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Serious Thread: Race Discussion

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Parker, Dec 4, 2014.

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  1. MoreCowbell

    MoreCowbell
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    That's odd phrasing when the second half of your sentence is nothing more than your personal feeling. And how you've assumed your conclusion. If you think a white kid walking in his gated community would have the same probability of being harassed, and that the odds of him being shot, are the same... then you're living on a different planet from the rest of us.

    We probably don't hear it because it isn't relevant to the discussion. You might as well talk about how black people get fewer sunburns, or are more likely to use cocoa butter. None of the people in these recent events were connected to a violent gang or were engaged in gang activities at the time of their incidents.

    Probably. But that's derailing, so who cares? We aren't talking about class distinctions right now. The title of this thread doesn't read "Parental Income Discussion." One needn't discuss every conceivable social ill in order to discuss one of them.
     
  2. Nettdata

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    So, seeing as I'm just a fat white Canadian who acts like a condescending dickbag (or so I've heard), what am I supposed to do about it?

    So far all I hear is bitching and ranting and being angry, which is not at all constructive, and does nothing to help things.

    "Raising Awareness" isn't an end game...

    There are huge problems, but I haven't heard any solutions.

    So how does this change?
     
  3. MoreCowbell

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    What exactly do you want to hear? That we've grabbed our rifles and we're planning to infiltrate NYPD headquarters?

    Protest is nothing but the manifestation of frustration and anger. And protest works. You change state policy by changing its leaders and making it known that such policy won't be tolerated.

    Your question is basically "Hey guys, how does a democracy work?"
     
  4. Nom Chompsky

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    It starts with white people helping to stop black on black crime.

    If you are a white, every time you see a black start to do an intraracial crime you bop him on the nose with a rolled up NY Post and say "NO" in a calm, steady voice. Remember you have to catch him in the act, because if you do it after he will just be confused and will not know why he is being punished.

    If this is not an option, you can also try sending a black person you know some bitcoins.
     
  5. Parker

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    Looks like someone didn't read the articles.

    People, you can disagree with the facts in the articles. People once disagreed the earth went around the sun, couldn't convince them otherwise. In the face of sciences and facts. "Galileo better get with the program" they said. People once thought the world was flat, even after it was discovered it was spherical. Some people still think it is flat.

    We learned as a people, by looking at overwhelming facts and evidence what is true. Some have not and will be looked back on in history as horribly wrong. If you are disagreeing with anything I am saying, not because its my opinion (is it an opinion if I say fire burns?) I can keep linking statistics of the imbalance, unfairness, and privilege that we have in this country.

    I can tell you right now, if you read any of the articles I linked and thought "Nah." You're on Earth watching the Sun rotate around you and think you're the center of the universe.

    What side of history do you want to be on? Below is an analogy to help you understand.

    re: Black people need to get their shit together and stop doing stuff that hurts black people.
    Group A drops a bomb on a building full of Group B. Group B starts screaming, moaning and complaining about not being able to get out of the building easily because of the devastation of said bomb. Group B's building is also on fire. Now not everyone in Group B has been totally affected by the bomb and fire, some of them can and do get out the building. Unfortunately the majority of Group B has lost limbs, eye sight, cut off from a lot of tools and things they need to get out of the building. After a while, people start looking out for themselves feeling they can't get out the building. Group B inside the building, the ones that don't have all the tools to get out start acting out, breaking shit, not focusing on the greater picture of getting out the burning building.

    Meanwhile, Group A, with no longer any plans to drop a bomb on Group Bs building, does a few things. First, they are really nice to the Group B people who got out of the building. Second they really think the bomb was bad, and promise to not drop another. Third, they work at a tire factory that is really bad at controlling its chemicals that constantly run down to Group Bs building, keeping the fire going. Fourth, some of the tires roll down hill too from the delivery trucks keeping that fire burning long. Fifth, they deny there is even a fire burning in the building, because the bomb was dropped years ago, it couldn't possibly still be the fire. Sixth, think that since they only dropped the bomb once, believe it couldn't have caused any other lasting problems.

    Seventh, they believe that Group B could really get out that building if they would just get their shit together, stop moaning and complaining about getting out the building, stop fighting about getting out the building. They don't notice the smoke continue about their lives.

    I'll let you guys connect the dots, you're smart people. You know the earth is round and we go around the sun. If you can't figure it out, after a good college try, click the spoiler below.
    The bomb was slavery. The fire: backdoor slavery, segregation, Jim Crow laws, unfair police brutality, uneven amount of arrests, denying job opportunities based on race, sub prime housing loans shitty teachers being railed to predominantly black schools, the justice system being harsher to black people than white people, crimes against black people by white authority figures going unpunished, crimes being pinned on innocent black people because reasons, and thousand more issues!
    Goodnight.
     
  6. CharlesJohnson

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    Start dispersing tax funds earmarked for schools equally instead of locally by zip code. Poor schools will finally get proper funding. Add incentives to stay in school. Kill standardized testing and pretty much every other private contractor taking a huge pile of money and adding nothing of quality service (this includes shitty lunch programs). Give teachers more autonomy in their own class; you hired them, they must be good enough to teach without micromanaging bullshit. Civics and basic sociology courses by senior year.

    Stop hiring psychopaths for police. All recruits must have at least a 2 year degree (most require this already) with a certain GPA (B or better) and pass a highly inclusive psychological eval and IQ test. Actually make officers accountable for excessive force. These people are supposed to be held at a higher standard than the general public, and they are supposed to be trained to subdue individuals of various sizes and mental states. Hire better press agents. Ferguson might have been avoided if they told the public what happened.

    It's at least a start.

    I truly believe if people stopped watching their news, and instead read a variety of sources in the same amount of time, we could avoid a lot of this fear mongering, baiting nonsense.
     
  7. Parker

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    I point to the last line in Part 5.
     
  8. Chellie

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    Stop telling the people who have actually lived these experiences "You are just wrong and even if you were right, if you just do xyz it will all be magically fixed" is probably a good first step. Be willing to at least accept the possibility that it's not that easy and they probably have a better perspective than you do.


    Looking at you, Kampf.
     
  9. ODEN

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    Nah, we have decades of evidence to show that throwing money at it won't fix it.
     
  10. dieformetal

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    Hurricanes Are My Bitch

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    I had no idea MoreCowbell was black. I know I'm on-again-off-again here a lot, but still...you'd think I'd have picked up on this by now.
     
  11. JoeCanada

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    I'm also a white Canadian. While I'm probably not as fat as Nettdata, I do often think "Well what am I supposed to do about it?" when these discussions come up, and reading the last line of part 5 actually did really resonate with me. (Just to be clear, and to impress Parker and Nom, I read all five parts.)

    If you look at the big picture, and come at the issue in a macro sense, it seems very obvious that there is a problem. If X black people are imprisoned and Y white people are imprisoned for drug charges, and X is WAYYY bigger than Y, you can't just say X-Y=the number of black individuals who have made poor decisions this year. (Same with income inequality, etc. etc.) You can absolutely go through it case by case and find a bunch of black individuals who did, in fact, made really stupid decisions, but the overall numbers tell me something is definitely going on.

    It's tough because individual cases like Trayvon Martin or Eric Garner get people talking about big picture stuff, but then the discussion implodes back into being about the individual cases. I think those kinds of incidents really rattle the black community because that sort of thing IS a problem, whether each of those individual cases is a perfect example or not. [Black guy] is killed by police, big racial issues are raised, then people say "well actually in this particular case the police acted appropriately, therefore all those big racial issues you mentioned don't really exist."

    The last line, "There are no easy solutions. But let’s talk." is great, and he expands on that earlier in the article:

     
  12. MoreCowbell

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    #52 MoreCowbell, Dec 4, 2014
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  13. downndirty

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    Two problems, ad nauseum. One, if you're black you can't be an individual. That gets thrown into consideration first and foremost, which is why we have racism against our President, black doctors, CEO's, etc. They are not judged on their merits as individuals as much as they are their race. This is utterly fucked, and one thing that both white and black people can do differently.

    When all this shit went down, both parties focused on the "black" part of innocent, black, teenage male. Focusing on any other part of the description: this cop shot an unarmed minor/boy/innocent somehow makes it seem worse, doesn't it? Why is that? This kid was an athlete/musician/scholar/model or whatever the fuck he was, but all of that is somehow less (and less important) than black. That turns the whole debate racial, when it could just as easily have been MADD or the PTA or the NCAA protesting the death of a child/student/athlete. You know, how it fucking should be?

    I'm a white guy, and when I interact with police, they don't leap to the conclusion I am a serial killer, pedofile or school shooter the way that they leap to the drug-dealing, gang member stereotype with black men.

    Two, cops fucking suck in this country. The "freedom, 'Murica" crowd does have one thing right: we have too many fucking laws, and they protect the entrenched, vested interests. Black people rarely are part of the entrenched, vested interests and have their rights trampled on, time and time again. Compare New Orleans federal response to New York, or look at Cancer Alley, Louisiana. Aside from criminality, basic social justice isn't the same if you're black, and before any of this other shit (police, guns, culture, etc) will change, black must be given the same consideration before the law. If you appear before a judge in the wrong skin, the system just does not work for you. Why? Because you are not empowered enough to be a social equal to a judge, a developer, a mayor except in rare cases.

    The NBA makes this point more eloquently than I ever could: players are almost all black, huge influence on black culture, almost zero black owners/coaches. Chris Rock said it like this: black people can be rich (Dennis Rodman or Oprah), but there's always a white man signing the check that has wealth (real fucking power).

    Think about if you were going to get a power plant dumped in your backyard. Why does this not happen to many white neighborhoods? Because the black neighborhoods have cheaper land. Why is that? Because of the systemic and historic disadvantages-bad parts of town, less return on housing investment, more transient population (why develop if they're either going to leave or tear it all up?), or my favorite: bottom-dollar development. "Well, they need houses, but they can barely pay for them. Let's build the cheapest bullshit we can get by with, and sell it to them on such long terms with stupid high interest, it'll be just like owning them again! It's not like they can use the system well enough to sue us, and if they do every judge in the county is white and sympathetic to our interests/money. We'll be fine!"

    If having the right dad can make you a famous actor, musician, governor or even fucking president, then the converse of having the wrong dad means you started out underneath the bottom. Thats the stacked deck your average black guy has been playing with for generations.
     
  14. Trakiel

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    Call me Caitlyn. Got any cake?

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    I'm sick of hearing about this bullshit excuse. In the past two years we've had a couple of all-american white boys shoot up a theater and elementary school, yet I never once heard anyone say, "the white community needs to get its shit together" or anything of the sort. So why do 'Black Communities' need to shoulder some of the blame when black citizens are killed by the police?

    I have a question for my fellow white people who keep offering up excuses and rationalizations for these killings: Why are you so immensely reluctant to admit there's some racism going on here? Do you honestly believe we live in a post-racial society where racism is all gone? And if not, and think the deaths of Garner/Brown/Rice/Martin/Crawford/others don't have racial influences underlining them, then what do you think actually does qualify as racism?
     
  15. MoreCowbell

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    #55 MoreCowbell, Dec 4, 2014
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  16. Revengeofthenerds

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    There are so many layers to this that whenever someone brings it up and looks at me, or asks my opinion about it, my standard response is "How much time do you have?" There's no such thing as a short answer, but among the layers:

    - First and foremost, when a cop tells you to do something, YOU DO IT. Whether they are right or wrong, the correct response is "yes sir/ma'am." The time to argue is in court, not then on the street. Chances are VERY high that they know the law a hell of a lot better than you think you do, so while you're refusing to listen, they're gathering probable cause from your increasingly (to them) alarming behavior and going through the legally-necessary escalation of force steps.

    - The media is covering this a lot right now, so it seems like it is happening a lot more. Just like it seems like there were more airline issues after 370 happened. Not that there is never "police brutality," or airplane crashes, or kids bringing weapons into schools, or crazy weather, but when the media focuses on it the perception is that it is on the rise. There have always been issues between cops and the people they arrest, and if it looks like the police are getting more militarized, well, we also haven't seen these number of massive, violent protests before either.

    - The biggest issues bring out the biggest assholes on both sides, and this makes it a lot worse. You have to remember that, just because the talking heads and that drunk dude at the bar had one-sided opinions, many of us have very nuanced beliefs which are anything but controversial. And you have to remind yourself, too, that it's ok to have a nuanced opinion as well. Remember: the smartest people are the ones who you don't hear from, because they are smart enough to know when to keep their mouths shut.

    - Get all the facts before you tell someone else they are wrong and you are right. Unless you have read all of the documents from the Ferguson grand jury, do you really think you are better informed than those who made the decision to issue a no true bill?


    So like I said, it's all shades of grey.... no pun intended.

    And cast my vote in support of this board conducting this thread intelligently. I actually look forward to the discussion.
     
  17. Crown Royal

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    Just call me Topher

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    Because the word "racist" is a red flag on fire. It doesn't matter how racist some prick is, the one thing that pisses them off more than anything is being called a racist. And then, they go ahead and say the most racist fucking thing..."What? All I said was blacks are all criminals who would be have it easier and happier in life picking cotton on a slave chain, and you have to lose your shit, GO THERE and bring up race as the issue here. You just find racism in EVERYTHING don't you?"

    If you have the stomach, just go on Twitter and hit the Garner or Ferguson trends and you'll be balls deep in the most racist hypocrites on the planet. And just like political or religious discussions, nothing-- NOTHING-- will make these people realize that they're the ones who are wrong.

    Racism is an issue in this. I personally just don't know how to weigh it against the fact that American police are insanely out of control and no, it isn't a few "bad apples". The tree is rotted in the roots.
     
  18. Nettdata

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    Interestingly enough, I have the power do to exactly none of that... so again, I ask, what can I, as an individual, do?
     
  19. shimmered

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    I'll tell you what you can't do.
    You can't say "I'm not racist. I believe in people's character, not their MAC foundation shade." because if you do, you'll be told your racism is so ingrained you don't even see it.
    You can't say anything about white privilege and whether it's a real thing or a construct. You can't say anything about white guilt and its rightness or wrongness. You can't say question the role both black AND white play in this ongoing situation.

    Don't do that.
     
  20. Rob4Broncos

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    Have a bake sale.
     
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