<p>Again, lkf, I don't get your argument against my own points. You seem to be focused on whether more black or whites are recruited athletically. And you seem to be coming down on the side of greater black recruitment. This opposes AdOfficer's info, and I just consider her a reputable source, & I wouldn't have any authenticity for a diff. position regarding the recruitment of athletes. (Athletic recruitment of any kind is a hook, whether that's white or black recruitment. Which is why I agree with, and was similarly going to post an hour ago, what was said in the last sentence of post 219.)</p>
<p>108K Japanese killed by the bomb--even if it were a genocide the number does not compare to Pol Pots 1.6M.</p>
<p>Chart of Worst Genocides in 20th century. Asia, taking it's lead from Stalin (?), has the some of the worst offenders and the highest nubmer of deaths per country--even after discounting Mao's carnage to 20 million dead. Africa has more offenders but fewer deaths than Asia. </p>
<p>Extreme institutional inhumanity has an impact on culture in the generations to follow.<br>
<a href="http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/dictat.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/dictat.html</a></p>
<p>AA is an American attempt to redress the impact of slavery. Personally I applaud the effort--and tolerate the experiments and the mistakes.</p>
<p>Would the Chinese or Japanese attempt to redress the impact of their crimes? It took forever for the Japanese to admit theirs--and I do not believe the correct history is taught in Japanese schools--to this day. Clearly, redressing crimes agaisnt humanity is not part of Chinese or Japanese culture. Is this absence the underlying factor in the fierce objection to AA for AFAms?</p>
<p>So little mention is made of the recent horrors in Asia but in fact, every Chinese national my age and older would have seen terrible terrible wrongs during the cultural revolution. </p>
<p>We were listiening to the Beatles and while the Chinese were running for their lives.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Your gut is serially out-of-date. This is 2007. This is not 1954. Heck, I doubt you were even born at that time. You have absolutely no memory of any governor standing in front of a door and preventing a student from entering the school. All you can do is think, “OMG! My great-great-great-grandfather had a chance to speak up when a racist white man forced a poor old black man to sit in the back of the train, but my great-great-great-grandfather didn’t do anything!
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Fab,</p>
<p>It must be wonderful to think that chnage happens overnight in one fell swoop. When you talk about 1954, it was not our grandparents but rather our parents. Hey, I actually have siblings that were alive and attending school in the south in 1954 where change was still more slow to take place because there was still a tier system between schools in the city and schools in the country where students did not attend school for a good part of the year because they had to harvest the field (Why do you think the school calendar to this day is set where students in the south start in august and finish in may?)</p>
<p>I remember as a child going south (yes my parents are from florida and georgia) when we stopped at the store and you had to enter through the back door in the 60s. I remember segregated fountains. I remember going to high school in NYC in the 70's and having friends/siblings who attended FDR, Sheepshead Bay, New Utrecht, Madision and schools that were in predominately white neighborhoods, that were chased to the bus stop and the train stations on a daily basis. </p>
<p>Young black men are still more targeted on highways (and don't be behind the wheel of a luxury car) and stopped for the sole reason of driving while black. If you think that for one moment that racism does not exist in this country and people are not losing thier lives for nothing more than the color of their skin, I am sure the families of Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Ousmane Zongo, Abner Louima, James Byrd would surely disagree.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Yet, they are also lumped into one group.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>They surely are. To save space and recognize the inherent flaws in grouping people based on race, maybe we should abolish the race box.</p>
<p>cheers,</p>
<p>"Extreme [Asian] institutional inhumanity..."</p>
<p>I'm not going to defend Chairman Mao's legacy. That's the job of the Chinese Communist Party. To say he did terrible things is an understatement. Yet, for you to depict "Asian culture" as institutionally inhumane is, quite frankly, bigoted.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Clearly, redressing crimes agaisnt [sic] humanity is not part of Chinese or Japanese culture.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>In World War II, many Japanese left their infants in China as they scrambled to return home. Did the Chinese who picked these infants up kill them as retribution? Some may have. Most didn't. Most raised them as their own, despite knowing that the Japanese were responsible for nine years of hellish war and suffering in China. Some of these infants, now senior citizens, tried to reunite with their families in Japan through modern technology. Most were snubbed because they had been sinicized and were indistinguishable from other Chinese. For an "institutional[ly] inhumane" culture, cheers, it seems like we wouldn't raise the offspring of our former enemies as our own.</p>
<p>It's rather difficult for an "institutional[ly] inhumane" culture to last 5,000 years. I take your prejudiced and ignorant insult as a compliment.</p>
<p>Cheers: Since we are on subject of human genocides, would you like to guess how many American Indians were exterminated after the arrival of Columbus?</p>
<p>The correct answer is "nearly 100 million -- roughly 95% of the population." </p>
<p>Within a few generations of their first encounter with Europeans, nearly all native people in the Western Hemisphere were exterminated. In terms of the number dead, the destruction of the Indians of the Americas ranks as the largest act of genocide in history</p>
<p>source <a href="http://www.understandingprejudice.org%5B/url%5D">www.understandingprejudice.org</a></p>
<p>
[quote]
If you think that for one moment that racism does not exist in this country and people are not losing thier lives for nothing more than the color of their skin...
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Um, I do not think that. Furthermore, I do not like Asians are exempt from racism. I know what happened to Vincent Lin. I know how our justice system failed his family.</p>
<p>I contested cheers's notion that there is still "so much institutionalized racism" in 2007. (There's certainly some, though, as she demonstrates.) I did not write that I believe racism is dead. It's not. I'm neither white nor black, but in the presence of whites, I've heard many racist jokes and racist comments. While I would prefer that these jokes and comments die altogether, that they are uttered in private now instead of public (as was the case in 1954) constitutes progress in my opinion. We still have much further to go.</p>
<p>I've never heard any racist joke or racist comment against blacks in public. Ever. That's a thing of the past. I've heard plenty of them in the locker room and on bus rides. But you know what? Those are private situations. No one dares to use any racist language in public against blacks anymore. By contrast, the opposite isn't true. I have previously described my lunchroom story where several black students used anti-white racist language without consequence. (Interestingly, they viewed me as white even though I'm obviously not.)</p>
<p>The dream has been deferred. I feel that as a young American, both in age and in heritage, it's my duty to my country to do my part to realize this dream.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I've never heard any racist joke or racist comment against blacks in public. Ever. That's a thing of the past. I've heard plenty of them in the locker room and on bus rides. But you know what? Those are private situations. No one dares to use any racist language in public against blacks anymore.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>This has got to be the most culturally encapsulted statement I have ever read that was written by you. If jokes are told in "private situations" does it make it anymore right (remember that quote evil prevails when good men do nothing, so I guess because it had "Nothing to do with you" and the jokes were not aimed at you then it was all good?).</p>
<p>Are you living under a rock? Do you not watch the national news and it was National News when Michael Richards ranted in his stand up act to a black heckler?</p>
<p>
[quote]
Michael Richards, who played Jerry Seinfeld's eccentric neighbor Kramer on the sitcom "Seinfeld," publicly apologized for racist comments he made in a tirade aimed at some hecklers at a nightclub where he was working as a a stand-up comic. </p>
<p>Appearing on the "Late Show With David Letterman" Monday, the actor spoke live via satellite from Television City, Calif., and fielded questions from Letterman, while in-studio guest Jerry Seinfeld looked on. </p>
<p>"For me to be at a comedy club and flip out and say this crap…" said Richards. "I'm deeply, deeply sorry." </p>
<p>Earlier in the day, as news of Richards' comments hit the web, Seinfeld issued a statement saying he is "sick over this horrible, horrible mistake" and calling Richards' remarks offensive.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Can you say Don Imus and his comments about the Rugters Women's basketball team?</p>
<p>
[quote]
"What is it about Asian history and culture that makes some Asian Americans so resentful --downright bitter--about AA for African Americans?"
[/quote]
America has incurred a debt to a large segment of its population, namely, to blacks; and blacks feel this debt quite acutely. Many Americans understand that as a nation we must repay the debt, not because of guilt, but because it is morally right and healthy for our country in the long run, since it is impossible for a people with such an enormous claim against the country to ever work in comfort and freedom. The comic, Chris Rock, said it quite concisely when after saying he loves America that ‘blacks can’t look at America as other groups do. For blacks, America is the rich uncle who pays for your education, but who also molested you’. As long as this sense of molestation endures, America will be seen by large portions of its population as a pervert, whatever good it does.</p>
<p>Other Americans, especially relative newcomers, do not acknowledge the illness at all. They do not feel the debt because they are not black, have never felt the stigma handed them through American history, the lack of heritage, the pain, shame, fear, isolation and doubt about their place, which doubt persists from centuries of enslavement to this day. And because they cannot sense this, it simply does not exist as far as they are concerned. They in fact will often state that blacks have no cause to sense the debt blacks sense, and they despise blacks for even sensing it. It does not occur to them that something as soul wounding as America’s peculiar version of slavery, and also being subjected by law to the most calloused justifications for that peculiar sort of slavery, can have devastating effects on a people for many dozens of generations unless something is done about it.</p>
<p>MLK understood quite clearly what needed to be done, but now many people hostile to MLK, more recently Asians, have begun to appropriate the weight of MLK’s reputation and name for their own agenda. Fabrizio, for example, claims to share in a dream of a colorblind society when MLK never had such a wretched dream. King pointedly dreamed of a day when little black, blond, brunette, redhead, white, brown eyed, green-eyed, [insert additional color-aware term here], girls and boys would play together. In King’s dream, there was brilliant color, not the insipid blindness being advocated here. The beauty of King’s dream is that skin color has no more meaning than eye-color, though we are free, encouraged even, to see them both. There is no requirement to overlook the obvious differences in hair, eye, and skin color, as if these differences do not exist. It is a corruption</a> of The Dream to engage in willful deception, deliberately overlooking the obvious, and by this ridiculous and false behavior demonstrating that skin color in fact holds more power over us than we claim.</p>
<p>By turning King’s words into cheap slogans, and undoubtedly appearing to unperceptive readers as one who embraces King’s vision, Fabrizio’s views appear noble and Kingly when in truth they are hostile to King’s vision. They are pollyannaish and false, and it is plain to me they are false because up to this</a> post where his motives were very effectively called for what they are, Fabrizio harped with the obvious and pure selfishness that typically drives much of the debate over AA, about the “unfairness” of AA to those who have no control over their race. It was after a poster pointed out the</a> flaw of his position that Fabrizio began to cling exclusively to corrupting King’s vision to support an agenda that is in fact hostile to King. It is clear to me King’s beliefs do not drive his position at all. It is merely a trick, an attempt to maintain a view that is hostile to the Dream, while faking allegiance to that dream.</p>
<p>As with most immigrants, the desire here is not for a society wherein all Americans are Americans who, having no fundamental claim against the nation, are free to seek opportunity as they together uphold the nation as equals. That was King’s Dream. The desire here is something altogether different, and it is quite simple-- money, status, and toys. It does not matter to them that the country, their country, has shell-shocked a great segment of its population for almost all of its history. The moral import of it is lost on them because all that matters is money, status, and toys. I don’t speak here only of Asians. It is the case with immigrants generally-- indeed generally with all people. Very few (if any) immigrants come here with the sort of high ideals pretended here by Fabrizio. They come here, understandably, to get things. It would be a wonderful system were it all based on fairness and equality—in other words, were it not resting on the blood and bones of blacks. But it is resting on blacks and always has. If we truly wish to effect King’s vision, we first need to remove the strong and legitimate claim against America that blacks sense. It need not cost a lot in what matters most to us (money, status, and toys), but we need to apply a persistent force to the nation until that claim no longer exists. Indeed, America ought not apply the force. America should only enable blacks to apply the force to themselves.</p>
<p>Because of official policies that lasted from 1619 all the way into the 1970's, and indeed into the twenty-first century, blacks have found themselves generally in a tough spot. Part of the problem is that America officially developed a culture, specifically for blacks, that was never designed to compete with anyone, a culture that was never designed to chase the American dream in the healthy ways other cultures chase it. America wanted a slave culture for us, and that is what it forced on us, officially. We coped by finding what little identity in this wretched framework we could muster; and fantastically, though we were but slaves, a large variety of our creations are now part of popular culture. Unfortunately, most of our creations are powerless as institutions that could benefit us as a group. For example, we may be good at certain sports, but there are too few positions on any team to give even potential mobility to the entire group of American blacks. Other racial and ethnic groups have widely varied cultural and economic institutions from which they have gone on to become mainstream Americans. Blacks were officially denied these sorts of institutions, and this is why we have always been on the outside of America, looking in, while other groups have moved onward. We have only been free to acquire cultural capital in the last thirty years. I myself remember official racism in my town, and I am not that old.</p>
<p>I think AA can help here. To answer lkf’s question, I don't see AA as “payback” in the “tit for tat” sense of the word. In fact, I do not even like AA. I simply see it as an agent that has potential to help give back to blacks what America took away. I do not think modern Americans are necessarily the cause of the circumstances with blacks, and so I think they have no need for any guilt about it at all. But because of America’s official removal from blacks of what other groups take for granted, the nation has a duty to correct the wrong it has caused. It can correct this wrong by simply enabling blacks to appropriate for themselves the cultural capital that already exists, and that has long served as the engine of progress for whites. There are young blacks who, despite the past, want to acquire this capital-- to be part of the American dream. Though at a disadvantage due to race, they are getting good grades, performing well on the SAT and aspiring to better lives. We will never see these kids in prisons, pregnant, on drugs, because they have the cultural fortitude and awareness to set their focus on better things. We need to work especially to evaluate them, perchance to protect them from the trash heap of statistical chance, since they are so few among so many who do not suffer their sort of disadvantage. Should we find them as merit-worthy others, we should give them an opportunity to continue developing themselves, acquiring cultural capital as they have always done, to eventually meet spouses, have children, and pass their particular culture onward, instead of passing forth the culture America gave them. Basically, I favor college admissions AA for the relatively few blacks who have a proven desire to overcome the past, who are ready to do college level work and pursue their goals. I favor it especially for elite institutions because those schools give blacks the best, most efficient shot at acquiring the most capital of the sort I mention here. In a few generations, this group of black people will tend to release their claim against America because opportunity will be so obvious to them. Indeed, I think the black conservative movement has come out of the black middle class, which probably exists in part due to AA.</p>
<p>I also favor the sort of AA advocated by some here. Black kids need better schooling, and very early in their lives. But it seems so few people understand what we blacks go through in this country, I do not think it possible for our current institutions to serve us as they now exist. Many blacks don't even understand us, but are simply relying on old coping mechanisms that, while enabling us to get by day-to-day, hamper our growth. I don't think we have sufficient leaders and teachers to properly address the issue here. We need to reach black families early, to show them how the American culture, including aspects of black culture that have come to us from slavery, kills our minds. When you've seen as many black moms as I have, seen their children and other family members being poorly nourished and not growing up in homes where discipline is assumed and learned by osmosis, you understand that AA for blacks needs to start at some remarkably fundamental level in much of the black community. I do not think the government can really help us directly here, though it can help quite a lot indirectly. We blacks must to do this. We have a duty to ourselves and to our children to do it. Unfortunately it will take some time because so many of us are still in conflict about a range of issues that persist from the past. This sort of AA is in its infancy, and in fact it has not yet been born. It is the most important AA of all, FAR more important than college AA. But we ought not do away with the college AA simply because it is of secondary importance. It helps us maximize the progress already taking place.</p>
<p>Now, I don’t think colleges even have to be concerned with any of this. Colleges, especially private ones, have their own agenda and should be free to pursue it. If a college wants to extend opportunity to blacks because it wants influence across a wide spectrum of people, then fine. If a college sees itself as having an obligation to all people, and wants to use AA for blacks, Asians, women, men (as is currently practiced), then fine. I speak only from my own view about the power of AA. My goal is to use various sorts of AA to facilitate a change of culture so that blacks, even the poorest of us, feel invested in themselves and in the future. AA on all levels, in college and in the community, can do this. Over time, it can help repair the past so that blacks no longer sense a claim against the country.</p>
<p>We will know when to end AA quite easily. When the debate surrounding AA becomes a debate essentially of blacks pressing against blacks (instead of whites and now others pressing against blacks while using a misguided black token), when we see blacks themselves objecting in sufficient numbers against the “stigma” of AA to eventually overthrow AA (rather than our current crop of non-blacks whose motives for using the stigma argument are at best doubtful), then we will know that AA needs to go. I suspect that twenty-percent of blacks are at this point today. I want these tables turned, to be part of a twenty-percent minority of blacks or smaller, who will lose the AA debate to eighty percent of American blacks.</p>
<p>For epiphany:
No, not at all. I am saying that I disagree with AdOfficer's statement that:
This is a fairly sweeping statement, imo. The fact that he/she has never seen a black or Latino athlete recruited for some minor sport at her school does not negate the fact that many black athletes are recruited for major sports, giving them major money and major opportunities.</p>
<p>Please separate out legacies from athletes. I don't know anything about "developmental" admits. I have no doubt that the crew or golf teams at ivy schools are overwhelmingly white. I think you will find that tennis teams do have Asian athletes and equestrian teams are nearly all white females (no surprise there). The point is that AdOfficer is referencing sports with low participation, low media attention and low revenue generation. If I were a college athlete, I'd rather be recruited for Division I football than for Division III squash (if they even recruit for that.) </p>
<p>The major NCAA sports of basketball and football are certainly not full of wealthy white kids and do have a great many black players. 57.8% of D-I basketball players are black and 45.4% of D-I football players are black. Please stop asserting that athletic recruitment only helps wealthy white kids. It is just not true. This is all I am saying and you can easily check NCAA statistics at the link below. You will also notice that Division I football and basketball, steppingstone to professional sports, has a larger percentage of black athletes than Division II and III, and are represented at a higher overall percentage than their presence in the general school population. Clearly, athletic recruitment is not only for wealthy white students.</p>
<p>You can check out the summary beginning on page 9 and the charts on subsequent pages.
<a href="http://www.ncaa.org/library/research/ethnicity_report/2004-05/2004-05_race_ethnicity_report.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.ncaa.org/library/research/ethnicity_report/2004-05/2004-05_race_ethnicity_report.pdf</a></p>
<p>Thanks for the clarification, lkf. I did understand most of what you were asserting in your previous post, so it does appear that you & AdOfficer are at odds with regard to proportions, percentages. (Or, perhaps because the context of AA is majority vs. minority, AdOfficer wanted to concentrate on advantages for hooked white candidates vs. hooked URM candidates whose hook was not athletics but race/ethnicity.)</p>
<p>"Other Americans, especially relative newcomers, do not acknowledge the illness at all. They do not feel the debt because they are not black, have never felt the stigma handed them through American history........."</p>
<p>could it be that they are not fixated on the past as much?</p>
<p><a href="Drosselmeier:">quote</a>
I do not think modern Americans are necessarily the cause of the circumstances with blacks,
[/quote]
</p>
<p>They are, however, beneficiaries of those circumstances.</p>
<p>If only the caste system left over from slavery were in the distant past. </p>
<p>Imagine eliminating the caste system in India and you have some idea of the subtleties and difficulties of getting to the 80% threshold--even 60%. </p>
<p>Many of the immigrants who come to the US are fleeing desparate inhumane conditions. They arrive with deep conflict wounds that normally take a prosperous generation or two to heal. Think about the Holocaust refugees, the Central AMericans, the Irish, the Cambodians, the Vietnamese.</p>
<p>AfAm wounds are not conflict wounds. They are caste system wounds--much more difficult to heal.</p>
<p>In fact, which societies in history have successfully eliminated caste systems?</p>
<p>^ You can't take criticism, can you? Truth hurts doesn't it?</p>
<p>I have learned a very nice Chinese proverb. 'Empty barrels make loud noise'</p>
<p>Say what? Nothing about this discussion 'hurts' me. Be serious, man! This is cyber space, not my dinner table.</p>
<p>btw--I believe the TOS prevent the use of Chinese proverbs to insult other posters.</p>
<p>I don't see cheers being unable to take criticism here, so I was equally confused.</p>
<p>
[quote]
If jokes are told in "private situations" does it make it anymore right
[/quote]
</p>
<p>No, it does not. Furthermore, I have never suggested that it is “more right.”</p>
<p>Thanks for bringing up Michael Richards, whose meltdown disproves my claim. Since you bring him up, though, I advise you to watch the clip again. Few in the audience were laughing when he went on his racist tirade. The audience reacted negatively to his use of racial epithets. Many gasped and used variants of “oh my god.” Many others simply stood up and left. You didn’t hear any “Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about!” Why? Because this isn’t 1954.</p>
<p>Are things all hunky dory now? No. Are things as bad as you think they are? No.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Are things all hunky dory now? No. Are things as bad as you think they are? No.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Is this simply because you say so, or because of your experience? I find this to be both condescending and disingenuous and would suggest that you live on a few more days or go out into the real world. </p>
<p>When you are picked up for driving while black, or followed in a shopping mall simply because of the color of your skin, or someone marginales your work simply based on the color of your black skin, you let me know.</p>
<p>Drosselmeier,</p>
<p>It seems like you enjoy depicting me as a fraud who doesn’t really believe in the ideals of colorblindness and racial equality.</p>
<p>Quite honestly, I find that offensive.</p>
<p>You base your delineation on two things. First, you dismiss my sharing a dream where Americans can live in “a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character” as profiteering despite my acknowledgement that I differ from Dr. King on how to reach this dream. That you refuse to recognize this acknowledgement is highly disingenuous on your part. Second, you dislike my opposition to racial preferences. That’s all you have, but you’re still able to draw a nice and distorted portrait. I commend you.</p>