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[Racism & Poverty] : A Love Story?
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Casual racism is harder to find, that's why it's crucial not to dismiss it so quickly. Not every racist wears a white hood and is in the Klan. It's also wrong to dismiss it from not being intentional, it doesn't have to be to be racism, and that there are racists doing this intentionally but not overtly. The latter needs to be hidden now, since overt racism is frowned upon rather than in the past.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/09/03/how-st-louis-county-missouri-profits-from-poverty/
This is the other major example, btw.
I'd like to hear the other viewpoint on why the banks were even doing that.
It seems strange that reputable Banks would somehow say "Let's screw over the Blacks, for no reason, just because they're black".
Bolded the important part. They thought they could get away with it.
Then go and and seek out that knowledge!
Ignorance is perfectly OK, but it should not be mistaken for a position of argumentation.
I don't get it, why would they not just screw over people randomly than just black people specifically?
Sorry I just don't believe shit I read on the internet right away the first time I read it from one source.
Banks being reputable is no guarantee they wouldn't have racists working for them or how the business world hasn't got a bad reputation with minorities. Racists can be great at their job, while also being racists who'll use their position to screw over minorities - who are excellent bait for easy marks since they don't have the political capital to defend themselves that white people have.
Racism hides under the surface in our culture, and if you know what to look for you wouldn't have be shocked that Hulk Hogan was a racist before the recent scandal blew up. The wrestling industry has a problem with racism behind the scenes, and so do many industries. They just hide it. Many don't even know it's there.
Please read the Department of Justice report on Ferguson. If you don't have time to read the whole thing, just ctrl+F to the part with the heading "Ferguson Law Enforcement Practices Disproportionately Harm Ferguson’s African-American Residents and Are Driven in Part by Racial Bias". I'll provide the absolute Cliff's notes, though
1. The city of Ferguson applied absurd fines to citizens as a form of revenue seeking
2. The city of Ferguson disproportionately applied those fines to black people
3. The city of Ferguson would then assess late fees and an absurd schedule of court appearances to deal with those fines
4. If you could not pay the fines and the fees, Ferguson would issue arrest warrants as a form of coercing payment
Of those 4 things, only #2 was specifically about black people though.
Are you saying the average white person was fined more than the average black person, or that merely blacks received more fines than whites? There's a difference.
Who says banks are reputable? The big banks that were fined here are crooks out to steal every last dollar that's not nailed down.
Please read the report. Skim it. I beg of you.
I can't debate with you if you don't engage with the sources.
pleasepaypreacher.net
This I feel is a better explanation, that it's not the Bank as an entity creating racist policies, but rather the decentralized people who work for those banks who impose their own racist tricks on the clients.
That's actually an awful explanation. It's not individuals. It's society.
The banks as entities are the people who make them up. Pretending otherwise is how you reach the point where they are capable of doing whatever they want because the profit for breaking the law, getting caught, paying lawyers, and getting fined still beats out legal business practices.
Please explain why Blacks and not other under-represented minorities.
They were fined for cheating Hispanics too.
I'm willing to bet the fine was less than the profit though. Just guessing.
I'm going to read the report some more, and then come back
Because of all minorities, blacks tend to be the weakest in financial understanding. As for why, well...we've been discussing that in this thread.
Yeah, so banksters are racist dicks. That doesn't prove that The Man is keeping black people down.
Yes, Jim Crow did exist.
And forty years after that we machine-gunned Indians at Wounded Knee. Hell, slavery was legal in 1857. A fantastic time for race relations indeed.
You could say the same thing about the trunk full of beads for New York.
Here you go again with the conspiracy talk. Colluding. Extracting. Harvesting. As if local bank managers and mayors get together in smoke-filled rooms and rub their hands together with glee at all the money they're stealing from black people. Your examples are from eras when slavery was legal and lynching was a public event that families attended and you say that the United States' economy is fundamentally based on stealing money from black people.
Does McDonalds steal money from black people? Does Boeing? John Deere? Olive Garden? Farms? I'm sure Hasbro's factories are filled with white men in straw hats cracking bullwhips over the heads of the toiling slaves.
Oh wait, none of that's true, because that's insane. I'm not an idiot; I know racism exists today, but I don't believe in your conspiracy theory.
Meanwhile, Hispanics make up a smaller 7.8% of the House despite being 17.1% of the population and their mortgage impact is 2.5%. Asians make up 2.3% of the House compared with 5.3% of the population, and their "skin tax" is 0.5%.
So I ask again, why Blacks? Of all the minorities they have the BEST representation, and yet they're targeted the MOST.
Screwing over someone entirely because you know they're too poor to protect themselves: Not racist.
Screwing over someone because you assume based on their race that they'll probably be too poor to protect themselves: Moderately racist.
Screwing over someone entirely because of their race, with limited concern as to whether they'll be able to protect themselves beyond ensuring you avoid punishment yourself: Highly racist.
I can probably safely assume that all three of those things are happening everywhere, the question is the proportions. Racism and opportunism certainly build off of each other, but if opportunism is the bigger threat, then more resources should be put into dealing with that.
The Ferguson statistics are nice to see. Well, not that they exist, but as an example. I'm still concerned about poverty as a confounding factor there, but it does seem like racism is arguably making the town engage in inefficient opportunism.
Congress is a useful shorthand for the power structure of society.
It's easy to maintain a status quo, even if it causes harm. Look at smoking, leaded gasoline, etc. I don't think it's people with evil intent glowering with their hands like a puppeteer over a scale model of Compton. It's just people doing their jobs they way they've always done it. Unfortunately, the way they've always done it has also been influenced by the racism of the past. The rules may have changed recently, but we are still feeling the effects.
And even if you COULD boil it down to a few bad actors (I don't think you can, really, but that's beside the point), that still means there's a terrible problem.
If you extrapolate from the constituents the congressman represents and not the attributes of the congressman himself, sure.
Y'know, none of the old plantation owners or even the pro-segregation lobby gathered together in their times' equivalent of a smoke filled board room - and yet the overt & brutal literal harvesting / lynching happened, and seemed to have a regular cadence to it. It seems like perhaps institutionalized racism & even slavery do not require a conspiracy between given actors.
Also, many of the examples are not from when slavery was legal.
Also, yes, many of your listed companies have profited off of the back of the slave system & segregation systems that preceded them (albeit probably indirectly; receiving loans from creditors or subsidies from government agencies, for example, whose treasuries were & still are thoroughly tainted).
We're better than that - if you mean "power structure of society", SAY IT. Nbsp and Captain Marcus are our resident sceptics, so debate by bringing your A game.
If you send the exact same resume to employers but change the name from a "white" name ("Emily" or "Brendan") to a "black" name ("Lakisha" or "Jamal") the former gets 50% more callbacks. If it were really about class, that shouldn't be true.
That you don't agree with the interpretation of the evidence in favor of the argument doesn't a conspiracy theory make.
I'm actually pretty shocked that you are singling out his wording of "The Man" screwing blacks and other minorities over as incorrect when we have an example where it was so obvious that the Federal Government got involved, multiple times. Like, aside from the government itself I don't know how you can get any more "The Man" than a large banking corporation.
I assume that you fight this characterization because you don't have a good argument for why these practices went on aside from "systemic disenfranchisement," but you refuse to accept that interpretation for reasons that aren't clear.
And to be clear, systemic disenfranchisement is a hallmark of racism.
Because as a community, they're woefully financially illiterate, but also aspirational.
Congressmen, and women, aren't unbiased individuals when it comes to race and politics, everyone has opinions. Even if they were it says a lot about them that they'd cheerfully encourage these behaviors with their constituents rather than do their job to help everyone. Racism and constitutional racism thrives by giving power to those beliefs. What they do influences who they pick on to hold posts in the government on the federal, state and local levels. And there's their donors.
I think, in a thread about racism, we should cite sweeping racial generalizations.
If we must have them at all. Because "Blacks are bad with money" is not a good look.
Being a skeptic of racism in america is not some badge of socrates, at this point you have to willfully ignorant to ignore what's been going on since the founding of the country.
pleasepaypreacher.net
That's what I told him.
What you get is not being suspected of a crime purely on your skin color.
What you get is not having the history a nation that is lauded as "great" that valued your race as 3/5's of a person.
What you get is not having your race being enslaved and sold as cattle for hundreds of years.
What you get is not having people shove a flag of oppression in your face and tell you its about heritage and not hate.
What you get is not having political commentators list off dead young men in your community and asking what your community is doing to invoke this violence
What you get is being pulled over by the police and reasonably assured you won't be executed for the crime of unbuckling your seat belt
All this and all you had to do was be born white.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Second, Congress didn't gut the VRA. That was the Supreme Court.
Third, I have emphasised that I am not a skeptic of racism in america. I am a skeptic of your ability to form a coherent argument without resorting to glib nonsense and ad hominems.
Let me know when you're done arguing with Mr Strawman over there.
Now this is an argument I can get behind. The stereotype in media/music of young blacks as criminals/the auto-immolation of black communities causing white flight back in the '60s means NIMBY is sadly A Thing, causing redlining/denial of mortgages. If you combine that with Hahnsoo1's lazy greed of corporations it'd go a long way towards explaining your The Man theory and it gives us actual targets to go after to boot. Criminals? Honest jobs! Corporations? Tons of fines! etc.
Are you kidding? That happened all the time! The KKK, the White Citizens' Councils, the numerous knockoffs of the KKK, etc. Even though black people were treated terribly after the Civil War thanks to Johnson ending Reconstruction, that still doesn't prove that the economy was based on racism- we'd switched from an agrarian to an industrial economy and the new labor force for factories was poor Irish and Eastern Europeans.
Only John Deere existed before 1900 in that list. I'm sure McDonalds is receiving black people blood money even as I type this. Crates and crates of Confederate dollars, seized by Lincoln and used as hush money by his secret killer, Andrew Johnson.
"tainted", indeed. Taxes are taxes, man, you can't choose where they end up when you pay in April. Seriously, what the heck do you mean by "tainted' funds?
Again, not arguing against racism- just against you guys' weird idea that the entire economy is somehow based on crushing black people into the dirt. I'd say that the way to help them is with good jobs, not fighting against some massive shadow government/economy/conspiracy that doesn't exist. Do bits of it exist? Sure! Private prisons and mandatory sentencing laws for nonviolent crimes are terrible. But does the whole of it exist? No.
edited to remove sarcasm
And according to USA Today (zoom into the interactive map), Baltimore arrests 229.3 blacks and 67.4 non-blacks per 1000 residents, or 3.4 blacks arrested per non-black, which is noticeably worse than Ferguson's 2.8 blacks/non-black arrest rate.
So, you know, a black government with a black police force, seems to be more racist against their own black constituents, or at least that's the case in Baltimore.