njlauren
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Phydeaux
quote:
ORIGINAL: JeffBC
quote:
ORIGINAL: kdsub
Here is a recent article posted to Yahoo. With all the African American uproar over the Zimmerman case are blacks in America justified in their beliefs on racism? Or is this article more racism from the media?
Even if I go with the idea that every single thing written is the absolute Truth(TM), the entire piece is so ridiculously slanted that it makes me laugh. Am I surprised that we have placed blacks into a harassed, poor and really desperate situation so they commit crime? No, I am not. Sorry, but we have a freakin war on blacks going on nowadays. It's not surprising that they don't feel all that bound by the social contract.
Specifically, I'm referring to the racial targeting with our "War on Drugs".
Yeah, desperate people do desperate things. That's why it's best to avoid having too many desperate people. I like social safety nets not because I have a bleeding heart (trust me I do not). I like them because it effectively mitigates crap like this.
The only problem I have with your statement Jeff, is why blacks? Castro emptied his jails and brought Miami to its knees - but the cubans are working up the social ladder. The same with koreans in Virginia. The same with the vietnam boat people.
Mexicans (even suffering being illegal) are buying homes, and starting businesses. Despite the threat of legal harasment.
So lots of people are hitting our shores with no skills, no money, and nothing but an opportunity. Whats the difference?
Sure, drugs are one of the facets. But I think it is too facile to blame 150 years of lack of progress on drugs.
And yes, there is clearly racism. But other groups (italians, jews, irish, chinese) have faced incredible racism as well. Chinese workers for the railroads died in droves.
Until we can have an honest debate about the other components of the problem - it will never get fixed.
There are a lot of components to racism, and the problem with your statement is it tries to generalize without real facts. It is true that many recent immigrants are socially mobile, move up, etc, but you are also portraying things in a rosy cheek with one group while denying reality.
While there are mexicans moving up the ladder, there are big problems with mexican and south american gangs. There are vietnamese who have moved up the social ladder, and vietnamese who are in drug gangs, same with the Laotians and Hmong people, there are Asian gangs in NYC who are involved with drugs and killing each other.....and despite what the guy said on All in the Family years ago, the Mafia still exists and it is all Italian (disclaimer, I am of Italian background). It is painting images of model minorities which leaves out the reality too, that they have their problems, try telling people that Mexicans are moving up the ladder who have been in East La, for example.
That doesn't mean that there aren't real problems in the black community, the numbers are stark, 80% of black kids are born to single moms, marriage is a mess, education is a problem, big time, it is a mess, and crying racism is too simpleminded IMO, there are a lot of problems, including a section of the culture that says basically "why even try? And if you do, you are a sellout, a tom, whatever....".
On the other hand that leaves out something big. Unlike Italians, Jews, Irish and others from Europe, there is not all that much to distinguish people from those cultures, so once they have moved on from living in ethnic enclaves, speaking the old tongue, they basically become 'white'. With Asians, they obviously are distinguishable, as are people from south Asia and so forth, so they can't 'hide'. There is something else there, though, keep in mind that Asians and such are relative newcomers to the US, they don't have the history blacks do, the Chinese first started coming here in the 19th century, but thanks to the Asia exclusion act, few came into this country before the 1960's, so most people had little contact with them, and it also kept them insulated from the negatives of a poor community....Asians until fairly recent times tended to live in city areas, and the contact most had might be like in 'a Christmas Story", with the local Chinese restaurant, they didn't see the Tongs, they didn't see the opium addiction and such that was in the city areas where Asians were in any kind of numbers....
Why is that important? Because blacks have a long history here and the bigotry against them has bred that long a period of time. Blacks had the reputation of being inferior from the time europeans 'discovered' africa again, it was why they were taken into slavery, it is lot easier to enslave a group you think is inferior. Then, you put in generations with no education, living as slaves, without anything to call their own including family, then you had Jim Crowe that left them festering, and it was a recipe for disaster. Blacks came north just at a time when the cities were experiencing white flight, and were left with a situation that all that was left was poverty, bad housing, schools not equipped to handle them, and yes, a social structure that wasn't there. One tale from my own story, my mom grew up in NYC, in what is now laughingly called the South Bronx, this was prior to WWII, and she went to a high school that when she graduated in 1942, was about 40% black if her yearbook is any indication...she said many of them were middle or working class, they lived in the area around 180th street, and they talked about 'the trash' coming up from down south, so even they were aware of what was going on. When you have a background that messed up, it is hard to repair, and frankly, few have even really tried.
The Jews, Italians, Irish, Chinese, Mexicans, Koreans etc have one big difference, they came here, as poor as they were, with a family structure and culture that was intact. Blacks who come in from Africa these days have a very different profile then ones born here, in part because there is a culture they can grasp onto. Blacks didn't have that, and when I hear some scum try to claim that 'slavery wasn't so bad', it leaves off the very reality of that, and Jim Crowe.
And yes, blaming white racism alone isn't the answer, but the idea that somehow it is the fault of blacks as well is idiotic, the reality is that liberal or conservative, everyone has danced around the issue, and so far no one has really come up with answers. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the brightest men ever to be in the Senate (especially compared to the crap we have these days, unlike the tea party types he actually had an education and looked at facts, rather than running around throwing out nonsense), wrote a book back in the late 1950's about the black family, and said it was in deep trouble, that the breakdown in the black family was going to snowball, and he was right, and he was castigated by liberals for saying that, but it is true and it has come home to roost, and no one, the liberals who want to excuse it away, or the conservatives who run around saying 'they should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps" (which I don't recall which famous black leader said "hard to do, when you don't have the straps or boots").
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RE: Is this Racism or an eye opener for the likes of Al... - 
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