All things Racist...USA edition (2 Viewers)

[Farb]

I was looking for a place to put this so we could discuss but didn't really find a place that worked so I created this thread so we can all place articles, experiences, videos and examples of racism in the USA.

This is one that happened this week. The lady even called and filed a complaint on the officer. This officer also chose to wear the body cam (apparently, LA doesn't require this yet). This exchange wasn't necessarily racist IMO until she started with the "mexican racist...you will never be white, like you want" garbage. That is when it turned racist IMO

All the murderer and other insults, I think are just a by product of CRT and ACAB rhetoric that is very common on the radical left and sadly is being brought to mainstream in this country.

Another point that I think is worth mentioning is she is a teacher and the sense of entitlement she feels is mind blowing.

https://news.yahoo.com/black-teacher-berates-latino-la-221235341.html

 

[Farb]

That's wonderful. Wonderful that you've been getting out and getting good and sunburned.

There's nothing more real than an American Indian wearing a sunburn. Or any one wearing a good proper sunburn.

I relish that situation. I'm glad you got it!

Well, the weather WAS nice here for a minute, so I had the top down for a few days!

 

[Farb]

We also don't know what these kids were doing prior to getting into the scuffle. Maybe one was already being watched by the cops for past behavior? Maybe the black kid has a history of starting fights. The white kid also was immediately thrown to the chair and sat down, didn't try and get up, and communicated with the female (since that was important) officer. There are too many unknowns but in a society that is seeking racial injustice and the supply is low, one must create racism out of anything.

 

[V Chip]

We also don't know what these kids were doing prior to getting into the scuffle. Maybe one was already being watched by the cops for past behavior? Maybe the black kid has a history of starting fights. The white kid also was immediately thrown to the chair and sat down, didn't try and get up, and communicated with the female (since that was important) officer. There are too many unknowns but in a society that is seeking racial injustice and the supply is low, one must create racism out of anything.

It’s funny you accuse others of creating something out of nothing right after you invent many possible excuses for bias seen in the video.

 

[Farb]

It’s funny you accuse others of creating something out of nothing right after you invent many possible excuses for bias seen in the video.

We are not discussing the possible motives of the video? Excuses or possible explanations other than the one presented (rascism)?

 

[V Chip]

We are not discussing the possible motives of the video? Excuses or possible explanations other than the one presented (rascism)?

Again, I didn’t claim racism. Racial bias <> racism.

But yeah, feel free to invent scenarios that excuse the behavior seen. I’m certain they’re likely.

 

[Farb]

https://www.sacbee.com/news/equity-lab/representation/article258317553.html

Racist graffiti on a water fountain. Investigating as a hate crime.

https://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2022/02/17/person-identified-mcclatchy-hs-racist-graffiti-protest/

Now it is not a hate crime, they got a confession after surveillance video. The perp was a black female.

I wonder why she would do this? Probable answer is not enough real racism to claim victimhood status.

 

[SaulGoodmanEsq]

Probable answer is not enough real racism to claim victimhood status.

Nah. If that were the case we wouldn't be inundated with the white victimhood complex this country has had to suffer through the last decade or so.

 

[SamAndreas]

Well, the weather WAS nice here for a minute, so I had the top down for a few days!

When I was 20 I bought and restored a 1964 and 1/2 Mustang convertible. I drove it until 1987, and then after the engine had frozen during the winter and the block was broken I gave it away.

I know it was the ultimate classic car.

I loved that convertible, we had some great road adventures together. I puled the 6 cylinder engine from it and replaced it with a V8 289 and a four speed top loader transmission. One time I did a 22 second mile in it, which translates to 165 miles an hour. At that speed was it ever hard to drive. Real scary.

I only took it to the max for that one mile on a flat absolutely straight section of totally smooth highway once. That's why I'm still alive.

 

[BullSheetBuddha]

When I was 20 I bought and restored a 1964 and 1/2 Mustang convertible. I drove it until 1987, and then after the engine had frozen during the winter and the block was broken I gave it away.

I know it was the ultimate classic car.

I loved that convertible, we had some great road adventures together. I puled the 6 cylinder engine from it and replaced it with a V8 289 and a four speed top loader transmission. One time I did a 22 second mile in it, which translates to 165 miles an hour. At that speed was it ever hard to drive. Real scary.

I only took it to the max for that one mile on a flat absolutely straight section of totally smooth highway once. That's why I'm still alive.

My brother had a 1969 mustang mach 1 428 cobra jet. In 1970, as I remember, we went out onto the Mass Turnpike, with me driving, and I took it up to 140. It drove very well. An interesting thing, we were on the eastbound side of the pike and I had forgotten that in that spot westbound was a state police station.

 

[Bigdaddysaints]

even the other kid says he even offered to be arrested, he was told by the officers that Kyle was arrested for resisting. And now the mall says Kyle is resposible for the damages the officers caused by breaking the table.

“I knew that was really bad,” Joseph told NJ.com. “I even offered to get handcuffed, I offered to get detained after Kye was detained, and they turned my offer down. I even asked they why they detained Kye and not me, and they said because Kye was resisting.”

“It has just been discovered that the mother of Z’Kye, the Black teenager involved, was told by the head of mall security when she went to pick him up that she would be responsible for the cost of a broken table that law enforcement knocked over

 

[Optimus Prime]

even the other kid says he even offered to be arrested, he was told by the officers that Kyle was arrested for resisting. And now the mall says Kyle is resposible for the damages the officers caused by breaking the table.

after the backlash this causes the mall don't be surprised if it's retracted as an 'error'

 

[V Chip]

even the other kid says he even offered to be arrested, he was told by the officers that Kyle was arrested for resisting. And now the mall says Kyle is resposible for the damages the officers caused by breaking the table.

It’s obvious from the video that he didn’t resist at all. That’s an invented charge.

 

[Optimus Prime]

Good article
===================

Is America a racist country?

As some of you will recall, Sen. Tim Scott answered that question in a speech last year with an emphatic no. He was promptly echoed by Vice President Kamala Harris. Neither explained their reasoning, but one assumes it was based, at least in part, on the fact that the country has no laws explicitly requiring racial mistreatment.

Fair enough. America hasn’t had such laws for a whole 50 years, give or take.

But that line of argument asks that we accept a ridiculously narrow definition of what it means to be “a racist country.” It ignores the fact there is not a single American field of endeavor — journalism, pro football, real estate, banking, politics, health, you name it — that is free of racial discrimination. Might have been entertaining to see how the senator and the veep responded had anyone thought to point that out.

Not to pick on them. Their reality avoidance is hardly unique. Indeed, where race is concerned, eliding the truth is an American tradition.

Which is what makes the second trial of Ahmaud Arbery’s killers — the federal hate crimes trial — feel so critical. Prosecutors are asking a jury to face that truth, head-on. In the state trial that ended in November, three white men — Gregory McMichael, his son Travis McMichael and their neighbor, William Bryan — were found guilty of murder after chasing Arbery, an African-American jogger, through their south Georgia neighborhood. They claimed to believe he was responsible for a series of break-ins.

He wasn’t. He was just a black guy out for a run. His killers got life sentences.

But if the state trial proved what happened, the federal trial that began Monday seeks to establish why. Most of us already “know” why, of course: three racists did a racist thing. But this prosecution, if successful, will establish that to a legal certainty. In a nation so steeped in racial denial, it would be gratifying to see these men convicted of hate crimes. But first, a jury that includes eight white members will have to agree that Arbery was shot because he was black. In other words, it will require them to face what America too often is.........

Leonard Pitts Jr.: Is America a racist country?

 

[Optimus Prime]

This could have gone in the CRT or education thread

Very good article
===================================

“Ms. Connell! Ms. Connell!” Makani was doing all he could to get his teacher’s attention. “Is this the same like what Colin Kaepernick is doing?”

Ms. Connell, a middle-aged white teacher, was teaching her fifth grade public school students all about Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement in the fall of 2017. Her classroom, like the rest of the school, served predominately poor Black, Latino, Asian, and immigrant students.

Ms. Connell was visibly annoyed by Makani’s question.

“Rosa Parks … ” she answered while turning down her lips and furrowing her eyebrows, “ … didn’t disrespect our country.” Makani shrugged his shoulders, and the lesson continued on, with Ms. Connell turning to a discussion of the Ku Klux Klan, completely dismissing Makani’s astute observation about the parallels between historical and contemporary acts of resistance.

Teachers like Ms. Connell have recently been the targets of right-wing attacks for teaching a curriculum on America’s history of racial oppression, colloquially referred to as critical race theory. Many have come to these teachers’ defense, pointing out the necessity of including basic American history in school curricula. In these debates, people across the political spectrum tend to assume that white teachers—who make up 79 percent of the public school teaching force—are comfortably, and truthfully, teaching about America’s history and the present realities of racial oppression. However, my research reveals something different: a disturbing picture of what is actually happening........

What I discovered was rampant racism, cruelty, and indifference from teachers working inside public schools. Most of the teachers I observed were not, in fact, teaching about America’s racist history but instead were perpetuating everyday racial violence against their students inside the classroom. While the idea is not prominent in public discourse, I am not alone in finding teacher racism to be an everyday presence in the American classroom.

One recent study, for example, found that teachers hold as much implicit and explicit pro-white racial bias as nonteachers do. Education scholar Michael Dumas has written about teacher racism and Black suffering inside the classroom, showing that these attitudes have concrete outcomes. And students themselves know this. Social media is replete with students talking about teacher racism, and they have often taken to the streets to protest it.

The curriculum I witnessed in action at the elementary and middle schools I studied was certainly multicultural, as it is in many urban school districts. Teachers lectured extensively about the civil rights movement, and students read books about Black families, such as The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963, to learn about it. Teachers also received extensive anti-racist and cultural sensitivity trainings through the district and within the schools......

According to Ms. Mack, professor Gomez—a woman of color who was the instructor of the multicultural graduate seminar in the College of Education that Ms. Mack was taking at the local university—didn’t understand or care about white people.

Ms. Mack shared with us that one of her classmates was shot down in class after asking professor Gomez why there wasn’t a “white history month.” The professor explained that 11 months of the year are “white history months.” When Gomez underlined to her class of educators the importance of correctly pronouncing their students’ names, Ms. Mack interjected, explaining that her first name, Andrea, was always mispronounced so she understood what mispronunciation felt like. But professor Gomez highlighted that the experiences of students of color cannot always be equated with those of white people. “It just makes me so mad,” Ms. Mack shared, “that I can’t sleep at night.”

This resentment didn’t end here. Again and again, across 15 different classrooms and multiple special courses—such as computers, music, and physical education—and over three years, I witnessed the cruelty and indifference with which white teachers treated students of color. When one Black boy gave a gentle hug to his white fourth grade teacher before leaving for lunch, she spoke loudly, “Oh my god, don’t touch me [rubbing her fingers up and down the arm he had hugged]. You touch too much, Michael.” As Michael walked away, still within earshot, the teacher said to me, “He touches too much. Constantly hugging. Probably doesn’t get love at home. But it’s weird and scary sometimes.” Michael lowered his eyes and sprinted out of the classroom.

No child should be treated like Michael. But no amount of academic stardom spared Black and brown students from cruelty—not even Nazli, a Black girl in the fourth grade whom teachers and friends referred to as a “math genius.” Calculations came easy to Nazli, and her classmates envied her skills. However, that all changed after her baby sister’s sudden death. Nazli wasn’t interested in math anymore, and her grades dropped as she grieved her sister. While grading one of her assignments in class, her white fourth grade teacher said to me: “She really hasn’t been doing well. I get it. Life can be hard. But it’s grit we need. Not sure you’ve seen that TED Talk? No matter how much I teach, grit is key.”

This wasn’t the only time that I heard about “grit” in the schools. Teachers underlined how hard work and “grit” can get students “anywhere you want.” When Marianna’s father was deported, she was asked to summon grit to continue doing her schoolwork. While the classrooms had posters all over with Spanish language text to make sure “students feel seen” and sense that the school “values their culture,” as one teacher told me, teachers didn’t shy away from using words like illegals and said nothing about the cruelty of deportation and borders. In talking about the necessity of grit and willpower in school, and equating height discrimination to racial discrimination, teachers signaled to students that racial discrimination is a relic of the past...............

MSN

 

[Optimus Prime]

For what it's worth
==============
New research by a pair of social psychologists suggests that Donald Trump's presidency unleashed racial animus and white supremacist ideology in ways that will shape American society for years or decades to come.

The study by Benjamin C. Ruisch of the University of Kent in England and Melissa J. Ferguson of Yale, published last week in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Human Behaviour, is entitled "Changes in Americans' prejudices during the presidency of Donald Trump." The authors summarize their findings this way:

In 13 studies including over 10,000 participants, we tested how Americans' prejudice changed following the political ascension of Donald Trump. We found that explicit racial and religious prejudice significantly increased amongst Trump's supporters, whereas individuals opposed to Trump exhibited decreases in prejudice.

Ferguson and Ruisch explain this by referencing the power of "social norms," which, they say,

do not exert a uniform effect on people's attitudes. Rather, adherence to social norms occurs largely along group boundaries: People primarily assimilate to norms that are held by 'social reference groups', that is, individuals and groups that they personally respect and admire. In the highly polarized political landscape of the United States, this translates into the prediction that Trump's counter-normative behaviour should not have uniformly affected the attitudes of all Americans. Rather, it should have increased expressions of prejudice primarily amongst those who view him positively, that is, his supporters.

The authors offer additional details about how prejudice against Muslims, Black people and other minority groups changed during Trump's term in office, and on the impact of support for him on those dynamics:

The previous nine studies demonstrate that prejudice in the United States changed during the presidency of Donald Trump. Critically, however, the direction of this change differed dramatically as a function of support for Donald Trump. We find that Trump supporters not only deviated from the widely documented societal trend towards decreasing expressions of prejudice but also showed significant increases in prejudice towards a range of minoritized groups. Those who were opposed to Trump, conversely, showed significant decreases in expressed prejudice over this same time period. We next turned to examining the mechanism behind these effects. Our interpretation of the correlational changes in prejudice that we observed is that Trump's political ascent may have changed the social norms (that is, standards) for expressing prejudice, leading his supporters to feel that prejudice against minoritized groups had become more acceptable. [Emphasis added.]

Ferguson and Ruisch advance the ominous conclusion that "the presidency of Donald Trump may have substantially reshaped the topography of prejudice in the United States.".............

MSN

 

[Optimus Prime]

White-supremacist groups continued in 2021 to distribute propaganda at a historically high rate, a report published Thursday says, part of what some experts call an increasingly panicked reaction to growing diversity in America.

The Anti-Defamation League’s research found 4,851 reported cases of white-supremacist propaganda in 2021, including racist, antisemitic and anti-LGBTQ items. That’s down 5 percent from 2020 but way up from 294 cases in 2017, when the anti-hate organization began observing a rise in white-supremacist activity. ADL researchers found 1,206 incidents of propaganda in 2018 and 2,714 in 2019..........

MSN

 

[insidejob]

Don't forget, y'all, racism doesn't exist or have any effect on minorities because everything was made right.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/03/09/redlining-pollution-environmental-justice/

Decades of federal housing discrimination did not only depress home values, lower job opportunities and spur poverty in communities deemed undesirable because of race. It’s why 45 million Americans are breathing dirtier air today, according to a landmark study released Wednesday.



The practice known as redlining was outlawed more than a half-century ago, but it continues to impact people who live in neighborhoods that government mortgage officers shunned for 30 years because people of color and immigrants lived in them.



The analysis, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters, found that, compared with White people, Black and Latino Americans live with more smog and fine particulate matter from cars, trucks, buses, coal plants and other nearby industrial sources in areas that were redlined. Those pollutants inflame human airways, reduce lung function, trigger asthma attacks and can damage the heart and cause strokes.


“Of course, we’ve known about redlining and its other unequal impacts, but air pollution is one of the most important environmental health issues in the U.S.,” said Joshua Apte, a co-author of the study and an assistant professor in the School of Public Health at the University of California at Berkeley.



“If you just look at the number of people that get killed by air pollution, it’s arguably the most important environmental health issue in the country,” Apte said.



The federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) marked areas across the United States as unworthy of loans because of an “infiltration of foreign-born, Negro, or lower grade population,” and shaded them in red starting in the 1930s. This made it harder for home buyers of color to get mortgages; the corporation awarded A grades for solidly White areas and D’s for largely non-White areas that lenders were advised to shun.

 

[Optimus Prime]

Interesting article on the Latinos in the White Nationalists groups

I almost wish that Paul was still around to comment
============================================

It should come as no surprise that there are several Latino male white nationalists who have gotten disproportionate attention in recent years, but in a country that keeps misunderstanding why the U.S. Latino community is nowhere near close to being a monolith, it is critical to examine how this notion of Latino white nationalists still feels strange to some.

The country’s estimated 62.1 million U.S. Latinos have ideologies from one extreme to the other.

Last week’s news that Enrique Tarrio, the former Afro-Cuban leader of the Proud Boys, was arrested on federal charges surrounding the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has sparked some interest in an apparently paradoxical reality: nonwhite Latino men worshiping at the altar of American white supremacy and providing cover to ensure that white nationalists stay mainstream.

As a journalist who’s been covering Latino communities for years, I know that this supposed paradox has never existed and that the country’s estimated 62.1 million Latinos have ideologies from one extreme to the other. American whiteness is a prize; it is where the power lies, and people like Tarrio would rather bask in that whiteness than fight against it and appear too “woke,” even it means tearing down democracy.

Non-Latino media have long been obsessed with proving the claim that more and more Latinos are longing to become white, which ignores the fact that being Latino is not just a sole racial construct but more of a messy combination with ethnicity. Voices from within the U.S. Latino community have responded by diving into the complexities of what it is to be Latino in modern-day America.

While it is apparent that the country has become more multiethnic and multiracial, the quest for what Cristina Beltrán calls “multiracial whiteness” will always have an appeal in our community.

“For voters who see the very act of acknowledging one’s racial identity as itself racist, the politics of multiracial whiteness reinforces their desired approach to colorblind individualism,” Beltrán, an associate professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU, wrote after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. “In the politics of multiracial whiteness, anyone can join the MAGA movement and engage in the wild freedom of unbridled rage and conspiracy theories.”

Such a belief in multiracial whiteness has roots not only in U.S. Latino communities but also in Latin American countries of origin. The most obvious example will always be Cuba. More than 60 years after the Cuban revolution, reactionary forces against big government, communism and oppression have become a media industry in places such as Tarrio's hometown, Miami.

Of course, broadly painting Miami as some reactionary Latino white nationalist monolith is a mistake, but it would also be a mistake to say that such a reactionary sentiment does not have influence or impact.

In addition, anti-Blackness has deep roots in Latin American culture, and when such views get amplified through U.S. media, they’re rarely if ever challenged. For instance, at the height of the George Floyd demonstrations in 2020, Spanish-language news sites were rightly criticized for making the same bad editorial decisions that Fox News did while reporting on Black Lives Matter.

So given that Spanish-language news played into Black Lives Matter hysteria, it makes sense that an Afro Cuban such as Tarrio could be inspired to burn a Black Lives Matter banner outside a historic Black church in Washington. Anti-Blackness is prevalent in U.S. Latino communities, even when the individual identifies as Black or brown.

Anti-Blackness has deep roots in Latin American culture, and when such views get amplified through U.S. media, they’re rarely if ever challenged.
Still, American media, Spanish-language media included, have no problem giving Tarrio the mic to insist on the following: “I'm pretty brown, I'm Cuban. There's nothing white supremacist about me.”

That’s the problem. Individuals such as Enrique Tarrio (who goes by Henry in written reports) are used to downplaying right-wing racism and white nationalism because they are not white themselves..........

MSN