Re: But these days [racism] isn't anywhere nearly as prevalant as it used to be. These days it is usually structural.
Indeed. Racism in the US used to be Terrorism --racial terrorism. Remember that people used to throw a picnic every time a "nigger" got lynched...(*) US racism hit the bottom of human vileness and hatred in the days of Jim Crow --it could hardly have sunk lower. It could only improve from the dark age of record KKK membership (in the 1920s/30s), the dixiecrats (1950s), the state-ordered assassinations of M.L. King, Malcom X, Bobby Kennedy, etc. It's no feat for the US to have moved itself out of such a cesspool....
(*) liu.edu
Re: Blacks, on the average, tend to be poorer and less educated. Those two things weigh more heavily against them than their skin color.
You should construe it the other way around: why are African-Americans less educated, hence poorer (as wage earners) in the first place? Do you intimate that there's no racism in US schools/universities? Racist whites don't work as teachers and professors in US schools and universities? There ain't racist white students? Racism breaks out only outside schools and universities?
Re: If the US were as racist as many Europeans believe, then explain Oprah(please) and all of the black sports stars, entertainers, Colin Powell and other powerful blacks.
The problem is that when you balance those success stories with the dismal statistics pertaining to the African-American minority as a whole you get a rather bleak picture: over 60% of all inmates are black, unemployment of blacks is in the 25%-75% range, same with healthcare deficiencies, etc, etc.
Somehow, token black celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Colin Powell, and Condi Rice are counter-productive in that their very successes are instrumentalized by the US power structure to silence the vast, overwhelming majority of "losers". Every time discriminated blacks complain "righteous whites" dismiss them with fairy tales about Colin Powell, Ken Chenault (**) or Dick Parsons... Hence the very success of ONE African American is used as a decoy to distract from, and dismiss, the fact that MILLIONS of blacks are denied any chance to succeed --"structurally", as you put it. Eventually, the blame is pinned on the individual, on personal failures or shortcomings. If thirty million blacks can't make it in the US --the only country on earth where everybody can succeed provided s/he tries hard enough-- then it's not because of some structural, inner flaw in the US fabric, it's not because there's a pervasive and deep-seated racism in US society. No, it's because INDIVIDUALLY each and every one of those thirty million blacks is but a misfit... The failure of any one of them can be broken down to some personal flaw --be it laziness, crime-proneness, or a lack of skills/education. Indeed, thirty million different, peculiar, unique, reasons to fail in America.
Gus
(**) usatoday.com |
