But where's the race war? Maybe I just don't understand what a race war is, — frank

Everywhere (in the US). Where's the front, what the weapons? Think, for example, red-lining. Or the steam-roller effects of second-rate education combined with both economic and political suppression. The weapons evolving, the purposes unchanging.

Think of the most successful and self-actualizing people you know, how many people there are like that and what they are like. Now drive through a ghetto and mark the lost lives on every street, deformed, injured, crippled by racism in all its forms, with all its opportunistic diseases.

In terms of race relations and a racially healthy society, we're in Berlin or Dresden or Tokyo c. 1946. And part of what makes it all glacially slow to rebuild is the denial of the whole scope of the horror of it - that is a third-rail reality that most cannot face or touch, even if the denial costs them their own humanity.

But where's the race war? Maybe I just don't understand what a race war is, if there's one underway. Do you see it? — frank

Maybe it's more like a "Cold" Race War, rather than a "Hot" Race War.

I love how the media blames the politicians when they are just as culpable for propagating lies and misinformation. After all, they report what the liars in government say, as if any of it is actually other than meaningless platitudes and spin. If the media actually did think that all the whites in power were such evil racists, then why do they give them a platform to speak on their news channels? Fucking hypocrites.

You're tiresome, Harry, and nos4's crown is secure. Go get some therapy and then an education. And be advised it's a sign of maturity to do your wanking in private, if for no other reason than yours is much ado about nothing. .

Everywhere (in the US). Where's the front, what the weapons? Think, for example, red-lining. Or the steam-roller effects of second-rate education combined with both economic and political suppression. The weapons evolving, the purposes unchanging. — tim wood

Red-lining is an example of systematic measures to keep the US from developing a diverse society. The goal was segregation. Let's poetically call that a war on blacks.

The idea of a race war goes back to before the Civil War. It was envisioned as a real war starting with a mass slave revolt

Is it that people like Morrison don't know about that slice of American History? If so, that's maybe a good thing.

Maybe it's more like a "Cold" Race War, rather than a "Hot" Race War. — Harry Hindu

That actually makes sense. Cold wars have occasional outbreaks of down scale violence. Otherwise it's just tension.

Who are the people engaged in this cold race war?

And be advised it's a sign of maturity to do your wanking in private, if for no other reason than yours is much ado about nothing. . — tim wood

Yea, I'm just sincerely burned out on the extreme rhetoric. If you just want to sling insults, could you please go elsewhere?

did he also encourage racists across the world? — frank

Yes he did. I guess he woke up the beast that was sleeping since 1945 when Second World War ended. It is so complex determine what is a race war and if it actually exists. I think it is related to the context of the country: jobs, rent, economy and other social values. Covid-19 brought us a very big breach in the social pyramid/structure, people lost jobs, GDP losing percentage, companies shutting down...
so when you are in a critical environment, some people prefer to start putting labels and differences to just empower their selfishness. It is common if the easy argument of “they are quitting our jobs”
Which jobs? I guess the lowest paid... because sadly immigrants always have the shittiest jobs of society.
I wish when life comes to normality, we would forget this differences and confrontation between us as humans.

The only advancement racists have made in the last while is the critical race theorists permeating academia and the industrial media complex. It will lead to segregation, apartheid, but not war.

Is there a race war underway? — frank

No.

I think it's safe to say that most Americans don't realize a race war is underway. — frank

Please explain in what way calling racial conditions in the US a war makes a solution to those issues easier or more likely. All they do is give one group of people an opportunity to feel self-satisfied.

wish when life comes to normality, we would forget this differences and confrontation between us as humans. — javi2541997

How much of it is really continuous with historic racism, and how much of it is the outlet for today's fears?

Please explain in what way calling racial conditions in the US a war makes a solution to those issues easier or more likely. — T Clark

Maybe it's an attempt to keep the focus on race since the events of the summer. Every year this happens. Every year nothing changes.

So let's just act like it's Malcolm X time and declare an invisible race war.

The only advancement racists have made in the last while is the critical race theorists permeating academia and the industrial media complex. It will lead to segregation, apartheid, but not war. — NOS4A2

The justice system is biased. Subtract the racial bias and there's still a bias against the poor. I'm glad academia thinks about it. Aren't you?

Maybe it's an attempt to keep the focus on race since the events of the summer. Every year this happens. Every year nothing changes. — frank

I'll ask again. Please explain in what way calling racial conditions in the US a war makes a solution to those issues easier or more likely.

Who are the people engaged in this cold race war? — frank

The extremists on both sides, and the politicians that use the rehetoric that created and then reinforce the extremists. The rest of us are able to see that another person excercising their liberties isn't necessarily a threat to our liberties. Only when others try to take a larger piece of the pie than they deserve because they've been led to believe that they have been slighted in some way, does it affect everyone. Over-representing some is under-representing others.

Peering at life through the racial lens is the problem to begin with. — NOS4A2

If you're proposing that our society should be so called "color-blind," that won't sell. Maybe it might in the future sometime once we've worked ourselves out of this hole we've dug ourselves into over centuries.

How much of it is really continuous with historic racism, and how much of it is the outlet for today's fears? — frank

I think it is unmeasurable. There a lot of traditions and social ruptures that comes from historic racism. Today’s fears about having in your own country citizens from other cultures dependes of the quality of education level. Some States are used of it for example UK, USA, Canada, etc... others are not so openly like Russia or Japan.

Peering at life through the racial lens is the problem to begin with. Mental segregation leads to real segregation. Teaching impressionable youth to use this lens, often for cynical reasons, creates racists. — NOS4A2

Some don't have the luxury of being able to forget what they look like. But yea, being able to see past race is a good thing.

:up:

The rest of us are able to see that another person excercising their liberties isn't necessarily a threat to our liberties. — Harry Hindu

What are you talking about specifically?

ask again. Please explain in what way calling racial conditions in the US a war makes a solution to those issues easier or more likely. — T Clark

I don't know.

The rest of us are able to see that another person excercising their liberties isn't necessarily a threat to our liberties. — Harry Hindu

What are you talking about specifically? — frank

Some examples would include a black person marching against police brutality, in which some cops view that as a threat to their holding a job. Marching against police brutality won't make you lose your job if you aren't a cop engaging in police brutality. If you are a good cop, then you should be joining the march as weeding out those bad cops will give all cops a better name for themselves. All groups have been victims of police brutality.

A white person marching for ensuring that votes are legitimate doesn't threaten someone's rights to vote. It is ensuring that all legal votes count and illegal votes don't. If you weren't voting illegally, then you should welcome such a cause and even join the march, as it is valuable to all legal voters to ensure that the power of their vote is not diminished by illegal votes. All legal voters are negatively affected by illegal votes.

The extremists on both sides, and the politicians that use the rehetoric that created and then reinforce the extremists. The rest of us are able to see that another person excercising their liberties isn't necessarily a threat to our liberties. — Harry Hindu

The liberty of the knee on the neck? And those extremists who report on it? Obviously they're the problem.

A white person marching for ensuring that votes are legitimate doesn't threaten someone's rights to vote. — Harry Hindu

Nobody felt threatened by the marchers.

Stay on topic, please. Off-topic posts will continue to be deleted.

But where's the race war? Maybe I just don't understand what a race war is, if there's one underway. Do you see it? — frank

Personally, I prefer "The only war is the class war", but I'll stick to race.

What people call a "race war" is really just "business as usual".

If we read the histories of housing discrimination, for instance, we find that "red lining" was a survey conducted in the 1930s by the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC), a government agency. If we look at white people organizing to repress black people, we find that "Jim Crow" was organized in the 1890s. Slavery had just ended 30 odd years earlier. In the post-WWII period, the government financed a huge growth in suburban building, and it was both explicit and implicit that the suburbs were to be white.

The consequences of government and private actions during the century--1860s to the 1960s--locked in the race-poverty relationship. Circling back to "the only war is the class war", government and private actions have also locked in a lot of people (white and colored alike) to the increasingly impoverished working class.

The upshot of all this is that long term race and class discrimination is impossible to overcome without very radical changes, and short of a revolution, which is unlikely to happen.

The upshot of all this is that long term race and class discrimination is impossible to overcome without very radical changes, and short of a revolution, which is unlikely to happen. — Bitter Crank

Was Bernie Sanders trying to initiate that kind of change? What do you think will happen to today's progressives? Will they sell out eventually?

You pick some demographic and you figure out what they fear.
Then you feed that fear through media and present a scapegoat.

What Sanders was proposing was not all that revolutionary. You know, one can say we need revolutionary change. Whether one really wants to experience a revolution is something else.

These days progressives have a major problem of 'social efficacy': we have some good ideas, goals, objectives, desired ends, etc., but we are not able to achieve much. Conservatives, reactionaries, and propertied interests are hostile to anything more than token changes. Redistribute income? Reform education? Undo unjust, century-long housing discrimination? Not a chance.

Progressives are more likely to wear out than sell out. Anyway, nobody is offering much of a bribe to progressives.

I don't know what precisely should be done, anymore. The progressive housing reform advocates working during the 1930, '40s, and '50s are the people responsible for the nightmares that many public housing projects turned into. Some of the progressive advocates predicted in the early '50s that the high-rise housing projects were a huge mistake, and they turned out to be right. Other equally sensible progressives were shocked and appalled by how fast and how bad the housing projects ended up being.

Waves of progressive educational reform have come and gone, without eliminating the sometimes huge gaps between white and black or hispanic student performance. Anti-poverty programs often end up benefitting only the middle-class workers in the programs. on and on and on...

The thing is, rational sensible plans for progressive change end up being severely warped by the existing system which creates and maintains the problems in the first place.

I'll ask again. Please explain in what way calling racial conditions in the US a war makes a solution to those issues easier or more likely. — T Clark

If your title would be the "national race and ethnicity writer for The Associated Press", would your objective be to provide solutions race relations or to show that serious racial problems exist in the US and that they matter?

So as whites, blacks, and latinos become genetically mixed, the race problem will go away, but inequality is too deeply rooted in our kind of civilization to uproot.

Why do we accept it? Is it because we need it?