Nailed it again.
Right on!!! I find myself doing this all the time! Well, unless I’m pissed off, then I’m truely the angry black man!
Another spot-on cartoon by Mr. Bolling 
Sadly, not drawn in classic Richard Scarry style… who am I kidding (myself) this is so true.
As a white male I play the game of life on it’s easiest setting (Pathetic). But I’ve seen prejudice towards others first hand and been on the receiving end of prejudice - admittedly very mild and non-life-threatening - and it’s an eye-opener.
Let the copologists and racists swarm in to defend the use of their 2nd Amendment rights (he said stick up! I had to stand my ground, it was a 8’ tall demon/Hulk with arms like tree trunks and a shock of flaming red hair [sorry, had to slip that Simpsons gag in there])
At least white people aren’t as crazy as they used to be. We got a glowing endorsement from a comedian and everything!
(I don’t see it myself, there’s certainly some improvement out there but it feels offset by increasingly hostile reactions on the other end of the spectrum.)
#NotAllCrackers
I dunno. It’s gotten to the point where I - a suburban white-bread schlub in his 60s – find it hard to see even an ounce of humor in the situation. I suppose if my otherwise-pigmented friends can do it, I can too.
It’s nice that Chris Rock thinks that white America has dialed down the crazy…but I honestly think he’s not looking in certain regions and cultural corners. The dial’s been turned pretty high in some places over the past few years.
One can hope that recent events will open some eyes. Stuff like this would help.
The crazy used to be much more widespread public policy. So the regrettable state we find ourselves in now is still a significant improvement on the institutionalized level of hostility the previous generation suffered under.
Um, not so fast. Institutional racism is really more of a changing same.
Those places have always had the dial set to 11, but there are fewer of them.
Um, ok, sure, no qualitative difference between the society Chris Rock lives in and the one his mother grew up in.
“changing same” means to me that there are qualitative differences, but that the problem is one of Whack-A-Mole.
For instance,
Chris Rock’s mom grew up in a time without widespread zero-tolerance bullshit. Her people were already held by a similar but unspoken yoke, but what genius it was to make it policy & pretend to apply it to all of us eh? It worked too.
I grew up in Alabama - in Birmingham area, with family in Montgomery where I was a frequent visitor. I was post Jim Crow but my family was not. My grandparent’s maid participated in the bus strike.
I grew up not really understanding until recently what it meant that racism was THE LAW. Sure I knew all the things that happened, of course, that was my area’s history, but it just didn’t click until recently how terrible it was back then. It really hit home when a woman who’d written a book on her experience living as a white Jew under Apartheid came to speak to my Temple and someone mentioned that similar laws had existed in the South. All the horrible things she’d described happening in South Africa had happened, too, where I grew up, just before my time.
I ran into a African-American lady recently at my work who grew up in Alabama during the Jim Crow era, picking cotton. We sat down and talked and she said that people just didn’t want to tell my generation how horrible it had been.
It’s better than it was, which I’m glad about, but recent events show things need to improve and I think with Obama in office racism has gotten more daring and overt.
Arseholes using a false equivocation to demand that racism is over, thus a-okay. Hey, whatever else his presidency shows us, it shows us a pile of arseholes we might have missed.
I’m embarrassed to say that over the holiday I had a conversation with family members that was 1) not expected, and 2) was really unpleasant. A teacher and a cop were both trying to convince me that because black people are arrested at much higher rates than any other racial group, then they are more “criminally minded” than other racial groups.
I explained the correlation /= causation, but got no traction on that. Once I got around to essentially calling them racists, that’s the point where I noticed some people had passed the “talkable” level of alcohol consumption and were well into the “shouty” part. The worst bit is that both the teacher and the cop work in the predominantly black and definitely marginalized sections of their town, so their “black people are bad” ideas are likely to be reinforced.
I felt the racial balance was off, but 6 ppl total in the strip comes out to about 17% black. Myself being mixed, I know the feeling of being a “brown person,” in a white culture. All of our collective advances in science and technology seem to outpace our ability to see humanity in each other sometimes. How do we make our instincts more altruistic and less selfish? Can we re-map our psychology and still maintain a balance with our humanity?
Or are enforcing the “black people are bad” ideas.
Indeed, and that’s what is so unnerving about it. They’re both educated so the logical disconnect just doesn’t equate for me. How can they fail to see their own racism? It’s…just sad.
I’ve completely given up on white relatives who get shouty whenever pollitics come up (and race is a political issue too). They’re just never going to change, and it’s a waste of my energy to try to get through to them.
