re: #260 RogueOne

Obviously I disagree. We’d be having the same discussion if gingrich had said “he’s articulate but we don’t need someone who can read a teleprompter”. IMO, every criticism or slam on the president is met with cries of “racism!”. Don’t like the HCR bill? Racist. Don’t like the stimulus packages? Racist. Don’t like the auto company buyouts?…you know where I’m going with all this.

My problem is we read every day about actual victims of racism. People pulled over for DWB, black kids beaten and tased for minding their own business, people tossed in jail for much longer terms for selling crack instead of cocaine. All this crying wolf denigrates actual victims and diminishes the word “racism”. I mentioned earlier that when you have the incredibly insensitive proclamation by the gov of VA you don’t need to make stuff up to show that we haven’t come as far as a lot of us would have liked.

The problem I have with this line of argument is that if racism doesn’t rise to a certain level of violence or exclusion, then it’s not “real” racism. (And naturally, anyone calls out racism below that externally imposed line is crying wolf, playing the race card or just plain making it up.) A few decades ago, people could have said with just as much justification that excluding people from jobs or housing on racial grounds was trivial when compared to lynchings or civil rights abuses, and calling job related discrimination racism denigrated “real” victims.

And no, we haven’t come as far as we would have liked, but I think many people believe that we have come a lot further than we have. There’s a real discomfort in acknowledging how deeply racist attitudes are ingrained in speech, stereotypes and culture, and it’s a lot easier to say that those things are made up.