Uh, you’re the one who derailed the topic over terminology, unless I missed something:
If you’re going to object to the terminology used by others to denote a particular concept, then I think it is incumbent upon you to propose an alternative terminology. You don’t think that’s reasonable?
Print and broadcast media, writers, editors, publishers, radio personalities…
Yes, of course, but if we’re not allowed to make any generalizations whatsoever, it’s going to be exceedingly difficult to discuss race relations in the USA.
Why assume I’m being belligerent? I wasn’t.
It’s not an “unexamined presumption” either…it’s a fairly common observation that e.g. newspapers will refer to a black person as a “black person” and a white person as a “person”. Perhaps it’s a little strong to simply state it to be a fact, but then again, I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t force me to submit spectroscopic evidence were I to assert that the sky is factually blue on a cloudless day.
How? I said twice that I agree about the term “racialization”. So that’s not a disagreement over terminology. What I said which was apparently contentious is that whereas the process does happen, I disagree with the content of the generalization - the presumption of whiteness being a sort of norm.
Which I think can be demonstrated constitute a significant minority of the population. That’s why discussion of what seems “mainstream” or “popular” is deceptive. In a broadcast media culture these supposed “norms” are cultivated by a small invested group of people. It is the business of broadcast media to present itself as what everybody obviously thinks, but it isn’t. It provides a false metric with the agenda of steering the cultural climate.
I agree. But simply being allowed to make generalizations does not automatically make them accurate or useful.
Why do you assume that I am referring to you? I never said I was doing so.
It is unexamined if anybody actually believes that newspapers write anything on their own. The newspaper is an institution which employs writers, and curates what they say with the interests of their editors/owners/publishers/investors/etc. A tiny population of people being responsible for this is not demonstrate that it is normal, popular, mainstream, etc. So the question becomes “What writers? And in whose interests?”
All I said is that yes, I think that racialization is a real phenomenon. And no, I don’t think that the Americas are a white culture. I don’t understand how challenging me on these points is in any way productive. But I have provided some background about why I see it this way, which may or not clarify matters.
Arguably it does after the existing population decreased by 95% following the introduction of Europeans.
The point about “whites” is that once people have been here a few generations, you’re hard pressed to tell Irish from German just by looking at someone. If you’re Korean or another non-European race and marry within your own ethnic community, you still get asked if you speak English four generations later by strangers. Here in the Bay Area, I know fifth generation American-born Chinese citizens (20% of our population is of Chinese descent) that regularly have people ask them if they speak English (usually tourists wandering around). By culture, these Chinese folks are as American as anyone else here but they don’t get seen that way at times.
It’s a small price to pay for Law & Order. Imagine the chaos if Urban Americans (wink wink) thought they could get away with acting like us in the Silent Majority!
Note that forced labour, i.e. slavery, is legal for prisoners. The constitutional amendment that outlawed slavery makes an exception for it. A wide variety of “made in the USA” consumer products are produced by slave labour.
If I’m not mistaken, in a true debtors’ prison, time served goes towards your debt. Here, you just lose your job and thus the ability to service your debt at all.
I think it does it by having the cops shoot the black people, and then cop-run commissions declaring the shooting justified - thus implying criminality on the black persons part.
I don’t see this happening in the US, but many other countries have a police force that isn’t armed all the time. But you could make it so that the police take their gun more seriously. In the Netherlands for instance, police can only carry a gun if they pass a yearly “exam”. They also know that pulling out their gun will most likely result in a review and misuse of their firearm will result in criminal charges.
Result is that police on average pull out their gun (not fire, just pull out of its holster) about 2 to 3 times during their entire career.
“The fines that anyone incurs for any particular conduct depends on their income — so you’re fined a day of your salary or six days of your salary or a month of your salary or half a day. But it depends on your income, rather than a flat fine that applies to everyone.”
In a true debtor’s prison time didn’t count for anything - only the hard labour you did while in it.
Fun fact: if you were relying on this to get you out of debtor’s prison you would generally die in there because you also had to work off the cost of your incarceration as determined by the guy with a prison full of people whose labour he could sell at any price and whose wages were whatever he felt was fair.
I have an IQ which despite everything is still comfortably over 135, and I would not trust me with a gun, whether in the interests of law enforcement or otherwise. Your irony is well placed.
Policing is largely about the culture in which future policemen are raised. Unfortunately people do not necessarily get the police they deserve; they get the police that the majority want, or, even worse, they get the police that the government wants.
