Quote:
|
Originally Posted by mixedmedia
You missed my point entirely. How is it moving people forward to suggest that jokes about white people is the same thing as a fully-grown black man having to step off of the sidewalk to let a white teenager pass?
|
I don't think I ever said that. My position is that there isn't any difference between Imus calling a group of black women "nappy headed ho's" and Jackson calling Jews "hymies" or Chris Rock calling white people "motherfuckin' crackers."
Quote:
|
The attitude these days overwhelmingly seems to be "well there is no more racism so they should get over it."
|
That's certainly not my attitude. There's a lot of racism coming from all sides of the ethnic playground. Racism doesn't become better or more understandable or more acceptable based on the color of the racist. That very concept is racist.
Quote:
|
But our black communities are just supposed to "get over" 100 years of institutionalized racism that ended at about the same time?
|
Yes. If they want a colorblind society that judges people based on their merits rather than how light or dark they are, then yes. They're going to have to get over it. I got beaten up when I was in 5th grade. Should I be hunting that guy down now, *cough* years later? I mean, damn, can't you understand why I shouldn't get over it? Yeah, it sucks that I got beaten up, but I had to let it go. It sucks that black people were treated poorly because of their race, but at some point, you have to let it go. It sucks, because it's very natural and human to want to hold a grudge, and to want revenge. But seeking revenge isn't going to help society grow, and it isn't going to end racism.
My goal is to end this asinine concept that people should be treated or viewed differently because of their skin color. That's a goal that will never be realized until we put the past where it belongs, behind us. I'm not saying forget about the past - we should remember the past and continue to learn lessons from it. But if we dwell on the past, and continue holding resentments based on the past, we will just poison ourselves.
Your comparison of Iraq/Vietnam was irrelevant. I advocate learning from the past. If Bush had looked at Vietnam, and had been smart enough to care about learning something instead of witching up his own unfounded beliefs and then refusing to look at anything else, he could have learned from the past. Likewise, we can learn from our appalling past of racism. We can learn that racism is evil, and we can learn that we must never allow it to stain our country again. But until we eliminate racism entirely, we can't achieve that goal.
Quote:
|
My point is that we are forgetting how appalling racism can truly be. And it's not about jokes or off-hand comments made by fringe radicals. It's about being born into a world with limits and no innate rights to dignity and freedom. I'll wager that you, like me, don't have a lot of personal experience with anything like that.
|
What matters is the experience of today. We have all experienced a world in which people actually think skin pigmentation means something. That's bad enough. It's time to eliminate that thought from our society. We can't do that if Imus calls people nappy headed ho's, or if Rock calls people crackers.
We must make a choice. Do we want to wallow in the misery of the past, and therefore never see the colorblind society that we should unquestionably have, or do we want to actually look at TODAY, and figure out how to make a better society for everyone, TODAY?