Scamp wrote:Since you mentioned "content of people's characters", how would you feel if your country had a minority ethnic population of 13% who committed over 50% of the gun crimes, violent crime, and murders?
Crime and unemployment, poverty, drug addiction, and instability and bad circumstances go hand in hand in almost all human societies Scampy.
And that is a misstatement to say that all 13% percent (I assume you mean African Americans are all criminals). Most African Americans are not criminals. Most like most other ethnic groups are just working people minding their own business. The core of crime is actually a very small percentage of people in any community that do almost all the crimes over and over again. For example crime statistics in societies that have overwhelming numbers of European or white people such as Finland or Russians or English townships with almost all English people the ones committing crimes in those places are white and English but they are poor, drug addicted, live in areas with few opportunities, bad school districts with low level education opportunities. Do we blame their circumstances on their English heritage? Or nationality? Or do we blame it on their circumstances? Their environments?
Let us take Charles Dickens as an example, he wrote about Little Dorrit, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A Christmas Carol, Tom Jones, etc etc. His main characters where they English and white? Yes. But where the villains bad guys also white? Yes. Were the heroes like Oliver Twist or David Copperfield white yes. So the whitenss was not the defining factor for being a good guy or a bad guy. Instead the Fagin character in Oliver Twist was an abusive gang leader, exploiting poor street kids to go and steal for him.
Would we judge the entire white English culture by the acts of a Fagin or the other villains in the story of Charles Dickens imagination? Of course not.
But we tend to blame the entire African American community for the actions of a fraction of their population who does commit crime. And we do not think it might be circumstantial or due to lacks in their lives...but because they are inferior morally, ethically or culturally. Why do we think that way? At leat the white society in the USA tends to do that. Why? That is when systemic racism is really easy to spot.
Being human is complex. You got complexity in all nationalities, ethnic groups, economic and social class groups, and in every rank and caste in society. Yet, we do not want to humanize fully the people whom we want to not accept into the circle of complete and open acceptance as fully human. Fully human as we are.
Somehow that group in the racist mind.....is not capable of the achievements, talents, and abilities that we assign to our own social milieus or cultural legacies. Why? Some of it is due to lack of study. We often do not know the history of other people who are not part of our social circles or national histories and as such since we never studied who the great people in those cultures are about? We assume they have no one of any noteworthy accomplishments. But as they say ignorance of the law is no excuse to break the law, ignorance of a group's history is no excuse to think they had no one of any noteworthy talents or abilities to talk about or be proud of. All societies have people of extraordinary talents or abilities. But being able to understand context and circumstances of all people is of extreme importance in order to extrapolate why something either of good value or bad value is happening there.
Context says a lot.
I once debated a very long time ago I think it was in 2002 with a man who said women could never be as intelligent as men in human history. He presented a long list of men who did everything of importance in human history for millennia. Women did hardly anything he said. Which meant they lacked the ability to be great scientists or doctors, or lawyers, or presidents of nations, or leaders, or this or that. Women were therefore innately inferior. He was smug. Women were meant to be inferior in every way because the real evidence says that men are the ones who did the vast majority of every great technological advancement, agronomy advancement, scientific achievement, literary work, etc.
It never occurred to him that women had zero access to a formal education for many hundreds of years, and were denied the ability to vote in democracies all the way up until 1920 in the USA. In other nations up until the mid 1930s in others and in certain nations like Mexico until 1952. Which meant women could not be part of a democratic political process for hundreds of years. Silenced, denied any opportunities, and punished for even aspiring to be given that opportunity.
How could you blame a group for failing to accomplish something that had a bunch of prerequisites for accomplishment built into it and then barring them from getting that environmental or circumstantial-based situation to happen? You wasted the POTENTIAL of all those people. Humanity is based on 2 genders. You basically wasted the potential growth and contributions of 50% of humanity's ability to be creative, problem-solve, be productive, and help make society better because of FEAR and IGNORANCE of what the human group could have done but was denied.
It is an interesting fact, that the more you limit people's rights? The less growth in a positive way is obtained in the world. For all of us. The less you give rights? The less you get the ability to have access to innovation, expansion, and stability.
Yet, people who are scared of a sector of human societies always find ways of restricting the rights of those whom they feel are a threat to their way of life. In the case of racism that is systemic, it has to do with thinking that some sector of society is a threat to safety, to wealth retention, and superior social status.
They fear the loss of something in those three categories. They do not think of changing circumstances or environments as a remedy. Why? Because they fail to allow logic and rationality to govern their decisions. They only believe in some kind of threat. Fear. And selfish innate thing. Only my group is valid in this world. It is impossible that those African Americans, and Latinos. Poor White people who live in trailer parks, Gays, Eccentrics, this or that shit categorization is capable of being as CAPABLE as my group, or my social milieu.
They have to justify their lack of acceptance. In some form.
It is being small and not a very good character.
Toni Morrison said it best when she answered a question about racism and how it affected the group who was discriminating terribly.....she said this:
- By Negotiator
- By litwin