Quote:
Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall
Good grief, here I go again.
Adder is correct. You are wrong. Your constant inability to understand racism as a system which benefits one group of people over others because all you can see is the good-bad binary that requires actual malice before one can be labeled as a racist is a huge problem.
We live in a racist society set up to benefit white people in every possible way. Continuing to vote to keep that system in place is a vote for that racist system. One party has made it clear that that is what they are about. Voting for politicians who fight tooth and nail against fixing the problems with the system is a vote for racism. Requiring a smoking gun before admitting any action is racist--as opposed to looking at how an action, decision, policy, or law actually impacts people, is racist.
For example, you can talk about how a voter ID law is race neutral til you're blue in the face. If the law addresses a nonexistent fraud issue and reduces black voters by multiples over white voters, that law is racist. Period. Impact. It doesn't even matter if the person who drew up the law loves it because it reduces the number of Democrats, because the impact is racist. This is the most obvious example I can give you, but there are a million examples of this type of thing that fall in different places on the systemic racist spectrum in this country--application of death penalty, drug laws, San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, etc.
And this is just the institutional stuff. If you are a partner and you only work with associates with whom you identify (mutual friends, both like sailing, grew up in your township), and you end up only working with white men, that's racism. You don't need to sit behind your desk, rubbing your hands together trying to figure out how to keep the black man down. The impact of your "unintentional" actions is racist.
TM
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I agree there are endless forms of racist
impacts. That's not what Adder is saying. Adder is saying that
people who unintentionally contribute to those impacts are racist. That's where I get off the train.
Using that sort of reasoning, unless one is actively engaged in a rigorous and constant war against all racist imapcts, he is racist.
I've played golf at a club that at one time didn't admit Jews. I didn't know that at the time. Am I consequently an anti-semite? Of course not.
The problem with Adder's reasoning is the conflation of impact and actor. Of course non-racists can have racist impacts. Racists can have non-racist impacts. But to say that because society is filled racist impacts everyone in it is racist is creating a bizarre form of what Catholics call "original sin." I hardly think it's wise to follow reasoning approximating what that organization has preached.
