He most certainly did denigrate Washington just as he does every other Black man who rejects victim hood in it's various forms. As usual you conveniently filter out what you don't want to see.
Systemic Racism in 2024 is a fantasy pushed by the Democrats and their faithful followers. A more accurate term would be Systemic Favoritism. The last vestiges of Systemic Racism vanished in the 70s. If you disagree then provide SPECIFIC EVIDENCE of Systemic Racism against Black people today.
I use the term "opportunist" in a positive sense in that Black people in America today if they are willing to put in the work have every opportunity available to them. Both you and IM2 have benefited from living in this country yet you dredge up ugly images of America's Racist history in order to project it into present day.
As usual I will not drop to either you or IM2's level of name calling. I wouldn't do that to your face so I don't do it here.
Mike, first of all I want to apologize for calling you an ass. Even though I fully meant it, it was still unprofessional and something that I should not have done simply because I know better than to allow others to get me to act out of character and to return in kind what I receive from them. And just FYI, I penned this before I saw your response about my comment.
Having said that, I am not "filtering" IM2's opinions. I do not see everything he posts and most of what he posts he posts for the board not to open a discussion with his colleagues here. He's vastly outnumbered and treated in the worse ways possible because of the protection offered to the worse of your group while we get chastised, punished and banned for merely speaking the truth, however unsavory it may be to some of the members here faking fragility.
Do you even understand why we disagree on your opinion that "systemic racism" no longer exists? I basically discount pretty much everything you say on the topic because you have never indicated how you arrived at the conclusion that systemic racism no longer exists in the United States. Additionally, you aren't knowledgeable enough of the topic to even offer any insight into the subject matter other than your own opinion.
This is just for starters.
I'm going to try an analogy, see if you get what I'm saying.
I can't count the number of times, I have been sleazed or sexually assaulted throughout my lifetime. And the sexual assaults that I'm referring to here is not of the nature of some creep jumping out of the bushes, dragging me in and raping me. I'm talking about what guys refer to as "coping a feel". No one has the right to put their hands on me and I guarantee you, if I do anything much more than give them a dirty look or say something to them like, "that's not cool",
I will be accused of overreacting. They have attempted to explain away what they did by telling a story, denying it happened, claiming it was an accident, etc. The last time this happened was within the last 12 months and I'm a friggin senior citizen!
People who have never experienced this, including other women, will try to explain it away as something perhaps that I did ("you must have led him on"), something I misconstrued ("oh he didn't mean it that way") or just will outright deny that it happened ("there must be something wrong with her to make up something like this") or at least downplay and try to diminish the incident. They are so busy trying to excuse away what actually happened that there has never been any concern expressed for how this impacted me, the person who was victimized.
This is exactly the way you act when you start in talking about systemic racism or any racism as a matter of fact. YOU have NEVER been on the receiving end of white supremacist beliefs and policies therefore you don't want to believe that it still occurs and treat anyone who complains about the same way I've been treated when I've been sexually assaulted or sleazed - with denial or minimization or a complete lack of concern or care that it happened ("so what").
Every act of racism, no matter how small is an offense and a violation of the law, just like every act of an unwanted touch is an offense of sexual assault and a violation of the law and my person. Unfortunately for Black people but fortunately for the remaining white racists doing their best to ensure racism never dies in our country, racism in most situations is not a violation of the criminal code.
Words have meaning and you claiming to be using a negative term in a positive manner doesn't fly. An opportunistic is someone with no moral code, one who "exploits chances offered by immediate circumstances without reference to a general plan or moral principle". You're denigrating Black when you refer to us this way as well as calling us victims when you know good and damn well we as a race have been horribly victimized by the white supremacist structure that was put in place to exploit us and our lives from the very inception of this country. And it's patronizing as hell for you to be preaching to us about how we should be grateful for the opportunities afforded us by living in this country. We're
ENTITLED to those opportunities because we are American citizens same as you and probably more than you when you consider what we accomplished despite living, working and prospering (within limits) given what we were ALLOWED to work with. There is no such thing as an NDA (non disclosure agreement) requiring us to never look back or mention the U.S.'s history simply because we were afforded an opportunity to improve our lives. We do this because we want our country to be better for EVERYONE but especially for the Black people who may not have gotten the same opportunities we did.
I understand that you all don't like that part of the country's history brought up, but it is YOU who is filtering out only the parts of our history that is palatable to you, not us, we don't have that same luxury to just ignore the ugly parts and only focus on the good parts. But because we've never had that luxury of choosing what WE want to focus our attention on, it has strengthened most of us in ways that you couldn't begin to understand. Just as one example, one of the other members here was posting about how he would never work somewhere where he wasn't wanted. Black people never had that option since we were not wanted in a multitude of places where we worked, at least not by another other than the person who hired us.
Ignorance is a lack of knowledge regarding a particular subject so when I again refer to your ignorance I am not trying to insult you, I'm telling that you don't have enough knowledge about the subject matter to do anything other than offer an uninformed opinion and of course people like IM2 and the rest of us are going to reject that.
I often work with crime victims. How insulting would it be if I were to discount all the things they tell me, to their faces, just because they don't have a witness or anything to corroborate the events they've experienced and the things they're telling me. There are a lot of white people in our country, just think of a group of defense attorneys as an example, who see, firsthand, the damage that the continuation of white racism against Black people wreaks but this is just one of a multitude of scenarios that Black people have to navigate where we are attacked and/or have to defend ourselves, often against people such as yourself claiming that the incidents that we've experienced never happened or "that's doesn't rise to the level of blah blah blah racism"
Is this enough information for you to understand why what you're doing is condescending and offensive?
