Institutional racism in the Democratic and Republican parties - discuss

I have not linked welfare and race once except to say in my experience it is the whites around me that are abusing it. heh, self-racism I guess, if you like. I was, again, talking about affirmative action, which is not a welfare programs, so please stop saying I am linking welfare with racism.

By government assistance, I was again meaning affirmative action. The government telling minorities that they are worthless and inferior and cannot hope to succeed without the assistance of government in leveling the field for them. How can you call that anything but racist?

Ok that's fine, by saying affirmative action and government assistance programs you were just being redundant by saying the same thing twice then? You can see how a fellow might have been confused.
 
*thumbs up .gif I am too lazy to actually find*
 
By government assistance, I was again meaning affirmative action. The government telling minorities that they are worthless and inferior and cannot hope to succeed without the assistance of government in leveling the field for them. How can you call that anything but racist?
That tends to be the idea of government in general. If people believed they could succeed without it, we wouldn't have one.
 
Cutlass is the most partisan american poltiical agent on these boards, i ain't surprised he is pounding the republicans on the racist line. He is the real anti-american with his "half the country are rasists" stuff.

Maybe he was right in 1976 but not anymore.


You're a limey. You don't get to say who's antiAmerican and who isn't. We kicked your limey butts out, and now you're our vassal state. :mischief:
 
-I- didn't say welfare, I said affirmative action and other like programs, a program specifically designed to perpetuate the image of minorities being incapable of achievement on their own. Someone else mentioned welfare and associating it with racism and I simply pointed out that that isn't the case.


Which is a literally false thing to say. Affirmative Action is about offsetting advantages that whites have.
 
So two pages now and no examples for either side, though we have multiple people claiming it must be so for one side because they say so.

Republicans are seen as racists for one reason, and its because Democrats have successfully sold us as such. Its quite impressive really, but its pretty clear that they now swallowed their own pill.

You can claim a Southern Strategy from half a century ago is racism and be correct, but knowingly falsely perpetuating in the here and now for the express purpose of manipulating groups along racial lines is the exact same thing and its what the Democrats do every day.

Seriously, didn't we just have a thread claiming criminal background checks were racist? Where do you think that was started? And this forum is full of reactionary appeals to racist smearing upon encountering any difficulty on any issue. Have any issue with immigration for any reason? Your a racist. Don't like Obama and are not from his party (and sometimes even if you are)? Your a racist. Don't like the abuses coming from the AG? Your a racist. Have any problem with any spending whatsoever? Racist. And if you have any argument that might put that label in question, well then you are just using code words. Its the first line of defense against pretty much anything, and you have to ask yourself about the motivations of people who are so flippant about throwing out such an accusation.

If you have any question as to how absurd this has become I point you here:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jun/5/msnbc-host-martin-bashir-irs-new-n-word-war-obama/

And before any of you get your panties in a wad accusations of socialism, unamerican, war on women, baby killer, atheist, fundamentalist and the lot are all getting the same treatment. Can't win on merit, well just accuse the other guy of being some version of satan. Racism is especially had though because usually the others at least restrict themselves to a particular topic. When having a problem with the IRS is now racist you have gone off the rails.
 
I think it's fairly logical to think that, on balance, more conservatives are going to be racist than liberals (to use those broad terms). If we assume that society has been racist in the past, is less racist now, and is continuing to become less racist, and if we define conservatism by its general opposition to change (or preference for maintaining traditional structures), then that's generally going to be more prone to racist outcomes. And it's logical to assume that, if the policies of conservatives have a greater propensity towards racist outcomes, but there'll be a higher proportion of proponents of those policies who are themselves actual racists.

Importantly, this is not to say that all conservatives are racist, or that all people who support policies with racist outcomes are racist. Anyone who suggests otherwise is simply demonstrating their inability to actually think about an issue, or at least their preference for scoring cheap points at the cost of sensible argument. Take a 'tough on drugs' policy, for example. I think this is something V adheres to; that if you possess drugs, you are breaking the law, and ought to be punished accordingly. Thus, there should be no soft treatment for drug possessors. I think this can be traced back to a reluctance for change, the perceived moral turpitude of drug possession resting on the fact that it's the subject of an existing law, rather than resting on the idea that it's inherently immoral, even if alternative explanations are construed to justify the position. But even if this is not the reason that lies behind the position, I don't think it's too controversial to suggest that a 'tough on drugs' line is more prevalent amongst conservatives.

Now, drug laws disproportionately impact on minorities. This is quite clear. A particular problem can be seen in the exercise of police discretion. In Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are subject to more searches, more arrests and more police discretions, which is notoriously the case for black people in the US, too. Now, when someone supports a 'tough on drugs' policy, they do not want the law to be applied unequally, and they do not want outcomes to have a racial bias. They may not be aware of the unequal application of the laws their support, and may not have turned their minds to the issue. So just because there is racism involved in the law/policy, or racist outcomes, does not mean that the proponent of such laws/policies is a racist. It may even be that such supporters stubbornly refuse to have regard to patent facts demonstrating racism. But this is more likely a sign of their naivety of race issues or simply an aggressive reluctance to challenge their own views. Painting those people as racist is not only likely to harden their minds against any valid arguments that might otherwise make them reconsider their position, it's also simply inaccurate.

At the same time, it shouldn't be expected that people are not going to point out unequal outcomes and label those unequal outcomes as racist. In the face of people pointing out such facts, it shouldn't be assumed that they're labelling the proponents of such policies as racists. It may be confronting to be told that a policy you support has racist outcomes, but it would be mistake to ignore the facts and instead just assume it's a personal attack.

It's also important to note that reasons for having laws change over time. In Australia, drug laws were in fact introduced at the turn of the 20th century in response to the farcical moral panic at Chinese-run opium dens luring white women for sexual purposes. This doesn't mean people supportive of drug laws today think that there are Chinese-run opium dens that are luring their white women. So just because someone supports a law that has racist origins, or has historically been fairly racist, does not necessarily mean that they themselves should be labelled a racist.

So two pages now and no examples for either side, though we have multiple people claiming it must be so for one side because they say so.

That's because examples would be utterly useless cherrypicking. Both ways.
 
Why do Americans insist Obama is black? He looks Semitic. If Obama is black, then Osama is too!

Obama looks that way because he has a white mother. His father, however, is more African than most African-Americans!

It's also important to note that reasons for having laws change over time. In Australia, drug laws were in fact introduced at the turn of the 20th century in response to the farcical moral panic at Chinese-run opium dens luring white women for sexual purposes. This doesn't mean people supportive of drug laws today think that there are Chinese-run opium dens that are luring their white women. So just because someone supports a law that has racist origins, or has historically been fairly racist, does not necessarily mean that they themselves should be labelled a racist.

Weren't US drug laws designed to destroy the hemp industry? Most countries actually introduced drugs laws due to international treaties, which we're instigated by the US.
 
Your a racist.
No, You're a racist.

And before any of you get your panties in a wad accusations of socialism, unamerican, war on women, baby killer, atheist, fundamentalist and the lot are all getting the same treatment. Can't win on merit, well just accuse the other guy of being some version of satan.
Not Satan, just as big a moron as someone who leaps to the "racist" label as easily. Both are instances of needing a label to make the argument, instead of being able to phrase it.
 
Is there a Democrat equivalent to the Southern Strategy?

As an aside, I would like to note how disconcerting it is that the article on it is so well-sourced.
 
Is there a Democrat equivalent to the Southern Strategy?

As an aside, I would like to note how disconcerting it is that the article on it is so well-sourced.

Not exactly. Urban democrats have historically made very racial or ethnic-focused campaigns, but those are usually against other democrats (if you have a black guy and a white guy running for mayor, for example, some dems may try to ugly up the campaign to drive up black or white turnout).

The Southern Strategy didn't live and die with Nixon, btw. The money quote on it came from Lee Attwater in like, 1988, and principles from it were used later.
 
What an odd thing to say.
Not if you want to promote the agenda of the actual racists while insinuating that everybody who disagrees are the real racists.

Do the right-wingers who incessantly use this latest incarnation of the Southern Strategy think it actually works?

The Rise Of The New Hate

No, all Republicans aren't racists--there are any number of reasons that a principled person might oppose Obama that have nothing whatever to do with race. But as the contest for the Republican nomination tightens, the clamor of racial, McCarthyist and conspiratorial dog whistles--what I have come to call "the New Hate"--has become as deafening to those who can hear them as the blare of vuvuzelas at a World Cup soccer match.

"Nobody even knows what's going on in Libya," the born-again birther Donald Trump (who brags of his "great relationship with the blacks") complained back in April. "[Obama] said he has no control over [gasoline] prices, which he does if he gets on the phone or gets off his basketball court or whatever he is doing." Back in November, Rush Limbaugh coined the word "uppity-ism" to describe what he saw as Michelle Obama's overweening sense of entitlement. "There's no question in my mind," he opined to his radio audience just a few weeks ago, "That [Michelle and Barack Obama] view [the presidency]... as an opportunity to live high on the hog without having it cost them a dime. And if they justify it by thinking, we deserve this, we're owed this because of what was done to our ancestors, who knows."

Ron Paul has long-standing ties to the John Birch Society and has been a frequent guest on Alex Jones's 9/11 denialist radio show; he has delivered thoughtful speeches about the great wrong that was done to the South in the Civil War, has had documented associations with white supremacists, and has allowed racist and homophobic writings to be published over his byline. For all that (maybe it's precisely because of that), his presidential campaign has been relatively free of hate-mongering.

The same can't be said of the Republican front runners. During an interview with Forbes in 2010, Newt Gingrich talked about Dinesh D'Souza's book, The Roots of Obama's Rage.

"What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension," he asked of our Hawaiian-born president (whose Kansas-born mother was white), "that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?....This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president."

In South Carolina two weeks ago, Gingrich repeatedly called Obama "the food stamp president."

Not to be undone, Mitt Romney--who had already accused Obama of wanting to "make us a European style welfare state....where government's role is to take from some and give to others"--kicked off his Florida campaign by telling a rally that "it's time we had someone in the White House who knows how to create jobs because he's had a job."

Gingrich is nothing if not ecumenical in his hatreds. He has fulminated against Shariah law in words that evoked Henry Ford's attacks on the Jewish Kahal in the 1920s, and has been demonizing his critics as Communists, traitors, and degenerates since he first entered politics in the 1970s.

"The centerpiece of this campaign," Gingrich said during his victory speech in South Carolina, "Is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky....The founding fathers of America are the source from which we draw our understanding of America. [Obama] draws his from Saul Alinsky, radical left-wingers and people who don't like the classical America."

Some baffled pundits wondered if any of Gingrich's constituency even knew who Alinsky was. In fact, Gingrich was taking a page out of Glenn Beck's book, who invokes Alinsky's name almost as frequently as he does George Soros's, another left wing Jew. And why woudn't he? Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are both on the record as Alinsky's admirers. The mainstream media rushed to fill in the blanks about Alinsky for their readers, but they overlooked the most important thing. Alinksy dedicated his 1971 book, "Rules for Radicals" to Lucifer--"the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom."

Alinsky was being facetious of course, but for millions of Americans (hundreds of thousands of whom believe Barack Obama is the Antichrist), the Prince of Darkness is no laughing matter. For that is what this particular dog whistle is really about - the left's supposed alliance with Satan. And if you don't believe me, just Google "Alinksy" and "Lucifer" and see what comes up.

This is the power of the New Hate. What reels susceptible voters in isn't the policy prescriptions that go with this or that expression of it, but the narratives that justify them - horror stories about the impending erasure of white Christian heartland values (and at their most highly wrought, of white heartland Christians themselves). This is how a serial adulterer can lay claim to the moral high ground--by channeling a set of meta-stories whose antagonists are still lurking in the darkest corners of the collective imagination. Gingrich and other angry populists evoke the specters of Godless Dr. Frankensteins, tinkering with human life in their sinister laboratories; of angry black men and wandering Jews, thirsty for revenge; of predatory women who've strayed from their husbands' kitchens, and gays who've emerged from their closets, like vampires from their coffins, in search of new blood. Peel back yet another layer and there are witches and devils and changelings.

Heartfelt and sincere or cynical and opportunistic, the New Hate poisons our political discourse and divides us even more than we are already. But it operates most effectively beneath the threshold of consciousness. Subject its premises to critical or historical analysis, or merely expose them to the light of day, and they lose much of their potency. Just ask Ron Paul.
 


The writer of that post is pretty severely racist. Or, to be more charitable than he deserves, has so bought into propagating the Party Pravda that he is utterly and completely incapable of seeing things as his victims see them.

To mine a few choice gems out of it:

The first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, signed the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing the slaves. The Republicans in Congress worked to write and to pass the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. These landmark amendments to the Constitution helped to outlaw slavery, to guarantee equal protection under the laws, and to secure voting rights for African American men.

Why should blacks today vote for a party based on the actions of people who have been dead for well over a century? Ancient history. The party changed. That legacy no longer is part of the Republican legacy.


The author goes on with a thoroughly misleading bit about the Civil Rights era. The reality was that both parties were mixed on the issue at the time. But over time it was the Democrats that moved towards liberty, and the Republicans moved against liberty.


There's one thing that voters of all color and backgrounds share: they like being told what they want to hear. Minorities, white blue collar workers, and those living in poverty were told by one side that there would be help for them, and told by another side that they could and should do it themselves.


No this is the most pervasive lie. And it is the lie that is the reason that Republicans can never expect to get strong support from black voters until they stop telling themselves this lie.

Republican policies are not about encouraging people to self-sufficiency. Republican policies are all about blocking and taking away self-sufficiency. And the people who are the victims of this know it to be true, because they live it every day for generations on end.

So the reality is: Democrats help people to help themselves, and help those who cannot help themselves. Republicans make it much harder for people to help themselves, and then try to take away any help provided to these people from outside.

Perhaps the Conservatives, Libertarians, and Republicans will once again be seen as the true champions of individual liberty and true civil rights. It would certainly be much fairer a label than what they have now.

Except, of course, if the Republicans want to be seen for these things, then what they really need to do is to stop opposing these things.

If the Republicans want the black vote, they have to fundamentally reverse nearly all of the policies that they stand for. Because their policies are the opposite of their rhetoric.
 
Perhaps the Conservatives, Libertarians, and Republicans will once again be seen as the true champions of individual liberty and true civil rights. It would certainly be much fairer a label than what they have now.
LOL I would LOVE a thread defending this idea.
 
Weren't US drug laws designed to destroy the hemp industry? Most countries actually introduced drugs laws due to international treaties, which we're instigated by the US.

That got thrown in the mix, but one of the major driving forces behind drug criminalization was to stop 'coked-up black men from raping white women'. That mirrors what happened with Australian drug laws in which racial fears were trumped up to criminalize certain behaviors that were associated with minority groups. When the first raft of drug laws were debated, a lot of Congressmen were against them on the grounds that the Constitution doesn't give them the legal standing to outlaw that. However, once certain congressman successfully made the association that coke-->coked up black men--->white women in danger, no one wanted to be the guy who was the 'pro black on white rape drug' Congressman so they conveniently forgot the constitutional arguments and voted for it.

Then when moral crusaders went after alcohol, they remembered the Constitution all of a sudden and had to pass an amendment to outlaw it.
 
LOL I would LOVE a thread defending this idea.
Isn't that essentially what all these similar threads are about until it becomes quite clear they have again turned into just the opposite?

But alas, the trick is understanding what the "true civil rights" dog whistle is all about. Perhaps some day the conservative white Christians will no longer be persecuted.
 
Is there a perception in the USA that there exist welfare payments simply for being a particular ethnicity?
There's enough of a perception of it for Chris Rock to do repeated sketches on the subject. That doesn't make it true, of course, but the perception is clearly there. And somewhat widespread too, given these sets were in different parts of the country in front of very different audiences.

I think it's fairly logical to think that, on balance, more conservatives are going to be racist than liberals (to use those broad terms). If we assume that society has been racist in the past, is less racist now, and is continuing to become less racist, and if we define conservatism by its general opposition to change (or preference for maintaining traditional structures), then that's generally going to be more prone to racist outcomes. And it's logical to assume that, if the policies of conservatives have a greater propensity towards racist outcomes, but there'll be a higher proportion of proponents of those policies who are themselves actual racists.
I've met plenty of racist liberals. The difference I've found is that racist conservatives want to keep the minorities down, "in their place," whereas racist liberals want to lift the minorities up, "because they can't help themselves" (aka, the White Man's Burden). Both of these are explicitly racist policies, but at least the liberal one is trying to do the right thing, no matter how half-arsed.

Now, drug laws disproportionately impact on minorities. This is quite clear. A particular problem can be seen in the exercise of police discretion. In Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are subject to more searches, more arrests and more police discretions, which is notoriously the case for black people in the US, too. Now, when someone supports a 'tough on drugs' policy, they do not want the law to be applied unequally, and they do not want outcomes to have a racial bias. They may not be aware of the unequal application of the laws their support, and may not have turned their minds to the issue. So just because there is racism involved in the law/policy, or racist outcomes, does not mean that the proponent of such laws/policies is a racist. It may even be that such supporters stubbornly refuse to have regard to patent facts demonstrating racism. But this is more likely a sign of their naivety of race issues or simply an aggressive reluctance to challenge their own views. Painting those people as racist is not only likely to harden their minds against any valid arguments that might otherwise make them reconsider their position, it's also simply inaccurate.
This is sadly the case. When institutions are racist, especially institutions such as the police, then the average person who wants people treated equally may actually be condoning systematised inequality, due to the actions of racist institutions or individuals within those institutions.
 
Back
Top Bottom