Does systemic racism against blacks even exist anymore?

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MLK was not infallible.

True, but as a black person, he had first-hand knowledge of the "Black Experience".

When I listen to white people discussing CRT in negative terms, and saying that MLK's "I Have A Dream" speech is all they need to know, I have to wonder why they do not realize that "I Have A Dream" is not everything that MLK was about, and that MLK's speeches only skim the surface of the "Black Experience".

White is not the default color of humanity.

the worst kind of racism is that which denies its own existence.

"The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." -- attributed to Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

Would you say that the black experience was different in King's time? This is one of the more frustrating aspects I find with modern racial activism, this insistence that things have not gotten any better for black people or other minorities since the 1950s, which is just objectively false and risible.

IIRC, when you run polls it's not black people who think racial relations are so bad, it's progressive white activists, which makes a sort of sense when you realize that they've replaced religion with activism as the source of their feeling of belonging and doing good in the world, they're very motivated to believe things are awful and that they're helping to fix them, regardless of the reality on the ground.



Would it help if I pointed you in the direction of some black intellectuals who also believe CRT and it's children are toxic and counterproductive to racial justice in America? Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Kmele Foster and Thomas Chatterton Williams are all excellent resources on the topic, and contrary to the objection I can feel coming, not black conservatives in the Clarence Thomas / Thomas Sowell mold either.

https://glennloury.substack.com/
https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/
https://www.thomaschattertonwilliams.com/
https://shows.acast.com/wethefifth/episodes

Personally, I also reject the idea that you have to be a certain race to understand certain subject or comment on them; I mean yes, I obviously can't accurately describe day to day life as a black man, but I can certainly comment on why Critical Race Theory is toxic and dangerous, that does not require personal experience to evaluate the value of as a concept.

I'm going to use an example that I heard recently: Addressing systemic racism is like treating a man you've been beating with a hammer; stopping the beating is great, but you also need to heal the damage that was done by the beating (e.g. reparations for the damage done by redlining), where as anti-racism, which is the currently voguish Kendi influenced CRT offshoot, would instead hit someone else with the hammer (e.g. Asians applying to elite colleges) and pretend that that's healing the damage done by the previous hammering. It just doesn't make sense, and you don't have to have the black experience to know that.

As to MLK, yes, many people stop at "I have a dream" and go no further, particularly as to his economic views on class, but I don't see that as a reason to then jump to "white people can't talk about CRT". I also think that King's now out of vogue "colorblind" stance, "judged on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin" is very much worth preserving and elevating over the currently fashionable Kendi/DiAngelo proactive racism model.




Never said that it was. If anything, that's another failure of CRT, treating "white" as this monolithic group with special properties, which is just as racist as anything it's attempting to correct for.

BLM Roundtable

This roundtable discussion by black intellectuals is also important.

Pretending that systemic racism no longer exists will not make it go away, in spite of what Trump says.

Who cares what Trump says? Pretending that nothing has changed since 1964 is just as false and just as damaging, and the current strain of anti-racist activism just makes things worse.

the dirty little open secret is that too many DON'T want it to go away. people are genuinely threatened by other people who don't look like themselves. and those kinds of xenophobes are reproducing faster than the rest of us, the world-over. this world is soon not gonna be a tenable place for people like me.

This is perhaps the most important gap in the statistics about perception/experiences between black Americans and white Americans I posted from the Univ of Michigan.

I think white Americans (and yes this could apply to Europeans in any western country) have taken a view that they live in a "post-racial" society. That gaps in treatment, living standards, employment are not their fault, its due to past injustice and those "bad people" are dead.

It's a like a marathon race where white americans were given a massive lead while the black runners were held back. The black runners are now allowed to participate in the race but they are i) massively behind the other runners and ii) still have hurdles/obstacles they have to cross that other runners don't face.

The economic gap is in reality unlikely to be closed for many generations because white immigrants were given or able to buy the best land in America. Land ownership and securing capital to send children to college gives whites a massive advantage in securing the best jobs, best housing. Of course migrants have made inroads into the American dream working 2-3 jobs and sacrificing a normal life (that white Americans take for granted) so their kids can get an education.

what i wonder, is why the PTB thought the japanese were worthy of compensation for their incarceration during WW2, but not POC for their ordeal in slavery for over a century??

cyberdad and Fnord,
I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the video I posted, or the booklist Dox provided.

blabby -- that's something they discuss and debate in the video. You might want to check it out.

Good question? I am not sure how that works. I do recall my parent's American friends who grew up in California in the early 1950s had Japanese classmates in their school. It might be the Japanese (and hispanic people?) were treated as white people in that state.

There's an interesting biography about singer Carly Simon. Simon's mother was actually Afro-Latina and technically black. But she was able to classify herself as hispanic (when arriving in America) and although might have drawn curious glances managed to avoid the PoC tag and assimilated. What she did would have been impossible for a black person who looked like her.

she passed for non-black. slightly different from passing for white. close enough for gov't work, as they say here. the late john roland redd [aka the famous organist korla pandit] passed for indian [india] even though he was light-skinned black. he even got to marry a statuesque blonde.

I recognise there are black intellectuals who support conservative politics. This is not new. Long before Clarence Thomas or Condaleeza Rice (the latter is very impressive) there was a black elite who tended to favor allying themselves with those in power and working with them.

I don't favor drawing attention to crazy ones though like Candace Owens who seems to be overrepresented as the archetypal black conservative.

I didn't suggest it was new, or that black intellectuals "ally themselves with those in power" (thereby suggesting they don't have their own power?)

I'm just curious where you would weigh in on their discussion.

Also why are they called a black elite? Do you call white, Asian, or Indigenous scholars elites?