Facts about racism

Post Reply New Topic

In the British, or the American, sense?

By the way, I would say that my political beliefs most closely resemble "Social Democracy," with some conservative viewpoints pertaining to financial things.

White people should not feel guilt. You didn't do anything wrong. It's ok to be proud, just don't think you're superior.

It's fine to make racial jokes, just don't take them serious. Stop walking on eggshells out of fear of being labeled a nazi.

We all need to learn to laugh at ourselves and lighten up.

I can't be with a white man who has so much guilt and no backbone (does that make me a racist for only dating white men?)

I feel bad for Germans, they can't even have their own flags in their yards without being labeled a nazi. If we keep dwelling in the past, we will never move forward.

Here's a fact about racism, although it's more of a fact about psychology. People who understand cognitive bias have a chance of finding a way to address it; people who wish to redefine their biases as facts will not have that chance.

Was there a particular day when the people running the police forces stopped supporting the Klan wholesale? Anaheim, CA was dominated by them not long before I was born. This idea that the most obvious harm of racism was in the past is absurd.

People alive today got attacked for attempting to register to vote. They could not get certain jobs, and their children could not get home loans due to the redlining practices of banks. This persisted until the Clinton administration. Claims by First Peoples against the BIA for massive fraud were mostly resolved at long last under the Obama administration.

Stereotype threat is a well-documented phenomenon in social psychology, and demonstrates real harm done to real people by persistent stereotypes of their cultures by the dominant culture of America.

To answer my own question, some were purged, some left, and some got promoted. Rage Against the Machine was not just making stuff up when they said that some of them that run forces are the same that burn crosses. The last place that progress arrives is in the communities with the least political power. Politicians will find it convenient to use them as punching bags as long as they can't obtain political power.

It is necessary to say specifically that Black Lives Matter because the statistics show that black lives do not matter as much. It's actually more relevant to say that First People's Lives Matter, if you look at the death penalties carried out since the 1970s. No one has ever been executed for murdering an Indian.

There was a discussion about individual and structural racism, which I can't locate now. I have some further thoughts on the subject. Yesterday, I watched an introductory lecture on complexity theory to see if I wanted to look at more videos in the series.

Mulling the lecture over, I realized that we can usefully partition our thinking into analytical, reductionist thinking which leads to individual attitudes, and systems thinking which leads to structural racism. Confusing the two causes problems, because the two systems of organization differ in important ways.

If we take the analytical, reductionist approach, we have to decide when any individual's attitudes or behavior crosses a line into racism. Seems simple in theory, but put it into practice in a complex system, and you end up with what we have now: a lot of accusations and a lot of resentful people. We don't have the kind of well defined linear function for society that will let us translate between the two ways of thinking, and complexity theory suggests that we never will.

Asserting that only white people can be racist is a racist thing to say, but not for the reasons people usually put forth. Adding up all the power and resources controlled by white people would lead to the analytical, reductionist conclusion that white people have enough dominance to impose their hierarchy everywhere. So, white people are all powerful? That sounds pretty racist to me. It also sounds just like the old White Man's Burden, clumsily trying to become nicer. It's like the casual racism of super-privileged elites trying to be generous to "savages," or a promising academic who got blacklisted for promoting ideas of scientific racism held dear by their beloved mentor.

Anyone can participate individually in structural racism, within a well-defined system. Consider the situation of a hafu in Japan. Within that system, Japanese has the same qualities that White has in the US. It is the ideal, and one drop of other blood excludes people from being Japanese in some but not all important ways.

The promoters of scientific racism want us to get caught up in an argument about nationality, ethnicity, and race, and plenty of opponents will engage in that argument. Not me. It looks like more attempts to apply reductionism to a phenomenon which will produce more useful insights from complex adaptive systems thinking.

This provides an answer to the question of how we can have structural racism without labeling so many people as individually racist by association with a group.

I watched Birth of a Movement, a documentary about the response to Birth of a Nation by DW Griffith. In the film, Spike Lee recounts seeing it in class at film school. The professor only talked about its importance as the first feature film, and the techniques invented for the film. When Spike started asking questions, which probably related to the horrible racism in the film, the professor got defensive and shut him down. It's literally a propaganda film for the KKK which depicts all the worst racist stereotypes of black people and promotes a revisionist history of Reconstruction which persists to this day, but the school wanted to present it without that context as recently as when Spike Lee was a student.

African-Americans are more likely than white people to be wrongfully convicted.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-c ... SKBN16E0H2

In one case, the Jewish cemetery was not vandalized as reported. I read the story from a reputable source; find your reputable source on this one, because it's real. Yep, someone saw a bunch of toppled headstones and reported it as vandalism in one case. Turns out, the headstones had been like that for a long time with no complaints. Undeniably, the number of reported bomb threats has tripled since Trump's election; undeniably, various non-xians have experienced more arson, vandalism, and so on, and the rate of increase is increasing.

I guess some will say it's all liberals, or mostly liberals, doing false flag operations?

On to more interesting topics. People who have not cared much, now care more. Thank you, president Trump.