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namman siggins

We need to talk about race

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Well, I'm sure there are a bunch in my country, but through whatever happenstance I've managed to end up in a life that is almost entirely isolated from PoC. I think that might be a sign in and of itself that there's something fishy going on.

It looks like that particular instance is changing for me anyway now that we've moved and my daughter's going to school - she's got quite a few coloured classmates and seems to be making friends with at least one. I'm looking forward to some more variety in life in that sense.

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But aren't there race-problems in other countries too?

No, we are perfect and just and nothing bad ever happens here.

 

Edit: But yeah, of course there are problems here as well. An anti-immigrant party is becoming bigger and bigger every time there is a new poll (I think the last one showed them at 18% making them the third-largest party). This week there was the third attempted arson at a building site of a new location for asylum seekers.

 

Also it has started to feel as if every time there is a murder, people are very quick to assume the perpetrator is foreign.

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Race problems are RAMPANT across Europe now. There are whole parties like UKIP dedicated to racist agendas. It becomes a lot easier to spot if you read every instance of 'immigrant' as foreigner. There some harsh anti foreigner policies planned.

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One thing here in West Virginia (wrt to the confederate flag) that I could never figure out is why people fucking display it and fetishize it and the Confederacy here when WV was literally created because our state broke away from the Confederacy and Virginia to rejoin the Union.  There were people on both sides in the state and certain counties leaned one way or the other (both General Lightburn and Stonewall Jackson lived in my county...and oddly everything is named after Jackson even though the county actually leaned heavily towards the Union side...I've always found the glorification of Stonewall Jackson around here odd/weird and I'm fucking related to the guy).  There's this weird sort of romantic image/revisionism about the Confederacy in the south that even WV has a good bit of and I've always found that strange outside of the southern parts of the state.

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I'm white for all intents and purposes (mainly ukranian / russian, albeit there is some polisch, middle eastern and Swedish roots  in my family far down the tree but I'm whitey McWhite white)

 

My parents immigrated from Ukraine to Germany in 94 on the grounds that my maternal grandfather was Jewish.

 

I have a couple of things to say about living in germany as an immigrant but I don't thing this thread is the appropriate place to do that.

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I'm caucasian and I've heard that I'm welsh and scottish or something. I haven't investigated my ethicity beyond that.

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This forever and always amen.  The collapse of Detroit was pretty much completely due to racism against Black people who moved north during the great migration. If anyone wants to talk about Detroit specifically, I am super interested and passionate after reading this book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Origins-Urban-Crisis-Inequality/dp/0691162557 for an urban geography class I took

I've been meaning to read this...

 

Here are some great books on race, if anyone is interested:

Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

The Color Complex

The New Jim Crow

The Condemnation of Blackness

The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World

Ghettoside

They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America

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This forever and always amen. The collapse of Detroit was pretty much completely due to racism against Black people who moved north during the great migration. If anyone wants to talk about Detroit specifically, I am super interested and passionate after reading this book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Origins-Urban-Crisis-Inequality/dp/0691162557 for an urban geography class I took

That book is incredible. If you ever want to talk about it, I live Detroit adjacent and could recommend some further reading about the city (though most of what I've personally read is specifically about LGBTQ+ populations because I'm a selfish white gay dude).

Edit: And another great book is White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism

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The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning

We live in a country where Americans assimilate corpses in their daily comings and goings. Dead blacks are a part of normal life here. Dying in ship hulls, tossed into the Atlantic, hanging from trees, beaten, shot in churches, gunned down by the police or warehoused in prisons: Historically, there is no quotidian without the enslaved, chained or dead black body to gaze upon or to hear about or to position a self against. When blacks become overwhelmed by our culture’s disorder and protest (ultimately to our own detriment, because protest gives the police justification to militarize, as they did in Ferguson), the wrongheaded question that is asked is, What kind of savages are we? Rather than, What kind of country do we live in?

 

Time for a New Black Radicalism

We don’t typically assign the term “radical” to people like the computer programmer or the legislator described above, for a number of reasons. First, radicalism, especially in the political sphere, is thought to necessarily entail violence. Second, radicalism is often used as a substitute for “fundamentalism.” Lastly, radicalism is thought to represent (some form of) insurgency as a way of life or lifestyle. This last reason when combined with the first is what makes the idea of radicalism, especially black radicalism, alarming to many Americans. Yet it turns out that all of these reasons for treating radicalism as a dangerous doctrine are wrong.

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It looks like there's actual action being taken to get the confederate flag taken out of government buildings and such.

 

I noticed someone today with a confederate license plate on their car, and it's not the first time I've seen it here. What a weird fucking thing for a symbol of such a specifically, objectively terrible thing has simultaneously managed to distance itself from its context enough to pop up in a completely uninvolved country.

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It looks like there's actual action being taken to get the confederate flag taken out of government buildings and such.

 

I noticed someone today with a confederate license plate on their car, and it's not the first time I've seen it here. What a weird fucking thing for a symbol of such a specifically, objectively terrible thing has simultaneously managed to distance itself from its context enough to pop up in a completely uninvolved country.

 

Its even more mind boggling that the actual confederate government had not formerly adopted the confederate battle flag.  Yet years later when the southern Dixiecrats (1948) and the growing KKK needed a symbol to rally around. Voilà you have "heritage."  

A completely unrelated, but fond memory I have, is of my high school history teacher who brought in a confederate battle flag and stomped on it in front of our class.  Proclaiming that this was the flag of a hateful cause and shouldn't hang in anyone's yard.  I can still remember him yelling "THEY LOST!"  He really challenged students in his class to not accept this flag as a piece of heritage, but as a symbol of white supremacy. 

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The Apple store has removed all the apps featuring imagery of the rebel-flag (from what I've heard on twitter). Some claim that only a government can censor. I don't think the word "curation" really captures what is going on here. Anyone know what to call a central power's removal of content from a massively popular distribution channel they own because they don't want to support certain views or offend customers, partners, and workers?

Maybe "enforcement of terms of use"?

Edit: nevermind, apparently there is already a discussion in the Business Side of Video Games thread.

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The local PBS station in Dallas, KERA, published a short interview with a civil rights authority where they pretty much go sentence by sentence through the Sandra Bland arrest, as recorded by dashcam. It's a bit of a depressing read. Bland knew her rights very well and was fearless in defending them to the officer. His response was invariably to escalate the situation in order to assert his authority in a situation where, legally, he had none, and the upshot was Bland's arrest and later death.

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I work in rural Appalachian area. The other day this guy I have seen regularly for years but never had a need to speak with came in and asked a question. He has some asian features like a darker skin-tone. Hearing a Hawaiian accent was really nice having lived there for 2.5 years 8 years ago and not hearing one since (besides what my wife and myself had picked up). I asked if he used to live in Hawaii. He seemed defensive, explaining that he has lived here for 30 years and he had only been stationed on Oahu for a little while. I thought the defensiveness was a bit odd, but just told him that I was excited to hear a little bit of a Hawaiian accent because I miss it sometimes. We made some small-chat about living on the islands and then he left.

Today I came into work and a older caucasian man who has lived here all his life said that someone said to give me a hat. The hat says "Hawaii" on it. The co-worker described the gift-giver as "some foreigner or something, I don't know." I was like "Ah, this must be why the fellow was defensive when I asked if he had lived elsewhere."

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