First thing's first: KEEP. THIS. SHIT. CIVIL. If you can't talk about race without resorting to childish insults and rude generalizations or getting angry at people who don't see it your way, leave the thread.
With that said, I bring you to what can hopefully be the general thread about race.
First, a few starter questions.
- How, if at all, do you feel your race affects your everyday life?
- Do you believe that white people (or whatever the majority race in your area is) receive privileges simply because of the color of their skin. How much?
- Do you believe minorities are discriminated against for the same reason? How much?
- Do you believe that assimilation of cultures is better than people trying to keep their own?
- Affirmative Action. Yea, Nay? Why or why not?
Also, a personal question from me.
- Why (in my experience, not trying to generalize) do white people often try to insist that they aren't white? I can't count the number of times I've heard "I'm not white, I'm 1/4th English, 1/4th German, 1/4th Scandinavian 1/8th Cherokee, and 1/8th Russian," as though 4 of 5 of those things aren't considered "white" by the masses. Is it because you have pride for your ancestry, or an attempt to try and differentiate yourself from all those "other" white people? Or something else altogether?
edited 30th May '11 9:16:04 PM by Wulf
Wandering Jew
This is not satire.
Fun Fact: South Koreans drink more than anyone else on the planet.
Hooray for hypocrisy.
edited 6th Nov '14 6:45:18 PM by DeviantBraeburn
Everything is Possible. But some things are more Probable than others. JEBAGEDDON 2016
Blowout soon fellow Stalker
I'm not entirely sure he really gets what the KKK is about. Has nobody told him?
Oh really when?
Pronounced YAK-you-luss
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Clearly, that Korean company was worried about an Irish employee disrupting their steady booze supply.
Mad Scientist Wannabe
"Wait a minute, am I the only person here who isn't some kinda racist?"
Minnesota TV news shames us as Minnesotans: "Get out the vote" effort by the mayor interpreted as being allied with violent street gangs because she did it while standing next to a black person. more here.
A nice butterfly
The KKK thing? Hilarious.
The Black Nerd thing? wtf world wtf
It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes
Wandering Jew
The Wanderer
Black and Hispanic Children Underrepresented in Autism Identification
Crossposting because it's relevant here too.
Eating a Vanilluxe will give you frostbite.
The Mistress
Y'know... I kinda find this funny, because "Negro" is actually the Portuguese word for "Black".
Visiting from the Hoag Galaxy
Yeah, it seems that whether or not you're being racist can be influenced by what language you're using or where you're from. Like, the American news media insists on using the term "African American"...regardless of where the subject is from. Protip: A black person from England is not African American. Calling them that is incredibly rude.
Blowout soon fellow Stalker
I know a Caribbean guy who got annoyed at people who kept calling him African-American.
Oh really when?
That also is due to The US having a very egocentric culture.
The education system here is not geared to include international cultures or relations so a well intentioned person trying to be respectful could use the wrong term because they don't know enough to identify that person elsewise.
I made a woman's day at work because I actually knew where Laos was and was aware enough to know her mom doesn't have any documentation of her birth or medical history because they had to run like hell during Vietnam.
She said it was a relief to not have to explain everything for once.
"Psssh. Even if you could catch a miracle on a picture any person would probably delete it to make space for more porn." - Aszur
Hmmm...
My sister is in her first year of high school and she told me their "world history" class is actually just preparation for the US history state test, with nothing about the rest of the world at all.
Blowout soon fellow Stalker
World History in schools is pretty barebones. Most of it is focused on Western Europe and even then only so we know why and how the English started colonizing what would become the US.
Everything is about America and American Exceptionalism.
Oh really when?
In my high school, we didn't even have world history. It was explicitly European History.
Scratch that, I took an AP course, which was European History, because the test was. The non-AP students had world history. Though I'm not sure why we had a class geared for the European History test over the World History test.
Maybe it was an student interest thing? I took the World History test as well, and I was the only student in the entire school district to do so.
Nihil assumpseris, sed omnia resolvere!
Mikon :3
I thought this might be interesting.
Some of the scenes were actual shot in Selma and Montgomery.
And this goes without saying usually, but avoid the comments section.
After a couple of years reading random history books I get sent for review, I've discovered that after a while I began seeing connections and a more complete picture than I ever did from the linear narratives that were foisted on me in school history classes. Straight white men history alone is far more weird and interesting (Julia Child is a surprisingly common thread) than I had realized; add in everybody else, and it's mind-blowing.
As an example, the way the white American planters stole Hawaii from the Hawaiians in the 1880-90s had a lot to do with the way organized crime of the 1960s and 70s developed in that state.
When whites are guilty of colorism:
Additionally, new results from the American National Election Studies more directly illustrate the degree of skin tone prejudice by whites. Those data indicate that white interviewers are several times more likely to judge an African American they see as light skinned to be above average in intelligence, regardless of that African American’s educational credentials.
The Wanderer
Let's not forget that colorism is basically white supremacy's little brother.
Eating a Vanilluxe will give you frostbite.
@ Wicked: I enjoyed that write-up from Coates. The rebuttal toward Barkley, I mean.
Race to Our Credit: Denial, Privilege and Life as a Majority
I've seen some of Tim Wise's work. He can be self-congratulatory in his essays and public speaking, but his arguments are well-articulated and necessarily blunt. The link's a fairly long read, so here's a chunk that illustrates the core of his argument.
Denying ones privileges is of course nothing if not logical. To admit that one receives such things is to acknowledge that one is implicated in the process by which others are oppressed or discriminated against. It makes fairly moot the oft-heard defense that 'I wasn't around back then, and I never owned slaves, or killed any Indians, ' or whatever.
If one has reaped the benefits of those past injustices (to say nothing of ongoing discrimination in the present) by being elevated, politically, economically and socially above persons of color, for example—which whites as a group surely have been thanks to enslavement, Indian genocide and Jim Crow—then whether or not one did the deed becomes largely a matter of irrelevance.
Of course, what is ultimately overlooked is that denial of one's privilege itself manifests a form of privilege: namely, the privilege of being able to deny another person's reality (a reality to which they speak regularly) and suffer no social consequence as a result.
Whites pay no price, in other words, for dismissing the claims of racism so regularly launched by persons of color, seeing as how the latter have no power to punish such disbelievers at the polls, or in the office suites, or in the schools in most cases.
On the other hand, people of color who refuse to buy into white reality—the 'reality' of the U.S. as a 'shining city on a hill' , or the 'reality' of never-ending progress, or the "'reality' of advancement by merit—often pay a heavy toll: they are marginalized, called 'professional victims, ' or accused of playing the race card. "
edited 11th Nov '14 2:58:45 PM by Aprilla
A nice butterfly
The word for the black color in spanish is also "Negro", which is also the equivalent to the N word in the language, but it is not offensive. Heck. It is often used as a nickname. The word is a lot more "fluid" and easy to say than "black guy" is in english.
But I am often told that It is better to avoid the word, even in spanish, when talking in a public place in the U.S...
Also. The U.S? Egocentric? Nnnnoooooooo! 
I think you mean America! Don't know what gosh darn' U.S is this is 'merica!
Wandering Jew
HGW XX/7
I dislike the implication in Wise's passage - particular the section "If one has reaped the benefits of those past injustices...then whether or not one did the deed becomes largely a matter of irrelevance." - that white people are collectively guilty of the slavery or imperialism of yesterday because we benefit from it today. I think the distinction between those who actually committed historical atrocities and those who - not by choice - benefit from them decades down the line is worth making.
edited 11th Nov '14 6:01:41 PM by Achaemenid
Schild und Schwert der Partei
Who Am I?
It's not a question of guilt or blame. No one chooses one's privileges. It's a matter of recognition- of acknowledging the privileges one has received and adopting a willingness to share some of the benefits.
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
The Sobering Reality of Actual Black Nerd Problems
Eating a Vanilluxe will give you frostbite.