Racism - Always and Forever

When I watched press conferences of him I always found it kind of funny he was standing next to a general named Schwarzkopf. (Meaning black face)

 

I don't know necessarily either...

but there are perceived / real biases & outcome expectation from White America on

• African Americans / African or Afro-???? Immigrants
• Latino Americans / Latino Immigrants
• Asian Americans / Asian Immigrants
• Muslim & Arab Americans / Muslim & Arab Immigrants
• Rez Natives / Urban - Suburban Natives

These tend to be sort of fluid over time and often highly regional - flip flopping between coasts / heartland & urban/rural and highly dependent on how long a migrant group has been a part of the local population

 

Trust me....I can testify on that.

 

Show me the proof that those affirmative action projects worked. I can link studies that might make you think twice about that.

The original arguments for affirmative action framed it as a reparations project. Over time as the data was starting to become clear that it wasn't actually doing much for black people in poverty, the emphasis was shifted to diversity. In this sense there is some data that shows that affirmative action does seem to help middle class and upper middle class black people gain prominent positions.

Normalizing discrimination is normalizing the bigotry of low expectations.

As far as your 'schools falling behind' argument, why fix that with legalized discrimination when the most obvious fix to that problem is to separate school funding from property taxes? Why not put that on a ballot?

Bottom line, if there's a struggling community that you care about, go to that community and invest from the bottom up. Universal healthcare, universal basic income or whatever. Don't lower the bar for excellence. You're not helping as much as you think you are. There's a Duke study that shows about 50% of affirmative action recipients in their STEM fields never finish compared to low single digits for rest of population.

Make learning a priority from childhood. There are studies that show that 75% of education achievement is determined from factors at home, like economic stability, two parent household, crime in neighborhood etc. Empower those communities through the root causes. Racial discrimination is not the way. It's mostly applied to upper middle class people anyways. All it does is make bourgeois college educated liberals feel better about themselves. And it ignores that race is not the only factor in privilege. In fact I guarantee you that if I checked your California data, class would be a much stronger correlation.

And therein lies the problem with racialized systems. It undermines class consciousness. Go to Western Europe social democracies that have far better outcomes in education and upward mobility and you'll find that they don't even collect race data. Color blindness is the true equality, not segregation.

 

I think I'll pass on this one!

 

You mean Stormin' Norman Schwarzgesicht?

 

He wasn't making a point of anything. He was just acknowledging it. Maybe it's a different place in the caste system that Isabel Wilkerson has been promoting with her latest book. You may not have noticed it, but it is a thing. There can be different ceilings for people based on how they are perceived and that often goes back to family.

 

It's an extreme statistical anomaly that all 3 presidential/VP trailblazers of African descent have zero heritage of American slaves. Of all black people eligible to be president but born before Ted Kennedy's immigration act of 1965, I'll bet at least 98% of them if not more, had SOME heritage of American slaves.

It might mean that American blacks who are the descendants of immigrants are more accepted by white America. It might be that such people have a different vision of their place in the American power structure. It might mean that such a background makes one especially adept at coalition building growing up, a skill that's very useful for an ambitious politician. It might mean something else entirely.

I doubt it's random.

The US World Cup team of 1950 was vastly overrepresented by men from St. Louis. If I gave you the numbers, you'd immediately make the guess that it wasn't random, that SL must have had a very vibrant soccer culture in the late 1930s and 1940s.

I'm just noting the extreme anomaly and wondering what it means.

 

A couple of dorms at Virginia Tech were renamed. One of them was named Lee Hall. No, not that Lee. Lee was a student and then professor in the 1890s, but there is evidence he was a KKK member. He was an editor for the yearbook and it's a long tradition for white people of putting racism to be immortalized in there evidently. One of his listed clubs was KKK. Some call that a bad joke, but he is also listed as being in a Pittsylvania County Club next to a drawing of a lynching. It was never determined if he was part of it, but it seems likely.

The dorm will be renamed Hoge Hall. The Hoge's were a couple who let the first black students stay with them when Black students couldn't live on campus. It was annoying when I had to update paperwork about my past when dorms were given new mailing addresses. I've already updated documents to reflect the new dorm name.

 

Precisely.

There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear.

 

A shade darker? Have you seen what the racist cop did to Sureshbhai Patel, and got away with? How dark was he? The game is a lot more rigged than even you may believe (not knocking you, just expressing my frustration).

 

Great post up until using that phrase. Color blindness isn't what is needed. Quite the opposite actually. A more inclusive teaching of history, focussing on the struggle and heroes of minorities and marginalized groups often improves outcomes too.

The whole idea of "color blindness" is bullshit. My daughter knows colors and shades at 3. Pretending color isn't there and isn't affecting people's lives is dismissive. I feel that my daughter has already started developing preferences, and black people seem "other" to her.

Not really her fault, since not many black people live near us, or in SLC at all. And we don't have many, if any at all right now during COVID, non-white people in our close orbit aside from a lovely Iraqi family. It's unfortunate. We were and had intended to continue actively seeking out diverse groups for our kids to participate in. COVID sucks.

 

I was mostly with him to that point, too. The main problem is that you can't go straight to "color blindness" after centuries of the complete opposite. So in order to address the imbalances that have been caused by those centuries, there seems little choice but to try for a bit of redistributive justice based on color,etc.

Some day, maybe, "color blindness" will be the best policy, but I don't think we're there yet. Nor anywhere near it.

 

3 is a bit low as a sample. Isnot there an organisation that keeps track of data/numbers about black people in public offices and who ran for such offices?

Another question is how the social circumstances were in which these immigrant descendants grew up. Are these different from the circumstances in which the slave descendants grew up or were these the same. In other words were these immigrant descendants living in non segregated environments or not.

 

Indeed. Groups of people tend to select people "like us". When that "like us" is skewed because of centuries excluding, it only changes after changing the "like us" group being a reflection of the society's build up. So affirmative action is the way to tackle that skewed distribution. There's no other way.

 

Not suggesting that color blindness is our reality, because that glosses over the injustices that we need to see.

What I'm saying is that color blindness should be the ethos. The long term goal. And I fully believe it could be achieved maybe by the end of this century even if we work towards it.

 

Who is this guy? Influential?

Historically, the Democrats were the party of slavery. Now they’ve nominated to the second spot on their ticket #KamalaHarris, the direct descendant of a slaveowner who owned 200 human chattels. In this respect, the party stays true to its antebellum traditions

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) August 14, 2020

I thought she was an immigrant.

 

The Dutch idiot Ayaan Hirsi Ali opens on Fox News attack on Biden. She's a researcher at the Stanford Hoover Institution.
She accuses Biden of reciting sharia talk of Mohammed.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ayaan-hirsi-ali-biden-sharia-law-muslim
Ayaan Hirsi Ali calls out Biden for quoting Muhammad pronouncing Sharia law in remarks to Muslim voters
'Joe Biden should come out and apologize profusely to the American people,' Ali tells Tucker Carlson

Well, well....why on earth would a medium like Fox invite her....

 

He is an ex-felon (campaign contribution violations) who was pardoned by Trump.

He was born in India but has been in the US since college, I believe.

He ran a school but to resign in scandal.

He is a far-right conspiracy theorist.

He makes hyperbolic and completely ridiculous movies, that are devoid of facts. I will not name them as I choose not to advertise his slander and bullcrap.

He is influential in that a bunch of people we to see one of his movies about Obama.

He is pretty evil.

 

He's also one of the earliest beneficiaries of the right wing funding of minor-league opinion makers on college campuses, specifically in his case the Dartmouth Review, noteworthy for racist and anti-gay opinion pieces. It was funded by, IIRC, the Collegiate Network, which was meant to create a pipeline of future zone-flooding pseudo intellectuals like Dinesh and Anne Coulter, who was at Cornell around the same time DiSouza was at Dartmouth, doing pretty much the same thing.

 

Anne Coulter went to Cornell? I always assumed she came from North Central Delaware State College or something.

 

Had me doubting my memory, so I looked her up: Cornell B.A., Law from U of Michigan.

But yeah: Populist pretensions to the contrary, they're pretty much all of them card-carrying members of the meritocracy, who have been funded as such from before they turned twenty...

Which tells me all I need to know about the merits of the meritocracy.