Systemic Racism: Fact or Myth?

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_Dr Exiled
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Re: Systemic Racism: Fact or Myth?

Post by _Dr Exiled »

EAllusion wrote:
Wed Jun 17, 2020 3:54 pm
Study after study shows that blacks use drugs about at the same rates as whites and sell them at slightly lower rates. Yet, blacks are drastically more likely to be searched for drugs. If drugs are found, they are more likely to be charged with a crime. If charged with a crime, they are more likely to be convicted. If convicted, the are more likely to receive a harsher sentence. Every step of the way magnifies the disparity in outcome that when you end up looking at the end state, blacks are vastly more likely than whites to be in prison for drug crimes even though all the independent evidence suggests they do not commit more drug crimes. Why this happen is a combination of prejudices of individual actors in the system and systems being structurally designed is such a way that blacks are put at significant disadvantage. It's both biased prosecutors/judges *and* the fact that police are expected to search people more in black-dominated neighborhoods.

This, in total, is one example of what is meant by systemic racism.

Posting a video of some black people assaulting someone and asking "where's the systemic racism in this?!" makes it seem like you suffered brain damage in an explosion in your makeshift meth lab. It's so dumb, it's hard to take the idea of engaging you seriously.
Additionally, the sentences for possession of crack cocaine (mostly in african american neighborhoods) are disproportionately more severe than for powdered cocaine (more likely to be used by more affluent whites).
"Religion is about providing human community in the guise of solving problems that don’t exist or failing to solve problems that do and seeking to reconcile these contradictions and conceal the failures in bogus explanations otherwise known as theology." - Kishkumen 
_EAllusion
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Re: Systemic Racism: Fact or Myth?

Post by _EAllusion »

Dr Exiled wrote:
Wed Jun 17, 2020 6:07 pm

Additionally, the sentences for possession of crack cocaine (mostly in african american neighborhoods) are disproportionately more severe than for powdered cocaine (more likely to be used by more affluent whites).
Yeah. I'm always a little wary of bringing up this point because there are people who think that if you resolve powdered/crack penalty disparities you've fixed the problem when that's really just a cherry on top. I don't think that's you, but it comes up too often.

Aside from the injustice of it all, what's frustrating is there are people who look at the racial disparities in drug crime sentences and just think, "Well, black people are more likely to be criminals. What do you expect? Should we just like black criminals go free to make things artificially equal? Is that what you want?!" Like, the research is super well established on this one, and it doesn't budge them because if it's not overt racism driving that opinion, there's a fundamental indifference behind that attitude.
_Icarus
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Re: Systemic Racism: Fact or Myth?

Post by _Icarus »

From 4th grade to 10th grade I attended a small private school in my birth town of Phenix City, Alabama. It was called Glenwood and it still operates as one of the more expensive top tier schools in that area. There were roughly 200-500 students between kindergarten and 12th grade, depending on the year. Up until the time we moved to metro-Atlanta area in April 1987, this school prohibited black students from attending. So I grew up having nearly zero interactions with black kids. Our only exposure to the black community at that time was when we crossed the bridge over the Chattahoochee into Columbus and had to drive through the poorer areas where they'd always be sitting outside on their porches. My parents would frequently refer to them as "Porch Monkeys." We had it ingrained into our psyche that they were almost like a different species from us. They were lazy, violent, drug addicts, useless people who couldn't take care of themselves. My first interaction with black kids came in 1987 at Lassiter High School in Marietta Georgia. There were nearly 4,000 students from 9th to 12th grade and fewer than 100 black kids but Lassiter's was one of the more affluent districts in the area. Glenwood now allows black kids. This policy change happened sometime after we moved away, and I don't know the details about how that happened. But I do remember that black athlete students tried to apply while I was a student there and the parents of the majority of students would protest their proposed inclusion and their voices drowned out the little support their inclusion received from any of the students. So for people who keep saying slavery was 200 years ago therefore there is no more racism and America has nothing to apologize for, you're ignorant as all get out. Systemic racism didn't stop when slavery ended, it only evolved and acclimated with a post-civil rights era. Today it exists everywhere, and it is violently expressed via our justice systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenwood_ ... ble_alumni
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_EAllusion
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Re: Systemic Racism: Fact or Myth?

Post by _EAllusion »

I just found out that Vera Lynn just died. My reaction, which I'm sure is common, was "Vera Lynn was alive?!"

Vera Lynn would've been an adult when Martin Luther King Jr. was a child. And he seems like a ghost of the distant past to me. There are people alive today who personally knew former slaves. Profound discrimination reaches into the present, but even our imagined distant past isn't that old.
_Some Schmo
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Re: Systemic Racism: Fact or Myth?

Post by _Some Schmo »

EAllusion wrote:
Thu Jun 18, 2020 3:15 pm
I just found out that Vera Lynn just died. My reaction, which I'm sure is common, was "Vera Lynn was alive?!"
Mine too. That and... I should listen to Pink Floyd's The Wall again.

Does anybody here remember Vera Lynn?
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_Res Ipsa
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Re: Systemic Racism: Fact or Myth?

Post by _Res Ipsa »

Some Schmo wrote:
Thu Jun 18, 2020 7:00 pm
EAllusion wrote:
Thu Jun 18, 2020 3:15 pm
I just found out that Vera Lynn just died. My reaction, which I'm sure is common, was "Vera Lynn was alive?!"
Mine too. That and... I should listen to Pink Floyd's The Wall again.

Does anybody here remember Vera Lynn?
I don’t even remember whether I ever knew about her. This does feel like a Pink Floyd kind of day.
​“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”

― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
_Gunnar
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Re: Systemic Racism: Fact or Myth?

Post by _Gunnar »

That was indeed a powerful video in the OP. It both points out the inherent injustice and maliciousness of systemic racism and its inherent stupidity. Especially the stupidity of deliberately making it much harder for blacks to earn and adequate living and then blaming them for being too often desperate enough to turn to turn to crime for mere survival when legal options available to them seem inadequate to insure it. Then higher crime rate among poor blacks caused by that systemic discrimination against them is used to further justify and even amplify the built in systemic racism, resulting in more hateful, thoughtless racists like Ajax. I feel like crying over the fact that there still so many bigots like him who still can't see the inherent irrationality, injustice and harmfulness of attitudes like his. I can't help but believe that ultimately, he and his loved ones are potentially as or even more damaged, in some ways, by his own bigotry as the the objects of his bigotry.

As if it wasn't already stupid enough, Ajax even had abject temerity and ignorance to suggest in another thread that the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, which ruled the unconstitutionality of segregation, actually contributed to, if not actually creating, the racial tensions and turmoil we are now experiencing. Why is it so inconceivable to some that people of different races, cultures and religious beliefs could and should get along amiably and respectfully with each other and even love each other?
Last edited by Guest on Mon Jul 06, 2020 3:39 am, edited 4 times in total.
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_Jersey Girl
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Re: Systemic Racism: Fact or Myth?

Post by _Jersey Girl »

I don't know how this thread has developed and I don't feel like looking back over it at the moment. The other day was visiting with one of my offspring and discussing the current history that is being made in real time. Shared my memories of the 68 riots and the civil rights movement, how I worked in the Deep South at a certain time and years later (when reading up on Freedom Fighters and the Movement) realized that I may have been working with KKK members or adults whose daddy's were KKK. Anecdote to follow on that in a sec. We discussed how incomplete school curriculum was and I shared going back to grade school what I was taught about Christopher Columbus and how sanitized the curriculum was in both our experiences. All kinds of things we discussed.

I noted that we are witnessing history being made this very second and how the faces of the protesters have changed from the 60's and how this "push" is different than that time period.

She is reading a book about systemic racism titled, "White Rage". Told me about the information contained therein. I told her I wanted to read it after she's done. There's a friend in line ahead of me. It sounds like something we all should read. Basically the game has always been rigged against Black people and how the manipulation was carried out.

Note: If I ever made a contribution in my life, it's that I raised some decent human beings.

Here's the brief story. I was working in the DS dispatching drivers and heavy equipment operators. They would come in my office on break and shoot the breeze. One day they were congregated in my office and in the group was a Black female driver named, H. H was a single woman in her 30's. The guys were ranging 30-50 year olds. All white. I was in my mid-20's and the only Yankee in the place. They didn't like me at first. I guess I grew on them. ;-)

So they are all in there talking on break rotating out in shifts in my office because the taxi drivers couldn't all go down at the same time. It was a mix of taxi drivers, deuce and a half, semi drivers, and crane operators. H was among them all chit chatting and laughing and what not. G was a burly crane operator, probably 230 lbs easy and 6 foot tall, not that this matters but it did in terms of what took place. I was probably 100 pounds soaking wet at the time if I was even that, tiny petite. They called me Lil Bit. Prior to this incident I thought we were all good working friends with good relationships. Lots of laughs and all that.

H walks out of the room to go back "on". As soon as the door closed, G says "Why, I'd like to just cut her little monkey tail off". :eek:

And I spun around in my chair saw that some of the guys were smiling this weird smile and I said, "What did you just say?". And he said it again, "I'd like to cut her little monkey tail off". :surprised:

To which I replied to the effect, "How come you didn't say that to her face? Get the hell out of my office right now and don't let me hear crap like that coming out of your mouth ever again, do you hear me?" "Well, okay..." and he turned and left.

I cannot fully express what that felt like to me. As soon as he said that, I could feel an adrenaline rush like my blood was boiling or something. Fight or flight. In an instant, I chose fight. And those smiles? Those snarky smiles they had on them. But even though it was a little scary, I felt satisfied that I drew the line that day.

So probably within 5 years or so ago, when reading about the Movement, I realized that it wasn't so many years before that incident that a bus was burned in the bus station in that same town and that one or more of those guys daddy's could've been Klan members or at least supported the Klan.

What the heck is my life about anyway, right?
Failure is not falling down but refusing to get up.
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_Meadowchik
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Re: Systemic Racism: Fact or Myth?

Post by _Meadowchik »

EAllusion wrote:
Thu Jun 18, 2020 3:15 pm
I just found out that Vera Lynn just died. My reaction, which I'm sure is common, was "Vera Lynn was alive?!"

Vera Lynn would've been an adult when Martin Luther King Jr. was a child. And he seems like a ghost of the distant past to me. There are people alive today who personally knew former slaves. Profound discrimination reaches into the present, but even our imagined distant past isn't that old.
My mother was born and raised in Texas, and her grandmother remembered former slaves working for their family when she was little.
_Icarus
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Re: Systemic Racism: Fact or Myth?

Post by _Icarus »

Some of the best arguments I am hearing from the BLM movement regarding reforming the police:

- End the failed drug war that militarizes police and puts both them and everyone else needlessly in harm’s way.
- End qualified immunity and police unions that make policing free from any meaningful accountability. (Cops who are caught on video planting drugs are still keeping their jobs, for example)
- Fundamentally change what we need police for. Government agents with guns don’t need to solve all of society’s problems. This attitude is getting a lot of people hurt, including police officers.
-Insert the many other great arguments for reform

The arguments I am hearing from everyone else:

-I support the blue
"One of the hardest things for me to accept is the fact that Kevin Graham has blonde hair, blue eyes and an English last name. This ugly truth blows any arguments one might have for actual white supremacism out of the water. He's truly a disgrace." - Ajax
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