How does that make them “snowflakes”? Southerners just have a more polite way of interacting than any other Americans.
When one race is outnumbered the interaction changes. For example, 1 Black man and 1 White man talking – everything’s ok. Another Black man or another White man shows up, then somebody automatically becomes the outsider.
I also understood your first post to mean that you have to dance around issues, that you can’t be straight forward. But there’s a fine line between being direct and being rude. Politeness is one way to handle that, if everyone understands the rules.
So, I kind of get what you’re saying, I think.
He identifies as Black not only because of his appearance, but in every way.
I’m glad you get it.
Why, bless your little heart.
To you, that is a truth. It is not my experience. I was often in situations where the numbers changed. In the late sixties, my love was music. I was a percussionist/drummer (I could read music) in the school band, orchestra, marching band, and I also had a band that played at the local high schools and occasionally the frat houses at Rutgers.
At that time, musicians were all about peace, love, sex, pot, rock and roll, and anti war. While admittedly there was just one black student in my high school, when my friends and I went into the city (NYC) we were often in mixed groups and the ratios changed depending on the party/coffee house/head shop we visited. We had some incredibly good times.
While the “hippie” scene (I dislike that term) was not as prevalent in New Orleans, the jazz musicians were very mixed and very close. Music does seem to bind people from all backgrounds.
For me, the experience continues in the Air Force. Now, as I mentioned earlier there were racists. In fact, as a squad leader in basic, I had two black men in my squad. The dorm chief (Calicotte) was racist and he regularly treated these men unfairly. I did not take this lightly. I knocked (once, hard, as instructed) on the TI’s door. Since you were also military, you know it takes some balls to do this in basic. I heard, “Enter!” So I waked in, saluted, and said “Airman Randolph reporting as ordered, sir!” The TI said, “What is it, Airman.”
“Sir, you told us that the only color we see here is green. Airman Calicotte consistently abuses two of my men because they are black.” The TI, Ssgt Wright, told me I did the right thing and that he would tell Calicotte to reread his Bible (Calicotte was very religious). I realize now that the bible might well be why he was racist. At any rate, I soon found out that a TI in the air force can select someone in his flight to receive a stripe straight out of basic.
But this is exactly what being an American seeks to eliminate.
“All men are created equal under the law”, and where customs vary, the guest respects the customs of the host.
“When in Rome, do as the Romans do”. But at all times that should exclude “racism”.
This is why I love the world of music. Among musicians there is no racism.
I can’t make sense of the thread of your comments in this topic. You started with “social complexity” as the problem, and didn’t support that, other than pointing out that some other people have said that. So, I’m not going to fact check that. I’m guessing there is no strong consensus about it. Then the “bad information” about the terrorist. We tried to sort that out, but it seems to have been dropped. And you slid over to “globalization”, and “allowing immigrants to flood in” as the problem. Although you are okay with allowing for the individual to be “driven crazy”, so maybe you aren’t blaming the New Year’s attack on immigration. Hard to tell.
Can you see how I’m having trouble? You point to causes that happen to be causes that racists, xenophobes, and rich people who want to divide us use, exploit, exaggerate and sometimes cause by their actions then blame others. Those causes are part of larger problems, and you list more in post #12, but you don’t connect the larger issues to the individual, so I can’t tell what your logic and reason is and how it connects to the data. You end post #21 blaming progressives.
At #24, you almost make a balanced statement, including all the rich and powerful people. Which is where the blame game should start, but it shouldn’t end there since it takes all the people buying crap to make them rich. But I’m not doing my counter narrative here. I’m showing it’s not possible to get anywhere with your conversation because you keep pointing wildly in all directions and using undefined terms like “progressives”, and saying it’s simple. Terms like “forced diversity”. And saying, “doesn’t mean we have to like them”.
You were challenged on what you mean by “white” and at #34 you said “humans vary so much in appearance”. Okay. That was mixed in with me asking about what you meant by diversity and you said “Diversity is a choice”. I was born in this country in 1960, I didn’t get to choose who lived here or what the immigration policies were for the previous 190 years. You were very frustrated at that point about us understanding that you don’t believe all immigrants are the same. But up to that point, you had been referring to them as a problem, and to diversity as a cause of world problems, so what are saying?
In response to all of the comments about skin color and how it is not related to criminality, you said, “but we still can live without them”. That actually is the debate. That is the question that doesn’t get discussed because there so much noise about terrorists. Immigration is one way to get workers, to work in your economy. That’s a starting point. “They’re not sending their best” is racist rhetoric.
So, all that gets buried under the new distraction, starting at #46 about what a European “looks like”. Anything about race not being related to personality is swept away with “easy to figure someone’s racial background by their appearance.” The Obama stuff just gets silly. You say he looks more black than whiter, which is fine, it’s what you see. But you dismiss an article about what other people say. Sociological data is not “hilarious”.
We’ve had other threads about “white culture” being superior. Another tangent. Another distraction. Your link is titled “Obama is culturally black…” which is what the rest of the people on this thread have talked about the entire time, while you use racist dog whistle terms and switch to a new one each time one of them is questioned.
My opening question was something like; how many bums on the street do you step over, how much violence do you witness, before you start looking for systemic issues behind them? The answer of “it’s those people over there that are causing” has been thoroughly studied. It’s not the problem.
The short answer is this thread went off from the OP a few days after it started.
The long answer is your post above is this thread in a blender and I don’t feel like sorting it out for you.
I don’t know about that. Being an American seems to mean different things to different people. The most important thing to say here is the idea that being American is somehow supposed to eliminate racial differences is obviously ridiculous.
It’s been 500 years. White Americans and Black Americans and whoever else are very different peoples. If we haven’t gotten along by now, we never will.
That illogical statement explains a lot about you. The drive to explore the globe started long before “progressivism”. We can’t undo it
That’s what my post says, not what it does. You are the blender. You didn’t feel like defining your terms or providing evidence or supporting your claims with logic and evidence. I didn’t ask you to sort it out. You could pick up any part of this and take it somewhere that meant something if you felt like it.
Music can cross boundaries. To someone born after that era the hippie thing looks very White and middle class. I suspect drugs played a role in whatever small percentage of non-White youth were into that.
Sounds like you were a good buddy that Black recruit. I’m guessing your basic training platoon was mostly White, as were the instructors. If you were the minority it would have been a different story.
Exploring the globe is not remotely the same as forcing different peoples to live together.
I’m not the only one in this thread. You’ll have to pick one specific thing you brought up to focus on.
Nobody is forcing anybody. People come here because the want to. By the thousands.
Re: Music. Let me remind you that Jazz (based on the blues) is an original American artform, beloved by people all around the world.
This is an example of American Jazz excellence.
A lament, writtenby John Lewis, in memory of Django Reinhardt, a white Belgian guitarist.
I can accept the idea that, nowadays, it is difficult for Whites and Blacks to live together.
Maybe, that can be explained by history.
We should remember that:
In March of 1857, the United States Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, declared that all blacks – slaves as well as free – were not and could never become citizens of the United States. The court also declared the 1820 Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, thus permiting slavery in all of the country’s territories.
The case before the court was that of Dred Scott v. Sanford. Dred Scott, a slave who had lived in the free state of Illinois and the free territory of Wisconsin before moving back to the slave state of Missouri, had appealed to the Supreme Court in hopes of being granted his freedom.
In 1896, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. Justice Henry Brown of Michigan delivered the majority opinion, which sustained the constitutionality of Louisiana’s Jim Crow law. In part, he said:
We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it… The argument also assumes that social prejudice may be overcome by legislation, and that equal rights cannot be secured except by an enforced commingling of the two races… If the civil and political rights of both races be equal, one cannot be inferior to the other civilly or politically. If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane.
In 1915, When Birth of a nation came on the screens, president Wilson, a staunch racist, praised the movie.
The Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a white supremacist far-right hate group, is portrayed as a heroic force that protects white women and maintains white supremacy.
Klan men numbers exploded.
Federal police protected the White supremacists and the Lynchers, not the civil rights activists, up to the seventies, up to letting ML King being killed.
Right now, when Civil rights activists denounce white suprematism, they are called Wokes and criticized.
Nowadays, Black people are averagely more poor, with a shorter life expectancy, and so. They are still discriminated, killed and seen as a threat, because Blacks.
And in many Republican states, books who explain these facts, novels who illustrate them are banned from librairies schools.
Most White people ignore and deny this story.
I barely knew the guys. But I was responsible for my squad. I saw an injustice and reported it - which was my duty. We were all just kids, as were most of those who were dying in Vietnam.
Your theory that a minority cannot thrive in a population is ignorant of the facts. The black men/kids in my flight were fine. Just two kids (white) washed out - one attempted suicide and the other was discharged as unable to adapt to military life.
And don’t forget the majority black city in Oklahoma that was thriving before it was burned to the ground. It was thriving! It was…
Stop.
I could go on but I am a big fan of concision.
You are correct @thatoneguy. As long as there are people like you we will have a problem integrating. But as long as there are people like me, the dream of a kinder world will live on. It really can be better than you think.
I’ll make this a general statement. It is my (considerable) experience that, especially in the southern states, there is a persistent belief that dark skinned people are less intelligent than white people.
This is a left-over from the centuries of slavery that forbade the slaves from learning how to read and write. Their educational standards were delayed several hundred years from lack of access to information, not from lack of intelligence.
It is obvious that today’s “colored” people are intellectually equal to “white” people because today they have generally the same educaion and employment opportunity.
Today the US can boast to have a racial kaleidoscope of “learned” minds in all facets of “modern life”.
The adaption and inclusion of world wide cultural influences from imported vibrant social lifestyles only adds to the richness of the US society. America potentially could represent the entire world to an alien visitor.
I’ve talked about this over the years in other threads:
It is obvious that some groups are naturally more intelligent than others just by looking at what a particular society has produced. This is true with racial groups and ethnic groups.
Look where advanced civilizations have developed over and over again and we see patterns that can also explain why we have these problems in America with so-called inequality. Keep in mind this doesn’t mean that prejudice does not sometimes limit the abilities of others. But, big patterns exist and these are a better explanation.
Come on. Blacks didn’t come here because they wanted to.
And the governments of the Western world are forcing diversity on their populations. This is why all of these anti-liberal movements are popping up in America, Germany, Italy, Britain etc.