Posted on 09/18/2011 9:20:58 AM PDT by flowerplough
...In 1964, in West Virginia a fourteen-year-old Henry Louis Gates Jr. broke his hip and went to a doctor who x‑rayed his knee, which was also in pain. The doctor saw nothing wrong with his knee and deemed his pain psychosomatic. "He said that I had a nervous breakdown because I was an overachiever," Gates said. "He said colored people weren't supposed to do as well as I had done. I had been stressed out and there was nothing wrong with my knee. White guy thought I was imagining things. And that's why I walk with a cane and I've had a dozen operations since I was fourteen." Gates remains bitter about the whole thing. "I hope that motherf***er's burning in hell."
Duke Professor Wahneema Lubiano, ... took the National Merit Scholar's test and placed as a semifinalist. But when she went to the guidance counselor, he suggested she go to secretarial school. "And I believed it," she said. "I went home crying but I believed it." ...
In the fall of 1960, in Greenville, South Carolina, an eighteen-year-old Jesse Jackson tried to use the public library. He was home from college and needed a certain book for a speech he had to give. "I went to the colored library," he told me. "Librarian said, 'I don't have that book but my friend at the Central Library does. I'll write you a note and I'll call her. She's my friend.' ... When I got there I went in the back of the library and two policemen were standing there talking with her. No doubt she told 'em I was coming.
"So I give her the note. Said, 'May I get the books?' She said, 'I'll have 'em in about six days.'
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Given the three examples here - while there *could* be alternative explanations - I’ll go ahead and stipulate that these *were* examples of racism. Albeit from a couple of generations ago.
The problem is that these people have allowed these experiences to define themselves for the rest of their lives and to dwell in the past. The result is minds filled with hate and the spectre of racism lingering behind every seemingly innocuous incident that the have passed on to succeeding generations.
Perhaps some of this is inevitable and human nature but it’s obviously not constructive for anyone.
i was hit over the head and robbed at knifepoint and gunpoint while i was in the military by two blacks.
lucky me, a friend was knifed from his biceps down to his wrist.
today we would have probably been shot.
We have got to get over this unhealthy obsession with racism. The year is 2011, 150 years after the Civil War and 50 years after the Civil Rights legislation. There may be a few vestiges of it in older white people. As seen from this article older black people find it difficult to move on. As for young people, I am seeing very little of racism at all. It is time to forgive the past and move on. It would be terrible to waste any more generations on this.
About that same time as the black liberals speak of their suffering a black liberal supervisor told me that I (as a white man) was to blame for all problems and that I should feel guilty. I told him that I was was not and would not.
This racism bullcrap will be with us forever, or as long as we have a category of citizen known as African-American.
Unfortunately, we have a community of racist pimps who make their living fabricating incidents of so-called racism.
Black people need to get over themselves and act like they are just like other people. Lose the attitude. Lose the ghetto culture. Your problems are not of my making, so don't try to say your problems are due to my racism. I know it's not true.
"There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs. There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don't want the patient to get well." - Booker T. Washington
Some of this could be called “slot machine racism”. That is, you put a nickel in a slot machine, and if you win, it is “good luck”, but if you lose, it it because the slot machine is “racist.”
But that, in itself, is a conundrum. They can see racism anywhere, and whether it is racist or not can only be proven with objective information, which is usually not forthcoming.
Another way of looking at it is the “middle class black paradox.”
When a poor white person gets an education and works hard and becomes middle class, nobody really notices and there is no great recognition of their status.
But when a black person does the same, they often have an expectation that there *will* be some recognition. Something, anything that distinguishes them from poor, uneducated blacks. And yet, no matter what they do, they feel like they are still lumped together with the people they left behind.
And thus they are unhappy when, holding a good job, they move into a nice neighborhood with expensive homes, they are treated just like a white person, which means ignored.
To make things worse, there is no recognition by other black people, either. Comedian Chris Rock even made a stage routine about this, (peppered with NSFW language), about how going to prison held the same status as earning a Master’s degree.
Again, NSFW.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSaAytiB2bM
When I was a little kid, in the ‘60s, my parents took us to the local electronics store (George’s, in Marlow Heights, MD) to buy a color TV. The salesman showed my dad a black and white TV and told him it was color but that the color programming wasn’t on yet. My dad saw other TVs on the same channel in color. He was so angry he wanted to punch the guy, but he didn’t. We left the store and never went back. We bought a color TV from Sears or something instead. I never heard that there was a problem at that store till 30 years later. I guess my parents didn’t want me to think that there were stupid/racist people in the world at that young an age. I guess I’m glad they didn’t tell me about it at the time because I would have been frightened.
There used to be dinosaurs roaming Manhattan, but I don’t live in that time anymore, so I don’t worry about it.
What’s worse, experiencing an incident of racism, or inflicting a lifetime of “hate whitey” rhetoric on innocents simply because they share the same skin color? The solution to racism is not more racism.
My life was once saved by a black man and I had a very close relative brutally raped by a black man.
I couldn’t care less about color—the first is a blessed saint and the other an evil bastard damned to Hell—no more no less.
Exactly.
1960s - Real racism.
2010s - Racism of that type now rare to non-existent.
What exists now are either incidents that are infinitely more subtle or alternatively just exist in the minds of those that lived through or have been told about the real incidents.
Apparently only a couple hundred cases are diagnosed each year, implying that the rarity of the disease might be a more plausible explanation than racism.
Poor Henry, everything in his life seems to be the fault of some white man.
They dredge up this garbage from 40 years ago. Hopefully that generation will pass along soon and we can hear the racism stories from the current generation.
Agree. The problem is the lack of recognition that things don’t stay the same - they change.
We see this in all walks of life. For example the music industry has a hard time seeing things as they exist in 2011 as opposed to how they were in the 60s.
While it might be a stretch to compare attitudes towards race with those towards music and the purchasing of same, but the common denominator is the refusal to accept that things change over the course of 50 years, sometimes in very dramatic fashion.
Another example might be the Polish Cavalry leading charges into German Blitzkreig columns. What worked in 1870 ain’t gonna cut it in 1939.
I was told pointblank that it was too bad I was white, that they would have liked to hire me, but they had to hire a black. This was in 1980 during the end of Jimmy Carter rein.
We can all play the race card if we want to. I bet the whites will have more recent examples.
Booker T Washington was the man. I love this quote and show it to many blacks I work with to show them that the race-baiters have always been with us.
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