Normally,I wouldn't say this around Black people but...

Ah-huh! On this one, we agree 100%

 

I never claimed to know about the black experience. I do believe racism does exist and is not fair and it does need to be addressed. I do have a place in my heart that breaks for all the wrongs in society that are done to people just because of the color of their skin. I was just saying that sometimes people from both sides are misunderstood. I have done volunteer work in several areas in ar. and will not go into that-but see-sometimes people just jump to conclusions and point fingers at everybody and I try to think of an answer to the problem rather than sit around and worry day and night about who's fault this is and who's fault that is. But anyone who tries to explain things from both sides of the coin gets slammed. I always respect your posts Jelly and I am sorry that I offend you-I truly love all people and want everyone to succeed in life, and will try to help in some way to those who have not been treated fairly in life! I will do what I can do. I can't change corporate america- I can only do what I can do. I think sometimes you misjudge others jelly.

 

:smt038:smt038

 

What a cop-out! Thats exactly the kind of attitude that encourages companies not to examine their hiring and promoting practices.

You talk about black people not understanding white people, you clearly dont understand black people. Do you understand how much strength it takes a professional person who has worked hard to come out and say, "Hey, I feel Im a victim of discrimination." (Do you think all black people who claim to be discriminated against are lazy uneducated, bums milkng the clock?) Alot more strength than it takes for someone to whine, "Im just one person...and corporate america is too big for me to make a difference."

If you want to see things from a black person's point of view who is determined to make a difference...pay attention to the management staff and people in positions of power in the restaurants, department stores, banks, car dealerships, and tons of other businesses that you frequent. Do they attempt to diverify the management staff?...and not just in their "urban" locations, but in their white, suburban locations as well.

Is that something you honestly think about when you go into your local bank? I do. Because Im not going to take my business to a bank, restaurant, department store, or car dealership who thinks that their black empoyees are only capable lower level positions, or can only run their "black" stores.

Thats how you make a difference. By holding minorites AND corporate america accountable. Not by discouraging black people to check the african american box, tinkerbell. That box is how the government keeps track of progess and makes sure minorities are being treated equally, not to give them a handout. Think!

Im not judging you, shy, Im just calling it like I see it. I know black people have to take more accountability. Yes, we have socio-economic disadvantages, as well and racial hurrdles we have to navigate in order to get a fair shake in white people's world. And we can do it. But Im not going to give corporate america a free-pass. They need to examine their hiring and promoting practices. The lie about a lack of qualified minority candidates is bull-shit, and you know it! 90% of the time, all applicants for a job are the same. Its just a matter of a company making a committment to diversity or giving a minority applicant the same opprotunity they have afforded countless white applicants.

 

Ive read some of your posts.

Perhaps you should give the muscle between your ears a lil workout, also.

 

Ok Jellybird, I think you are rather inteligent, so I will try to answer this, I'm not looking for an argument, and I don't want to offend anyone, but I was refering to the victim mentality in most of my post, and you never quoted me on anything I said where I "thought I had black people pegged". I was speaking from my experience with poor whites and hispanics with that same victim mentality.

I don't think white people are hired because of the color of their skin, I work in HR, corporate America, we carefully track race, and we make sure it isn't a factor, I know for a fact minorities are hired because a company has to fill a quota and they must hire a certain number of minorities to do so. They have to track it in order to know. It causes us to pay more attention to race than anyone wants to because it should not be a factor. I should be able to hire someone based on their qualifications for the job.

The problem is whiny people, I did say I was speaking of poor whites and Hispanics. Unfortunately I must include all races. The ones I've admired the most recently are the Koreans in my town because they don't whine, the do something, they have made amazing changes in their lives.

Actually, I've thought that a lot. I have a dear friend in a wheelchair, and I've had to help her a lot. Sorry, your argument about not understanding doesn't hold water.

I know a lot about people on welfare programs, not so much about colleges and football, I don't think I'd be too effective there, maybe you can tackle that one.

No, not a cop-out, just being realistic, do you really think all of us white women should try to change corporate America. I don't have the time, nor the interest in tackling it. I have to focus on my little corner of the world, as does Shy.

Yes, I know it's hard, I lost a promotion at my job because a MAN got the job, due to his degree, and I ended up training him for his job, I also had to help him out of trouble more than once over the last 4 years he's been in the job. He can't do it, he doesn't understand it and he's not focused. However he still has it. Yes, he's a white man, but the fact is I was discriminated against. So again your argument of not understanding doesn't hold water.

Thank you for the practical advice, I'm glad you will make a difference and because you feel so passionate about it, I'm sure you will!

I admit I had not paid a lot of attention to seeing this sort of thing but I will promise to do so in the future.

I didn't say it was for handout purposes, I didn't try to discourage anyone, I only said I admired those who chose not to go there. I think we should not have to go there.

That is not true at all, I've seen people lie on applications, I've seen false I.D.'s I've seen people who appear to be all on the up & up end up being the scum of the earth. Color has never been a part of that though and shouldn't be. The company I work for hires about 80 to 90 % minorities, in our area because we seldom get an application from a white person. So we don't give white people preference. This corporation is in California, Washington, Arizona, & New York, and I know the demographic in each area is different, but we track it closely and we hire and promote mostly by resume and experience, sometimes the degree holds out over the ones with only experience. That's all I've seen.

(I personally just trained a black man to do a job that is considered to be above me, and he is better paid than me. In this case I didn't apply because it is out of my town.)

 

...and thats all I have to read. If you dont think that there are white people who are hired because of the color of their skin, then you are living a state of denial.

 

I'm serious, it's called the State of Arizona!! Come and visit us sometime!!

 

Perhaps you should quit crying about race. No matter how much you wish it, the reparations check and the 40 acres and a mule ain't coming

 

Originally submitted by flaminghetero...this is an article that quite a few of you should read. Its an article by Tim Wise, an accomplished anti-racism intellectual.

Ask a fish what water is and you'll get no answer. Even if fish were capable of speech, they would likely have no explanation for the element they swim in every minute of every day of their lives. Water simply is. Fish take it for granted.
So too with this thing we hear so much about, "racial preference." While many whites seem to think the notion originated with affirmative action programs, intended to expand opportunities for historically marginalized people of color, racial preference has actually had a long and very white history.
Affirmative action for whites was embodied in the abolition of European indentured servitude, which left black (and occasionally indigenous) slaves as the only unfree labor in the colonies that would become the U.S.
Affirmative action for whites was the essence of the 1790 Naturalization Act, which allowed virtually any European immigrant to become a full citizen, even while blacks, Asians and American Indians could not.
Affirmative action for whites was the guiding principle of segregation, Asian exclusion laws, and the theft of half of Mexico for the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny.
In recent history, affirmative action for whites motivated racially restrictive housing policies that helped 15 million white families procure homes with FHA loans from the 1930s to the '60s, while people of color were mostly excluded from the same programs.
In other words, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that white America is the biggest collective recipient of racial preference in the history of the cosmos. It has skewed our laws, shaped our public policy and helped create the glaring inequalities with which we still live.
White families, on average, have a net worth that is 11 times the net worth of black families, according to a recent study; and this gap remains substantial even when only comparing families of like size, composition, education and income status.
A full-time black male worker in 2003 makes less in real dollar terms than similar white men were earning in 1967. Such realities are not merely indicative of the disadvantages faced by blacks, but indeed are evidence of the preferences afforded whites -- a demarcation of privilege that is the necessary flipside of discrimination.
Indeed, the value of preferences to whites over the years is so enormous that the current baby-boomer generation of whites is currently in the process of inheriting between $7-10 trillion in assets from their parents and grandparents -- property handed down by those who were able to accumulate assets at a time when people of color by and large could not. To place this in the proper perspective, we should note that this amount of money is more than all the outstanding mortgage debt, all the credit card debt, all the savings account assets, all the money in IRAs and 401k retirement plans, all the annual profits for U.S. manufacturers, and our entire merchandise trade deficit combined.
Yet few whites have ever thought of our position as resulting from racial preferences. Indeed, we pride ourselves on our hard work and ambition, as if somehow we invented the concepts.
As if we have worked harder than the folks who were forced to pick cotton and build levies for free; harder than the Latino immigrants who spend 10 hours a day in fields picking strawberries or tomatoes; harder than the (mostly) women of color who clean hotel rooms or change bedpans in hospitals, or the (mostly) men of color who collect our garbage.
We strike the pose of self-sufficiency while ignoring the advantages we have been afforded in every realm of activity: housing, education, employment, criminal justice, politics, banking and business. We ignore the fact that at almost every turn, our hard work has been met with access to an opportunity structure denied to millions of others. Privilege, to us, is like water to the fish: invisible precisely because we cannot imagine life without it.
It is that context that best explains the duplicity of the President's recent criticisms of affirmative action at the University of Michigan. President Bush, himself a lifelong recipient of affirmative action -- the kind set aside for the mediocre rich -- recently proclaimed that the school's policies were examples of unfair racial preference. Yet in doing so he not only showed a profound ignorance of the Michigan policy, but made clear the inability of yet another white person to grasp the magnitude of white privilege still in operation.
The President attacked Michigan's policy of awarding 20 points (on a 150-point evaluation scale) to undergraduate applicants who are members of underrepresented minorities (which at U of M means blacks, Latinos and American Indians). To many whites such a "preference" is blatantly discriminatory.
Bush failed to mention that greater numbers of points are awarded for other things that amount to preferences for whites to the exclusion of people of color.
For example, Michigan awards 20 points to any student from a low-income background, regardless of race. Since these points cannot be combined with those for minority status (in other words poor blacks don't get 40 points), in effect this is a preference for poor whites.
Then Michigan awards 16 points to students who hail from the Upper Peninsula of the state: a rural, largely isolated, and almost completely white area.
Of course both preferences are fair, based as they are on the recognition that economic status and even geography (as with race) can have a profound effect on the quality of K-12 schooling that one receives, and that no one should be punished for things that are beyond their control. But note that such preferences -- though disproportionately awarded to whites -- remain uncriticized, while preferences for people of color become the target for reactionary anger. Once again, white preference remains hidden because it is more subtle, more ingrained, and isn't called white preference, even if that's the effect.
But that's not all. Ten points are awarded to students who attended top-notch high schools, and another eight points are given to students who took an especially demanding AP and honors curriculum.
As with points for those from the Upper Peninsula, these preferences may be race-neutral in theory, but in practice they are anything but. Because of intense racial isolation (and Michigan's schools are the most segregated in America for blacks, according to research by the Harvard Civil Rights Project), students of color will rarely attend the "best" schools, and on average, schools serving mostly black and Latino students offer only a third as many AP and honors courses as schools serving mostly whites.
So even truly talented students of color will be unable to access those extra points simply because of where they live, their economic status and ultimately their race, which is intertwined with both.
Four more points are awarded to students who have a parent who attended the U of M: a kind of affirmative action with which the President is intimately familiar, and which almost exclusively goes to whites. Ironically, while alumni preference could work toward the interest of diversity if combined with aggressive race-based affirmative action (by creating a larger number of black and brown alums), the rollback of the latter, combined with the almost guaranteed retention of the former, will only further perpetuate white preference.
So the U of M offers 20 "extra" points to the typical black, Latino or indigenous applicant, while offering various combinations worth up to 58 extra points for students who will almost all be white. But while the first of these are seen as examples of racial preferences, the second are not,
hidden as they are behind the structure of social inequities that limit where people live, where they go to school, and the kinds of opportunities they have been afforded. White preferences, the result of the normal workings of a racist society, can remain out of sight and out of mind, while the power of the state is turned against the paltry preferences meant to offset them.
Very telling is the oft-heard comment by whites, "If I had only been black I would have gotten into my first-choice college."
Such a statement not only ignores the fact that whites are more likely than members of any other group -- even with affirmative action in place -- to get into their first-choice school, but it also presumes, as anti-racist activist Paul Marcus explains, "that if these whites were black, everything else about their life would have remained the same." In other words, that it would have made no negative difference as to where they went to school, what their family income was, or anything else.
The ability to believe that being black would have made no difference (other than a beneficial one when it came time for college), and that being white has made no positive difference, is rooted in privilege itself: the privilege that allows one to not have to think about race on a daily basis; to not have one's intelligence questioned by best-selling books; to not have to worry about being viewed as a "out of place" when driving, shopping, buying a home, or for that matter, attending the University of Michigan.
So long as those privileges remain firmly in place and the preferential treatment that flows from those privileges continues to work to the benefit of whites, all talk of ending affirmative action is not only premature but a slap in the face to those who have fought, and died, for equal opportunity.

 

I actually read your last post, tinkerbell, and Im sorry I did. I not trying to sound condescending, your posts reeks of someone who isnt quite educated enough to debate racism...institutional or otherwise.

1) You probably lost the promotion to the guy with a degree because you dont have one, thus he his more educated than you and more qualified.

2) The football situation has nothing to do with football. Its about the hiring and promotion practices within college and professional football. Again, do a little homework.

3) Why cant people demand change (whine?) and better treatment and at the same time "do something?" Dont project.

4) You know for a fact that the problem is whiny people? How? Again, ever take the time to study a little sociology?

So you think we should demand individual responsibility from the poor, uneducated, and socially disadvantaged "underachievers", but we shouldnt demand it from regular, everyday, people? We should just go about our lives and not worry about the actions and policies of the businesses we frequent, regardless of whether or not they may have discriminatory practices, because its not our problem. How mighty white of you.

...oh, and when you quote someone, you dont take part of a sentence and change the just of what they said. I didnt say "all job applicants are the same."

 

Okay. There was plenty of racial preference and racism in the past. Whites were clearly favored over all other groups. No one denies that. But white people today are not responsible for what happened in the past. So you should lay off shyandsweet and Tinkerbell because they don't share the collective guilt that you feel all white people should carry.

And just because there was racism and discrimination in the past doesn't meat that it should be reversed now. Two wrongs do not make a right in my opinion

So go ahead and call me an Uncle Ruckus or a Tom or whatever you're gonna call me.

 

Sorry...after alot of personal reflection, those phrases are no longer in my repertoire. How about misguided and uneducated. And no I dont mean dumb, but ignorant as to how the past is a variable of the future.

"Whats past is prologue."

 

Please explain how I'm ignorant? Is it because I don't share in your victimhood? Is it because I don't wanna get back at the "white devils" who oppressed my ancestors years ago?

 

Yes I lost the position to a guy who has a B.S. (you know what that stands for) because I didn't have one, funny how I was then asked to train him at his own job, because he was "more qualified". If I had been a black man they wouldn't have done that, for fear of a law suit.

I'm sorry that you feel I'm not educated enough - because I chose what goes into my brain, You know the old adage, "Garbage in = garbage out". There is man featured on another thread that Conservative is a code word for anti-negro, you seem to agree with whole heartedly. Sorry, he boars me and I will not spend my time "educating myself" that way. If that's what you mean by education.

If you had carefully read my post you would see where I thanked you for giving some real everyday advice on what I could do to be more responsible in that area. I never said we shouldn't demand responsibility from everyone. It's just the way you go about demanding that's wrong, because not everyone would even be effective in the areas that you are talking about, and no one can change everything, nor should everyone try, we have to do the best with the areas in which we have some influence and credibility.

You sound like a reasonably articulate, person, who feel he has a "calling" to change the world - Go for it, I don't mind you doing it, just don't expect an army of followers who do it your way!

That's like asking a mother of small children who doesn't believe in abortion to start picketing abortion clinics, at the risk of going to jail. (Then what happens to her own kids?) Just be cause she doesn't feel she should be picketing doesn't mean she wants abortion to continue, nor does it mean she ignores it's existence.

 

(sigh)

It has nothing to do with "victimhood" or getting payback on the "whitedevils." (Gosh, what an ugly word.) The facts are that racism and discrimination do exist and its about demanding equal treatment and opportunities. No one can deny that blacks are prosecuted more veminitly than whites in the judicial system, which leads to the disproportionate number of blacks being incarcerated as compared to whites. That racist government policies in the past are a primary reason for the huge socio-economic void between blacks and whites today. Did you read the article by Tim Wise?...it would save me alot of time.

But your ignorance lies in the fact that you dont see the huge push by conservatives since the reagan era to destroy anything that would benefit blacks and minorities and turn their demands for opprotunities against them. To do away with affirmative action, they told minorities that if they just as good as whites they would need it...that it discriminates against whites...and that soils the accomplishments of the truely capable minorities.

1) It assumes that blacks are not just as capable, and that the hiring and promotion of blacks is equal to that of whites...which we know isnt true because of discrimination.
2 It doesnt discriminate against whites. What is does is partially eleminate the effects of white privilege and there is a large segment of white america that isnt ready to let that go. (Yes, white privilege does exists. Just look at the huge segment of unqualified white students who get into schools thru entitlements and the "old boy network." I have yet to see any white people stand up and say, "No thank you, we will get into your university on our own merits.")

For things to be equal, they must start off and continue to be equal. Sorry, but you cant repair over 400 years of slavery and denying of education, financial, employment opportunities for an entire race in less than two generations.

Conservatives have developed this "plan" that to silence the voices of minorities who may (or may not) be the victims of discrimination...they decided they would claim to be victims, too. So all of a sudden, a small group of whites start claiming to be victims of reverse discrimination.

When minorities look to the government for opportunities to better themselves, its welfare and handouts. But as stated in Mr. Wise's article, white people went to the government for low interest loans to buy homes, and to make sure that they got an upper hand on blacks and other minorites, they has lawmakers put into law that blacks could not recieve these same loans.

Look, I could go on, but the simple fact remains that things do need to change...on all fronts. For things to get better for everybody as far as the racial divide is concern, we need blacks and minorities to be more accountable. We need corporate america to be more accountable. And we need everyday people to speak up and demand accountability from both sides. We can put the past behind us if we stop wimpin-out and attacking minorities but turn a blind eye to discriminatory practices of some of the people and businesses around us. Silencing those who claim to be discriminated against doesnt make inequality go away. It just silences the "squeaky wheels." But if we eliminated the discriminatory practices and employers, businesses, univerisities, people, and government agencies and told them it wont be tolerated, then there are no victims all problems are solved.

Easy...right?

 

...and there it is.

Now who is whining with a victim mentality?

 

The disparities in the judicial system are abhorrent. I know because we have those disparities here in Ohio. I agree. Something has to be done. No one should face different judicial results because of their race. It is only the nature of the crime that should be taken into consideration. I will say that the Drug War has exacerbated those disparities. The Drug War must come to an end. Too many people have had their lives destroyed because of it

There should be no government mandated affirmative action. It's not the government's job to decide what type of people should be hired at a business.

The government should not be doing that. A qualified white person shouldn't be disqualified because of past racial discrimination. That's not fair. I don't see how we can get beyond race when the government mandates preferences for some race at the expense of others
This is a free market. Business can decide who they want to hire. If you want to start a business that hires only minorities, that should be up to you. The vast majority of businesses will hire the person most qualified for the job. There is no need for affirmative action

The only thing the government should do is make sure all people are equal before the law. Those are the only wrongs it should right. Anything else is unacceptable.

It is discrimination. When the government decides what racial/ethnic/gender percentages there should be in a business, it is overstepping its bounds.

No one should be going to the govenment for handouts. The government was wrong for creating the racist home loan programs in the 30s that benifited whites at the expense of blacks and others, but that doesn't it's ok to turn the tables and discriminate against whites. The remedy is to not discrimite at all

I agree. I think all people need to do a better job of taking care of themselves. I don't think government should discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation. I think businesses would be better served by hiring the most qualified persons for the jobs. I think colleges and universities should accept the most qualified students

 

In the immortal words of karmacoma, "...its like talking to a loaf of bread."

 

If you don't like my responses, tough titty dude. I speak my mind and say what I feel. I'm not gonna sugarcoat anything :smt102.