|
 exclusive58
illegal alien
Registered: 04/16/04 
Posts: 2,146
Last seen: 6 years, 1 month
|
 Racism in the US 
#4040002 - 04/11/05 04:29 AM (19 years, 10 days ago) |
|
|
How important is it? I know its present and well living (i even see it here on the shroomery), but is it something that is dying off, or on the opposite is it something that is regaining strength and popularity?
--------------------
|
 Silversoul
Rhizome
 
Registered: 01/01/05
Posts: 23,576
Loc: The Barricades
|
|
It depends who you ask, and how they define racism. There's certainly no more of the "whites only" signs or police using firehoses on protesters(they use tear gas now). I'd say that certain legislation meant to fight racism, such as affirmative action, just contributes to the view that these minorities are weak, and need extra help. They also constitute reverse racism, which makes great recruiting material for white supremacists organizations who portray their race as oppressed.
Other than that, there's also a lot of xenophobia, particularly towards Mexicans and Arabs. The former because "They took our jobs," as South Park so eloquently put it, and the latter because of 9/11.
There are a few solutions I would propose for each of these things. First of all, end affirmative action, as well as hate crime legislation. They don't work, and they just reinforce the idea that these people are inherently different and inferior. Second, a single tax on the value of land, combined with the elimination of all other taxes, would free up land for enough jobs to employ everyone who seeks employment. Thus, there would be no more reason to feel that one is in competition with other groups for desired jobs. Third, we should stop using interventionist foreign policy, which is the cause of so much of the hatred directed towards us. We might be able to get along with our Muslim neighbors then.
As for how strong racism is today, I'd say we've come a long way since the era of public lynchings and separate dining rooms, but it's still a problem. We need to realize that attacking the symptoms of racism will not affect the underlying roots of it.
--------------------
|
mps
Registered: 05/20/04
Posts: 21
|
Re: Racism in the US *DELETED* [Re: Silversoul]
#4040174 - 04/11/05 08:02 AM (19 years, 10 days ago) |
|
|
Post deleted by mpsReason for deletion: old
|
Seuss
Error: divide byzero
Registered: 04/27/01
Posts: 23,480
Loc: Caribbean
Last seen: 2 months, 7 days
|
Re: Racism in the US [Re: mps]
#4040248 - 04/11/05 08:42 AM (19 years, 10 days ago) |
|
|
> First it was against the French, for reasons I still don't understand.
My feelings on this is because the French were unwilling to compromise on the stuff in the middle east... at least as portrayed to the American people by the media. I don't think the American people would have been as upset if the French had taken a "lets work together and figure something out" attitude... rather, we were led to believe that the French said, "No! We don't care what happened to you or your country. We don't care if you were attacked or not. We don't care if they have nukes or not. We say No!, and we don't care what you say or think, that is the way it is going to be."
Remember, this is the message that Bush and the media gave to the American sheep, er public. It doesn't matter if the message was true or not, it upset a lot of Americans and got them to 'hate' the French and to not look too closely at the accuracy of what was really happening with Iraq.
I guess what I am trying to say is that any 'racism' against the French because of the middle-east stuff was caused by politics and ignorance. Score one for both Bush and Bin Laden on this... maybe the are working together (scary thought).
> Then it was against the Mexicans. That one has always been around, but it's getting more prevalent now, and it's completely irrational.
I kind of understand this one as well. There is a lot of resentment towards the Mexicans that come into the US because they tend to refuse to adapt to American culture. For example, when I was a child, I flew through the Miami airport with my parents. While waiting, I noticed all the announcements were in Spanish rather than English. When I asked an airport employee why, I was told that there was a city law that required all public notices to also be in Spanish... but there was no law requiring the messages to be in English... therefore, they only did them in Spanish. I was absolutely dumbfounded at the absurdity of this. It may sound like a small thing, but the erosion of culture tends to upset people. (Ever wonder why the middle east hates western-ism... same concept...)
I am sure there is more to it than what I stated above... but at least I hope I provided a few things to think about...
--------------------
Just another spore in the wind.
|
Phluck
Carpal Tunnel
Registered: 04/10/99
Posts: 11,394
Loc: Canada
Last seen: 5 months, 23 days
|
Re: Racism in the US [Re: Seuss]
#4040256 - 04/11/05 08:46 AM (19 years, 10 days ago) |
|
|
Quote:
My feelings on this is because the French were unwilling to compromise on the stuff in the middle east... at least as portrayed to the American people by the media. I don't think the American people would have been as upset if the French had taken a "lets work together and figure something out" attitude... rather, we were led to believe that the French said, "No! We don't care what happened to you or your country. We don't care if you were attacked or not. We don't care if they have nukes or not. We say No!, and we don't care what you say or think, that is the way it is going to be."
Anti-french sentiment existed long before that, for some reason. Tons of countries opposed the action in Iraq and made it known, France became a scapegoat for this.
--------------------
"I have no valid complaint against hustlers. No rational bitch. But the act of selling is repulsive to me. I harbor a secret urge to whack a salesman in the face, crack his teeth and put red bumps around his eyes." -Hunter S Thompson
http://phluck.is-after.us
|
newuser1492
Registered: 06/12/03
Posts: 3,104
|
Re: Racism in the US [Re: Phluck]
#4040264 - 04/11/05 08:49 AM (19 years, 10 days ago) |
|
|
Freedom fries 
|
JesusChrist
Son Of God
Registered: 02/19/04
Posts: 1,459
Last seen: 11 years, 7 months
|
Re: Racism in the US [Re: mps]
#4040265 - 04/11/05 08:50 AM (19 years, 10 days ago) |
|
|
"Giving someone the advantage because of their race is simply the reversed racism of the problem it was trying to solve."
It isn't reverse racism, it is simply racism.
I think people don't like looking at the success stories. They don't make good copy. The United States is the greatest country in the world to be a black man.
And I suppose I am a racist for wanting my country to enforce immigration law.
And the French are now a race of people? What about Canadians? If people don't like Canadians are they racist? What about the Irish? What if somebody loves Ireland more than any other country, are they racist?
We have one race, it is called the human race. We are all God's children in my eyes. That doesn't mean that I have to admire or agree with the geopolitical stance of French. That doesn't mean that the government should take away my wealth and spend it on the social services of people who sneak across the border in defiance of US law.
One of the things that never gets brought up in the race debate is the makeup of the "white" race. Are the Nordic peoples the same race as the Greek? Are the Celtic people the same race as the Spanish and swarthy southern Italians? Are the Welsh, Poles, Germainics and Slavs all the same race of people? Are Jews a race of people? What about Arabs? What race are people from India?
--------------------
Tastes just like chicken
|
looner2
ABBA fan
Registered: 06/20/04
Posts: 3,849
|
|
Since it is impossible in our society to point out any shortcomings that a certain race possesses, then the logical conclusion is that it is the other races fault for their downfall. Unless this dogmatic thinking is erased from our heads, and truth be sought, the rift between the races will gradually and continually increase.
--------------------
I am in love with Acidic_Sloth
|
Phluck
Carpal Tunnel
Registered: 04/10/99
Posts: 11,394
Loc: Canada
Last seen: 5 months, 23 days
|
Re: Racism in the US [Re: looner2]
#4040349 - 04/11/05 09:22 AM (19 years, 10 days ago) |
|
|
Quote:
Since it is impossible in our society to point out any shortcomings that a certain race possesses, then the logical conclusion is that it is the other races fault for their downfall.
Logical conclusion? Could you explain that to me?
Quote:
Unless this dogmatic thinking is erased from our heads, and truth be sought, the rift between the races will gradually and continually increase.
Uh, thanks to the ways genes spread, and the massive mixing of cultures due to advances in communication and transportation, the races are becoming closer, if anything.
--------------------
"I have no valid complaint against hustlers. No rational bitch. But the act of selling is repulsive to me. I harbor a secret urge to whack a salesman in the face, crack his teeth and put red bumps around his eyes." -Hunter S Thompson
http://phluck.is-after.us
|
Silversoul
Rhizome
Registered: 01/01/05
Posts: 23,576
Loc: The Barricades
|
Re: Racism in the US [Re: Phluck]
#4040409 - 04/11/05 09:41 AM (19 years, 10 days ago) |
|
|
Quote:
Phluck said:
Quote:
My feelings on this is because the French were unwilling to compromise on the stuff in the middle east... at least as portrayed to the American people by the media. I don't think the American people would have been as upset if the French had taken a "lets work together and figure something out" attitude... rather, we were led to believe that the French said, "No! We don't care what happened to you or your country. We don't care if you were attacked or not. We don't care if they have nukes or not. We say No!, and we don't care what you say or think, that is the way it is going to be."
Anti-french sentiment existed long before that, for some reason. Tons of countries opposed the action in Iraq and made it known, France became a scapegoat for this.
Anti-french sentiment in America can be traced back to the "x-y-z affair" in 1797.
--------------------
|
Phred
Fred's son
Registered: 10/18/00
Posts: 12,949
Loc: Dominican Republic
Last seen: 9 years, 3 months
|
Re: Racism in the US [Re: mps]
#4040485 - 04/11/05 10:11 AM (19 years, 10 days ago) |
|
|
mps writes:
Quote:
First it was against the French, for reasons I still don't understand. French-bashing is tolerated, which I think is racism.
French-bashing is not racism, but it does exist -- and not just in America. Jonah Goldberg has an amusing piece on this. From http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg071602.asp
Frogs in Our Midst
Beware fellow hoppers.
A neo-Nazi fired a rifle at French president Jacques Chirac over the weekend. In what many observers called a surprising turn of events, the French politician did not respond to the gunfire by giving the young man the keys to the city and raising a neo-Nazi flag up the Eiffel Tower.
This is just one sign of how times have changed. Oh, I don't mean that the cheese-eating surrender monkeys are, all of a sudden, the sort of hamburger-eating heroes who leap recklessly into the fray with no regard for their personal safety. For all I know, saying gesundheit ? or anything else in German ? is still the best way to get a table at a French restaurant.
But, from my own personal perspective, the frog-bashing business has changed a lot since I first started just a few years ago.
Obviously, I'm hardly the first guy to chronicle France's status as the Boston Red Sox of military history or to ridicule the Frenchman's proclivity "to eat with his hands and make love with his mouth." People have been mocking the French since before the French were even, well, French. Recall, if you will, that in 49 B.C. the Gauls folded faster than a Vietnamese "masseuse"'s massage table when you hear your wife's car in the driveway when Julius Caesar came a-knockin'. Afterwards, he was reported to have said to the generals of Gaul, "Get off your knees, my sandals are clean enough. Go make me some lunch? something light." And this is how the Caesar salad was born. (Alas, the original recipe was lost until Caesar Cardini, a descendant of the emperor's, rediscovered the method while sorting through some family records in the 1920s.)
Indeed, other nations have long recognized the cultural, ummm, uniqueness of the French. The Dutch, for example, have a saying, "It took no more effort than casting a Frenchman into hell." The Italians: "Attila, the scourge of God; the French, his brothers." The Germans have innumerable phrases about the French, which only make sense because people love to talk about their waiters. "The French write other than they speak, and speak other than they mean," goes one German saying. "The friendship of the French is like their wine ? exquisite, but of short duration," goes another. "May the French ulcer love you and the Lord hate you," is an old Arab curse. The Russians noted long ago, "A fighting Frenchman runs away from even a she-goat," though I suspect this sounds better in the Russian.
And the English language is soaked through with anti-French bile. Phrases like "to take French leave" (to depart without permission, or less charitable but more apt: to flee) are less prevalent these days, but that has more to do with the fact that people speak English poorly. Much of our English heritage is derived from our forefathers' eagerness not to seem French. Dr. Johnson, for example, remarked that he'd read that Englishmen preferred their weathervanes in the form of roosters, or cocks, as a subtle jab at the fickle Gauls, who turned whichever way the wind blew ? Gaul being a play on Gallus, meaning cock (this, no doubt, will be great news to highbrow limerick writers as Gallus and phallus can now be rhymed).
All of that aside, it seems incontrovertible that these days, French-bashing is as "in" as women's jeans that show more butt than a plumber touching his toes. Indeed, in this decade, mocking France's poor hygiene, its contempt for Hebrew Semites, its enabling of non-Hebrew Semites, and its penchant for capitulation at even the slightest whiff of the Teutonic have become as run-of-the-mill as jokes about lost socks in dryers and shopping carts with one bad wheel were in the 1980s. Saturday Night Live, various comic strips, and a host of websites ? of varying degrees of maturity ? have all gotten in on the act.
Even the phrase "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" is now used as often as the French say "screw the Jews." Oops, sorry, that's a different popular French expression. I meant to say "pass?." [NOTE: I am not the author of the term. Again: It's from The Simpsons. But I do take some pride in its wide currency, as I believe I am its most successful popularizer.]
So the question remains: Why is French-hating so popular today? It's not like they've denied us fly-over rights recently. We haven't had to liberate Paris again (yet). French forces haven't fired on us like they did during Operation Torch in North Africa. They haven't stuck us with Vietnam, or propped up Carrot Top's career the way they kept Jerry Lewis going all those years. And yet, if Major League Baseball goes on strike, smacking frogs with heavy sticks may finally become the national pastime, as God no doubt intended.
I think the answer is simple, though perhaps not as simple as Al Bundy's epigram, "It is good to hate the French."
When terrorists from the most French-coddled and French-influenced region of the globe blew up the World Trade Center, any number of commentators noted that the "End of History" thesis was over. History, many of us said, had come back with a vengeance ("And this time, it's personal!" screamed my couch). Long-simmering differences between Christendom and Islam reignited with the end of the Cold War.
Well, it would only make sense that such fires ignited elsewhere as well. Remember, our differences with France ? much like our differences with the Arab world ? were always visible to those willing to see, even during the Cold War. The French maintained military independence from NATO. They regularly annoyed us in the U.N. and made our foreign policy more difficult, denying us air rights and whining about how our movies were more popular ? with Frenchmen ? than theirs were. Indeed, if the French had had their way when the Berlin Wall fell, East Germany would have remained a separate, and socialist, country.
But we overlooked all of that for two important reasons. The French didn't matter, and we had better things to do ? like win the Cold War over French objections. Both of these things are still true in an absolute sense, obviously. But, with the Cold War over, the French matter more today in a relative sense ? even as they matter less and less in an absolute sense.
While most of the West, if not the world, is Americanizing for good and for ill, France remains determined to stay French. The beautiful jabbering they call the French language is disappearing like an ornate sandcastle washed over by the global English tide. French officials debate for years over whether words like CD-rom are acceptable cultural imports (It's not. "Cederom" is the accepted form), while the rest of the world increasingly treats France as the Betamax of world history ? an interesting alternative, but no less irrelevant for it.
This would be touching, save for the fact that France increasingly defines being "French" as disagreeing with the United States. We support Israel, so the French hate Israel (and they really do hate it). McDonald's is American, so noodle-armed French intellectuals flex their wine muscles by tearing apart a few Mickey D's (even as France remains among the biggest consumers of Big Macs in the world). We say the war on terrorism is important, so they say it isn't. We say Osama bin Laden launched the attack on 9/11, and so the number-one bestseller in France says the Pentagon attacked itself.
You can see the problem here. If you want a culture which is defined by thinking and doing the opposite of another culture, that's fine. The British played this game with the French and became the pedestal upon which liberty, the rule of law, and the free market rest while France, in the words of Thomas Carlyle, remained simply a long despotism tempered by epigrams.
But this tendency becomes troublesome when a culture moves beyond the aesthetic and the culinary to the epistemological and the geopolitical. France can grumble about how much they hate our movies and food, as they spend their euros on both, all they like. Matters of taste are inherently subjective. But when the French start claiming that America is an imperial conqueror because we want to eliminate the terrorists the French have bought off for decades, well, them's fighting words. When politicians start making apologies for the murder of Jews because they want Arab votes; when French diplomats start setting up roadblocks in the U.N. because it's fun to embarrass America; when one froggy intellectual after another starts lecturing the United States on how to do things when so many of the world's problems can be laid at unwashed French feet ? well, that's when frog-bashing is going to become an American pastime again.
THE ENEMY WITHIN
Though not for all Americans. Increasingly, France is becoming the North Star for domestic America-haters. The French have long said that being French is a state of mind, not an ethnicity (which is why they made Algerian students recite "Our forefathers the Gauls?" every day). Well, if you go by French attitudes alone, America has the largest population of Frenchmen never to have surrendered to Germany.
Cynthia McKinney, that awful woman, cribs most of her conspiratorial nonsense from French best-sellers and newspapers ? even if she's too dim to know it. America's lefty intellectuals, long convinced that anything said with a French accent must be true, serve as a transmission belt for any and every anti-American pronouncement that comes out of Paris.
It's funny: The assumption that France is more "progressive" than America is widespread among American liberal cosmopolitans, even though France in many ways represents everything American lefties are supposed to dislike about America. France was a colonial power, and still is far more of one than America. If you think dropping bombs in Puerto Rico was bad, consider that the French dropped a nuclear bomb in a minority neighborhood of the globe not too long ago. The French use nuclear power, torture animals to make their food tastier, laugh at sexual harassment, and have absolutely no racial affirmative-action programs whatsoever. French families are abandoning their older relatives at French hospitals so they can take extended vacations. French schools have been forced to issue "bully insurance" because playgrounds have become so dangerous. Over a hundred candidates in France's parliamentary elections were under criminal investigation.
When you think about it, there are four possible explanations for why American leftists love France so much (aside from France's historical love affair with Communism and Stalinism). First, the French are trying to outlaw hard work and, perhaps eventually, work entirely. Government agents stake out companies suspected of working their employees more than 35 hours a week. Some exiting employees are searched to make sure they don't bring any work home with them. If you believe that requiring work is a form of discrimination against those who want to live well without working, then you've got to love France.
Second, the only sexual preference France doesn't celebrate is heterosexual monogamy.
Third, France has always treated its intellectuals like celebrities, a seductive practice for American academics forced to drive around in old VW buses and live next door to men who actually work with their hands.
But, finally, the most important reason American leftists love France is that French elites say bad things about America. French intellectuals call us racist, stupid, imperialistic, simplistic, etc. ? and that alone is proof of their intellectualism. So long as you call America "racist," you could add that an enema is as good as a toothbrush and some professor of "communications theory" would applaud.
I've grown tired of these French-bashing columns because there's not much left to say about a nation of 200 cheeses and one kind of toilet paper. Besides, the real threat isn't the frogs across the pond. The real threat is their fellow hoppers here at home.
Jonah Goldberg
July 16, 2002
Before people start getting all bristly and whiny with me about the above, let me stress that these are the words of a political pundit, not the words of Phred. Jonah Goldberg has a reputation for being tongue-in-cheek. It's part of his schtick. I posted it because I found parts of it amusing, and other parts to be right on. What actually triggered my recollection of this particular piece was this part --
Quote:
French intellectuals call us racist, stupid, imperialistic, simplistic, etc. ? and that alone is proof of their intellectualism. So long as you call America "racist," you could add that an enema is as good as a toothbrush and some professor of "communications theory" would applaud.
I thought that apropos to a thread on American racism started by someone living in France. Something clicked in my cranium, and I was able to Google up this commentary I read a couple years ago. Memory is a funny thing, sometimes.
Phred
--------------------
|
Asante
Omnicyclion prophet
Registered: 02/06/02
Posts: 87,330
|
Re: Racism in the US [Re: Phred]
#4040610 - 04/11/05 10:40 AM (19 years, 10 days ago) |
|
|
hmm I don't think that Jonah Goldberg piece is funny. At all. If you parody a culture you delicately play around with insider facts and factoids about that culture.
This is just a blunt slander by someone with no specific knowledge of French culture. This is a comedian's way of doing a n****rjokes and getting away with it because it's directed against a currently unpopular European nation.
Quote:
The comedian said:
The Dutch, for example, have a saying, "It took no more effort than casting a Frenchman into hell."
No we do not.
Quote:
"A fighting Frenchman runs away from even a she-goat,"
I doubt the Russians have got sayings that depict them as goatfuckers.
Quote:
The French write other than they speak, and speak other than they mean, goes one German saying.
That is not a German saying. Positively. In fact it couldn't even pass as a saying.
This is post-9/11 war rethoric and Phred, I don't get what you find funny about it nor what it adds to the discussion.
--------------------
Omnicyclion.org
higher knowledge starts here
Edited by Asante (04/11/05 10:41 AM)
|
Seuss
Error: divide byzero
Registered: 04/27/01
Posts: 23,480
Loc: Caribbean
Last seen: 2 months, 7 days
|
Re: Racism in the US [Re: Phluck]
#4040827 - 04/11/05 11:28 AM (19 years, 10 days ago) |
|
|
> Anti-french sentiment existed long before that, for some reason.
True. It hasn't always been that way... Statue of Liberty, WWII D-Day, etc...
On one hand, the French have always (in my lifetime) been portrayed as snobbish... too good to add non-french words to the language (email anybody)... too good to be nice to non-french speaking tourists... too good to worry about world opinion by testing nuclear bombs... likes to point out all the bad things other counties do while pretending they don't do equally bad things in other parts of the world, etc...
Again, I am not claiming that the above is true or not... simply the impression I am given as to how a typically American feels about the French. The current anti-french "freedom-fry" BS was simply a propaganda move by the Bush admin... if Americans hate the French, and the French are against the stuff going on the middle-east, then the American people aren't going to be as opposed to the stuff going on in the middle-east just to get back a bit at the French... (yes, the media teaches us to be fickle...) Whoever is pulling the strings in the Whitehorse isn't a moron...
--------------------
Just another spore in the wind.
|
California
A E S T H E T I C S A T A N
Registered: 12/27/04
Posts: 72,118
Loc: H A U N T E D H O U S E 
|
Re: Racism in the US [Re: Seuss]
#4040874 - 04/11/05 11:45 AM (19 years, 10 days ago) |
|
|
Racism exists, and always will, as long as there are distinctively different races.
But IMO it is on it's way out.
America welcomes many different races. What is a more racially diverse country?
While so many races co-existing in America does provide grounds for racism/racial discrimination, it also allows for these different races to learn about and grow comfortable with each other.
|
RandalFlagg
Stranger
Registered: 06/15/02
Posts: 15,608
|
|
Quote:
exclusive58 said:
I know its present and well living (i even see it here on the shroomery) but is it something that is dying off, or on the opposite is it something that is regaining strength and popularity?
That's hard to quantify. In U.S. mainstream culture, political correctness is everywhere. I see preachy TV shows and movies that make obvious anti-racist and "progressive" statements. So, there is some amount of pressure to toe the political correctness line. I think racism has gone "underground" somewhat (meaning that when someone might have a little racism in them and they don't admit it).
Racism will always be with the human race and Americans aren't the only ones who experience or exhibit it.
|
RandalFlagg
Stranger
Registered: 06/15/02
Posts: 15,608
|
Re: Racism in the US [Re: mps]
#4041276 - 04/11/05 01:45 PM (19 years, 10 days ago) |
|
|
Quote:
mps said:
First it was against the French, for reasons I still don't understand. French-bashing is tolerated, which I think is racism.
I think what it boils down to is a strong sense of American patriotism mixed with a strong dose of ignorance; where anyone who drapes themselves in the flag and calls themselves an American is automatically above a non-American.
 Have you ever been to France? The second they hear English come out of your mouth they treat you like garbage (I went to Paris). I'm not saying all French people are assholes. In fact, I'm willing to bet the asshole ratio in France matches the asshole ratio in America.
I will also agree with you that the "anti-French" thing in America seems to have gone a bit far. I think a lot of it has to do with the "attitude" that Americans perceive from French people. I can't nail down any specifics, but I get the feeling that a lot of French people have this "I am an enlightened European and you are a neaderthal American" attitude.
|
GabbaDj
BTH
Registered: 04/08/01
Posts: 19,682
Loc: By The Lake
|
|
Racism is alive and kicking..
Its just no longer socialy acceptable to talk about these things..
I rode around downtown LA yesterday and I saw lots of interesting shit. I saw a few craps games and niggas yelling "gimmie my money". I saw a hooker getting beat by her pimp yelling "nigga you gona learn" and I saw not one but two black women piss on the street..
Now what was I sayin? Oooh yah, we got racism.. But I dont know why?
--------------------
GabbaDj
FAMM.ORG
|
exclusive58
illegal alien
Registered: 04/16/04
Posts: 2,146
Last seen: 6 years, 1 month
|
|
haha, its funny to see that this thread turned into a discussion of the anti-french sentiment in the US. Does this reflect that americans have overall more of a problem with the french than with black people?
IMO, the french bashing is a result of the anti-french propaganda (because of the Iraq war) mixed in with the "feel-good" emotion that you get when you belittle a group of people other than your own (i.e. superiroty). oh, and also because there does exist french assholes! 
I remember a picture i saw in a magazine of a Bush rally, and in the front row there was a guy with a cowboy hat (and he literally looked mentally retarded) wearing a t-shirt saying "Iraq First, Then France"!
But to get back on topic, to me, a race is either defined by the skin colour or by the religion. When i was asking the question, i wasn't thinking about the anti-french thing, i was more wondering about the actual state of racism of blacks in the US.
Oh, and one thing i'd like to mention, in France, the word "race" is not even used anymore. If you say "the black race" people will think you're racist. And you know how in the US when you have to fill up something like when you get employed, and they ask you you're skin color, well in France that's prohibited, all you need to say is if you're French or not.
|
Asante
Omnicyclion prophet
Registered: 02/06/02
Posts: 87,330
|
|
I believe it is a constant, that it is just as severe as it has always been, only in another form.
If you observe Americans  you notice a strong tendency to categorize and condemn. If you for instance watch how debates about welfare develop among many Americans, it is very clear that hardcore discrimination is by no means a spectre of the past. People on welfare are generally strongly stigmatized and rejected. And if a discussion among Americans heads for strong stigmatization and rejection, ethnic and racial comments somehow mysteriously but consistently show up.
Americans are race-nuts. Many white Americans consider Latino's to be non-white, while England and Spain/Portugal are closer together then major American cities, barely 600 miles apart.
If you are 7/8 European, 1/8 African, then you are nontheless considered to be "black". If you put a bit of cream in your coffee, is it then a cup of cream? 
There are three places where north-Europeans genocided the local population and have colonized to this day, being South Africa, Australia and the USA. Of those three the USA still has most who survived the genocide tucked away in "reservations", a practice South Africa tried to copy by putting the black Africans in "homelands".
South Africa has had it's Truth Commission. Australia is reluctantly accepting that they have wronged the Aborigines.
America basically said: injuns, here's your peyote, n*ggers, here's some rights and now SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Imagine that in times of Apartheid South Africa had made a "reality" series like "Cops". They would've been bombed! But the US merrily exported it worldwide... Well the whole white world, at least.
"Affirmative Action" is bitterly fought. Now you may agree or disagree with what comprises contemporary "affirmative action" but the average "outspoken" white American will basically fight any advance of his non-white countrymen, if that means a temporary setback for themselves. Objectivity is lost.
And after over 100 years the Ku Klux Klan is still legal and even has a TV station.
The heart of the matter in my view are the position of the media and their puppeteers, the Government, who made fear politics and "divide and conquer" into standard domestic and international politics.
But in a nutshell: I believe it's as strong as it was, but in all shapes and guises. Currently the focus of hate and fear lies on the middle east. Guantanamo Bay is nothing less then a Concentration Camp. A place that violates just about any international law in the book. And what is one of it's restrictions? Ah right: only non-Americans can end up there. Nuff said.
--------------------
Omnicyclion.org
higher knowledge starts here
|
exclusive58
illegal alien
Registered: 04/16/04
Posts: 2,146
Last seen: 6 years, 1 month
|
Re: Racism in the US [Re: California]
#4041414 - 04/11/05 02:38 PM (19 years, 10 days ago) |
|
|
Quote:
Oregon said:
Racism exists, and always will, as long as there are distinctively different races.
I disagree, simply becuase there are no distinctively different races. We're all humans. We just need to get our collective head out of our collective ass and realize that the colour of a man's skin
is of no more significance than the colour of his eyes. (thanx Bobby)
Quote:
But IMO it is on it's way out.
I hope you're right. 
Quote:
America welcomes many different races. What is a more racially diverse country?
While so many races co-existing in America does provide grounds for racism/racial discrimination, it also allows for these different races to learn about and grow comfortable with each other.
Well see, you're right about America being such a racially diverse country, but its not a melting pot, its a salad bowl. All the blacks get together and live in the same neighborhood, all the whites move to the suburbs, etc... I don't think this shows that these different "races" are comfortable with each other! They're actually avoiding each other it seems.
Doesn't this point towards the fact that racism is still alive and kicking in the US?
|
|
Threaded
Previous
Index
Next
Red Vein Kratom 
Unfolding Nature: Being in the Implicate Order 
Golden Teacher Liquid Culture For Sale 
Bulk Cannabis Seeds 
CBD Topicals 
North Spore Mushroom Grow Kits & Cultivation Supplies
Edit 
Reply 
JesusChrist
wingnutx
1 2 all )
MagicalMystery
Great_Satan
atomikfunksoldier