posted
On White Pride and Other Delusions: Reflections on the Rage of the Uninformed
By Tim Wise May 23, 2007
"The price the white American paid for his ticket was to become white...This incredibly limited, not to say dimwitted ambition has choked many a human being to death here: and this, I contend, is because the white American has never accepted the real reasons for his journey. I know very well that my ancestors had no desire to come to this place: but neither did the ancestors of the people who became white and who require of my captivity a song. They require of me a song less to celebrate my captivity than to justify their own."
James Baldwin, "The Price of the Ticket," 1985
It seems like every week I get an e-mail from someone demanding to know why there's no White History Month, or White Entertainment Television, or why whites aren't allowed to have organizations to defend "our" interests, the way people of color are, without being thought of as racists. One of these internet missives, which has been making the rounds lately on MySpace and other popular networking sites, implies that whites are somehow oppressed because we can't get away with calling people of color any number of racial slurs (a litany of which the author then proceeds to recite, almost gleefully), while persons of color presumably call us names like "cracker," "honky," or "hillbilly" all the time.
The e-mail goes on to express anger over, among other things, Martin Luther King Jr. day, and Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance day in Israel), as if these were holidays that discriminated against whites. It then laments that white pride is seen as racist, but for people of color to feel and show pride in their group is seen as normal, natural, and even healthy.
The Reverse Racism Ruse (Or How to Ignore Power, History and Logic)
That so many people find this kind of argumentation persuasive would be humorous were it not so dangerous, and so indicative of the way in which our nation has yet to come to grips with its racist history. Had we honestly confronted racism as an issue, past and present, it is unlikely that such positions would make sense to anyone. After all, every month has been white history month, even if they weren't called that. White history has been made the normative history, the default position, and when your narrative is taken as the norm--indeed, when it gets to be viewed as synonymous with American history--the need to racially designate its origins is obviously a less pressing concern. White folks' contributions have never been ignored, diminished or overlooked. As such, to now demand special time to teach about the people we've already learned about from the start seems a bit preposterous.
As for racial slurs, while it is certainly fair to point out that their use is always inappropriate, no matter whom they're directed against, to think that a term like hillbilly is truly equivalent to those used against people of color, like "******," "spic," "raghead," or "chink," requires one to exhibit a profound ignorance of history. These and other slurs against people of color not only sound more hateful, they have operated in a more hateful manner, by forming the linguistic cornerstone of systematic oppression and institutionalized racial supremacy. Hundreds of thousands were enslaved and millions have died at the hands of those who thought of their victims as "*******," "spics," "ragheads" and "chinks," and used those terms as they went about their murderous ways. American history, in its historic treatment of persons of color has been an inter-generational hate crime, which didn't begin to end, even in theory, until the 1960s. On the other hand, anti-white terms are typically the end of the line when it comes to anti-white racism. People of color control no institutions that are capable of discriminating systematically against whites. They cannot keep whites from having jobs, or getting a loan. Nor can black cops get away with racially profiling whites, even when whites actually do lead the pack in one or another form of criminal behavior (serial killing, corporate fraud, or drunk driving, for example). So no, the terms are not the same, even as all are inappropriate and offensive.
And the idea that whites working for white empowerment or "white rights" is no different than people of color working for the empowerment of their group (through such mechanisms as the NAACP, or the Congressional Black Caucus, for instance), also makes sense, only if one takes a fundamentally dishonest glimpse at the nation's past.
After all, groups representing persons of color were created to address the unique disempowerment experienced by those groups' members. Blacks, Latinos, Asians and Native Americans have been systematically denied opportunities in the U.S. solely because of their group membership. Their "race" was the basis for housing discrimination, restrictions on educational opportunities, exclusion from jobs, and other forms of mistreatment. Whites have never been the targets of institutional oppression in the U.S., as whites, such that organizing as whites would have made sense. Sure, whites have been marginalized on the basis of ethnicity--the Irish, for example, or Italians, or Jews--and have long organized around ethnicity as a support system, for job networking, educational benefits, or other purposes. But as whites, persons of European descent have been the dominant group. So to organize on that basis, would be to come together for the purpose of providing collective support for one's existing domination and hegemony. It would be like corporate management forming a union to protect its interests from workers; or like the upper-caste in India, forming a Brahmin support group to protect itself from the Dalits, at the other end of the caste spectrum. Such a contingency would be redundant in the extreme.
To have a White Student Union, especially at a college where whites were in the clear majority, would be absurd, for this reason. To have a Congressional White Caucus, given the way in which white elites dominate the government would be even worse. To have a White Entertainment Television would ignore that whites already predominate on most all existing networks, and that shows pegged to people of color are few and far between, and usually limited to a handful of smaller networks and cable outlets.
Though many argue that affirmative action has made whites the victims of massive "reverse discrimination," and thus necessitated the rise of a white rights movement to secure white collective interests, the evidence simply doesn't support such a view. Although individual whites have likely experienced instances of discrimination--and anecdotal data suggests this is true, though far, far less often than the occasions when people of color experience it--there is nothing to indicate that such incidents are a widespread social phenomenon, against which whites now require organizations to protect them.
So, for instance, whites hold over ninety percent of all the management level jobs in this country (1), receive about ninety-four percent of government contract dollars (2), and hold ninety percent of tenured faculty positions on college campuses (3). Contrary to popular belief, and in spite of affirmative action programs, whites are more likely than members of any other racial group to be admitted to their college of first choice (4). Furthermore, white men with only a high school diploma are more likely to have a job than black and Latino men with college degrees (5), and even when they have a criminal record, white men are more likely than black men without one to receive a call back for a job interview, even when all their credentials are the same (6). Despite comparable rates of school rule infractions, white students are only half to one-third as likely as blacks and Latino youth to be suspended or expelled (7); and despite higher rates of drug use, white youth are far less likely to be arrested, prosecuted or incarcerated for a drug offense than are youth of color (8).
So when it comes to jobs, education, housing, contracting, or anything else, people of color are the ones facing discrimination and restricted opportunities, while whites remain on top, making the idea of organizing for our collective interests little more than piling dominance on top of dominance. Not to ensure a place at the table, so to speak, but to secure the table itself, and to control who gets to be seated around it, for now and always.
It is for this reason that white pride is more objectionable than "black pride," or "Latino pride." In the case of the latter two, those exhibiting pride are not doing so as a celebration of their presumed superiority, nor dominance over others. If anything, they are celebrating the perseverance of their people against great obstacles, such as those placed in their way by discrimination, conquest and enslavement. In the case of white pride, whites as whites have not overcome obstacles in the same fashion, because we have always been the dominant group. Although Irish pride or Italian pride makes sense given the way in which persons of those ethnicities have faced real oppression in the past (and even today, in the case of Italians, who sometimes face negative stereotypes), white pride, given the historic meaning of whiteness, can mean little but pride in presumed superiority.
White Bonding as a Dangerous Distraction
But especially ironic is that by seeking to bond on the basis of whiteness, those pushing the concept end up ignoring the way in which white identity has actually harmed persons of European descent, by causing most of us to ignore our real interests, all for the sake of phony racial bonding. To understand why this is so, it might help to have some historical perspective on how the notion of whiteness came into being in the first place, and for what purpose.
Contrary to popular belief, the white race is a quite modern creation, which only emerged as a term and concept to describe Europeans in the late 1600s and after, specifically in the colonies of what would become the United States. Prior to that time, "whites" had been a collection of Europeans with little in common, and often long histories of conflict, bloodshed and conquest of one another's lands and peoples. The English, for example, did not consider themselves to be of the same group as the Irish, Germans, Italians, or French. While most Europeans by that time may have thought of themselves as Christians, there is no evidence that they conceived of themselves as a race of people, with a common heritage or destiny.
But the notion of the white race found traction in the North American colonies, not because it described a clear scientific concept, or some true historical bond between persons of European descent, but rather, because the elites of the colonies (who were small in number but controlled the vast majority of colonial wealth) needed a way to secure their power. At the time, the wealthy landowners feared rebellions, in which poor European peasants might join with African slaves to overthrow aristocratic governance; after all, these poor Europeans were barely above the level of slaves themselves, especially if they worked as indentured servants (9).
In 1676, for example, Bacon's Rebellion prompted a new round of colonial laws to extend rights and privileges to despised poor Europeans, so as to divide them from those slaves with whom they had much in common, economically speaking. By allowing the lowest of Europeans to be placed legally above all Africans, and by encouraging (or even requiring) them to serve on slave patrols, the elite gave poor "whites" a stake in the system that had harmed them. Giving poor Europeans the right to own land, ending indentured servitude in the early 1700s, and in some cases allowing them to vote, were all measures implemented so as to convince lower-caste Europeans that their interests were closer to those of the rich than to those of blacks. It was within this context that the term "white" to describe Europeans en masse was born, as an umbrella term to capture the new pan-Euro unity needed to defend the system of African slavery and Indian genocide going on in the Americas (10). And the trick worked marvelously, dampening down the push for rebellion by poor whites on the basis of class interest, and encouraging them to cast their lot with the elite, if only in aspirational terms.
This divide-and-conquer tactic would be extended and refined in future generations as well. Indeed, the very first law passed by the newly established Congress of the United States was the Naturalization Act of 1790, which extended citizenship to all "free white persons," and only free white persons, including newly arrived immigrants, so long as the latter would make their homes in the U.S. for a year. Despite longstanding animosities between persons of European descent, all blood feuds were put aside for the purpose of extending pan-Euro or white hegemony over the United States (11).
During the Civil War, the process of using "whiteness" to further divide working people from one another continued. So, for example, Southern elites made it quite clear that their reason for secession from the Union was the desire to maintain and extend the institution of slavery and white supremacy, which institutions they felt were threatened by the rise of Lincoln and the Republican Party. One might think that seceding and going to war to defend slavery would hardly meet with the approval of poor white folks, who didn't own slaves. After all, if slaves can be made to work for free, any working class white person who must charge for their labor will be undercut by slave labor, and find it harder to make ends meet. Yet by convincing poor whites that their interests were racial, rather than economic, and that whites in the South had to band together to defend "their way of life," the elites in the South conned these same lower-caste Europeans into joining a destructive war effort that cost hundreds of thousands of lives (12): their lives, in fact.
Then during the growth of the labor union movement, white union workers barred blacks from apprenticeship programs and unions because of racism, encouraged in this by owners and bosses who would use workers of color to break white labor strikes for better wages and working conditions. By bringing in blacks and others of color to break strikes, bosses counted on white workers turning on those replacing them, rather than turning on the bosses themselves. And indeed, this is what happened time and again, further elevating whiteness above class interest in the minds of European Americans (13).
The effectiveness of racist propaganda to unite whites around race, even if it meant overlooking economic interests was stunning. Nowhere was this phenomena better summed up than in the words of one white Texas fireman, who responded to the suggestion that the ranks of railroaders should be opened up to blacks by saying, "We would rather be absolute slaves of capital than to take the Negro into our lodges as an equal and brother (14)."
White Bonding and the Continued Conning of the Working Class
Today, whiteness continues to serve as a distraction to working class persons of European descent. So in the debate over immigration, it is often claimed that immigrants of color are driving down the wages of white workers, and that sealing the border is necessary to secure jobs and decent incomes for the working class. But such an argument presumes that the only thing keeping employers from giving white workers a raise (or black workers for that matter) is the presence of easily exploited foreign labor. As if closing the border would suddenly convince them to open up their wallets and give working people a better deal. In truth, however, were companies unable to exploit immigrant labor, they would simply move their entire operations to Mexico, or elsewhere, to take advantage of low-wage labor or non-existent regulations on their activities. And if they were the kind of companies that couldn't move their operations abroad (such as construction firms, for example), they would likely shift to more contingent, part-time and temp labor, which would mean that whoever ended up with those jobs would still have little or no benefits, and insecure wages. This is hardly the recipe for real improvement in the conditions of working people.
White workers would be far better off joining up with workers of color, including the undocumented, to push for higher wages and better working conditions; and they would surely be better off if those coming from Mexico were made legal and organized into unions. But thinking as whites has made this kind of cross-racial solidarity virtually unthinkable. Instead of focusing on the trade agreements that allow companies to move wherever they can get the best return on investment--agreements which have, even by the government's admission resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs--white workers are encouraged, by racism and white bonding to focus their ire on the workers themselves. After all, the workers are brown, while the owners are almost all white, which is to say that the latter are the ones with whom the white working class has been convinced to identify.
For an especially painful example of how destructive white racial thinking can be, consider St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, next door to New Orleans. In the aftermath of Katrina, St. Bernard was among the hardest hit communities. Next to the ninety-four percent black Lower 9th Ward, in New Orleans, ninety-four percent white St. Bernard was probably the most devastated part of the region. Though racially different, the communities are both predominantly working class and populated by families with moderate income; and when the federal government, via the Corps of Engineers failed to ensure the proper construction of the levees, or when the local levee board diverted levee repair funds to build interstate off-ramps for the area's casinos, both the Lower 9 and St. Bernard saw their communities utterly destroyed.
But despite the common interests of the two community's residents, if you had asked most any white person in St. Bernard about the folks who lived in the Lower 9th, prior to the storm (or for that matter today), you would have been treated (or still would be) to an uninterrupted string of racist invective. To whites in "da parish" as it's known, blacks from New Orleans are the source of all the region's problems. This is why, in 1991, more than seven in ten whites from St. Bernard voted for neo-Nazi, David Duke when he ran for Governor of Louisiana. This is why the very first thing that Parish government did upon returning home after the storm, and starting to rebuild, was to pass a blood relative law for renters: in other words, you couldn't rent in St. Bernard unless you were a blood relative of the person who was to be your landlord. It was a clear attempt to block people of color from moving in, and once legal action was threatened the Parish backed down, as they could offer no non-racist reason for passing such a law.
And yet, what has the racialized thinking of whites in St. Bernard gotten them? It didn't keep them safe from busted levees. Indeed, had they been less racist and less given to thinking with their color, they might have noticed how much they had in common with their 9th Ward neighbors. But instead of joining hands with blacks in New Orleans, and marching alongside them in Washington DC or Baton Rouge, and demanding that their joint concerns be addressed, whites in places like Chalmette have been content to sit around talking about the "niggahs," and how lucky they were not to have to live side-by-side with them.
In a final irony, when students from historically black Howard University went to the New Orleans area to do relief work earlier this year, they were assigned to work in St. Bernard, rebuilding homes: homes that were it up to Parish leaders, they wouldn't have been able to live in. When one busload of students arrived at the site to which they had been sent that day, locals promptly called police. Because after all, a bunch of black people in the neighborhood must be a sign of trouble. So much for solidarity.
Conclusion: White Solidarity Illogical and Hurtful for All
It is perhaps understandable that young whites, uninformed about the history of racism in America, might fall prey to the lure of "white rights" thinking. After all, without a full understanding of the way in which whites have been elevated above people of color, and continue to be favored in employment, housing, criminal justice and education, it would make sense for whites to wonder why things like affirmative action or Black History Month were necessary; or why groups that advocate for the interests of persons of color were still needed. If you start from the assumption that the U.S. is a level playing field, then these kinds of things might seem odd, even racially preferential. But given the historical context, not to mention the vital information regarding ongoing discrimination in the present, the importance and legitimacy of these initiatives and organizations becomes evident to all but the most unreasonable.
What is most important for white folks to understand is that our interests do not lie with the racial bonding we are being asked to embrace. Indeed, the very concept of the white race was invented by the wealthy so as to trick poor and working class European Americans into accepting an economic system that exploited them, even as it elevated them in relative terms over persons of color. As such, for whites to organize on the basis of whiteness is to codify as legitimate a category the meaning of which was always and forever about domination and privilege relative to those who couldn't qualify for membership in the club.
Finally, to organize as whites in a white-dominated society, where whites have eleven times the average net worth of blacks and eight times the average net worth of Latinos (15), have unemployment rates half that of blacks, poverty rates one-third as high as that for blacks and Latinos (16), and where whites run virtually every major institution in the nation, is by definition to organize for the continuation of that domination and supremacy. It is to seek to enshrine one's head start; to seek the perpetuation of hegemony established in a system of formal apartheid, as if to say that that system was perfectly legitimate and worthy of survival. It is fundamentally different than for a minority group to organize collectively so as to secure their interests, since minority interests and opportunities cannot be assumed or taken for granted, as a function of their lesser power, while those of the majority typically can.
And to organize on the basis of whiteness is to cast one's lot with the elite, who desperately wish for working class people to believe their enemies are each other, rather than the bosses who cut their wages, raid their pension funds, and limit their health care coverage. The more that white working people fight working people who are black and brown, the less they'll be likely to take aim at those who pick their pockets every day they show up for work: paying them only a fraction of the value of the products and services they provide, all in the name of profits which they have no intention of truly sharing with their employees. Whiteness is a trick, but sadly one that has worked for nearly three-and-a-half centuries. Only when white folks wise up, and realize that whiteness itself is our problem, will we ever stand a chance of true liberation. Until then, our whiteness will provide us privileges and advantages, but only in relation to those at the bottom of the racial caste structure. It will provide a psychological wage, as W.E.B. Dubois put it, as an alternative to real wages. Not a bad deal, until you're struggling to feed your family and keep a roof over their heads. For in times like that, real currency works a bit better.
NOTES:
(1) U.S Federal Glass Ceiling Commission, Good for Business: Making Full Use of the Nation's Human Capital. (Washington DC: Bureau of National Affairs, March 1995).
(2) Fred L. Pincus, Reverse Discrimination: Dismantling the Myth. (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2003), 18.
(3) Roberta J. Hill, "Far More Than Frybread," in Race in the College Classroom: Pedagogy and Politics, ed. Bonnie TuSmith and Maureen T. Reddy. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), 169.
(4) Sylvia Hurtado and Christine Navia, "Reconciling College Access and the Affirmative Action Debate," in Affirmative Action's Testament of Hope, ed. Mildred Garcia (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997), 115.
(5) The State of Black America 2007: Portrait of the Black Male. (NY: National Urban League 2007).
(6) Devah Pager, "The Mark of a Criminal Record," American Journal of Sociology 108, 5 (March 2003): 937-75.
(7) Russell J. Skiba, et al., The Color of Discipline: Sources of Racial and Gender Disproportionality in School Punishment (Indiana Education Policy Center, Policy Research Report SRS1, June 2000), 4.
(8) "Young White Offenders get lighter treatment," The Tennesseean. April 26, 2000: 8A; Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Results from the 2003 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (Office of Applied Studies, Department of Health and Human Services, Rockville, MD, 2004), also, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999. Summary of Findings from the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse; United States Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime in the United States, 2001. (2002); Coramae Richey Mann, Unequal Justice: A Question of Color. (Indiana University Press, 1993), 224; Jim Sidanius, Shana Levin and Felicia Pratto, "Hierarchial Group Relations, Institutional Terror and the Dynamics of the Criminal Justice System," in Confronting Racism: The Problem and the Response. eds. Jennifer Eberhardt and Susan T. Fiske, (London: Sage Publications, 1998), 142; SAMHSA, 2003 (see above): Table H.1. and calculations by the author. According to the SAMHSA report, as of 2003, there were 19.5 million current users of illegal narcotics. According to the data in the report, there were 165.4 million whites age 12 and over in the U.S., that year, and 8.5 percent of these were current users, which translates to 14 million white users. 14 million as a share of 19.5 million is 72 percent. According to the same report, there were 26.8 million blacks 12 and over in the U.S., of whom 9.7 percent were current drug users. This translates into 2.6 million current black drug users, which, as a share of 19.5 million is 13 percent. According to the report, there were 29 million Hispanics, of whom 7.2 percent, or 2 million, were current drug users. 2 million as a share of 19.5 million is 10 percent. Combined then, the black and Latino users come to 23 percent of all drug users; Human Rights Watch, Punishment and Prejudice: Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs. (Washington, D.C. Volume 12, No. 2, May 2000); Michael K. Brown, et al., Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society. (University of California, 2003), 144.
(9) Rubio, Paul. 2000. A History of Affirmative Action, 1619-2000. University Press of Mississippi; Loewen, James, 1995. Lies My Teacher Told Me, New Press; Gutman, Herbert and the American Social History Project. 1989. Who Built America? Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture and Society. (Volumes 1 and 2) NY: Pantheon; Allen, Theodore. 1994. The Invention of the White Race, Volume One: Racial Oppression and Social Control. NY: Verso; Allen, Theodore, 1997. The Invention of the White Race, Volume Two: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America. NY; Verso.
(10) Rubio, 2000; Thandeka, 2000. Learning to Be White: Money, Race and God in America. NY: Continuum.
(11) Rubio, 2000; Ignatiev, Noel, 1994. How the Irish Became White. NY: Routledge; Guglielmo, Jennifer (ed), 2003. Are Italians White? How Race is Made in America. NY: Routledge.
(12) Manning, Chandra, 2007. What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery and the Civil War. NY: Knopf.
(13) Loewen, 1995; Gutman, et.al. 1989.
(14) Brown, Michael K, Martin Carnoy, Elliott Currie, Troy Duster, David B. Oppenheimer, Marjorie M. Schultz and David Wellman, 2003. Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society. University of California: 207.
(15) Shawna Orzechowski and Peter Sepielli, Net Worth and Asset Ownership of Households: 1998 and 2000 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Current Population Reports, P70-88, May 2003), 2.
(16) The State of Black America 2007: Portrait of the Black Male. (NY: National Urban League 2007)
Posts: 3446 | From: U.S. by way of JA by way of Africa | Registered: Jan 2010
| IP: Logged |
posted
Sorry Truth but I don't agree with you at all. AA is reverse racism. Whites have just as much right to be proud of our heritage as you do. We have the right to voice that pride, the right to come together & celebrate our pride in our people. All this ohhh well you can have English Pride or Irish pride, etc is just a way of causing division amongst Whites to keep us from uniting as a people. Another JEWS ARE NOT FRICKING WHITE. Who gives a flying flip what a self hating poc Jew pretending to be White like Tim Wise has to say. He is all for the genocide of Whites & has stated so many times. I care not for what he says & do not believe a word he has to do say. We will NOT give up our identities, our heritage just to make you happy I'm WHITE and I'M DANG PROUD OF IT.
Posts: 3257 | From: Madisonville, KY USA | Registered: Nov 2011
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by DHDoxies: Sorry Truth but I don't agree with you at all. AA is reverse racism. Whites have just as much right to be proud of our heritage as you do.
He's saying it's stupid to identify more with race than economic interest.
quote:We have the right to voice that pride, the right to come together & celebrate our pride in our people.
You werent reading what he said. Were we reading the same thread? Cause he pretty much said your "pride" is expressed through norms only reflecting the culture of those who identify as white. WTF do you mean "come together and celebrate your pride." yall do that sh!t everyday!!
quote: All this ohhh well you can have English Pride or Irish pride, etc is just a way of causing division amongst Whites to keep us from uniting as a people. Another JEWS ARE NOT FRICKING WHITE.
posted
Truthandrights do you even know who Tim is?
Tim Wise is a far-left multiracialist extremist, who has called for the genocide of 'whites'.
On November 3rd, 2010, Tim Wise published a hate-filled genocidal rant, targeted at 'whites'. In it, he openly mocked and demonized 'whites', and gloated about their impending minority status (in US) and how their genocide will be 'beautiful'.
Quotes:
quote: Do you hear it? The sound of your empire dying? Your nation, as you knew it, ending, permanently? Because I do, and the sound of its demise is beautiful.
quote:And [Leftists] know how to regroup, and plot, and plan, and they are planning even now — we are — your destruction.
quote:Whatever the case, and whatever your economic station, know this… You need to drink up. And quickly. And heavily. Because your time is limited. Real damned limited. So party while you can, but mind the increasingly loud clock ticking away in the corners of your consciousness. The clock that reminds you how little time you and yours have left. Not much more now. Tick, tock. Tick, tock. Tick. Tock.
(Unlike in South and Central America where there is a problem with Mestizos, such a problem doesn't affect America, so these stats are roughly accurate).
So 223 million 'white' people.
How the heck are they suddenly on the verge of genocide or disappearing? LMAO
Also remember according to marriage statistics 98.5% of white women are married to white men, so miscegenation isn't an issue at all.
So could someone please explain how whites are on the verge of extinction as Tim has a sick fantasy of?
Posts: 1575 | From: - | Registered: May 2011
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Anglo_Pyramidologist: Truthandrights do you even know who Tim is?
Tim Wise is a far-left multiracialist extremist, who has called for the genocide of 'whites'.
On November 3rd, 2010, Tim Wise published a hate-filled genocidal rant, targeted at 'whites'. In it, he openly mocked and demonized 'whites', and gloated about their impending minority status (in US) and how their genocide will be 'beautiful'.
Oh please . He demonized the white right wing. not all whites. He wasn't calling for the deaths of whites either. Quit takin sh!t so srs.
quote:Quotes:
quote: Do you hear it? The sound of your empire dying? Your nation, as you knew it, ending, permanently? Because I do, and the sound of its demise is beautiful.
Oh boo hoo the potential end to white supremacy. Dont take his sh!t outta context he specifically SAYS its to the right wing white racists. Your just mad cause that means your ass.
quote:
quote:And [Leftists] know how to regroup, and plot, and plan, and they are planning even now — we are — your destruction.
Talkin about the RIGHT WING NOT ALL WHITE PEOPLE READ THE DISCLAIMER ON HIS SITE
quote:Whatever the case, and whatever your economic station, know this… You need to drink up. And quickly. And heavily. Because your time is limited. Real damned limited. So party while you can, but mind the increasingly loud clock ticking away in the corners of your consciousness. The clock that reminds you how little time you and yours have left. Not much more now. Tick, tock. Tick, tock. Tick. Tock.
[/QB][/QUOTE]
he also says!!
quote:*NOTE: PLEASE RE-READ THE TITLE OF THIS ESSAY BEFORE GOING FURTHER. NOTICE, IT IS AIMED AT THE WHITE RIGHT. NOT ALL WHITE PEOPLE. ANYONE WHO THINKS THIS ESSAY IS “ANTI-WHITE PEOPLE,” AS OPPOSED TO THAT SEGMENT OF THE WHITE COMMUNITY THAT IS RIGHT WING, CANNOT READ PLAIN ENGLISH. PLEASE TRY AGAIN.*
Way to take sh!t out of context.
Posts: 2508 | From: . | Registered: Nov 2011
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Anglo_Pyramidologist: Anyway despite Tim's genocidal rant...
Demographics of the United States
2010: White: 223,553,265 (72.4 %)
(Unlike in South and Central America where there is a problem with Mestizos, such a problem doesn't affect America, so these stats are roughly accurate).
So 223 million 'white' people.
How the heck are they suddenly on the verge of genocide or disappearing? LMAO
Also remember according to marriage statistics 98.5% of white women are married to white men, so miscegenation isn't an issue at all.
So could someone please explain how whites are on the verge of extinction as Tim has a sick fantasy of?
Latinos dont identify by race which means solidarity based on race is going to crumble in the US unless theyre able to make Latinos think like that which is doubtful. They havent really done it yet and theyve got 40 years and counting. BTW your poppin out your ass stats on how sh!t is right now, not projections several decades from now.
Posts: 2508 | From: . | Registered: Nov 2011
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Anglo_Pyramidologist: Anyway despite Tim's genocidal rant...
Demographics of the United States
2010: White: 223,553,265 (72.4 %)
(Unlike in South and Central America where there is a problem with Mestizos, such a problem doesn't affect America, so these stats are roughly accurate).
So 223 million 'white' people.
How the heck are they suddenly on the verge of genocide or disappearing? LMAO
Also remember according to marriage statistics 98.5% of white women are married to white men, so miscegenation isn't an issue at all.
So could someone please explain how whites are on the verge of extinction as Tim has a sick fantasy of?
Latinos dont identify by race which means solidarity based on race is going to crumble in the US unless theyre able to make Latinos think like that which is doubtful. They havent really done it yet and theyve got 40 years and counting. BTW your poppin out your ass stats on how sh!t is right now, not projections several decades from now.
The statistics will stay the same, but not the percentage. However most people don't understand this. So called 'minority' racial populations in America are increasing in number and will overtake the 'white' percentage. However this doesn't mean that whites are declining themselves in stat number, it just means the other 'minority' races are increasing. So the 200 million white figure will stay the same, but other races will increase their million figures.
Anyone who claims like Tim wise that there is going to be a genocide or racial replacement of 'whites' in 50 or so years is delusional and a fantasist. The 200 million white people in America are never going to disappear.
Posts: 1575 | From: - | Registered: May 2011
| IP: Logged |
quote:*NOTE: PLEASE RE-READ THE TITLE OF THIS ESSAY BEFORE GOING FURTHER. NOTICE, IT IS AIMED AT THE WHITE RIGHT. NOT ALL WHITE PEOPLE. ANYONE WHO THINKS THIS ESSAY IS “ANTI-WHITE PEOPLE,” AS OPPOSED TO THAT SEGMENT OF THE WHITE COMMUNITY THAT IS RIGHT WING, CANNOT READ PLAIN ENGLISH. PLEASE TRY AGAIN.*
Way to take sh!t out of context.
Hexactly.....clearly some folks in this thread either did not read it atall, or did not read it in its entirety, or skimmed through it, or read it but did not pay attention to what they were reading, or read it but did not comprehend it....
Posts: 3446 | From: U.S. by way of JA by way of Africa | Registered: Jan 2010
| IP: Logged |
Of Children and Inkblots: Trayvon Martin and the Psychopathology of Whiteness
Write this down if you need to.
Tweet it to yourself.
Put it on your Facebook wall, never to be deleted from your ever-growing and cluttered timeline.
Memorize it.
Trayvon Martin is not an inkblot, the meaning of which is yours to interpret.
He is not a walking Rorschach, whom one is free to see however one wishes.
He was not put on this Earth to be deciphered by you, dissected by you, problematized by you, labeled by you, slandered by you, or shot by one who had done all those things to his seventeen-year old black body before you even knew his name.
He was a child. A child dearly loved by his parents and sibling. And the fact that he was black doesn’t complicate that. The fact that he wore a hoodie doesn’t complicate that. The fact that he had a tattoo, a partial gold grill on his teeth, and liked to play-act in front of a web cam from time to time, posing as a man, flashing cash and acting tough doesn’t complicate that either. It is the rare boy who doesn’t tough-pose in a mirror, making muscles for some imaginary admirer, or perhaps just for himself. But it is the rare child who, having done so, finds himself suddenly the recipient of so much contempt for his cold, lifeless body — a body whose now inanimate state has been blamed for that condition because of his swagger, his clothing, his minor disciplinary problems in school, anything so as to shift attention from the real issue; namely, that Trayvon Martin is dead because George Zimmerman decided to confront him. And George Zimmerman decided to confront him because he was black, and for no other reason.
That’s right: for no other reason. The fact that Martin, according to autopsy reports, had trace elements of THC (the chemical found in marijuana) in his system means nothing. The amount of the compound was so minimal as to suggest that not only had Martin not likely smoked weed that day, but whatever he had smoked, whenever he’d smoked it, would not have been sufficient in quantity to have in any way affected his behavior the evening of his death. Which is to say that Zimmerman’s uneducated conjecture on that 9-1-1 call, to the effect that Martin looked like he was “on drugs” carries no weight whatsoever. All he was doing was walking, looking around as he did so, and talking on the phone to a girlfriend.
He wasn’t casing townhouses.
He wasn’t peeking in windows.
He wasn’t blazing up a blunt in the courtyard.
He wasn’t doing anything at all.
But being black. And male. And wearing a hoodie (in the rain, imagine).
And yes, I know: the autopsy report indicates Martin was shot at relatively close range (certainly less than a foot away given the stippling around the entrance wound in his chest), and Zimmerman’s wounds appear consistent with his claim that he shot Martin during a fight. And yes, at least one witness seems to confirm that Martin was, at one point prior to the shooting, on top of Zimmerman, punching him.
But is that all it takes for so many white folks to cavalierly dispatch with the otherwise inviolate right to life, which they would have extended (one hopes) even to Martin, prior to the release of that information? Does a black child, followed and confronted by an adult, have no right to be afraid of them? To fight back upon being accosted? To stand his ground? The claim that Zimmerman had given up on the pursuit of Martin and was returning to his vehicle when Martin blindsided him is corroborated by no one, was not believed by investigators on the scene, and is utterly discredited by Martin’s girlfriend, who heard the words exchanged between the two, and then the sound of shoving, 2-3 minutes after the end of Zimmerman’s 9-1-1 call. If one chooses to believe Zimmerman on this absurd point, it can only be because one finds the story so plausible based upon one’s own preconceived notions of black aggression, that the facts in evidence no longer matter.
Finally, does one have the right to kill a child, just because, having initiated all the drama to begin with, the first party suddenly finds himself not nearly as big and bad as he had long believed? Is getting one’s overly suspicious, meddling ass beaten a legitimate excuse for homicide?
Apparently so, if the victim is young, and black, and wearing a hoodie, and has a tattoo (even if it is a tattoo of his mother’s name), and a partial gold grill, and occasionally poses with macho swagger on a webcam, and has been known to smoke weed. Although none of these are officially listed as penalty enhancements within our nation’s justice system, let the word go out from this point forward that they have been elevated to virtual capital offense status on the streets, by a frightened, racially-anxious white public, always seeking to rationalize every death of black men, at the hands of cops, or just folks pretending to be cops.
It would be humorous were the consequences not so deadly: watching so many white folks pour out their psychological neuroses onto this dead black child.
“Have you seen him? He was huge! A football player!” came the voices of some. You can find any number of internet posts in which hysterics chime in that he was 6’2, or 6’3, intimating in the process that black males are not allowed, apparently, to be tall and still innocent of whatever wrongdoing we seek to ascribe to them. Look at the 7-11 security camera! come the shrieks from others. My God! Look how he towers over the store clerk! What rational person wouldn’t recoil from such a giant, and who among us, were we to find ourselves in the all-important role of neighborhood watch captain, like poor George Zimmerman, wouldn’t presume one such as this to be a predator of the most dastardly kind?
Which is to say that at some point between that sojourn to the corner market, and the moment at which the county medical examiner stretched out his tape measure alongside the stiff body of this hulking menace, Martin must have become a human shrinky-dink, because he was put in the ground at a mere 5’11, and 158 pounds. Not a linebacker, and not a weight-lifter; rather, a somewhat taller-than average, skinny child, confronted by a self-appointed security guard with no legal authority whatsoever; someone whom, it should be noted, would not likely have been nearly so brazen about confronting Martin had the latter truly cast the imposing and dangerous shadow being painted by many of Zimmerman’s apologists.
Again, Martin would be alive but for George Zimmerman’s suspicion of him. Period. That is not remotely arguable. Had George Zimmerman remained in his vehicle, as he was instructed to do by the 9-1-1 dispatcher to whom he spoke (and had he not taken it upon himself to follow Martin, which any neighborhood watch captain knows is not what the police want them to do), the latter would still be alive, and Zimmerman would have remained just a pathetic wanna-be, rather than a murder defendant. Even the lead investigator on the case believed Zimmerman should be charged with manslaughter and that his decision to pursue Martin was the proximate cause of the evening’s tragic events.
And among reasonable people there is also no doubt that it was Martin’s race that prompted Zimmerman’s suspicions of him. Though such a thing can probably never be proven beyond any doubt whatsoever — and ultimately the matter is not pertinent to the murder charge itself — it seems readily apparent that racial biases, be they overt or implicit, animated Zimmerman’s reaction to the presence of Martin in the neighborhood. His prior overuse of the 9-1-1 system to report on black males in the neighborhood (and only black males, even as young as 9 years of age); his reference to how “these assholes” always get away (which, given his prior calls about black males in the community suggests he was referring to the types of people about whom he had called previously); and reports from a former co-worker that he regularly made racially-insensitive remarks, together with racially-charged comments on his MySpace page, all seem indicative of someone beholden to any number of negative stereotypes about racial others.
And honestly, given the media portrayals of African Americans — and especially the overrepresentation of such persons as criminals, relative to their actual rate of offending (Rome, 2004) — can anyone really deny that Zimmerman likely viewed Trayvon Martin in such a fashion? Or that he would have responded the same way had the young man that evening been white? To believe such a thing strains credulity to the breaking point. Even those who seek to justify Zimmerman’s actions as he no doubt would — as a response to the previous break-ins in the community by black males — are admitting by definition that Martin’s race was the key determiner of suspicion, that “statistical discrimination” is legitimate (despite the clear and convincing evidence that it is not, and is actually dangerous to engage).
But if the shooting of Trayvon Martin served to give us insights into the soul of George Zimmerman alone, it would be of far less interest and worthy of far less commentary than has been afforded it thus far. Far more telling is what the case tells us about race in America, and more to the point about white people in an era of change, in an era when demographic shifts have already rendered us less than half of all new babies born, and in which, within three decades, we will cease to be an absolute majority of persons in the United States. If you think the loss of numerically dominant status (together with a thoroughly multicultural pop culture and economic anxiety unlike that faced by whites since the Great Depression) isn’t implicated in white America’s reaction to the Martin tragedy (and indeed all race-related matters in this country), you might want to check the THC levels in your blood, lest someone shoot you tonight and then try to blame you for being high.
Check out the Trayvon commentary at sites like American Renaissance — the nation’s leading highbrow white supremacist organization — or, for that matter at far more mainstream conservative websites like Free Republic or FOX Nation. The blatant bigotry, the unhinged hatred for all things black that leaps from the comments sections of those sites, under stories concerning Martin and Zimmerman, is enough to make decent people retch. It would be enough to make decent conservatives denounce those sites and all of their followers, if, that is, there were any significant number of conservatives left who truly disagreed with them, who weren’t themselves caught up in only the most thinly veiled racial resentments and anxieties. There’s a reason that John Derbyshire remained a conservative in good standing for so long, despite his year-after-year habit of making blatantly racist remarks, which only recently became a bridge too far for the folks at National Review.
There’s a reason that privileged white frat boys at Cornell University threw bottles at black students last week while chanting taunts about Trayvon in the process. There’s a reason that a white Miami firefighter thought nothing of taking to his personal Facebook page and saying that Martin, and for that matter pretty much all “urban youth,” are products of their “failed, shitbag, ignorant, pathetic, welfare dependent excuses for parents.” There’s a reason a white police officer in New Orleans likewise thought it perfectly appropriate to all but gleefully bray about Martin’s death, intoning on Facebook, “Act like a thug, die like one!” There’s a reason a firearms dealer in Florida made a financial killing selling a shooting target made to resemble Trayvon Martin, whom the target-maker calls a “thug,” and whom the entrepreneur feels deserved to die.
There is a reason that the vast majority of whites think Zimmerman was justified in shooting Martin, while few blacks agree; this, even though most whites and blacks agree that we can never know for sure what happened that night. In other words, even though we can never really know who did what to whom and why, two out of three white people are convinced the shooting was appropriate, that the ending of this child’s life was justified. The only explanation for such confidence is that whites presume black people to be scary, dangerous, suspicious, and worthy of a lower threshold of evidence before one takes action against them. There is no other explanation.
And please, let us dispense with all the self-righteous lectures about how we on the left and in the “race industry” have been quick to jump to conclusions about guilt or innocence in this case, before all the facts were in.
To begin, I know of no one who has ever said that George Zimmerman’s legal guilt was so self-evident that he ought not even have a trial. Quite the contrary, we were the ones demanding he be arrested precisely so the facts could come out, a charge could be brought and a trial commenced as soon as possible. We have weighed in as to his moral culpability, to be sure. We have inveighed against what we believe to be the racial biases that animated his acts, though very few (and certainly not I) have called for hate crime charges to be filed. Legal guilt or innocence is for a jury to decide, and it may very well be the case that the legal standard for second degree murder cannot be met in this instance. It may well be true that if a fight ensued, even if Zimmerman started it, his decision to shoot Martin may be more tantamount to manslaughter, legally, than anything else. So be it.
But this has nothing to do with the legal presumption of innocence. While there is no doubt that the presumption of innocence is a crucial component of the legal process — and indeed should be expected of all jurors in such cases — to point to those of us who have opined as to Zimmerman’s culpability as somehow shredding this sacrosanct principle, and uniquely so at that, is utterly preposterous.
The fact is, none of our perceptions are truly objective. None are free from one form or another of bias. And not only with regard to this case, but any case. I doubt seriously, for instance, that the persons now clucking their tongues at those of us whom they accuse of “presuming Zimmerman guilty” before all the facts were in, actually waited until the defense rested in the 1995 murder trial of O.J. Simpson before deciding whether or not he had killed two people. If we’re being honest, we would have to admit that most of us had already made up our minds about that one while O.J. was still in the back of the white Bronco, sixteen months earlier, or shortly thereafter.
I doubt they react with such dispassionate impartiality when watching the evening news and seeing a young black man, arrested for some crime or another across town, being brought in by police. It is simply a truism that, generally speaking, we tend to believe that people who are accused of crime probably did it, whatever it may be. But how likely we are to feel that way can and will be intensified, or diminished, depending upon the pre-existing narratives that we tend to accept about our society. So if we believe, based on our reading of the evidence or from personal experience, that the justice system is overly-punitive of black men, we will be less likely to presume guilt for black defendants than others might. Likewise, if our internal ideological narrative is one that says widespread corporate malfeasance is a real problem, we’ll probably be more likely than others with a different narrative to presume the guilt of an Enron executive, or a Wall Street banker. Conversely, if our ideological narrative is one that presumes widespread cultural dysfunction among members of the African American community, we’ll likely see guilt when confronted by an image of a black criminal suspect or defendant. According to academic research, whites are highly likely to view blacks as violent and dangerous (Peffley and Hurwitz, 1998: 90), and adherence to these stereotypes is highly correlated with a tendency to presume guilt, evidence notwithstanding, whenever the adherent is confronted with a crime that fits their mental schema regarding black criminals (Hurwitz and Peffley, 1997: 384). Likewise, if we have a positive perception of police officers, we’ll be less likely to presume that the officer accused of brutality or corruption is really guilty of either.
Basically, we all see what we’re predisposed to see. In the instant case, for those who fear black people, they will see Martin as a thug, whom it was logical to fear and to follow, given his race, his attire, and a half-dozen or so prior burglaries in the neighborhood by other black men. For those who believe anti-black bias is all too common, we will see evidence of it in Zimmerman’s actions: his initial suspicion of Martin despite the latter doing nothing indicative of pernicious intent; his previous and repeated use of the 9-1-1 system to report on the presence of black men, even children as young as 9; and his utterance of what sounds like a racial slur during his infamous call to police mere minutes before he shot Martin. For those who think some of us are too quick to allege racism, they will give credit to Zimmerman’s “black friend” who vouches for his racial ecumenism, they will hear that 9-1-1 call differently, and they will focus on the presence of Al Sharpton at the side of the victim’s family and conclude that something must be amiss with the allegations of racism, because of their pre-existing dislike of Sharpton personally.
So let’s just admit it, OK? Let’s stop pretending that we wait around for all the evidence before coming up with some general conclusions about the guilt or innocence of criminal suspects. We don’t. We all jump the gun, and the direction in which we jump relates to the direction of our general political and philosophical tendencies.
But insofar as many jump to conclusions that cast millions of people in a suspicious light, and label them deviant, dangerous and worthy of death at the slightest misstep, all because of the color of their skin, their jumps are more inexcusable, more evil, more destructive of a decent society than the conclusions to which the rest of us may leap from time to time.
Trayvon Martin is not an inkblot. But he does provide an interesting window into the psychopathology of the white conservative mind. And what one can see through that window does not bode well for this country or its culture in years to come.
SOURCES:
Hurwitz, Jon and Mark Peffley, “Public Perceptions of Race and Crime: The Role of Stereotypes,” American Journal of Political Science, 41 (2), 1997: 375-401.
Peffley, Mark and Jon Hurwitz, “Whites Stereotypes of Blacks: Sources and Political Consequences,” in Perceptions and Prejudice: Race and Politics in the United States, ed. Jon Hurwitz and Mark Peffley (New Haven: Yale University, 1998), 90.
Rome, Dennis. (2004). Black Demons: The Media’s Depiction of the African American Male Criminal Stereotype. NY: Praeger.
Playing the Friendship Card: White Lies, White Denial and the Reality of Racism
I swear, if I hear one more transparently racist person insist they aren’t racist because they have black friends, I am going to shoot them. But not because I’m violent. I’m not violent. And this I know because I have friends who are pacifists.
Yes, this is a joke, but seriously, it’s getting just about that stupid, and not simply because George Zimmerman’s “black friend” swears he’s not racist (and that that whole “coon” thing he said about Trayvon Martin before he shot him was really “goon,” and that it was meant as a term of endearment, natch). Much more, it seems that everyone who ever says or does something blatantly racist to a black person is quick to wrap themselves in the cloak of their multicolored affinity networks, as if this provided the perfect inoculation against the charge that they were anything less than purely enlightened.
I’d like to think it’s because we’ve made progress — that this feigned ecumenism was the result of a real and abiding shame at the recognition of one’s biases, and the concomitant desire to front so as to maintain one’s own sense of decency. But sadly, I think it has nothing to do with any such societal evolution. Rather, it’s just a bunch of phony twaddle spread by those who are too stupid to know what racism is, or, alternately, so cunning as to hope that the rest of us are.
I mean really now, when even Daryl Dedmon (who ran over James Anderson in Mississippi a few months ago, after saying he wanted to “**** with some niggers”), has friends who insist with straight faces that he’s not racist, and point to a couple of black associates as proof, you know that the black buddy defense is about as solid as goose **** and smells nearly as bad.
When a cop can call a black scholar a “banana-eating jungle monkey” and yet, still insist that he isn’t racist and has “no idea” where that language came from (hint: it’s racism, asshole), you know that some white folks are so congenitally ignorant as to disqualify themselves from either policing or association with remotely decent people.
When a Republican Party activist in San Bernadino sends around phony food stamp certificates, which she calls “Obama Bucks,” to her friends, and then swears this wasn’t racist — because even though they were adorned with prominent pictures of fried chicken, “everyone likes fried chicken” — you know before the sentence is even fully formed in her throat that she’s a lying crapsack.
When you come to political rallies carrying signs of the president dressed as an African witch doctor with a bone through his nose, or send around e-mails depicting the White House lawn covered in watermelons, or throw “ghetto parties” at your fraternity house, replete with blackface makeup, your claims of interracial camaraderie are not merely irrelevant to the suggestion that you just might be a racist, more to the point, they are blatant effing lies. The people who claim they have black friends and still do this kind of thing are liars, plain and simple. Every one of them. No exceptions.
How do I know? Easy. Every time I’m confronted with one of these people I ask them a series of questions, all of which are splendidly simple, yet, questions that they have never — not even one of them — been able to answer in a satisfactory manner.
First, and regarding their black friends, I ask the most obvious of all questions: Can you name them?
And not just first names please — I mean, who can’t think up “Jamal” or “Keisha” off the top of their head in a pinch — but rather, first and last name. After all, I know the first and last names of all my real friends, white, black, or otherwise.
If they manage to somehow get past this question — and only about a third do — I then ask them where their black friend (or friends if they’re really large-scale liars) grew up? After all, if asked this about a real friend, most of us would be able to answer with little trouble.
Then, for the handful who make it this far — and I mean they can be counted on a few fingers — I ask the final and ultimately fatal question.
Could you please dial their numbers on your cell phone for me, and let me speak to them?
Blank stares ensue, followed by something about how they don’t have their black friend’s numbers in their phones (unlike their white friends, whose numbers are right there, ready to be dialed or texted at a moment’s notice). So I ask for e-mail. Nope, they don’t know their e-mails either.
Mmm hmm… Of course not. And ya know why? Because they are lying.
They don’t have black friends. Not real ones at least. Knowing some black dude with whom you occasionally shoot hoops at the campus rec center does not mean you have a black friend. Engaging in small talk with a black person about your mutual affinity for hip-hop, does not mean you have a black friend. Telling the black person who just bussed your table at the restaurant “thank you,” sure as hell does not mean you have a black friend. Neither does it count if your kid happens to have a black teacher with whom you get along well at parent-teacher conferences, nor when you chat about your respective Final Four brackets with a black person around the office water cooler — nor even when, on occasion, you might go out with a bunch of your colleagues, including the darker among them, to a sports bar for wings and beer.
Friends are people with whom you share the multitude of pain and joy that life has to offer.
They are the people with whom you share real secrets, insecurities, fears, triumphs and defeats.
They are the people who know they could turn to you in a pinch, and to whom you could turn were the proverbial shoe on the other foot.
They are the people who — were they really in your life — would jack you up were you to say or do any of the incredibly stupid-ass things that you seem to do or say over and over again. And they are the kind of people that having jacked you up over your asshattery would make sure you knew exactly why you should never say or do that kind of thing again, or why, if you find it impossible to curb your stupid, should yet make damned certain never to use them and their friendship with you as a cover for your actions.
Of course — and here’s the bigger point — even if one does have black friends, this doesn’t mean that one is free from racial bias or could never act in such a way as to further racism. I mean, if personal closeness to people of color were all it took to insulate oneself from a charge of racism then, by definition, male heterosexuality would be the perfect defense against charges of sexism: to wit, all straight men could answer allegations of misogyny, no matter how blatant, with a simple, “but I’m married to a woman!” every time they ogled a woman’s breasts in public, called a woman a bitch, claimed that women who get raped “probably asked for it,” or ruminated about how no woman should be president because of, ya know, that whole menstrual cycle thing.
In short, personal affinity for someone who is of color, or a woman, or LGBT, or whatever, says nothing about how one views the larger group from which those individuals come. After all, there were many whites who supported enslavement and segregation as social systems, and yet, managed to conjure personal kindness for individual black people on a case-by-case basis. Their friendly relationships notwithstanding, they were complicit with evil, and thus, were themselves instruments of that evil. Whites who claim to have black friends (and perhaps even do), and yet view the larger black community with disdain, or view their black friends as exceptions to a general and more negative rule (like the ones who tell their black friends that they “don’t even think of them as black” as if that were a compliment rather than the prejudicial calumny it is), are indeed racists, however unwilling they may be to wear the label. Sadly, based on the social science research, this applies to most of us, for indeed, the white community in particular does (by our own admission) continue to adhere in large measure to any number of hostile and racist stereotypes about African Americans. That we may be willing to carve out a few exceptions — our own personal Cliff and Claire Huxtables — does nothing to alter this sad fact.
Even more distressing, the systemic inequalities that continue to plague our nation are capable of rendering even genuine interracial friendships moot by virtue of the fundamentally different treatment provided to those on the respective sides of that racial coin. So, for instance, I grew up with mostly black friends, for the first several years of my school experience. Having attended pre-school at an early childhood ed program at a Historically Black College (Tennessee State), most of my early peer group was black. It was black kids with whom I identified early on. It was black kids on whose ball teams I played. It was black kids with whom I hung out in the cafeteria, with only a few exceptions.
And yet, a few important facts are worth considering: facts that make those early friendships far less important to understanding my own racialized experience than they might otherwise seem.
First, my genuine affection for those friends did little or nothing to prevent them from experiencing institutional racism and race-based mistreatment in those schools. Routinely they would be punished more harshly than the white kids (myself included) for minor behavioral infractions, even though they committed those infractions no more frequently than we did. That we were friends did not imbue me with an understanding of what was happening, let alone the nerve at the time to speak out and interrupt the process to which they were being subjected. Likewise, most all the black children in those early grades — so many of whom were truly friends of mine — were tracked into basic and remedial level classes, while most all the white kids were tracked into advanced and honors classes, even though we showed no more promise (and sometimes quite a bit less) than they. And again, my closeness to those kids, personally, did not prevent me from taking advantage of my race-based privileges — or indeed, even allow me to notice that they were race-based privileges at the time — let alone to protest the unfairness of it all. So although the friendships were real, their impact on racism as a functioning social reality in the lives of my black friends, and myself, meant absolutely zip.
Second, and as I’ve written about elsewhere, my genuine connections to black people — in all likelihood far more extensive than 90 percent or more of all white Americans — did not provide an ablative hardening around my consciousness, which somehow prevented the entry of any and all racially-biased thoughts from time to time. I’ve caught myself having racist thoughts over the years, and though I have caught myself and interrupted the thoughts before they manifested as racist action, that doesn’t get me off the hook. It means that like anyone else, I am subject to the influences of my culture. It means that advertising works on us all, and in the case of racially prejudicial imagery, we’ve all been subjected to plenty of that advertising, so to speak. We can deal with that honestly and humbly — and resolve to do better tomorrow than we managed to do today — or, alternately, we can prevaricate and pretend that we haven’t a racist bone in our ostensibly colorblind bodies.
Finally, no matter how many friends of color we white folks may have, unless we are there to intervene every time they get unfairly stopped by a police officer, every time they get followed around at the mall on suspicion of shoplifting, every time they apply for a mortgage loan and face the risk of being charged higher interest, and every time they apply for a job, knowing that the employer may be looking at them as a walking, talking stereotype, then our friendships will mean pitifully little in the larger scheme of things. Only when those personal relationships translate into collective and committed action will they do black and brown folks much good.
And interestingly, white folks who are actually committed to that kind of action, and the change it would portend in the larger society, are the white folks who never feel the need to parade their interracial friendships in front of others, while the ones who wear their black and brown friends on their sleeves like trophies are the ones who rarely ever do a damned thing to alter the institutional patterns that subject said friends to myriad injustices.
Oh, and just so ya know: this is pretty much exactly what your black friends would tell you… that is, if you actually had any.
posted
Though many argue that affirmative action has made whites the victims of massive "reverse discrimination," and thus necessitated the rise of a white rights movement to secure white collective interests, the evidence simply doesn't support such a view. Although individual whites have likely experienced instances of discrimination--and anecdotal data suggests this is true, though far, far less often than the occasions when people of color experience it--there is nothing to indicate that such incidents are a widespread social phenomenon, against which whites now require organizations to protect them..
INdeed. Dataon "affirmative action" indicates that the primary beneficiaries are not evil minorities but white women. And white people have been benefiting from "affirmative action" quotas for a very long time. Mandatory "white only" quotas are well documented.
Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White 2005, WW Norton
BOOK REVIEWS
WHEN AFFIRMATIVE ACTION WAS WHITE- author Katznelson traces history to show that goals, timetables and quotas were specifically put in place to benefit whites at the expense of blacks beginning in the New Deal era. Indeed such quotas were embraced by southern whites with the specific understanding that they would benefit and not blacks. In program after program, blacks were systematically cut out of the loop and sidelined while whites pocketed the benefits and filled body count quotas. Katznelson shows how this was accomplished while whites used a seemingly "race neutral" approach.
EXCERPT from some book reviews:
Rather than seeing affirmative action developing out of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, Katznelson finds its origins in the New Deal policies of the 1930s and 1940s. And instead of seeing it as a leg up for minorities, Katznelson argues that the prehistory of affirmative action was supported by Southern Democrats who were actually devoted to preserving a strict racial hierarchy, and that the resulting legislation was explicitly designed for the majority: its policies made certain, he argues, that whites received the full benefit of rising prosperity while blacks were deliberately left out. Katznelson supports this startling claim ingeniously, showing, for instance, that while the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act was a great boon for factory workers, it did nothing for maids and agricultural laborers—employment sectors dominated by blacks at the time—at the behest of Southern politicians. Similarly, Katznelson makes a strong case that the GI Bill, an ostensibly color-blind initiative, unfairly privileged white veterans by turning benefits administration over to local governments, thereby ensuring that Southern blacks would find it nearly impossible to participate... <<end excerpt>>
Katznelson places into contemporary context the cause of racial inequity that is directly related to government policies, which are widely believed to benefit blacks but which have actually benefited whites. He eschews the more generalist focus on slavery and white supremacy as the causes of racial inequality and focuses on government policies of the New Deal and post-World War II distribution of veteran benefits. He identifies in a practical sense government policies, most of which appear neutral on their face, that were designed to restrict blacks and, in fact, impeded them from progressing commensurate with white America. The war economy and labor needs expanded opportunities for blacks and substantially reduced economic disparities. But postwar policies to promote home ownership and labor laws regarding minimum wages deliberately excluded blacks. Other policies providing the engine that produced today's middle class, including the GI benefits that financed college education, reinforced the discriminatory patterns...
Affirmative Action primarily benefits white women says conservative female author
"I regard affirmative action as pernicious — a system that had wonderful ideals when it started but was almost immediately abused for the benefit of white middle-class women. And the number one sign of it is in the universities. The elite schools were destroyed by affirmative action for women, not for blacks." --Author/lecturer Prof. Camille Paglia
If as some authors hold AA benefits mostly white women, white guys also benefit from that extra pay and perks brought home by their white wives under AA
Social security setup benefits primarily white women at the expense of blacks says conservative author
Says historian/economist Thomas Sowell, "[Social Security] is not a racial policy...but economists who have studied it have long described it as a system that transfers money from black men to white women, given the different life expectancies of these two groups.”
Other "minorities" quickly piggy-backed on a program ostensibly set up to help blacks including white women who are not a numerical "minority argues conservative author Sowell.
QUOTE: "As in other countries, however, these policies spread far beyond the initial beneficiaries. Blacks are just 12 percent of the American population, but affirmative action programs have expanded over the years to include not only other racial or ethnic groups, but also women, so that such policies now apply to a substantial majority of the American population... the top 20 percent of black income earners had their income share rising at about the same rate as that of their white counterparts, while the bottom 20 percent of black income earners had their income share fall at more than double the rate of the bottom 20 percent of white income earners. In short, the affirmative action era in the United States saw the more fortunate blacks benefit while the least fortunate lost ground in terms of their share of incomes. Neither the gains nor the losses can be arbitrarily attributed to affirmative action but neither can affirmative action claim to have advanced lower-income blacks when in fact those fell behind."
Sowell holds that immigrants classified as "minorities", suffering no past discrimination in the United States are benefitting well from Affirmative Action. The Fanjul family from Cuba for example, with a fortune exceeding $500 million - received contract set asides for minority businesses. European businessmen from Portugal received the bulk of the money paid to "minority owned construction firms" between 1986 and 1990 in Washington D.C. Asian businessmen immigrating to the United States had also received preferential access to government contracts.
Sowell also argues that while blacks are the claimed beneficiaries of a program primarily intended to benefit blacks, a huge majority of "minority and female owned" businesses are in fact owned by groups ''other'' than blacks, including Asians, Hispanics and women. In addition the vast majority of "minority" firms appeared to gain little from government set-asides. in Cincinnati for example, 682 minority firms appeared o n the city's approved list but 13% of these companies received 62% of preferential access and 83% of the money. Nationally, a miniscule one-fourth of one percent of minority-owned enterprises are certified to receive preferences under the Small Business Administration, but even within this tiny number, 2% of the firms received 40% of the money.<ref> Sowell, 2004. Affirmative Action Around the World, pp 115-147</ref>
Alleged "calamity" affecting white males "swamped" by black AA quotas is bogus, according to detailed US Dept of Labor survey of reverse discrimination cases. Most cases brought by white complainers lacked merit, courts ruled.
FROM NY TIMES ARTICLE- CITING US DEPT OF LABOR STUDIES Reverse-discrimination claims fell into two categories: individual decisions in which a white man asserted that he would have been hired for a job had he been black or female, and cases that claimed programs or plans unfairly favored women and minorities.
“Many of the cases were the result of a disappointed applicant failing to examine his or her own qualifications,” Mr. Blumrosen wrote, “and erroneously assuming that when a woman or minority got the job, it was because of race or sex, not qualifications.
Affirmative action has caused very few claims of reverse discrimination by white people, according to a draft of a report prepared by the Labor Department. The author says his findings poke holes in the theory that affirmative-action programs unfairly benefit minorities at the expense of white workers.
The report, prepared by a law professor at Rutgers University, Alfred W. Blumrosen, found fewer than 100 reverse-discrimination cases among more than 3,000 discrimination opinions by Federal district and appeals courts from 1990 to 1994.
A "high proportion" of the reverse-discrimination claims lacked merit, the review found. Reverse discrimination was established in six cases, and the courts provided appropriate relief in those cases, it said.
"This research suggests that the problem of 'reverse discrimination' is not widespread; and that where it exists, the courts have given relief," Mr. Blumrosen wrote. "Nothing in these cases would justify dismantling the existing structure of equal employment opportunity programs." Reverse-discrimination claims fell into two categories: individual decisions in which a white man asserted that he would have been hired for a job had he been black or female, and cases that claimed programs or plans unfairly favored women and minorities.
"Many of the cases were the result of a disappointed applicant failing to examine his or her own qualifications," Mr. Blumrosen wrote, "and erroneously assuming that when a woman or minority got the job, it was because of race or sex, not qualifications." http://www.nytimes.com/1995/03/31/us/reverse-discrimination-complaints-rare-labor-study-reports.html (Blumrosen, A. (1996: pp 5-6) US Department of Labor: Discrimination COmplaints Review (1990-1994))
Other detailed studies BY SCHOLARS show very little reverse discrimnation against whites in employment, exposing the bogus propaganda spun by racist "biodiversity" proponents. Most discrimination complaints brought by white men actually involve sex, not race discrimintion, and the main opponent of the white men in said complaints was WHITE women.
"Reverse discrimination is rate both in absolute terms and relative to conventional discrimination. The most direct evidence for this conclusion comes from employment-audit studies. On every measured outcome, African-American men were much more likely than white men to experience discrimination, and Latinos were more likely than non-Hispanic men to experience discrimination (Heckman and Siegelman 1993, p. 218) Statistics on the numbers and outcomes of complaints of employment discrimination also suggest that reverse discriination is rare. According to national surverys, relatively few whites have experienced reverse discrimination. Only 5 to 12 percent of whites beleive that their race has cost them a job or promotion, compared to 36 percent of African AMericans... Alfred Blumrosen's (1996, pp. 5-6) exhaustive review of discrimination complaints filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission offers additional evidence that reverse discrimination is rare... [of cases] two percent were by white men charging sex, race or national origin discrimination (three-quarters of these charged sex discriminatin) and 1.8 percent were by whote women charging race discrimination (Blumrosen p. 5)" --Tracy E. Ore - 2005. The social construction of difference and inequality p. 390
Other detailed studies show trivial to almost no "reverse discrimination" against whites in employment. These studies note that reverse discrimination has occurred, but its prevalence is rare QUOTE: "Barbara Reskin 1998) also acknowledges that some white men are hurt. In the four-page section n reverse discrimination, she discusses studies showing that few EEOC cases involving charges of dsicrimination filed by white men (Blumrosen 1995, 1996) and the few federal appeals court cases involving discrimination where white men are the plaintiffs (Burstein, 1991; She concludes, "Although rare, reverse discrimination does occur." --Fred Pincus 2010. Reverse discrimination: dismantling the myth
Curiously, the background of "Affirmative Action" quotas- Richard Nixon's "Philadelphia Plan", does not reveal any hard push for such quotas by black leaders at the time. The main drive for the quota plan seemed to have come from elsewhere. History does not show blacks lined up at the time clamoring for quotas, as alleged by assorted right wingers...
QUOTE: "What needs to be explained however, is why, if affirmative action was the result of civil rights activists moving into the halls of government, very few calls for affirmative action programs were heard at the time of their "capture".. Besides localized demands for quotas in large cities, and a brief national discussion of their possibility before the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, during which civil rights leaders made clear their opposition to quotas, very little was heard about the issue at all...
"key civil rights movement figures ignored or opposed the Philadelphia Plan when it was introduced an affirmative action policy in the construction industry in 1969... David Skrennty devotes an entire section in his book, The Ironies of Affirmative Action, to this very question. Noting that, in fact, none of the civil rights groups asked for affirmative action before it was implemented, he asks why, if racial preferences was in their interest, they did not demand it in 1964? His answer is simple: 'Anything beyond color blindness has a strange taboo-like quality. Advocacy of racial preferences was one of those 'third rails' of American politics: touch it and you die." --Yuill, K, 2006. Richard Nixon and the Rise of Affirmative Action. p- 2-14
1) the white architect of Watergate pushed AA quotas, knowing that this "third rail" would be a "wedge issue" in the Democrat camp, dividing its customary constituencies- blacks, Jews, union members, white ethnics, etc? And that the "wedge" would give certain right wingers a perennial bonus talking point- railing against "undeserving" or allegedly "unqualified" minorities "taking our jobs with quotas"?
or
(2) Could it be that the white initiators of Affirmative action quotas foresaw it would create inevitable demand that OTHER groups also get quotas, most notably white women? Hence in this view, blacks would be pushed out as front men to be used as justification, and take most of the negative fallout/backlash, but white constituencies would quietly reap most of the benefit behind the scenes? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Historically many white unions have systematically discriminated against blacks, while speaking the language of progressive "brotherhood" and "merit." In some workplaces, skilled blacks trained lesser skilled whites who then moved up the ladder, while the blacks were denied promotion not simply by outright discrimination but by a subtle web of union rules and restrictions.
-------------------- Note: I am not an "Egyptologist" as claimed by some still bitter, defeated, trolls creating fake profiles and posts elsewhere. Hapless losers, you still fail. My output of hard data debunking racist nonsense has actually INCREASED since you began.. Posts: 5905 | From: The Hammer | Registered: Aug 2008
| IP: Logged |
posted
While Tim Wise likes to present himself as an ''ordinary white guy'' [sic] the reality is the complete opposite.
You can read his bio on various sites -
quote:Tim Wise was born in Nashville, Tennessee to father Michael Julius Wise (a Jew) and LuCinda Anne [née McLean] Wise (of Scottish ancestry). As a boy, he attended Hebrew school.
Sure, Jews are Caucasoid ('white') however Tim likes to present himself as an ordinary 'white' household American, when in fact Jews are less than 1% of white America's population.
Tim has further attempted to deny, or cover up his Jewish ancestry...
Private correspondence between Wise and a Wikipedia administrator is reproduced here:
quote:As for the term 'white', I am the one who has been putting that back [into the 'Tim Wise' Wikipedia entry] in every time it gets taken out. I think it is important that people know I am a white antiracist ally...I do not want the focus to be on my Jewishness...being Jewish a) has nothing to do with my views on race and b) allows racists to too easily dismiss me as "naturally being leftist" since, in their mind, Jews are a distinct and destructive race of evildoers who don't even have the right to speak about whiteness...so please, leave the white descriptor in place and do not post about me being Jewish —Tim Wise, 29 April 2009. [Bolding added]
Now we move onto some info about him.
Far from being an 'ordinary white guy' [sic] Tim from a young age embraced Marxism:
quote:Tim Wise in the 1980's demonstrated in favor of the Marxist terror group the ANC and against the government of South Africa. He helped form a student group to hold pro-Marxist-ANC rallies at his university, Tulane.
Later he got involved, with a communist organization known as "Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism".
How many ordinary white people are Marxists who join anti-racist groups?
And since the 1980's, he's still involved with far-left (communist) anti-racist groups.
There is absolutely nothing normal or ordinary about him.
Posts: 1575 | From: - | Registered: May 2011
| IP: Logged |
UBBFriend: Email this page to someone!
![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
. He demonized the white right wing. not all whites. He wasn't calling for the deaths of whites either. Quit takin sh!t so srs.![[Wink]](wink.gif)
![[Embarrassed]](redface.gif)
Hexactly.....clearly some folks in this thread either did not read it atall, or did not read it in its entirety, or skimmed through it, or read it but did not pay attention to what they were reading, or read it but did not comprehend it....
Printer-friendly view of this topic