I guess I could give a passing grade to William Saletan for good intentions, if nothing else. His piece reminds me a bit of a comedy routine Lenny Bruce used to do called “How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties.” Only Mr. Saletan is trying to relax white folks.
I guess I had an advantage. My mother was the director of a nursery school, and she arranged it so my play dates included both white and black kids. I never had a chance to form the misimpression that black kids are any different from white kids. When I first encountered some soft racism from someone I liked and respected, I was already in 7th Grade, and I found it confusing and disorientating. My friend wanted to know why I was going to root for Larry Holmes to defend his heavyweight championship against Irish-American Gerry Cooney. I still remember it. “Marty, why do you always root for the black guy?”
Since there really wasn’t any predicate I could think of to justify the “always,” I felt a little defensive, as if it were an unfair question. But the main thing is that it had never occurred to me once to make my decision about who I wanted to win a boxing match on the race of the boxers. I liked Larry Holmes. I didn’t want him to lose to some second-rate punk with a big punch but no skills. The idea that my self-image might be improved if someone who looked like me was proven to be the toughest son of a bitch on the planet just didn’t compute for me.
It wasn’t a one-way lesson, either. I quickly realized that there were some black kids who were rooting for Larry Holmes specifically because he was black. That made me start to think about racial matters in a way that had never been necessary before. I didn’t like it.
The bottom line is that white America has always treated blacks differently as a group, which has forced blacks to react in kind. This reinforces racial thinking, which has the effect of perpetuating differential treatment.
My biggest problem with Saletan’s piece is that he is talking to whites who have already been accused of racism. How about instructing white people how to avoid being accused of racism in the first place? Because when you support policies and laws that have the purpose of legalizing murder and disenfranchising blacks, then you should expect blacks to respond with racial solidarity. They will point out that they are being targeted because of their appearance rather than content of their character, and the wheel of racial tension will go around one more time.
If I have any advice for white people, it is this. Stop generalizing about race. Stop supporting policies that are intended to screw people based on how dark they are. Stop putting people of color on the defensive about their appearance, and they will eventually stop organizing in response along racial lines.
There is really only one prime directive: judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. And, yes, white folks have to take the lead on this because we are the ones that imposed this system in the first place.
Boo, the last sentence of your post: YES.
It is maddening to talk to my fellow white people who think that blacks need to start this outreach, and start it in the way they want. These whites don’t really want to hear about current experiences of blacks, they don’t want to talk about our shared and separate histories. They’re willfully blind. When they say this, my translation is that they want ALL blacks to unilaterally disarm rhetorically.
Essentially, it’s “Don’t make me uncomfortable; let’s just let bygones be bygones, OK??”. It’s offensive, and will not work.
Máy ảnh Canon. The bottom line is that white America has always treated blacks differently as a group, which has forced blacks to react in kind. This reinforces racial thinking, which has the effect of perpetuating differential treatment
I guess I could give a passing grade to William Saletan for good intentions, if nothing else.
Saletan? Glad I was drinking a little bit earlier(thanks to the Mets!).
recently are best represented by the Cohen piece in the Post. They all say the same thing:
Of course, the real truth is that violent crime in this country has been dropping for 30 years. For example the violent crime rate in the US has dropped from 758.2 per 100,000 to 403 in 2010 (and it dropped further in 2011 and 2012). In addition, the incidence of youth incarceration is down about 40% since 1995 – and it is down as much for blacks as for other races.
So the idea of exploding crime is bullshit, and the idea that liberal programs are causing an epidemic in crime is bullshit.
In none of these articles will these numbers EVER be mentioned. The truth is white America has much less to fear from Black America than they did even 15 years ago. Of course if you are going be afraid of violent crime, you should start with the people you know because only about 1 in 5 murders occur between people who do not know each other.
It drive me crazy none of these articles will talk about this – instead they expose the writers racism cloaked in misinformation.
If I ever meet that diarrhetic shih tzu Cohen then he will have a legitimate reason to fear the angry Black man…
OTOH, I just flicked on O’Reilly, and his TPM blamed all the current controversy on black entertainers, Obama, drug dealers and the out-of-wedlock births in black communities. Bill was really, REALLY MAD.
When they came out of the commercial break, Juan Williams applauded O’Reilly’s passion and said he was right on point. Even that ass-kissing didn’t prevent Bill from turning both his volume and condescending tone up to 11 when Williams said the justice system failed Trayvon Martin. “Don’t give me any of that crap, Juan.” Bill sounded like your standard Angry Drunk Dad, albeit one with 2 million viewers.
Bill closed the segment by wildly thrashing out against women. “I sat three days in that Democratic convention. I heard the biggest bunch of BS I ever heard about The War On Women and all this crap. I didn’t hear one time somebody say, ‘You know, black ladies? Don’t have babies out of wedlock when you can’t support ’em and you don’t even know the guy’s name.’- don’t do that. Did I even hear that one time? I did not.”
Why oh why is Obama trying to start a race war? Huh?
Then O’Reilly brought on Bernie Goldberg to pan Obama’s statement. Bernie said the President missed a golden opportunity to chastise the black community, just like he claimed MLK did in an out-of-context quote he provided. Oh yeah, Goldberg (Goldberg!) also called black-on-black murders “the Holocaust in the black community.”
God damn, these are awful human beings. I know we’re supposed to listen to each other’s points of view, but what do we do with these massive projections of offense and victimization, and how to deal with those who are persuaded to join in?
that the african american murder rate has fallen from 51.1 per 100,000 in 1991 to 24.4 in 2008?
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf
And where exactly are the “black ladies” and all the other ladies supposed to get the birth control to prevent pregnancies if we can’t have ObamaCare, can’t have contraception coverage in our insurance policies, and can’t have planned parenthood clinics???
They want to deny us medical care, autonomy over our own bodies, and I’m not even getting into pay equity, affordable child care, etc. I am very sure that men like O’Reilly still really want to have sex with ladies.
Maybe the ladies should go Lysistrata on all of this male stupid.
We have been talking about individual conversion against racism for at least half a century. And while it takes place, the institutions that oppose and reverse it grow more powerful and shrill.
It is the institutions that continue to promote racism, legitimate racism, and promotes conversion to racist patterns of thinking that are the major problem, not individual folks’ inability to be nice.
When Rush Limbaugh and his bigotry-spewing brethren are no long financed by rich racist bigots, things will change.
When there is no longer the dodge of “Christian schools” or private schools or charter schools to avoid having white children sitting in the same classrooms as people of color, then we will have to start facing the issue of class in educational discrimination.
When real estate agents will not be incentivized to profit from racial community-busting and white flight or premium prices for “exclusive” communities, then once again we start facing the issue of class in housing discrimination.
When banks no longer practice the informal and in some places illegal practice of redlining based on ethnic demographics, there will be more ability for folks in those neighborhoods to be upwardly mobile.
One thing to remember about these statistics is that for the past 30 years, the national elites have spent lots of money shutting down the institutions of upward mobility through starving colleges and universities, saddling the hopeful upward mobile of all ethnicities with heavy student deals and dramatically declining entry salaries and fraudulently dealing with mortgage credit and credit card interest rates and terms. One suspects that credit agencies use ethnicity as one of the factors in scoring credit, which has implications for interest rates. And very well does not exist in reality; it’s just a spurious correlation.
And these institutions are integrated as a system to ensure that racism doesn’t disappear in the US.
No amount of relaxing your white friends deals with this issue until these institutions disappear.
I listened to a discussion last night on Chris Matthews’ show, and they were talking about something very much like this; how we need to start off by making a conscious effort to “be nice” to each other. And while it sounds like a great idea when you say it, I have to wonder if we haven’t tapped out the pool of people who are amenable to a large enough degree of self reflection to know that is the proper human behavior. And what are left with now is a large group of people who are simply impervious to that kind of persuasion.
I think a recent experience, while anecdotal, shows what we are dealing with here. We just finished our county fair this past week. Our local Democratic Party, as usual, had a booth at the fair. When working, we all wore tee shirts which, on the back, was printed, “Democrats Because We Care”. One guy stopped by the booth on the last day, looked at the shirt one woman was wearing and sneered, “Democrats because you care, huh? Yeeeah right. You mean care about BLACK PEOPLE”.
It really makes you wonder if we will ever be rid of this shit.
We will never be rid of this shit until we take down the institutions devoted to perpetuating this shit. And that is very hard to do in a society that prides itself of its liberties. Especially because entrepreneurial white racism seems to make such good money these days; you need look only a the pile it made for Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson and Liberty University’s latest Falwell and the latest Bob Jones of Bob Jones University. And upteen hundred “Christian academies”.
And what all the religion talk is doing is trying to wrap racism in the American (and not just the Confederate) flag and appropriate the American mythology and civil religion for racist purposes. (Which is why the absolutely hate Martin Luther King’s Birthday as a national holiday.)
The fact that religion is so inextricably entwined with the two hundred-plus years of racism in this country means that it will likely ALWAYS be with us. The de-facto respect which is given to religion in this country creates an impenetrable shield which negates any possibility of even having a discussion concerning its ongoing liability on this issue. Religion has certainly played a positive role in many aspects of civil rights and fighting the scourge of racism. But the creeping tentacles of religious fundamentalism are quickly finding their way into legislation at the state levels. And that is where it is having great success and finding tremendous support among what is a largely white constituency. When you drill down through all of these efforts to turn back the clock in the various states, it is almost universally driven by a philosophy rooted in religious patriarchy and racial animus. In their view, women and minorities have gotten all uppity in the last few generations. It’s time for them to rediscover their proper place in god’s plan. Sadly, the fact that this is all wrapped up in “god talk” makes it an unquestionable truth to the gullible religious masses, who are looking for simplicity and comfort in an increasingly scary and unrecognizable world.
Race and God are both concepts that depend on humans for their existence. It is not correct to say that they are not real concepts or that they do not exist. They both exist, but only because so many humans insist on thinking about the world in a particular way that isn’t justified by science.
Genetically speaking, the president is just as white as he is black. But he still gets followed around in a department store. Therefore, he self-identifies as black because he has to deal with all the problems that a black person faces because of their skin tone. He is black, and there is no point in denying it.
What bonds black people together and makes them a “community” or a “people” is partly culture and proximity, but it’s much more so the common experience they have as second class citizens, suspicious citizens, who are not free to choose whether to be black or not. Being black is a real thing, just as praying to God is a real thing.
But no one prays to Apollo anymore. Eventually, people will unlearn the concept of race.
Genetically the President is not typed by race because genetically color only applies to skin, eyes, and other organs of the body. Race is not a genetic construct. It is a totally socially-created construct that uses a few markers for discrimination between people and attribute a whole set of stereotypes to those markers. Race has also become social self-identification, which makes it a label for various subcultures of American culture or various separate cultures altogether.
Genetics has demonstrated that there is no phyisical biological basis for sweeping racial assignments.
Saying that genetically speaking the president is just as white as he is black in nonsense science, just like climate change denial.
Genealogically speaking about cultural heritage, that statement however is correct and has some meaning in evidence.
Technically, what I wrote is true.
White people are the ones that invented the concept of race and you’ve used it exclusively to your advantage for hundreds of years. It’s working quite well for you, why would you want to “unlearn” it? The answer is obvious, you never will.
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Framing Children’s Deviance
by Lisa Wade, PhD, 5 days ago at 12:00 pm
Leontine G. sent in a troubling example of the framing of children’s deviance, and their own complicity in this framing. She included two links: one to a Today show story about a 7-year-old boy who took his family’s car on a joyride and got caught by police, and one to a CNN story about a 7-year-old boy who took his family’s car on a joyride and got caught by police. Different 7-year-olds. One white, one black.
The white boy, Preston, is interviewed with his family on the set of the Today show. Knowing his kid is safe, his Dad describes the event as “funny” and tells the audience that if this could happen to a “cotton candy all-American kid like Preston,” then “it could happen to anybody.”
When the host, Meredith Vieira, asks Preston why hid from the police, he says, “cause I wanted to,” and she says, “I don’t blame you actually.” With Preston not too forthcoming, his Mom steps in to say that he told her that “he just wanted to know what it felt like to drive a car.” When Vieira asks him why he fled from the police, he replies with a shrug. Vieira fills in the answer, “You wanted to get home?”
Vieira then comments on how they all then went to church. The punishment? Grounded for four days without TV or video games. Vieira asks the child, “Do you think that’s fair?” He says yes. And she continues, “Do you now understand what you did?” He nods and agrees. “And that maybe it wasn’t the smartest thing?” He nods and agrees. “You gonna get behind the wheel of a car again?” He says no. Then she teases him about trying out model toy cars.
They conclude that this incident just goes to show that “Any little kid, you never know what can happen…” and closes “I’ll be seeing you at church buddy boy!”
READ ON TO SEE HOW THEY TREATED THE BLACK CHILD.
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2013/07/17/framing-childrens-deviance/
Every time I see a label tossed into the conversation I’m reminded how lazy the labelOR is not how well defined the labelEE is.
Paula Dean thought if she declared herself ‘not a racist’ that would be the end of the conversation. She hides behind that statement and thinks it allows her to mistreat her employees. The denial that labelling seems to cover is astonishing and seems a part of a certain culture we mistakenly endure.
Once you get to know any person, their race, disability, strengths, fears, grace, and commonality are what rise to the surface. Not their race or yours.
Labels are a barrier.
Do you think the black kids you played with didn’t suffer from the ‘misimpression that black kids are any different from white kids?’
Also, I think it must be very difficult to understand race and racism without a visceral knowledge of what it feels like to feel pride in a co-ethnic’s successes and shame in a co-ethic’s failures.
I once, when I was much younger and only slightly stupider, in an attempt to establish my non-racist creds, said something about how I tried to judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin, and that I tried not to even think of whites as white and blacks as black, and I was educated quite effectively by a black friend that that was racist. And of course she was perfectly right.
Kids have to learn to see themselves as different, but it doesn’t take long for a black kid to learn. They certainly won’t get to 7th Grade without noticing. But, when we were all three or four years old playing with blocks, we didn’t know and didn’t care. One of my black playmates went on the graduate from and work for Middlebury College. He excelled at lacrosse. He always had a full spectrum of friends. Another one of my black playmates probably never went to college and I have no idea what he is doing with his life. In high school, at least, he tended to have primarily black friends. But both of them are surely acutely aware that they or their kids could be the next Trayvon Martin for no good reason.