Prejudice - some thoughts.

[LOki]

For eight months out of the year, I live in New York City. What's amazing about it is that extreme poverty coexists with extreme wealth. You walk through Washington Square Park and see homeless people sleeping on benches. You then walk a few blocks downtown and you find luxurious apartments and even homes. While this is a drastic difference, somehow everyone manages to live in the same area.

With that said, I'm not racist, but rather CAUTIOUS of my surroundings. From what I've observed with my own eyes, black and hispanic people in the city tend to cause the most violence and act most erratically. Specifically young males. Whenever I read of a crime in the newspaper, it often involves one of those two minorities.

I often took the subway during rush hour and at 3 or 4 in the morning. If you simply sit back and observe, you will see these two minorities acting as if they own the train, as if it's theirs to do as they please. Instinctually, I would choose to sit next to a white person rather than a black person in New York City because of what I've seen, heard, and read. It's not a matter of being racist, it's a matter of being smart in your own surroundings.

Excellent! We have similar experience and different perceptions of it! I have plenty of opportunity to work in Manhattan. I live way out in the country--too far away to commute daily, and far out enough that there is no racial diversity amongst the neighbors and genetleman farmers that live around me.

Recently I spent 9 weeks working predominantly in the North end of the island--above Central Park. I was staying in Fort Lee, crossing the GWB and parking at the corner of 165th and St. Nicholas. I then, if not working within walking distance, would board the 1 train at the 168th street station--lowest level at 11PM--to get to one of my jobsites. I take it that you are familiar with all the above. I'll take it that you do not have to imagine how many non-white folks I encountered on dark streets, dimly lit subway stations, and everywhere else my work took me. But get this, if I made a preference regarding who I sat next to on the train--and I admit that I did--I never made it on skin color, I made it on smell.

I am not going to argue too much about that. I just stated how I work and my suspicion that many others do too. I also think I gave a quite good example of where I might use skin color as an input for desicion. Statistically I am right. Statistically I save not only my time by this but others too. But as an excerise in improving on myself I'll do the opposite next time!

Consider me to be arguing that your statistics are misleading you. Statistically, 100% of folks that don't speak clearly, don't speak clearly--you have to talk to them to find out. Statistically, pigment content in one's skin has 0% effect on determining how clearly a person can speak. I've never been to Sweden, so I can't speak of how things go there, but in the U.S. you need only depart far enough from pavement to find perfectly white folks whose speech is impenetrable--and before Johnny Reb gets all stupid about defending the honor of his hillbilly kinfolk, let me submit that in the farthest reaches of New England this assertion is valid as it is where my kinfolk come from; the farthest Northern midwest, where, ErikViking, many of your countrymen settled. An ahltellyoowutdare, yookinbetcher luckeestares datdeydonemake nosensedare, ya? Ya!

And let me add that efforts to immprove one's own capacity for understanding are just as valuable as other's efforts to be understandable, and more rewarding.

Wow. You're so deep and superior.

Unfounded assertion--demonstrate.

Actually humanity is subdivided loosely into races.

What of it?

There are checkoxes where you check which one you are when you apply for school, jobs, nearly everything.

What of it?

You must have been drunk when you applied for your last gig.

Unfounded assertion--demonstrate.

Well then, I think we ran out of stuff to argue about. In this thread anyway.

Posted only 4 minutes before this:

I am assuming what you are speaking of is racial profiling. It is downright dumb to ignore it. Throw out the best evidence for identifying a suspect for political correctness.

I see no problem with identifying people who live the stereotype by that stereotype. If you're a white guy who can't dance, a "thug" , or one of the vatos locos, whatever. You are what you are. And when certain groups are known to act in a certain manner, it is not unwise to expect such behavior of them.

As if you'd stand for being treated every day, and in every encounter like the serial killers, racial supremacists, and domestic terrorists that so often look like John Wayne Gacey, John Walker Lindh, Richard Reid, Timothy McVeigh, Ted Kazinsky, Charles Manson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and every single member of StormFront and the KKK. You'll note how little white racial profiling happens. How very rare it is that all white men in windowless vans get pulled over for a corpse check.

Racial profiling is ineffective (for instance, John Muhammed and Lee Malvo were black, and Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols were white), and wrong. This is not to say that if witnesses saw a white guy commit a crime, that the cops should not be looking for a white guy, but on the otherhand, they should not from that point forward consider that crime to be a white-guy-crime that all white guys are potentially guilty of--same goes for Arab looking folk, just in case you're unsure if I'm unwilling to go there. In fact, considering how leaving evidence of the crime, and not one's skin color, is really what catches criminals, I'd like to see the argument that demonstrates that a potential criminal's racial profile has EVER lead to apprehension and conviction. For instance, a demonstration that any portion of Ken Lay's arrest and conviction rested in any manner upon the greater likelihood that the crimes he committed are crimes committed predominantly by white men. "Oh, and your Honor, if it pleases the court, I'd like to submit into evidence "Exhibit A"--Mr. Lay is a white man." A person's skin color does not make them a criminal, not ever, nor is it indicative of a person's propensity for a crime, but that is exactly what racial profiling asserts with the kind of conviction (heh!) that justifies the bullshit of us treating each other as criminals based on skin color.

 

[ErikViking]

Consider me to be arguing that your statistics are misleading you. Statistically, 100% of folks that don't speak clearly, don't speak clearly--you have to talk to them to find out. Statistically, pigment content in one's skin has 0% effect on determining how clearly a person can speak. I've never been to Sweden, so I can't speak of how things go there, but in the U.S. you need only depart far enough from pavement to find perfectly white folks whose speech is impenetrable--and before Johnny Reb gets all stupid about defending the honor of his hillbilly kinfolk, let me submit that in the farthest reaches of New England this assertion is valid as it is where my kinfolk come from; the farthest Northern midwest, where, ErikViking, many of your countrymen settled. An ahltellyoowutdare, yookinbetcher luckeestares datdeydonemake nosensedare, ya? Ya!

And let me add that efforts to immprove one's own capacity for understanding are just as valuable as other's efforts to be understandable, and more rewarding.

Hm. Ya. That was funny! Is that the way you write how we talk?

About statistics, well this isn't fun too discuss since we have too little common reference. You live in a country built on immigration. I don't, it is a good chance of a colored person not speaking clearly here. But perhaps I have exagerated a little. (I don't, which you know, link skin color to the ability to speak clearly).

 

[Abbey Normal]

 

[LOki]

Hm. Ya. That was funny! Is that the way you write how we talk?

It's the best I could do in text. The closest thing to hearing it is in the movie "Fargo" where the dialect is thinned out to a comprehensible level.