Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Wednesday, May 01, 2013

May Day!




15 comments:

Black guy from the future past said...

Question Dale: Do you think integration has been good for black folk? Why or why not? I feel this issue is very pertinent per the subject (revolution/rebellion) of this blog post.

Dale Carrico said...

Lots of different policies might be subsumed under the heading "integration," which ones do you have in mind? And "good," as opposed to what alternatives? I'm pressing for specificity here because that's a hot button word in part because many people mean lots of things by it and associate who knows what experiences and intuitions through it and it's not exactly easy to talk meaningfully about it until everybody has taken some care to be clear just what they are really talking about, you know?

Black guy from the future past said...

What I mean by integration: An excerpt from the "Human Rights Record of the United States in 2012" dealing with racial issues. (yes the report is from China, a known human rights violator, but what they write is poignant nonetheless.)

*had to delete most of the passage to get it to post, read full section here:

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2013-04/22/content_16430019.htm

IV.

On Racial Discrimination

The long-existing racial discrimination prevalent in the U.S. society sees no improvements, and ethnic minorities do not enjoy equal political, economic and social rights.

Racial discrimination is rampant in the field of law enforcement and justice. The Reuters website reported on July 3, 2012, police tend to be more lenient to whites. Out of more than 685,000 police stops in New York City in 2011, more than 85 percent of the stopped were black or Hispanic. Ethnic Americans are often offended by law enforcement authorities. A 21-year-old black man in Arkansas was searched and put into a police car, and later was found shot in the head while handcuffed (www. telegraph.co.uk, August 8, 2012). The incident where a 28-year-old black man, Mohamed Bah, was shot dead by New York police outraged the black community (NYDailyNews.com, September 26, 2012). An article on the website of Texas Civil Rights Project on July 24, 2012 said the Austin police' excessive use of force had led to two fatal police shootings of minority suspects since 2011. The president of the Texas Civil Rights Project said that the shooting death of a dog even received more thorough and careful investigation than the death of a black victim. The New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow wrote an article on January 14, 2013, saying "the idea that progress toward racial harmony would or should be steady and continuous is fraying. And the pillars of the institution the fundamental devaluation of dark skin and strained justifications for the unconscionable have proved surprisingly resilient."

Apartheid in fact still exists in the American society. New York Times reported on August 6, 2012 that, the proportion of non-Hispanic black residents on the Upper East Side is only 2.7 percent, and whites 81 percent. Local co-op boards can reject black buyers without giving a reason, and some Upper East Side co-ops have a reputation for rejecting black buyers. A study found that the New York area was the second most segregated for black people and the third most segregated for Hispanic and Asian residents. A superintendent of NASA Real Estate Corporation was sued for refusing to show three African-Americans any openings, claiming no apartments were available for rent, but showing vacancies to white individuals who inquired about the same apartments less than an hour after turning down black renters, saying, "You look like nice people. That's why I show you." (queenscourier.com, December 12, 2012) Furthermore, studies found a rising tide of apartheid in the U.S. workplace. Nineteen out of the 58 surveyed industries showed a trend toward racial re-segregation between white men and black men (www.washingtonpost.com, October 25, 2012).

Racial relationship is in tension, and hate crimes take place frequently. The Associated Press reported on October 28, 2012, citing a latest poll, that 51 percent of Americans now express explicit anti-African-American attitudes, three percentage points higher than in 2008. The abc.go.com reported on November 19, 2012, three shop owners of Middle Eastern descent were shot dead in four months in Brooklyn, New York, and the police cannot rule out the possibility of the homicides being racially motivated. Two young white men from Mississippi killed a black man by running a truck over him. The two, since 2011, have frequently assaulted and attacked African-Americans in and around Jackson, Mississippi, using beer bottles, sling shots and motor vehicles, and they often bragged about their exploits (Reuters, December 5, 2012).

Black guy from the future past said...

*cont

There was a time in the US when blacks owned many small businesses, shops, clubs and entire towns. I am sure you heard and read about Black Wall Street. Since integration, black folk in this country own little to nothing. Many are incarcerated, most are poor, many still face racial prejudice, whether they know it or not. Some black radical thinkers have suggested that black folks ought to segregate from whites and establish their own economic and social centers like white folk have done. Some have suggested violent revolt out of anger and a need for revenge. Some of these radicals even go as far to say that white people are inherently evil for racism and the violence whites as a group and political structure have meted out against black folk and anyone else who are not white. I just want to challenge you with these hard topics and issues and push this idea of rebellion and revolution further.

Dale Carrico said...

Of course I agree that white racism is still an active force in this country (nobody observing the ongoing racist war on drugs, contemporary GOP disenfranchisement efforts, reactionary anti-immigration discourse, stop and frisk and racial profiling and the rest can honestly doubt this) and that structural racism and institutional vestiges of slavery, Jim Crow, the exclusion of domestics and agricultural workers from the New Deal and on and on and on are real and catastrophic. I don't think separatism is any kind of answer. I think anti-racist and progressive education, agitation, organization, legislation is the answer. I doubt that this response will surprise anybody since I say these things constantly of course.

Black guy from the future past said...

All I have to say is black radicals such as Kamau Kambon would be very mad at you. Not simply because you are white, but also gay. I personally, have no problems with anyone. I would love to live in a world where everyone can live together in peace. But do I really think that is possible? We would have to become more than human, more than what we are now. Certain strains of thought (such as religion, nationalism and greed corruption)would have to die or be severely altered and people are heavily, nay, violently invested in the way those things are today. It took us thousands of years to reach western societies (imperfect and exploitative as they are) now and there are many pockets of the world that are seemingly stuck in the 19th century and back. It would seem that for the human liberal experiment to succeed. It would take another couple thousand years. I don't think we can afford to wait so long. Every year there is the potential for disaster such as the types Annalee Newitz so easily dismisses and say we will "survive".

Dale Carrico said...

would be very mad at you

What, somebody somewhere strongly disagrees with me on some topic?

Black guy from the future past said...

AHHAHAA! As I like to often repeat, everyone disagrees with everyone, in some way, shape, or form.

Dale Carrico said...

Quite.

Black guy from the future past said...

@ Dale a friend of mine told me to pose you this question.

ask him (you)why the colonists vs the english is called independence, but for Black People going through much worse, it's called "separatism".

The declaration of independence lists out the grievances of the colonists to the english as their reasons for wanting independence. It's one of their most cherished documents. Ask him what did they list in that document that was any worse than what Black People were going through in THAT time or even in THIS time.

Black guy from the future past said...

Black people and white people in this country and in the world will never truly ever get along. What white people did 500 plus years ago and the structures they created and supported and profited off of, and continue to profit off of, both implicitly and explicitly, both with or without their knowledge, will not allow white people and black people to get along. History itself will not allow it. Martin Luther King failed, Gandhi failed, hell even Jesus Christ failed. "Non-violence" is a bullshit game, rhetoric and idea. America is an illegitimate, hypocritical and violent country and deserves it's inevitable fate of catastrophe and destruction. Only violence can cleanse violence, blood for blood. All this rhetoric about "organizing" and "agitating" thus allowing the white supremacist instrument of the USA and the "Western world" to continue unscathed, for it's warts to simply regrow in some darker more subtle corner is absolute bullshit. Make no mistake, "Civil Rights" merely moved institutional, societal and economical racism and white privilege into some more dark, obscure and subtle corner. The only thing left to do is to extirpate the very foundation and soil that allows such darkness, ugliness and barbarity to continue to grow and remain incessantly rooted in everyday life. Black people get punished for fighting against racism (see Assata Shakur on FBI most wanted list) But white people never get punished for meting out racism, they always get off scot free. Only after the long fact of exploitation and murder and torture is done, are some pitiful concessions made, by white folk which means they remain in power. When a bully and murderer attacks you strike back and kill him. You don't embrace him. That is called suicide, disaster and absolute idiocy.

Dale Carrico said...

Black people and white people in this country and in the world will never truly ever get along.

This is a stupid and frankly racist thing to say in my option. Racial categories are pseudo-scientific, and it is quite a different thing to expose the exploitation and violence enabled by raci*ism* (which is certainly real) than to endorse actual assignments of race and attribution of racial stereotypes -- among them, about who can get along with whom -- to human beings all of whom are descendents from Africans and many/most of whom (including many racists) descendents from slaves whose enslavement was rationalized by recourse to irrational racial thinking. This is the end not the beginning of this exchange, my blog isn't a place where I will entertain what I deem to be racist discourse. But please don't take that amiss -- I appreciate many of your comments here and don't judge you in any kind of sweeping way just because I disagree with you so ferociously about this.

Dale Carrico said...

why the colonists vs the english is called independence, but for Black People going through much worse, it's called "separatism"

Rarely does the assumption of national independence require the expulsion of all those who benefited from occupation from continued life in the newly independent nation. Even if it did there would still be a difference from the expulsion of occupiers and the refusal of a cohort of individuals who decided to define what the pure "national kind of person" consisted of and refuse interactivity on the basis of that absurd construction. Be all that as it may, Native Americans might have had a historical justification for a struggle against foreign occupation but the situation of involuntary relocation and enslavement was a different kind of unspeakable crime, just as the Apartheid regime of Jim Crow was also a different kind of unspeakable crime -- of course, these different crimes stand in tangible relations to one another, to an extent enable and co-construct one another, but still differences that make a difference to resistance struggle distinguish them. If your friend means to imply that it is racism that makes me distinguish separatism from independence struggle, I respectfully submit that they don't know me very well but as a beneficiary of white privilege I know one has to be vigilent about drifting into racist attitudes and practices whatever one's intentions and so I will take their warning under advisement.

Black guy from the future past said...

Dale I am by no means racist at all. I was merely pointing to the political distinctions of "white" and "black" and seriously questioning if there can be any meaningful, non-superficial and equitable community among these polities, looking at the issue from the historical context. Those are physical distinctions by the way, but politicized, the distinction of "whiteness" has become toxic and malevolent against "blackness".

So lets continue this very pertinent and interesting line of dialogue. I personally feel that you cannot see outside of your own viewpoint as you push the idea of non-violence naively, while also acknowledging that violent forces of oppression are at work. Not passive or implicit forces, of oppression, very violent and explicit forces of oppression at all levels and sectors of society. So my issue is, what is your solution to deal with this disconnect? You denounce the so called "black separatist movement", I am sorry to tell you this, but those terms "separatism" or "Black separatism" is denigrating. I am talking about black independence, not separatism. Interaction between blacks and whites can and will continue, isolation is impossible now, but African people need to carve out a niche that is prosperous for them. Unlike the toxic niches Africans endure now, under current western, political, social, and economical orders. Note: (America continued to maintain relations with Britain after independence, yet they violently separated from Britain) The main point is, I want to know how you think blacks can obtain equal footing in a society built on the very existence of oppression of non-white peoples. Think about it, there is not a group of people that this country hasn't screwed over. If you are against blacks being left alone to create prosperity of their own design and making, then what do you suggest as an alternative?

Dale Carrico said...

Stop trolling. You're not stupid, so stop pretending to be. It's boring. Thread over.