Learn English. If foreign immigrants like me can do it, I'm sure a native like you can too. If you can't keep up, you can always join this forum.
He is a foreign immigrant, so you must be patient and take the time to try and understand him. I think what he's saying is that the black police are going to beat the racist white police even harder than how they beat thier victims.
Nexxo mentions he's originally from somewhere else and suddenly he's dismissed as writing unintentionally cryptic English?! Just like that, he's perceived as having the stylistic equivalent of a thick accent and now needs interpreting? I do hope you're kidding, mvagusta. As an editor, I'm forced to deal with clumsy and opaque prose every day. Nexxo's posts are the exact opposite; they're the reason I discovered bit-tech in the first place. If his writing is testament to anything, it's that EFL public schools need improving, since he's clearly leagues better than most first-gen writers I know. I understood the "speak English" comment to be in the classic anti-intellectual tradition: "Stop usin' them big words 'n' quotin' them books no one reads!" Forget intellectual snobbery -- that no longer exists. We live in an age of anti-intellectual snobs.
While I can read that and understand it, it still doesn't explicitly make any point at all. Nexxo is just repeating what he's already said in other posts (which I read and agreed with), but this time using metaphors rather than specifics.
I was responding to: To put it in simpler terms: you reap what you sow. Any game can be turned back on you. Anything you can do... johnmustrule comments on the unsettling polarisation he observes: I'm explaining the mechanism behind it. People may not like the NBPA, but perhaps it bears dwelling on why it came into existence in the first place. Change starts with oneself, not the other guy.
I am a middle class white male. While I know racism exists, I don't see it as often as some here. I'm sure I could pick out many things that could, literally, be racist. However, I don't. Some things make me uncofortable with as many '___ Black ___' organizations, turn the tables and they change their position. I remember as a boy, getting in trouble at school, my single working mother contacted the NAACP for assistance/recognition of the porblem in my school. We were definately surprised after a representative contacted school officials and I was back in school the next day (as opposed to a weeks suspension). I'm irritated by racism. I understand in my location, there may be minorities, and they may be treated differently/unfairly. However, some occasions I have to wonder how they'd behave if I was in there native behaving as they're here - if the shoe was on the other foot. And, sometimes I have a hard time believing they'd be different or 'fair'. I choose not to judge based on a person's skin color, but they're attitude. I'm laid back and extremely easy to get along with, non-confrontational. However, if you're an ass, I won't bite my tongue. After reading these thoughts, there's only one thing I can do in either direction. I will do my best in raising a family (I'm a single father of a three year old girl), that does not know how to be biased. Teaching there is no difference, except what's inside... and I think that's the only thing, and the best thing I can do for this particular situation.
Being of "mixed race" (as they say) and having both black and white relatives, I can most unequivocally tell you from personal experience that they wouldn't be. They're not. Ethnic minorities are as racist as the ethnic majority --towards the ethnic majority and towards other ethnic minorities. It's human nature: we are truly equal.
I'd say that there are racists in every nationality around the world, including mine as some of my relatives obviously are, but we aren't all racist. So you can't say that we are all truly equal, especially when it comes to moral standards, which racism is a part of.
Here's a link I provided to a fellow American the other day when he complained that racism in our country was overstated: http://books.google.com/books?id=oLoXHHc_uUkC&pg=PA135&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=0_1#PPP1,M1 Encyclopedia of American Race Riots, by Walter C. Rucker, James N. Upton (a two-volume reference work listing every race riot ever to have taken place in the States). But that doesn't mean things are better in other countries. Racism simply boils to the surface more swiftly in a capitalism-driven non-royalty-based country that embraces and incorporates immigrants on a staggering level -- and where slavery created institutional inequality, which was incorporated into designing documents at the government's formation (the electoral college, etc.). The inconsistencies between the two tendencies -- "we the people" and "they the slaves" -- have created paradoxical figures in American history: Jack London, author of White Fang and apparent socialist friend of the common man, who turns out to have been a virulent racist whose inclusive political philosophy turns cold and hostile whenever Jack Johnson wins a fight. Johnson beat every adversary, including white ones, at boxing, which horrified London because it meant white men were not dominant. They no longer "owned" the ring, which made London hoard the sort of title he'd been keen on distributing before. One issue I sometimes have with friends from other countries and race is the "color-blind" defense, which is easy to make until you discover that racial tension is going to exist wherever there are competitive needs for income, property and jobs. Since issues regarding race are often really about something else, the underlying tensions won't arise until the dominant group's threatened on the livelihood/property level. Hence the rather superior attitude I sometimes used to encounter on trips to Norway and Sweden: "we don't have prejudice here; we're not like you!" That attitude has all but vanished in the wake of supremacist activities in Oslo and the blond(e) blue-eyed screeds of people like Varg Vikernes: Things changed as soon as dark-skinned immigrants moved to those places en masse and began competing for jobs, housing and benefits, which led to reactionaries embracing the idea of racial property. I love those places, but to say they are free of racism is "color-blindness" at its most pernicious. Darius James, author of Negrophobia, who now lives in Berlin, once told me many of his fellow Berliners claimed race wasn't an issue in Berlin because "there are no black people here." Darius would point to black people on the street and say, "what about him"? and meet with shrugs. This is the sort of so-called color blindness that seems completely unobtrusive unless you're on the receiving (read: invisible) end. Lastly, about the exclusivity of certain groups that are said to be pro-minority and anti-majority: Often, the reason members of other groups can't join a group devoted to a specific kind of prejudice is because the other groups are not subject to that particular form of ill-treatment. It's like asking why I can't go to group therapy for rape victims just because I haven't been raped. It has nothing to do with fears of being an "excluded white male" -- I haven't been raped! Yes, one's initial reaction is often annoyance at being excluded. But then the larger picture comes into focus, and one sees the need for such groups to exist. If our societies' approaches to jobs, property and human rights were fair on every level, then these groups wouldn't be needed, but neither would people be so defensive about holding onto what little esteem, status, salary, etc., they already have. Middle-Eastern cab drivers in New York often fix American flags to their dashboards for a reason: They don't want people to assume they're "terrorists" (read: threatening dark-skinned immigrants) and accost them. A common response to the question of racism is this: "It wasn't a problem until you mentioned it." The response sounds reasonable until you realize that issues of race and property are often so entrenched in a given society that they occur on an unconscious level. That's why they have to be traced and pointed out in order to be righted. My answer to the above response: The reason race is allowed to be a problem is precisely because people aren't supposed to mention it. If race truly doesn't matter to you, then you won't have to dismiss it every time someone brings it up. Ralph Wiley's book, Why Black People Tend to Shout, tells of inner-city black people who only go to white doctors because they've absorbed the idea such doctors are inherently better. It isn't a question of one group being called racist by another. It's a question of the same billboards and underlying assumptions misleading us all.
Perhaps the Berliner's true meaning wasn't so much the (perceived) lack of black people, but rather the (perceived) homogeneity of the populace. The other guy on the street may have been black, but he was a fellow German. One opinion I've heard regarding racial tensions in America is that it's difficult to pin down an archetypal American citizen. We're preoccupied with adding prefixes to alert everyone of our origins: Irish-American, Chinese-American, African-American. One of my Canadian colleagues once told me that she hadn't experienced that kind of designation until she came to the States; people in Canada were simply Canadians. Clearly racism isn't simply a black-and-white issue, and racial boundaries become confused when nationality, or any other socio-cultural designation, comes into play. Do I hire the black American or the white African-American? Indeed, prejudice occurs on every level: How many white, middle-class professionals have cast aspersions on other white, middle-class professionals because they voted for the other guy? -monkey
Trouble is, national homogeneity is an illusion. I'm not even going to bring up the irony of our German example -- I'd prefer to avoid violating Godwin's Law (which is not really a law but rather an indicator for bad taste). Instead, I'll compare Darius's practical example with something far more pedantic: The use of the term Fatherland. Suffice to whine that merely calling a country "the Fatherland" is synecdoche at its most irritatingly exclusive, but attempting to cleanse such terms of sexist conventions can be an exercise in pointlessness. Yes, it's possible to redesign language from the ground up -- inventing non-gendered non-neutered pronouns for everything, etc. -- but that would mean effectively erasing centuries of associative links and creating a vast reeducation program that would not be without massive casualties. Semantics -- the study of meaning -- is not pointless, but here it would be impractical. Darius's complaint addresses the idea that there are "no black people" in Germany, not that blacks are really just citizens. He doesn't care if someone uses metonymy to refer to black individuals. He cares when someone denies their very existence. At a certain point, one has to grasp the difference between reassuring convention (citizen vs. black) and dehumanization (patriotism vs. invisibility). I would argue that national identity doesn't address the deficit of individual black people's ignored identities -- which is why Darius bothered to point at black people in the first place. Nice paradox, supermonkey. Well-put and well-observed. What's fun about your example is that it turns out to be applicable at every level, including this one. It illustrates the irony of discrimination (prejudice or keen judgment?) as well as discussions about it, including this one: The unfortunate part of conversations about race is that they often degenerate into brutal competitions between the would-be just and the covertly superior: One faction wants to be seen as the most tolerant, another, to insult anyone who is deemed most prejudiced, both effectively replacing the scapegoat of race with the straw man of ignorance. A better object for each faction might be self-awareness. It's a given we're each going to say something stupid en route to defending a more enlightened POV, which makes the quest for the Most Tolerant Comment prize breathtakingly pointless. Since we all carry unexamined prejudices within us, perhaps we're better off seeking to understand ourselves than castigating those who have failed to understand us.
Was the Berliner implicitly denying the black man's existence? I'm not privy to the details of the conversation, so I admit I'm only guessing here. Without knowing the context in which the Berliner made the statement, I'm left to wonder if the Berliner had something else in mind when he said that there weren't any black people in Germany. "There are no black people here" is obviously hyperbole. I imagine the Berliner knows full well that black people exist in Germany, but if he thinks of the black man as just another guy on the street, it's easy for him to lump the black man with the rest of the population. Still, I question whether it's necessary to keep reinforcing a color designator. I believe it's one of the reasons Cultural Diversity training is ultimately ineffectual. By constantly pointing out that other people different, we end up treating them appropriately. Our actions are racist nevertheless. Based on what you've said here, do you think it's possible for someone to be, by actions and attitude, colorblind? That is, can someone fully acknowledge the existence of a black person - yes, that guy on the corner has dark skin - yet not think of him in terms of color? By the way, thanks for the new word. I've never encountered 'synecdoche' before. -monkey
Cultural diversity training fails because it emphasises people's ethic differences and states that you should be respectful of them, but then goes on to tell you that you should treat them as exactly the same as you nonetheless. Kind of a contradictory message. People get confused and default to prejudice (as they have not learned how people are different, just that they are) or its stealth cousin, politically correct behaviour (which arguably is worse). A more functional approach would be to celebrate people's differences. Yes, we are all different. Yes, difference is good. I can. My mother is Black, my father White. As a child I never thought about it --it was just how things were.
Indeed. That is what I was trying to say, but I see now that I didn't word it properly. Rather than approach differences from a positive view, the training more often warns against differences as something to avoided. -monkey
