Senate "Race" Relations (was "U.S. Society and Black Men")

I'm sure the man's gun ownership and racism aren't related.

 

Everyone should feel as angry as you do on this. If someone doesn't, they have a problem.

 

I understood as soon as I saw that it was Rochester Hills. Very rich and very white area. Good schools. Low crime.

Also the kind of place that doesn't take kindly to black faces.

 

Pretty insane. I've never been to a Starbucks that wasn't filled with white young people not drinking Starbucks. But apparently if you're black, you're tresspassing...


As for the kid almost shot while asking for directions... Last year some of my mom's college students from Zambia were visiting and staying with us, and my parents live in a very white neighborhood with a few exceptions (next door neighbors are Iraqi, there are a few black families, but mostly white people). My mom had told the guys they could play soccer in the common land. She then asked me privately if I thought she should tell the neighbors they were our guests so the neighbors wouldn't freak out. I adamently said no, if our neighbors freak out because some perfectly peaceful black guys are in the neighborhood, that's disgusting and their problem. I don't want our guests to feel any stigma.

At the same time, part of me sadly gets where she's coming from. The fact that it crossed her mind that someone in our virtually crime-free neighborhood might call the cops if they saw black people they didn't recognize playing soccer is nuts and so sad. And people think segregation is dead. Not when black people have to be scared about going into white neighborhoods it isn't.

I can only imagine what the couple black families who do live here think. Sometimes I see their teens out riding skateboards, and I think about Trayvon Martin and what happened to him out minding his own business near his dad's house. Crazy.

In the end, we didn't label them like they needed a disclaimer, which I was insistent about. Nothing bad happened. But the fact it even crossed anyone's mind...

 

Honestly, this Starbucks thing to me does not call for a boycott; it calls for a sit-in.

 

America's well-regulated militia at work.

 

These stories are so disheartening. The one about the 14 yr old being shot at for knocking on a door to ask directions was so sickening and awful.

In my mind, I always come back to the questions, "How can we make real progress?" "What's the answer to this deeply ingrained, often "invisible" (to those who have never experienced it and haven't taken the trouble to educate themselves) problem?"

Some of the things that are commonly brought up as answers are sometimes disappointing when you look closer--like I just noticed this line in a CNN article posted today, "What the Starbucks incident tells us about implicit bias". It quoted a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley (whose "primary research is in stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination") who said "he hasn't seen evidence to suggest that implicit bias training reduces discriminatory behavior in police departments and other institutions..." He goes on to suggest an alternative:

Acc to the article, "This could involve changing general practices -- such as how ending New York's stop-and-frisk policy reduced the number of minorities subjected to unnecessary stops, he said. Glaser suggested that Starbucks could employ prescriptive rules on how to handle someone believed to be loitering, with clear rules what to do in those circumstances when there's no danger."

Hopefully the Starbucks CEO will make those kind of broader changes to Starbucks policies and procedures in addition to adding bias training, etc.

Edit: As for one of the other stories, I don't know where the hope lies for somehow changing the attitudes of people who would shoot at someone (no matter how "old" they looked) for knocking on their door to ask directions... (or more accurately, I guess, people who would immediately assume that a black person must be lying about needing directions and was in fact trying to break into their house)

Of course, one "preventative measure" for that incident would be having much tighter gun control laws, which I am in favor of...but even if such laws were instituted, while it would make things safer for other people, it wouldn't change the attitudes of that couple. In fact, having their guns taken away would probably just make them even more disposed to anger and prejudiced behavior.

So I find myself wondering what could really make a difference in changing the hearts and minds of people filled with that much fear and ignorance? I always want to find reasons to hope for meaningful change and progress, but it's difficult sometimes...

 

This will do wonders for race relations. I would try this except i'm not dark enough also i don't drink coffee also I have self respect.

Step 1: Walk into Starbucks
Step 2: "I heard ya'll were racist"
Step 3: "where's my free coffee."
Step 4: actually get given the free coffee

This totally isn't going to play into the hands of white nationalists right?

 

He got a free coffee. Racism is over, now. We're even. Equal. I don't ever want to hear about racism, slavery or inequality ever again.

I still want to smack the smile off that guy's face, though.

 

People should look up what "Hotep" is and see what hoteps believe.

 

Well, I'm not racist, but there are no races in humans anymore, all of us belong to the genus, species and race of "homo sapiens sapiens", though most possess some DNA from archaic humans (not that I have a problem with that).

Therefore racists are morons and hopefully I don't have to explain to anybody why.

I don't know much about American history, but in the Classical age, where slavery was very prevalent, too, people weren't discriminated for their ethnicity. Slaves were slaves because their city was conquered, they were captured by slavers or sold as children because their parents needed money and various other reasons, but not just because they belonged to a certain people.

 

*Sigh*

 

I mean, obviously race is a construct. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist in practice, or that it doesn't affect people.

It's like money. It's not backed by anything, but people believe in it, therefore it exists. And it's a major part of many cultures. So yes while there's nothing different technically between a black person and a white person and an Asian person besides superficial looks, there *are* different cultures and subcultures, which are sometimes tied to people's race or ethnicity.

Basically, I'm just saying that while it would be great to live in a post-racial world, we currently don't. So we still have to take the construct of race seriously because it's still a way all of our minds judge people.

Oh and just... Maybe don't use the phrase "I'm not racist, but..." Since that's almost exclusively used by racists. And because we all have at least ingrained racial bias.