a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
b_b  ·  3662 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How can white Americans be free?

    The article seems to be more about the author than about people in general, but maybe I'm just out of touch.

I don't think so. I think you're right on point. I had to stop reading halfway through, because I could feel myself getting dumber by the line. It's not often I find a piece so philosophically unsound that I can actually feel myself losing a point or two off of my IQ, having given too much effort trying to make sense of otherwise non-sensical arguments. The author thinks there is a divide between white and non-white, and that this is the struggle of the brown person. This couldn't be further from the truth. The struggle is between former slaves and former slave holders. Period. All other racial divides are trivial by comparison (except maybe the Native American/white divide, but it certainly isn't in the popular consciousness to nearly the same extent). Nobody ever made a law that says that Asian Americans can't vote, go to school, or be taught to read, let alone that they can be owned, traded, abused and disposed of. I'm not saying that it's not possible for Asian Americans to be discriminated against by some people some times, but there's no institutional racism against them (look at their income demographics for evidence). Latinos suffer more from xenophobia than from institutional racism, also (although some states seem hell bent on institutionalizing their xenophobic tendencies). In the end, each situation is different (hell, Asians are super racist against blacks, from my observations. I have a bunch of Chinese colleagues, and lots of them are scared stiff of black people). We can't arbitrarily create a divide between white and non-white. It's the most dishonest attempt at defining race relations I think I've come across in a supposedly serious piece of journalism (or whatever this is).