific point for the protest.
This is a nice-sounding speech, but it mustn't be forgotten that Dr. King also said "A riot is the language of the unheard"
--and unfortunately, the fact of the matter appears to be that most of the unheard tend to be people of color. To interpret Dr. King's famous Dream speech as indicating that he wanted people to completely ignore the existence of race seems to be an unwarranted conclusion.
The categorization and separation based on those categories is what keeps us apart. It is what keeps this continuing war well-fed. As long as we are "white cops" and "black teens", we will spin our wheels and accuse each other without all of the facts, and repeat the futility of our fathers.
I did my final term paper in my senior year on MLK and Gandhi's use of Thoreau's On Civil Disobedience, so I have read quite a lot of their speeches.
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