smooth

I find the responses to these racism threads odd, to say the least. Always have and my suspicion is I always will...

Is it willful ignorance or just plain ole not knowing how shit works that compels people to post info that is flat out incorrrect factually?

ng added an extra 150 years to our "normal" racist/slavery timeline...yes, I'm quite sure EVERYONE in this forum knows our "US" country isn't 300 years old and slavery didn't END until 1865...so the notion that whites are somehow being called to pay for the "sins" of others' actions over 300 years ago is absurd and hyperbolic on the face of it.

Shakran, in answer to your question of whether it's going to take an extra 100 years for anyone to "get over it" is most likely...yes given that it took just shy of 100 years between black "freedom" and the ability to attend "white" schools! And you ought to check your facts on Dr. King and not use him in this type of argument...given that he was a proponent of affirmative action. Perhaps reading up on the how and why of that would alter your opinion on the matter...unless you walk away thinking he was racist in theory!

Which leads to the next point...even setting aside the notion that whites benefit disproportionately from a social/political/economic context based on our history (which I don't, and fail to comprehend how anyone can...yet they are doing exactly that in this very thread without ANY explanation for how one can be seperated from our collective history other than "I don't believe that"), racism didn't end in someone else's time...blacks were still being lynched as recently as 40 years ago. Our civil rights era just started kicking as little as 50 years ago. Are you people so young that your parents or grandparents weren't DIRECTLY involved in personal and structural racism?

Finally, AA programs are not, and have not, been primarily based on race/ethnicity. They are based on disadvantaged minorities. Someone correctly pointed out a number of programs that directly benefit women and persons with disabilities. In fact, women are the largest group to have benefited from AA programs...

Now, one might wonder the impetus behind the sentiment that blacks are stealing white jobs...and I don't mean *I* wonder about you. I mean you should wonder about yourself. And juxtapose that sentiment against roachboy's argument and self-examine whether you really have or can seperate yourself from our collective history and culture...

EDIT: forgot to add, uber, that your response to those AA examples appears bullheaded. Just an observation... The response to women benefit is that AA is sexist? Assuming your assumption was correct that socio-economic status is not relevant to AA beneficiaries, what would prevent your or anyone else from arguing that it then was "class warfare" or "classism"? Not that it would change much, in case anyone didn't know it already, blacks and women, particularly black women, are the poorest in this country.

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