[QUOTE="enterawesome"][QUOTE="SaudiFury"]
I'll add my two cents here. and please take the time to read this because i believe this will add value to the conversation.
1. I do believe there is a lot of distrust (though i haven't seen or heard outright racism towards whites) that blacks have towards whites.
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2. The reason i believe why whites don't get all offended when someone calls em' a cracker, is complex and yet at the very same time simple. the caucasion race has done conquer and conquest of places across the world. slavery in America, the complete destruction of the Aztecs by the Conquistadors. the nation of Zimbabwe for a time was called Rhodesia. Rhodesia named after a white British empire-builder Cecil Rhodes. Think about that for a second....
the audacity to rename an ancient land inhabited by Africans for tens of thousands of years, and just because of sheer military force, the entire region is renamed by a guy who comes from a little island in the north.
Time and again, in history, caucausions have been dominant. this is the same crap that neo-nazi racists point to. it doesn't mean the white race IS superior, it is merely that the white race based in Europe had a leg up on the other races on the globe.
Sad to say this, but things like food, sex, and things like identity come from the far more primitive parts of our minds. might makes right. whites do not have the history of struggle for equality or freedom. they had a struggle of conquest and colonization. Africans, Native Americans, Asians, Indians, Hispanics, and many others had to fight for their equality from one singular race - caucasion.
when you have to do that...... the slur of the n word, chink and the other awful words carry weight. it demeans a person. it makes you less then human. I remember hearing my grandpa (i'm half White and half Arab) telling me to be careful and not get involved with black girls. I just nod and say "ok Grandpa". he had nothing against blacks in terms of working with them, just didn't like them mixing. That says that there is something wrong about the other race, that they cannot mix. it's old thinking.
Put yourself in that culture, detach yourself from your ethnocentric views and you begin to really understand why other races feel the way they do about whites.
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3. HOWEVER, i have warned my friends of other races - Arabs, Jews, Blacks, and the more narrow minded white friends, to not just blame one or the other just because of your own impressions. I have personally met about 6 Brazilians in my life, each one has been a jerk to me in one way or another, that doesn't mean i view Brazilians as being just jerks. I remember telling this story to a couple of my caucasion friends - when the subject of race relations came up - and i still remember my one friends impulse answer was "just most Brazilians are jerks" i responded quickly with "no, i just have had bad luck, haven't met the right people. people are people no matter where they may come from".
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4. I remember my one friend - who is a dyed in the red Republican - who couldn't wrap his mind around why the election of Obama was such a big deal. I had to turn around to him and ask "when was there a white guy elected to the Presidency?", he'd shrug and say "so what?". From slavery to Presidency. this would be like if an Arab Muslim got elected in France or Israel, of if a Hmong became a leader of Vietnam or Laos. it is unheard of.
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Not saying its right. wrong is wrong no matter who does it or says it.
but detach yourself once in a while and view it from their point of view.
it'll do you a lot of good.
theone86
You have a lot of good points, but it seems like you're generalizing each race and yet not. Caucasions generally dominating over others and colonizing is just perhaps a thing of chance. Incidentely, it was whites who originally conquered; not because they were white, just because a white nation, most presumably, conquered first. They conquered Europe, and from there power continued to spread and build, because they had the jumpstart, by pure chance. I hope you see what I'm seeing, I can't put it any better. Also, I should note that other races struggle to survive while whites conquer, because they moved to a harsher climate or area, where survival is more difficult. On a much larger scale, at one point, humans were just that: humans. Then the human race grew and grew, and moved elsewhere. Africans, as we know call them, moved to Africa, but there is little food, water, or shelter in Africa, which makes survival harder. This also lead to how we call them "black": this harsher climate made them adapt their skin pores to deflect sunlight, so their skin became black. Now back to races conquering over each other, you must remember at one point, it wasn't Caucasians conquering Africas or Spaniards, it was humans conquering less fortunate humans. Races are, to be blunt, simply a meaningless, and I dare say ill-conceived and improperly used label.Wow, color-blindness, one of the most ill-concieved philosophies on the face of the Earth. Maybe at one point in time skin color was just an evolutionary curiosity, but it has become so much more to the point where we can't just wake up and say everything's better, we can just go on with our lives now. For one, it wasn't pure chance that gave whites a leg up on every other race. A large part of the equation was that they had more iron reserves and developed military technology must faster than other civilizations. Another was that their livestock was unique and transmitted different diseases than, say, the llamas of Central America. After Europeans had been in constant contact with livestock like cows and pigs they were better prepared to develop immunities to diseases like smallpox which ravaged other populations in great numbers. And possibly most important is the cultural philosophy of Europeans as conquerers, a philosophy that set them apart from most other civilizations and that continues, in some respects, to this day.
Which brings me to my next point, people seem to think that racism is ancient history and has no effects on people today. Any problems anyone has are simply their own, right? Wrong. Do you think that as soon as the slaves were emancipated they enjoyed hte same social standing as everyone else? No, in fact in most instances they were reduced to working jobs similar to the ones they did as slaves through institutionalized racism. Do you realize that up until the Civil Rights Movement lynchings in the south were still fairly common, or that legal segregation in the United States lasted into the 70's? You can still see the effects of the socio-economic stratification caused by these and many other harmful practices in that African Americans are still disproportionately dominant in terms of poverty and inversely so in terms of representation among the wealthy elite, that the racially diverse still dominate the rank and file in our military, and that African-Americans still aren't graduating from college or even high school at an alarming rate. Maybe you haven't heard of this, and maybe you haven't heard about redlining. People like Rush Limbaugh go around saying that the Black man's plight is all his own, that they live in ghettos because they're lazy, and that's simply false. After the end of World War II America offered assistance for troops to find affordable housing which led to the rise of suburban neighborhoods. At first, black and white soldiers integrated into neighborhoods, but certain whites having an aversion to living near black people combined with institutionalized racism in pricing properties led to what is referred to as white flight. As soon as a blakc family moves into a neighborhood their property values, and by proxy their neighbors' values decrease. Racist or not, white people sell their property en masse to avoid financial losses. The white people are still more wealthy than their black neighbors generally so when they leave all the funding for social services leave with them. The schools are worse, as crime increases white police see themselves less as serving the people in these black neighborhoods and more as having to control them, and before you know it you have a ghetto. The solution for this was to move the black populations into urban areas a la projects, but this simply moved the problem from one area to another. Now you have impoverished neighborhoods where police only show up to do raids, where ambulances rarely come at all, and where an attitude of hopelessness prevails, and that's what it's like TODAY. Racism created this problem and we have yet to even attempt to remedy it, save for more relocation programs that frequently run into the same problems as their predecessors.
Color-blindness is simply an attempt by the dominant cla$$ to shirk responsiblity and shift blame. Maybe there was originally no difference between people with different pigmentations, but we manufactured differences. It's called symbolic interactionism, we attatch certain ideas and stigma to different things, like the way red is a universal for stop on street lights. We created a difference and discriminated based on that difference, we can't just one day up and decide to act like none of it ever happened. When we were creating problems for these groups based on race it was certainly an important factor, but now that these problems exist and are acknowledged we want to just treat race like a non-issue, very convienent.
Well said. Couldn't agree with you more.
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