Topic: Racism - Remnant of the Past or Alive Today?

[anagrammy]

Those people deserve to have their asses kicked. Even though the term "white devil" is cartoonishly funny.

The last part of your post reminds me of being in junior high and how the skaters hated the preps, etc. It's  sad that mentality continues in people who are above drinking age. (and what the HELL is a wannabe redneck? Lol)

I'm surprised no one has brought up that email circulating that depicts President Obama as a baby chimpanzee. It has two parent chimps dressed in shirts and a baby chimp with Obama's face photoshopped onto it. On the Bill Handel show they took a poll to see whether or not people considered it racist. Something like 60% of the listeners said no. That blew my mind.

The traditional slurs are losing meaning with the passing of the generations.  For example, I did not know that "acting white" is a racial slur used to denigrate any young African American who is carrying a book!  I have been taking a class on white privilege (that quickly got renamed "Interconnectedness") and it has been opening my eyes to the fact that 1) what I think I know is wrong and 2) I don't know shit.  It has been very humbling.  Imagine what it's like to teach your six year old that if a group of white kids start following him around, to either hide or report it to the nearest adult.  Imagine what it's like to be followed in stores because you might steal.  Imagine what it's like to be a kid picking up a crayon that says "Flesh" and it's not the color of your skin. 

There are some interesting films on youtube that we saw showing little African American girls choosing the "nice" doll or the "good" doll or the "pretty" doll from a choice of black and white baby dolls.  Yeah, they want to play with the white one "because she's better."  It just makes you want to jump in the film and hug her. 

Anagrammy

[Eddie Coyle]

     I beg and pray for the return of Fort Rock. His rants had nothing on the absolute palaver that senescent,guilty white liberals are putting forth in this thread. Practically a parody of a parody. The SDS intertwined with AARP.

[EvB]

Hey - anagrammy!  howzabout you & I, along with any other senescent palaver-er here find ourselves an ice flow, get on it, and leave the succinct (plff) apparently young, and hip to move on sans perspective?

Christ, it's as bad as "Don't trust anyone over 30" - and with less cause.

[JustOneFix]

Haloed-

I was laughing the whole time I was typing it. While it sounds like a bit from Phil Hendrie & his Austin Amarka character, that's how the whole thing went down. The one thing I don't understand is why they decided to go into a Country Bar of all places. They should've known going in that it would go over like a fart in church. You don't see but just a couple token whites in a 'black bar'. Yes I've been in a 'black bar' and I can't say I felt that comfortable. It may have been due to the comments my Napalm Death shirt was getting.

[Eddie Coyle]

Hey - anagrammy!  howzabout you & I, along with any other senescent palaver-er here find ourselves an ice flow, get on it, and leave the succinct (plff) apparently young, and hip to move on sans perspective?

Christ, it's as bad as "Don't trust anyone over 30" - and with less cause.

      "Don't trust anyone over 30", yes, the argot of YOUR generation. Anyone who uses terms like "white privilege" get nothing but mockery and ridicule from me.

[The General]

The SDS intertwined with AARP.

HAAAAAAAAahhahahahah.  Thanks.  Exactly.

[onan]

Hey - anagrammy!  howzabout you & I, along with any other senescent palaver-er here find ourselves an ice flow, get on it, and leave the succinct (plff) apparently young, and hip to move on sans perspective?

Christ, it's as bad as "Don't trust anyone over 30" - and with less cause.

I think its frikken hilarious. As a mentor of mine said many years ago: pathology is it's own reward.
 
I fully expect a glorious WTF moment ahead for several of the posters here. I wish no one here ill, but I am so sick of the " I have seen two rocks so I know the mountain. And this place is rife with it.
 

[haloedorchid]

Privilege exists. I think it would be easier to recognize if you grew up in a time of overt racism, but it's easy to see if you look hard enough even in a time of more covert racism. Like everything, it just depends on where you live and what you're experiences are. I think if something as arbitrary as beauty priviledge exists, then race privilege absolutely does. 

At least where I live, I've noticed in the papers that anytime a school science/math/spelling bee is won, it's always students of Indian or Asian background. Some of the schools here are majority Asian/Indian. Their parents are the ones working in the high-tech corporations. Things are definitely changing. 

[anagrammy]

Priviledge exists. I think it would be easier to recognize if you grew up in a time of overt racism, but it's easy to see if you look hard enough even in a time of more covert racism. Like everything, it just depends on where you live and what you're experiences are. I think if something as arbitrary as beauty priviledge exists, then race priviledge absolutely does. 

At least where I live, I've noticed in the papers that anytime a school science/math/spelling bee is won, it's always students of Indian or Asian background. Some of the schools here are majority Asian/Indian. Their parents are the ones working in the high-tech corporations. Things are definitely changing.

[anagrammy]

Hey - anagrammy!  howzabout you & I, along with any other senescent palaver-er here find ourselves an ice flow, get on it, and leave the succinct (plff) apparently young, and hip to move on sans perspective?

Christ, it's as bad as "Don't trust anyone over 30" - and with less cause.

Coyle promised we would not hear from him if we use the term "white privilege."  Some people do have emotional reactions to lingo, others dismiss the opinions of others based on age, gender, etc.  It takes some living to realize that dismissing all but yellow food makes a pretty dull diet.  Personally, I think interacting deeply with people of various ages, genders, sexual orientations, nationalities, races, etc. opens your eyes to deep possibilities.  Eddie might enjoy the movie Horse Boy just to experience what might happen if a Western couple opened their minds to the possibility that a shaman could help their autistic boy.  Maybe thinking a little about white privilege would lead him to the realities of white backlash and frank self-segregation (which I see in Oakland). 

It's not over, is my point.  We recently had rioting here in Oakland over the killing of a young black man on a BART station, all caught on video.  When it was announced that the sentence was coming down, a citywide riot alert went out (I worked downtown).  I walked out of the office to this most startling sight:  helicopters zzzinging overhead, circling, and traffic jams at the freeway onramps.  White people queued up to get out of town and black people coming in.  Same with the streets-- whaaat?  I'm leaving the downtown area to avoid trouble and African Americans are coming in from other areas!

Anagrammy

[anagrammy]

HAAAAAAAAahhahahahah.  Thanks.  Exactly.

Eddie is young and seems to be still individuating.  It's easy to understand his need to view the opinions of old people as irrelevant. 

Anagrammy

[aldousburbank]

Eddie is young and seems to be still individuating.  It's easy to understand his need to view the opinions of old people as irrelevant. 

Anagrammy

Yeh but... I'm 50 and still think old people's opinions are irrelevant, except for Annagrammy's, AquaGoat's and mine.

[The General]

Eddie is young and seems to be still individuating.  It's easy to understand his need to view the opinions of old people as irrelevant. 

Anagrammy

Just tired, I assume, like me, of hearing anachronistic 60's rhetoric that just isn't relevant anymore.

[EvB]

Yeh but... I'm 50 and still think old people's opinions are irrelevant, except for Annagrammy's, AquaGoat's and mine.

Well  to YOU then! 

{j/k}

[aldousburbank]

Well  to YOU then! 

{j/k}

And Evy B, of course.   

[Eddie Coyle]

Just tired, I assume, like me, of hearing anachronistic 60's rhetoric that just isn't relevant anymore.

       AMEN TO THAT. Terms like "white privilege" are straight out of the New Left playbook. Stomach-turning imbecility that I will mock mercilessly.
 
       BTW, I consider myself an "old" 35, who actually feels more comfortable talking to people older than I, so I'm not an "ageist"...

        How about this for WHITE FUCKING PRIVILEGE. I scored 1330 on the SAT. None of the five schools I applied for would offer more than a partial(10%) scholarship. This was made much worse  after finding out that a black girl at my school got a 4 year free ride to Boston University with an SAT of 950! 9-fucking-50. And she didn't last 6 weeks there. Meanwhile, I was so discouraged that I took the civil service exam and entered a life of drudgery at 19. White privilege is a gas,man...

[EvB]

       AMEN TO THAT. Terms like "white privilege" are straight out of the New Left playbook. Stomach-turning imbecility that I will mock mercilessly.
 
       BTW, I consider myself an "old" 35, who actually feels more comfortable talking to people older than I, so I'm not an "ageist"...

Someone forgot to show me that playbook. But no matter.

What I really want to say is I was aware, from you profile that you are in your mid-30's AND I never took anything you said as "ageist" - though I admit to reacting with some annoyance to the implication that some of us here who were around in the 60's and 70's are culturally stuck there.

Tell me, if you will; did you ever read the post where i talked about my own epiphany regrading the "white guilt" I carried and what it took to make me aware of it and fight against it? I noticed you didn't respond (not that you are required to) but if you are not taking the range of experience described in a person's post, then you are just pigeon holing them and, IMO, missing something. 

It's just and example, but that is one place where we could have expressed agreement - where i could have learned more from you than the fact that you have disdain for older liberals who sometimes use the language of their personal history.

[JustOneFix]

Just to throw a spanner in the gears- 

There's more 'black privilege' and other minority privilege than there is white privilege. The blacks have NAACP, BET television and a couple other television networks, they riot & burn down their own houses, they get paid for it. There's many other examples along this line.

If one was to setup a "Whites only college fund" Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would be banging fists on their portable podium saying how racist it is. Have you ever heard of a white person getting a scholarship from the United Negro College Fund?

The headquarters for the NAAWP used to be about 10 miles from my house. It routinely got graffiti and empty bottles of Olde English 800 were always tossed on the front lawn. The law didn't see this as a hate crime, but when the NAAWP members went over and spray painted things on the NAACP building, that got labeled as a hate crime.

The playing field needs to be level for all parties. None of this elitist racist bullshit that is done under the guise of "white guilt" and "oppressed blacks"

As for White Privilege- that must've gone out in the 1960s as I don't see it today. I wasn't around back then, but a goodly number of my friends were.

[The General]

What I really want to say is I was aware, from you profile that you are in your mid-30's AND I never took anything you said as "ageist" - though I admit to reacting with some annoyance to the implication that some of us here who were around in the 60's and 70's are culturally stuck there.

I don't really know how old most people are here on coastgab.  But believe me, you didn't have to be around in the 60's to be stuck in the politics of the 60's.  People born in the 90's are using those same old tired arguments.  I live in Seattle, and see it everyday.

[Eddie Coyle]

Someone forgot to show me that playbook. But no matter.

What I really want to say is I was aware, from you profile that you are in your mid-30's AND I never took anything you said as "ageist" - though I admit to reacting with some annoyance to the implication that some of us here who were around in the 60's and 70's are culturally stuck there.

Tell me, if you will; did you ever read the post where i talked about my own epiphany regrading the "white guilt" I carried and what it took to make me aware of it and fight against it? I noticed you didn't respond (not that you are required to) but if you are not taking the range of experience described in a person's post, then you are just pigeon holing them and, IMO, missing something. 

It's just and example, but that is one place where we could have expressed agreement - where i could have learned more from you than the fact that you have disdain for older liberals who sometimes use the language of their personal history.

   "White privilege" is the jargon of Jerry Rubin, Susan Sontag, Huey Newton et al...at least they're no longer part of this mortal coil. And I did read about your personal experience and felt it was somewhat poignant.

   My disdain isn't for older liberals per se...it's just some of their language and tactics that irk me. "White Privilege" being a prime example, it's guilt-tripping and frighteningly short-sighted. As someone of distinctly, lower/lower middle class/blue-collar roots, a term like white privilege infuriates me. Is that the "privilege" that got my 18 year old uncle killed during the Tet Offensive in Feb,1968? When he and his pals were basically told "volunteer or be drafted".

[EvB]

As someone of distinctly, lower/lower middle class/blue-collar roots, a term like white privilege infuriates me. Is that the "privilege" that got my 18 year old uncle killed during the Tet Offensive in Feb,1968? When he and his pals were basically told "volunteer or be drafted".

wish i had more time right now to reply to this, because I ABSOLUTLY get it.  I'm often called paranoid and a conspiracy theorist because of  this - but I'm convinced that those few (and the ones we know about do happen to be - by in large - white men, but no matter) who hold the majority of the monetary and cultural capital are the ones who run the show - and they like nothing better than to see those of us who are not members of their club squabling over the scraps.

[anagrammy]

       AMEN TO THAT. Terms like "white privilege" are straight out of the New Left playbook. Stomach-turning imbecility that I will mock mercilessly.
 
       BTW, I consider myself an "old" 35, who actually feels more comfortable talking to people older than I, so I'm not an "ageist"...

        How about this for WHITE FUCKING PRIVILEGE. I scored 1330 on the SAT. None of the five schools I applied for would offer more than a partial(10%) scholarship. This was made much worse  after finding out that a black girl at my school got a 4 year free ride to Boston University with an SAT of 950! 9-fucking-50. And she didn't last 6 weeks there. Meanwhile, I was so discouraged that I took the civil service exam and entered a life of drudgery at 19. White privilege is a gas,man...

You're my son's age and the exact same thing happened to him.  Correcting racism with racism, no?  RIDICULOUS!  My brilliant son drives a truck for Frito-Lay; he has two kids and is struggling financially, so I am totally with you.  Racism cuts both ways and clumsy attempts to compensate have, in my opinion, made things worse, not better.  It hearkens back to Old Testament eye-for-an-eye type "justice." 

Social change is like an underwater earthquake.  It makes a necessary adjustment but causes tremendous upheaval and destructive tsunami's thousands of miles away.  Giving minority preferences flies in the face of the core value of America as a land of equal opportunity.  Imagine they gave us women come compensation for the fact that we STILL make 60 cents on the dollar compared to men doing the same work.  How about a compensatory tax break for the ladies?  Isn't it discriminatory to compensate races and not gender, and what about Native Americans?

Take aldous for example.  He turns down free seeds because he gets it.  ITS WHITE GUILT.  And what do we have to feel guilty about?  How about lying and covering up our nasty genocidal history, and that's just for starters.  How about stop pretending we are fucking John Wayne just out there helping other countries who want to have democracy.  It is an insult to the intelligence of the citizens, no matter what their race.

I love America and the principles it was founded upon, even if they were hypocritical slave holders.  Maybe the ideals cannot ever be visualized perfectly, but eventually we will all be light brown and skin color won't matter.  Our children's children's children will either not exist at all or be asking their grandparents to tell them about the olden times when people came in different colors, like a box of crayons.

Yesterday a gorgeous Hindu woman came to my meditation class dressed in a T-shirt and jeans.  I felt a loss, like disappointed that I didn't get to see that radiance in a sari. 

When I had my wisdom teeth pulled, my mother blended my food for me.  One night it was Yankee Pot Roast smoothie.  It tasted kinda the same (good) but I missed the texture of the big chunks of beef and the soft carrots and the squishy potatoes and OMG the gravy all thick and shiny.

When the races disappear with their unique flavors, and everyone is a mongrel, it will definitely be a loss.  For example, there will be no New Orleans.  Oh, wait a minute, that already happened....

Anagrammy

[Eddie Coyle]

wish i had more time right now to reply to this, because I ABSOLUTLY get it.  I'm often called paranoid and a conspiracy theorist because of  this - but I'm convinced that those few (and the ones we know about do happen to be - by in large - white men, but no matter) who hold the majority of the monetary and cultural capital are the ones who run the show - and they like nothing better than to see those of us who are not members of their club squabling over the scraps.

   Yup and it's why the racial/religious divisions drive me nuts-total fucking distractions.. "leaders" like an Al Sharpton are pawns in the game of the elite. Watch the great 1978 movie "Blue Collar" and it's basic message " they keep us down by dividing us-black vs white,young vs old" etc,etc

   "White Privilege"...if they mean, Rockefellers,Warburgs,Rothschilds..Kennedys,Bushes....Yes, absolutely. If they mean rest of us working stiffs...well, a big greasy "fuck off" to them.

[Eddie Coyle]

You're my son's age and the exact same thing happened to him.  Correcting racism with racism, no?  RIDICULOUS!  My brilliant son drives a truck for Frito-Lay; he has two kids and is struggling financially, so I am totally with you.  Racism cuts both ways and clumsy attempts to compensate have, in my opinion, made things worse, not better.  It hearkens back to Old Testament eye-for-an-eye type "justice." 

      This is the beauty of discourse, that seemingly disparate personalities can find common ground. I've seen the damaging effects of social-engineering up close and personal.

       I went to South Boston High School, which became infamous in 1974-78 for it's busing crisis that was chronicled in Anthony Lukas "Common Ground". By the time I went there(92-94) the school was still a tinderbox, it's former prestige was gone and internecine conflict was constant. White vs black, brown vs black,brown vs white...we, whites were not allowed(by gov't mandate) to exceed 12% of the student body, so I know what it's like to be a despised minority. Social engineering destroyed that school, it's spirit...and lead to more drop-outs and broken dreams than a million drug dealers ever could.

[anagrammy]

      This is the beauty of discourse, that seemingly disparate personalities can find common ground. I've seen the damaging effects of social-engineering up close and personal.

       I went to South Boston High School, which became infamous in 1974-78 for it's busing crisis that was chronicled in Anthony Lukas "Common Ground". By the time I went there(92-94) the school was still a tinderbox, it's former prestige was gone and internecine conflict was constant. White vs black, brown vs black,brown vs white...we, whites were not allowed(by gov't mandate) to exceed 12% of the student body, so I know what it's like to be a despised minority. Social engineering destroyed that school, it's spirit...and lead to more drop-outs and broken dreams than a million drug dealers ever could.

Sadly so true.  I am reading a book right now that is so powerful I can only take it in small doses.  It's title, "The Twilight of Common Dreams"  by Todd Gitlin.  In addition to the financial destruction of our country, there are a million fractures in the ideology we hold dear.  Unless we can transcend our cultural differences, we will be a United States in name only.  Partisanship and tribe affiliations will supercede us acting in the best interests of our country, and so we see ourselves being sold down the river by whichever party is in control.  The only thing that's changing in America under Obama is that most of us realize that the two party system is a joke.  The nameplates change every four years but the warlords that run this country just hold their razor to the throat of the next election winner and nothing changes.

Except hope is leaving the building.  We must fight for local control, it's our only real hope.  Just say to the Federal government like we did to the English, leave us the fuck alone.

Anagrammy

[aldousburbank]

If one was to setup a "Whites only college fund" Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would be banging fists on their portable podium saying how racist it is.

I was raised deep in the civil rights movements of the sixties.  Because of this, I've been very aware of the various levels of integrity on whichever side of the racism thing.  I have lots of very bad stuff to say, from my personal experience, of the race whores, the so called reverends Jackson and Sharpton.  Pheww!  They suck more than Noory.  Without them this topic would have lost much of its shelf life in America some time ago.

[onan]

.  We must fight for local control, it's our only real hope.  Anagrammy

Funny you would see it that way. It was because of "local control" that lynchings were acceptable to the "locals" and not well know to those not local. In essence that is where the "civil" rights movement really got a foot hold. Local governments brought the national guard into block blacks from attending state universities.
 
Is our federal government failing us? I would say yes in some areas. But I would quickly add that local governments are doing the same. How many here are aware of their state's participation in local tax breaks to corporations. In NC I can tell you that the state budget is in the crapper more due to overcompensation to big business than it is to so called entitlements.
 
In many ways I do think local governments are better. Certainly they can react to needs quicker. But I am not sure I would trust the narrow minded politicos in Alabama or Mississippi to make appropriate decisions regarding healthcare or education.

[Michael Vandeven]

     I beg and pray for the return of Fort Rock. His rants had nothing on the absolute palaver that senescent,guilty white liberals are putting forth in this thread. Practically a parody of a parody. The SDS intertwined with AARP.

Haha, you rock.

Sent from my DROIDX

[EvB]

In NC I can tell you that the state budget is in the crapper more due to overcompensation to big business than it is to so called entitlements.

This is true in every state I've have investigated. And again (she said, taking out one of her favorite drums) this is an excellent way to keep us at each others thoughts.  I cannot tell you how many middle class people i know who are holding on by their fingernails, blaming people who get food stamps, subsidized heath insurance and so forth, for making their lives so hard. When you point out to them that the corporations get most of the "hand out" money, they shriek "but they are the ones who provide us JOBS!!"

Oh, and by the way, do you all know that one class of recipients of government subsidies are MAJOR LEAGUE SPORTS TEAMS?  Yes, indeed.  At one time, there was a kind of logic to it.  We were a nation suffering from a depression, and then a world war. Sports was something that could cheer us and bring us together.  But tickets to these events were not beyond the means of the average American, and the franchises themselves did not make the big bucks they do now.  (okay, not all of them do - but these subsidies are not dependent upon the income of the franchise - the Red Sox get 'em - the NY Yankees get 'em - the Dallas Cowboys get 'em - I think you catch my drift.)

So, what we have here are multimillion dollar franchise - who do end their year well in the black - STILL getting multimillion dollar subsides paid by government tax income - yours and mine.

Dunno about you, but that pisses me off a whole lot more than the idea that someone is getting Welfare money they don't really need or deserve.

[aldousburbank]

Maybe the ideals cannot ever be visualized perfectly, but eventually we will all be light brown and skin color won't matter.  Our children's children's children will either not exist at all or be asking their grandparents to tell them about the olden times when people came in different colors, like a box of crayons.

In a sense, Anagrammy, you, and our children and grandchildren are the (some say foretold) rainbow nation you describe.  I don't know why I fell in love with a young beauty from Pennsylvania 23 years ago, but we make handsome children.  They abide with people of every color and our lifestyle provides them with rich and varied cultural opportunities.  They go to rock concerts and tipi ceremonies, and pretty much everything in between- they are full on Americans.  They know what racism is but will not accept it in their minds.  I am not about mixing every color on the paint pallet, but I started brown and my wife's family now has a nice tan in their lineage is all.