Does systemic racism against blacks even exist anymore?

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King0fSpades
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31 Aug 2021, 8:17 pm

Dox47 wrote:
auntblabby wrote:
you can't reasonably expect a long-marginalized minority to embrace the system that marginalized them. marxism is, among its faults, at least NOT capitalism.


If you think racism is any less pervasive or virulent under Marxism than under capitalism, I've got some bad news for you...



He's got a point auntblabby. I hate to say it, but many of the countries that base their governments off of Marxist teachings are susceptible to various forms of oppression towards minorities. Look at what happened to the homosexuals living under Fidel Castro's rule in Cuba as a prime example (and that's not even race related).


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31 Aug 2021, 8:24 pm

King0fSpades wrote:
He's got a point auntblabby. I hate to say it, but many of the countries that base their governments off of Marxist teachings are susceptible to various forms of oppression towards minorities. Look at what happened to the homosexuals living under Fidel Castro's rule in Cuba as a prime example (and that's not even race related).


Just sticking with Cuba, during the 60s and 70s a number of black radical types fled there after committing crimes in the US, and later interviews with them made clear that they did not find the racial utopia they hoped for there. I'm not sure if it's still true, but many of their beaches, hotels, and restaurants were long segregated and forbidden to black Cubans during the Castro regime. The Soviets were super racist as well, and let's not even talk about the Chinese.


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31 Aug 2021, 8:29 pm

Dox47 wrote:
and let's not even talk about the Chinese.



*talks about the Chinese* :D


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31 Aug 2021, 8:31 pm

King0fSpades wrote:
Dox47 wrote:
auntblabby wrote:
you can't reasonably expect a long-marginalized minority to embrace the system that marginalized them. marxism is, among its faults, at least NOT capitalism.


If you think racism is any less pervasive or virulent under Marxism than under capitalism, I've got some bad news for you...



He's got a point auntblabby. I hate to say it, but many of the countries that base their governments off of Marxist teachings are susceptible to various forms of oppression towards minorities. Look at what happened to the homosexuals living under Fidel Castro's rule in Cuba as a prime example (and that's not even race related).

my point was not that marxist nations are not racist but that they are not CAPITALIST with all the known flaws of capitalism, and the appeal of marxism to marginalized blacks has to be understood in this context.



King0fSpades
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31 Aug 2021, 8:34 pm

auntblabby wrote:
King0fSpades wrote:
Dox47 wrote:
auntblabby wrote:
you can't reasonably expect a long-marginalized minority to embrace the system that marginalized them. marxism is, among its faults, at least NOT capitalism.


If you think racism is any less pervasive or virulent under Marxism than under capitalism, I've got some bad news for you...



He's got a point auntblabby. I hate to say it, but many of the countries that base their governments off of Marxist teachings are susceptible to various forms of oppression towards minorities. Look at what happened to the homosexuals living under Fidel Castro's rule in Cuba as a prime example (and that's not even race related).

my point was not that marxist nations are not racist but that they are not CAPITALIST with all the known flaws of capitalism, and the appeal of marxism to marginalized blacks has to be understood in this context.


This is the way I view it. Jumping from Capitalism to Marxism/Communism is like jumping from a burning ship and swimming towards a life raft that is surrounded by hungry sharks.


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31 Aug 2021, 8:38 pm

King0fSpades wrote:
auntblabby wrote:
King0fSpades wrote:
Dox47 wrote:
auntblabby wrote:
you can't reasonably expect a long-marginalized minority to embrace the system that marginalized them. marxism is, among its faults, at least NOT capitalism.


If you think racism is any less pervasive or virulent under Marxism than under capitalism, I've got some bad news for you...



He's got a point auntblabby. I hate to say it, but many of the countries that base their governments off of Marxist teachings are susceptible to various forms of oppression towards minorities. Look at what happened to the homosexuals living under Fidel Castro's rule in Cuba as a prime example (and that's not even race related).

my point was not that marxist nations are not racist but that they are not CAPITALIST with all the known flaws of capitalism, and the appeal of marxism to marginalized blacks has to be understood in this context.


This is the way I view it. Jumping from Capitalism to Marxism/Communism is like jumping from a burning ship and swimming towards a life raft that is surrounded by hungry sharks.

but it is not anywhere near as much of a cultural shock to those with nothing and no hopes whatsoever of having anything at all.



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31 Aug 2021, 8:50 pm

King0fSpades wrote:

This is the way I view it. Jumping from Capitalism to Marxism/Communism is like jumping from a burning ship and swimming towards a life raft that is surrounded by hungry sharks.


Except that it's a Marxist life raft, so it's full of holes and already on fire itself. I don't think capitalism vs Marxism is still really an open question at this point, the former, for all of it's flaws, is much preferable, even (maybe especially) for minorities, who at least have a chance to advance under capitalism vs being strangled by the state under Marxism. It's like my feelings towards the US, a highly imperfect country that at least trying to live up to its ideals, vs the various authoritarian states which are simply enriching their own ruling class at the expense of their people for as long as they can get away with.


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31 Aug 2021, 9:40 pm

I dunno, maybe every system in the world hurts minorities? That's what makes them 'minorities' in the first place.

And a capitalistic society doesn't exactly give minorities a fair shake in life if it happens to be an apartheid state.


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31 Aug 2021, 9:47 pm

with any kind of power [money is power concrete] there is always an in-group and an out-group. the third-way nations at least try to file off the cruel sharp edges of their money systems. but if they had as many POC as we have, i don't know how well they'd perform.



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31 Aug 2021, 10:31 pm

Dox47 wrote:
King0fSpades wrote:
He's got a point auntblabby. I hate to say it, but many of the countries that base their governments off of Marxist teachings are susceptible to various forms of oppression towards minorities. Look at what happened to the homosexuals living under Fidel Castro's rule in Cuba as a prime example (and that's not even race related).


Just sticking with Cuba, during the 60s and 70s a number of black radical types fled there after committing crimes in the US, and later interviews with them made clear that they did not find the racial utopia they hoped for there. I'm not sure if it's still true, but many of their beaches, hotels, and restaurants were long segregated and forbidden to black Cubans during the Castro regime. The Soviets were super racist as well, and let's not even talk about the Chinese.


My understanding of Cuban history is they never enacted laws based on race like the US even during the pre-revolution era. Do you have evidence they practiced "legal" segregation? if they did prior to 1956 I suspect it applied to places where Americans entered like restaurants, casinos and hotels to cater for wealthy racist white Americans.

Your throw away comment about the Soviet Union is false. Many thousands of American blacks and students from Africa were given refuge in the Soviet Union and we able to get good jobs and marry Russians. Things that were forbidden in the USA who (we all know) practiced Jim Crow up to the 1970s.



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01 Sep 2021, 12:47 am

cyberdad wrote:
My understanding of Cuban history is they never enacted laws based on race like the US even during the pre-revolution era. Do you have evidence they practiced "legal" segregation? if they did prior to 1956 I suspect it applied to places where Americans entered like restaurants, casinos and hotels to cater for wealthy racist white Americans.


They definitely practiced legal segregation pre-revolution, and though Castro put an end to that, they never solved the problem of their upper class being almost exclusively European descended Cubans, while the Afro-Cubans made up the rural and working poor, and were de facto barred from most of the better jobs and facilities, particularly in the tourism sector. It wasn't until quite recently that Cuba had any Afro-Cubans in a leadership position in the government either, they might not have had de jure legal racism, but it was prevalent in Cuban society.

(I'm trying to stick to left leaning sources here, because I don't want a pointless argument about where this info is coming from)
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/opin ... begun.html

Quote:
Havana

CHANGE is the latest news to come out of Cuba, though for Afro-Cubans like myself, this is more dream than reality. Over the last decade, scores of ridiculous prohibitions for Cubans living on the island have been eliminated, among them sleeping at a hotel, buying a cellphone, selling a house or car and traveling abroad. These gestures have been celebrated as signs of openness and reform, though they are really nothing more than efforts to make life more normal. And the reality is that in Cuba, your experience of these changes depends on your skin color.

The private sector in Cuba now enjoys a certain degree of economic liberation, but blacks are not well positioned to take advantage of it. We inherited more than three centuries of slavery during the Spanish colonial era. Racial exclusion continued after Cuba became independent in 1902, and a half century of revolution since 1959 has been unable to overcome it.

In the early 1990s, after the cold war ended, Fidel Castro embarked on economic reforms that his brother and successor, Raúl, continues to pursue. Cuba had lost its greatest benefactor, the Soviet Union, and plunged into a deep recession that came to be known as the “Special Period.” There were frequent blackouts. Public transportation hardly functioned. Food was scarce. To stem unrest, the government ordered the economy split into two sectors: one for private businesses and foreign-oriented enterprises, which were essentially permitted to trade in United States dollars, and the other, the continuation of the old socialist order, built on government jobs that pay an average of $20 a month.

It’s true that Cubans still have a strong safety net: most do not pay rent, and education and health care are free. But the economic divergence created two contrasting realities that persist today. The first is that of white Cubans, who have leveraged their resources to enter the new market-driven economy and reap the benefits of a supposedly more open socialism. The other reality is that of the black plurality, which witnessed the demise of the socialist utopia from the island’s least comfortable quarters.

Most remittances from abroad — mainly the Miami area, the nerve center of the mostly white exile community — go to white Cubans. They tend to live in more upscale houses, which can easily be converted into restaurants or bed-and-breakfasts — the most common kind of private business in Cuba. Black Cubans have less property and money, and also have to contend with pervasive racism. Not long ago it was common for hotel managers, for example, to hire only white staff members, so as not to offend the supposed sensibilities of their European clientele.

That type of blatant racism has become less socially acceptable, but blacks are still woefully underrepresented in tourism — probably the economy’s most lucrative sector — and are far less likely than whites to own their own businesses. Raúl Castro has recognized the persistence of racism and has been successful in some areas (there are more black teachers and representatives in the National Assembly), but much remains to be done to address the structural inequality and racial prejudice that continue to exclude Afro-Cubans from the benefits of liberalization.

Racism in Cuba has been concealed and reinforced in part because it isn’t talked about. The government hasn’t allowed racial prejudice to be debated or confronted politically or culturally, often pretending instead as though it didn’t exist. Before 1990, black Cubans suffered a paralysis of economic mobility while, paradoxically, the government decreed the end of racism in speeches and publications. To question the extent of racial progress was tantamount to a counterrevolutionary act. This made it almost impossible to point out the obvious: racism is alive and well.

If the 1960s, the first decade after the revolution, signified opportunity for all, the decades that followed demonstrated that not everyone was able to have access to and benefit from those opportunities. It’s true that the 1980s produced a generation of black professionals, like doctors and teachers, but these gains were diminished in the 1990s as blacks were excluded from lucrative sectors like hospitality. Now in the 21st century, it has become all too apparent that the black population is underrepresented at universities and in spheres of economic and political power, and overrepresented in the underground economy, in the criminal sphere and in marginal neighborhoods.
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Raúl Castro has announced that he will step down from the presidency in 2018. It is my hope that by then, the antiracist movement in Cuba will have grown, both legally and logistically, so that it might bring about solutions that have for so long been promised, and awaited, by black Cubans.

An important first step would be to finally get an accurate official count of Afro-Cubans. The black population in Cuba is far larger than the spurious numbers of the most recent censuses. The number of blacks on the street undermines, in the most obvious way, the numerical fraud that puts us at less than one-fifth of the population. Many people forget that in Cuba, a drop of white blood can — if only on paper — make a mestizo, or white person, out of someone who in social reality falls into neither of those categories. Here, the nuances governing skin color are a tragicomedy that hides longstanding racial conflicts.

The end of the Castros’ rule will mean an end to an era in Cuban politics. It is unrealistic to hope for a black president, given the insufficient racial consciousness on the island. But by the time Raúl Castro leaves office, Cuba will be a very different place. We can only hope that women, blacks and young people will be able to help guide the nation toward greater equality of opportunity and the achievement of full citizenship for Cubans of all colors.

A little old, but it covers the period under discussion. I'll try to find the accounts of the Black Panthers who fled to there in the 70s if you like, they were not happy with what they found when they got there.

cyberdad wrote:
Your throw away comment about the Soviet Union is false. Many thousands of American blacks and students from Africa were given refuge in the Soviet Union and we able to get good jobs and marry Russians. Things that were forbidden in the USA who (we all know) practiced Jim Crow up to the 1970s.


You do know that racism isn't confined to black people, right? The Soviets horrifically persecuted the Jews, for example, particularly in the Stalin era, but even into the 80s the refuseniks were a real issue, Jews who wished to emigrate to Israel but were not allowed to leave, and who faced severe repression by the Soviet state. Then there were all the various ethnic groups looked down upon by the Russians who faced various forms of oppression, from exile to extermination depending upon the era, with what they did to the Cossacks often considered a genocide. They put on a real show of being nice to black people during the cold war for propaganda purposes, and as part of their power plays in Africa when they were trying to prop up various regimes there, but look at the experience of black people in Russia today, and you'll quickly see it was all a Potemkin show.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in ... viet_Union
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Russia


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01 Sep 2021, 1:57 am

Dox47 wrote:
[
They put on a real show of being nice to black people during the cold war for propaganda purposes, and as part of their power plays in Africa when they were trying to prop up various regimes there, but look at the experience of black people in Russia today, and you'll quickly see it was all a Potemkin show.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in ... viet_Union
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in_Russia


Yep agree that was the motivation (for propaganda), and also agree former Soviet republics are no longer a "paradise" for PoC.

Although historically it was quite something that in 1936 Olympic athlete Jesse Owens thought Adolph Hitler treated him better than FDR. The US didn't have a glowing reputation for their treatment of black Americans (especially returned servicemen who risked their lives after WWI and WWII.), I was pointing out that they felt relief in the Soviet Union (whatever the Ruskis ultimate agenda).



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01 Sep 2021, 2:11 am

having read hedrick smith's book "the russians" way back when, i remember he interviewed a man on the street who said words to the effect that he had nothing against POC as long as one never married his sister.



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01 Sep 2021, 7:08 am

auntblabby wrote:
having read hedrick smith's book "the russians" way back when, i remember he interviewed a man on the street who said words to the effect that he had nothing against POC as long as one never married his sister.


I've watched a few podcast interviews of Russians in the streets, They say some awfully un-PC type things.



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01 Sep 2021, 7:23 am

auntblabby wrote:
having read hedrick smith's book "the russians" way back when, i remember he interviewed a man on the street who said words to the effect that he had nothing against POC as long as one never married his sister.


Sounds like the white people in my state. :lol:


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01 Sep 2021, 7:51 am

I'm married to an Afro-Caribbean person.