Walt, how do you feel in terms of question V??
I've grown up black in America, and been around just about every level of all kinds of Americans of all colors and creeds - so nothing any black Coli poster could say would make me feel less sympathetic toward the contempt blacks face in this country.
I do think the reality of how segregated our country has always been - despite the romantic notion of America as a melting pot - handicaps all people when it comes to discussing race. One of the things most black people don't realize is that most whites are too busy with their own lives to be oppressing anyone. White families are dealing with making ends meet, losing relatives to cancer, stressing over mortgages, failing marriages, getting their children into college, working long hours at thankless, unfulfilling jobs... when they hear aggressive accusations about how racist they are, they tune the fukk out.
We've reached a really depressing point in this country where most whites take an ahistorical view of racism, and militantly ignore context because they're tired of feeling attacked; most blacks, on the other hand, are so frustrated with the "same old, same old" that they've lost patience and lash out at white people as a monolith. Which leads to both sides viewing the worst representations of each other as an accurate gauge of the general population.
I remember Mos Def rapping on "Thieves in the Night,
I find this depressing there's never no in-between: we're either nikkas or kings; we're either bytches or queens... In the same vein, there doesn't seem to be much of an in-between in most minds and hearts anymore, race discussion tends to go the way of overzealous baseball debates: people choose a team and they ride for it regardless of nuance.
I also think the end of lawful segregation, while absolutely necessary and correct, hurt blacks by incorporating us into the mainstream, because our images were broadcast widely, and those images tended to be extreme, base, and out of step with our day-to-day lives. So where once you saw blacks being physically terrorized by police and lynch mobs, attacked with dogs and fire-hoses, spit upon by children, you suddenly saw stereotypical images of uncouth blacks flaunting money while celebrating an over-the-top hypersexuality and disregard for what most consider basic decency.
One prominent black academic described the process simply and tragically enough - black people no longer had the moral highground in the eyes of the general public. So whites and others no longer felt compelled to be intimate allies with the black struggle, because it wasn't clear to them anymore that blacks were, in fact, an oppressed, sympathetic cause.
That's the power of media, art, music, propaganda. Also, many groups that were closely allied with blacks were able to assimilate, and once they got what they needed they saw no need to maintain allegiances with blacks. Which is where a lot of tension and resentment began to build between blacks and groups like Jews, for example, in the 70s, in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement.
I think people forget to factor class into the equation, when it's an essential piece. The wealthiest and most powerful and most privileged people in this country, without any fukking doubt, are white people. Still, the wealthy and powerful elite of this country is a small % of the overall population. So when regular white people, who struggle and scrape by and just want to enjoy this brief life we get, start getting attacked and called hateful and racist and "CACs," their hearts grow colder and their minds more tired, and eventually they'd rather not engage the issues of racism at all.
And the fact that so many whites seem to tune out the shyttiness that racism has wrought and still continues to deliver to black life, blacks start to view whites in general as moral monsters, because indifference often borders or hatred and contempt from the perspective of those being figuratively ignored.
I guess I made this thread because I still believe there are bridges that can be built and common decency that can transcend the muck our society is in... because I believe in the individual, separate and apart from groups. And I like to know what everyone's perceptions are, and how they differ, and why, etc. So, yeah, thanks everyone for posting. I just use it as food for thought.
