Yep. And before the Chinese left Chinatown, and before any other Asians came over, and before the Mexicans invaded our border, and before the Indians left their reservations, and before the Muslims came over from all those Middle Eastern Arabias, and before Hitler scattered the Jews and pushed some of them over here. Oh wait, the Indians are still on their reservations, except when they come out to gripe about our sports teams, failing as they do to see how we’re actually honoring their bravery and um, their nice red skin.
Yep, back when all those so-called people knew their rightful places.
I am going to be unusually optimistic and say: nah, things are better. There will always be racism. It will wax and wane as far as overt/covert like you said. But certainly attitudes have changed for a majority of people. We DID elect a half-black president, which would have been impossible, what, only 50 years ago? Similar attitudes about women, gays, and other minorities have swung far around from where they once were.
Certainly this doesn’t mean any of those above issues has completely gone away and that there still isn’t examples of systemic racism and pockets of racism that has gone full retard. Certainly we have a way to go on racism and other issues, but it is progressively getting better.
I can see why those who don’t suffer (or don’t suffer much) from racism would think so. However, the myth of continual “progress” is just that, a myth. In many ways, problems wrought by the pathology that is racism are getting worse, not better. As for electing a black president? That’s mostly just window-dressing.
the awkward truth is that when it comes to the goals laid down by the civil rights movement in general and Brown in particular, America is actually going backward. Schools are resegregating, legislation is being gutted, it’s getting harder to vote, large numbers are being deprived of their basic rights through incarceration, and the economic disparities between black and white are growing. In many areas, America is becoming more separate and less equal…
This is not to say that we have literally reverted to a bygone era. “No man ever steps in the same river twice,” goes the proverb. “For it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” We have a black president, a black attorney general and a black editor of The New York Times; there’s a growing trend to interracial relationships; suburbs are becoming more diverse. If the civil rights movement had been about getting black faces in new and high places, its work would now be done. But it wasn’t. It was about equality. And the problem is not that we still have a great deal of progress to be made or that progress is too slow—it’s that we are regressing.
Worse from when? The 80s? The 60s? The 30s? The 1880s?
I agree that its still bad in many places and many example still exist both in the system, enforcement of laws, and popular culture - but at the same time the laws have changed, general attitudes have changed, we live in a world now where uttering the n-word can be a career ending move, while still under-represented there is a strong presence in popular culture to the point where emulation is popular among some, in general there is significant outrage for acts like police cruelty that would have been met with cheers not that long ago.
Again, I am acknowledging we still have a long way to go, I disagree we are living in “post racial times”, but I think we have been making forward progress in the last 100+ years.
What can you say about Polk Co. Tn?
Well, There’s this lovely place called Sand Mountain there and You will never find a more wretched hive of Klan scum and villainy.
Yes true believers! The Klan is still around and the good ol’e boy network still hard at work.
I like to point out to people that when he was born, Obama’s parents marriage was ILLEGAL in many states and they faced arrest in a large portion of the country. Despite the number of crazy racists around, that level of de jure racism has faded. Plenty of racisim in the APPLICATION of laws, but the laws themselves are not OVERTLY racist. Racist legislators are forced to pretend that there is a non-racial basis when they pass discriminatory laws. Seeing progress and even being proud of it in no way blinds us from seeing how far short we fall or forgives us from not continuing the fight.
I agree. Things are by no means perfect, and there is a long, long way to go, and it’s not clear that it ever can be perfect. But I think that Obama was right when he told students at Howard University that they couldn’t choose a better time “to be young, gifted and black in America.”
Each one of those students has a higher likelihood of becoming doctor, senator, or CEO than any of their parents or grandparents ever did. Is it high enough likelihood? No, of course not. But we shouldn’t pretend that it’s not better.
I don’t think it really makes sense to make these kinds of comparisons: “racism is better now than at time X”.
The word “racism” is a short-hand for a huge variety of different attitudes and behaviors. Over any given period of time, some of these get “better” and some get “worse” (and which is which is a function of one’s value system rather than an absolute fact about the universe).
For example, in many ways it seems ludicrous to suggest that racism now is worse than racism in the 1960’s. But what percentage of black youths are in prison? How long are their sentences? How do these figures compare to the 1960’s? I expect not so favorably as to make the claim that racism is unambiguously better now so unequivocal.
It’s also unfalsifiable, pointless, and has a good chance of causing people to declare victory prematurely – it’s already pretty easy to find the claim being made that racism is “over”, black people have all the rights and legal privileges of whites and now they just want more, and all the problems of black communities are really the fault of the people in those communities.
Finally, maybe the absolute value of how racist things are isn’t really as important as the sign of the first derivative. Maybe it’s better to be in the 1960’s when racism is quite bad but big parts of federal government are mobilizing to fight it than to be in 2015 where some black people* have more opportunity than ever before, but those opportunities are being drawn down over time instead of expanded.
*It doesn’t actually seem very easy to escape the ghetto. There may be more middle class black folks with more opportunity now, but I’m not so sure it’s easier to escape poverty than ever before.
Thank you for the insightful nuance. Those are the kinds of distinctions that many people gloss over when clinging (for whatever reasons…) to the idea that “Hey, you gotta admit, we’re making progress!” Holding that belief and trying to support it seems more important to many people than seeing the numerous ways in which we’re not making progress, and more important than seeing the many people for whom life still isn’t any easier than it was for their ancestors. It’s like a form of confirmation bias – “I think we’re making progress. See, here are some examples!” It’s also a way of avoiding the truth that racism is a broad weapon wielded in a racist social order. Racism is fomented to keep demographics divided, and to keep certain demographics in their conveniently subjugated places.
This guy’s perception of reality wasn’t ruined by TV - he never had one. His reference is just a tool for getting recognition from his base, which is composed mainly of ignorant pig fuckers so stupid they can’t tell the difference between TV and reality.
Ever gone to Tennessee? Don’t. Like scat sex, joining Scientology, or voting Republican, don’t do it, don’t even think about it.
I’ve already tempered my statements to say that we still have a long way to go. But along with equal rights on paper, most people no longer have the belief that blacks are some how naturally inferior. Just like most people no longer have the belief that women are naturally inferior and couldn’t possibly do things things like science or math or what have you. The sexism and racism that exists today isn’t nearly as severe as in the not-too distant past.
Again, I can completely agree with the issues you brought up still being problems and there is a lot of work ahead. But I can also look back and see improvements.
What is really weird is I am the optimist in the room. Haha. That’s a new one.
look, here you’re saying “OK, you make some good points about how A) a lot of black people don’t really have much more opportunity now than black people had in the 60’s even if some do, and that B) a lot of black people are really worse off due to the war on drugs and the carceral state, and that C) things might be getting worse now rather than getting better as they were in the 60’s, and yes these are all ways in which racism is still bad. But look, P) more than half of people believe blacks are real human beings now!”
A, B, and C are all ways in which racism is worse than it was in th 1960’s. P is a way in which racism is better.
Implicitly, you seem to be doing an equation like this in your head:
A + B + C +… < P + R + Q + …
But that’s not a valid move. You can’t just take individual aspects of racism and add, subtract, and compare them. They are not numeric quantities. We are not in a vector space. There is no metric to determine the amplitude of the racism field at any point of space-time.
Yes, I’ll happily concede that P and R and Q are great progress in the project of treating other human beings like human beings. But it doesn’t follow that because P racism is better. The issue is more complex than that, and oversimplifications like “things are better now” have a tendency to blind people to the more important nuances of the issue.
Note that none of that disputes the point that more than half of people believe blacks are not inferior now. Now, however, i will dispute that point. What do you think the proportion was in the 1960’s? Presumably less than half ,but like 30%? 40%? And what do you think the precise percentage is today? How big do you think the delta actually is?
Interesting. All the KKK activity I heard about was on the Alabama Sand Mountain–which a quick Google search corroborated. It is pretty easy to find racists in any rural area, if for no other reason than the lack of familiarity with non-whites. Klan activity in Polk County wouldn’t surprise me though.
I did shake my head at the fears over immigration at the Polk County candidate forum. You see, immigrants go places with jobs…
