7 ms·

What is it suddenly with all this talk about racism? > Racism in SF or LA is bad... > ...having to deal with racism in Boise, Idaho, for example, was somethin

What is it suddenly with all this talk about racism? > Racism in SF or LA is bad... > ...having to deal with racism in Boise, Idaho, for example, was something they didn't feel comfortable with... Who are those racists and in what way do they express their racism? I'm a European who has been on your side of the Atlantic and Pacific quite often for work- and leisure-related purposes over a period of several decades. If I can believe the current narrative things have been going from bad to worse to black people walk the streets in fear of their lives from racist cops in the last few years. This did not use to be the case, America was the "melting pot" or "salad bowl" or whatever metaphor you want to use where people divided by country of origin, religion, personal story and - yes - skin colour all came together under the stars and stripes to celebrate their country on the 4th of July. Now that same flag is being called a racist symbol by leading politicians, the 4th of July supposedly celebrates independence for only part of the population and more of such nonsensical inflammatory political rhetoric. Either everyone has been blind for decades or the current narrative about racism is a lie meant to achieve some political purpose. I do not believe the former to be true so the latter seems to be the answer but that makes me wonder why the parent poster brought up the bad racism in SF and LA and the racism in Boise, Idaho. Maybe I should point out that I use the traditional definition of the word racism as can be found in printed copies of dictionaries and encyclopedias from a few years ago. Is that the change which made it possible to claim racism is everywhere and if so, why do people use the new definition of the word?

codingwageslave 5y ago
I completely agree.
qshaman 5y ago
As a latino, I can tell you what type of racism I have faced in the east coast, for example: - While chatting on the phone with a friend in Spanish, I get people screaming at me: "Speak English! This is America, go back to your country!!. ......" - "Chinga tu madre!! Mexican!" (I'm not Mexican) - "We dont speak Spanish here, sorry..." even tho I can communicate perfectly well in English. and many more, in my personal experience, the west coast is way better regarding racism, I have Pakistani friends who have had a pretty rough time living in Oklahoma. I agree that racism is being using as a political weapon, and all of that, but is truly more common in some places. If you are a white European, you will have a hard time seeing racism, compared with people who are not white.
- dariusj18 5y ago
  I find it strange the phrase "political weapon". As if the idea that there might be an issue in the country and politicians wanting to do something about it makes it a weapon. "Oh no Mr. Smith, your not allowed to mention the things that are wrong, otherwise people might think your using it to point out the flaws in your opposition."
  - colpabar 5y ago
    I think "political tool" is a better term, and I believe it's an incredibly effective tool for dividing people who might otherwise be united on certain issues. I think that after the 2008 financial crisis and the following bailouts for the people who caused it, a lot of people got fed up, and occupy wall street was born. Occupy was a class based movement: the ultra-rich vs everyone else. And then something happened, and suddenly everyone had to be divided by every other attribute imaginable - race, sex, gender, disability - class just wasn't as important. Instead of the 1% vs the 99%, the 99% was divided by all those attributes and fought each other over whose issues were more important. Then it quietly fizzled out and nothing was accomplished. The 1% must be so happy watching the 99% squabble amongst themselves over who's the most oppressed. I think that most, if not all, of the major political/social issues today should be viewed through a class-based lens _first_; everything else should come second. But the users of this tool cannot have that, and here we are: everything is about race/sex/gender and nothing is about class.
    - dariusj18 5y ago
      My guess is that the Occupy movement was one of the first things that got you into politics, otherwise I don't know how else to explain your opinion. Identity politics was around way before the Occupy movement and has been one of the greatest driving forces in progressive social change.
      - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
        Yeah, but colbapar has a bit of a point: Identity was there, but it wasn't quite so all-consuming of an issue. But I think the timing is a bit off. I think Occupy had pretty much fizzled before identity exploded. I could be wrong - I'm not all that political, so I'm only a fringe observer of these things - but it seems to me that Occupy was pretty much over by 2013, and identity didn't really explode until 2016 or so.
war1025 5y ago
> Either everyone has been blind for decades or the current narrative about racism is a lie meant to achieve some political purpose. I think it's a bit of both. As the saying goes, "I can tolerate anyone except the outgroup" [1]. Part of that is racism, sure. A lot of it is people being uncomfortable with outsiders in general. But also the left has found that words like racism, bigotry, xenophobia, etc. are very big sticks, and a big stick is a fun thing to hit your opponents with. [1] https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/I-Can-Tolerate-Anything-Except-The-Outgroup https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/I-Can-Tolerate-Anythi...
yardie 5y ago
I was waiting for one of these responses to arrive. And just like clockwork... So let's dig in: > If I can believe the current narrative things have been going from bad to worse to black people walk the streets in fear of their lives from racist cops in the last few years. In fact, just the opposite. It was worse before, but has slowly gotten better. Black artists have been making songs and paintings about corrupt and racist police not for years but for over a century. Body worn cameras and phone cameras have made the evidence irrefutable, "the police lie." So, now the NWA song, "Fuck the Police", wasn't just a bop but an actual indictment of the LAPD set to a 3/4 beat. > that same flag is being called a racist symbol by leading politicians You must be confusing the American flag with some other racist flag. No leading politician has ever referred to the stars and stripes as racist. > the 4th of July supposedly celebrates independence for only part of the population Umm yeah, that declaration was for land owning, white men. Native Americans didn't get theirs until 1965. We celebrated it but we knew it wasn't "for us" > everyone has been blind for decades or the current narrative about racism is a lie meant to achieve some political purpose. Great big omissions about the history of this country have been uncovered. And instead of believing the citizens have been intentionally blinded you prefer to think it's some conspiracy. Carry on. > why the parent poster brought up the bad racism in SF and LA and the racism in Boise, Idaho. Because when deciding where to relocate in the US some of us don't have the privilege of going wherever we want. One of the questions that get asked is "is X minority there? and if not why not?" Sometimes it's as simple as location (ie, HI, AK) and sometimes it's an old racist law like sundown towns. I bring up Boise as a counterexample. We're familiar with LAPD and know what to expect when dealing with them, and Bloomberg era NYPD. When discussion on moving out of California came up it was to other large cities with large minority populations, a place like Boise is an enigma to us. We don't know what's there and that can be dangerous for us. > Is that the change which made it possible to claim racism is everywhere So a country that is built on racism, which the US was, it tends to be everywhere, just not in expressed in objective terms and concepts you'd be familiar with. For example, Washington has an unnaturally low Black population. Because black people were literally banned from an entire state. Btw, I'm sorry for you other people have a different experience from you, and that makes you feel uncomfortable.
- muzz 5y ago
tablespoon 5y ago
> If I can believe the current narrative things have been going from bad to worse to black people walk the streets in fear of their lives from racist cops in the last few years. That's not new, it's just better publicized now: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/12/movies/boyz-n-the-hood-john-singleton.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/12/movies/boyz-n-the-hood-jo...: > ‘Boyz N the Hood’ at 30: A Vivid Examination of Racism at Work > ...This is evident when Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr.) interacts with Los Angeles’s finest. As a child he sees how even a Black police officer doesn’t take his father, Furious (Laurence Fishburne), seriously when he reports a home break-in; when Tre is older, the same officer pulls a gun on him during a routine traffic stop. He quickly learns that the cops are there to neither protect nor serve him or his neighbors. What Singleton shows us about the relationship between the police and Black residents may be well understood now, but at the time it was rare for the Black community’s view on policing to be so well embodied by Hollywood. I was always taught to be wary of officers as a young Black man, but this was one of the first times I saw the rationale for that fear onscreen in a major American film. ---- > Either everyone has been blind for decades or the current narrative about racism is a lie meant to achieve some political purpose. I do not believe the former to be true so the latter seems to be the answer but that makes me wonder why the parent poster brought up the bad racism in SF and LA and the racism in Boise, Idaho. Like most things, it's not that black and white, but a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B.
SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
I mean a decade ago we didn’t have social media that allowed minorities to say and record their experiences. Makes sense to me that once minorities don’t have to work around a gatekeeper like MSM that suddenly everyone realizes what a shitshow it is. There were countless George Floyds before George Floyd but only now we have people with cameras to capture it and put it somewhere for everyone to see.
- dogleash 5y ago
  >only now we have people with cameras to capture it and put it somewhere for everyone to see. The Rodney King beating was in 1991. Your whole post is an inaccurate depiction of awareness of race relations pre-internet. Pretending like nobody was aware is just a convenient narrative for people who have made race relations a bigger part of their politics in the recent years. Because the alternative is admitting that they knew damn well but didn't care about it as much. Which would be the truth, but is too uncomfortable to admit.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > The Rodney King beating was in 1991. Sure, but it was portrayable as an isolated, extreme incident because similar events captured on video rather than by word of mouth and the mass violence resulting from the media attention to it made it less, rather than more, likely that similar incidence, even if similarly captured, would get similar attention from the oligopoly establishment media while it had no mass grassroots alternative. So, unless you mean that to support GPs point, I’m not sure why you point it out. > Pretending like nobody was aware is just a convenient narrative for people who have made race relations a bigger part of their politics in the recent years. Whites who weren't personally perpetrators or direct witnesses of racist acts (and even those that were occasional witnesses) were less likely to be aware of the spectrum of racist harassment and violence experienced by Blacks in the US before universal omnipresent cameras and grassroots media to distribute and virally redistribute recordings made the aggregate of individual instances that would have largely never been recorded previously and most of which, even if they had been recorded would have either been individually too minor for the news to cover at all or to inflammatory to cover in an unfiltered way.

codingwageslave 5y ago

I completely agree.

qshaman 5y ago

As a latino, I can tell you what type of racism I have faced in the east coast, for example: - While chatting on the phone with a friend in Spanish, I get people screaming at me: "Speak English! This is America, go back to your country!!. ......" - "Chinga tu madre!! Mexican!" (I'm not Mexican) - "We dont speak Spanish here, sorry..." even tho I can communicate perfectly well in English. and many more, in my personal experience, the west coast is way better regarding racism, I have Pakistani friends who have had a pretty rough time living in Oklahoma. I agree that racism is being using as a political weapon, and all of that, but is truly more common in some places. If you are a white European, you will have a hard time seeing racism, compared with people who are not white.

dariusj18 5y ago
I find it strange the phrase "political weapon". As if the idea that there might be an issue in the country and politicians wanting to do something about it makes it a weapon. "Oh no Mr. Smith, your not allowed to mention the things that are wrong, otherwise people might think your using it to point out the flaws in your opposition."
- colpabar 5y ago
  I think "political tool" is a better term, and I believe it's an incredibly effective tool for dividing people who might otherwise be united on certain issues. I think that after the 2008 financial crisis and the following bailouts for the people who caused it, a lot of people got fed up, and occupy wall street was born. Occupy was a class based movement: the ultra-rich vs everyone else. And then something happened, and suddenly everyone had to be divided by every other attribute imaginable - race, sex, gender, disability - class just wasn't as important. Instead of the 1% vs the 99%, the 99% was divided by all those attributes and fought each other over whose issues were more important. Then it quietly fizzled out and nothing was accomplished. The 1% must be so happy watching the 99% squabble amongst themselves over who's the most oppressed. I think that most, if not all, of the major political/social issues today should be viewed through a class-based lens _first_; everything else should come second. But the users of this tool cannot have that, and here we are: everything is about race/sex/gender and nothing is about class.
  - dariusj18 5y ago
    My guess is that the Occupy movement was one of the first things that got you into politics, otherwise I don't know how else to explain your opinion. Identity politics was around way before the Occupy movement and has been one of the greatest driving forces in progressive social change.
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      Yeah, but colbapar has a bit of a point: Identity was there, but it wasn't quite so all-consuming of an issue. But I think the timing is a bit off. I think Occupy had pretty much fizzled before identity exploded. I could be wrong - I'm not all that political, so I'm only a fringe observer of these things - but it seems to me that Occupy was pretty much over by 2013, and identity didn't really explode until 2016 or so.

war1025 5y ago

> Either everyone has been blind for decades or the current narrative about racism is a lie meant to achieve some political purpose. I think it's a bit of both. As the saying goes, "I can tolerate anyone except the outgroup" [1]. Part of that is racism, sure. A lot of it is people being uncomfortable with outsiders in general. But also the left has found that words like racism, bigotry, xenophobia, etc. are very big sticks, and a big stick is a fun thing to hit your opponents with. [1] https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/I-Can-Tolerate-Anything-Except-The-Outgroup https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/I-Can-Tolerate-Anythi...

yardie 5y ago

I was waiting for one of these responses to arrive. And just like clockwork... So let's dig in: > If I can believe the current narrative things have been going from bad to worse to black people walk the streets in fear of their lives from racist cops in the last few years. In fact, just the opposite. It was worse before, but has slowly gotten better. Black artists have been making songs and paintings about corrupt and racist police not for years but for over a century. Body worn cameras and phone cameras have made the evidence irrefutable, "the police lie." So, now the NWA song, "Fuck the Police", wasn't just a bop but an actual indictment of the LAPD set to a 3/4 beat. > that same flag is being called a racist symbol by leading politicians You must be confusing the American flag with some other racist flag. No leading politician has ever referred to the stars and stripes as racist. > the 4th of July supposedly celebrates independence for only part of the population Umm yeah, that declaration was for land owning, white men. Native Americans didn't get theirs until 1965. We celebrated it but we knew it wasn't "for us" > everyone has been blind for decades or the current narrative about racism is a lie meant to achieve some political purpose. Great big omissions about the history of this country have been uncovered. And instead of believing the citizens have been intentionally blinded you prefer to think it's some conspiracy. Carry on. > why the parent poster brought up the bad racism in SF and LA and the racism in Boise, Idaho. Because when deciding where to relocate in the US some of us don't have the privilege of going wherever we want. One of the questions that get asked is "is X minority there? and if not why not?" Sometimes it's as simple as location (ie, HI, AK) and sometimes it's an old racist law like sundown towns. I bring up Boise as a counterexample. We're familiar with LAPD and know what to expect when dealing with them, and Bloomberg era NYPD. When discussion on moving out of California came up it was to other large cities with large minority populations, a place like Boise is an enigma to us. We don't know what's there and that can be dangerous for us. > Is that the change which made it possible to claim racism is everywhere So a country that is built on racism, which the US was, it tends to be everywhere, just not in expressed in objective terms and concepts you'd be familiar with. For example, Washington has an unnaturally low Black population. Because black people were literally banned from an entire state. Btw, I'm sorry for you other people have a different experience from you, and that makes you feel uncomfortable.

muzz 5y ago

tablespoon 5y ago

> If I can believe the current narrative things have been going from bad to worse to black people walk the streets in fear of their lives from racist cops in the last few years. That's not new, it's just better publicized now: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/12/movies/boyz-n-the-hood-john-singleton.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/12/movies/boyz-n-the-hood-jo...: > ‘Boyz N the Hood’ at 30: A Vivid Examination of Racism at Work > ...This is evident when Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr.) interacts with Los Angeles’s finest. As a child he sees how even a Black police officer doesn’t take his father, Furious (Laurence Fishburne), seriously when he reports a home break-in; when Tre is older, the same officer pulls a gun on him during a routine traffic stop. He quickly learns that the cops are there to neither protect nor serve him or his neighbors. What Singleton shows us about the relationship between the police and Black residents may be well understood now, but at the time it was rare for the Black community’s view on policing to be so well embodied by Hollywood. I was always taught to be wary of officers as a young Black man, but this was one of the first times I saw the rationale for that fear onscreen in a major American film. ---- > Either everyone has been blind for decades or the current narrative about racism is a lie meant to achieve some political purpose. I do not believe the former to be true so the latter seems to be the answer but that makes me wonder why the parent poster brought up the bad racism in SF and LA and the racism in Boise, Idaho. Like most things, it's not that black and white, but a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B.

SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago

I mean a decade ago we didn’t have social media that allowed minorities to say and record their experiences. Makes sense to me that once minorities don’t have to work around a gatekeeper like MSM that suddenly everyone realizes what a shitshow it is. There were countless George Floyds before George Floyd but only now we have people with cameras to capture it and put it somewhere for everyone to see.

dogleash 5y ago
>only now we have people with cameras to capture it and put it somewhere for everyone to see. The Rodney King beating was in 1991. Your whole post is an inaccurate depiction of awareness of race relations pre-internet. Pretending like nobody was aware is just a convenient narrative for people who have made race relations a bigger part of their politics in the recent years. Because the alternative is admitting that they knew damn well but didn't care about it as much. Which would be the truth, but is too uncomfortable to admit.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > The Rodney King beating was in 1991. Sure, but it was portrayable as an isolated, extreme incident because similar events captured on video rather than by word of mouth and the mass violence resulting from the media attention to it made it less, rather than more, likely that similar incidence, even if similarly captured, would get similar attention from the oligopoly establishment media while it had no mass grassroots alternative. So, unless you mean that to support GPs point, I’m not sure why you point it out. > Pretending like nobody was aware is just a convenient narrative for people who have made race relations a bigger part of their politics in the recent years. Whites who weren't personally perpetrators or direct witnesses of racist acts (and even those that were occasional witnesses) were less likely to be aware of the spectrum of racist harassment and violence experienced by Blacks in the US before universal omnipresent cameras and grassroots media to distribute and virally redistribute recordings made the aggregate of individual instances that would have largely never been recorded previously and most of which, even if they had been recorded would have either been individually too minor for the news to cover at all or to inflammatory to cover in an unfiltered way.