PattyG said:
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Ask 10 black people whether they've been the victim of racism before. Essentially what's happening here is you (I'm assuming you are white) are attempting to speak for them saying their experience is totally null and void. Yes, black leaders are pushing for more personal accountability on the part of the black community, as well they should. They'll say don't blame others for your problems because that's a self-empowering message. But I don't think you'll hear any of them say racism is relegated to history.
Anyway, I don't want to pick apart your entire piece. Let me just mention one point: having Obama elected President doesn't mean the races are now treated equally. Obama graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard Law, George Bush was an alcoholic who ran his dad's businesses into the ground. When a black guy who is referred to as an "obnoxious drunk" by his father's associates can get elected President, then racism will be over.
You won't pick my statements apart, because it can't be done. You might be able to convince yourself you did it, but this is one of those cases where I'm simply right.
The thing is that you can't ask ten black people if they have been victims of racism fairly, because of the simple fact that the accusation of racism is a powerful tool. It also enables someone to blame some kind of nebulous racial oppression for their problems, rather than having to face them, and perhaps admit that they are their own problem. The use of the "race card" is one of the biggest problems we're dealing with on society today, and really the only way to deal with it is to stop letting it have an effect.
See, the thing is that the very fact that you really have to search long and hard to find someone who seriously believes in the racial inferiority of a group of people (or the inherant superiority of his own people) within nations like the US is why it's dead. You have to search because the people who would admit to such things face social censure for their beliefs, because the rest of society clearly does not agree with them. That means that racism is dead. If racism was alive, you would have the majority of messages on TV and in the media being about oppressing "lesser" peoples as opposed to oppressors being universally defined as the bad guys, and nobody would be concerned about being racist, because there wouldn't be any repercussions for it.
The thing is that I'm not saying that "their experience is totally null and void" but simply that "they" never had those experiences to begin with. In most cases racism is being used as a scapegoat for personal failure, and not wanting to do hard work. You lose in the rat race, then it was racism, your life isn't where you wish it was (and news flash, very few people are where they aspire to be), then it's time to blame whitey, etc... Some of them might even believe it, but that hardly makes it the case, and all you have to do is take a look at what's going on and how racism is treated and it's pretty obvious. Simply using the "N" word can get people in tons of trouble socially if not legally because of what society in general actually believes and supports.
Of course a lot of this comes down to politics and voting blocks as well, there are people who have a vested interest in convincing others that racism is alive and everywhere. People who will tell minorities (and not just blacks) that they are being oppressed, because it brings the people together, what's more people generally want to be told that their problems are not their own fault, that there is someone to blame... as racism was a problem, trying to pretend that it's still a force in society is a logical tool. The people flock to the leaders who tell them what they want to hear, and those leaders become powerful due to the support, and can leverage that following into political favor by pretty much acting as a mercenary voting block, whomever favors the leaders are the ones he tells the people who listen to him to support, and then they get better numbers in the polls.
Understand, I never said that there aren't people who don't believe racism is an issue, simply that it really isn't one.
It's just like the point Bill Cosby sort of makes, just because people don't want to do the hard work and acknowlege that equality means fitting into the same dis-sastified rut as everyone else, doesn't mean they are being oppressed. The oppertunities are there, the books, computers, money for education, however embracing those things just means you get the same shot as everyone else, it doesn't mean your guaranteed any kind of success any more than anyone else. Equality means that you go to school, you study hard, and then chances are you wind up doing a crappy job to make ends meet, that's life for everyone irregardless of race. However for a few people, again irregardless of race, they are going to do really well and break into that upper 1% of society. The problem is that we're dealing with an inherant sense of entitlement, with equality being viewed as "equal to the top 1% of society", which is hardly the case.
At any rate we're doubtlessly going to have to agree to disagree, but honestly you probably should have learned a lot about this kind of thing in sociology.
As far as the presidency goes, dress it up as much as you want, the bottom line is that if there was mainstream racism Obama could not have won, he would have been considered inferior on merits of race, and probably wouldn't have even been allowed to run for office, never mind garner the support (which goes accross racial lines) in order to win.
Also understand something, when your looking at presidential cantidates, it's not so much about the man himself, as about his organization. Presidents are just a face put on a coalition of interests, the guy who has been able to convince all the right people that he's best able to do the job they want done. There are tons of people all competing for the honor of bring the dude who gets run, and in the true nature of American competition the best guy comes out on top. "Best" can mean anything from intelligent, to charismatic, to just plain ruthless, or some combination of all of those.
Just to get the support to make it into a primary, with all the diverse interests that requires to say "your the guy we want" means that racism has to be dead, before it even goes to the people themselves. If some really pragmatic guys thought Obama was inferior, or that people would view him that way, they never would have considered him for their face, given that there were tons of people they could have used beforehand.
Yes, this is a very cynical way of looking at politics, but it's also accurate. In general politics reflect on the needs of society becase the guys paying the money for these campaigns and wanting their interests represented, want the surest bets they can run.
Honestly I think your a little too offensive about Dubbya because you don't like him. Me, I voted for him twice, but have mixed opinions. In the end, the bottom line was tha his backround convinced an entire organization of interests that he was the guy they wanted. Was he the smartest, the most charismatic, ruthless, or whatever? We don't know exactly what the respective thinking of the people was, but the guy won *TWO* elections despite his dirty laundary being out there, oh granted they WERE very close elections, but he still won them. Truthfully though I kind of suspect he won the first one due to Al Gore's own people (pretty much the "Clintonista" faction) pole-axing him despite the recounts. Do some reading on Gore and dirt digging and you'll notice that towards the end of the campaign there was a big deal being made about how he was receiving campaign financing from China that was being fronted through Buddhist temples. Given all of the problems with Clinton and the speculation that he didn't LOSE a bunch of military tech to the Chinese through incomperance but sold it to them, that could very well have been a big deal, a President caught being run by foreign interests that were rapidly rising to be enemies of the country? If you think the Obama-Citizenship issue is, big, that would have been bigger. I also think that's why The Democratic party pretty much lowered the boom on Hillary and bought her off with a promised cabinet position, if she was in the forefront all that garbage would have been thrown at her... but yeah at any rate this is all irrelevent supposition. The point I'm getting away from is that both Bush and Obama convinced the right people to back them, and in the end that's really what it comes down to. The very fact that Obama could do it, is a sign that racism is dead as a mainstream phenomena, just by becoming a cantidate, and then to win the election... well obviously nobody was saying "we can't have a racially inferior president" and not voting for him.
We're going to have to agree to disagree, and I probably won't write any more responses to this because if we seriously get into it, it won't go anywhere good. I've said my piece. The bottom line is that at least as far as race goes, it's not so much an opinion, as it is a pure sociological fact. As a society, the USA, and the first world in general, are not in any way, shape, or form racist. There might be a few racists on the fringes, but due to societal hatred they pretty much stay hidden because the merest hint of serious racism is enough to ruin careers, get someone beaten up, or face all kinds of social censure.