Looking for a good article that explains racism

[Onlooker]

I know more than one person who thinks racism is pretty much limited to lynching and other blatant forms of hate. These people regard Jimmy the Greek's famous comment (that blacks are such good athletes because slave owners bred them that way) as reasonable, and think that Bryan Gumbel's comment that the Winter Olympics is as white as an RNC convention is as bad as Rush Limbaugh's remark that the media treated Donovan McNabb as an elite quarterback only because he's black. I don't think these people are true racists, I just think they don't realize why their attitudes are racist, and am looking for an article that does an intelligent job of explaining what racism is.

As a scary footnote, a search for "What is racism?" in Google had as its first entry a link to Stormfront, a neo-Nazi group.

[msongs]

1. maybe it is that...

people who are different than us do things we do not like or that affect us negatively. Rather than look at the actual
behavior or try to understand the deeper ramifications, we look at the most superficial aspect, which is external appearance,
and use that to express our anger/dismay/hurt/concern/confusion or whatever other emotion we are feeling or situation we are experiencing.

just one view point.

msongs
www.msongs.com/political-shirts.htm

[acmejack]

2. That is scary

narrow minded freaks.

[TygrBright]

3. Hereya go... a repost of a compendium I did some years back here on DU...

(NOTE: This was originally posted in somewhat-sarcastic (can you tell?) response to a troll whining about 'those people' hiding behind a 'victim mentality' when 'racism no longer exists in our public institutions,' and so why should we care whether Jeb Bush appoints any black judges to the FL courts. Idiots are everywhere...)

Okay. I'll start at the beginning. Bear with me, now-- it's possible you may know SOME of this, although one couldn't tell it from your posts. And it's not simple or easy, but since we're all Democrats here, we can actually handle the fact that a lot of critical political and social issues don't have simple and easy explanations and solutions, right?

A LONG time ago, some WHITE guys thought it would be a great idea to take advantage of the strife between various BLACK tribes in Africa to BUY the losers, bring them to North America, treat them like domestic animals (only worse, because they were mostly cheaper, in those early days, than cows or horses,) make them legally not human, and abuse them in every conceivable way while at the same time making them the key element of their economy.

Later on, the descendents of the WHITE guys decided they didn't want to pay taxes to England anymore and they should form their own nation, in which all the WHITE guys who owned real estate would have franchise (political self-determination) and access to the executive, legislative, and judicial power of government. They called this "Liberty and Freedom," and fought a war for it, and won, and put together a pretty cool document called a "Constitution," which enshrined all the rights that WHITE guys were entitled to.

Meantime, the BLACK people (remember them?) were still being beaten, separated from their families, killed, raped, and made to do all the heavy work of the economic backbone that supported nearly half of the newly "Liberated" America.

Over the next few years the WHITE guys who owned real estate started getting a shitload of flack from the far-more-numerous WHITE guys who didn't own real estate about why didn't all these cool "rights" apply to THEM, too, since there were more of them, and all that high-sounding rhetoric of "liberty and justice for all" should include them, right? And they won their point, and then ALL the WHITE guys had all the rights guaranteed under the Constitution. This set a really dangerous precedent for the young nation: The notion that our ACTIONS should actually reflect our STATED BELIEFS. We're regretting this, now, but it's too late, the precedent is there.

However, there were a growing number of people in the part of the country that had never bought into the economy-based-on-BLACK-labor thingie, and they had a variety of reasons for looking askance at the WHITE people who were getting rich off it. The WHITE guys who were getting rich off it got all the other WHITE guys in their part of the country to buy in on the notion that the WHITE guys who were getting rich off it were defending a "way of life," that benefited ALL the WHITE guys in their part of the country, because after all, BLACK people are really inferior and awful and if we stopped exploiting them as the backbone of our economy, they'd move next door to the WHITE guys who had never benefitted much from their labor anyways, and come on to their daughters, and dance and sing better than the WHITE guys, and hump like ANIMALS with those gigantic... well, anyway, they convinced ALL the WHITE guys in their part of the country that States should have the right to decide whether keeping BLACK people as slaves and having an economy founded on BLACK labor was a Good Thing. And that if all those uppity people in the other part of the country who didn't know how to control their own nigras tried to intervene, they should fight a war about it.

At THAT point, some of the WHITE people who had been saying all along that BLACK people were (gasp) just that-- PEOPLE-- and thus BLACK guys might possibly be entitled to all those things the Constitution guaranteed WHITE guys, got really obstreperous about this preposterous notion and started pressuring the politicians in their part of the country to make an issue of it.

Okay, long story short, after much economic calculation and foofooraw, they did make an issue of it, it led to war, and the people whose economy wasn't almost totally dependent on BLACK labor won. Now everybody faced some tough choices, because, frankly, even the WHITE guys from the part of the country that had never based its economy on BLACK labor weren't too keen on having BLACK people move next door and start marrying their daughters and sing and dance better and... well, you know that part.

So the WHITE people from the winning side decided to "Reconstruct" the part of the country that lost in such a way that the BLACK people would want to stay there, mostly, and not make nuisances of themselves elsewhere.

In the mean time, the BLACK people, who had been largely left to their own devices when slavery collapsed, had no economic resources and no assets and were generally difficult to cope with because there were an awful lot of them. So the "Reconstructors" barged down to the losers and decided that rather than trying to make the losers implement the Constitution fully, THEY (the winners,) would do it because you couldn't trust those losers. (They may have had a point, but it still wasn't the smartest approach.)

Having the winners bossing everyone around, with their hands in the cookie jars, using lots of newly-freed BLACK people as their front men, made the loser WHITE folks even MORE furious, and contributed to the elevation of their contempt for BLACK people into out-and-out HATRED for BLACK people, and determination NEVER to let them enjoy those Constitutional rights and move in next door to them and marry their... oh, I did that part already. 'scuse me.

So as soon as the winners sucked the last takings from the losers' economy, and got tired of playing good-cop/bad-cop with the losers, and having those nasty hot mosquito-ridden summers to deal with, they packed up and went home, there to figure out "legal" ways to keep the BLACK people who were coming to their part of the country from moving next door, etc.

In the mean time, the losers founded a social club that dressed up in sheets and did lots of jolly well-intentioned pranks like burning crosses and lynching BLACK guys and generally terrorizing anyone who thought that maybe they should make some progress toward letting BLACK people enjoy their Constitutional rights and have equal access to the executive, legislative, and judiciary powers that make up our system of self-government. When they weren't dressing up, they hung around in the halls of government, keeping BLACK people out and formulating cool political principles like "Separate But Equal," which is a way of saying "Okay, BLACK people can HAVE Constitutional rights, they just can't DO anything with them."

Okay, fast-forward again, about seventy-five years. Not much has actually changed. The WHITE people on the winning side are doing a way better job of pretending that BLACK people are entitled to Constitutional rights, so they rarely have to resort to having guys with shotguns administer "poll tests" to BLACK people trying to (gasp) vote. The WHITE people on the losing side pin their faith in the white sheets and Separate But Equal.

In the meantime, however, some other developments have occurred. For one thing, women noticed that something had been left out of the Constitutional rights-thingie, and threw MAJOR PMS hissy-fits and eventually the guys allowed them Constitutional rights just to shut them up. As long as they didn't take them too far, like wanting to get paid the same for doing the same job as a guy, or wanting to own real estate or have credit in their own name when they had perfectly good husbands, or anything like that.

Also, over the previous 75 years, some BLACK people had slipped through the cracks in the ghetto fences, as it were, and started educating themselves and starting their own businesses and newspapers and developing a really close-knit but widespread network of people to help each other cope with the problems attached to being BLACK. And these uppity BLACK people, along with a few well-meaning WHITE people, started pointing out that although theoretically BLACK people HAD Constitutional rights, the number of BLACK people who were actually involved in the executive, legislative, and judicial mechanisms that make up our government was, um... well.... um... not real big.

Among other things. Like economic opportunity and educational opportunity and a few minor issues like that. But anyway...

About fifty years ago, these uppity BLACK people, and a few WHITE people, began pointing out to the rest of the WHITE people that the ideas of "Liberty and Justice for all" and "Constitutional rights" were not exactly alive and well in America. In the next ten years or so, the rest of the WHITE people, irritated by their obtuseness, killed a lot of them, threw hundreds in jail, and otherwise tried to gently convince them that they were overstating the case.

Unfortunately for the WHITE people who were still trying to make out like "having" Constitutional rights was the same thing as being able to EXERCISE Constitutional rights, a huge number of OTHER WHITE people, who didn't really care much one way or the other (because no BLACK people lived next door to them, etc.) were starting to listen to the BLACK people and their WHITE allies about those minor issues of access and exercising rights and so on.

Finally, after ten or fifteen years of watching BLACK people and their WHITE friends have dogs set on them, get fire hoses turned on them, get beaten by ugly mobs, etc., they decided that finally, a few hundred years after BLACK people were forcibly brought to America, and a hundred years after a war had been fought to allow them Constitutional rights, it was time to start allowing them to exercise those rights, if only to shut them up so that we could all go back to watching "Gilligan's Island."

So they passed some laws saying "BLACK people not only HAVE Constitutional rights, but they can USE them if they want," and the WHITE people assumed that settled everything and the whole shabby, shameful, disgusting episode of slavery and discrimination was over for good and all those noisy people would just shut up now and sit down and quietly use their Constitutional rights in someone else's neighborhood.

Unfortunately, the BLACK people, whose economic progress since "getting" Constitutional rights a hundred years past had actually been pretty good, considering what they were up against, STILL didn't have enough money, highly-educated young people, real estate, etc. to actually make a lot of progress in using their Constitutional rights, because most of the political offices, good-paying jobs, and prime real estate were still in the hands of WHITE people. And as long as WHITE people controlled all those things, and no one and nothing nudged them along to give BLACK people a shot at getting in on the action, BLACK peoples' economic, social, and political progress was going to be pretty slow. Generations, in fact. For millions of BLACK people. Who would spend those long, slow generations in grinding poverty.

(Are you still with me? Now we're getting to the interesting part, I promise.)

So the BLACK people pointed this out. By this time, a lot of WHITE people, for reasons of their own ranging from moral high-mindedness to crass political opportunism, were ready to look at this situation and see the real disadvantages of it. After all, having a really really large, really poor, disaffected underclass of people united by race and feelings of unfairness and oppression would cause a LOT of social problems and might even prevent the WHITE people from making lots of money and enjoying "The Brady Bunch" in peace and quiet.

So the BLACK people and the WHITE people who agreed with them sat down and devised a whole range of strategies to give BLACK people some opportunities to get better educations, decent jobs, etc., even though the BLACK people might not ALWAYS have the same qualifications as WHITE people. The idea was that a couple of generations of this would give enough BLACK people a chance to get into political office, lucrative business opportunities, fashionable universities, the social clubs where so much of America's business is transacted "off the books," as it were, that at some point BLACK people would finally have all the wherewithal to participate equally in political, social, and economic self-determination. Then they WOULD have all the same qualifications and opportunities as WHITE people had had for the last COUPLE OF CENTURIES and then we can ALL go back to watching "Cheers" in peace and maybe even when Ted Danson retires they'll hire a BLACK actor to take his place, wouldn't that be an interesting twist?

Of course, any idea this complicated was bound to have some bugs in it, and things didn't work out the way everyone planned. This was mainly due to a lot of WHITE people who STILL didn't want BLACK people living next door to them and marrying their... Oh, never mind, suffice to say that they came up with a whole range of strategies to fight the outrageous notion that after three-hundred-plus years of waling on BLACK people, as soon as they stopped waling on BLACK people, WHITE people were off the hook and should be able to go back and watch "E.R." in peace and quiet, NOW, without having to give up a single one of those lucrative jobs or slots at prestigious universities or seats in executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government UNTIL every single BLACK who wanted a chance at them could meet or exceed the qualifications of the WHITE people who felt entitled to them. Or until the BLACK people could collect enough evidence to sue the WHITE people on grounds of discrimination, which the WHITE people were becoming increasingly adept at not supplying, and even passed a few reactionary little laws to help them pretend that discrimination NEVER entered into the process, no, not at all, UH-UH!!! Besides, since they don't have a lot of resources to buy equal access to the courts they'll get tired of suing us soon or run out of money or make everybody REALLY annoyed with them and that's a win-win strategy, too.

Among the ways these WHITES (and a few opportunistic BLACKS who saw a way to advance their personal agendas) came up with to counter this radical notion were: Claiming that the whole idea of using special strategies to get BLACK people fully into the mainstream of social, economic and political life was, in fact, a RACIST notion! And claiming that, okay, maybe it was a good idea, but hey, ten or twenty years is enough time for a community of millions of people with a huge number of educationally and economically disadvantaged people in it is PLENTY of time to make up ground, so the whole thing is passe', over, so ten minutes ago, dude.

I hope this very long-winded and somewhat tedious recap answers your question about: >>What's the big deal? Whatever happened to a color-blind society where people were judged by their merits, and not by how much light their skin reflects? You know, like Martin Luther King, Jr. fought and died for?<<

Now, to address a few more of your issues:

>>How you inferred that I have no idea, since my post was devoid of any mention of Governor Bush's selection process or criteria.<<

God, I am SO SORRY!!! I thought Ol' Jebbie's selection criteria was WHAT WE WERE DISCUSSING!!! Stupid me!! You mean I just typed all that stuff for NOTHING? Whoah... call me dumb, yep. So, you placed a post, in a thread criticizing Jeb for establishing a short list for a judicial appointment, that had NOTHING TO DO WITH HIS SELECTION CRITERIA? Even though you were taking others to task for criticizing it?

Wow, man... you're too good for me. I never even saw that one coming.

But, hey, I'm a glutton for punishment (we've already established that, right?) so I'll keep right on going.

>>Frankly, I don't know who the qualified candidates are, which is why I didn't make any mention of it in my previous post (which is in turn why I'm baffled at your inference of that). See, it's not my job to know (since I'm not a resident of Florida).<<

ummm.... I really hesitate to point this out, since you're obviously in this discussion on a WHOLE 'NOTHER LEVEL than the rest of us pedestrian disputants, but the point *I* was making was not that YOU should know who the qualified candidates were, but that OL' JEBBIE should know, since as Enlightened Grand Goober of the Great State of FL, he should presumably have his finger on the pulse of who's who in the state's legal system. Or at least have access to someone on his staff who has that information.

I was trying to clarify for you (how outrageously presumptuous of me! What was I thinking!) the gravamen of our outrage in Goob Jebbie's SELECTION of a short list of four white people for a high judicial post in a state that is already woefully lacking in black representation among its judiciary, and will be further depleted by the retirement of the incumbent of the seat. Our issue was not that any of the four white candidates should not have been there, but that in a state where senior black members of the judiciary are distressingly rare (given their representation among the state's population,) NO ONE on the Goob's staff seems to have made an effort to ferret out a SINGLE black candidate for the post. Even for show, for godssakes.

And my personal incredulity that in a great big state with a large black population it should REALLY NOT BE TOO MUCH OF A TASK to find a qualified black candidate or two and add them to the list. Even just for show. Not even MAKING THE EFFORT, for godssakes, is a blatant nose-thumbing at the idea that black people should have access to such opportunities.

>>Stating "They're gonna replace a <fill in ethnicity> with <different ethnicity>" as if it mattered is the real bigotry.<<

No, the real bigotry is trying to use "bigotry" as an argument to perpetuate inequity in the name of a sham "equity" that does not, and never has yet, existed anywhere in America's corridors of power and wealth. But I'm not accusing YOU of such bigotry, of course. Don't take it personally. It's clear from the injured innocence of your post that you, personally, are an incredibly fair-minded, non-racist individual who really supports the notion of equal opportunity for all, and you're just a little clueless on how this insulting flipoff by Florida's own Mr. Integrity violates your deeply-held convictions.

Hope this helps!

informatively,
Bright

[pop goes the weasel]

4. that's only black and white

Racism is more complex than that, even in the US, and not relegated to just the US. There's an overview of race problems in the world at http://www.globalissues.org/HumanRights/Racism.asp that might be useful. There is an extensive and well-written Wikipedia article on racism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism.