Letters to the Editor
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Worldwide
It is not just America. If you go to, say, Jamaica, which has a large majority "black" population, you will not find that Jamaican doctors, teachers, and lawyers share the same "values" as the black underclasses in the housing projects of Kingston--known, as devotees of Bob Marley will recognize, as government yards, and their inhabitants as yardies.
For the puposes of this discussion, let us just assume that there is a distinct race called "black", even though this is actually not the case.
Now the "values " of the black underclass cannot really be called values at all, because they have no value and they are actually just symptoms of social disintegration. Since when have alcoholism, crime, drug addiction, obesity, diabetes, poor educational performance, domestic violence, illegitimacy etc. been regarded as "values"?
OK, you can say that churchgoing and gospel choirs are value-added areas within some parts of the black underclass, and I will not fight with you, but as soon as these activities become value laden, they are tinged with bourgeoisity and hues of whiteness. You can even say that hip-hop and rap is the cry of the dispossessed.
If you refer back to a movie like How Green Was My Valley, one can argue that historically there have been, and no doubt still are, poor working class communities where people live with dignity and honor according to the values of their class. But it is almost impossible to live a life of dignity and honor in the black (or white) underclass of the US without becoming middle class, or even whiteified, because things like dignity and honor are really middle class values.
Black people in the US are not really held back by discrimination or by lack of opportunity, but there exists a large community of people who profit from keeping large numbers of black people in the ghetto. Many such people are criminals, especially drug dealers, to whom every kid that goes to college is potentially a lost customer. Then there are also the people whose livelihood revolves around selling alcohol, tobacco, junk food, fast food and other products that destroy health and cause litter. Since these products are vast industries, huge amounts of money are at stake.
I often work near Jacksonville, a large city in north Florida that has a murder rate so fearsome that military who are posted at bases there welcome a tour of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan for relaxation.
The city fathers (and mothers) and the local newspaper annually make a big song and dance about the murder rate and hold prayer vigils and Days of Action when they Take Back The Streets to stop the killing, but the fact is simply that a lot of criminals live in their city, and though sometimes bystanders and children get killed in the crossfire, many of those who die are themselves criminals.
The criminals, inasmuchas they think about it at all, have no intention of stopping killing people. If you are a drug dealer, you have to have a means of enforcing law and order, or else people would just be doing whatever they liked without consequences, right? Moving in on other peoples turf, not paying debts, looking at other people's women--it would be total anarchy if you could not shoot the occasional malefactor pour encourager les autres.
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Race should die
Skin color has about as much 'racial' information as hair color. Blonds tend to have some Northern European ancestry. Redheads tend have some Irish or Scots ancestry. 'Blacks' generally have some African ancestry.
I don't feel any racial affiliation with groups that share my skin color. I don't see that I am responsible for the attitudes of skinheads or fundamentalists pushing their creation agenda on our schools. I fight those values. Why should people who share a skin color with misogynistic rap stars or ghetto gang bangers act differently? Maybe they're judging by the content of character not the color of skin?
The way to a race-free society is not to classify everyone and decide if your skin is darker than a certain shade or your ancestry is least X% 'black,' you're 'black.' The way forward is treat people as if skin color is as unimportant as hair color. Maybe in the current generation it will be a polite fiction, but in the next generation the attitude might be more real.
Already we have come light years from the segregation of the 50s. Attitudes have changed dramatically.
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I guess it depends on what you mean by race
do you mean racism? do you mean differences in culture? do you mean economic and/or legal disparity?
In the past 10 years down here 99 black churches were burned to the ground. We still get the very very occasional flaming cross. But on the other hand there are far far FAR more interracial married couples and biracial families than up in the liberal tolerant north east. Yet if you hang out at the county courthouse you'll find that 80% of the people up there to answer for their crimes are black or Hispanic, in a community that's 20% black and 10% Hispanic.
Is race dying? Maybe. We'll just find other ways to hate people.
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lots of people keeping race hatred alive
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/map/hate.jsp
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Wondering whether Kamiya spends any time around black people
Spend a semester in any high school that has more than, say, 15% black students. Urban, suburban, rural, doesn't matter.
After that, such an inane question as Is race dying? would never even occur to you.
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Racism without Races
Here are two ironically intertwined scientific results:
1. Genetically, race does not exist; or more precisely, it is a huge exaggeration. For pretty much any gene except those governing skin color and a few other traits, the difference between the so-called races is less than the difference within. Therefore in statistical terms, race is a meaningless category; it does not convey useful information.
2. Genetically, racism - or more precisely, tribalism - does exist. Studies on young children show that tribalism is instinctual; when someone untribal-looking shows up, the fear centers in the brain light up. This is an pre-rational process; not to be reasoned away, only rationally managed.
So we humans are genetically programmed to over-react to a genetically irrelevant difference. Racism is in our genes, even though race is not!
It's just another one of Mother Nature's little jokes.