Police shot in Dallas

You mean the last two pages where pretty much everyone is in agreement that those biological factors don't exist?

 

Yeah.

It's basically having a dialogue about agreeing that in order to type, you have to hit the keys on your keyboard.

::slow clap::

 

So...you don't think its appropriate to consider race, even to exclude it, when looking at the causal factors of systemic racial prejudice?

 

I don't know why you would consider an event where one person tries to reach the finish line faster than others in casual factors of systemic ethnic prejudice?

 

How droll.

 

I really have zero tolerance for the word "race." It's a word developed in a time of ignorance and abhorrent human rights (in comparison to today), is used by the ignorant to propagate a strong "us vs. them" mindset, has about a positive a connotation as the word "fecal matter," and no anthropologist worth anything would use it.

So if there is a word that better describes what we're talking about, without all the negative stuff, that better defines the subject matter and doesn't enable some outright stupid ways of thinking . . . . why wouldn't we use it?

Words are important because we, you know, communicate ideas through them.

 

It's a social construct, but very much a reality - same as something like money.

 

Money as a social construct creates a currency to buy/sell goods which contributes to you not having to cultivate a mass amount of one thing everyone else needs, or develop a really useful skill, in order to purchase the wide range of things you use every day. It makes living a lot easier.

Race does . . . . . . . . (hint: creates a divide)

 

It sounds like you're advocating for color blindness; I don't think history or contemporary distribution of resources, and access to social institutions makes sense in the United states except in light of race. Color blindness strikes me as equally valid a solution for racism as the insistence that money doesn't really have value for the ills of capitalism.

 

During my time studying evolutionary psychology I remember hearing how people are predisposed to be racist. Basically it is very easy to create feelings of racism in people. Sorry I can't remember the studies.

The idea that the term 'race' shouldn't exist I find baffling.

Another thing I remember from evolutionary psychology is a study were men were told a simple dialogue about how a certain child had been naughty. The more similar the child looked to them the less likely they were to say 'he should be hit'. My interpretation was that people must be genetically predisposed to try and help the preservation and...

Sorry I can't link to the study.

Hmm this Is getting very Richard Dawkins. I need sleep

 

Sometimes we don't even collect money for jobs we do. We get the services of the people we do work for. There's all kinds of bartering with materials as well. If we really put effort into it I bet we could survive and be counted as wealthy without collecting any money at all, lol.

In the long game, what the hell is going on about race going to do for anyone other than make them "different from us?" How many issues revolving around people of certain ethnicity have to do with financial status rather than them being of that ethnicity in the United States? It's not really a wonder why the people of a certain ethnicity are blamed for all kinds of problems when they're also the poorest. They're poor because of racism in the past, a generational curse that has followed them. I don't think the solution to the issue is going to be addressing racial issues because it's too divisive. I'm willing to bet if you fix the financial disparity that you would find there aren't too many "race issues" at all save for the people who should probably just curl up and die anyways.

Say, "We're going to fix this race of people and move them up in our society by giving them all this training and free stuff" and you'll have everyone and their mother up in arms about it.

Say, "We're going to fix the wealth gap and bring the poor up to the middle class by providing training and free stuff" and you take away half the argument the prior group would spout off about.

 

I have thought it would be nice if 'Anonymous'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_(group)

Somehow gave everyone the same amount of money in there bank accounts.

 

That awkward moment when I wake up to find I have a black neo-Nazi screaming at me that I'm an Ashkenazi degenerate on Twitter and I have never spoken to him before. :dunno:

You mean stealing and sharing resources from individuals who have worked for their success amongst the larger undeserving community regardless of effort, skill, talent or logic?

So...socialism? :evil:

Almost all of it, IMO. But then I've been a long time believer that you could tackle pretty much all of the "systemic racism" arguments by looking at tackling issues related to everything BUT race.

The real problem is that identity politics is a hell of a drug, even though it's divisive as all hell. #UnpopularOpinion

 

If we as a society agreed to dispense with money, it would probably result in some reaaaaaaaally Interesting Times, but you're right, probably would not represent the end of our species.

I think this is the argument about equity vs equality. If people are starting from uneven starting positions based on race even compared to people of a similar socioeconomic bracket then attempts to address those discrepancies based on race via a socioeconomic lens will fail. For example, if blackness is assumed to be linked to criminality and drug dealing, black people will necessarily benefit less from an attempt to address the economic state of their neighborhood. They will still be viewed as more suspicious, stopped more often, and found guilty more often thus contributing to the entire process all over again. I think that what we have is a case where race and class are coinciding, self reinforcing factors.

And yet race remains a shorthand for all it has ever meant. We can say that this is all in our past, but we continue to see a sociological distinction between how blacks and whites are able to participate in America.

If, from the very start, you've said that historic racism has perpetuated itself into current affairs, I'm not sure how ignoring it currently will solve the problem - we've had attempts to address financial disparity and economic inequity that did not solve racial prejudice - only targeted campaigns against racism and for civil rights did that. Addressing racism in the past was divisive, especially to measures like integration in schools. These barriers to social equality still exist in less obvious fashions now.

 

It's just all outdated for the issues today. Yes, the issues today were created from racism in the past. Ask a run of the mill racist why they don't like black people today and you're probably not going to get a "they are an inferior part of the human species" reply, but rather that they're all criminals with a terrible culture. The latter is from economic status.

It's always amusing for me to hear qualms people have about racism, from police matters to finding a job. I'm a bit of an outlier in my line of work being that I'm generally intelligent enough to manage my finances and the opportunities I have with the lack of a criminal record and opportunities I have due to my military service. I mentioned the topic of this thread to some of my workers and their reply was basically ":explicative: them, they don't even treat you like a human and are out to get you whenever they come around." They also couldn't find a good job to save their lives, are often involved in criminal activity from thievery to drugs, and are poor. It's the exact same issues minorities often mention, but they're all as white as can be. It's a common problem across the board in construction, and even the white population in the poor community I live in. They face the exact same issues, but they can't claim racism for their woes.

Continuing to address race as the issue, and not financial status, is still in my opinion simply divisive and in the larger scope of society, irrelevant. I'm not denying racism exists. I'm saying that as a society, I don't think it's the main issues we should be addressing and that since it is, it creates more division than problem solving. It's more of a distraction.

 

Sounds fairer than our current sperm lottery system of hereditary capital wealth.

 

What utopia did you spring from?

Good luck with your "No, stop that. That's not a thing any more and you're not allowed to talk about it." approach.

 

Yeah, my whole life has been one big existence in a utopia. Please highlight where I said anything that fits what you said so I might avoid phrasing things a certain which allowed sub a generalization.

 

I'm in complete agreement with your premise.

I just don't get how you propose to deal with ingrained attitudes without addressing them.

 

That description is beautiful

The problem I have with that though is that it (basically, correct me if I am wrong or have misinterpreted your sentiment) compares the theoretical framework suggested within socialism with the very real inequalities created under capitalist systems, which is a false equivalence.

Sure, we could point to the excesses within America as a failing of capitalism (and that would be fair), but we could also point to the failings of countries like Venezuela where they have an ACTUAL food scarcity crisis for which the military has had to come in to help distribute rations - despite the fact they have a good supply of oil and a productive work force. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/...od-distribution-services-160713041510705.html

We could also look at countries that have changed since adopting a capitalist/socialist outlook on their economy and how they have grown or shrunk (minimal/greater government interference in the maintenance of the economy & redistribution of wealth). In which case I'd point out China as an example of how abandoning central government controls can benefit (from an economic perspective, at least. They still control the population but look at their growth over the last few decades) & Cuba as an example of how it can lead to stifled growth and immense waste, along with the socioeconomic issues. Or if you want a more extreme example, Soviet Russia back in the day.

This is not to say that capitalism is perfect or that there aren't socialist ideas that do not work, obviously. But it is wrong to compare the theoretical ideas of socialism with the real life inequalities of capitalism.