Probably.

you in the same boat as him, banno, fxdrake and other suspect posters on this forum. Adding Benkei to my list now. — Judaka

#Squad.

Nah its OK :)

I'm glad you're so invested me in :heart:

:heart:

I know I haven't been murdered on a daily basis but please don't try to undermine my views just because of that. — Judaka

It's OK I'm sure your mommy will teach you grammar one day.

I don't need clowns to take me seriously.

What's wrong? Your jimmies a little too rustled? Panties too twisted?

Western Justice — ernestm

Wait I didn't know apartheid was Western Justice.

Yeah it must suck to be such a moron as to not understand collective nouns.

You can barely get grammar right and you want to talk about race?

Come back when you've crawled out of kindergarten.

It's cute how those who are not regularly murdered everyday on the basis of their skin color get to explain how skin color does not matter. It's like those celebs who, while hiding out in their multi-million dollar mansions, got to tell everyone that 'we're all in this together'. Everyone rightly told them to crawl into a hole and cark it.

Please don't feed these stupid discussions about music and language. These are ivory tower bullshit that only people with no experience or understanding of racism can think are the centre of gravity of racial issues. And not, say, being murdered by cops, incarcerated at extraordinary rates, being denied public infrastructure, having education gutted, and so on. It's a white persons view of race, informed by the only points of encounter they've ever had with it: in books and fifth-hand stories.

They can all fall into a well and drown then.

This is a dumb discussion.

Sorry but if you think the bloody Sapir/Whorf thesis is to blame for racism then you've abdicated your right to be taken seriously. Please go back to Facebook.

I dunno I thought the opportunity to be something less than pure scum would be jumped at, especially considering the fact that Trump is shitting all over their precious amendments rights now, but I guess not.

Ah yes, the Sapir/Whorf thesis is to blame for racism.

Do these people hear themselves speak? Or do they just vomit out words and expect to be taken seriously?

Serious question through, exactly where is Biden in all this? Apart from his performative sorrow and offering to shoot people in their legs, what kind of policy responses are he and his team offering? Anything? I'm seriously asking, I can't find anything. I've seen more policy discussion on Facebook than I have out of the dude supposedly vying for the next president of the United States.

Maybe as a start he can offer to repeal his 'tough of crime' bills that led to a militarized police and the mass incarceration of black people that directly fed into what's happening right now? I dunno, what else is on the table from this ex-segregationist?

No I heard something stupid and called it stupid I'm sorry if that's over your head I know nuances like that are hard to grasp.

Right. So racism isn't created by a legacy of a culture of colour-based slavery justified by a racist narrative of white superiority, followed by years of jim crow laws Klan terrorism and lynching, endless propaganda and jokes against black people and so on. It's created by anti racists. As long as we're clear. — unenlightened

It's so fucking stupid.

This is like peak enlightened liberalism. How should we deal with racism? A: Remove the ability to speak about it. Job done!

It's hard to imagine a more bright-line example of what privilege is than this thread. Like children closing their eyes and pretending that will make the Bad Thing go away. Bloody infantile.

Comrade Cotton knows whats up. American Imperialism does as much damage to the world as American police violence does to it's own people. The demolishing of both would be great.

Funny, the one place which burned down a police precinct got the kind of necessary change needed... :chin:

Better question for this thread is, is questioning the existence of systemic racism in the US, an act of racism itself? — Benkei

I don't think it would be fair to say this. One has to remember that the kind of education we get - not only in school, but in the media, and in our social lives more generally - militate hard against acknowledging it's existence. The atomic individualism fostered by neoliberal ideologies makes structural analysis really hard to see. It makes class analysis even harder still.

In fact one of the most positive aspects of to come out of all the recent events is the legitimation of the very vocabulary of systemic racism. The fact that people take the pains to even deny it is already miles ahead of the utter silence and indifference to it's coherency as a concept. That people can begin to think 'racism' and 'system' together is already a boon for thought more generally. That's how we win. We take over the vocabulary and shape the terms of the conversation. The right has known this for a long time. It's nice to see a left effort at this taking root.

Even if hardcore individualism and agency was a thing, you can still have systemic racism as an emergent property of the whole. That's why even when there would be no racists, society could still be racist. — Benkei

I wanna agree with this, but I also want to emphasize that the nourishment and sustaining of those properties are collective acts of political and economic decision making. I want to be careful not to naturalize this stuff - one can trace back moments of decision where such structures were given life and then entrenched due to the protection of interests that arose in the wake of those decisions. Path dependency is real, but that we are on this particular path and not others is a question of politics.

More on why this shit works:

“By interpreting inner-city violence and poverty as glaring manifestations of the failure of blacks to live up to American values [conservative politicians] helped create and legitimize a new form of prejudice.” That racial resentment fueled a long “period of retrenchment” that rolled back many of the civil rights movement’s gains.

Recent history, however, suggests that the current protests are more likely to liberalize racial attitudes than prompt backlash. So far, Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests have pushed whites’ racial attitudes in a progressive direction, especially among young people.

...Racial attitude shifts were larger in the places with BLM protests. Political scientist Shom Mazumder’s recent study, “Black Lives Matter for Whites’ Racial Prejudice,” shows that from 2014 to 2018, white racial resentment declined more in areas with BLM protests than in areas without them."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/05/floyd-protests-will-likely-change-public-attitudes-about-race-policing-heres-why/

Collective problems require - in fact can only be addressed by - collective action. Capitalism wins by means of social atomization. So much more to say but I am so tired. Here:

https://youtu.be/G8Vy7OrHR50

Yeah, poverty absolutely has to be addressed. But again, it's not a competition. These are twin evils that work to enforce and perpetuate each other, and why not address both together rather than just one? Here's a apropos quote from Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton (from a book written in 1967!) which gets at this two-pronged nature of racism:

"Racism is both overt and covert. It takes two closely related forms…we call these individual racism and institutional racism… The second type is… far more subtle, less identifiable in terms of specific individuals committing the acts. But it is no less destructive of human life. The second type originates in the operation of established and respected forces in society, and thus receives far less public condemnation than the first type… It is institutional racism that keeps black people locked in dilapidated slum tenements, subject to the daily prey of exploitative slumlords, merchants, loan sharks and discriminatory real estate agents. The society either pretends it does not know of this latter situation, or is in fact incapable of doing anything meaningful about it.” (Black Power: The Politics of Liberation).

If what is called structural racism is being highlighted here, it's because it so often forgotten about, or else simply outright denied. It's been 60 years since that passage above was written. We're still dealing with the same problems as if they were discovered yesterday.

Poverty and racism are not in competition with each other. They work to enforce each other to the extent that poverty itself can - and should - be understood as racist from the get-go. Again, this doesn't mean that poverty only affects one race rather than other. But that it disproportionately does, and that it helps sustain this disproportion, makes attempts to not address poverty attempts to entrench racist structures.

One thing I haven't mentioned is that concrete instances of racism are born out of this structural disproportion. People see wretched black folk - made wretched by poverty - and think: 'my Gosh, it must be the color of their skin'. And when those wretched folk do terrible things, for lack of opportunity, people think: 'it must be the color of their skin'. This stuff self-enforces and self-sustains. No one is born racist. People become so.

Crosspost!

Why would erasing a key element of the problem from an analysis make it better? It's like saying - yes, I know that car is on fire, but forget that, let's just figure out how fires work. That's a very dumb thing to do.

Why are people so scared about race? .

A long day in Sydney.





*Why Sydney? Because Australia murders its indigenous Australians unaccountably at rates even higher than the US. At least 30,000 people at these protests.

It seems to me that the past dropped a very big problem on our doorstep. We, being the present Capitalist system, already had policies of neglect and abuse in place that affected people in a negative way and both failed to help those of the white population in poverty or drove others into it. When the black population was integrated into this population they represented a far greater proportion of people in poverty than the poverty stricken white population. Those policies applied to poor whites had the same affect on blacks but in greater numbers. The numbers were possibly so big that they created a worse situation for those same people, a situation they would find hard, if not impossible, to get out of. — Brett

This is almost exactly right, with the caveat that the problem is not just a hangover from the past. The past did indeed drop a very big problem on our doorstep, but the present reproduces and entrenches those problems. We're not just dealing with lingering effects from the past (although that is part of the story). We are also dealing with structures that re-produce, re-instantiate and ensure that those problems handed down form the past continue to effect us in the present. Those structures also militate against ameliorating those problems. There is a present agency at work, and not simply a passivity - and that agency is political and economic.

As for the fact that these structures have the same affect on blacks but in greater numbers - or rather in disproportionate numbers - that's just what systemic racism is. You've described it in your own words! You just haven't given it a name. The vicious cycle of poverty you described does not just 'contribute' to racism. The vicious cycle of poverty is racist. Poverty is racist. And look, if the contingencies of history turned out differently, and it was, say, whites who were disproportionality caught up in the reproducing net of poverty, then that too would be racist. But that's not largely the world we live in. And yeah, of course there are poor white people - this simply means that they have every reason to stand in solidarity with poor blacks. Or poor anyone for that matter, and all with each other. Workers of the world fuckin' unite.

This is your position then, that Capitalism created racism — Brett

Will reply more in depth later but the first substantial step in abolishing racism is to abolish capitalism yes.

Well, yes, and the words I wrote around those words too.

Actually I might know the problem. Refer here and here. Let me know what you think,

What about it confuses you?

I don’t know. Do you — Brett

Indeed.

You're the one asking questions without specifying what qualifies for an answer. So you tell me.

The fact that the injustice invovled is specifically racial (which is not to say only racial).

Because that would be denying reality. When certain black men are thee times as likely to die at the hand of police officer than comparable white men, to say 'why are you bringing race into this' would be - I dunno, it wouldn't even be denying reality, it would be an active attempt to warp it. The real question is why people are so threatened by race. Why the anxiety over admitting race into the field?

It already was.