Showing posts with label Racism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Racism. Show all posts

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Racism 101

Listen to this radio ad put out by aRicherLife.org (a public awareness campaign developed by the National Fair Housing Alliance) and see if you can spot the racism.  (I'll wait)

Did you hear it?  If not, then I'll spell it out for you.  Here's the dialog: 
First guy: "I grew up in an all white neighborhood."
Second guy: "I grew up in a diverse neighborhood."
First guy: "Everyone I knew was just like me."
Second guy: "Everyone I knew brought something different to the party."
First guy: "They looked like me, thought like me, acted like me - so my neighborhood always stayed the same."
Second guy: "They introduced me to different tastse, different ideas, different ways of doing things - so my neighborhood always got more interesting."
Together: "They definitely helped shape the way I look at things"
Second guy: "and they prepared me for the future."
First guy: "They did?"
Second guy "They did."

The announcer then goes on to tell us how great diversity is.

So, if you still don't get it, here's the racism: the implication that all white people look, think and act alike simply because of their skin color.  That, my friends, is textbook racism.

Think about this for a minute...  Do all white people really act and think alike?  Think about all the white people you know.  There are white people who are liberals, and white people who are conservatives - white Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Independants, Greens...  There are white Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, atheists, agnostics... and even within the white Christians there are Catholics, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Pentecostals, Seventh-Day Adventists... There are white Packer fans, Bronco fans, Laker fans, Celtic fans...  white soccer fans, baseball fans... white scientists, white vegetarians, meat lovers, broccoli haters...  well you get the picture.

If all white people thought and acted alike, they'd all be Libertarian Ron Paul supporters and Black Sabbath fans whose favorite football team was the Denver Broncos.  (I'm pretty sure that's not true.)  And that's because diversity is not due to the color of one's skin - diversity comes from our uniqueness as human individuals.  So not all white people think and act alike, and not all black people think and act alike (and I'll save you the suspense; neither do all brown, red, yellow or any color in between).  There is no race that thinks and acts alike simply because their skin is the same color. 

To think otherwise is to be a racist.

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

On Race and Racism

I'm white so I'm probably not allowed to say this but does anyone else see the racism of the "black leaders" (Sharpton, Jackson, et.al.) in this country?

Now I'm not talking about reverse racism or how they view whites, I'm talking about how they view blacks!  For centuries people of various skin colors have been fighting stereotypes and insisting that skin color does not determine how one thinks or acts.  This was at the heart of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's message personified in his "I have a dream" speech.  His dream was that his "children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

The central tenet of racism is that skin color determines character, that skin color determines intelligence, that skin color determines how a person will act.  The Ku Klux Klan was famous for pronouncements lumping all blacks into a single category based solely on skin color.  That is racism.

And that is exactly what today's so called "leaders of the black community" are doing.  They are famous for speaking about blacks as if their skin color made them all fall in lock step with whatever political agenda they're selling!  That's racism... on a par, and equal to, the racism of the KKK... and it's just not true.  Black people do not all think alike just as white people don't all think alike, just as brown people, yellow people and red people don't all think alike.  Every person on this planet is an individual and makes their own choices.  Nobody makes choices because their skin color forces them to do so!!!

To insist otherwise is nothing more than racism.