The Issue of Racism in America

Jack Wade wrote:

I wear hoodies when it's cold out to help keep me warm. I must be a black ghetto thug killer.

No black ghetto thug killer would be caught wearing my Duran Duran hoodie...

They're scary dudes. They don't need hoodies! Talk about "tude"

I had a friend who wore an Abercrombie hoodie. For five years, he didn't even know what the fuck Abercrombie was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_cdbByTeNE

You've probably already seen this President Richard Pryor skit. It's pretty dam' funny. And prescient.

Jack Wade wrote:

I wear hoodies when it's cold out to help keep me warm. I must be a black ghetto thug killer.

Peter Parker is wearing a hoodie in the new SPIDER-MAN film, to make him look all "emo" and dark and stuff.

Lisabeth Salander wears a hoodie in THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO.

It's not just the hoodie by itself that has certain connotations; it's the person wearing the hoodie and any sort of attitude they try to present. Because so many places have been robbed or vandalized by young, black males in hoodies, Zimmerman was predisposed to being suspicious of a young, black male in a hoodie, wandering around in a neighborhood that he didn't seem familiar with. To be suspicious is part of human nature, and no matter how hard we try to sanitize it from our culture with politically correct righteous indignation, we're never going to completely get rid of it.

Δ

^ I listened to 3 minutes. He's giving me a headache as he's fixated on race, but he did manage to thoroughly villify the "hoodie" by the three minute mark.

Just say no to the hoodie!

Expecting James David Manning to not be fixated on race is like demanding the Super Bowl be on Saturday.

Sharky wrote:

Expecting James David Manning to not be fixated on race is like demanding the Super Bowl be on Saturday.

Noted. Consider me educated. I'd never heard of this guy before. He does make the anti-hoodie case well though. Now if he could just be enlisted to help with the anti-blue-snuggies cause, I'd nominate him for a Nobel.

Pastor Manning calls Michelle Obama.....well see it to believe...

^That was an entertaining sermon. He not a fan of either Obama or the First Lady I see. Duh!

Say what? Obama has 7 half-brothers via his dad. It's like these guys don't exist, just like Obama's white mother, that he seems to have all but dis-owned.

The Pastor takes some good shots at billionaire arsehole George Soros. Amen to that!

Sign me up for the podcast!

"Jezebel"

Sharky wrote:

Very moving.

Not a bad little speech. I listened to the whole thing. He makes some really good points re the hoodie and other garb that has come to be symbolic of violence.

I think he's rushing to judgement re Zimmerman though. He's declared Zimmerman to be a racist, so he's not helping there. Zimmerman could very well just be a trigger-happy security guard, who reacted too aggressively to a perceived threat. Manning does explain that Trayvon was 6'2, wearing a hoodie at night, in a gated community that Zimmerman was charged with watching, so there was ample reason for Zimmerman to be wary of Trayvon. There is also the very real possibility that Trayvon was more than a possble threat but that he had become a very real and tangible threat to Zimmerman. Zimmerman did have significant head injuries.

But Manning's whole schtick seems to be about chastising Trayvon for making himself vulnerable by appearing threatening to a guy like Zimmerman. This is good advice but still the real issue is what went down. Who attacked who first? Did Zimmerman have justification in pulling the gun. This is what needs to be determined.

Sharky wrote:

I think if you listen very carefully, he did manage to sneak an apology in there, along with all the fresh ammo he managed to fire at both Whoopi and Michelle.

I think if I was Michelle, I would have begged for him to spare me the apology. Cut your losses.

Geraldo Rivera doubles down on hoodies too. It's open season on the hoodie. Sell your stock.

Rivera is also slamming his former pals as MSNBC for their race-baiting coverage of the Zimmerman/Trayvon affair.

Geraldo Rivera: MSNBC Anchors Don't Care About Evidence, Are 'Cheerleading' for Zimmerman Conviction

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2012/04/21/geraldo-rivera-msnbc-anchors-dont-care-about-evidence-they-are-cheerl#ixzz1stTv1O1Q

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/cnn-panel-slams-hbos-girls-for-lack-of-diversity-odd-out-of-step/

On CNN’s Starting Point Monday morning, host Soledad O’Brien and TheWrap’s Sharon Waxman took several shots at the homogeneously white new HBO show Girls , chewing it out for its stark lack of diversity.

“The entire show takes place in New York City and, yet, they really don’t have much diversity, if any diversity on the show,” O’Brien observed.

“That’s definitely one aspect that is a little bit strange for people who live in New York City, which is this wildly diverse city, every time television does this,” Waxman said. “Things are multiracial and multi-everything, you know? That’s the reality. You don’t see that in the characters. It’s kind of a little odd.”

O’Brien observed that Girls‘ staff writer Lesley Arfin responded to the controversy over the show’s homogeneity by Tweeting out “What really bothered me most about Precious was that there was no representation of ME.” The tweet was later deleted.

Wow!” Waxman responded. “Wow.”

The CNN panel momentarily tried to figure out if Arfin’s racially-inflammatory tweet was a joke.

“Do you think so?” O’Brien asked. “I guess it seems like she’s not necessarily taking the question of representation seriously to me.”

According to ColorLines’ Jorge Rivas, Arfin reportedly apologized for the tweet, but then deleted it, “Without thinking, I put gender and politics above race and class,” Arfin tweeted last Wednesday. “That was careless. The last thing I want is girls vs. girls,” she wrote. Rivas also noted that Arfin had a past history of racially-charged statements.

Waxman did play devil’s advocate, noting that many races self-segregate, but was surprised the show went out of its way to be so white.

“In defense of the show, you know, you can’t [not] say that people do tend to hang out with members of their own race,” Waxman said. “That is kind of a social pattern and you see that over and over on college campuses, among Asian students and African-American students. But, at the same time, it does feel out of step, you know? Nobody walks around in a world where everybody is white — I watched the show last night with an eye — [it] couldn’t be every character would be of the same race — and it actually was.”

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Let's call a spade a spade: modern day "diversity" is nothing more than thought control. In other words, if you aren't diverse enough, some of these liberals are going to come along and correct your thinking for you, because there must be something seriously wrong with a person who is attracted to people who look like themselves and think like themselves and behave like themselves. How dare you be successful without including, giving credit, or acknowledging the contributions (real or imagined) of any number of federally approved and certified minorities? How dare you enjoy your life or have fun without including at least one "person of color"?

This "diversity" isn't even about addressing real racism anymore; it's about conditioning people to think and behave a certain way that is almost completely contrary to human nature. Liberals are some of the most humorless people imaginable.

And how is the writer's tweet about the movie PRECIOUS "racially inflammatory"?

Soledad O'Brien is a hack.

I have come to the conclusion that the greatest proponents and drivers of racism and division-in-society,are our superior-thinking progressive betters.

The liberal basically exists to promote their own delusional self-superiority. Thus they preach the politicis of division. They scream racist, homophobe, sexist, climate-denier, what have you, at every opportunity. The goal is to stigmatize-as-victims, as much of the population as possible, so that liberals might come to their rescue armed with the power of big nanny-state government to make everything better.

Meanwhile actual racists, your KKK, skinheads, Nazis and the like, are only a radical fringe of society. But when normal tolerant folk are constantly being bombarded and beaten down by liberal noise-makers, for not energetically swallowing their vile politics-of-division kool-aid, and rebel, then the fringe elements become emboldened (Breivik) and the politics of division are further exacerbated and often with more violent consequences.

If Zimmerman is acquitted, liberal race-baiters will be in full roar. Watch-out. It will get ugly.

tiffanywint wrote:

If Zimmerman is acquitted, liberal race-baiters will be in full roar. Watch-out. It will get ugly.

I agree. Everyone involved with the case should get out of town before the verdict is reached. Zimmerman is likely to be acquitted. That will set off "race-riots" i..e everyday-occurrences in the black community, but just amped up to a higher degree. There won't be any marches for justice. There will be armed confrontations with the police, bombs thrown, white civilians fired upon and possibly murdered and raped...storefront property destroyed (don't expect the police or the fire department to chase the looters out of your shops) Grab your kids, grab some canned goods, grab your guns....take your wife if you have to.....and just flee from anywhere that there is a large urban demographic. Stay away from large urban centers. Try and get into the countryside, or into areas where there is a very tiny percentage of urban dwellers in amongst the country folk.

A lot of folks are trying to turn this into another Rodney King scenario.

And they're succeeding. It's plain as eggs that if Zimmerman is acquitted, many an inner city will go up in flames. Oh well. Better that than sentencing an innocent man to hell.

Gravity's Silhouette wrote:

Try and get into the countryside, or into areas where there is a very tiny percentage of urban dwellers in amongst the country folk.

Actually I've booked a spot at the local Fema camp, so I'm good.

Stay out of Starbucks though. Rioting leftists have a thing about smashing their windows for some reason. Very odd as they were giving away free coffee yesterday for Earth Day. I don't give a crap about Earth Day, (at least not in a worship-the-earth kinda way) but I did dutifully bring my re-usable mug, in for free coffee.

Thank-you Starbucks. A great corporate citizen and friend of the earth.

"We love Starbucks"







more cute Starbucks-loving, earth-loving polar bears.

My initial inclination is to side with The Justice Department on this issue (story and link below): if the firefighters union has been proven to have given answers or discussed the questions with white firefighters then there is an equality issue at stake. *HOWEVER*, just reading a bit more into the story helps you understand where Attorney General Eric Holder is really coming from on this issue. The key point is: "The Justice Department said black employees who do pass the tests rarely are promoted since their scores are generally lower than white workers."

THAT is the real issue. If black firefighters were passing the test in better numbers and beating the scores of white firefighters, they would have no issue with this test. However, since even when they pass they still aren't coming close to the scores of white firefighters, the whole testing procedure is deemed irrelevant and/or discriminatory and is being thrown out.

Is it possible....maybe, just maybe, that black and white people learn differently? I'm just throwing that out there for a legitimate debate. We know women and men perceive and process knowledge and facts differently, so why should we expect to find that different races learn....well, differently? At this point, black educators and white, liberal intellectuals are becoming more and more desperate to show that 'we are all the same' when test results from Jacksonville to Connecticut just don't show that. If you are having to throw out whole testing procedures because one race can't keep up with another, aren't you essentially admitting that the lower-scoring race either can't keep up or is not applying itself diligently enough to study for and to pass the test?

Don't forget the New Haven, CT firefighter lawsuit that the Supreme Court upheld back in 2009:

Ricci v. DeStefano, 129 S. Ct. 2658, 2671, 174 L. Ed. 2d 490 (2009) is a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States arising from a lawsuit brought against the city of New Haven, Connecticut by twenty city firefighters alleging that the city discriminated against them with regard to promotions.[1] The firefighters, nineteen of whom are white and one of whom is Hispanic, had all passed the test for promotions to management. City of New Haven officials invalidated the test results because none of the black firefighters who passed the exam had scored high enough to be considered for the positions. They stated that they feared a lawsuit over the test's adverse impact on a protected minority. The complainants claimed they were denied the promotions because of their race—a form of racial discrimination.[2][3]
The Supreme Court heard the case on April 22, 2009, and issued its decision on June 29, 2009. The Court held 5-4 that New Haven's decision to ignore the test results violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricci_v._DeStefano

Washington sues Florida city over firefighter tests

(Reuters) - The Justice Department sued the city of Jacksonville, Florida, on Monday, claiming its use of written tests to determine promotions in the city's fire department discriminates against African-Americans.

The lawsuit followed a more than two-year investigation examining Jacksonville's record of promoting African-Americans for the ranks of lieutenant, captain, district chief and engineer dating back to 2004.

It came after a separate lawsuit filed last year by two dozen Jacksonville firefighters challenging the city's promotional process. In the lawsuit, the firefighters alleged union officials unfairly shared exam questions with white workers but not with black workers ahead of the test.

"This complaint should send a clear message to all public employers that employment practices that have the effect of excluding qualified candidates on account of race will not be tolerated," Thomas Perez, a U.S. assistant attorney general for civil rights, said in a statement.

A spokesman for the Jacksonville mayor's office declined to comment.

The complaint by the Justice Department alleges the exams are "not job related for the positions in question."

The complaint said use of the tests "has resulted in a disparate impact upon black candidates" because African-Americans pass the examinations at significantly lower rates than white candidates.

The Justice Department said black employees who do pass the tests rarely are promoted since their scores are generally lower than white workers.

"At best, these tests measure only a slice of what is necessary to be a supervisor, but they stand in the way of qualified African-Americans advancing in the fire department," the statement said.

The lawsuit also named the local firefighter's union, the Jacksonville Association of Firefighters Local 122, as a defendant since it negotiates the terms of promotion tests with the city.

No union official could be immediately reached for comment.

Black firefighters, city and union officials in Jacksonville have been in court mediation since 2009 working to resolve decades of courtroom battles over African-American participation in the city's fire department.

That is all rooted in a legal sophistry known as "disparate impact," which means that any mechanism producing unequal results along race or sex lines, even if there is no malign intent whatwoever, is illegal. It is through this gambit that standardized tests are being thrown out left and right. Blacks and Hispanics invariably do worse on these tests, as do whites vis-a-vis east Asians, so they are somehow "racist." The alternative is to admit the obvious: different races, generally speaking, have different levels of intelligence. But oh no. There's no way in hell anybody in power is going to admit this obvious fact. It would be "RACIST!" to do so.

:roll: