It's amazing how empowering reading is. Benjamin Franklin used to stay up reading the books dropped off at his brother's printing press, and Warren Buffet supposedly reads 5 hours a day as part of his standard work schedule. Forget 10,000 hours, I'd like to know how many words the most successful people have read in their lifetime.
“Learning to Read” excerpt from The Autobiography of Malcolm X
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Re: “Learning to Read” excerpt from The Autobiography of Malcolm X
#162For those who feel uncomfortable with Malcolm's former creed that white people are devils and the black race is superior to all others, please do take note of the fact that he did convert to mainstream Islam near the end of his life thus disavowing any such racism or black supremacy. As Malcolm so eloquently stated: "America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the…
> You see, orthodox Islam, from the very beginning, espoused equality for all races. In fact, race in Islam is an inconsequential matter. Oh, is this why Muslim Arabs engaged in the enslaving, transportation, and sale of 10–18 million black Africans over the course of 13 centuries (650 AD – 1900 AD)?
You seem to have misunderstood my claim. I was comparing the creed of orthodox Islam to that of the NOI. The NOI's official doctrine is clearly racist but you cannot point to a single tenet of orthodox of Islam which would indicate that Islam espouses racism.
Re: “Learning to Read” excerpt from The Autobiography of Malcolm X
#163Everyone should really just read the entire Autobiography. http://www.amazon.com/The-Autobiography-Malcolm-Told-Haley/d... Also, they should spell "Malcolm" correctly. :)
Is it still worth reading for somebody who despise the man? Both what he was (a robber) and what he became?
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Re: “Learning to Read” excerpt from The Autobiography of Malcolm X
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't politely ask your oppressors to give you the rights they have taken away from you.
Why not? It worked for King, it worked for Ghandi. Do you really think there could have been something like the civil rights laws -- born primarily of white people -- if the primary black person had been X and not King?
Perhaps it worked for King because the alternative to King was X?
Re: “Learning to Read” excerpt from The Autobiography of Malcolm X
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why are you not seeing the word "subordinates" in the US Civil Rights Commission definition of racism. People are subordinated when the law fails to protect them. The law can fail to protect you due to corruption, bad management, or institutional racism. If you are white and the law fails you I'm saying it is not institutional racism.
The difference here is one of degree, not kind, as institutional racism is built out of a whole lot of individual racism. Anyone who mistreats someone because of the color of their skin or defends the practice is doing wrong and I see no value in defending that. Standing against individual racism is a necessary part of standing against institutional racism and I don't think a reasonable person can condemn one but not…
A difference of kind is evident when people say racism is the same whether referring to racial prejudice by a Black US person or White US person. People are using a 100 year old dictionary definition to say racism is just racial prejudice. Wikipedia's first sentence says it is racial prejudice AND discrimination. While the US Civil Rights Commission is stronger in saying you have to also subordinate someone based on race. You want to say racism is derived from everyone's individual racial prejudice but you miss the economic exploitative motives from 200 years of slavery and group behavior. So let us be clear it is not just personal racial prejudice behind racism. To subordinate someone you really are talking about racial prejudice and discrimination with power backing it based on institutional racism, hence power. Otherwise you are talking about racially based prejudice that is based on the individual and not the group or its historical circumstances. People here want to address racism by lifestyle choices and racism is not fixed by lifestyle but by law, institutional changes, and starting with the recognition of what racism actually is.
The newspapers are not going to report on a street riot if I go out by myself on the street and break windows and set fires. To report me as a street rioter there should be a street riot which makes me part of a group dynamic. Racism is a group dynamic effort to oppress another racial group. If someone is not a street rioter without a group dynamic of street rioting how can someone be racist without a group dynamic of racism to oppress another racial group. To have a group dynamic of racism to oppress another racial group you need power.
Re: “Learning to Read” excerpt from The Autobiography of Malcolm X
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are many useful things to be talked about. Individual prejudices, individual behaviors, and self-reinforcing societal power systems all get called "racism". Quibbling over which arbitrary word is bound to which concept looks like an avoidance of actually grappling with the issues.
The issue at hand is that claiming that only white people can be racist is itself a racist statement according to the traditional definition of racism. Even with moo's definition of racism, the statement cannot be true in states where non-whites are the majority and hold power. Again, I am not claiming that whites face racial oppression across the US. That's silly. This is whole thread only exists because of people t…
It's almost like you didn't read my comment at all.
Re: “Learning to Read” excerpt from The Autobiography of Malcolm X
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference here is one of degree, not kind, as institutional racism is built out of a whole lot of individual racism. Anyone who mistreats someone because of the color of their skin or defends the practice is doing wrong and I see no value in defending that. Standing against individual racism is a necessary part of standing against institutional racism and I don't think a reasonable person can condemn one but not…
A difference of kind is evident when people say racism is the same whether referring to racial prejudice by a Black US person or White US person. People are using a 100 year old dictionary definition to say racism is just racial prejudice. Wikipedia's first sentence says it is racial prejudice AND discrimination. While the US Civil Rights Commission is stronger in saying you have to also subordinate someone based on…
You may not intend this, but you have been implying that racial prejudice is somehow tolerable.
Your down votes are proof that it is not and that we must judge people not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character, as a wiser man than me once said.
Re: “Learning to Read” excerpt from The Autobiography of Malcolm X
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your concept of hatred here is what I would describe as self defense. I draw a distinction between racial prejudice - that is, prejudging people based on their race - and racism - which I understand as a social-political-economic system of institutionalized racial oppression. Racial prejudice is an order of magnitude less interesting to me than racial oppression. I am a person of color and I know that people see me a…
White people can and do experience this. I have experienced harassment by blacks because I am white. Never a physical attack, but certainly verbal slurs and taunting. Am I therefore morally justified to have a predjudicial opinion of blacks, because a few anonymous ones have harassed me? There isn't any institionalized discrimination in the USA any longer. There's a perception of it, but that's largely self reinforce…
White people can and do experience racial prejudice in America, but we do not experience institutional racism, which is the working definition of "racism" for the author of the comment you replied to.
> There isn't any institionalized discrimination in the USA any longer. There's a perception of it, but that's largely self reinforced.
Institutional racism is alive and well here; I'm surprised to be the first one to respond to your remarks stating otherwise. There are many, many studies that show a marked disparity between arrest rates, conviction rates, and incarceration rates for whites and blacks in America. This disparity exists virtually across the board and for crimes which we know are committed in equal amounts by both groups of people such as marijuana use (in fact, whites smoke more weed but are still arrested less frequently for it). Regarding employment, there are also plenty of studies which show that job applications with "black-sounding" names get far fewer callbacks than those with "white-sounding" names, regardless of what else is written on the application.
The difference between people judging someone based on race versus all of those other things that you mention is that in the other cases, society has not been shaped so that "haters of feature set X" are pretty exclusively the people in power, so e.g. bald people are not consistently discriminated against at every turn. This is at least in part what is meant by institutional racism: the random person on the street has little effect on anybody[1], but when people with the same attitude have the power to arrest you, to deny you a loan, to make your life difficult in any number of ways, the result is a hostile environment that is supported and maintained by the institutions that house such people and support their discriminatory behavior by tolerating its emergence in their official capacities.
Institutional racism can be difficult for members of the dominant group to acknowledge or even see. I have only started to become attuned to it myself over the past few years, and I still don't have a very sharp or complete picture of it. It is usually far more subtle than calling someone a name or making a disparaging remark: you will be treated with a veneer of politeness as your concerns are summarily dismissed. It's easy for someone from the dominant group to come up with excuses as to why a particular act is not an example of institutional racism instead of giving credence to the collected experiences of those who are on the receiving end[2]. If you are genuinely interested in investigating and understanding the phenomenon, I'd recommend looking at the statistics before talking to people about it for precisely this reason: what seems innocuous in isolation looks more sinister when you begin to understand the scale at which it is happening.
This comment is not going to change anybody's mind, and that's okay. I just didn't want to let that statement stand uncontested any longer than it already has.
[1] Though, really, when the random person on the street becomes many or most random people on the street, the effect can be pretty devastating as well. [2] Some are of the opinion that this tendency is itself an expression of racism, effectively assuming that the victims are mistaken or lying while the perpetrators are assumed to be innocent. I am not sure if it is a subtle racism or if it is simply hard to put faith in such a vastly different outcome that developed from a familiar situation. Having exhibited this behavior myself on more than one occasion, I'm sort of invested in believing that it is the latter.