Rioting in the U.S.

In my personal experiences, I have seen a higher likelihood of racism coming from blacks rather than whites. Lets say hypothetically that this is true across the nation; that doesn't mean that racism affects whites more than blacks. Quite the contrary given the population difference. It is a factor.

I just can't agree with this when economics was used to displace and destroy minority communities. It's tantamount to ignoring the issue.

History clearly shows us that race and economics are more tightly woven in America than conservative pundits would like us to believe.

But if we really want to examine the rest of your post we'd also find the second point lacking. Take the Hmong community for instance. Immigrant families placed in affordable housing (i.e. the slums) during the 70-80s and, to this day, they are dealing with the same issues as African Americans.

The idea of equality through economics/capitalism is a lie spread by people with established generational wealth or acquired wealth through unfair lending practices.

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"This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined." -Baruch Spinoza

I know I have trouble seeing the nuance in this stuff.

I don’t agree with a lot of people getting carte blanche to say whatever they want (telling people to shut up, not your time to talk) but I know there is a lot of pain behind it. I can accept that.

I don’t agree with the rioting on the surface, but that is what we do in America. Nobody is going back and judging the merits of the Boston Tea Party.

First off, a big ol' to my friend MattJohn for the post. I appreciate the substance very much. I know this is hard for everyone to talk about sometimes, too. I hope we can all keep that in mind. Onward:

Kinda confused, because the first paragraph is phrased as disagreement, but the second paragraph is what I'm saying, too. I am explicitly arguing that they're interwoven, which is why people end up talking past each other so easily when the word "racist" comes out: because one side thinks it means "is explicitly and currently prejudiced against minorities" and the other thinks it means "anything which disadvantages minorities, past or present."

So, you might say "the banking system is racist" and maybe cricket goes "that's absurd" because he thinks you're saying bank tellers hate black people, or something.

I honestly don't know how this undermines the second point. Which, to reiterate, is that white people have more intergenerational wealth than minorities in aggregate, but lots of individual people/families came here recently and do not. As is often noted, Italians, Irish, and other less-favored European nationalities were treated with disdain by other nationalities (or just families that had been here longer) as recently as last century, and obviously the grandchildren of those people are in a very different position re: wealth than a lot of others.

People almost universally resent being grouped together based on things they can't control, and that includes white people who get grouped in with the country club Anglophile set when their grandfather was a Polish coal miner or something.

Oh boy, I really wanna unpack "unfair lending practices" because most of the complaints there are mutually exclusive (like "redlining" in one direction and "predatory lending" in the other, so that both granting loans and denying them become evidence of racism). But that's a little outside of the scope here, and probably not necessary to hash out given the stuff above, because I'm not sure we actually disagree on the link between economics and race. Just between economics and racism.

I acknowledge that black Americans have the lingering economic hardship caused by centuries of slavery, Jim Crow laws and institutionalized discrimination.

I learned in Jr. High history class how after slavery ended, blacks still remained literally 'enslaved' by Jim Crow laws in the south and were forced by law and lack of opportunity to be sharecroppers...where they worked hard but didn't even own their own land. Sharecropping was just a legal form of slavery after the Civil War.

As a response to the wretched conditions in the south, millions of blacks in the 20th century moved to the larger industrialized cities like Detroit and Chicago seeking a better life and a chance to make a living. Only to find they were paid pennies on the dollar and were denied a chance to have good paying jobs.

All of that has lead to many blacks living in poverty in large cities. So yes I fully agree that past racism and discrimination has lead to the current situation of many blacks having less...But those historical factors don't equate to modern day whites being responsible for past 'sins'...though all people of good heart should strive to make America and the world a better place to live in by reducing poverty and it's negative effects.

I think, now that I understand what you're trying to argue, a more compelling way to frame the issue is through societal expectations, but even those are fraught with racially based undertones.

I'll address this further when I get back. I gotta go hang an access point.

The key point to take away from this whole discussion is that people's reactions to the words racist/racism are a measured response of the life they have lived. Those reactions are far more telling about a person's motives and agenda.

EDIT: Also, I think the idea that anyone here, especially if they are white, is going to have the answers to fix the issues with disenfranchises communities is quite laughable. It has to come from them and, for better or worse, we are witnessing that at this very moment. That's precisely why I don't have patience for most of the stuff being said because it's basically discrediting a rights movement.

Yeah, no rush, I think we're probably mostly in agreement but it's worth hashing out. I very much agree that people are reacting to these words differently, both because they mean different things to them and because it's gonna be hard to swallow anything that doesn't jibe with our lived experience, for better or worse.

And in my experiences, it is the opposite. Discrimination is across the board, not specialized to one race, this is true and I highly doubt anyone would argue otherwise.

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Yes, but that sentence you quoted makes it look like something else without the sentence that came after. The two together and I think we're even more in agreement.

This is something I can agree with. This doesn't mean that I think something like communism (or anarchy, for god's sake) would be a solution. To me, both capitalism and socialism are philosophical ideas or thought constructs that have no place in the real world. And just like with religions, people are ruining the world by following these dogmas to the letter. The state should exist for the people, to provide security while trying to minimize its control. A good economical system would have concepts from both capitalism and socialism.

I just completely disagree with the idea that all these social issues are turned into racial ones. I'm not American so I don't know how things really are there (I know the statistics, though, and they don't seem to support BLM claims), but these riots and movements are spilling into Europe too. It's all political and the people pulling the strings don't care about George Floyd, Derek Chauvin, you, or me. They care about money and power. The rioters on the streets are pawns in their games.

As an example, rioting against police shootings in Finland is insane. There's a year old article in one of our newspapers that says that during this century police have shot 9 people (one of those is an accident in training) and if memory serves me right, only one of those 9 was non-white (a Somali immigrant who had killed two people with an ax, tried to kill 3rd, and attacked the police with the same ax).

I'm really sad about the state of the world and naturally, my concerns are more directed towards my home. I fear Europe is moving towards Orwellian nightmare or a civil war (and who knows what that would lead to).

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You have yet to prove anything, but okay.

I have not called anyone a name in this entire thread. Please don't throw that assumption out there, it's inappropriate.

I've shown personal experience as proof. Cricket doesn't accept it, doesn't make it ANY LESS TRUE. If I can't change your mind with real world experience, how the hell am I supposed to with numbers from a website? I guess White Privilege is a perceived notion. I see it, you don't. I apparently can't change your thought process and you won't change mine.

Black men at disadvantage.

In New York City, 88% of police stops in 2018 involved Black and Latino people, while 10% involved white people. (Of those stops, 70% were completely innocent.)
-New York Civil Liberties Union.

In one US survey, 15.8% of students reported experiencing race-based bullying or harassment. Research has found significant associations between racial bullying and negative mental and physical health in students
-Adolescent Health and Harassment Based on Discriminatory Bias.

From 2013 to 2017, white patients in the US received better quality health care than about 34% of Hispanic patients, 40% of Black patients, and 40% of Native American patients.
-National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Report.”

Black Americans are more likely than white Americans to be arrested. Once arrested, they are more likely to be convicted, and once convicted, they are more likely to experience lengthy prison sentences.
-Report to the United Nations on Racial Disparities in the U.S. Criminal Justice System.

Black Americans and white Americans use drugs at similar rates, but Black Americans are 6 times more likely to be arrested for it
-NAACP. Criminal Justice Fact Sheet.

On average, Black men in the US receive sentences that are 19.1% longer than those of white men convicted for the same crimes.
-US Sentencing Commission.

In the US, Black workers are less likely than white workers to be employed in a job that is consistent with their level of education
-Economic Policy Institute.

Here are some percentages on what people think in America.


For the record, I'm in now way calling you or Cricket racist. I want that to be abundantly clear. I apologize if that is how my current state is coming off to you.

I would never discount^^your personal experience, sorry if it ever came off that way.

Let's assume that those statistics are true, which I wouldn't but I also wouldn't discount, my question is why?

For instance, more likely to be arrested is directly tied to more likely to commit crime. More likely to have a longer prison sentence can be tied to more likely to have a prior.

What does more likely to commit a crime entail?

Not remembering the exact numbers, but isn't something like 6% of the population responsible for like 40% of the crime?

Let's assume that those statistics are true, which I wouldn't but I also wouldn't discount, my question is why?

Actually I just looked it up and it's worse than that, but why is also my question. I think much of the blame belongs to whites for sins of the past. However, white people alone can't solve it which is why I say we all need to work together. I like prison reform better than affirmative action. I understand affirmative action but any time it's directly tied to race, it's not optimal. Prison reform is not race related in policy, yet it disproportionately helps black men who need it most. I think we need more policys that incentivize men to be fathers, graduate high school, etc.

We shouldn't even have threads like this here, but that's another talk for another time.


True, but the fact that they are interwoven means that any argument that advances the idea that race is not a contributing factor and that economics is a primary deciding factor is folly, and it doesn't negate the fact that the bank system is racist. How we feel about words and the way they are used does not change facts. And this is precisely my point: that racial biases are interwoven into every aspect of American society. One cannot argue, from any angle, that another factor is responsible for the disadvantages because to do so is to equate that race is not responsible. When two things are so interwoven that you can't point to where they begin and end then you cannot claim or argue that one of those factors does NOT play a part in the workings of that system.

Chick-fil-A is a business that is interwoven with religion, so I can't argue that them being closed on Sunday is a sign of their success. To do so is to negate the significance of a deciding factor in their business operations.


There's a big difference between a community that freely immigrants and a community that was built on a lack of suffrage and the imprisonment of their ancestors. It's an unfair, and rather grotesque, comparison of lived experiences. One group had the empowerment of choice whilst another group was disempowered through their lack of choice.

People universally reset being told where to live, how to live, etc, etc.


Ah, but unpacking it would show the economics of racism. It's not a matter of economics and racism being linked. It's a matter of historical records showing us how economics was used to further racism.

TL; DR: Apples to oranges.

I think a lot of people in here are forgetting that America was built on slavery. BUILT ON and not beside. You are going to be hard pressed to find a sector of society that has not been influenced by that history, and this is why race is brought into so many current discussions about society. It's also why a lot of those same systems are, and have been, racist.

A reasonable position, and one I'm actively considering. I'd rather do it in a time between social controversies, but as you say, for another time.

When someone says it's not race, it's economics, that does not mean there is no relationship between the two. As you say, they are inextricably linked. We agree there.

What it means to say "it's not race, it's economics" is that the person at the end of the process--the bank teller, the HR person deciding who to hire, whatever--is reacting to the end result, and not the skin color. And that's an important distinction! If the problem is that people throughout society are denying minorities opportunity just because they hate them, that's way different (and would require totally different solutions/policies) than if the problem is that race has left people poorer, and that that poverty has left them disadvantaged. Because that means their race is what caused the problem, but it is not inherently the problem.

That's how people end up talking past each other: because very few people see the former in the world. They just don't see an army of bank tellers and landlords out there who hate minorities and exclude them just for being a minority. So when they're told these things are "racist," they can't square it with their sense of the world, and they object. No productive communication will happen, then, unless we either find another word or at least bother to try to define our terms upfront. That might just lead to an argument about whether it's wise or fair to use such a powerful word to describe third-order effects of race, but even that terminological argument would be more productive than two people arguing about "racism" because neither is using the word the same way as the other.

I think it'd be grotesque to compare their histories as a whole, yeah. But I'm only comparing the intergenerational wealth stuff. None of this exists in a vacuum, of course.

Maybe when this dies down we can expound on it and find out. Definitely something I'm interested in, given that over the last few decades both one course of action and its opposite were both described as racist.

Sure, you are free to think that but it fails to capture the realities of how racism was institutionalized in this country.

A community has been left poorer not because they were just neglected but because they were actively suppressed: don’t give them an education because they are too dumb, don’t give them land because they won’t know what to do with it, don’t let them move into your neighborhood because they will devalue your property, don’t give them a job because they are too lazy, don’t give them a loan because they don’t understand money, etc, etc.

We are talking 200+ years where a whole community was generalized and demonized for merely not being white. Their power was actively suppressed. This is a fact, and this is precisely why the generational wealth gap and other realities exist today.

I’d argue that it is far more telling of a person if their reaction is to discredit/disagree with someone because they didn’t like the usage of a word. That line of thinking originates from a place of arrogant ignorance: “oh, that word is wrong because that’s not how it actually is in the world.” When that takes place between white people it’s an annoyance at worst but when spoken towards the community that is dealing with pain it’s equivalent to “Cowboy the **** up” or “Quit lying. You ain’t got it bad”.

As a member of a community that once actively pointed to its race as an example of superiority it is not my job to defend or refute a word because I don’t like it’s connotations. It’s my job to listen to the hurt: Actively listen.

I mean, you can see the inherent problems in a white person trying to defend against the claim of racist/racism, right? Just the mere act of refuting is an extension of the very same systems that implemented and advanced racism.

As a white person, you don’t have to accept that racism is a fact. You are free to let it go in one ear and out the other, but the moment you begin to argue back against it you have furthered the narrative of “I’m better than you because I’m white”. And this is because of the long history that white people in this country have of controlling and manipulating people that don’t look like them because white people know what’s best for the others.