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Racism and America
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17744
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Fri Feb 21, 2014 7:49 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

A better man than Ted Nugent is a pretty low bar. Most people in jail in California can make it over that bar.
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MalibuGuru



Joined: 11 Nov 1993
Posts: 9293

PostPosted: Mon Mar 31, 2014 11:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Horrible hateful tea party racist rants...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1ChA-bPIBs#t=53
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swchandler



Joined: 08 Nov 1993
Posts: 10588

PostPosted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 12:54 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

No doubt, the tea party has one unhappy black man that arguably "hates" liberals.
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MalibuGuru



Joined: 11 Nov 1993
Posts: 9293

PostPosted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 1:39 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

swchandler wrote:
No doubt, the tea party has one unhappy black man that arguably "hates" liberals.


Thousands of Black men willing to stand up to the soft prejudice of under expectation of the government plantation. (welfare) They are brave souls who want nothing more than true freedom.
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swchandler



Joined: 08 Nov 1993
Posts: 10588

PostPosted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 2:07 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

"Thousands of Black men willing to stand up to the soft prejudice of under expectation of the government plantation. (welfare) They are brave souls who want nothing more than true freedom."



You really buy such contrived BS? You know, I can't recollect the tea party talking about investing in public schools. Instead, they use a few black conservatives to promote school vouchers and the Balkanization of public education. Ask yourself who will really benefit from a government voucher program. Only fools would believe that it will be people of color.
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MalibuGuru



Joined: 11 Nov 1993
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PostPosted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 11:01 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Chandler, by all accounts, education in inner cities is horrible. I'm not a big supporter of vouchers, however as a temporary solution to an immediate problem, it is a good one.

Maybe only 20% of inner city kids will benefit. But that will lead the rest into a better system. Do you really want to continue harming so many children with poor outcome?
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17744
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 12:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

It never ceases to amaze me how the right never lets the facts get in the way of their belief system. I've been making my way through Diane Ravitch's new book, "Reign of Error". I've posted excerpts from her previous book, and talked about my experience in a school where about half the kids are below the poverty line. While I've also volunteered in Oakland, where there were indeed schools that were pretty abysmal, there are no easy answers to poverty and its impact on education. I see it primarily as dysfunctional kids, emotional basket cases, acting out in school. There are not stupid kids, and it is not a school system that isolates them--so it pisses off some of the parents of well-behaved kids. It is a dilemma what to do--they are angry about things outside of school, but if you kick them out of class it doesn't help with the anger, and many are on their way to the penal system. Charter schools and vouchers just ignore the problem of the hard to educate.

In fact, schools are improving. Scores on the international test, the NAEP are up for all students, and for black and Hispanic students. for math, 1973 to 2008, age 9, white students up 25 points, black 34 points, Hispanic 32 points (page 51). The achievement gap has been narrowed--but not eliminated because all scores are going up. But to make the point about poverty, here is a quote from page 59 attributed to Sean Reardon of Stanford: "The black-white achievement gap is now smaller than the achievement gap between the poorest and most affluent students..." In fact, the achievement gap associated with income is growing, while the gap associated with race and/or ethnicity is shrinking.

This is not entirely surprising since poverty co-varies with race and with family dysfunction. I can almost always tell which kids come from houses with alcohol, drug, or violence issues--they behave almost exactly the same.

Finally, I wasn't going to post this until Bard posted the latest Tea Party rant. It is sad that he doesn't understand that it makes my point, not his. There are bigots of all political persuasions, and it is sad and unacceptable that anyone would call anyone racial names because of their political views. It makes the point that racism is still alive in America. Here's an essay by Patricia J. Williams that makes the point, missed by most on the right, of what racism is still like for African-Americans:

Quote:
More than forty years ago, during my first days at college, I was made instantly and acutely aware that a lot of people seemed never to have met a black person. For the most part they were not intentionally belligerent, but they were excruciatingly, unself-consciously, dopily innocent. (“Leontyne Price actually studied opera? I thought she was just naturally musical…”)

Plus ça change, I suppose, but it is a disheartening testament to the intractability of America’s housing and educational segregation that, so many decades after the civil rights movement, many white students still seem never to have truly engaged with a black person till they get to college. More discouraging still, they then seem to turn interrogation of that void upon their black classmates’ right to be there, rather than upon the constrained and blinkered circumstances of their own upbringing.

The toll of that social gap is the subject of a new play, I, Too, Am Harvard, written by sophomore Kimiko Matsuda-Lawrence with a broad coalition of classmates, which premiered on March 7. The play is presented in two acts, the first of which looks at the wide diversity of Harvard’s black students: descendants of American slaves, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, students who could (and are told they should!) pass for white, recent immigrants, mathematicians, musicians, poets, linguists, engineering students, children of all sorts of “mixed” marriages, poor kids and the children of Ivy League grads.

The second act looks at what those varied individuals have in common: this batch of young people is indisputably brilliant, thoughtful, humane and funny. A more pressing commonality, however, is that they are all routinely greeted as… otherwise.

They are treated with open disdain, the champagne flutes snatched from their hands at cocktail parties as they are mistaken for waiters. They are figured as criminals when they walk across campus. Their sexual prowess is interrogated, their beauty denigrated. They hesitate before asking questions in class—for a dumb question from a white person isn’t heard as a reflection on all white people, but any question from a black person tends to be scrutinized for inherent inferiority, “proof” that the student’s lonely little voice is the evil marker of where a “more qualified white person” ought to be sitting.

Only about 10 percent of the students at Harvard are black: yet that small, diverse population is hyper-visible. One young man described sitting down for dinner in the cafeteria, joined by four black friends. Later that evening, he was accused, by some white dorm mates, of “self-segregating.” Yet every other table in the cafeteria was all-white. He wondered aloud if his dorm mates even realized that their world is much more segregated than his. They didn’t seem to see that “they’re living all the time in a white world” and that most other people on the planet “live in multiple worlds.”

As another young man put it: “We are always so concerned about making everyone comfortable with our presence when we are made uncomfortable every single day.”

In addition to the play, these students put together a gallery of photographs of themselves on Tumblr (#ITooAmHarvard), holding signs with actual comments made by friends and classmates (“You’re really articulate for a black girl”; “Are you all so fast because you spend so much time running from the cops?”), as well as responses to those comments (“No, I will not teach you how to ‘twerk’”; “Please don’t pet my hair, I am not an animal”). They’re evocative images, filled with gravity and grace, humor and sadness.

This project lends voice to unusually gifted, hard-working young people—by any human standard—who nevertheless spend much of their lives hidden behind the projections of others. Along with the eloquent students at Northwestern University who are unionizing to press their case against financial exploitation of poor and often minority “amateur” athletes by the NCAA, #ITooAmHarvard is part of an emerging nationwide student movement led by—but not exclusive to—students of color of all sorts. Oh, and joined by feminists, poor whites, those identified as gay/lesbian/transgender, and anyone else who has a clue of what it’s like to be bullied. Together, they have begun a new kind of dialogue about belonging and worth. And they are turning a mirror on the very bad manners, shall we call it, of a society that buries them beneath the history-deprived in-your-face-ness of tone-deaf provocateurs who, much like Paula Deen, never really mean to hurt your feelings—and yet who feel “crucified” when someone points out that they have.

This mix of insult and innocence is what some social psychologists call “microaggression”—the small, often unintentional expressions of ignorance and offense. It is a blindness that is as much the product of segregation as disparate stop-and-frisk policies. It’s not always as deadly as George Zimmerman’s constructed fears. But it represents a significant part of the unexpressed and unaccounted-for tensions within our polity.

An actor’s clear young voice lingers long after the performance: “Blackness to me is faith…having faith in what you don’t see. We as a people often don’t see validation. So for me, it’s having faith that I am significant, valid, valuable, even though everything else is telling me I’m not.”

Most conversations about race in American higher education focus on the endless, unwinnable effort to defensively prove “merit.” With gentility, restraint and admirable integrity, #ITooAmHarvard shifts the frame of this contentious landscape and asks instead: What institutional Weltanschauung is it that indulges such brutal, breezy presumptions regarding those about whom we are basically so miserably ill-informed? Whence does the entitlement come that allows such profoundly ignorant encounters within any community, never mind Harvard’s? Harvard! That ultimate self-promoting paragon of what the “civilized” world exalts as our best and brightest hope for peaceful human co-existence—yet here so persistently revealed as… otherwise.
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MalibuGuru



Joined: 11 Nov 1993
Posts: 9293

PostPosted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 1:10 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

My college experience was different. One of my closest friends was black. He recently died. On his Facebook page, (friends) were as many whites as blacks. (maybe even more whites and Hispanics) His fraternity brothers were 80% white. He made a conscious effort to move out of the comfort zone.....

Also on a similar topic, I was the only white musician in the otherwise black USC high school summer jazz ensemble at ISOMATA.

OTOH, if you hang out in the wrong neighborhood in Hawaii God bless you. You are an Effing Haole. Does that mean I'm frozen with fear, or can't make Hawaiian friends? Succeed in Hawaii? I think not.

PS, the public schools there are horrible.
PSS, my Mexican wife's friends and family in Mexico are educated, well kept, yet far poorer than the poorest Americans. I would trade them any day of the week for our poor.
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mac



Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17744
Location: Berkeley, California

PostPosted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 1:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Without taking much time to read, much less think about what I posted, or actually demonstrate his point, Bard says, with great erudition:

My college experience (at the private University of Spoiled Children--which selects for conservative viewpoints) was different.

Oh, how compelling.
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MalibuGuru



Joined: 11 Nov 1993
Posts: 9293

PostPosted: Tue Apr 01, 2014 1:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

mac wrote:
Without taking much time to read, much less think about what I posted, or actually demonstrate his point, Bard says, with great erudition:

My college experience (at the private University of Spoiled Children--which selects for conservative viewpoints) was different.

Oh, how compelling.


Wrong, Not USC, that was where I attended summer programs. You won't find that I'm a Trojan. And I did find your article to be interesting. Just not necessarily accurate in every way.

PS, if I hadn't gone to a predominantly black school in junior high, and had some black friends in college, I wouldn't be comfortable around them. I can see how a white genius from the suburbs would be at a loss for words upon being neighbor to a black genius from the inner city. All sorts of prejudices could come out........although innocent IMO.
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