We won't stop bigotry by concealing success

[barryqwalsh]

I've been a journalist for more than three decades, so I'm not often taken by surprise by other scribblers. But, during the flurry of media interest in our film Things We Won't Say About Race That Are True, a pugnacious radio interviewer bowled me a bouncer. If we should be able to say whatever we like about other people, he asked, should he be able to say "I really don't like black people" out loud?

We won t stop bigotry by concealing success The Jewish Chronicle

 

[Pogo]

But of course. That's what free speech means. It isn't supposed to be necessarily pretty or nice. If it were supposed to be that, there wouldn't be any point in securing the right to it, because nobody would object.

 

[DarkFury]

Freedom of speech is NOT freedom from insult. YOU will say something that insults someone.
The very existence of that SHOWS freedom of speech in use.

 

[DGS49]

Is it an insult to say you don't like someone? Lot's of people don't like me (LOTS of people), and I'm not the least bit insulted.

If someone doesn't like me because I'm CATHOLIC, I find that offensive but I'm not insulted by it. If someone is an idiot what is that to me?

I was raised in an "integrated" neighborhood, meaning, in my case that we were about the only white family on the block. It was my Grandmother's home and we inherited it after the neighborhood had changed colors, so to speak.

Black people are, in many ways DIFFERENT from white people. Not better, not worse, but different. I used to hear people say all the time that there was no possible justification for racial prejudice because all people are alike. None of the people saying this had ever spent any time in intimate contact with "Negroes." None of them ever lived in one room with 35 "Negroes," as I did in the Army at Ft Lee Virginia, or lived in a "community" where "Negroes" were in the majority, as I did in Vietnam.

At the end of that experience I didn't like Negroes. It took me a while to grow out of it.