Reality

[Lurker]

I don't think I attacked him. Certainly not with the vitriol people are displaying towards Select. Just look at Fobbon's latest. There's no excuse for that. While people might not be inherently racist, it's clear from this thread that many people here are inherently assholes.

[Kulaf]

Of course I have been on the attack from the start. As are other members here. We've said why.

As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

[Kulaf]

Just look at Fobbon's latest. There's no excuse for that.

No arguement there. My opinion of the guy is on record.

[Select]

Fobbon - I'm going to do my best to address this knee-jerk of yours.

The majority has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. Its still racism. Are you saying Saddam's regime wasn't racist because the Sunni sect was an ethnic minority? Are you saying white settlers to New England weren't racist because they were vastly outnumbered by Native Americans? What about Arab slave traders?

You're being reaaaaaallly stupid here. With this, the majority doesn't always have to do with numbers, you moron. It's who is in power with the social, political, and financial ability to oppress. You don't necessarily need to be a member of a larger population to be a member of the controlling group.

The white settlers to New England were the racists with the power and were the oppressors. I do not like branching beyond the U.S. since it's what I mostly focus on, but Saddam was in power with the financial and definitely the political means. The sociological approach is about the institutions that give prejudiced people the ability to keep different people down.

It's definitely not just "They are 1,000,000 more stronger than us." as you suggest with

Are you saying white settlers to New England weren't racist because they were vastly outnumbered by Native Americans

Sociology is smarter than that and I thought you were, too.

We were all born prejudiced, its a part of human nature.

Show me this. I and sociologists say it's learned like racism is. Jaro said something along the lines of racism being inherent. I want him to show me, too. So which is it? I say neither are inherent, but learned. Where are your studies? I think you're trying to give yourself a reason to believe being prejudiced is okay by saying "We're all born with it." It's false comfort.

Racism is at its peak of power when there is a system in place that allows the exploitation of a certain group, and I think thats where you're getting confused, but you're full of shit if you think the system is what racism is. Are there racists purporting the system? Probably. Does racism perpetuate itself through such systems? Most definitely... but racism is not a system. Racism is crosses being burned in peoples yards. Racism is people being shot like cattle for no reason other than their genetic heritage. Hitler had a system to execute his racism,

Racism = Prejudice + Power. The system gives racists the power to be racists.

But they didn't need one in Rwanda - they just went out and shot people. No system there.

There was a system. A system is not "gas chambers and ovens" and a written out plan, it can be a concept. It can be systematically demonizing and dehumanizing a people. How do you think they got so many people to kill? By systematically enforcing the idea they were less than human.

You can say that you don't approve of those jokes because they have been used historically to perpetuate a racist attitude, like a lot of racial slurs - and there's nothing wrong with that. I would agree with you. But jokes like that aren't racist.

After saying that, how can you think they're not?

I understand when nobody wants to shop at Food 4 Less because of all the russians and koreans that shop there. That does not make me racist.

Actually, it does.

Jew nose of yours

My nose is from the Italian part of the family, not the Jewish. You know you're stereotyping to assume all long, thin, aquiline noses are Jewish noses. Does that make you racist? It's also been broken at least twice as a rough kid - Maybe a hit would make it stop leaning to the right.

Kulaf - Where is it on record?

This thread is going nowhere. We're all repeating the same thing over and over again and some people are starting to knee-jerk. I've tried answering a few questions and I'm still waiting for mine from a few pages back to be answered. This is not intelligent or even productive

[Harlowe]

I saw a lot of dog piling on Saev.....what's the difference? He can take it and she can't? Not one of you that jumped on him even tried to engage him in debate.......he is also around the same age as Select if not younger since he just enlisted in the military.

No offense but that's just a double standard.

Well honestly Kulaf there are a couple of differences, probably more than that, but I'll give you a few; first he's never shown himself to be thoughtful about anything here - which is fine but I'm not going to engage a troll in a discussion, its tiresome. Secondly, people that troll, as a general rule, aren't sincerely interested in a discussion anyway, so his post came off as a phony ploy. He proved he didn't deserve respect or consideration when he threatened Select. Lastly, I've gotten to know Select better as a real person and not just a board "Character" over the past year or more (I would think others have by now as well) and have a great deal more patience with regard to hearing her out. She's not an irrational or ignorant person. She can come off very "know it all" about things she feels strongly about, but I don't get the impression anymore that she genuinely feels superior, its where she shows her age and experience arguing/debating issues. She's very thoughtful about things, just not the perfect communicator yet (who here is). So with her, I think over all this time people would know she's genuinely interested in discourse and not an insincere jagoff.

[Kulaf]

Again......why not just let it go? Why did all of you feel the need to jump him? I didn't defend him but if you are going to jump other people on this board it is a bit disingenuous to then worry about other people more to your liking being jumped.

There has to be one standard regardless of ability or how popular someone is. And that standard should be that you and your arguement need to have "legs" and stand on their own.

[Kulaf]

Kulaf - Where is it on record?

http://www.brellrants.net/forum/viewtop ... 20#p499260

[Partha]

My problem with Select's argument is that it in no way deals with the three terms I listed. When a black man calls another one a 'redbone' or a 'high yellow', in most cases, it has ZERO to do with the level of power either person has. Like Fobbon said, it has everything to do with separating your group from 'the other'. In 1865, there were riots in New York City where Negroes were dragged out, beaten, and killed by Irish mobs over the supposed lack of jobs. Both groups had exactly zero financial or political power over the other, so that wasn't the issue. The issue was 'the other' was going to take their jobs. It might be comforting in academia to pretend that all racism is haves over the have nots, but it's not true and never was.

Of course, then Fobbon had to go and ruin a good point by showing his ass, but we're not angels on this board, any of us.

[Select]

The Irish are white. Although they were discriminated against by other whites, they were not considered sub-human to the extent that blacks were - enough to be slaves, even. That gives them a social advantage. Since the white Irish had been able to vote all that time, I'd say the white Irish did have a political advantage.

[Fobbon Lazyfoot]

You guys are a bunch of fucking nancies, jesus. Where's Embar, anyway? He knows how to call people names. I'd probably disagree with him, too, makes for a good argument. Saev was being a whining bitch, Select is being an arrogant hippy. And for fucks sake, Lurker and Harlowe, the whole lot of you tear into each other more often than anyone down in the politics section. Lighten up already.

You're being reaaaaaallly stupid here. With this, the majority doesn't always have to do with numbers, you moron. It's who is in power with the social, political, and financial ability to oppress. You don't necessarily need to be a member of a larger population to be a member of the controlling group.

You missed the point. You're still confusing racism with other things - in this case, systematic oppression.

Show me this. I and sociologists say it's learned like racism is. Jaro said something along the lines of racism being inherent. I want him to show me, too. So which is it? I say neither are inherent, but learned. Where are your studies? I think you're trying to give yourself a reason to believe being prejudiced is okay by saying "We're all born with it." It's false comfort.

I'm going to repeat myself when I say this: quit pretending you're better than everyone else, and quit assuming you know what I'm trying to do. I was saying that being curious or intimidated by things that are foreign to you is part of human nature. You want studies?

A newsweek article about small children who apparantly have an inherent distrust of people of other skin colors

Its an interesting read. The psych forum I got it from had mixed feelings. I would take it as food for thought; race is such a controversial topic (and there are still a lot of racist people in the world) that newsweek could have put a lot of spin on it.

Kelly et al. (2005)

To quote:

Historically, the perception of human races has had major ramifications for the social and economic livelihoods of people throughout the world. Adults very rapidly make judgements and categorize people according to ethnicity

I'm actually impressed with this study, because I admit that I tend to view psychological studies with slight disdain because they rely a lot on statistical evidence and small sample sizes. They had a decent sample size I suppose, and the statistical p values were pretty low. While I recommend reading the entire article, this was the sentence that summarized my views on it:

First, early predominant exposure to own-race faces tunes one's facial prototype towards own-race dimensions. Second, the tuning of the face prototype to one's own race actuates a preference to look toward familiar, own-race faces.

I believe what this is saying is that your own race is what you are, from a very early age, familiar with. That is to say if your own race is what you are surrounded by. Would be curious to see what adopted babies do. Or what about blind adopted babies? That would be a curious study. I lived with a blind korean kid in the dorms - he knew more racist jokes than anyone, was awfully funny.

I also thought what they said about this study in the fourth paragraph of their discussion paragraph was interesting, I'd love to dig up that article sometime, I'm shuffling through EBSCO and PsychINFO as I write this but so far I can't find it. Right now I'm perusing some interesting studies involving monkies and more babies, I'll post them when I get through all of them.

I and sociologists say it's learned like racism is

Sociology is smarter than that and I thought you were, too.

I'm glad you speak for all of sociology. Show me YOUR studies, asshole.

Racism = Prejudice + Power. The system gives racists the power to be racists.

No, the system gives racist people the power to oppress people. Racist people don't need power to be racist. If someone says "hey i'm a racist" do you say "oh really? are you a public official or government representative? cause if not then I don't believe you". A homicidal maniac who is chained to a wall isn't any less of a homicidal maniac just because the system is depriving him of the power to act upon his intent. Just because its easier for a racist white man to get elected to congress than it is a racist black man doesn't mean that black people can't be racist, it just means racist black people are probably really frustrated with our government.

After saying that, how can you think they're not?

Because words don't have power in and of themselves. A black person using a racial slur as a term of endearment (or simply indifferently, as a pronoun) isn't the same as a white person saying it. The white person can't say it because white people historically used it as a derogatory and negative term. Same word, different meaning. Fifty years ago telling a joke that had a racist connotation meant something entirely different than it does now. If that joke still means something different to you than it does to us, then thats fine, I can respect that. Everyone has a different threshold for what they find offensive. But you're being an arrogant ass about it.

Actually, it does.

Durr hurr, no, it doesn't. You want to explain yourself a little?

My nose is from the Italian part of the family, not the Jewish. You know you're stereotyping to assume all long, thin, aquiline noses are Jewish noses. Does that make you racist? It's also been broken at least twice as a rough kid - Maybe a hit would make it stop leaning to the right.

I don't actually give a fuck about your nose. I'm going to assume you want to talk about noses, though. I actually don't have any Jewish in my family, but everyone seems to call it the jew nose anyway. I know a few Jewish people, they all have small noses. Curious, no? I've never broken mine, either, although it sure does look like I do.

Kulaf - Where is it on record?

Yeah Kulaf, where it is on record! You mean that one thread where you started crying? I remember that one.

This thread is going nowhere. We're all repeating the same thing over and over again and some people are starting to knee-jerk. I've tried answering a few questions and I'm still waiting for mine from a few pages back to be answered. This is not intelligent or even productive

I skip pages sometimes. Please do me a favor and summarize your questions. And my post wasn't a knee-jerk, my first post said the same thing, just with less words.

Oooo look, racism and "reverse discrimination" juxtaposed for comedic effect!




*edit for the last couple posts

There has to be one standard regardless of ability or how popular someone is. And that standard should be that you and your arguement need to have "legs" and stand on their own.

I agree! Man thats twice in one thread.

Of course, then Fobbon had to go and ruin a good point by showing his ass, but we're not angels on this board, any of us.

And a damn fine ass it is, if I do say so myself.

The Irish are white. Although they were discriminated against by other whites, they were not considered sub-human to the extent that blacks were - enough to be slaves, even. That gives them a social advantage. Since the white Irish had been able to vote all that time, I'd say the white Irish did have a political advantage.

You're completely missing the point. Even if they did have a "political advantage" over the blacks, they weren't beating the blacks to death with their "political advantage". You could have put that riot on a secluded island in international waters and it would have still been just as racist.

[Embar Angylwrath]

Select and I playfully fought. We also spoke to each other in PM's. I think there is a difference, also I am more empathetic towards her since she was diagnosed with MS, since someone struggling with something like that doesn't need numerous people being assholes to them.

If you want to use that for an excuse for picking on her, be my guest, but it's weak.

That's bullshit revisionist history. That's like saying the tutsis and hutus were just playing Scrabble. No one buys that on this board, Harlowe.. no one. You ripped into Select with as much joy and vigor as pitbull on a poodle. Don't try to paint it any other way. You were demeaning, condescending, hurtful and vicious. And it was GLORIOUS. But don't be a weeping vagina now and give out e-hugs because you feel like a shitbag for doing so.

@ Lurker - Her untenable position is that racism can only come from the majority to a minority. That's a ridiculous statement. I challenge her to walk some of the streets of LA, and tell me racism can only be from whitey to blackey.

@ Select... how does your definition of racism apply to different minority groups? Blacks against Hispanics? Asians against either one? Which one is the racist group when violence based on skin color and affiliation is visted upon another minority group, by a minority group. Doesn't fit so well with your hatred of whitey, does it?

[Harlowe]

I don't know, I always considered it a big game of wicked-fun trash-talking between us. The term "playful' probably isn't the best one though, because I don't mean to bring to mind two girls going "tra la la" holding hands and skipping, just in the sense we were both completely full of shit trying to best each other at insults and condescension. It was a massive game of "yo momma".

But you know, that was what? 3-4 years ago? I could recall it completely wrong, only Select can answer that.

[Fobbon Lazyfoot]

Well speak of the devil... knew you had to show up eventually, Embar.

Here's another study, Select. Daniel T Levin (2000) wrote up a little study about the cross-race facial recognition deficit phenomenon. I tried to upload the PDF but it was too big, you can probably find it in your school's library database if your library utilizes PsychINFO. The article title is Race as a Visual Feature: Using Visual Search and Perceptual Discrimination Tasks to Understand Face Categories and the Cross-Race Recognition Deficit. If anyone else is interested I can probably convert the html version to a word file or .txt and upload that, if you want.

Here is what I gather is the big point:
(cr=cross race, sr=same race)

In particular, CR persons are coded with more emphasis on category-related information (e.g., stereotypes that apply to an entire group) and less
individuating information than are SR persons

In this article, I propose a new explanation for the CR recognition deficit which assumes that selecting race-specifying information in CR faces reduces the amount of individuating information available and therefore reduces recognition accuracy in individuation tasks.

Meaning (or at least what I take it to mean) that people naturally see people of different races as the race first, the person second. This is broadly generalizing, of course, but I believe that it makes it easier to feel prejudice towards someone if you inherently downplay their individuality. If you see the race first, isn't it easier to apply stereotypes and generalizations? I don't think its unreasonable to say that, if it is natural for people to identify people of other races by characterizing them with racial qualities rather than individualistic qualities, that it is natural for people to make an inappropriate number of assumptions, stereotypes, and generalizations about someone based on their race without knowing them given that their race differs from yours. If I'm misunderstanding what the author is trying to say, then feel free to say so, and I'll give the article a more in-depth review.

I thought Experiment 3 was particularly interesting with regards to race as an identifying feature.

If participants recognize Black faces poorly because they emphasize race-specifying information, then they should be paradoxically accurate when making discriminations in the Black end of this continuum. This prediction conflicts with most encoding expertise hypotheses, which assume that people cannot make subtle perceptual discriminations among CR faces.

We can't tell CR faces from each other, but we can pick out which CR face is more C? Took me a while to absorb that one but I think I understand where the author is coming from.

edit: see also: O'Bryant & McCaffrey (2006) and Maclin et. al. (2001) for more discussion on the cross-race recognition deficit theory. Its fairly well documented, and I'm going to maintain that that particular phenomenon lends support to my argument.

If you would like more, see the references within the above mentioned articles - they have a lot of older works referenced on the phenomenon as well.

[Partha]

The Irish are white. Although they were discriminated against by other whites, they were not considered sub-human to the extent that blacks were - enough to be slaves, even. That gives them a social advantage. Since the white Irish had been able to vote all that time, I'd say the white Irish did have a political advantage.

You DO realize the origin of the IQ test was specifically to deny the vote to Irish immigrants, right?

Arguing that Irish laborers had any advantage over black in 1860's America is like arguing a month old baby has a height advantage over a newborn.

[Embar Angylwrath]

@ Select -

Even though this isn't the political section, it has to say something to you that everyone is lined up one one side of this argument... except you. Leftists, centrists, conservatives, old people, young people.

Harlowe is being the nicest about it (/scratches head over that). She's gently trying to say your compassion for minorities and their history in the US (a good thing, your compassion), is clouding your logic. You are engaging in illogical rationalizations in order to support your position. Take the compliment of being a nice person, swallow your pride, step back into reality and move on.

[Taxious]

Take the compliment of being a nice person, swallow your pride, step back into reality and move on.

Yes that's exactly what Select is known for, admitting she's wrong...

[Select]

it has to say something to you that everyone is lined up one one side of this argument... except you. Leftists, centrists, conservatives, old people, young people.

Sure, it says something to me about this board. We are diverse here, but we're a very small sampling of the population. It's not like I don't go to liberal boards who have a strong following and are far better spoken on these subjects than myself. They're still a minority in the grand scheme of U.S. politics, but they lean about left, not far far far left, or left-center like most liberals.

[Embar Angylwrath]

it has to say something to you that everyone is lined up one one side of this argument... except you. Leftists, centrists, conservatives, old people, young people.

Sure, it says something to me about this board. We are diverse here, but we're a very small sampling of the population. It's not like I don't go to liberal boards who have a strong following and are far better spoken on these subjects than myself. They're still a minority in the grand scheme of U.S. politics, but they lean about left, not far far far left, or left-center like most liberals.

Then this board is more indicative of a true sampling of opinions on this subject, compared to a narrow ideological leftist leaning board, wouldn't you agree? Again, you have everyone... EHV.. REE...WON... trying to explain things to you on this subject from their specific perspective. And they all line up on the same side. Doesn't it say something to you that Partha, Lurker, Kula, Harlowe, Tax and I are ALL saying the same thing? We hardly agree on anything, hell we'd fight over where the Sun came up, but in this we are unified. What does that say to you?

As much as I disagree with you on certain issues, please don't become the next Rsak on this board.. you're dangerously close to that now. Rsak couldn't take a reasoned argument and digest it. He/she/it was impervious to logic, yet was able to engage in all kinds of distortions and contortions to support his/her/its argument. In this thread, you are becoming Rsak, and its all due to your arrogant naivete. You can pull back if you want, and show you have some capacity for reasonable thought and discourse. Or you can continue in your current illogical trajectory and erode what credibility you have.

Don't become Rsak...

[Harlowe]

I think where Select ventured into an area that was relevant and generally ignored (because I think people are uncomfortable facing it with any degree of honesty) is privilege and the role it plays in everyone's lives. People tend to get veeeery defensive about it.

[Embar Angylwrath]

I didn't see anyone disagree with that notion, Harlowe. And if you think Select was confusing racism with classism, then what does that say about her basic understanding of the subject matter?