black321 wrote: 
you missed the bit about being imposed instead of bought into. That is the critical part. That is where the word oppression comes in, and only then. Astoundingly, a lot of minority cultures have indeed bought into Western values. 

But yes, you are right, cultural exchange and communication is key to resolution and moving forward. But this also means people have to have an open ear to what minority groups have to say and why they are saying it. Unfortunately that is very frequently not the case with the pertinent bits getting lost in translation.

 westslope wrote: 
exactly.

 steeler wrote: 
absolutely. We are back to Lazy's point about having to continually fight for these rights. 

Nevertheless, when you are a member of the dominant culture it is very easy to be culturally deaf to the views of a minority culture and merely assume that your culture, because dominant is somehow universal. It's not. Universality will only be endowed by universal buy-in.

Case in point:
The European perspective: NZ Maori have (and always did) full rights under the law in NZ. Not only that, but they (well most of them) signed a contract (Waitangi) with the imperial powers, ultimately leading to billions in reparations paid down the road for breaches of the original contract. They are treated fairly and can get ahead if they want to (as evidenced by any number of very successful Maori).
Maori perspective: Pakeha brought in unimagined technology, a radically new concept of law, Christian religion, social structures, etc. and urbanisation, from which Maori culture is still reeling. Europeans also decimated the native forest (95% of it to be precise) pushed Maori off collectively owned land, and ultimately, via their technology have brought the planet to the brink of a mass extinction event. Worst of all though, is that Europeans desecrated the natural environment that was sacred to them and continue to do so.

Just taking the starting point of these two cultures illustrates the gulf in the buy-in to any set of values the dominant culture may want to assert, no matter how "fair" it might appear to be. 

*edit, and I haven't even mentioned the wars.

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote:

Semantics again perhaps, but to me, you’re mixing apples and oranges.

Certain values or cultures dominate in societies/countries, just like most societies employ hierarchies. Trying to reword this as racism, a politically charged word, is inappropriate.
Even using the word oppression instead, I don’t see current systemic examples.

But…people and their cultures favor certain values, often at the expense of just about every other group or culture, until that new, smaller, culture continues to contribute to the dominant culture, and result in its own values being incorporated.

While it’s important to focus on accepting different/minority values, it’s also important for those same minorities to focus on exposing the virtues of their own values…to becoming incorporated. We can’t tax, legislate, redistribute…this (not that that is what you are arguing for, but it does seem to be the intent of many groups on the left), it has to be done by the individual.

The primary reason to dig up the past is to understand where we are now, and how to move forward.
Ever be in therapy with someone who only wants to argue the past to support how they were wronged, why they have a grudge against you...? They are hurt people, but don't want to really move forward.

All cultures evolve, as do values… evolving towards a more perfect union.

Everybody is racist.  If you think of racism as a form of confirmatory bias.    I am not sure that I have ever met anybody who is not racist.

What matters are those who act on their confirmatory bias.  Or more to the point, those who steadfastly refuse to revise their confirmatory bias in the light of new information.  


To explain some 'racist' behaviour, many individuals do not object to a particular 'race' per se but rather object to the behaviour and characteristics associated with that race (or identifiable group of people).   In many cases, the so-called 'racists' object to the social norms and conventions of the different people.  

Lots of well-educated self-styled liberals and progressives have no understanding of this and that explains why they so generously give away common property to others that does not really belong to them in the first place.  

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote:

Got the point, and it is well-taken. But not necessarily  mutually exclusive of the point I was making.  People — especially those in minority groups — are more likely to voluntarily buy into a system if there is a perception that it is a fair one and fairly administered. 

 black321 wrote: 
no, I think that is missing the point. To use my crude structure, merely putting Type Two racists (who do not distinguish on skin colour) into the executive positions of a system that is inherently based on cultural domination is not going to cut it. 

Note that this system doesn't have to be racist per se  - it might even be the best and fairest system ever invented (which you might argue the US system is). But if it is imposed instead of bought into, it remains a system of cultural oppression. That is the point. People have to buy into it voluntarily.

PS and yes these issues are pretty universal around the globe nowadays. 

 steeler wrote:
I think that's closer to the truth.
Most of our systems are inherently neutral, but those with inhabit/run them are not. 

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote:

So  not racism, but a value system? Yeah, getting into semantics, but this is important in unfolding the "problem."
Arguably, this is a bigger issue for Europe, than the melting pot of the U.S.

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote:
Systems can only be as neutral as those who inhabit/run them.

 black321 wrote: 
see my response below. It is not that the systems are intrinsically biased or racist in the sense of excluding people on the basis of their skin color. It is the mere fact that the system itself is an import imposed upon another culture. Only when that other culture freely buys in to the values you are peddling can you rest easy. 

Don't get me wrong, I think the US values are among the best humankind has ever managed. But you have to allow minority cultures to buy into them voluntarily. And when their execution routinely exhibits a cultural or racial bias you are not doing yourselves any favour in trying to sell them.

 R_P wrote: 
yep. When I was a young student I was heavily involved in the HART movement in NZ when the South African Springboks were invited to tour NZ during the UN ban on sporting contact with apartheid SA. We fought hard. Some of us lost teeth. My best mate lost his cheek bone. Amazingly no one got killed. We thought we were the angels on the side of the right and good. 

After it was all over, we had a convention and a young Maori kid got up and said something like "you white people are shit. You stand up and fight for the rights of black South Africans thousands of miles away and you don't give a fuck about the black people here at home."

He was right of course. And Jiggz, if he is reading, is also no doubt apoplectic about us pansy-faced white liberals pulling (from his perspective) the rug out from under his feet.

I get it. I understand both sides. But in the end, the Maori kid was right. It took me a long time to realise there are two stages to racism. The first is obvious blatant racism.  Those who exclude others merely on the basis of the colour of their skin. That is easy to identify and relatively easy to resist (though it remains stubbornly persistent).

But the second stage is much more elusive and hard to understand. This has nothing to do with skin colour but on the dominance of the values of the prevailing culture swamping the values of the  minority culture. 

To put it bluntly, type one racism distinguishes on skin colour alone. Type two not on skin colour but allegiance to a certain set of values. But type two is just as pervasive and racist as type one. 

You can identify type two racists as those who loudly proclaim "I'm not racist, some of my best friends are black or hispanic" or whatever, yet nevertheless ruthlessly pursue an agenda of cultural domination and suppression.

 

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote:
Hmm, which systems are biased/racist? 
I'm sure there are still a couple of examples, but a systemic issue?

The Mantra of White Supremacy
The idea that anti-racist is a code word for “anti-white” is the claim of avowed extremists.

How many Americans know that the claim that anti-racism is harmful to white people is one of the basic mantras of white-supremacist ideology? Americans are familiar with white-supremacist movements like the Klan, skinheads, neo-Nazis, and the Proud Boys. But they don’t seem to recognize white-supremacist ideology—the most venomous form of racist ideology. I suspect that many Americans don’t know how much white-supremacist ideology shapes their political thought and America’s political discourse, and allows juries to exonerate racism and convict anti-racism.

With his ANTI-WHITE MANIA graphic, Tucker Carlson yet again presented the most dangerous mantra in American politics: Attacks on racism are really attacks on white Americans that lead to white people being harmed. “Anti-racism is anti-white” is the old and explosive mantra of avowed white supremacists. It has been their organizing vehicle, fueling their rage, fueling their backlashes, fueling their delusions.

All year long, this white-supremacist mantra has been fueling what Martin Luther King Jr. once called the “white backlash” against last year’s racial reckoning. It is inciting voter-suppression policies and insurrections (to protect white political supremacy). It is inciting swarms of lies, insults, threats, and simulated killings of anti-racist Americans (who are branded as anti-white). It is inciting the false claim that anti-racist books and education are harmful to white children. It is inciting bans of those books and lessons. It is inciting the second assassination of King to justify those bans.

Some Democrats have predictably made it a bipartisan affair. As Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the 1619 Project, recently told the Los Angeles Times, “This idea that racial reckoning has gone too far and now white people are the ones suffering is the most predictable thing in the world if you understand American history.”

Centrists told abolitionists that they’d gone too far and provoked the backlash (causing southern secession). Centrists told King and other civil-rights activists that they’d gone too far and provoked the backlash (causing Democrats to lose elections in 1966 and 1968). Some centrist Democrats today say “woke” politics have gone too far and provoked the “wokelash” (causing Democrats to lose elections in 2021). “Some of these people need to go to a ‘woke’ detox center or something,” the Democratic political strategist James Carville said after the 2021 elections. “They’re expressing a language that people just don’t use and there’s backlash and a frustration at that.” Actually, GOP operatives are expressing (or whistling) an anti-white language that anti-racists just don’t use—and there’s a backlash and frustration at that.

(...)

Whitaker did not create the mantra. He reproduced it. Since the very first Civil Rights Act, white supremacists have cast anti-racist bills as racist toward white people. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 defined citizenship, granted it to African Americans, and affirmed that all citizens are equally protected by the law. But President Andrew Johnson vetoed it, arguing that “the distinction of race and color is by the bill made to operate in favor of the colored against the white race.” In an address to Congress in 1867, Johnson opposed voting rights for Black men, fearing “the dread of Negro supremacy” and the “subjection” of “white people of the South.” In his best-selling 1874 book, the journalist James S. Pike described South Carolina’s interracial legislature as denying “the exercise of the rights of white communities, because they are white.” When an anti-lynching bill came before the U.S. Senate in 1938, Senator and lifelong Klansman Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi said its passage “will open the floodgates of hell in the South.

”When a new civil-rights plank was added to the Democratic Party’s platform, southern segregationists walked out of the Democratic National Convention in 1948. They formed the States’ Rights Democratic Party, known popularly as the Dixiecrats, running Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for U.S. president. “We affirm that the effective enforcement of such a (civil-rights) program would be utterly destructive of the social, economic and political life of the Southern people,” their platform stated.

Thomas Abernethy, the Jim Crow segregationist and U.S. representative from Mississippi, feared that the Civil Rights Act of 1957 would create “nothing short of an assemblage of powerful Federal meddlers and spies created for the purpose of tormenting, abusing, and embarrassing southern white people.” During his 24-hour-long filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Thurmond cited a newspaper article that warned of the “persecution” that white people could face under the law.

When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed, opponents of racial equity largely stopped openly claiming that anti-racist measures were harmful to white people. They instead claimed that anti-racist efforts to remedy racial inequality constituted “reverse discrimination” or “reverse racism” (against white people). They weaponized the very Civil Rights Acts they had long opposed against the policies and programs leading to integration, enfranchisement, racial equity, and racial justice. When the medicine is rebranded as the disease, the disease will inevitably persist—and it has. (...)

 black321 wrote: 
That is unfortunately because they are right, in a way. Your systems are inherently born of a certain culture and contain a certain cultural bias, which is their point.

BUT (that is a huge 156 pt bolded BUT), if you can get everyone to buy in to these universal values*, humanity as a whole has made a huge step forward and if accepted by all and sundry, that inherently culturally-specific origin becomes redundant. To sell that though, you have to really fight for that universality being applied. If it is not, don't be surprised by any push-back from marginalised groups.

*The alternative of course is to return to the same old petty tribal squabbling which will get us nowhere.

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote:

because these biased, and sometime racists, were and still are well ingrained in peoples' "thinking?"
but not in our systems...on the contrary, our fundamental, and evolving systems are what got us as far as we are out from under the thumb of racist thought.
the latter is where i think the 1619 projects, etc, go too far, and somehow try to argue our systems are inherently racist.

 NoEnzLefttoSplit wrote:
They were fought for then, they must be fought for now. There's always some clown insisting that this time is different.

 Lazy8 wrote: 
which makes it all the more incredible for me that people born in America, with such a strong foundation of hard-won universal rights (and MLK is part of that tradition) and astonishing individual liberties can so easily turn their back on that very same universality and restrict its scope to mean just "Americans", or "legal aliens" or "God-fearing WASPs" or whatever takes their fancy at the moment. It's like giving them a box of chocolates and all they can do is select the wrappers.

 kurtster wrote:
We can discuss history in any context we like, we're free people*. You don't get to shut anyone up for their perspective any more than they get to shut you up.

We judge the past so we don't repeat its moral errors. Feeding religious minorities to lions was not an act we should find morally acceptable no matter how big a crowd-pleaser it was in the Coliseum. We make that judgement for a very simple reason: we don't want it used as precedent to justify heinous acts today.

Need an example? Of course you do. When Trump issued his travel ban on Muslims the internment of Japanese-Americans during WW2 was invoked as justification**. Yes, that happened, it's part of our history—but it's something we*** condemn today as a racist act of panic. When it's brought up today—yes, we interred Japanese Americans during WW2—we need to complete the sentence: to the everlasting shame of those who did it. Don't want that shame to apply to you? Don't repeat it.

Nobody has to shut up about George Washington owning slaves to make the rest of his life's work relevant to us today. It's worth noting to keep us thinking; we need to judge Washington's deeds and words on their own merits, not just on the basis of the Great Man doing or saying something. It's an invitation to continue thinking rather than simply quoting from a sacred text.


* Y'know...mostly. Some terms and conditions apply. Also: thanks to the work of people like John Jay and George Washington.

** Maybe even by you, I can't remember.

*** Well, most of us. There are some moral dead-enders out there.

 Lazy8 wrote: 
A) I wish that were true but it is not.  It is the basis for the premise of white guilt in this country.  Even though no one in my family ever owned anyone, being here since well before the founding and being white, it is thrown upon me.

I have no problem discussing history, US history, as long as it is dealt with in the context of its time, not today.  Do we discuss Roman history or Egyptian history using today's knowledge and understandings to judge the actions in those times ?  The Romans threw Christians to the lions in the Colosseum.  Perfectly acceptable in those days.  Unthinkable and barbarian using today as a basis for passing judgement.  So somehow it is ok to look at US history out of its context and pass judgement and then extend that judgement to the decedents.  I am really tired of taking it and having to defend it and even more tired of defending it against someone who A) has no real knowledge of US history and B) has no interest in understanding it.  He just wants to find a way to use it divisively and out of context to stir a pot.  And in the process tries to claim the moral high ground by ignoring his own heritage and its similar sins that he chooses to highlight about this country.

B)  I absolutely agree however current discourse only allows for dealing with this in the context of today as I have stated before.  And this is the basis for those who wish to delegitimize the existence of this country and overthrow it based upon its founding being judged with todays knowledge and standards.

There are many here among us and at large in the media and politics who believe that it is legitimate and necessary to judge history out of context so they can pursue a reset of everything about this country.  Isn't this what the 1619 Project you referenced is all about ? 

The 1619 Project and its goals are simply disgusting imo.  How anyone gives it approval is beyond my comprehension.  Yet again, a great many here do, including Richard I would guess as I think he has referenced and endorsed it already.  He can correct me as he will certainly do.

Pardon the disjointed ramble as I am at work trying to do something to stay awake.  Not at home where I can be more focused.