Racism: glorified hyperbole in America

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One of the most eye-opening experiences I had concerning Islam was in Istanbul, where many women were wearing traditional Muslim headwear, but in ways that accented their outfits - as a fashion statement. A hijab or burka is not necessarily a sign of traditionalism.
 
I just finished reading Persepolis and there was a great chapter about the ways people would show their defiance to wearing them, simply by letting their bangs show.

Though of course that was a country where wearing them is the law, still.

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I just finished reading Persepolis and there was a great chapter about the ways people would show their defiance to wearing them, simply by letting their bangs show.

Though of course that was a country where wearing them is the law, still.

This reminds me of a world monotheism class I took as an elective in University, large class of like 400+ where a student insisted that "every hair shown [on a woman] is a stab through the heart of Allah."
 
In the particular case of Islam, it is very much so a man-on-woman act. Nobody look at my wife because she's for my private eyes only. It's somewhat possessive.

i would suggest coming to toronto and seeing how many women freely choose to wear the hijab (or not) before you make a blanket statement like that, my friend.

and also, it is stated explicitly several times in the torah and the bible that women must cover their heads due to their inferiority to men, so i really don't know why you think there's any difference with the examples i gave.
 
i would suggest coming to toronto and seeing how many women freely choose to wear the hijab (or not) before you make a blanket statement like that, my friend.

and also, it is stated explicitly several times in the torah and the bible that women must cover their heads due to their inferiority to men, so i really don't know why you think there's any difference with the examples i gave.


Blanket statement? It's not a blanket statement. I never suggested it was the viewpoint of every Muslim, nor did I suggest it was exclusive to the scriptures of Islam.

And excuse me for not being as cultured as Toronto. I suppose growing up as a first generation Egyptian American within that society, living in a diverse and touristic population of Orlando later on, and now living in a city in England where being white doesn't constitute you as part of a majority, I suppose I must just be some ass backwards Casey Anthony you see on TV. But yeah, Toronto.

And where was I singling out Christianity or Judaism as not potentially objectifying women? It's a product of patriarchal religions. Inclusive of Christianity and Judaism. You're being defensive of Islam, simply because you feel like I'm attacking it. I don't make an exception for one religion or another, it just so happened to be the discussion at hand. And like I said, the most important part of freedom of religion is your ability to choose what religion you have or do not have. I'm not going to "shame" someone because of a choice they make, even if that choice has no agreement or appeal to me.
 
i think we'd better walk away from this field of strawmen i can see we've both created and just set it on fire.

apologies if you took my words personally.
 
Speaking of Amish, don't they like, allow their people a year in the city life and give them the choice to stay or go?

Rumspringa!

i saw a fascinating documentary a few years back that followed a handful of Amish teens on their year of Rumspringa. Man, those kids partied HARD. If i recall correctly, most if not all of them then returned to the community.
 
And excuse me for not being as cultured as Toronto. I suppose growing up as a first generation Egyptian American within that society, living in a diverse and touristic population of Orlando later on, and now living in a city in England where being white doesn't constitute you as part of a majority, I suppose I must just be some ass backwards Casey Anthony you see on TV. But yeah, Toronto.
Casey Anthony really did some serious damage to the Orlando area.

Good for you for moving to England. Florida is a complete shithole that doesn't have any culture whatsoever.
 
Chicago's 500 Homicides: How We Got Here

"Some Chicagoans partly blame the violence on economic struggles and lack of jobs. However, Chicago's unemployment rate fell from 6.1% in 2015 to 5.5% in 2016."

Again, the violence has more to do with a cultural thing than it does with a lack of opportunity. Being poor doesn't just make someone pick up a gun and shoot somebody else. Media aimed at the black community glorifies violence and so does street culture. Couple that with a country as gun loving as ours and you get such a predictable result.
 
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Much like USC's program this one isn't only for Black students.

Halisi Scholars Black Living-Learning Community

The Halisi Scholars Black Living-Learning Community is designed to enhance the residential experience for students who are a part of or interested in issues of concern to the black community living on campus by offering the opportunity to connect with faculty and peers, and engage in programs that focus on academic success, cultural awareness, and civic engagement. (We currently have a long wait list and are no longer accepting applications for Housing for the fall 2016 semester.)

Programs like this exist at countless universities. I personally wouldn't choose to live in one, but I'm glad they exist.
 
Chicago's 500 Homicides: How We Got Here

"Some Chicagoans partly blame the violence on economic struggles and lack of jobs. However, Chicago's unemployment rate fell from 6.1% in 2015 to 5.5% in 2016."

Again, the violence has more to do with a cultural thing than it does with a lack of opportunity. Being poor doesn't just make someone pick up a gun and shoot somebody else. Media aimed at the black community glorifies violence and so does street culture. Couple that with a country as gun loving as our and you get such a predictable result.


This is an oversimplification on all fronts.


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Much like USC's program this one isn't only for Black students.



Programs like this exist at countless universities. I personally wouldn't choose to live in one, but I'm glad they exist.


Yeah, given the quick research I had done I figured this wasn't the whole story.


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We had a floor in our dorms that was designated as the Quiet Floor where noise infractions would face harsher penalties and for whatever reason they decided to also put a great deal of the Black students on that same floor (must have been almost nobody that requested to be on it). The results obviously weren't pretty as it was the loudest floor of the bunch and led to the students on it being over-penalized by their RA for something they never even signed up to be on. We can avoid getting into the cultural stereotypes and how some of them may ring particularly true here, making it kind of idiotic for the administrators to do all this in the first place, even if they had good intentions for the black students in the dorms...but anyway, that's just another similar example and I don't really see anything wrong with it. People are going to segment themselves in college anyway based on their likes and/or ethnicity, etc. It makes for a more comfortable learning environment for people to have a community that they can relate to.
 
We had a floor in our dorms that was designated as the Quiet Floor where noise infractions would face harsher penalties and for whatever reason they decided to also put a great deal of the Black students on that same floor (must have been almost nobody that requested to be on it). The results obviously weren't pretty as it was the loudest floor of the bunch and led to the students on it being over-penalized by their RA for something they never even signed up to be on. We can avoid getting into the cultural stereotypes and how some of them may ring particularly true here, making it kind of idiotic for the administrators to do all this in the first place, even if they had good intentions for the black students in the dorms...but anyway, that's just another similar example and I don't really see anything wrong with it. People are going to segment themselves in college anyway based on their likes and/or ethnicity, etc. It makes for a more comfortable learning environment for people to have a community that they can relate to.


Wait, why exactly were the results obviously "not pretty"?


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It's really unfortunate when people view millions of people who happen to belong to a minority group as some sort of monolith.
 
Are you saying that the stereotype of blacks being loud isn't something we come across in our daily lives from time to time? Or that we can't joke about such things like 30 Rock did about blacks yelling in movie theaters (when Alec Baldwin's character goes on a date with Condi Rice)?

Yes, the black students were louder than any other floor I'd hung out on and I didn't find that remotely surprising. It says nothing about race which itself is a fake construct. It says a lot about culture and environment which is something different entirely. Would you not expect students from a generally worse off background in terms of finances and education to not be generally louder and more focused on having a social atmosphere than some reserved rich white kid that sits around playing computer games? Because I sure would.

You're basically just taking something that I thought was kind of funny (and that the other black students thought was hilarious as well and were the ones that brought this to my attention) and turning into just another attempt to try and portray someone as a racist when the entire point of the post was to give an example of this sort of stuff in Universities and how it's a positive.
 
It's really unfortunate when people view millions of people who happen to belong to a minority group as some sort of monolith.

I don't. But let's try and rationalize something here...

Asians perform better in school than other American groups. To say that All Asians perform better in school would be a fallacy. To say that Asians generally perform better than the rest is an actual fact. Is that suddenly racist?

Blacks commit more murders than any other group. To paint blacks as a violent group would be generally racist and is far from the truth as we're basically talking about a small subset of disadvantaged urban males that commit these crimes. But, at the end of the day, it's a fact that members of the black community commit far more murders per capita than any other "racial" group in America.

Now let's swing back to the school performance. Would you regard Asians performing better as genetic? It's not impossible although you'd be considered a racist for doing so and we have no knowledge to support such a conclusion. But don't people with high IQs produce children with higher IQs than those with low IQs? Would it not be almost a guarantee that a couple with an average IQ of about 80 is not likely to produce an individual with a far above average mental capacity, regardless of environment?

Now let's continue to shrink things down from an entire race and then families to the cultural part of the equation. If you think that members of the Asian American community are more likely to encourage scholastic aptitude and thus that's why they achieve better results than anyone, then couldn't you argue that, say, black America does the opposite or a poor job if their results are so much worse even when all the other factors are accounted for?

Again, not saying any of this shit is a correct answer or remotely what I believe, just that if you're going to study something and/or try to solve a problem, why not take a closer look into things in the first place? Just shutting down intellectual discourse as racism before you get to the root of the problem or find a solution seems utterly pointless. If you don't try to see that there could be inherent cultural reasons as to why certain outcome occur, then you're never going to solve anything.

And I know I'll get blasted for all of this and some will take offense at even bringing up the idea of genetic aptitude when it comes to IQ, but tell me this, how many members of Asian countries were running in track and field at the last Olympics compared to black runners? If blacks are the best at basketball or track, does that make you racist for saying so? Or thereby implying that other groups are genetically terrible at such sports, etc? Likewise, if you can see the idiocy in trying to say that there's no genetic differences between human beings in terms of athletic success, then you can't just shut down a discussion on cultural reasons when it comes to other outcomes.

I've been assaulted twice in the Bay Area. By black men. I've witnessed assaults and even rounded up some of the culprits with the help of SFPD. All of the assailants were black despite black males making up roughly 3% of the San Francisco population. The vast majority of people I've seen enter or exit BART without tickets are black. The vast majority of people yelling regularly at the screen at the movie theater (something that admittedly happens rarely) have been black in my experience. Roughly 80% of the people walking around the building where I work in the dead of night are black and virtually all of the regulars hanging around the corner, homeless or not, are black. Every single time I've seen anyone illegally dump a couch or other furniture items off on a street corner around where I live, it's happened to have been someone that is black.

Does this say anything about Black America? Not in the slightest. It's a small subset of bad apples and of an entirely different socioeconomic status than Black America on the whole nor do I consider the actions of these people to be representative of their ethnic group (or whatever you want to call it) in the slightest. But the facts at the end of the day are that both through my own experiences and from actual crime records that blacks commit more crimes than the rest of the country. And you don't get to discredit my experiences or write off facts just because they don't gel with your own narrative.

To me, there is a cultural problem in the black community leading to this sort of stuff which in turn leads to a heavier (and scared) police presence and all of the other ensuing issues that this thread is all about. If it were really just about poverty and discrimination (which I still believe is most of the reason), then why aren't illegal immigrants from Mexico running around shooting 500 other people in Modesto or whatever? No white person of power is holding a cattle prod to make a black guy walk around San Francisco at 3 AM looking for trouble or get a neck tattoo that makes them become unemployable, etc. There is always a certain amount of personal responsibility involved.

That's about as much as I want to rant on this topic. Some of it will provoke the over-reactive, some of it might lead to an interesting discussion. Who knows.
 
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