OT Black Man In Minnesota Dies After Cop Kneels On His Neck/ Portland Riots

Memes r fun

 

Jesus destroyed the temple of the money lenders I believe? Do you take him to task for being proactive too?

 

“Show me a John Racism so I can speak to his manager and fix this!” Is a perfect example of how systemic racism has protected itself by creating the illusion that racism is just racists doing hard-r’s and owning slaves, instead of writing laws and loopholes hundreds of years ago that calcify into behaviors and attitudes that become the very structures of society; if you’re benefitting from these structures, it’s very easy to point at racists and say “I agree these people are bad and wrong because that’s all racism is” and then not really pay attention to how much easier it is for you to get a house or a job or a car or or or...

 

Bow down and kiss the ring, or I will huff and puff!

 

How can one love MLK, and at the same time be so clueless about him?

 

Great, then you figure out how to end this so-called systemic racism and I'll be following right behind you.

 

If you haven’t yet figured out that YOU are a part of the problem, then you aren’t’ following anyone anywhere. You’re just trodding the same old path.

 

Start by acknowledging how ignorant the thread title truly is..

 

An example of systemic racism and how Portland benefitted from it:

You know how recently The litter problem in Portland, especially on the side of the road, is just awful? And we hate it, right? It wS so much better ten years ago, why did it get bad?

Well... Slave labor is explicitly legal if the person doing the labor is a prisoner. This is in the constitution, has been since the 1860s. And in the 1980s, the war on drugs, which was designed explicitly to target Black people (though it’s never written in the words of the laws or guidelines), increased the prison population an incredible amount.

Those people, slaves for the state, would do litter patrols, and clean up the litter from the highways. When we decriminalized marijuana, the drug crime prisoner slave workforce evaporated, and the litter started piling up.

Without context, complaining about litter is innocuous, but in context, complaining about it is complaining about not having a slave force made up of people in prison on trumped up drug charges doing slave labor.

That is systemic racism at work: a series of systems layered on each other that inevitably end with racist results because of how they were designed to be implemented.

As an addendum, when marijuana was decriminalized, the laws around how to get a license to grow and sell excluded more black people than whites people because of the requirement that the growers not have a criminal drug record; since most of the drug offenses prosecuted in the war on drugs were against Black people, they were excluded, even though pot use rates were the same across races the entire time. Now the pot industry in Oregon is mostly white, because the layered systems worked to exclude Blacks, while no one system explicitly says “Blacks are bad lol”

 

Because there is no clear answer to solve systemic rascism, we should just ignore it then until someone does have an answer?

Or should we continue to strive for a better equality in all facets whether it's clear it makes things better or not? Learn from experiments and experience?


Are you not wanting to participate in trying to figure out how we can end systemic rascism, and would rather just sit and reep the benefits of being privileged until someone else finds the answer?

 

I miss your posts. Glad to see you back more often.

Things going good for you?

 

Thanks! I’m doing pretty good; my band’s album comes out tomorrow, so I’m real excited about that. Been getting my feet under me a bit more emotionally/mentally. I’m not going to agree with many here, but I definitely feel like, the longer I’ve been myself, the easier it is to hold my own, so I thought, why not just come back and shoot the shit with y’all?

 

I've told people in here forever that these are matters of the heart. Hearts are changed one conversation, one experience, one act of love at a time. That's where the real solutions lie. Would I go downtown and get all up in people's faces in a protest? No, but I'd buy any one of my Black brothers lunch and spend a few hours in meaningful conversation, laughter, etc. As I mentioned to Minstrel, it's a grass roots thing to me. That's where effective changes emanates from. We can use terms such as "systemic", and all that, but I'm cool with living life inter-racially, as it were.

 

I want to be fair to ABM: the systems are designed not to give gifts to whites, but to make them feel normal, so normal psychology makes whites think everyone has what they do, when the systems have set up roadblocks to others that are invisible to whites... if they are incurious or dealing with their own shit... I mean, there’s also that perpendicular systemic classism that cuts across race as well, so if you’re poor you’ve got your own shit to deal with and now suddenly one quadrant is fighting against other quadrants over who gets the most crumbs when they all should be fighting upward against the people actually benefitting (hint: it’s billionaires)

 

Yes, I'm all for peace as well. But what was more effective about him was that he was a fighter--not with violence but with demands for government action. He galvanized the black community and a significant chunk of the white community to push for civil rights legislation. He knew that government had a crucial role to play and fought tirelessly for it. He's a model of what I mentioned--bottom-up and top-down approaches working in concert.