I'm not one black person, I'm white. People were dismissing Grendel because he seemed uninformed; he linked to six pieces of anecdotal evidence, whereas my (other) response linked to two pieces of statistical evidence and referenced years of well-established historical fact. That's what I was mocking.
An honest mistake. I made the assumption based on the following line. Apologies nonetheless. | ... and whatever other bullshit white people think goes into our success. Thanks for replying to the post anyway and clarifying things up. You seem passionate about what's being discussed here, so I might as well ask: What are the "well-established historical facts" to which you are alluding? You made an oblique reference to "years of white antagonism" in your original response to Grendel; could you give me an example of how average white Americans have antagonized black people in recent years? From my (admittedly limited) understanding of the situation there, the problem seems to be quite heavily a class issue. In any case, I am not an American, and I don't attempt to keep on top of the narrative. I was merely commenting on the arguments outlined in this thread as I saw them. However, there is the worrying case of some people claiming that minorities can do no wrong, and that they "can't be racist against white people". As long as people are "punching-up" so to speak, being racist is fine. There was quite some discussion about everybody's favourite Goldsmiths Diversity Officer, just as an example. Initially thought that it was just hardliners over there in the US, but the trend seems to have spread across the pond to some hardliners here. What's your opinion on the issue? Is it still racist if you're punching up?
Yeah, I meant "whatever other bullshit white people think goes into [white people's] success." My bad on the lack of clarity. Also important to note, I'm not talking necessarily about white antagonism in recent years. I'm talking about white antagonism--from any time period--that has affected minorities in recent years. Here's some of the well-established historical fact about these effects: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States Jim Crow laws mandated the segregation of public schools, public places and public transportation, and the segregation of restrooms, restaurants and drinking fountains for whites and blacks. The U.S. military was also segregated, as were federal workplaces, initiated in 1913 under President Woodrow Wilson, the first Southern president elected since 1856. His administration practiced overt racial discrimination in hiring, requiring candidates to submit photos. These Jim Crow laws followed the 1800–1866 Black Codes, which had previously restricted the civil rights and civil liberties of African Americans. Segregation of public (state-sponsored) schools was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education. Generally, the remaining Jim Crow laws were overruled by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 but years of action and court challenges were needed to unravel numerous means of institutional discrimination. Such challenges continue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Crow_laws A major driver of this shift has been the rise of more punitive treatments for criminal offenders, resulting in skyrocketing incarceration rates. These changes 'have had a much larger impact on black communities than white communities because arrest rates have historically been much greater for blacks than whites,' the authors write. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/07/15/charting-the-shocking-rise-of-racial-disparity-in-our-criminal-justice-system/ I definitely think racism is racism, no matter who's the target. But I also think the US must reckon with our troubling history of enforcing white supremacy, and this will require some sort of reparation. Imagine: a woman has her purse stolen. Some years later, after the thief and woman have died, and the purse has passed on to the thief's heir, the crime is exposed. Is it unjust to take the purse from the thief's heir and return it to the woman's?Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
Lynching, the practice of murdering people by extrajudicial mob action, occurred in the United States chiefly from the late 18th century through the 1960s. Lynchings took place most frequently against African-American men in the southern U.S. after the American Civil War and the emancipation of all slaves, and particularly from 1890 to the 1920s, with a peak in 1892. [...] It occurred most frequently in areas with large concentrations of blacks, dominated politically by Democrats, and with competition among local churches, as part of the enforcement of white supremacy by whites in the late 19th century following Reconstruction. The granting of U.S. Constitutional rights to freedmen after the American Civil War during the Reconstruction era (1865–1877) aroused anxieties among white Southerners, who were unwilling to concede such social status to African Americans. They blamed the freedmen for their own wartime hardship, economic loss, and loss of social and political privilege. During Reconstruction, freedmen and whites active in the pursuit of civil rights, were sometimes lynched in the South. In addition, blacks were intimidated and attacked to prevent their voting, with violence increasing around elections from 1868 into the late 1870s. White Democrats regained control of State Legislatures in 1876 and a national compromise on the presidential election resulted in the removal of federal troops and official end to Reconstruction. There continued to be violence around elections to suppress black voting, particularly with the rise of the Populist Party and some victories by Populist-Republican candidates in the 1890s.
The Jim Crow laws were racial segregation state and local laws enacted after the Reconstruction period in Southern United States that continued in force until 1965 mandating de jure racial segregation in all public facilities in Southern U.S. states (of the former Confederacy), starting in 1890 with a "separate but equal" status for African Americans. Conditions for African Americans were consistently inferior and underfunded compared to those provided for white Americans. This decision institutionalized a number of economic, educational and social disadvantages. De jure segregation mainly applied to the Southern United States, while Northern segregation was generally de facto — patterns of segregation in housing enforced by covenants, bank lending practices and job discrimination, including discriminatory union practices for decades.
The position of most black men, relative to white men, is no better than how things stood after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1965. That's the sobering conclusion of a new paper out from University of Chicago economists Derek Neal and Armin Rick, who find that the considerable economic progress among black men between 1940 and 1980 has halted, and in many cases reversed.