Before I address some of your specific remarks, I must point out that a lot of your comments in reply to my earlier post are based upon your own observations. Time and again you write "I know," or "I have met," or something similar, yet not once do you show that your personal experiences, along with the feelings and beliefs held by the folks to whom you refer, are legitimately extrapolatable to society at large, that they are the norm that is experienced by most or a plurality of people in United States, or other parts of the world. Not once do you show that there exists a causal relationship between what you've observed and the things you cite as being the cause of those observations.
I point that out because every time I read one of you "I know..." statements, the thought that came to my mind I that I don't know and have never met -- not as a child, not as a teenager, not as a young adult, not as a young professional, and not as an adult soon to retire -- so much as one person who genuinely believes the things you attribute to the folks you've described. So what I'm asking of you is that you please present some credible, scholarly (peer reviewed) published evidence that indicates the things you've observed are worth anyone -- you, I and others -- accepting them as anything more than your having met and spoken with a bunch of dolts, dunces and mental midgets.
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I know young people that think 'whites are losers' and it is due to the constant hammering whites get in the media 24/7, without the slightest apology or empathy.
Why cant we discuss the good things whites have done without preceding it with an apology to nonwhites?
Red:
(See post opening paragraphs.)
Blue:
Over 2000 years ago, a white man, Plato, wrote a book called the
Republic. In it he presents the "Allegory of the Cave." That story speaks of people who are chained to a cave wall, and as a result, their sole understanding of reality is given by the shadows they observe on the cave wall. It is only upon being freed from the cave that they, like any would be philosopher, thinker, come to understand that their reality comprised of shadows is not at all the verity of what is. If by "we" you mean society, the general public, I heartily suggest you unchain yourself from the cave walls that limit your perception of the world and step out into a bookstore, library, or even bother to use Google Scholar, or just plain Google for that matter.
For at least the past 100 years, literally millions of people, from middle schoolers to PhDs, have written essays, papers and books that discuss the accomplishments of thousands and thousands of white individuals. For example, I once wrote a paper about the brilliance in two of Van Dyke's paintings.
Arnold Toynbee wrote scores of books about the deeds of many white individuals, and
others have written biographies of Mr. Toynbee. Indeed, the biography section of any bookstore or library is loaded with books that discuss the accomplishments of myriad white individuals, some well known and some not.
When you studied European and American history in school, were not the overwhelming majority of individuals noted white? We we learn of the great accomplishments in science, are the individuals who created them not white? In fact, as I write this, the only non-white scientist who readily comes to my mind is Dr. Charles Drew. When I think of the major names in economics, not one of them belongs to a non-white individual. I can rattle off the names of some hundred or more kings and queens in history, and the only non-white one that rolls off the tip of my tongue is Montezuma, although pressed as I typed I recalled Shaka Zulu.
One doesn't find much in Internet forums (hardly the most intellectually driven venues of discourse) about the accomplishments of white folks as a whole because every day those accomplishments exist clear and present in our lives. Turn on the light and you have Tesla and Edison. Get in a car and credit Karl Benz. Attend any sporting event and Francis Scott Key is right there with you. Think of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States and a score of white men are the reason you can.
Why do we not mention these people by name everyday? Quite simply, there is no need to. It would take incomprehensible amounts of ignorance to think that so much of what we experience every day didn't issue from the minds of white men and women. In short, what you're decrying is that people don't routinely sit around and state the obvious, extolling the virtuous achievements of history's white individuals.
Moreover, you're suggesting tacitly that people create what amounts to a daily/weekly "mutual admiration moment" for white individuals' virtuous accomplishments. Well, let me tell you something. Were history's figures, white an non-white, to have focused their thoughts and energies on "oh, how great we white guys are," they wouldn't have had the time to think about how to solve the problems they did that allow you and I today to drive cars, type on computers, use the Internet, send text messages, enjoy eggs Benedict, and a host of other things. You see, humanity, white, black, and yellow, advances when people invest their energies in solving problems, not when they sit around and pat themselves on the back for the problems they've already conquered. Janet Jackson, who is not a white person, made that clear when she asked, "What have you done for me lately?"
There is no question too that in the United States the decried acts -- most notably slavery and its impacts -- were conducted on the whole in the interest of ensuring the supremacy of whites over non-whites.
No, that is not true at all. It was done to acquire profit and wealth, and before blacks were enslaved whites were enslaved, such as the Irish by Cromwell and the Europeans enslaved by Barbary pirates.
Also a good many free blacks in the US owned slaves themselves, in fact some of the largest slave farms were black owned.
Slavery was not a racial institution, though some nit-wits used racial stereotypes to justify slavery of blacks, just like the English used ethnic stereotypes to justify the enslavement of the Irish.
Red:
Are you seriously going to attempt to argue that wealth is not a powerful, the most powerful, tool for establishing and maintaining one's supremacy over others? Or are you merely taking exception semantically with my statement? If the latter, I direct you to the "and it's impacts" component of my statement.
In your statement highlighted in red, we see another illustration of one's need to unchain oneself from the cave, get out and read more.
The institution of slavery may have begun as an economic and religiously driven thing, but it evolved by the 19th century into a ethic superiority thing.
In the view of some, no doubt, but then why did so many whites fight a war in overwhelming numbers to end slavery then if it was strictly a racial exploitation of nonwhites?
Merely having a fair degree of rectitude on the matter is more than ample as a reason why. Might not too being opposed to the idea of a nation splitting been enough? Once again, I suggest you read more.
That remnants of the attitudes set down from the 1700s to the late 1900s continue to shape the thinking of individuals to day is the problem. Plantation owners of the pre-Civil War era were people of their time. You and I are of our time. The thing of which folks gripe these days is now that it's been clearly shown that whiteness confers not natural advantages, other than perhaps being somewhat better suited to less sunny climes, it is unjust to continue to harbor and allow to color (no pun) our attitudes about race. Of the three races on the planet, the only one that for hundreds of years harbored the hubris of self-supremacy over the other two has been the white race, Caucasians.
That is not true either. Most Koreans and Japanese I have met were all racist, by our standards, both thinking that their race was naturally superior to the rest of the world. The one Chinese man I knew, actually from China, for about 9 months was a blatant racist and despised Americans as mongrels and moral degenerates.
Most blacks I have met subscribe to the idea that they are racially superior to whites, and we got our advantage over them by having stolen so much technology from other groups that we overpowered them with it and enslaved them to contain the threat of a 'black planet', lol.
Red:
Once again, you really need to read/get-out more. I have a good deal of experience with a limited quantity of Japanese people, having worked in Tokyo off and on for six month to one year stretches over the past score of years. I cannot attest personally to the social attitudes I've observed as being present in all Japanese, or even most Japanese, but I can say that I've seen expressions of xenophobia among Japanese. I would characterize the attitudes I've observed as a disdain for all things and people not Japanese. I haven't seen anything suggesting it's the same as the express dislike of blacks that many whites in pre-21st century America had. I have not seen any evidence of racism. On the matter of xenophobia, more than a few observers and writers have discussed it.
It is worth noting that xenophobic attitudes and racism are not the same things, although fear is a factor in both. (
Difference Between Xenophobia and Racism | Difference Between | Xenophobia vs Racism) The only culture toward which I think the Japanese have held racist attitudes is the Korean one. I don't know many Koreans and I haven't studied their culture. I also don't know the extent to which today Japanese, on the whole, despise Koreans.
One thing that is very clearly different is that what we experience(ed) in America is racially based. It was and, to the extent it's extant now, remains a thing between people of Caucasian extraction and Negroid extraction. The same cannot be said of the Japanese, nor about the disdain harbored by people of a great many other peoples. The animosity between Greeks and Turks, the English and the Normans, Serbs and Croats, for example are all ethnic or nationality oriented. They have nothing to do with race.
Blue:
Here again, I can only offer that you need to expand your knowledge and experience base. As goes your comment above, you'll need to demonstrate that the observations you have made in connection with the black folks whom you've met is palpably shared by a plurality or majority of blacks. If you are able to demonstrate such a general belief among blacks, you'd be able also to make a good argument that blacks feelings about themselves has changed dramatically since Brown v. Board of Education. (
http://www.amazon.com/Simple-Justic...uggle/dp/1400030617&tag=ff0d01-20?tag=usmb-20)
Nobody in their right might denies that numerous white individuals have provided all manners and copious positive contributions to humanity. The matter of derisive comments about "white people" rests not on individual accomplishments but on rather on the impact modern era whites have had on the planet and on other people.
That is simply not true. I have met at least a dozen people who honestly believe that everything whites have done/made/invented was actually stolen from some nonwhites and have never invented anything or done anything positive for humanity what so ever.
I have no basis for saying you have not met such individuals. Insofar as you have, I can only say with surety that you need not be alone when you visit the library.
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