Is racism acceptable if it is against "whites"?

Post Reply New Topic

Well if you really don't have any upward mobility measures in place that are open to everyone then you should consider that a shame.

Though if a white man learns to talk the talk and buys a good suit then he has a chance of being accepted. Whereas a black man is still a black man. So, even new immigrants can gain an advantage over people who have been there for generations as soon as they can do the accent. Assuming that they are white.

I have a Chinese friend who found it very difficult to even get a job interview. When he changed his name to take his step father's surname and an English Christian name getting interviews was no longer a problem.

Poverty is definitely not the only issue.

It's pretty absurd that you consider the marginal racial quota system anywhere near comparable to gas chambers or historical racial treatment. The fact remains that there is still a subterranean, unconscious bias in the employment system where people whose skin colour looks like your own are preferred to people with other skin colours. Once a certain critical mass of visible minorities make it into management conditions I can see abolishing marginal quota measures as advisable - I'd probably prefer a class-based system of employment equity, but racial biases still need to be redressed.

Except that I DONT consider them "comparable" in the sense you mean. However, taking Judaism as an example, there is a scale of discrimination apparent, from "wear a badge" through "dont run that sort of business" up to "take THIS shower". All of these are discrimination, all of them are unpleasant. The fact that one is nastier than the next does not REDUCE the nastiness of the first. Saying something isn't so bad because something else is worse is foolishness. Hitler was worse than Polpot. Doesn't make Polpot any LESS of a mass-murdering tosser. The Rwandan genocide was less well organised than the holocaust. Is it less nasty for that? The suggestion there is that racism against whites is more acceptable than against blacks because it isn't as mean or as brutal. Call a man a n****r and its racism as much as if you set fire to a cross on his lawn. Call a man a cracker....

... and I brought this over from another thread:

During my initial interview at the biggest place I have ever worked, the white supervisor conducting the interview leaned close to me and quietly said something about "the Mexicans" having taken over there ... and I later realized she was actually trying to assess whether or not to even bother hiring me as the only white guy in that particular department on a given shift. I quickly found out the other guys there did not want a white guy there, but I stuck it out until eventually changing shifts to where "the blacks" finally managed to run me off. At that particular place, it was the second shift that was primarily white ... and the place was owned by a man with ancestors in India.

No complaints here, however. That is just the reality of part of my work experience.

I've edited your post to remove some of the things I'm not comfortable repeating.

Can we have a clear idea of whether the debate is about employment equity quota systems OR racial epithlets and stereotypes? I do find calling a Caucasian man the c-word a pretty infatile act and it is regrettable. But the fact remains that the upper class and even middle managers tend to be Caucasian and that naturally reinforces the system. Until a substantially broad and wide spread black (and Latino, and Native American, etc) Middle Class forms, the quota system is one of the only viable tools against racial discrimination (unless one considers gettibg rid of face-to-face interviews).

My own experience of the entry-level workplace is one of having worked with some immigrants from Pakistan and India several time my age whose postsecondary degrees hadn't been recognized by Canada's professional associations. So, they worked entry-level jobs and seemed to like me. One person even invited me to supper at a Asian restraunt with his family.

So you counter institutional racism with more racism? I don't think that balances itself out, it's just twice as much racism as before. It reminds of how Marxists think a dictatorship of the proletariat will give way to a stateless free society or every antiwar activists favorite saying "fighting for peace is like f***ing for virginity".

Except that the quota system IS racial discrimination by its very definition, and being forced to hire people who may well be inferior employees only damages the hiring company and increases resentment against racial minorities.

There is no difference in the debate between racial epithets and discriminatory employment processes because both are racially driven. That is the point.

Editing words out strikes me however as being overly PC. Its clear that I am not CALLING anyone these terms, but that they appear as part of a reasoned debate etc etc. Its akin to covering up the "naughty" pictures in a medical text-book. Also, its not like you are actually repeating them yourself, merely copying a post to show you are referring to it.

As opposed to passing up whole schools of visible minorities who may very well be competent? Or, as opposed to letting large segments of the population stick to the floor and developing a large underclass? In the long-run, that's much more harmful to social cohesion than the few incompetents who get in under affirmative action. I'd rather have a system of class-based affirmative action, but the point still holds.



Like hell there isn't. It's like saying "there's no difference between racial epithets and population genetics as they both can have racial components".

I'd like to see social class as a much larger factor in employment equity schemes then race, but the point still remains that there are gross inequalities that don't disappear with time and that have the potential to undermine society.

In this context they amount to the same thing. I'm not saying that gassing Jews is equal to making Irish jokes. They clearly aren't the same. But they are both racially driven, despite being two examples from opposite ends of the spectrum.

As far as employment fairness is concerned: in the US racial minorities have now held officially the highest positions in the nation. In the UK some of the highest positions are held by racial minorities. Some people may be held back by negative discrimination in employment but clearly it is not endemic. Finance and class are far more divisive. Discriminating on those grounds is just as unfair as skin colour. Any way you cut it, positive discrimination is STILL discrimination, and quotas are discriminatory.

Also, in a quota system who trumps who? Does a disabled person trump a Muslim or a gay? If I as a disabled white person goes up against a non-disabled black person, can I out-quota him? Which Discrimination Act wins? Or should we both be judged on whether we can do the job and not even notice what colour the other is?

Well, obviously it's not acceptable. But for some stupid reason, a black or pakistani person could say anything they want about whites but if it's the other way round everyone is outraged.
An old junior school friend of mine added a pakistani girl from junior school onto her facebook friend's list, and most of this girl's friends are also asian, but for some reason all of her friends kept sending her wall posts saying "who's the white girl. who's the white girl" etc so my friend had to delete her because she didn't feel comfortable.
Also has anyone seen the website to black panther or whatever they're called? They're like the BNP but for black people.

Differences of degree and intent do matter and such moral absolutism has no place in politics.



Please don't tell me you're buying into the whole "since we have a President whose skin colour is black, we're a post-racial society" spiel. America still has a long way to go before it becomes anywhere near a nation where anyone who works hard and has decent intelligence can make a good living.



What are the numbers in private industry, in middle class, in various geographic areas, etc? A few people at the top doesn't imply thorough equality.



Finance is very discriminatory. Unless you want to place paid tuition with some scheme where the state subsidizes everyone's education and gives them money contigent upon diligence and ensures every public school is of equal status, I doubt financial discrimination will be eliminated without postiive finanical discrimination.



Depending on the viability of alternatives or whether there's any way to end negative discrimination without positive discrimination, I'd be for counting them all as "equal".



How the hell do you plan on doing that objectively or reducing gross racial and economic biases?

Last edited by Master_Pedant on 30 Aug 2010, 4:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

In the various neighborhoods I've lived in, going thorough elementary school to junior high school to high school, I've heard all amount of racial epithets and sophmoric racialism that I've shrugged at. Most people seem unable to critically review and disgard racial biases or language.

Nevertheless, I've heard "P-word" used by people a few times, one girl speak in a faux East Indian accent to a girl of East Indian ancestry, denigrating stereotypes about "alcoholic" First Nations passed around, as well as the reverse racism of using the word "cracker" in a racial context.

What are the numbers in private industry, in middle class, in various geographic areas, etc? A few people at the top doesn't imply thorough equality.



Finance is very discriminatory. Unless you want to place paid tuition with some scheme where the state subsidizes everyone's education and gives them money contigent upon diligence and ensures every public school is of equal status, I doubt financial discrimination will be eliminated without postiive finanical discrimination.



Depending on the viability of alternatives or whether there's any way to end negative discrimination without positive discrimination, I'd be for counting them all as "equal".



How the hell do you plan on doing that objectively or reducing gross racial and economic biases?[/quote]

Clearly if a nation HAS a black president or whatever then it is obviously possible for someone to reach that level regardless of skin-colour. It may not be easy, and that was not my implication. I'm not even denying that racism exists in employment etc. Never said that. What I'm saying is that using another form of racism is hardly a positive step in the right direction, It just encourages people to blame the minority in question.

A great deal of multicultural ultra-pc "lets not offend x y or z" bollocks in the UK is generated by bodies and groups with little or no input from the actual minorities involved. Nobody asked any Muslims if they were offended by Hot Cross Buns before someone decided they might be, and after that decision was made, the Daily Mail types were up in arms at the Muslims for it, without ever stopping to ask if they had been consulted.

Likewise, for a long time government grants were available to private landlords to renovate properties to a decent standard, if they were to be used to house asylum seekers. So of course private landlords started to favour asylum seekers over the indigenous renting population because they got loads of gear paid for. The reaction? The indigenies determine that the right of an asylum seeker to live in a newly refitted house with PVC windows etc over-rode that of the local populace. The local populace renting houses got no such boost to their living standards. Who gets blamed? The asylum seekers, many of whom would no doubt have been happy to live in a box under a bridge so long as they weren't going to get set on fire for being in the wrong tribe\religion etc. A much more sensible idea would have been either subsidised renovations for ALL private landlords regardless of the ethnicity of tenants, or nothing for anyone. By treating asylum seekers POSITIVELY, they managed to create negative feeling amongst everyone else.

When a person loses out on a job (especially in the current climate) to another candidate based on their ethnicity, are they likely to simply shrug and say "Oh well, I suppose that I can sign on welfare tomorrow for a pittance comforted by the knowledge that a minority has been treated positively in a society where they are trodden down by the man."? Or are they likely to start with "That's a load of s**t and utterly unfair" and end up with "bloody foreigners coming here taking our jobs" and so on? Positive discrimination creates negative feeling. Simple as that.

There's no such thing as *reverse* racism. It's all the same no matter who it is from or who it is directed towards.