Reparations for slavery...... yay or nay?

[Denilson-The-Comeback]

If America is so racist, then why vote for Obama. Hey, I was more naive then too. After 8 years of Bush I was down with it. Most white people are polite and it is because you take people as individuals. Now if you are going to in swinging telling them that all white people are racist, you won't find politeness. Thus confirming your 'All white people are racist agenda'. Like a broken record, Dennis. Tito why do you keep humoring him?

You are making two mistakes, the first mistake you make and to be honest if you’re looking to understand why discussions between blacks and whites about racism are often difficult, it's often because whites and blacks are often not talking about the same thing.

To whites, racism is seen mostly as individual thing like saying a slur. For blacks, it's that too, but racism namely, is the pattern and practice of policies and social institutions, which have the effect of perpetuating deeply embedded structural inequalities between people on the basis of race. It's the experience of systematized discrimination in housing, employment, schools or the justice system. It's the knowledge that one’s entire group is under suspicion, at risk of being treated negatively because of stereotypes held by persons with the power to act on the basis of those beliefs.

To blacks racism is systemic. To whites, it's purely personal.

I suppose these differences make sense. Whites have not been the targets of systemic racism, so it is much easier for you to view the matter in personal terms.

Second mistake you make is thinking that racism is an angry thing. We don't need politeness. Black ppl need justice.

Polite people change nothing. They never have and they never will. Nice polite white people were the ones who didn’t own black folks during the period of enslavement but also didn’t raise their voices against the ones who did. Polite white people are the ones who didn’t spit on sit-in demonstrators but also had no problem spending money with businesses that had remained segregated all those years.

One can be polite and not see that which is right before them. The officer who killed Eric Garner might be polite. Likewise, the grand jury that decided not to indict the officer and the grand juries all over the USA who rarely send police officers to Shawshank when they kill a black person might well be filled with polite people.

So what ?

Their politeness made them watch an officer kill a man who posed no threat to him, no charging him like a bull, or as Darren Wilson put it to justify his killing of Mike Brown, like “a demon.” So too, I suspect there may be at least a few polite white folks on that grand jury outside of Dayton that refused to indict the officer who killed John Crawford in the Walmart there.

Polite white people can watch cold blooded murder on video—a video that completely contradicts what the officer said about the incident, and also gives the lie to the claims of the possibly nice white man who first alerted police to Crawford’s presence in the store—and still see nothing at all in the way of a crime.

So too, the cop who killed 12-year old Tamir Rice in Cleveland and then lied about it—a lie we can all be quite sure of because that killing too is on tape—might well have been polite. . And those who will seek to rationalize these killing (and there are plenty who do), might be nicer than say, a sadist like Bull Connor.