Maybe. Or maybe the point is that for some people systemic racism isn't just another abstract problem that doesn't really affect them every single day of their lives.
It seems to me that's what's happening in this thread is privileged people with no experience of systemic racism telling Filipino veterans how they ought to feel about the country they fought for. The people with the concrete experience are speaking, and HN commenters are telling them they're bad and wrong and should be more mad. Seems strange, in light of the prevalence of the word 'listen' of late.
Seems like an odd place to put this comment. Nobody's talking about Filipino vets on this sub-thread, much less how they should feel or who is bad or wrong or should be mad. Am I missing subtext?
It seems to me that the thrust of this sub-thread is a debate over narratives. One narrative is "America is basically good, but it has serious problems, and we're working on fixing them". Another narrative is "America is basically bad, we should burn it to the ground and start over". Neither of these narratives are right or wrong, because all narratives are false. But I think one of them is more useful than the other.
And can I argue against your strawman as well, or will that disrupt your momentum?
This subthread started with "Well, ACTUALLY, if you look at the statistics, state sponsored/condoned violence against black people in the US barely exists and all this kerfuffle is an overreaction"
That's not admitting a serious problem, and calling it out as revisionist BS is not saying we should burn the country to the ground.
Oh, OK - I misspoke. It was the sub-subthread that started off cherrypicking statistics.
But if we're going to be pedantic it's worth noting that tearing down the things that you don't like is selective whereas burning everything to the ground is much more indiscriminate and there's a big difference there.
To put it another way, calling for the razing of America is totally unreasonable. But such calls are in actual fact extremely uncommon.
Using statistics directly responsive to the claim is cherrypicking?
It seems like your issue is with the claim, not the statistics. Being murdered by the police is not a central example of the problems of black people and holding it up as such will only cause people to address what you claim is the problem rather than what the actual problems are.
> But if we're going to be pedantic it's worth noting that tearing down the things that you don't like is selective whereas burning everything to the ground is much more indiscriminate and there's a big difference there.
When "things you don't like" consists of the likes of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, that's pretty hard to distinguish from burning the American system to the ground.
That's your conception of your country? I'm sorry to have to break this to you, but they're all dead now. All of the slave owners and all of the slaves are dead. Their children are dead. Their children's children are dead. It has been seven generations.
Or are we cherrypicking the past for things that mean something today as well?
> Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson is dead. Independence is not.
So, even though his children are dead and their children are dead, it's almost as if what he did in his life had ramifications through the ages and still shapes society today. I'd never considered that possibility. I wonder if there are other situations where that applies?
The obvious difference being that "all men are created equal" is something we should want to preserve whereas slavery is something we should want to destroy forever.
The point of his use of those statistics was to say that this phenomenon, while bad, is a small part of what the United States is. I didn't read it as minimizing the issue, as such. It's certainly one of the biggest issues we face today. And that's a great thing - that one of our biggest issues is such a small statistic. It certainly hasn't always been that way. Our biggest issues used to be much larger statistics. Slaves were more than half the population in some states. The point wasn't a dismissal of police violence as a non-issue, the point was that a reduction of the US to that fact is not a useful framing. Not for the victims, or for anyone else.
Hubris and the unwillingness to comprehend real problems and the desire to cover them up with "SHUT UP IT"S GREAT!" won't go down well.
What I'm seeing is more apologism for wrongful historical actions, perhaps in RESPONSE to what you described, but at this point it's become an "AMERICA IS GREAT SO SHUT UP"
Nobody is saying "America is great shut up". America has very serious problems, both currently and historically. The point of this piece and the other commenters in this thread in defending America is not that we should ignore the problems. It's that we should work towards fixing them in a positive way, not a "fuck America" sort of way.
It's not "SHUT UP IT"S GREAT!" so much as pointing out specifically why the claim that it isn't great is wrong, to which the responses were a moving of the goalposts to some other, generic wrongs against black people that haven't actually been specified and so can't be addressed.
Patriotism is just as absurd as any other dogma to a person who doesn't share it. I think the US has done some great things as have most countries. It's when you start blindly believing it's perfect that it seems less than rational.
> generic wrongs against black people that haven't actually been specified
> It's when you start blindly believing it's perfect that it seems less than rational.
Who said it was perfect?
> Surely you don't need to hear the list again?
Is there somewhere they keep this list? I keep getting partial versions.
There's the ones where we list bad laws that haven't been on the books in many years, the ones (like police murders) that do literally happen but are dramatically less common than the level of attention would lead you to believe, the thing where people try to claim things with aggregate statistics without adjusting for confounders...
I'm sure there are some legitimate ones, what I can't understand is why the focus is regularly on all these ones that evaporate upon examination.
Maybe it's the toxoplasma thing, which I can't link to because SSC is gone. :(
It's nothing personal, merely an observation of the phenomena that it's hard/ uncomfortable to see the unfairness of a system of which you are clearly a benefactor.
The idea that everybody's equal starting... now! is lovely if you can ignore the fact that some people have a 500 year head start.
So if you understand how historic injustice leads to present day disadvantage then there's no point distracting from the discussion by claiming to be bewildered by the fundamentals.
I agree that class distinctions are becoming less useful except if you define class in terms of opportunity in which case it's hard to argue that it and race live in two completely separate petri dishes.
The point is that, for largely existing political coalition reasons, people are trying to make a class problem be about race because it makes it align with the base of a particular political party. Police unions lean Republican, so Republicans have a political need to defend them, so if you can pit black people against the police then you can get them to vote the way you want without actually giving them anything. And then you don't have to worry about them getting together with poor white people to ask why housing costs so much and there isn't more economic opportunity for non-megacorps.
