Off-topic: Race.

[Valerie]

Basically what Ollie said.

There was a comedian, though I can't remember his name now, who was talking about "N-word privileges." He was saying that every race except white people could use that word without repercussions. Then he said (paraphrasing), "The reason white people can't use that word is because we weren't responsible with it in the past. We used it a little too much. We abused that word. So we had our N-word privileges revoked."

So... It goes way beyond individuals. If someone calls me a honkey or a cracker, why would I care? Those are silly words to begin with, plus they were only made in retaliation. "Nigger," on the other hand, is incredibly loaded with history and hate and violence. Cracker and honkey serve the same purpose as that word, sure, but they don't bring nearly the same heat, because crackers were cracking whips while black people were being cracked at.

Now, obviously, it still isn't right for someone to be rude to a white person based on race. No one here is saying that it's okay for anyone of any race to call me a cracker. But it is not the same level as if I called a minority a racial slur, because their racial slurs have a lot more painful history.

I don't even know where you're trying to go with the "police state" thing. Is it because hate crimes are a thing? Is it because we're trying to renew the VAWA? Is it because of the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act? Is it because health care is being expanded to be more available? Because all of those things are doing what you just said needs to be done: that everyone needs to have a fair shot, that we're trying to improve the quality of life for everyone, and "not just blacks." Gay people are slowly getting marriage rights, women are slowly getting paid at closer rates to their male colleagues, and crimes based on race/sex/religion/etc. are being recognized as hatred of particular groups. People who desperately need healthcare and can't afford it are slowly being introduced to the idea that they could someday have it. The U.S., and many other countries that are often accused of being "police states," is trying its damnedest to make sure everyone has a chance.

[Captain LeBubbles]

the true power of racism?

Racism powers, activate!

I am a terrible person.

[Otaking]

Hint: you're using an extremely simple definition of racism that doesn't qualify to the fullest extent, mainly because people don't think of the social systems that've been built up over several hundred years to define why race is such a heavy topic today.

Racism is not just "discrimination based on race."

Racism is prejudice, privilege, and power. All together, all at once.

And since there's only one group that gets all of those at all (or nearly all) times, guess what group is the only one that has the true power of racism?

Cue defensive YT freak-out...nnnao

No freakout from this whitey, but all you've done here is taken the phrase "Racism can't happen against whites" and reworded it. "The true power of racism"? What does that even mean?

I think power is a localized thing, wielded by whoever has it and opportunity at the moment, whether it's a mob on some white guys' porch beating him up for Trayton, or OJ getting off in a murder trial because of the power of money versus the ineptitude of one of our social systems...that being the justice system, or Rodney King getting the crap beat out of him by whites. I don't really think racism changes based on the color of the people involved, or the scope of it. I don't really think the definition changes from the macro to the micro, unless you're trying to dodge a conceptual argument using semantics.

It's fine to be defensive when I'm being told to act contrite based on the color of my skin about things that happened generations ago that I had nothing to do with. I think if you're not defensive about things in your life, you're a passive doormat. Possibly a passive aggressive naive doormat, but a doormat all the same. I prefer to be aggressive aggressive.

I don't even know where you're trying to go with the "police state" thing.

I have somewhat specialized somewhat non-public knowledge due to the nature of my employment. I oversee the installation of fiber optic splitters at Internet peering points. These are used to scan a copy of all Internet traffic sent over major peering points and feed them into government servers to search for words/recreateable data (VOIP data for instance) of interest presumably to NSA, FBI, Homeland etc. This began under Bush and continued under Obama. It's been being publicized in publications like Wired and EFF.org since roughly 2000 I believe but no one cares about stuff like this in favor of things that get air time in the media like 'subtle racism'.

If you want to feel you're not living in something more closely resembling a police state every day, feel free, I'm not going to try to change your mind. My mind works in another direction though. We used to consider illegal wiretapping an impeachable offense but I guess it's a new privacy-free world. There's a new fashion trend coming in which you wear masks to fool facial recognition software too. I just think a lot of liberals have really fucked up priorities these days about what they should be worrying about.

Is it because health care is being expanded to be more available?

From a period of 2005-2010 I've had a pretty extensive tour of major and minor hospitals in multiple cities in California and Texas, mainly due to my wife's condition requiring several surgeries, emergency visits to the ER, appointments of varying nature etc. I've waited for hours well into the next morning in emergency rooms nightly for months full of illegals that already can't pay, and I've seen and paid more than my share of their bills by virtue of the ridiculous overpricing that hospitals do because they can get it out of insurance companies (sometimes) I've had multiple near heart attacks as ten and twenty thousand dollar bills are bandied back and forth between hospital and insurance until one of them breaks down, or until they land on me.

I've had one of the best surgeons in the country tell me he wouldn't accept insurance anymore because of the fight they put up to pay out. I've sat in multiple pain clinics with tons of folks who washed out of medical care and ended up on painkillers because the system couldn't help them. I was very hopeful when Obama talked about increasing the efficiency of medical care through things like a national medical database (if I've already sold my privacy, give me something I can use for it) because to me, improving medical care, and making hospitals answerable for their care is the only way to help health care. All this talk went completely away in favor of spreading it around to more people who won't be able to pay which will hasten the system's demise unfortunately in my view from what I have experienced. (At least he lessened restrictions on stem cell research) I'm not an anti-socialist by any means but I am a pro-realist. I wholeheartedly believe we should help those less fortunate, however medical care is pretty crap right now and if you think otherwise you haven't been through the wringer on anything but well known, in-and-out conditions. Overloading the system even more is not going to help. "Subtle racism" will be the least of your concern when you have the free health care and it still costs someone 50,000 and that someone won't pay and it is your SO/Parent/Grandparent on the operating table after their 20th visit to a hospital because medical care is unpredictable, largely unregulated by any outside force and as inefficient as possible. Technology and efficiency are the only ways out of this mess, not continual arguments about culture and bureaucracy and handing out free everything with no way to pay for it.

The inclusion you're all doing of quiltbag sexuality and women's issues is just lumping all minorities in with race in a thread about race. If we're going to lump in all minorities together, you'll have to lump in whites too as they're a minority now and things will really get confusing. Oh which minority will get the coveted seat of privilege next, tune in for next week's episode!

Now some of you folks on this board brought up "the plural of experience is not data" which may be true in a strict scientific methodology, but I'll just add that an antonym of experience is naïveté.

[Kamino Neko]

Then he said (paraphrasing), "The reason white people can't use that word is because we weren't responsible with it in the past. We used it a little too much. We abused that word. So we had our N-word privileges revoked."

I'm hearing this in Bill Engvall's voice, though I'm not 100% he's the one who did the bit (which I know I've heard). Guy who did it was definitely southern, though.

[Zanosuke Kurosaki]

Then he said (paraphrasing), "The reason white people can't use that word is because we weren't responsible with it in the past. We used it a little too much. We abused that word. So we had our N-word privileges revoked."

I'm hearing this in Bill Engvall's voice, though I'm not 100% he's the one who did the bit (which I know I've heard). Guy who did it was definitely southern, though.

You might be thinking either Foxworthy, or Ron White, then. I'm leaning towards White, since he tends to be a bit more "coarse" with his material.

[AJ828]

I don't normally post here, as you can see. However, after reading this, I felt the need to do so. What bothers me so much is the way that so many of you are insisting that racism cannot happen to whites or it's okay as long as the racism is against whites (or at least, not as bad as if it were against any other race). This belief is as ridiculous as it is dangerous to all people. Racism can happen to any person at any time who is being discriminated against or abused due to their race. Here is a wikipedia article on racism for those who seem to believe that the word means something that it does not: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism

The following statements show me that very few of you have actually dealt with true racism (especially since according to this poll, 74% of you are white.), are merely posting what you think you should believe in order to be as PC and popular as possible, or are very naive:

Now, obviously, it still isn't right for someone to be rude to a white person based on race. No one here is saying that it's okay for anyone of any race to call me a cracker. But it is not the same level as if I called a minority a racial slur, because their racial slurs have a lot more painful history.

I'm sorry, Valerie, but having a racial slur hurled at you is exactly the same as if one were used against a person of a different race. It's the hatred behind any of those words that is the problem. Yes, the U.S. has a terrible past when it comes to racism and the abuses of and cruelty to African-Americans, and certain words bring call that past up for many of us. However, it is NEVER okay to use a racial slur against ANYONE. Ever. Furthering hatred and ignorance because of slavery is not okay. While many whites in the U.S. harbor feelings of guilt and shame over our racist past, it doesn't mean that it's okay for those whites to be abused as part of a misguided way of making amends for something that none of them had any part in in the first place. I personally feel terrible about what happened in my country due to slavery, but I certainly don't think that I should allow myself to be mistreated because of it, or make allowances for the behavior of others due to it. Two wrongs do not make a right, and the cycle of racism needs to stop somewhere.

Hint: you're using an extremely simple definition of racism that doesn't qualify to the fullest extent, mainly because people don't think of the social systems that've been built up over several hundred years to define why race is such a heavy topic today.

Racism is not just "discrimination based on race."

Racism is prejudice, privilege, and power. All together, all at once.

And since there's only one group that gets all of those at all (or nearly all) times, guess what group is the only one that has the true power of racism?

Cue defensive YT freak-out...nnnao

This poster has absolutely no clue as to what they are talking about. At all. Racism has nothing to do with power or privilege. Go to a poverty-stricken area and see just as much racism there (if not more) than you'd find in a wealthier area. People who have difficult lives often seek someone else to blame for them. Look at what the Nazis did to the Jews in Germany. They used the suffering populace's need to blame an entire race for their misfortune and it worked. Those that believe that it's only wealthy, powerful whites who are racist are living in a bubble. If anything, money helps even things up among the races. Poverty does the same thing. It's money, not race, that more truly affects how people are viewed in the U.S. at this time. And there are far more poverty-stricken, powerless whites than there of the privileged, wealthy sect that some seem to believe are the cause of all of the racial discrimination in the U.S. Privilege and wealth do not breed racists. Ignorance and hatred of what's different does. And racist beliefs certainly aren't unique to the white condition.

For many years and for many years, I lived in an area that had more non-white families residing there than whites. The racial breakdown in my highschool was the following:
Race Number Percent

Black 959 47.1%
White 484 23.8%
Hispanic 353 17.3%
Asian 236 11.6%
American Indian 1 0.05%

We had a large number of poor-to-lower-middle-class black families, and a smaller number of upper middle class-to-moderately-wealthy white families. I myself came from a lower-middle-class/poor white family, and got discriminated against by both sides. The black students beat me up, bullied me, and otherwise treated me deplorably. The white students bullied me, taunted me, or ignored me. I became friends with the very few white students whose family had the same monetary situation as mine and were considered outsiders like myself, and the kids in ESL (English as a Second Language). Those kids belonged to many different races and spoke a dozen different languages, and they were kinder than the kids from my country because they didn't care about the status quo and were also outsiders. The amount of black-on-white racism in my school system was staggering and impossible for our teachers to control, as was black-on-hispanic and black-on-asian racism. There was little white-on-black racism (mostly due to the fact that there were so few white kids there in the first place), and though it did exist there, it was kept quiet and happened in many cases because of the way white students were treated. There was a feeling of fear in that school that was so pervasive that few people of any color were comfortable there, especially if they were there to try to learn.

Racism should never, ever be allowed. It doesn't matter which group the racism is directed at. Hatred is hatred. Period. It doesn't matter who started the cycle of hatred. It ALL needs to stop. Too many of you are furthering and being accepting of racism by insisting that it's fine as long as its against one group instead of another, and that really bothers me. The Nazis believed that racism was okay, too. And look at how that turned out.

[Lia S]

There was a comedian, though I can't remember his name now, who was talking about "N-word privileges." He was saying that every race except white people could use that word without repercussions. Then he said (paraphrasing), "The reason white people can't use that word is because we weren't responsible with it in the past. We used it a little too much. We abused that word. So we had our N-word privileges revoked."

I have no desire to use the N-word, but I refuse to be part of this "we". As long as there is a "we/us", there will be a "them" and the cycle of racism continues even when you're trying to fight it.

AJ828: Welcome to the forums! I liked your first post, except the Godwin in the last paragraph.

[Captain LeBubbles]

*snip snip* {...} except the Godwin in the last paragraph.

Soooo... does that mean this thread is dead now?

[Gholateg]

Here's the thing.

Racism isn't this huge, horrible boogy man, out to get the people who aren't "Normal."
There is no normal. Normal is a myth. What we have is the same thing we've always had. Packs. Little islands in the sea of complexity that is humanity.
Racisim is small. It's mean and it's small and it's petty. Now, I'm not saying that the problems racism cause are small, I'm not saying that at all. But the ACT of being racist is the act of a small person.

The old black man who calls the yuppie white kids Honkey.
The Pakistani couple who watch the black kids in their store like hawks.
The old white Brit who hates Pakistani's for turning his neighborhood to hell.

It's ALL Racism. Every bit the same thing, creed and color of the same stupid pack mentality we all had back when we were hanging out in trees.
Saying one kind of racism is "Worse" is ridiculous. To approach the Godwin line; you can't rape someone a little bit.

[Lia S]

I've been thinking a bit, and I think it's really important to distinguish between two things: one is that a person can be a racist, and the other is that a society can be "racist" (in other words that there is a correlation between race and being treated worse than others). The latter can be even when nobody in that society is actively trying to keep things that way. Even when nobody alive is a racist. This "statistical" problem is a real problem: it's a waste of talent, and it causes personal racism in people on both sides who don't know the difference between correlation and causation.

The solution to personal racism is obvious (but not necessarily easy): people need to have their craniorectal inversions undone. The big scale problem doesn't have an obvious solution (that I can see) other than fighting personal racism and hoping the big scale effects of it go away by themselves. One can try to compensate but there is a high risk of losing goodwill when one isn't *very* careful while trying to do that (for example, what will many employees think when their boss hires an idiot because that was the only differently-coloured person who applied?). There's also the question why we would compensate for one kind of discrimination but not for another - maybe because racism is much more taboo so it's also extra PC to do the "opposite"? There's the argument that a white person in an otherwise identical situation always has an advantage over anyone with a different skin colour, but there are no two people on Earth who are in identical situations... and this leads me to the question how much different problems one must have to deserve equal compensation to what is given for being not-white...

I don't know what to do about it. Just don't confuse the two different kinds of racism or you might end up saying things like "all white people are racists", or things that imply the same, like "we lost the privilege to use the N-word".

[sgtrock]

There was a comedian, though I can't remember his name now, who was talking about "N-word privileges." He was saying that every race except white people could use that word without repercussions. Then he said (paraphrasing), "The reason white people can't use that word is because we weren't responsible with it in the past. We used it a little too much. We abused that word. So we had our N-word privileges revoked."

I have no desire to use the N-word, but I refuse to be part of this "we". As long as there is a "we/us", there will be a "them" and the cycle of racism continues even when you're trying to fight it.

AJ828: Welcome to the forums! I liked your first post, except the Godwin in the last paragraph.

Except he's right to bring up Hitler so it doesn't mean the thread is dead. Besides, I don't think he was the first in the thread to do so. He simply explained why Hitler's whipping up hatred of the Jews as a race was an appropriate point to highlight, and I think he's right. (More below.)

(Warning! Wall of text below with not just unsupported opinion, but real facts and ideas! Enter at your own risk! )

Did any of you ever hear of Carl Sagan's 1970s book, Broca's Brain? Among other topics that he covered, he spent quite a bit of time talking about the structure of the human brain. At one point, he explained that one way of looking at brains is to remember that they evolved essentially by continuing to build ever more complex structures on top of the older, simpler ones. The end result is that the more primitive the function, the deeper you need to go to find where it is housed within the overall structure. This applies from complex, abstract thought down to autonomic functions that keep our hearts beating and the liver working. While we know today that it's an overly simplistic model, in my view it's still a good analogy for thinking about how people treat each other.

Emotion lies somewhere between, but much closer to our reptilian roots than to our upper functions. Those who wish to be in total control understand that provoking and sustaining strong negative reactions is a much easier way to sieze and maintain power than appealing to our intellect is (even if it's a less precise and ultimately destructive means of doing so). We have been watching the deliberate invocation of those kinds of emotions for a long, long time. 9/11 simply provided a golden opportunity to accelerate the process in this country.

AJ828 is right, too, about the pervasive monitoring of all communications. Although, the problem has existed for much longer than he realises. The kind of monitoring that he talks about predates Bush by quite a bit. For example, CALEA was passed during Clinton's administration but was first proposed by the FBI much earlier.

To all intents and purposes and by almost any measure, those of us who live in the U.S. live in a fascist police state. By that I mean that corporate interests drive most legislation and political control is maintained by a combination of whipping up hatred of others combined with a total perversion of the Constitutional establishment of our rights. He's also right that our healthcare system is a mess.

Don't believe me? Consider these facts:

The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate of any nation on earth with the possible exception of China. (Many observers believe that China is grossly underreporting how many of its people are in prison).

While free speech itself is still allowed (witness this board, for example), real political dissent is almost completely absent from the national debate. Anyone not part of the oligarchy finds that their attempts to establish a new power base are routinely suppressed any time they might interfere with the two major parties.

The U.S. is the ONLY developed country in the world where medical costs are the primary reason for personal bankruptcy with 1.6 MILLION in 2011. That's up from 700,000 in 2001. So, Obamacare apparently made things worse, not better. Why? Because rather than crafting a sane national healthcare plan based upon any number of working models used everywhere else, the pharmaceutical, medical, and insurance industries siezed the opportunity and lobbied hard to ensure that their nests were padded even deeper in our dollar bills.

The U.S. pays a larger % of GDP for healthcare than any other nation except the map dot Timor-Leste. Worse, that % of GDP has been growing at an alarming rate almost since we started tracking it in 1995, yet what we get for all that money is demonstrably worse than that of dozens of other countries.

For example, maternal mortality rate per 100,000 births. The U.S. is the ONLY country where this statistic has actually RISEN in recent history, and it's been doing so for nearly 20 years! In fact, the lowest point this statistic reached in the U.S was clear back in 1979. After that, it was stagnant for about 10 or 12 years before it started to rise. So, for more than 30 years with Democratic Congresses and presidents, Republican Congresses and presidents, our healthcare has been getting slowly worse for at least one key statistic.
Pick virtually any other health related variable that you want and you can see that the U.S. lags behind the rest of the developed world. Life expectancy. Child mortality (0-5 years) per 1,000 births. Suicide. Bad teeth per child at 12 years of age. And the list goes on...
The only bright spot is that the overall trend is still largely showing steady improvement for everyone. All the sociopaths in the world can't seem to keep us down as a species.

The point of this long deviation from the main topic is to show that it's extremely difficult to combat the corrosive effects of racism and hatred in general when there are powerful interest groups who are committed to whipping up those negative factors in order to maintain their position at the top of the heap. I'm not saying, "Give up the good fight against racism and hatred because you can't win." I'm saying, be very aware that there ARE people who are happy to see us at each others throats and do everything they can to keep us from working together. Be aware that when you deal with the individual who has been steeped in Tea Party rhetoric, or had a father who was a card carrying member of the KKK, or grew up attending church at the Nation of Islam, that you are dealing with someone who will be extremely difficult to reach.

[Otaking]

AJ828 is right, too, about the pervasive monitoring of all communications. Although, the problem has existed for much longer than he realises. The kind of monitoring that he talks about predates Bush by quite a bit. For example, CALEA was passed during Clinton's administration but was first proposed by the FBI much earlier.

I've heard of those programs, Carnivore et al from earlier, but my personally verifiable experience with them began in 2000, so that's what I wrote about...I'm big on verifiable facts. Also I am not AJ.

The point of this long deviation from the main topic is to show that it's extremely difficult to combat the corrosive effects of racism and hatred in general when there are powerful interest groups who are committed to whipping up those negative factors in order to maintain their position at the top of the heap. I'm not saying, "Give up the good fight against racism and hatred because you can't win." I'm saying, be very aware that there ARE people who are happy to see us at each others throats and do everything they can to keep us from working together. Be aware that when you deal with the individual who has been steeped in Tea Party rhetoric, or had a father who was a card carrying member of the KKK, or grew up attending church at the Nation of Islam, that you are dealing with someone who will be extremely difficult to reach.

You are a breath of fresh air. It's not like I'm oblivious to systemic racism or don't believe in it, I just believe we are being kept down or encouraged to divide over divisive topics so one lame ass political party can garner votes over the other lame ass party. I believe they are not much different from one another in practice...the fact that my install orders did not change across political parties in power just highlights this for me. The whole political process just seems to be an ineffective show lately to keep us entertained while the real power brokers move things around behind the scenes and police forces can increase and write more tickets to support themselves. I always think of the white and black armies in Orwell's 1984 when I hear media corn fed conservatives AND liberals get going nowadays.

While free speech itself is still allowed (witness this board, for example)

I'm somewhat nervous posting what I have even, since I know how easily shit can be heuristically flagged up.

[Freemage]

The problem with not treating systemic racism differently than racial bigotry is quite simple--systemic racism does not, in fact, need racial bigotry to continue. They're separate problems, and require distinct solutions. Ignoring the fight against systemic privilege is essentially telling a very large segment of humanity, "Oh, don't worry, soon as we work out the bugs in the human psyche, we'll get to your issues." The problem there is that these issues are everyday, immediate and in many cases, life-altering and life-threatening.

[Gholateg]

The problem with not treating systemic racism differently than racial bigotry is quite simple--systemic racism does not, in fact, need racial bigotry to continue. They're separate problems, and require distinct solutions. Ignoring the fight against systemic privilege is essentially telling a very large segment of humanity, "Oh, don't worry, soon as we work out the bugs in the human psyche, we'll get to your issues." The problem there is that these issues are everyday, immediate and in many cases, life-altering and life-threatening.

That's the biggest problem with trying to find a solution to racism. It's ingrained into our survival instinct. We come from an omnivorous pack culture.

"We're not safe outside, the predators will get us! let's group up to protect each other!"
"Well, since we've teamed up, predators wont eat us... Go team! Lets bang and make little us's and celebrate!"
"There's not enough food for all of us since the predators went away! Fred, Barney, George! We need to team up and make sure *we* have food!"
"HEY! those guys have all the food! GET EM!"
"Hey, they STOLE OUR FOOD! Screw anyone not in our pack guys... throw sticks and poop at them to protect the food!"

So on adnauseum, down the line, until we find something else to hate, band together, kill it dead, then break apart again.

[Artemisia]

It isn't really the race mentality that is ingrained into us, but rather the us vs them mentality, and even that has less to do with genetics than you would think. May of the early cities only existed because humans worked together rather than against each other, and many relied heavily on trade to flourish. It really is an outgrowth of male-centered cultures that the 'other' is the absolute enemy. Anthropologically, it's a lot more complex than just 'us vs them.'