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The United States is a lot more racist than I ever actually imagined (programming.dev)
submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by to c/goodoffmychest@lemmy.world
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I used to believe racism in the United States was overstated.

Sure, it existed. But it's not something widespread. Common. The claim americans are racists is ridiculous.

Well...I was wrong.

"Zohran Mamdani is a terrorist"

"Mamdani supports ISIS and HAMAS"

"New York City faces sharia law"

"Mamdani wants to MURDER jews"

The amount of shit published about this guy is absolutely insane.

He recently attended the 9/11 memorial ceremony.

At some point, he greeted congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and smiled for 5 seconds.

Immediatly, politicians went wild

Senator Ted Cruz:

Congresswoman Mary Miller :

Speaker Mike Johnson:

Here is the video. You can clearly see that he was stoic. He hugged her. Then he immediatly went back to being stoic.

Dude smiled 5 SECONDS in a 5 hour ceremony and they accuse him of celebrating 9/11

At the same ceremony, JD Vance and Howard Lutnick laughed and joked.

No one cares. They are white.

The US is more racist than I ever imagined.

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[–] 27 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (11 children)

That's also been my experience. Most racists that I am aware of think that being a racist means that you are a "bad person" and since they are not "bad people" they can't possibly be racist.

I would argue that there are many, many people who are racist to their very core, but they're not evil or bad people. You don't have to hate to be a racist. You don't have to murder people or burn crosses on their front yard or hang out with rednecks in white bed sheets to be a racist.

You can have friends of other colors and invite them over for dinner and go to games with them and treat them exactly like you treat every single other person around you and still be racist. You can sleep with people of other colors, spawn children with them, and raise those children in a happy family, and still be racist.

Racism is not an action. It is a belief.

If you believe that people of other colors are different from you in anything other than melanin content and possibly a handful of relatively minor bone structures, then you have at least some racism in you.

But explaining that to your family over Thanksgiving dinner is incredibly difficult and at best unproductive.

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  • [–] 17 points 5 days ago (8 children)

    Racism is not an action. It is a belief.

    I'd say it's a spectrum of belief and behavior or actions. For example, people can do racist things without realizing it.

    It has been my experience that the people who are less honest about their racism tend to be the worst.

    Being in the south already fucks with your head. I'm convinced that a lot of the hyper religiosity in the white south is overcompensation for the sin of slavery. You can see it in a lot of the laws they make trying to downplay slavery because it hurts the feelings of white kids (and makes white parents uncomfortable). They know it was fucked up but rather than fix the systemic inequities that exist as a holdover of those days, they'd rather keep the inequities, tell themselves racism is long gone(except for those democrats) and pat themselves on the back.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (7 children)

    I agree. Like, I'm Native American. Brown skin, black hair, the whole works.

    I myself realized that I was being racist to black people. I would start talking in AAVE when I met them, because I had the preconceived notion that that was a way for me to ingratiate myself into the in-crowd.

    I never used the N-word, I do want to be clear about that, but I did not act like myself around the black people that I was familiar with.

    The funny thing is, when I realized I was doing that, I stopped doing it, and then, I actually developed real friendships with black people instead of just acting friendly with them.

    People can tell when you're being authentic. My fundamental core is not racist (at least as far as I am aware), but I practiced racism out of self-ignorance.

    I'm sure there are other areas where I carry racism, and I'm working on it when it presents itself.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 days ago (5 children)

    At the risk of being inadvertently racist myself, I'd like to share some thoughts about Native Americans. Please forgive me if I cross the line or come off as offensive. I'm just trying to understand. I'll probably fuck this up.

    There's still a hell of a lot of dysfunction among native peoples, most of which stems from historic oppression, genocide, etc. However it seems to me that tribal leadership has not helped your people out nearly as much as it could and often seems predatory itself. Humans being what we are it seems to me that cashing in on casinos has helped a few at the top rather than everyone else. I am I off base here?

    Another thought, and this doesn't apply to Native Americans only, is that there is a great focus on "traditional" knowledge, rituals, stories etc... Now I'm an atheist and tend to be pretty skeptical about all religion(and to a lesser degree culture) so from my vantage point(and coming from a place of ignorance about Native American life) a lot of this focus seems to work to hold your people back. I get the sense that if instead of focusing on the past, which could very well be a flawed and inaccurate understanding of the past, you focused on education and made that the pride of your people, you'd be able to stand taller and take less shit from the dominant culture. I'm thinking of something like, "Oh yeah most Natives are doctors", or "Native Americans are very serious about science".

    One culture I am familiar with is black culture in America and I feel similarly about the assumption that all black people go to church and are religious. I understand that embracing Jesus was necessary during slavery but at some point don't people realize they had adopted a slave religion designed to keep them from agitating about their circumstance?

    I suppose most people don't really think about these things much and just live their lives unexamined, which is sad because it just helps those who prey on us without us realizing it.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 child)

    However it seems to me that tribal leadership has not helped your people out nearly as much as it could and often seems predatory itself.

    This is actually common across post colonial societies. The book Why Nations Fail by Nobel Laureate Daron Acemoglu explains it well. Colonial powers left behind extractive institutions in non white polities whereas inclusive institutions were built wherever they stayed. It is very difficult to counter institutional momentum so the new elites often perpetuate the cycle of extraction started by settler-colonialism. Such extractive institutions promote corruption. That's not even taking into account neocolonial activities by prior beneficiaries of colonialism.

    An example of an extractive insitutional practice on indigineous reserves is federal land trusteeship and the lack of full property rights. This means that residents cannot use their real estate as collateral to secure commercial bank loans or mortgages. Economists refer to this landlocked wealth as "dead capital" because it cannot be leveraged to start businesses, build credit, or generate local economic growth.

    I question a causal relationship between religion and prosperity or that religion is a hindrance to agitation. MLK Jr and Gandhi were deeply religious and are amongst some of the most notable agitators of the 20th century. Ultimately what it comes down to is oppurtunity and we continue to live in a world where being born brown or black means you almost certainly, on average, have less.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 days ago

    I question a causal relationship between religion and prosperity or that religion is a hindrance to agitation. MLK Jr and Gandhi were deeply religious and are amongst some of the most notable agitators of the 20th century.

    Religion can be used in many ways, you point out another use for it. In fact, it is often because of the safe spaces afforded to religion that allow such agitation to occur.

    I should point out that MLK jr. strongly felt that non violent protest alone wasn't going to cut it. He valued Malcom X's rejection of non violence as a necessary counterpoint to his movement. From what I understand he felt it was necessary for white America to see that things could go horribly, violently wrong, but he wanted to lead with peaceful protest and didn't want to be associated with the violent alternative that could dominate if things didn't change in a positive way. Basically he was giving white America a choice, "We can make change in a civilized, respectful manner, or we can have chaos and violence".

    One major lesson from both of these men and movements that I wish the protestors of today would recognize is that often protest itself is not going to cut it. You have to get a televised beat down from the cops in order to sway the masses. Public unnecessary suffering changes minds pretty quickly. When you see well dressed people marching in a non threatening manner insisting on reasonable change get attacked violently by the authorities, most people will recognize that injustice and react. This happened with the beginning of the Arab spring when that man set himself on fire in protest. Oppressors always want to sanitize and hide their most extreme violence against the oppressed.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 days ago (2 children)

    As far as Native American politics go, I feel like applying Western ideology to Native Americans is very much the literal definition of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

    All of the other things I've said about race aside, there very much is a strong cultural portion of each individual person's makeup, and Western society has never understood the Native American.

    As a whole, taken over the full course of time, Western society has always either infantilized, bastardized, or romanticized the Native American existence, the psyche, the soul.

    And so when you see Native American societies failing to thrive in Western society, it is almost always a consequence of that failure rather than some sort of flaw with Native society.

    Capitalism is not a cure-all. It does not fit everyone.

    And when it encounters a people it does not fit with, it forces itself to either destroy them or conform them.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 days ago

    Oh yeah, I'm with you on the critique of capitalism.

    But I often wonder how much native culture is new, pretending(or wrongly believing) to be old. I have found that some cultures believe they have very old traditional practices and foods, which turn out to have modern origins. I think a lot of cultures pigeonhole themselves into this mindset of "we've always done it this way, therefor it's sacred and inviolable".

    An example is fry bread. Fry bread is often treated as a wonderful part of native heritage, not only in the US but across the world. But in almost every case, it is a food brought about by colonialism.

    I am reminded of an experience I had as a small child watching a Native American dance with all the feathers and such and at first I was fascinated but as I started thinking about it I felt sad because it looked to me that these people were dancing for the whites. And it all could have been bullshit made up 300 years ago to sooth the invaders. A common theme I see among colonized people is using religious belief as a way to shield oneself from further incursions. Because that's one thing most people will respect and back off from. "Oh you have deeply held religious rituals about X, well we should probably relax a little bit".

    All cultures change and grow, I strongly believe that insisting a given culture has been unchanged for millennia is a foolish proposition, especially if there is no written record. But even with one. It's like saying species don't evolve over time because you haven't seen any changes in your lifetime or your grandparents lifetime. It is a common human mistake to make.

    Thank you for being so generous with your time and thoughts.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 days ago (1 child)

    racism is also an action and a belief. you do acts of racisms, like stereotypes of pOCs in media, that is an act of racism, hate crimes, racist media messaging.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 days ago*

    I prefer to separate the racism from the action, but I will agree that racism is a belief structure that predicates an action.

    If you have racism in you, and you treat people of other races exactly the same as other people, each time you do it, it is a voluntary choice to override your intrinsic racism rather than an abnegation of your racism itself.

    If you have racism and you choose to capitalize on that racism and treat people of other races differently than you would treat people of the same race, then that racism is a voluntary choice to act in a different way than you normally would.

    Just like with my choice to speak in AAVE to black people, I was doing that out of racism.

    And since I have made the realization that it was a racist thing that I was doing, I have managed to stop doing it completely to the point where I don't even think about doing it, so in that tiny one little section of whatever racisms I may be carrying, I have managed to eliminate the racism by identifying it and changing myself rather than choosing to act in a new way specifically for specific people.

    It is, to me, my own personal validation of the phrase, "the first step to fixing a problem is admitting that you have a problem".

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