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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
At least until this January, yes. He won a pair of terms thanks to vote splitting, but now he's thankfully term limited.
CNN is reporting something about Trump's inaugural committee being under criminal investigation. No article yet.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/13/politics/trump-inauguration-spending-investigation/index.html
Looks like a "donations for favors" thing.
Edited by Rationalinsanity on Dec 13th 2018 at 6:16:21 AM
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.It's true, everyone has some amount of racism in them, no matter how small. Your job as a person is to deny those ideas and be a good person. No-one's free of racism, because we were all raised in a (sometimes subtly) racist culture and environment. Denying that you have some amount of evil in you is denying that you ever need to improve yourself morally as a person, and being critical of one's self and doing self-improvement is important to not being blind to your own faults.
There is a logic to the idea that we all have biases in favour of our own group, be that a racial group, a gender, a sexual orientation, a nationality, ect... said biases are a natural result of self preservation instincts and cultural focus and cultural learning.
We all agree that even the best societies have racial issues, we are all part of our societies as such we pick things up from our society at a basic instinctive level.
What’s important is if you lean into those bad cultural lessons, or try and fight against them, if when you glance back twice at the guy behind you at night you self-assess the possibility that you are in part being extra wary because that person is of a different racial group, ect...
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranI think pushover has the right of it in this one.
(America focused analysis FYI; absolutely not saying other countries don’t have issues with racism)
American society is deeply racist. Not in that every person runs around spewing slurs, but in that our system itself is racist. Our government, our housing, our schools, all of them were built by racists and reinforce racist outcomes. Passively maintaining these systems is still racism, whether it’s a job interviewer sliding past the resumes with Black or Latinx names, or a state building a new pollution disposal site next to a Native American reservation’s river, or kindergarten teachers penalizing Black and Latino children disproportionately to white children. Racism is a million little things, like almost all major media featuring Arabic roles being focused on either terrorism or mayyybe semi-sympathetic stereotypes. Or how most criminal roles on a lot of tv shows are disproportionately cast as Black and Latino.
A lot of my assumptions about the world when I was in high school were racist. I went to a high school that was 40% Black, 30% white, and the rest mostly Latino. I only took gifted classes, and in each class of 25-30 kids, there was never more than 1-2 black kids, usually kids whose parents were dentists or something like that. I noticed the difference as a teen, but shrugged and figured that black people just happened to be less motivated/smart because of poverty/laziness/ghetto culture.
Which is MASSIVELY racist and super inaccurate. As I’ve grown older I’ve started to learn and interrogate those old assumptions, but it’s still an active task to unlearn bigotry.
HOWEVER. That is not an excuse. I get very twitchy about the assertion that everyone is racist because it’s often used as a lazy argument for giving up/not trying to fix racism. Or people arguing racism is “natural.”
Racism isn’t natural. It’s taught every day via millions of microaggressions in our environment. It’s why even Black cops disproportionately assault/injure Black people, because they've been taught those racist stereotypes too.
I think it depend on what you mean by natural. Like, any given stereotype is naturally due to exist, but humans seem to natural create stereotypes as short hands.
I don't think "it's natural" is an excuse, even if technically true. A lot of things are "natural", that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to be better. Natural and good are not synonyms.
Edited by LSBK on Dec 13th 2018 at 6:34:18 AM
Well, some amount of in-group bias or wariness of people who are different than you is going to be natural, but the specific kind of racism in the US and many other countries that's centered around white supremacy is something that is taught, more or less.
Edited by Draghinazzo on Dec 13th 2018 at 8:41:18 AM
Racism is the in-group bias, expressed in the context of race. It's any preference for members of one racial group over those of any other, for any reason, conscious or not, explicit or not. Most racism is unintentional, but still victimizes members of those communities who have access to fewer resources, connections and opportunities than those of others. So it's fairly broad and all encompassing, yet few people are aware of that, or are yet willing to admit it.
Because lets face it, admitting to and dealing with one's own racism (or prejudice of any sort) is extremely hard. I liken it to a destructive character trait, not unlike greed or jealousy or violent anger. Everyone is aware of the need to control those impulses, in the interest of living and working together and preserving society, but we have not yet achieved the same degree of acceptance of the ubiquity of prejudice.
And it's hard for other reasons. It is extremely difficult for an individual to resist the pressures imposed on one by the institutions of one's own society, even for well-meaning members of the majority group, something that I have myself confessed to here in these forums. White people cannot always easily dispense with the unearned privileges that have been conferred upon them by society. It's also hard because it can feel like a betrayal of one's own group. For people who live in homogenous neighborhoods, and work in homogenous workplaces, and feel a debt to the kind of people who raised them and live around them, it can be hard to free oneself of a natural tribalistic tendency. And it's hard because of the fear of competition for jobs and other resources, and because of the kind of resentment that says "I suffered my entire life and the government didnt give me any assistance, so why should anyone else get any?" It's hard for a lot of reasons.
But people can change. People have been changing, very slowly over the course of generations, but they have. Conditions have improved for people of color in many places around the world, including the US, and conditions will continue to improve, so long as we continue to invest effort into persuading people to support change. The two most important approaches to promoting change are educating the public regarding the facts, and reforming the economy so that people share the burdens and the benefits of globalization more equally. Also it will take leadership to make reducing measurable disparities in health, employment, housing, education and so on into national goals. But it also takes individual commitment from each of us to work on our own cognitive and emotional biases so that we can avoid being the victims of our own fear and anger.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.![]()
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Just because it's no longer illegal for black people to drink at the same water fountains as white people doesn't mean racism in the USA has been fixed. There's still way more that needs to be done.
I also cringe whenever I hear "Everyone is racist", because all too often it's used to downplay racist actions.
Edited by M84 on Dec 13th 2018 at 9:52:13 PM
Disgusted, but not surprisedYeah, it should be noted that there is a major difference between "everyone occasionally has racist thoughts because of the culture they were raised in (and also intrusive thoughts are a thing), and you should stop those thoughts and work to move past them through self-improvement" and "everyone is secretly super racist, they're just afraid to say what everyone else is thinking, you should man up, stop letting yourself be censored by PC culture, and just blurt out every racist thought that enters your head".
Edited by PushoverMediaCritic on Dec 13th 2018 at 7:07:14 AM
What can I say? Avenue Q wasn't lying with its song, Everyone's A Little Bit Racist.

There is plenty of racism to be had, it just takes different forms, so the strains of dogwhistles used by the GOP right now mostly miss the mark-tiny minority populations, very few immigrants total, and most people are so poor that they sort of back into the stereotype of 'willfully ignorant douchenozzles who vote with their economic anxiety and chuck minorities under the bus in the process.' While that is just a front for most GOP voters in other states, here it is a reality that is no less harmful because of the supposedly moderate Republicans wearing a Mask of Sanity.
Of course, there is plenty of White-on-White racism to fill the void of explicit racism; There is a huge divide in southern Maine amongst the older White population between the French speaking population and the British descended people. Nearly a fifth of my class was reasonably fluent in French because so many of their (old, White, very racist) relatives spoke it, sometimes in lieu of English fluency.
Edited by ViperMagnum357 on Dec 13th 2018 at 5:02:18 AM