The only verb you really have in here is… watching. Like it’s all passive. Watching, welcoming… And you even say it’s “inevitable.” No it’s not. Inevitable suggests we can’t slide back, and we already have. Inevitable implies that no matter what you do, this thing will happen. I don’t think that’s true. I think we have some serious, hard and uncomfortable work to do to make this happen. There is nothing inevitable about it. And I also think we can fail, I think we can absolutely see massive losses of life in failure.
And now in your reply, slid back recently? It’s not recent. That’s what I am trying tell you. These problems have been building and build and been problems for decades… it’s just people are more open about it now, like to the point where they’re not trying to hide it but it was always there.
It’s possible for the majority of the country to be making progress while the more despicable members of society have become more outspoken. They’re more comfortable being more open about it because the current administration has promoted and encouraged it. That doesn’t mean we’re not still making progress overall.
Man, that is a pretty pessimistic way of looking at history.
Let’s take a Biblical-literalist’s view and tag civilization at just 6000 years (rather than 20 or 100 thousand or whatever). That means that it took us 5846 years to abolish state-sponsored chattel slavery, but only 100 more years to grant equal voting rights to all ethnicities here in the US. [Note: I’m citing 1864 as when the last major Western power abolished slavery; in actuality it was legal in some countries until 1981.]
Cleisthenes established the first participatory democracy 2526 years ago. It took 2401 more years for a country to give women an equal vote (thanks Kiwis!), but just eighty-seven years from there before a woman was elected as a major country’s head of state (takk Icelanders!).
And yeah, there’s lots of room for improvement here. I’m not saying that things shouldn’t move faster than they are, but sometimes a little perspective is in order.
What progress are we claiming? The number of black men in prison is staggering. We have data that shows even those who make it have higher chance to slide back down into poverty. Black women have incredibly high infant mortality rates, compared to whites. How much time during Obama’s presidency did we talk about his religion and whether he was a citizen. You can be shot for holding cellphone, or sitting in a car, or lying in the street with your hands up…if you’re black.We had textbooks widely used up until the 70s talking about how happy slaves were… we still have problems with textbooks in the south… teaching today’s generation. It’s easier to call someone kneeling at a sport game a traitor than it is to label a confederate officer, a literal traitor, a traitor. And segregation, there is evidence that our neighbors are still largely segregated and we have politicians that want more segregation.
And today, when someone discriminated against at a Starbucks we still get the auto, there must be more to the story, and the woman who took the video literally realizes that despite all the stuff that came before, people believed her because she was white… they would not have believed those two men without her.
Well we elected a black President. 43 white Presidents preceded him. That’s progress, if nothing else. And yes, he was followed up by the worst President in the country’s history but still. The Trump Presidency has definitely fueled the fires of racism and divide but voters seems to be turning against that in the various special elections we’ve had this year.
I don’t have solutions for the various shitty people that continue to live here but it feels like the younger generations are much more open-minded than the ones that have come before. There will always be shitty people but I feel that number is slowly dropping. No stats or facts to back that up but overall, I feel attitudes are improving. Obviously shitty things will keep happening in the meantime but I’m hopeful that each year will result in fewer of them. It would help if Fox News simply ceased to exist tomorrow as well.
I’ve said my piece and stand by it. We both seem to agree racism is still a severe problem with much work to be done, and I am not going to get into a protracted argument about the wording of the interpretations of just how severe the problem or how much work or whatever.
Just know that I agree with you and stand with you. Black prosecution and incarceration rates are staggeringly out of proportion with the rest of the population. Shooting black men in their own backyards for holding a cell phone in the dark should never happen. The Starbucks thing made my blood boil when I saw it. Institutionalized racism is real, it’s dangerous and it needs to be eradicated. Great strides were made for several decades…then America just kind of put racism on the back burner…like “oh, they’re equal now, so it’s all good right?”. Obviously it is NOT all good, not in the least. As I mentioned upthread, to eradicate systemic racism, we must change the system itself. Education reform, justice system reform, social services reform, immigration reform, voter registration and electoral reform, etc… That starts at the polls, this November.
While we definitely have had progress, I fear for regression. A lot of the progress came about through social and societal pressure, like calling someone the N word would get you looked at like a shithead by all types of people.
Unfortunately, I feel like that social and social pressure is weakening with how prevalent social media has become. It’s too easy to avoid the social pressure of not acting like a douchebag when you can so easily find and communicate in a selective bubble of like-minded douchebags. You have the Youtube personality where people think it’s funny to do racist and shitty things (like the drink boil water challenge) and there are no consequences because no one cares about what those around them thinks, only people in their bubble.
Why does it feel that way to you somehow mean more than it not feeling that way to others, some of whom are actually the target of racism? Is it because you don’t see it? Why would you see it?
And is it really that unreasonable to think that maybe the people experiencing the racism might have a better gauge on whether or not the newer generations are less racist than the older ones than the ones who do not experience it?
There might be a lot of truth to this. I remember being so shocked the first time I was in a public Halo 2 match, with everyone mic’d up. Just the racist vitriol was so shocking and pervasive. But this was back in 2005. Now, 13 years later, it’s just become part of the background noise. Oh yeah, public matches? Games don’t even bother providing voice chat in a lot of FFA matches anymore, because everyone knows they’ll fill the airwaves with vile shit.
It seems like we can’t go a couple of months before some eSport kid, these are not boomers, winds up in quasi trouble for his racist/bigoted mouth… you know, the ones that millions follow and listen to.
Half of them are simply sheltered morons. It’s no excuse but in some ways they are “trying to be cool” and keep the attention on themselves. It’s why I’m uncomfortable with the entire way entertainment has moved starting with reality tv. The YouTube scene is the ultimate bottom feeder evolution of that (with some exceptions of course).
These are young men not kids. We don’t have to keep giving them a pass. When you get in front of a camera and talk about how you hate a name because you falsely claim it’s a black name… that just makes that person a pos, and not just a regular pos but one with a mic and a ton of actual kids listening to him.
I’ve stated this before and while anecdotal with a very small data point, I believe a lot of these kids have grown up knowing absolutely nothing about the “N” word. Case in point, I heard my son use it one day when gaming with friends, and I had him disconnect & sit down with me.
When I further asked him if he knew the history of this word, he had zero clue. I then spent the next 15-20 minutes, along with my wife, explaining the various connotations around this including popular books & movies, along with the fact that he may see it get used between black people in a more affectionate manner which should not be confused that it’s OK for others to use it, including him or his friends. I asked him never to use the word again. Ever. About 3-4 months later, I asked him if he & his friends were using it anymore, because i was curious and he said “no, it’s not used anymore”. I would like to think that my interception was a big part of this. Who knows if I hadn’t of interjected or not noticed?
This was a talk that I had with him, because like it or not, the background & history of the word is simply not being discussed, neither in school nor at home (until that day). So where are they supposed to get the “notice” that this is not a good word?
So for me, it’s entirely conceivable that these kids are growing up knowing very little of the history, and seeing and hearing it in other areas, they use it w/out any knowledge of the background.
How do you address this so that the new generation knows? How can you hold them accountable if they never received the feedback that it’s simply one of the worst derogatory words you can use?
