Dare To Ask Talk And News About Our Differences 
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The scenarios Linda described for Chicago bear little or no relation to the observations underlying the original question – that many middle- to upper-income whites, looking for housing in middle- to upper-income, stable, predominantly white neighborhoods, refuse to purchase an otherwise very desirable home when it is realized that the home is owned by a black. These are not neighborhoods in transition, there is no erosion of property values through white flight or properties being put up for rent without any continuing landlord investment in upkeep, nor is there crime or any of the negatives Linda conjectured. Everything about the neighborhoods and homes is appealing to the white buyer until he/she realizes the home is owned by a black. The attitude is thus much deeper than Linda’s explanation suggests, and there is certainly no more of a basis for holding blacks responsible for whites having this attitude than there is for holding blacks responsible for white racism itself.
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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States,One realtor I’ve known for years confirms that many whites refuse to knowingly buy a house from blacks if the whites intend to live in the house versus holding it as an investment. He noted that this attitude is less rampant today than several years ago. I know of one black family who claims to have lost a sale when an anxious potential white buyer visited the property and realized that the owner was black. The prospective buyer apparently refused to even enter the house. The number of whites who hold this attitude is likely a large subset of the many whites who refuse to live next door to or on the same street as blacks, who refuse to patronize black-owned businesses or who refuse to work for a black. (Several white nursing assistants responding to newspsper advertisement I placed over the years for home companions to a home bound relative rejected the job, saying they could not work for a black, even though the pay and working conditions were excellent). One suspects that for these people, the idea of buying a house from, living next to, patronizing a business of, or working for someone to whom they’ve been led to feel superior is just too undermining and creates too many personal conflicts.
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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States,If judging people on what race they are never crosses Rob’s mind, he is to be both commended and recognized as a truly exceptional American. Our national history and psyche have been so infused with race that it is diffiicult to see how any engaged American could possibly escape it. To deny the fact of such influences is to deny one of America’s most profound realities. This denial can invite skewed perceptions, such as ‘race relations seem to be going great.’ Perennially, race relations in America have been substantially lousy. Mean, ugly and deathly things have happened in the name of, or because of, race. The only way of getting around that fact is to ignore it. While basking in that fact is non-productive, only through understanding it, its myriad manifestations and its consequences do we stand any chance of getting out of our debilitating racial rut.
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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States,Lord, Lord, K.J. Give us a break. The poster didn’t say ‘all’ nor did he say ‘most’. He said ‘many’! Such supersensitivity seems to border on paranoia. ‘Several’ is more than two. ‘Many’ is more than several and less than ‘most’. One is hardly ever wrong in using it in quantifying general human involvement in almost any behavior. The issue is why the subject behavior seems to be pronounced among whites. You are justified in your reaction to the poster’s accusing ‘many whites’ only if you know the behavior of all whites and that no number of them satisfying the poster’s definition of ‘many’ can be found behaving as described. I am pretty convinced that you cannot do that. So one wonders if yours is not a visceral reaction to any accusation of blacks be it against ‘one’, ‘several’ or ‘many’ whites. None of the responses from whites in this thread really address the primary question. It seems either a peculiar state of denial (a type of sweeping under the rug) or that no whites, willing to comment, feel that the poster’s question is valid. Both senarios are equally incredible. All crimes have perpetrators and victims. This crime of crimes, victimizing generations of blacks and benefitting generations of whites, seems to be one where too many whites feel that the criminals and their beneficiaries should go free or pay no prices, an attitude akin to that of most criminals. I am willing to say to ALL whites out there that MOST blacks feel the way the poster feels, growing largely out of their experiences, and the question deserve better responses than those given so far.
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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States,It is right to blame if the blame is right! When your family came in the 1940s, this was already a wealthy country made largely so by its exploitation of blacks. Cotton was king then, the defining economy of the deep South, a major contributor to the gross national product. It had been built on the exploitation of blacks since slavery. Without blacks, there would have been no Memphis, New Orleans or Atlanta nor a Mississippi or Alabama (aside from some steel works in the Birmingham area) to speak of, nor a single wealthy southerner whose wealth derived from cotton. In the Carolinas it was tobacco, rice and cotton with the same story of black exploitation feeding white wealth.
So America was largely what she was in the 1940s because of her exploitation of blacks. By partaking of the benefits of a society so sustained by exploitation, you in fact participate in that exploitation. Any Europeans (others were not welcomed here) accepting America’s welcome without working to eleminate that exploitation contributed to its continuation.
The moment your family stepped off the boat here, they had benefits secured by the color of their skin, regardless of whether you were raised to think white or not. Those benefits had been denied to blacks here for 320 years and continued to be denied for another 30.
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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States,Ken, the very problems you see as needing addressing, ‘school violence, our children’s future, our moral decay’, are rooted in our past, ‘One-on-one’ approaches in particular which ignore or discount that fact only perpetuate if not feed the problems. We are no more violent, or immoral that we have been in the past, just hypocriticaly dishonest, and totally void of any long-term and most short-term memory. The violence and immorality of slavery, Jim Crow, organized crime, racial hatred, discrimination and bigotry, religious self righteousness and the pathological greed which has bled off so much of our national wealth into the coffers of so few are important ingredients in the crucible mix that defines us today. We cannot escape this by just ignoring it, for we are defined by it!. How can we not really see this? The sad penchant of too many Americans for over glorifying our few good deeds, too quickly sweeping the many bad deeds under the rug, and believing we can solve a problem without adequately understanding its cause is nearsighted.
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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States,AMEN, Jennifer! This holier-than-thou/I-am-better-than-you attitude which seems to be all too prevalent among some Christian sects is doing as much as anything I know to give Christianity a bad name. It is regressive and thin-minded, and, in fact, mocks many of basic, fundamental tenants which have sustained Christianity through the ages.
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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States,The colonial English’s views of blacks and the Irish are not just nuanced version of each other. The Irish and English lack that most characterizing attribute of blacks, melanin, which for the English was so primitive a delineator as to challenge their willingness to accept blacks’ humanness. This goes well beyond arguments of cultural or genetic superiority to questions of commonality of species. In the English’s eye and words, the African’s blackness, his presumed lack of intelligence, his fecundity, and excessive sexual endowments rendered him almost inhuman. Many other whites bought into that view. While the English labelled others they subjugated or dispossessed as uncivil and savage, they rarely used these labels to describe blacks, for these are human descriptors and humanness among blacks the English held in doubt. Thus it was possible to hold blacks as (chattel) slaves versus (indentured) servants. No nuance here! Stark black and white! Black suffering, often at the hands of the Irish, has an integrity distinct from what the Irish or anyone else may have endured. Nuancing and thus devaluing these distinctions are precursors to eventual denials that the distinctions exist. A travesty.
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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States,Something just doesn’t compute here. If, as you say, ‘sexual expression is for the people God intended sex for, married people’, then why would God have invested such intense sexual drives and urges in, say, pubescent teens who most Western societies contend are too young for marriage. Why would a non-vindictive God punish innocent youth by imbuing it with such powerful drives which, by your argument, must/should go unrequited for up to a decade? One questions whether God’s intent is really what you claim it to be and whether this is just another example of our confusing the ways of God and man.
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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States,The reasons go way back to how the English chose to view Africans and themselves in relation to Africans during the centuries of English exploration and exploitation in Africa. The English took the differences in color and culture of Africans as proof of the African’s inferiority to the English, going so far as to describe Africans as ‘brutish’, ‘bestial’ or ‘beastly.’ Propaganda to this effect was ruthless and relentless for generations, making it easier to rationalize enslaving blacks and treating them as ‘beasts of burden.’ The English saw themselves, whites, as umblemished personifications of purity and perfection. They saw blacks as the embodiment of imperfection, almost unhuman. We are the benefactors of those attitudes. They became so ingrained so early in this country that the framers of our constitution could not see blacks being counted as full persons. For such mindsets any mixture of whites with blacks produced an impure product. That such mindsets have held powerful sway in this country is evident through the embarrassing array of laws produced under Jim Crow, some declaring that any ‘traceable’ evidence of ‘black blood’ (even when just hearsay) rendered one black, and by implication, impure. (It also meant that somebody had committed a crime.) For though the product may not have been as black as the blackest, such products were all viewed, and continue to be viewed by many, as shades of black and therefore impure. For that mindset, white has no shades.
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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States,John, while having a culture intact for 3000 years may understandably feed a sense of cultural superiority, this does not necessarily translate into nor has China espoused a belief in genetic superiority, a uniquely white belief. That a few whites may not hold this belief is not especially noteworthy when viewing the oppression visited upon mankind by the legions of whites who do. Historically, Taiwan was Chinese before 1949, and Japan encroached on China more during the last 150 years than China on Japan during the last 500. China’s most far flung claim to lands not contiguous with its mainland is to the uninhabited Spratly Islands (compare that to the Dutch alone), yet China was trading with Africa without exploit or plunder before Columbus was born, before the Treaty of Tordesillas divided between Spain and Portugal suspected lands thousands of miles away and unseen by either, and well before England began its rampage. Of all the intruders in China’s history (including the Khan and portions of the Manchus occupations), none seems more strident or greed driven than the Europeans forcing themselves onto China in the 19th century. That they viewed Europeans like other ‘barbarians’ from China’s past says more about European behavior than any Chinese sense of genetic superiority. Arguably, the cumulative misbehavior of the Chinese over the millennium pales in comparison to that of the least egregious among the English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Germans and American during just the last 300 years. Painting Chinese behavior with the same brush of marauding greed appropriate to so much white behavior profoundly misrepresents history.
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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States,Ebonics and American English have a co-shared beginning. If Ebonics is grounded in the mentality of the black slave, then American English is surely no less grounded in the mentality of the white enslaver, the genocidal exterminator, the lyncher and the dispossessing thief. If Ebonics is to be discarded because of its presumed characterizing mentality, only the most stupid of convertees would then embrace American English, given its characterizing mentality. One could give this as the reason Ebonics speakers are not enamored of standard English, except that it would be almost as off-base as Richard’s arguments. So let’s get back to reality.
All languages have varieties. These evolve when people are isolated by geosocial barriers forcing linguistic development along different lines. Everyone speaks at least one such variety. In cases of extreme isolation, two varieties can become effectively foreign to each other. Such varieties do not develop to aid communications between the isolated groups. That is what formal instruction in the standard is supposed to accomplish.
Experts have argued that Ebonics, one of the most distinct varieties of American English, presents “systematic interferences” in mastering standard English, and that attempts to provide standard English instruction to Ebonics speakers without taking this interference into account is neither pedagogically sound nor likely to succeed. Approaching Ebonics as just “bad English” is as misguided and counterproductive as approaching Italian as bad Latin. Persisting at ignoring the experts while continuing to badmouth Ebonics smacks of nothing less than a desire, if not a conspiracy, to continue the under-education of blacks.
Ebonics thrives because it is linguistically competent, extremely adaptive, its undergirding socioeconomic conditions are intact, and, most importantly, the system for educating students out of its usage effectively reinforces that usage.
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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States,It is not at all clear what you mean by ‘large’ or ‘such large’ and what is the standard or norm by which you make your judgment. If you are using white lips as a standard, one could ask why many whites seem to have no lips at all. It could indeed be that since we all are out of Africa, fuller lips, obviously fuller than your standard, are in fact the norm. In that case, ‘Why do many whites have such abnormally thin to nonexistent lips’ becomes the more appropriate question. Right?
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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States,It is a white thing. And it is time to face up to it. It will continue to be so until the very unlikely event of some non-white group coming along and behaving as whites have behaved worldwide. This is quite unlikely, because the drive for domination and hegemony that has characterized white behavior for most of the millennium has been propelled by a uniquely white presumption of genetic superiority and, most importantly, a belief, shaped and fed through their religions that whites are pre-ordained to inherit all of the earth as a means of supporting that presumed superiority. Thus the attitude “What is mine is mine and I will keep it, and what is yours is mine if I can get it, and I will get it through any means possible,” which so many see as characterizing white behavior. No other group has displayed such behavior so consistently for so long, nor has any displayed the precursor attitudes of genetic superiority and pre-ordination seen in whites. Historically, that the Chinese once may have seen themselves as centering the universe is not at all unusual for a people with limited or no contacts with the outside world, but the Chinese not only did not infer from that a justification for domination and hegemony; they in fact built a wall around themselves, effectively precluding the possibility.
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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States,The question to Rita seems to be in the same vein and of the same intent as the “collard greens and fried chicken” comments regarding Tiger Woods. They reflect nothing about curiosity or interest in one’s culture. They say “you may be here but you are still not one of us” (who are above tripe, tongue, collard greens and fried chicken). Rita’s response probably helped the person think more about the potential consequences of words or actions before speaking or acting. This has got to be a good thing and is necessary if one ever expects to relate to anyone other than a cultural clone.
Societies where people are not at each other’s throats are largely so because individuals begin in childhood to learn through instruction and healthy socialization that feelings can be hurt intentionally or through marauding insensitive behavior, and that it is far more civil and less painful to moderate the behavior than to require those who suffer the brunt of such behavior to be “less sensitive” to it. To say “I did not intend to insult” does not change the sting of it, and it is the sting that can drive otherwise well-tempered people to ill-tempered actions far more consequential than anything Rita may have done.
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Name : Floyd L., Gender : M, Age : 59, City : Memphis, State : TN, Country : United States,
