Louisville Will Erupt!

[Dill]

(09-25-2020, 06:02 PM)SunsetBengal Wrote: Wanna bet?  As a grown man, and so has my wife in her work environment, found ourselves in situations where each of us has felt the hatred toward us, because of our race.  I know that you're a smart and educated individual, pretty good at argumentation and debate and all, but you should stick to factual topics.    

Sunset, I spent much of my adolescence on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana. Doubtful that anyone here has heard "Hey white boy" more often than I.  And of course some of my neighbors made a point of telling me they hated whites. And at least three times I can remember, people physically attacked me because I was white. So I was in an environment where I felt hatred as fists. Plus a thrown bottle thrown at me once. (Or maybe that one was more about a girl. It was 50 years ago.)

Yet all that time (and even now) I never considered "racism" (if that's what it was) of Native Americans directed towards whites to somehow be a bigger problem than white racism (which mostly was racism) directed toward Native Americans. I didn't feel aggrieved if no one acknowledged how the white kids were treated on the rez. I mixed well despite the hatred of some, made lifelong friends. 

I wasn't forced to go through their education system or forced to learn their language. I wasn't forced to obey Crow law, as they were white law. (But if I were forced to do all that, and my life's success depended upon how well I did that, I fear I might "hate" Crows.) The only time I didn't have an employment advantage was when the movie Little Big Man was filmed there and the director needed lots of NA extras.* I had little to fear from white police off the reservation--not so my NA friends. Getting into college wasn't going to be a problem for me, or even getting through HS. I could date both white and NA girls. Again, not so my NA friends. 

Anyway, that's how I was introduced to race relations in the US,  from on top, lower middle class of the dominant culture, looking down from massive white privilege I was only beginning to realize I had. Racism has never made much sense to me as something "individuals from all groups do" regardless of race and social position. It has always been deeply implicated in the structural (legal, political) dominance of some groups over others, and by the history of that dominance. As an "old man" now, if a group of black kids kicked the crap out of me because I was white, I doubt my urge would be to cry "Blacks are racist too!"  Doubtful if I would see their actions as the mirror image of white supremacists, or just "individual". Doubtful if recognizing "racism in all its forms" could amount to much of anything separated from these structural/historical considerations already mentioned. 

So I have never disputed that white people may have "hatred" directed towards them, or that some Blacks will pick on whites where they can. I just continue think that as social problems go, "black racism" is by far the lesser evil. Take care of what SSF called "institutional racism," and some of that "black racism," maybe a lot, will begin to ebb.

This post is getting too long. Someone needs to raise the issue of black Americans who use race to "get over" and I'll continue.

PS how are "argumentation and debate" separable from "factual topics," or vice versa? 
*Just remembered--actually there was an NA hiring preference for tribal jobs. My sister was a nurse at the Crow Agency hospital for decades, but was eventually laid of when an NA could do her job. She hated losing the job but did not see herself as a victim of "racism."