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How Systemic Racism and Implicit Bias Affects African Americans

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by Reeko, Jun 4, 2020.

  1. Reeko

    Reeko Member

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  2. smoothie_king

    smoothie_king Member

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    Doesn't make sense!

    That's like saying "I'm smelling my own ashe because I don't wash my own ashe".

     
  3. DonnyMost

    DonnyMost not wrong
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    This video inadvertently does a great job of illustrating how green is the far more important color than black or white.

    The term "systemic racism" needs to be updated. There aren't really that many laws or rules in place in modern society that actively, or even passively, deny anyone advancement with respect to the amount of melanin in their skin (one exception I believe are drug laws which I think were shaped over time to target minorities and things like mandatory minimums). Are we seeing the legacy effects of systemic racism's prior existence everywhere? Yes, absolutely.

    Why are black people more likely to be poor? Because zero is a magnet and black families "race from zero" (which is a universal struggle) began much much more recently than any other group in the USA. Wealth begets more wealth, poverty begets more poverty. Being poor is expensive, being poor is criminal, being poor is unhealthy, being poor is deadly.

    All this being understood, time is both our friend and our enemy here. As the generations pass, folks who control more money and power who are unfortunately poorly programmed with heavy racism in their operating system will fade out to be replaced by those who carry less inherited bugs in their code, so to speak. Proportional representation is creeping ever closer in education, wealth, and power.

    This is the march of time on our side. However, median minority net worth is projected to hit zero around 2050. What does this mean? It means that despite my earlier point about representation increasing, stratification is also increasing. This raises the question; what good is equal representation when inequality is spiraling so insanely out of control? The answer is... not much.
     
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  4. fchowd0311

    fchowd0311 Contributing Member

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    Your last paragraph is so important. I was railing this point in the primaries when Warren and Bernie had a chance. This trend has been occuring under both parties' administrations. Some deep rooted systemic change in our political system is the only way to reverse that trend.

    I really hope Biden wins this election. But I really hope after Biden's administration, Democrat primary voters start thinking about the future rather than feeling nostalgia over status quo. People need to understand this trend is not sustainable.

    People who are furious about riots, do you think the probability of more riots increases or decreases as time moves forward if this current trend of wealth inequality that has been occuring for half a century continues?
     
    #4 fchowd0311, Jun 4, 2020
    Last edited: Jun 4, 2020
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  5. rocketsjudoka

    rocketsjudoka Contributing Member
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    You raise some good points and I agree with you that wealth begets more wealth, poverty begets poverty. This is one reason why I am very hard on the argument that we shouldn't criticize protest that turn into looting and destruction of property because this is the "language of the unheard" or an inevitable result of marginalization.

    As you note it is a huge struggle to escape poverty, that is very difficult for individuals and even harder for community. I've talked a lot about Lake Street and the neighborhoods around it but the poorest neighborhood is North Minneapolis and by no coincidence is also a historically black neighborhood. While most of the damage was along Lake Street several businesses along the Broadway, the main commercial corridor in North Minneapolis, were also looted and burned. Nearly all of them were black owned businesses. North Minneapolis has been trapped in the same cycles of poverty as other historically black neighborhoods around the country. There have also been many efforts over the years to redevelop the neighborhood. I personally have been involved with a few as an architect. Destruction of businesses in this manner has the immediate effect of wiping out capital that has been built up and invested in the neighborhood. It wipes out jobs that employ people in the neighborhood hurting the ability to build more capital. It wipes out a business that serves the neighborhood and one that was keeping capital in the neighborhood rather than going outside. In the longer term it discourages investment into the neighborhood as investors are hesitant to put capital into a neighborhood if they worry that people there will burn them down. What happens is that the very cycle of poverty and marginalization that people bring up are driving the anger just get's prolonged.

    A riot rather than becoming a wakeup call for more positive change ends up reinforcing the the conditions that they were there.
     
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  6. MystikArkitect

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    Your last paragraph is unsettling and the "riots" of today I think are symbolic of the economic collapse that will inevitably happen should wealth disparity not get resolved. Similar to 2008 where the wealthy took from the poor until they could take no more. Then they themselves went upside down due to the poor and middle class being simply unable to supply them with more fresh credit to destroy.

    Look around us. Have any of us ever seen this many homeless camps around the cities? I was shocked when I saw Riverside/Pleasant Valley in Austin a few weeks back. I lived there for a year in 2017 and it didn't look like that. There are homeless everywhere in Houston. Wealth disparity is a tsunami forming off the coast.
     
  7. mdrowe00

    mdrowe00 Member

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    ....sounds like a bunch of "climate change" liberal communist bullsh!t to me...;)

    ...not that it isn't true or anything...

    ...just saying...:D
     
  8. IBTL

    IBTL Member

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    The video gives an idea of reasons but looks to hinge a lot of it on redlining.

    There are tons of neighborhoods that were rich white then changed and became poor black.

    I agree with donnymost the issues relates back to economic first.

    I am around the hr space ..anecdotal ..but i know of companies that look at headcount and make hiring decision of hiring 'black female' even though its not eeoc friendly they will go as far as to say it then act on it.
    I am all for women / race in workplace but it should be merit based.

    Do i think that a woman is not capable of being president? Of course I think a woman would be great but I disagree that biden 'will pick a woman' he should friggin pick a woman OR man because they are best qualified best choice! As much as I will vote anything not trump this 'must be a woman but we dont know who' really irks me.

    My wifes job they would hire for manager positions then those managers would hire their staff. My wife sees all the resumes and they are doing ads on indeed and spending to look for candidates.

    The video talks about hiring names and at my wifes deal these supervisors she hired she made a point to hire best. That happened to be a black woman in a few of the locations.

    What became interesting was that the black hiring managers would accept reject folks and it seemingly WAS based on the name. Only hiring and interviewing black people rejecting any name that sounded white. My wife went through the system and all the susans Karen beckys were out many white good resumes. What could she do? As time goes the the staff is only black. To be fair the one gay manager seemed to sway to hiring gay people and the creeper white manager only wanted to hire hot 18 year old white chicks. So guess what ? The all get an f on the hiring card or tribal card.

    In the stuff I do.. same thing where they installed someone black at director and manager level and since then the whole dept is black and they coddle those they hired that werent qualified. It becomes a nursery and anyone with talent that is not a black female bolts.

    The racist part of it all is that black female manager / directors are making less than all of us and will never move past their role or up. Probably because they themselves are black or female.

    Its all these weird shackles and installs that you realize its race and gender optics , whos uncle you know...and lots and lots of things.. but I see it for what it is..a rocket hooking a rocket or a houstonian hooking up a houstonian. Loose tribal and that tribe can be location or race gender etc

    It sucks
    Aggies hire aggies but I can't stand 5 seconds with any of those guys so im good anyway - just part of the deal cest la vie
     
  9. Astrodome

    Astrodome Member
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    Where are the stats showing that blacks are unjustly killed by cops more? I find conflicting data when I look so maybe I just need to be pointed in the right direction.
     
  10. KingCheetah

    KingCheetah Contributing Member

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    Schools are the most glaring examples -- in Austin for example everyone moves away from those cool east side houses once they have kids and take a hard look at the schools they would be sending their children to.
     
  11. DonnyMost

    DonnyMost not wrong
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    That's pretty much every metro area in a nutshell. The under-40-no-kids-set buy row homes and condos in chic neighborhoods whose school systems are all dominated by minorities who live across the highway in low rent apartments. The moment a bun is in the oven they retreat to the suburbs or exurbs.
     
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  12. mdrowe00

    mdrowe00 Member

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    ...My mother, brother and I moved to Houston from Marshall, Texas when I was about 5 years old.

    ...I still remember the bus ride...I sat up front with the bus driver for practically the entire ride...talked with him about everything a 5 year old could come up with to talk about, I guess...it was a big adventure for me...and the brother was more than happy to keep me occupied...

    ...we moved into what's called "sunnyside" now....just off the intersection of Cullen Blvd and Bellfort avenue. Looked a lot different then than it does now, for a lot of reasons...

    ...but I remember being absolutely thrilled to see a "Dairy Queen" restaurant not too far from where we were going to live...

    ...I remember telling my mother how excited I was, that I was going to be able to go to a "Dairy Queen" like they showed on T.V. (remember that "this is D.Q. country" jingle?)...

    ...and she said, with a resignation more out of recognition than premonition...that I'd better not get used to seeing that. That restaurant would be gone in a few years, if not sooner.

    And it was sooner...like inside of six months gone sooner. I think that the pawn shop that replaced it is still there today…might have to go and check….

    ...same thing happened with a Rice Epicurean market in that area, too...gone inside of a year or so of when we arrived there. This all happened back in the early/mid 1970s.

    …one of the things that routinely gets left out or ignored in the whole “white flight” phenomenon that began in the 1970s, was the fact that it wasn’t really the idea of white people leaving areas where black people were entering that was going to be the lasting problem…

    …it was going to be the economic vacuum that their departure from these areas would create.

    The famous “American middle class” was constructed with government aid and purpose…and sadly, that middle class was constructed, as are too many things of economic value or importance in this country, at the expense of black people.

    Negroes moving into “better” neighborhoods often could not afford to remain there when economic downturns occurred…Negroes were always going to be underemployed, relative to their white counterparts…undercompensated if they WERE employed, in relation to their white counterparts…

    …schools that once relied on public funds that could be provided by those with the means to afford them were now gone, and could not be adequately replaced….

    …and so on and so on.

    One of the things that much of this COVID-19 epidemic may hasten us to address (and all of the other lingering racial stuff that’s not supposed to be important or matter anymore…not to mention the Donald’s idea of what it is that makes America great), is the idea of coupling “moral” virtue with economic status.

    …I have a friend who’s a wonderful Christian woman, and we talk often about things like this because we grew up as one of the first black children to go to a fully integrated public school.

    …she has, like a lot of Christians (particularly black Christians) equated to varying degrees moral dignity and virtue as concurrent with economic access and prosperity (God isn’t a “poor” god…poverty is a sin or a trick of the devil….that sort of thing…)…and she did grow up with a bit more of an economic advantage than I did…

    …I said to her once not long ago, that there are as many as one and a half billion people in the world who, in some form or another, identify themselves as Christian.

    It could be estimated that upwards of seventy-five percent of that number of persons live in abject poverty, if not abhorrent destitution. Most of those people do not live in what we consider the United States (contiguous or otherwise).

    Excepting individual circumstances (because at the end of the day, human beings are self-determining creatures, not instinctual animals), I asked her why there was such a large and disparate number between the “blessed” and the “cursed”….

    …if they’re all praying to and worshiping the same god (and since I personally don’t make distinctions between Protestants or Catholics or Presbyterians or Episcopalians or Mormons or Seventh-Day Adventists or any other denomination I may have missed, because they are all supposed to be following the lead of the same god)...

    …all of those people are fake Christians in service to the devil and deserve their fate? Really?

    …they tell a story of their god in mortal guise feeding a throng of thousands with a handful of food, and I’m supposed to believe that there are people in the world who believe in this god and have to go hungry because…I don’t know…just because?

    …my point in all of this is that, in this country, things are “built” economically and are justified, after the fact, morally. And for whatever it’s worth, there may have been a time in the world where that was at least a workable solution…the historical progress of humankind being what it is.

    …but now, because what we can produce is much vaster, in both scale and scope, than why we can justify its selective dispersement or quantify its lack as “moral” failing or bankruptcy…

    …we are all going to have to face the fact that, while we cannot guarantee equitable outcomes for many (free moral agency, where applicable, being what it is)…

    …we might have to stop guaranteeing inequitable ones. And feigning surprise or disgust at the consequence…
     
    #12 mdrowe00, Jun 4, 2020
    Last edited: Jun 4, 2020
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  13. JayGoogle

    JayGoogle Member

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    Wheneever someone talks about racism and it not being an issue I think they take it to a personal level.

    "Well, so what if someone is racist? IT's just that one person. Not many people care about it." and they are right.

    Most of the people do not care but a lot of people have biases they should consider...but I don't think this is even systemic racism, at least not to the point where it holds back a group for decades and decades.

    The best example I can think of is the GI Bill. Look at how it applied to white veterans and how it applied to black veterans. It gave a lot of opportunities to whites that it simply didn't give to black people and no doubt a lot of these people that brag about their WW2 grandparents benefitted from this bill. Black families did not. This was something that directly influenced the wage gap, very likely still does today, that would have uplifted a lot of black families and gave a lot of grandparents more to give to their children who would have had more to give to their children and so on...

    But because of the history of racism in this country they were given next to nothing.

    There are always policies like this where we look back and say "Well, that was racist..." and no one today would argue that it wasn't. Yet, of course the black folk then KNEW it was messed up, they were experiencing it. This is how it always goes though. Black people point out something racist about the country and it gets ignored or they get told they are just whining about something...then later everyone looks back at it and goes "Yep, that was f'd up, sorry about that."
     
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  14. Sweet Lou 4 2

    Sweet Lou 4 2 Contributing Member
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    The narrative the right likes to point out is - how come there are all these stories of immigrants who come here to work hard and pull themselves up by the bootstraps to make it in America. The point out the cab driver who puts their kids in ivy league school and such.

    two things they forget.

    1. A lot of cab drives today commit suicide because working 100+ hours a week still can't pay basic bills
    2. The people who come here are the most motivated hardened people in the world. You don't leave your home and culture for a foreign land far away from your friends, family and loved ones unless you are so ambitious to succeed you will scratch and claw your way to success.

    Blacks living in poverty don't know that kind of ambition because all they have seen is poverty. All they have been told is they are a falure. The idea of a black child thinking there is a path to an office job is ludicrous to them. The education system can't provide it to them, their parents have no idea how to provide it to them because they have never seen success, and their peers can't provide it to them. There's no one in their day to day lives to teach them how to succeed, and more importantly - make them believe in themselves to succeed.

    That is fundamentally what has to change. It's not an easy thing to correct, it takes out of the box thinking and it will take federal dollars. We has a nation have to think to ourselves - that ever child living in poverty is at risk, and needs a mentor to help them learn to over come their situation. Every single child. And that's how you overcome systemic racism.
     
  15. CometsWin

    CometsWin Breaker Breaker One Nine

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    The data actually shows that a black boy from the same wealthy background as a white boy will earn less in adulthood and is more likely to become poor than to maintain that wealth. So this Libertarian speak might sound good on its face but it's factually false in this particular case. Black boys and men are targets in our society, systemically and actually.

    You talk about there aren't many laws or rules in place to deny anyone advancement. The issue really is the manner in which you want to substitute race and income and how does it all perpetuate itself within a designed system and who designed that system, particularly when it comes to education and the criminal justice system.
     
  16. DonnyMost

    DonnyMost not wrong
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    What I said does not preclude this from being true, in fact it supports it (median income decreasing). Some doors will always be (more) open to people based on their identity, I don't deny that at all, but I do reject the idea identity is the most important factor and certainly not the only factor in success or failure.

    Can you elaborate on this? Targets how? And by whom?

    I'm not sure you're going to be able to make a case that the education system is purposefully or effectively set up to disadvantage minorities specifically.

    As for crim justice, I already hinted at how I see systemic problems there. It seems like the criminal justice system was set up in a way to keep the incarcerated in a downward spiral and our fore-bearers were plenty happy to aim the machinery of that system at minorities.
     
    #16 DonnyMost, Jun 4, 2020
    Last edited: Jun 4, 2020
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  17. Sanctity

    Sanctity Member

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    The riots already destroyed any hope some businesses had of recovery from the pandemic. It's too bad there's no laws that make protests only available to those who have proximity or are invested in the area.
     
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  18. pgabriel

    pgabriel Educated Negro

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    The most difficult thing to escape from poverty is ignorance. Ignorance begets ignorance. Educated blacks need to focus on education. They aren't helping poor blacks by focusing on civil rights. We have civil rights. That battle is over.

    I know people are gonna point to George Floyd but Floyd will get justice and that will deter idiot cops from being idiots.
     
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  19. fchowd0311

    fchowd0311 Contributing Member

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    People care about education when their circumstances in life allow them to care about education. Poor kids usually have more to worry about outside education where they get more distracted than children from well off families.
     
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  20. Invisible Fan

    Invisible Fan Contributing Member

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    I was more a believer of this when I read the same things 20 years ago.

    Minority groups are usually the first recipients when disaster strikes. 08 caused black homeownership to plummet. It hasn't recovered because banks don't rely on mortgages anymore. They bank on perpetual rent.

    Ad hoc racism with lending rates, self segregation ("white flight"), red lining, healthcare diagnoses, "culture fits", and the criminal justice system prevent a lot of black people from "racing past zero".

    Even as Gen Z becomes more diverse, implicit cultural biases could morph into "shades of lightness" rather than solid racial identities.

    I would say that a majority of people are afraid or even terrified if the government forced desegregation in our neighborhoods. Property ownership is one of our sacred cows.

    "Time" is a nice passive answer. What we do with it is more important because Trump was the Steven Miller and Steve Bannon's weapon against your "time".

    To them, "time" = "white genocide" and they're freely burning a lot of green to do it.
     
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