cry of the banshee wrote:
I have seen it personally. And it is exhibited in the general attitude.
So, your experience with blacks is different than mine. Fair enough.
I disagree that it is a symptom and not a cause, in fact, I think it it just the opposite; if blacks as a whole adapted to the ways of success, they would succeed.
And I also disagree with the idea that disparity in society is neccesarilly the fault of society.
Asians come here and succeed. Society owes me, you or them nothing.
Different experiences indeed...
I also disagree with you about the "ways of success" thing. It's not just black people at all, and in fact I think the whole question is muddied rather than clarified by making it about race. Plenty of poor white people that are also trapped in poverty, and it is my belief that it is in the nature of the societies we live in to prevent people from climbing the economic ladder.
The Asian immigrants is not a good comparison, IMO. They come here as individuals and are allowed in precisely because they have skills that correspond to positions that need to be filled, which they probably acquired in their homeland. It is not the same as an entire group which was brought here forcibly and kept segregated from mainstream society until very recently. A better comparison would be between African immigrants and Asian immigrants. I don't know about the US but there are a great deal of the former in important skilled positions here- particularly medical care.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:IQ-4 ... ighres.pngThis reflects the success rates of each group represented.
Well, like I said I don't like to have big arguments about things I don't feel qualified to discuss in a detailed way, and that includes IQ tests. There's plenty of research attacking the methods used in these findings, but it's probably better to find someone else to discuss that with as I can't shed any new light on the subject.
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Perhaps, but that is more like nepotism, than racism, as you yourself said that the white was part of the mangers extended family.
At any rate, who trained the black supervisors on the job?
An incoming supervisor has to be trained by somebody, and I myself came on board the company I work at in a lead position. I was trained by somebody that was there three years prior to my being hired.
Thats often SOP.
Well, this is slightly frustrating for me as it is what I have been saying all along: At the plant, the managers were not racist, but nepotistic. However, nepotism
led to a racist power structure. The black workers weren't excluded unfairly
because they were black, but they were excluded unfairly nonetheless. This is entirely the point I am making. A racist power structure can arise even when there is no specific intent on the part of management.
In this case, racial segregation ws the result of nepotism.Quote:
I have NEVER seen any senior management position that does not require a four year degree.
NEVER.
Well, the senior managers at the plant I looked at didn't have four year degrees.
Again, different experiences, maybe. Most senior management positions will have a degree qualification *recommended*, but not essential. Particularly when compared to someone with practical experience and years of service to the company.
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Then, how is this germaine to the topic?
Appointing "people they knew" is not the same as racism.
And they still had to qualify, they just don't give senior management positions to any jerkoff on the street.
Of course management is elitist. This is a surprise?
See above- I've said several times I don't believe they were racist, I believe that their nepotism led to a racially discriminatory structure.
Ok, neither of us are surprised that management are elitist. Why, then, should we be surprised that many black people find it hard to break through to better jobs? Answer: I am not.
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Your opinions.
And they are valid, but I don't see it that way.
I am not saying that blacks are neccesarilly inferior, I am saying they culturally do not seem to value the idea that hard work and playing by the rules is the way to succeed.
That they are victims that are owed something from society, that because a very small amount of rich landowners in a few southern states a long long time ago owned slaves (Africa still practices slavery today, BTW), they have a special status here.
Nobody seems to complain about the NBA being predominantly black, do they? Why not?
Well, there are seeds of agreement in here- I'm quite prepared to accept that the mentality of "playing by the rules" is rejected by more black people than white. IMO, however, this is an effect rather than a cause. People reject society because they feel it offers them nothing. The question is, is this feeling justified? I believe that it is.
You're way underplaying the history, here. A few rich southern landowners? How many African-Americans would be able to trace their ancestry back to slaves? I'd imagine an awful lot of them. Then there's segregation, which went on right up until the 1960s, and is even now still supported by a few octagenarian republicans. It's far more than just a few southerners owning slaves a few centuries ago.
And Africa doesn't practice slavery in anything like the same way the European and Americans did. People are not systematically and en masse transported to far away continents by soldiers with legal sanction and in fact encouragement by government. There is people trafficking and forced labour, but this is illegal and not condoned by African governments. You will also find this in Europe, and no doubt on the US-Mexico border as well. There is also plenty of indentured labour, which is also something that is frighteningly common in Europe also.
Regards the NBA, it is an entirely peripheral sector in which about 0.00001% of the population are involved. People are not relying on it to break out of deprivation, except in extremely rare circumstances.
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Pardon my hyperbole.
Maybe not "all the time", but you gather my inference.
It happens enough.
Is that alright?
How about all the other myriad programs set up to "level the playing field"?
And you implicitly admit that you don't know the extent of it's occurence, so it's merely another supposition.
Well, we are both making suppositions unless one of us can be bothered to go research the subject. As it happens, I don't support affirmative action as a national policy because I believe two wrongs don't make a right, plus that it is a blunt instrument which probably only exacerbates racial tensions. However, I do believe that if government was to look at things on a case-by-case basis, and in some cases could conclusively establish that unfair power structures had emerged, there may be a case for requiring a more representative managerial setup. This is
certainly not just black/white issue. In particular, I think it is far more pressing in the case of discrimination against women.
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You could just as easily say they are over-represented in the company overall.
Indeed, overrepresented in shit jobs, underrepresented in good ones.
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That dominant group should just give up their positions because ... why?
They built the organization.
Do the dominant groups in Mexico, China, Japan, etc. need to make concessions for minorities? Why should they?
In a situation where I am the minority, am I not going to be singled out as well? That is a human phenomenom, not a strictly racial one.
It seems that "diversity" is always urged at the expense of whites.
Screw that noise.
They built the organisation- aka they sat back and collected the profits from selling things made by cheap labour. Haha, but this is my Marxist roots showing so let's not get into that
IMO your argument is on slippy ground here because you are implicitly endorsing the right of one dominant group to retain power at the expense of another. If this "group" is defined by anything other than merit at the job alone, then how can this be justified? What's more, doesn't it just add to the argument that there are forces at work excluding those without power from it?
China, for a start, has a horribly discriminatory setup in industry, although the most grievous cases tend to be against rural migrant workers rather than ethnic minorities. People come from the countryside to work in the city and are not allowed access to any of the services and rights that urban workers are. Your province of origin can entirely determine your life chances. So yes, it does need to "diversify".
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Rio:
What about them? You mean, why don't Kenyan businesses actively seek to promote white people? Well, they always used to, of course...
Of course, what?
There was an "affirmative action" programme for white people when Kenya was a British colony. I am mainly being facetious by saying this, however. It should be noted that since Independence Kenya was ruled for a long time by the dictator Arap Moi. This makes it not very different from the majority of countries that gained independece from European empires. However, since Arap Moi's departure it has- despite flare ups in violence- become something close to a representative democracy, which puts it way ahead of a lot of non-African former colonies (Burma, the Arabian Peninsula, Iran, much of Arab North Africa, Central Asia) The idea that the whole of subsaharan africa has collapsed into a failure since the departure of the heroic white conquerors is total bs.
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Rio:
Of course gang-culture is not new, but then inequality is not new, is it? The structures I talk about are certainly not new. They are less obvious, sure... You will, however, find that violent crime always increases with inequality, whichever time period we are in.
You just made my point for me.
Really? Your point is that inequality causes gang violence? Seems like we agree then...
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Rio:
Eeesh, come on, man, am I wasting my typing fingers?
a) drop the defensive "this country". I've already said that the problems are the same in the UK. The whole, "you don't live here you don't know" thing just doesn't cut it.
b) the entire point of the last god-knows-how-many-hundreds-of-words I've been typing is precisely that it is not just the blacks who are coming off badly. If you are born poor, it is likely that you will not catch up with people born above you. This can apply to anyone, but because black people had been kept in poverty by an actively racist system for centuries, a much larger proportion suffer from this than do whites.
c) You'll notice that at not one point have I ever singled out any American to describe as "racist".
You misunderstood me.
A) The "this country" was not defensive. I am pointing out that I can not speak for how things are in say for instance the UK.
Let me pre-empt the next retort by saying I can speak of what is happening in africa and places like Haiti, because the dire situations there are common knowledge and are splashed all ove the early Sunday morning charity-a-thons.
B) Bollocks.
According to the US Census, 11.2% of American Whites and 29.0% of American Blacks lived in poverty in 1995. In 1995, there were 218.3 million American Whites and 33.1 million American Blacks, which shows (after multiplying by the respective percentages) that there were 24.4 million poor Whites and 9.5 million poor Blacks living in the United States that year.
Yet blacks are responsible for violent crime at a rate of more than 8 to 1 compared to whites. And keep in mind the FBI groups hispanics along with whites, for some reason.
C) Thank you. Why would you?[/quote]
a) Well, if your only knowledge of Africa comes from Sunday morning charity-a-thons then what makes you think you
do know about it? If you were to watch a Save the Children charity ad here you would get the impression that the whole of Britain was systematically keeping kids in dungeons beneath the stairs. Only some of us do that.
b) Well, I was referring to poverty, rather than crime, but your point is that poor blacks commit disproportionately more crime than poor whites, and this is something that needs explaining. My own instinct says that in lieu of a functioning society people fall back on race to provide them with a sense of community, leading to a sense of seperateness and hence opposition to mainstream society. Hence, a vicious cycle of violence exacerbated by inequality which is in turn exacerbated again by violence. i.e., the additional factor of long-standing racial division heavily exacerbates the increased likelihood of crime that comes with poverty and an unequal society.
Actually, in this regard maybe there is not so much difference between us. We can both agree that a culture of speration from mainstream society leads to a violent rejection of that society's values? The difference is that I have more sympathy for the view that this vicious cycle has its underlying roots in the mechanism of capitalist society.
There are a couple of articles that I'll link to that defend black people against the charges that they are more prone to criminal behaviour, as an endnote.
http://www.timothyjpmason.com/WebPages/ ... _crime.htmQuote:
I would note that these figures are far higher than for inner-city black populations of Caribbean origin in the UK. This suggests that the present high rate is to be explained by something other than the innate characteristics of ‘blacks’, and we would expect that a radical change in the circumstances in which American blacks find themselves would lead to a radical drop in the murder rate. And indeed, this is what happens ; those black people who have moved out of the inner cities, and who have found for themselves steady middle-class jobs, do not share in the pathologies of the ghetto.
http://revcom.us/a/106/Jena-macdonald-en.htmlQuote:
* A study in Pennsylvania found when factors like severity of offense and criminal record were similar, “white men aged 18-29 were 38% less likely to be sentenced to prison than Black men of the same age group.” (The Sentencing Project, “Racial Disparity in Sentencing: A review of the literature,” 2005)
* African Americans constitute 13 percent of all monthly drug users, but 35 percent of arrests for drug possession, 55 percent of convictions, and 74 percent of prison sentences. (The Sentencing Project, “Drug Policy and the Criminal Justice System,” April 2001)
* Black youth are four times more likely than white youth to be incarcerated for the same offense. For drug offenses, Black youth are 48 times more likely and Latino youth nine times more likely than white youth to get locked up. (See: “America’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline,” Children’s Defense Fund report)
http://www.peace.ca/truthaboutblackcrime.htmQuote:
The National Institute of Drug Abuse estimated that while 12 percent of drug users are black, they make up nearly 50 percent of all drug possession arrests in the U.S. (The Black and White of Justice, Freedom Magazine, Volume 128) According to the National Drug Strategy Network, although African Americans make up less than one-third of the population in Georgia, the black arrest rate for drugs is five times greater than the white arrest rate. In addition,since 1990, African Americans have accounted for more than 75% of persons incarcerated for drug offenses in Georgia and make up 97.7% of the people in that state who are given life sentences for drug offenses.
c) Well, you said that "America is not as racist as you think"- I was pointing out that I hadn't called any Americans racist
