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[Racism & Poverty] : A Love Story?
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Because of gerrymandering? I don't see how the democracy gives an inherent monopoly to whites. Black votes matter.
I actually thought my self fairly liberal until I started posting here
Just goes to show! Lots of variation even among those who are basically on the same side. Keeps discourse fresh though!
That purple monstrosity goes through 2/3rds of the major minority areas of Central and North Florida, keeping ~6 of what would otherwise be fairly balanced voting blocks in the rest of those areas solidly Republican at the cost of just one 1 democratic, and minority driven, district. Functionally this causes most of central and north Florida to simply not be accurately represented, especially when you consider that folks at the southern tip of that district (Sanford) have entirely different economic and local industry realities compared to Jacksonville (the north end).
As one example, five black people have been directly elected to the US Senate and nine have served there. Ever.
For reference: Edward Brooke (MA)
Carol Mosely-Braun (IL)
Barack Obama (IL)
Corey Booker (NJ)
Tim Scott (SC, re-elected after being appointed)
Two others were elected by their state legislature (both in Reconstruction Era Mississippi)
And two more were appointed but did not seek re-election.
I think you forgot about an entire gender here.
No, I'm not talking about gerrymandering. Think larger. It effects everything.
A person can represent any number of other people and persons. But when approximately 35% of your population is not white, and yet that percentage only appears in your senate approximately 2% of the time, that is more than just a statistical anomaly. And that's just looking at race, not gender.
It's less than half a percent, actually. 9/1963
Again, racism isn't just about black people - they're just the demographic baddest hit by it. Native Americans get it bad, too. It's every racial demographic that isn't white, and women get this from the sexism angle.
edit: Black people don't need to have black representatives for their interests but it's being a goose to not let them get a voice for themselves at the table in politics. Politics isn't a white only sport.
And I'm saying that doesn't matter, a white person can represent black constituents just fine
It's when that happens 99% of the time that this becomes a problem. No racial demographic should have a monopoly on political ranks.
Except it really isn't. Color blindness is a double edged sword, it cuts both ways. It shouldn't matter what the racial demographic of the congress is as long as all constituents are having their interests represented fairly.
Sure it is. It wouldn't matter if this wasn't a big a deal, but it is. Minority and women's interests aren't getting equal in political matters or in office. Color blindness is absolutely useless when the default is a white man who upholds their interests above everyone else's, politics isn't truly color blind. If it were we'd be seeing much more representation from women and minorities - there's nothing about being in politics that's inherently white or male, every demographic deserves access to that power.
edit: It's pitiful that the first minority president in this country was elected in 2008, and America's never had a woman president.
But they're not- the white guy representing the black folks in his district isn't concerned with their views; he's more concerned with the majority of his district which is white.
How it works is that instead of having 4 white districts and 1 black one, they have 5 majority-white districts with a thin slice of black people in each one. Since white people are the majority in each district the black people's concerns will be mostly ignored due to how small their proportion is, even if the Senator is a paragon of racial equality. What everyone is arguing is that it's more fair and more democratic to have black people have their own representative that can focus on them. The same thing happens with poor whites but it's less easy to see.
They can, but gerrymandering is there to ensure that Group X's voting power is diluted when you look at the results at the state level. End result, for districts created by Republicans, is that you get white people representing black people and working very hard against those constituents' interests.
If this isn't trolling and just, by some miracle, happens to be a thing you actually believe, I recommend revisiting everything else you learned from the grunting, sweat-slick pedophile who taught you it in light of the new information that it is both factually incomplete and wildly inconsistent with how any sane person actually assesses responsibility in our day to day lives.
But this is a political problem and there is a powerful political movement that will fight against this.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
this new Ann Coulter book sounds like a fucking racist screed ripped straight from the pages of stormfront
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/ann-coulter-s-adios-america-gop-s-immigration-policy-unplugged
I mean Coulter has always slung bullshit and peddled right wing agenda nonsense, but this feels more extreme than her normal level of conservative pandering. She's usually a more passive supporter of super rightwing bullshit, candidly condoning the more extreme aspects of the party, whereas now she's just straight out selling hardcore white supremacism.
No one's paying attention to her so this is a plea for attention based on controversy. It's not that she's selling white supremacy, it's that she's desperately trying to offend as many people as she can so she goes back on the talk shows and sells books. And she's really desperate- "Earlier immigrants proved their heartiness by vomiting all the way across the Atlantic Ocean to get here...also we should turn back immigrants' crippled relatives." Really? Really.
It reminds me of last week when I was in a restaurant and Fox was on. "Bernie Sanders, hardcore commie, doesn't want to put America back on its feet- he wants to put it under for good." It's just saying as much outrageous stuff as you can get away with in an attempt to get views.
This fact is pretty important. The income and wealth inequality of the top 1% is so high that it actually skews the math really badly. No small part of white wealth inequality is due to white millionaires, and not Joe Blow the white plumber.
The disparity is so bad, and problems so endemic, that I do think that "color blind" solutions are the right answer in many cases.
But hiring and educational practices would remain horribly biased.
She's always done shit like this. She's been shilling for white supremacy and being a terrible human being as long as there's been an Ann Coulter she just hasn't been in the limelight like in the past. This is how she became infamous. Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly do this song and dance too.
That's apart of the problem, not the whole problem. Income inequality effects every demographic but some worse than and others and not identically. Employers aren't turning away "Brad" because his name sounds too ethnic, they will do it for "Shaniqua." That's why systemic and casual racism is harder to stamp out, it's insidious - people don't want to hear they're subconsciously making racist decision and want to amend that to give every race equal opportunities.
Sure, back many pages ago I said it likely wouldn't be perfect, but OTOH, the situation many whites are in isn't super great, and may get worse, so there needs to be broad changes. Throwing someone a life saver to just help them into a sinking ship is a waste of effort. And, some more radical potential fixes, like basic income, would fix employment discrimination a fair bit by making it matter less and changing the labor market.
Basic income laws won't fix that, employment discrimination laws will. Or maybe a mix of both. It needn't be perfect, but we must strive to do better and may people, and organizations won't do it unless they're forced to - which means these laws must not be toothless they must be enforced thoroughly. Throwing someone a life saver is good to do on the individual level, that should be encouraged it's not a waste of effort. Multiply this a million times in society and the effect will be substantial because we're a nation, not a small group of individuals in the wilderness.
We already have employment discrimination laws - race is a protected class in federal law. Those laws are extremely difficult to enforce because, unlike resume studies, real candidates are never identical except for race and employers can always come up with some justification for their choice. Also, we allow huge information asymmetries between employers and employees, so the candidate never knows what the competition was and whether they even have a complaint. It's much easier to get employers for discrimination against people they've already hired.
This is a really thorny issue. Large businesses can blind resumes by having someone assign a number and removing names and such when they're reviewed by HR, but there is still the interviewing stage which is often about gut feelings.
Even if you overcome this problem and made hiring perfectly race-blind everywhere in the country, it wouldn't make much of a dent in black unemployment. The biggest drivers are usually 1) lack of skills and 2) criminal records. That's where I think major policy changes would have real impact. For example, with #2 you might create a class of legal record which is available only to the criminal justice system, and for many crimes have a process which automatically moves your criminal history into this category after a certain time without reoffending. Of course this policy is meaningless without an accompanying "right to be forgotten" that prevents private entities from storing these records while they're public and selling them to employers later.
Is such a policy actually a good idea, and if it is, can it ever be sold to the public in any form? Unclear! Ending racism is a hard intellectual problem. That's why discussions of racism are typically long on history and short on solutions. And that's why I advocate finding the solutions first, then selling them.
that's the funny thing about all of this. as a species, we largely don't know what motivations lie outside of scarcity-based concerns. with some thought, you can come up with a pretty long list, though....
Registered just for the Mass Effect threads | Steam: click ^^^ | Origin: curlyhairedboy
You should read Steven Pinker's http://www.amazon.com/The-Better-Angels-Our-Nature/dp/1491518243. Why resort to gene therapy when we are doing pretty well with whatever we had before gene therapy.
― Marcus Aurelius
Path of Exile: themightypuck
Hey look a study showing that after you control for education, non-Asian minorities still get utterly fucked by society. Who knew!
(Also, see if you can see the elite media totally ignoring Bernie Sanders)
Ummm, everyone who is not a silly goose?