Racism in America

I have not started a new thread in a long long time. I watched a 2016 movie last night called Hidden Figures, it's about three African-American women who were math people and work for NASA in the early sixties Space Program. It's based partially on a true story, and I mean very partially. The rest of it is pure crap and nonsense. It's a little bit about mathematics and NASA and a whole lot about racism in the early sixties. And of course everything is exaggerated way out of proportion. The main character is a black woman mathematician who goes to work at NASA in an all white engineering section and of course every single white guy there wants nothing to do with her because she's black. She can't even get her coffee out of the same large coffee machine she has to have her own coffee maker. And of course it turns out she's the smartest mathematician in the room and single-handedly saves the early Space Program. The whole movie is mostly Hollywood dreaming up a little digs against white people about how racist they were in 1961. I remember 1961, I was 13 years old. There was racism with but nothing like the movie portrays. It takes place in Florida and Florida in those days was a lot of people from the north who came down there to work for NASA. Everywhere the black women turn in this movie there's some white guy trying to beat them down. There's a whole room set aside for the 'colored' math people and they're all women. 30 or 40 women and not a single man among them. The only black men we see in this movie are in the private sector not in NASA. In those days we had to shop downtown because that's where all the department stores were and we always saw black people there and nobody was treating them any differently than anybody else. White people were not going out of their way to avoid them. Even in the South where they had blatant segregation blacks and whites mostly got along, in fact people who were living down there say they got along better in those days than they do now.

Are you saying that the blacks have had it easy all along, that there was no need for Rosa Parks to do what she did?

Get a grip...hate lives today, let alone yesterday.

Hell, Andrew Jackson declared all Native Americans to be "savages," less than human, as justification for stealing their land and exiling / exterminating them.

I may be racist but at least I recognize the humanity and right to equality of all US citizens.

In the sixties the blacks rioted in my then home town, Plainfield NJ: wild times with a cop and some spooks getting whacked: point is, I've seen the hatred first hand and what it inevitably leads to.

In hindsight today I cannot blame the minoities, be they black or red, for being terribly disgruntled and lashing out: they've been dealt a very shitty, oppressive hand.

Quote: missedhervee

Are you saying that the blacks have had it easy all along, that there was no need for Rosa Parks to do what she did?
.

All I'm saying is that it might have been bad but it was never as bad as they like to make out today. They make it look like every white person in the United states hated blacks and it wasn't that way at all. Some did, just like today. Most people didn't have time or interest to put a whole lot of effort into it. I had a black guy who was one of my drivers when I had the cab company who was always moaning and groaning about how the white guy had kept him down all his life. Like we sit around thinking about them all day long and how we can screw them up. One day I told him that it's even worse than he thinks. Not only do we not sit around all day thinking about them, we rarely think about them at all. We don't give a damn what they do, we have other things in our lives taking up our time. He absolutely didn't believe me, called me a liar, blah blah blah. He wanted to believe his own BS because it gave him an excuse for his life being a failure. Wasn't his fault, blame it on the white man.

I think part of the problem is that the education received by most blacks, esp. those in non-suburban enclaves, is not as good as whites get.

Without a proper foundation / education it is difficult to come to grips with, understand and succeed in today's increasingly complex world.

You are correct that white people typically don't think about blacks, they have other more pressing concerns, but when the subject comes up many if not most whites seem to look down their noses at black people.

Some compare them to gorillas; some recall how we used to own them and feel that makes them somehow superior; most of us have experienced prejudice while growing up, e.g. from our friends and family, and that helps to hard-wire our negative opinion.

Subtle perhaps but quite pernicious.

If you were to ask people what was the highest grossing movie, the biggest box office hit of 1974 almost nobody would get it right. It was Blazing Saddles. A movie that would never get made today and if it was no movie theater would show it. That's because things are far more racist now in this country then they were 50 years ago. I saw Blazing Saddles in the theater and it was packed and everybody, blacks included, thought it was hilarious. If there was a movie like that today I would be too terrified to see it in a movie theater, I'd be afraid I'd get knifed in the parking lot by angry African-Americans. There are YouTube channels where people in their twenties watch hits from the past that they've never seen and critique them as it goes along. Movies like Gone with the Wind, and Jaws, and Forrest Gump. I saw this couple watching Blazing Saddles the other day and they lasted about 15 minutes before they turned it off in disgust. They were very nervous watching it they said because it was so Politically Incorrect.

People like to think we've made advances in racism and we have not at all. I've been paying attention since the mid 60s and I've never seen racism like this before. Movies and TV shows bend over backwards not to be racist but in doing so they're more racist than ever. Comedians are afraid to make jokes. Accusing somebody of being racist is the absolute worst thing you can do now. People walk on eggshells trying not to offend anyone and what they end up doing is making race differences super important. It's having the opposite effect of what's intended.

I watch a lot of police bodycam videos on YouTube because there's so many of them, hundreds if not thousands. And they encounter problems with a lot of white people but there are far more black people in these videos than any other race. So of course the people who run these channels get accused of racism when all they're doing is showing reality. The truth is 37% of jail and prison populations in the United states are African Americans and they only make up 12% of the population. 68% of the people who have life sentences in prisons are African-Americans. That's just the reality of it but you can't show it without being called a racist. People under 40 have no idea what it's like to live in a country that isn't politically correct.

Quote: Evenbob

People like to think we've made advances in racism and we have not at all. I'

Oh, I don't know about that.

Seems we've "made advances" since this former blockbuster:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTURrbbXA14

I'm talking about advances since the 1970s when Blazing Saddles came out. People think we've we're much less racist now and we aren't, we're more racist.

Quote: Evenbob

I'm talking about advances since the 1970s when Blazing Saddles came out. People think we've we're much less racist now and we aren't, we're more racist.

Yes, I'd agree that "we," i.e. baby boomers are no less racist than before, but based on what I see younger people these days seem more tolerant and inclusive than the boomers.

My grandson is less overtly racist than my son: I suspect things will get better with each succeeding generation.

Quote: missedhervee

Yes, I'd agree that "we," i.e. baby boomers are no less racist than before, but based on what I see younger people these days seem more tolerant and inclusive than the boomers.

My grandson is less overtly racist than my son: I suspect things will get better with each succeeding generation.

Categorizing and generalizing is how we make sense of things. If you were attacked by the first and second dog you ever saw, you’d have a fairly strong reaction to the next one you saw even if it was friendly. And if you made a strong opinion about all dogs from those first two experiences, you’d have made a bad conclusion.

So, anyway, the process that makes us make too generalized conclusions isn’t going away. So, unless something fundamental changes about the way we experience and learn it ‘s always something that will have to be managed.

Quote: missedhervee

Yes, I'd agree that "we," i.e. baby boomers are no less racist than before, but based on what I see younger people these days seem more tolerant and inclusive than the boomers..

You are absolutely wrong. Being racist consists of being super aware of somebody being a different race than you and that's extremely prevalent now. People will go out of their way and bend over backwards to be polite and act phony just so nobody thinks they're racist. But that itself is racism. It's the epitome of racism. Being non-racist consists of really not caring what race another person is. Not noticing, not caring, not treating them any differently than you treat anybody else. People walk on eggshells now around black people which is racism.