The Lady Doth Protest Too Much, Methinks - Hysterical White Middle Class BLM Activism

[The Grand Nudger]

Redlining continues in the present. It's a good example of a thing that persists despite it's illegality, as so many other things that we've decided to write laws against do. The Financial Fraud Enforcement Task force continues to find, prosecute, and award damages in cases.

You could have easily discovered this had you googled it. As for racial biases and whether or not you have them - why do you imagine that calling someone the n-word is the most offensive thing you could call them? Why not cracker? Why not blueberry? Why not any other word? What makes that the most offensive thing? Obviously, this is a rhetorical question. Racial biases can be as simple as the things we pick up from our culture about what the most offensive ethnicity or ethnic slur might be. I'll quote the bard, given the thread title.

Zounds, ye whore, is black so base a hue?

[Aegon]

Redlining - a crime of the past. And, no I will not be "examining my own racial biases" as they don't exist, and I find the conjecture that they do insulting and condescending.

Very bold of you to think that narratives you've been sold since birth don't have an impact on your psychology today, since that would make you... not human. But then again, you're in the UK? So you won't really be able to understand race relations and you won't have the same implicit biases that Americans have.

I'll assume you're legitimately interested and that this won't be a waste of time like the last occasion I wrote this up:

Here's the issue: the whole system, from a fundamental level, is stacked against black Americans. History is not compartmentalized, though we're taught that it is. Rather, what happens today only happens because of what happened yesterday. The state has manufactured poverty in black communities. Here's a tiny snippet of how they did that:

Soon after the 13th amendment was passed and Reconstruction-era troops were pulled out of the South, black people were arrested for little to no reason just to be able to enslave them (because, to this day, slavery is technically legal in the US as long as the enslaved are prisoners. It's explicitly stated in the 13th amendment). Any prosperous black community (such as Wilmington, North Carolina in the late 1890s and Tulsa, Oklahoma in the late 1910s) were violently overthrown by white supremacists, and the first league of black congressmen were physically, literally forced out of office. 

As cities, towns, and suburbs became more evolved in the 1930s and 1940s, a process began called redlining, as you saw. This was when (obviously white-controlled) government agencies started to draw maps dividing cities into sections that were either desirable or undesirable for investment. This usually blocked off entire black neighborhoods from access to private and public investment. Banks and insurance companies used these maps for decades to deny black people loans and other services based purely on race. Think of all the ways one can build wealth... on top of slavery, slavery via imprisonment, the actions of white supremacists, and now lack of investment have all stopped African-Americans from building wealth that they could then pass on to future generations (unlike many white families in the US, who had little trouble securing loans for houses and college education). As late as the 1980s, an investigation into the Atlanta real estate market showed that banks were more willing to lend to low-income white families than to middle or upper income African-American families. And in Nassau County in New York, the county where I grew up which is considered to currently be the most segregated county in America, this practice persists today.

A bit stupid to imply redlining is a "crime of the past," when it directly impacted ability to build wealth for future generations.

This is where it becomes obvious that African-Americans, through no significant fault of their own, were trapped in poverty. The impacts of all this, of course, add up. Crime is associated with poverty, and many crimes (i.e, robbing) happen because of the situation the criminal is in (i.e. extreme poverty). Robbery happens at the highest income levels, of course, but at that point we just call it free market capitalism, and the most common form of theft in America is WAGE THEFT. But anyway, let's not get sidetracked.

In 1971, Richard Nixon started "the war on drugs." It was sold as a moral decision, the government's efforts to get harmful substances off the streets. That's not what it was for. Nixon's own domestic policy aide, John Ehrlichman, said so:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

The government literally looked for an excuse to put black men in prison, so they manufactured one. It only got worse under the Reagan administration. Under Reagan, the CIA literally helped traffic crack-cocaine from Nicaragua into inner cities. I know, what the fuck, right? Look that one up some time. Despite the fact that the government was complicit in the high amounts of crack in these majority-black communities, Reagan came down hard and began perpetuating racist stereotypes. A media frenzy around the crack epidemic created a hysteria that meant support for his law-and-order policy approach to drug use. Prison populations soared as African Americans were targeted by law enforcement — despite using drugs at similar rates to whites (hell, there were white celebrities touting "Just Say No" who used cocaine themselves. A ton of rich, powerful white people used the same drugs that African-Americans were being imprisoned for at record rates.) Crack-cocaine became wrongly associated with black people and the police responded accordingly. To this day there are clear disparities in the enforcement of drug possession. Despite studies showing white Americans and black Americans use illicit drugs at the same rate, and yet more than one in four people arrested for drug law violations in 2015 was black. In regards to weed specifically (the dumbest drug to enforce laws against), ACLU found that blacks were 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites in 2010, even though their rate of marijuana usage was, like other illicit drugs, comparable. 

Not to mention mandatory minimum sentences, which were another part of the war on drugs that hurt African-Americans more than it should have. Research shows that prosecutors are twice as likely to pursue a mandatory minimum sentence for black people as for white people charged with the same offense. Nearly 80% of people in federal prison and almost 60% of people in state prison for drug offenses are black or Latino. So now we're not just talking about communities trapped in poverty (for reasons mentioned earlier), policed unfairly (for reasons mentioned earlier), but now these communities are crippled by the amount of members of that community that are imprisoned for long periods of time. 

In recent years, black drivers have been somewhat more likely to be stopped than whites but have been far more likely to be searched and arrested. The causes and outcomes of these stops differ by race, and staggering racial disparities in rates of police stops persist in certain jurisdictions—pointing to unchecked racial bias, whether intentional or not, in officer discretion. A closer look at the causes of traffic stops reveals that police are more likely to stop black and Hispanic drivers for discretionary reasons—for “investigatory stops” (proactive stops used to investigate drivers deemed suspicious) rather than “traffic-safety stops” (reactive stops used to enforce traffic laws or vehicle codes). Nationwide surveys also reveal disparities in the outcomes of police stops. Once pulled over, black and Hispanic drivers were three times as likely as whites to be searched (6% and 7% versus 2%) and blacks were twice as likely as whites to be arrested. These patterns hold even though police officers generally have a lower “contraband hit rate” when they search black versus white drivers. Black people are more likely to be killed by law enforcement than other racial or ethnic groups. They are often stereotyped as being violent or addicted to alcohol and other drugs, for aforementioned reasons. Experts believe that stigma and racism may play a major role in police-community interactions. How could they not?

Check out some of these metrics:

[img]https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-stat/graphics/ai2html/wealth/DSYR2OUAFVA7LA3SPMGSUTOXDA/infant-medium.jpg[/img]

[img]https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-stat/graphics/ai2html/unemployment/DSYR2OUAFVA7LA3SPMGSUTOXDA/maternal-medium.jpg[/img]

[img]https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-stat/graphics/ai2html/incomepoverty/DSYR2OUAFVA7LA3SPMGSUTOXDA/incomepoverty-medium.jpg[/img]

[img]https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-stat/graphics/ai2html/wealth/DSYR2OUAFVA7LA3SPMGSUTOXDA/wealth-medium.jpg[/img]


[size=small][size=small][size=small][size=small]In regards to Obama's presidency "solving racism in America," I direct you to an essay by a great writer, Ta-Nihesi Coates:

Fear of a Black President

Prelude: As a candidate, Barack Obama said we needed to reckon with race and with America’s original sin, slavery. But as our first black president, he has avoided mention of race almost entirely. In having to be “twice as good” and “half as black,” Obama reveals the false promise and double standard of integration.

---

Why the fuck is my post littered with [size=small] lol

---

Fixed the images of said metrics:

[The Grand Nudger]

I can't help but continue the exchange, while we wait for other posters to process new information.

The quote comes from a hilariously testy argument between antagonists. A black child, a moor, has issued forth from the queens white loins, and the nursemaid accuses our moor of having ruined her - and that was the subtext of his response (as well as many others). Her adult children rush into the scene. All of them..mind, the queen, the moor, her children, engaged in what can only be described as a psychotically murderous criminal conspiracy. One of the children asks. Villain, what have you done to my mother?

Villain...I have done thy mother.

It's interesting that shakespeare wrote this part the way he did. Going so far as to have the moor break the fourth wall and comment on the word moor, and what he thinks about it. Interesting because, on the one hand..shakespeare is entirely likely to have been ludicrously racist by todays standards (it wasn't really a thing for them, except in that racial superiority was assumed as a matter of course). Ws he grappling with something like racial awareness? Probably not..because..on the other, the character in the play has no discernible motivation for being a villain. More that he wanders from one heinous act to another, his blackness standing in for all things black, and thus, evil. This much is explicitly stated in the script. His only regret as he approaches execution is, as he puts it, that he could not do a thousand more bad things. Another great monologue, if you're the type that reads it.

But, sure, tell me again how we have no biases, as we make a thread with the title of a statement about ladies who say no, and then laughingly joke about calling people things that literally are racial biases, as exemplified so wonderfully in our culture's literary tradition...by the same fucking author.

There's no getting rid of our biases, it's not humanly possible, and we have them..as another poster has already explained, because we are human. Like a gruesome matryoshka doll, no sooner have we peeled off one than another appears nestled within us, ad infinitum. The trick is to know that, and know ourselves, and prevent those biases from influencing our decision making and our positions on issues, including issues of fact. We may find this insulting. Condescending, even...but that matters very little if we then proceed to immediately demonstrate it's truth.

Holding such biases may not mean that we are racists, but the transition to that state most certainly lies in the confluence of denying their very existence while they actively damage our peers.

[GrandizerII]

Redlining - a crime of the past. And, no I will not be "examining my own racial biases" as they don't exist, and I find the conjecture that they do insulting and condescending.

Bolded mine. You cannot confidently say that. You are a human being who is a part of a system that has conditioned you into the person that you are in a manner that's often mostly beyond your control and even your awareness. As evidenced by your admission that you once called someone else the N-word, you ain't an angel, and you certainly do not live in a vacuum apart from the influence of society that enables/reinforces race-based privilege, racial biases and racist attitudes and actions.

And it may be insulting to have to be told that you probably do have these biases, but I'd rather accept that about myself than to accept lies to make me feel good about myself.

[TaraJo]

[video=dailymotion]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YK0p0DzZVzI&t[/video]No, not all white people are racist.  Not intentionally and maliciously, anyway, although subtle or subconscious racism is a topic for another time.  And not unless you want to be one of those tumblr SJW's who insist that white people have to be racist because racism isn't about prejudice, it's about power.  Yeah, that's a definition 95% of the world doesn't use so we're just going to dismiss it for the sake of this discussion.

But, here's the difficult lesson members of ANY group has to learn: the most ridiculous, outrageous, non-mainstream members of your group are going to be the ones that get the most attention.  So, yeah, we ignore the white people who are just quietly going about their jobs and we hyper focus on the white people flying their confederate flags and complaining about black welfare queens.

One of the best takes on the issue comes from Neil Degrasse Tyson.  I've always loved his ability at communication and how he can explain complicated issues in a way that laymen can understand.  Usually, he does that with scientific topics.  Here, he does it with racial issues.  It's worth a listen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YK0p0DzZVzI&t

[Duty]

edit, quote fail due to wall of text from Aegon. Basically, if you need a wall, your fail is large. YMMV

[The Grand Nudger]

If you didn't want to know, you shouldn't have asked.

[Fireball]

I have the potential to be racist, because I have called my boyfriend the N word before.

Down with me!

I bet you said it in a real hysterical manner too. :-)

---

I've never used a racial slur on anyone in my entire life.
I've said some fucking foul shit to people though. :-)

What? You called them a chicken? 

[Little lunch]

I bet you said it in a real hysterical manner too. :-)

---

I've never used a racial slur on anyone in my entire life.
I've said some fucking foul shit to people though. :-)

What? You called them a chicken? 

Haha.
What I mean is that there are even worse things to say than racial slurs.
Even though I am not guilty of racial slurs, I have been guilty of far worse.

[Aegon]

edit, quote fail due to wall of text from Aegon. Basically, if you need a wall, your fail is large. YMMV

10/10 response, thanks for wasting my time. Continue thinking what you want unchallenged.