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Houston Deputy Murdered while pumping gas
- Thread starter RonG
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Otsego Mar
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I'm fairly certain that based on the # of employees you have, you must have a certain ratio of racial diversity. Does this seem reasonable for the employer that is looking to hire the absolute best employee at every level?
I'm sure it seems reasonable for those only wanting to accomplish racial equality in the workplace.
Otsego Mar
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I think most people believe in the reality they want to believe in, and this is most definitely perpetuated in certain directions for certain reasons by the media.
Pioneer10
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How would you know that the media is telling the truth or not? It seems your presumption is that you must disagree with the media instead of taking a look at the situation itself
My opinion is based on multiple academic studies that show racism exists when everything is controlled but name or race. Seeing how other societies have dealt with underprivileged classes, etc. Its also come from personal experience as a minority who has noticed thay blacks are treated a lot differently then me by police friends, etc
I've also read a lot recently on the african american history post reconstruction and it is rather depressing (how social security and the new deal was tailored to discriminate against blacks. How housing policies segregated against blacks but allowed other initially oppressed immigrants to move into non segregated areas. How these things led to increased exposure to lead for example which a large body of evidence has accumlated leads to increased violence). Sources: The Warmth of Other Suns. When affirmative action was white. Kevin Drum cover story on lead in mother jones
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Otsego Mar
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How do you know the situation 100%? The only real source you have is by the media in some shape or form....unless you have witnessed it first hand - and even then you may not even be processing it correctly (perception is reality).
No one is arguing that discrimination was much prevalent at one point in time (it has happened almost everywhere on this planet based on many things other than race as well).
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Why is your only real resource the media? Again Im struck by the structure of your argument which when boils down to it is I will not only not trust the media but will believe the opposite of what they report
In essence though my belief about racism is again not based on any single situation but on academic studies that are not discussed as far as I have seen on cnn, fox, etc. As well as sociology and history books that are well boring for most and not things that will drive ratings. PS the academic studies are all contemporary and we are talking recent history
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In essence though my belief about racism is again not based on any single situation but on academic studies that are not discussed as far as I have seen on cnn, fox, etc. As well as sociology and history books that are well boring for most and not things that will drive ratings. PS the academic studies are all contemporary and we are talking recent history
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Otsego Mar
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I am not saying I will believe the opposite. You, however, are saying that what you read in history books is factual. I am saying that I will certainly not look at anything as if it were 100% factual - in the media OR history books.
Pioneer10
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Your argument continues to boil down even further into points one cant even discuss. Essentially we have reached the point where the point being made is dont trust anything that Lord Mar doesn't trust
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No, you absolutely do not unless required by certain government contracts (which I would agree is bs).
Some private employees also require that independently of contractors/vendors. And some employers worry on their own that an unbalanced workforce could hurt them in a lawsuit, though i think that's overblown.
But there is no universal legal requirement to employ a certain percentage of minorities. In fact, employers have been successfully sued by white applicants for maintaining such a policy. By me, in fact.
Otsego Mar
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That's interesting....I could have sworn I learned that from a Human Resources college course a decade ago.
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That's why they were teaching college and not actually working at HR - because they didn't know their shit. Eh, who am I kidding. Some HR types are 50-50 themselves...
But seriously, it can be true but only in some very limited contexts.
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More or less... That's impossible for me to answer. Though I do believe it is a mixture of both.
There is no doubt that racism is very much alive and dangerous in the world of today. It is everywhere around us and it exists in all of us, including you, gouri. Unfortunately, most of us aren't aware of its existence nor willing to do our part to make change happen. (I am not saying that this includes any of you out there reading this.)
You could argue that racism is a deep-rooted instinct, inherited from our lives as more primitive animals, instilled by primordial fears: The fear of others, the fear of the unknown, the fear of death, not rarely in combination with each other.
Combine this with the Ego, the sense of self and a special importance, that we are all carrying around with us wherever we go; add in the complexity of perceptions, feelings and sensations, and how difficult these are to not only interpret, but also to express, no matter if your tools consist of numbers or letters, academic research or tabloid papers, essays or comic strips, a landscape painting or a piece of music, a small poem or two lovers lying side-by-side in complete darkness, just holding hands without saying a word.
Maybe you're now able to see the shapes of a fugazi. To quote my mother: "No wonder there's so much war in this world."
The only way we can loosen these knots, in my opinion, is with a global change of consciousness. Humanity as a whole needs to realise that it's not you or me, black or white, Christian or Muslim, American or European, only us.
We also need to understand that we are not strangers to this universe, nor to Planet Earth. Rather, we are very much a part it. We are interlaced with the totality of the world in ways we hardly can imagine.
So to cite someone with a bit more authority than my mom:
"It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘Try and be a little kinder."
Good night.
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This is very interesting indeed and something I've felt myself.
Why does bad news sell so much better than good news?
Why is hate so much simpler than love?
What is it in all the horror and suffering that we find so fascinating?
I think that we are with these questions at some of the root problems of humanity today.
I'll give you one: A black friend of mine who has on more than one occasion experienced to be treated with some sort of forced kindness. He himself believes that it's because of their guilt and his own skin colour.
Otsego Mar
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Please explain the "forced kindness". Maybe he "believes" it was a kind of forced kidness. Or, maybe it really was?
Again, perception is reality.
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How We Built the Ghettos
A brief introduction to America's long history of racist housing policy.
by Jamelle Bouie
Politics
PoliticsHow We Built the Ghettos03.13.142:40 PM ET
Yesterday, apropos of Paul Ryan’s remarks on “inner-city poverty” and a culture that “doesn’t value work,” I wrote about the policy that went into building our inner-cities and depriving whole communities of wealth and opportunity. Likewise, at MSNBC, Ned Resnikoff wrote an excellent piece on the wide income and wealth disparities between blacks and whites. “ In 1984,” he writes, “the white-to-black wealth ratio was 12-to–1…But over the next 14 years the wealth gap began to grow once again, until it had skyrocketed up to 19-to–1 in 2009.”
A large part of this, he explains, has everything to do with housing discrimination:
Disparities in homeownership are a major driver of the racial wealth gap, according to a recent study from Brandeis University. According to the authors of the report, “redlining [a form of discrimination in banking or insurance practices], discriminatory mortgage-lending practices, lack of access to credit, and lower incomes have blocked the homeownership path for African-Americans while creating and reinforcing communities segregated by race.”
In my earlier piece, I alluded to these policies and practices, but didn’t describe them. But it’s worth taking the time to do exactly that, given the extent to which they were a huge influence on the housing landscape of the United States, and key to creating the ghettos and housing projects that litter our inner-cities. Obviously, this won’t be comprehensive, so consider it an introduction to these issues.
Redlining is the practice of denying key services (like home loans and insurance) or increasing their costs for residents in a defined geographical area. In theory, this could be used against anyone. In reality, it was almost exclusively a tool to force blacks (and other minorities) into particular geographic areas. The practice began with the National Housing Act of 1934, which established the Federal Housing Administration, as well as the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. It was this agency which created “residential security maps” for several cities to determine the safety of real estate investments in selected areas.
You should already see where this is going: Existing black neighborhoods were lined as unsafe, and thus ineligible for financing. For prospective property owner, this was terrible: Absent cash on hand, there was no way to afford a home or a business in your area. What’s more, blacks were all but barred from entering white neighborhoods, if not by restrictive racial covenants (which forbid property sales to African Americans and other minorities) then by violence and intimidation. In Chicago, for instance, anti-black riots were a regular part of public life. Here’s Arnold Hirsch, author of Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960:
On July 28, 1957, a crowd of 6,000 to 7,000 whites attacked 100 black picnickers who occupied a portion of the park that had previously been “reserved” for whites. Though blacks had used the park in the past, they were customarily restricted to certain portions of it. More than 500 police were needed to calm the area after two days of disturbances. On the first day alone at least forty-seven persons were injured and sixty to seventy cars stoned. Rioters spilled out of the park, attacked police officers attempting arrests, and, eventually, placed the entire area between the nearby Trumbull Park Homes and Calumet Park in turmoil. Police squadrons had to form a “flying wedge” to break through the crowd to rescue blacks besieged in the park.
In the late 1940s, he writes, there was “one racially motivated bombing or arson” every twenty days.
In short, redlining forced blacks into particular areas and then starved those areas of affordable capital. Combined with widespread job discrimination—which barred blacks from public employment and forced them into low-wage labor—you had neighborhoods that were impoverished by design.
Of course, at the same time of all of this, there was a mass migration of African Americans from the South to the industrial cities of the Midwest and Northeast. Some were poor, yes, but many were what we’d call working or lower-middle class, and more still were prospective homebuyers. In places like Chicago, white real estate agents—often with the sanction of local government—took advantage of their hope with a practice called “contract buying.” Here’s Hirsch, again:
When selling on contract, the speculator offered the home to a black purchaser for a relatively low down payment – often several hundred dollars would suffice. For bringing the home within the reach of a black purchaser, however, the speculator extracted a considerable price. In the Commission on Human Relations study, the percentage increase in the cost of the home from the speculator’s purchase price to that of the black consumer ranged from a minimum of 35% to 115%; the average increase was 73%.
This, it should be said, bears an eerie similarity to the targeted, predatory lending of the last decade. Of course, it was dramatically worse. Tenants had no equity in their homes until the terms of the contract were fulfilled, and speculators could evict tenants for missing a payment, regardless of their history. At least one speculator, notes Hirsch, was able to retrieve more than 150% of his investment (in a year) by evicting those who missed installments and collecting successive down payments. And there was no recourse: Unlike their white counterparts, who in the 1940s and 50s, could take advantage of the G.I. Bill, blacks couldn’t obtain conventional financing or subsidized loans. Contact lending was the only option, and it amounted to large scale (and sanctioned) wealth theft.
Related to this was block-busting. Remember, many of these cities faced a housing shortage, due to the large number of black migrants. Panicked by the prospect of black neighbors—and facilitated by highways and subsidized mortgage loans—countless whites left the cities for the suburbs. They were pushed along by “block-busters”; unscrupulous realtors who encouraged blacks to move into white areas (or created the appearance of transition), sparking an exodus and driving down prices. Once completed, more respectable realtors converted the homes and apartments into multi-family dwellings, cramming large groups into row houses meant for a handful of people. “In one Oakland apartment,” writes Hirsch, “the space that was rented to one white family at $25 per month was able to house three black families at $100 per month.” Journalist Isabelle Wilkinson describes the human side of this in her wonderful book, The Warmth of Other Suns.
Block-busting inspired tremendous violence and anti-black sentiment, especially from working-class whites, who were often outbid by blacks, but couldn’t afford suburban housing outside of the city. What’s more, it—along with contract-buying and the destruction of the tax base—helped create the perception that blacks were responsible for the deterioration of a neighborhood.
All of these tools and approaches were facilitated by the federal government and its partners at the state and local level. For decades, it was a project of Democrats and Republicans, who worked to appease a white supremacist majority, and often, shared their assumptions. This continued into the 1960s, and arguably, never stopped: Public housing projects, for instance, were placed in these segregated, depressed neighborhoods as a compromise with conservatives who opposed them outright. This, in turn, ensured concentrated poverty and all its attendant problems, as well as bad schools and poor public services. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 was meant to tackle all of this, but as Nikole Hannah-Jonesdetails for ProPublica, it saw sporadic enforcement, if that.
After a half century (or more), it’s not hard to see how we get to here from there: When you prevent a whole class of people from building wealth, accessing capital, or leaving impoverished areas, you guarantee cultural dysfunction and deep, generational poverty. When it comes to inner-city poverty—we built that.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/13/how-we-built-the-ghettos.html
A brief introduction to America's long history of racist housing policy.
by Jamelle Bouie
Politics
PoliticsHow We Built the Ghettos03.13.142:40 PM ET
Yesterday, apropos of Paul Ryan’s remarks on “inner-city poverty” and a culture that “doesn’t value work,” I wrote about the policy that went into building our inner-cities and depriving whole communities of wealth and opportunity. Likewise, at MSNBC, Ned Resnikoff wrote an excellent piece on the wide income and wealth disparities between blacks and whites. “ In 1984,” he writes, “the white-to-black wealth ratio was 12-to–1…But over the next 14 years the wealth gap began to grow once again, until it had skyrocketed up to 19-to–1 in 2009.”
A large part of this, he explains, has everything to do with housing discrimination:
Disparities in homeownership are a major driver of the racial wealth gap, according to a recent study from Brandeis University. According to the authors of the report, “redlining [a form of discrimination in banking or insurance practices], discriminatory mortgage-lending practices, lack of access to credit, and lower incomes have blocked the homeownership path for African-Americans while creating and reinforcing communities segregated by race.”
In my earlier piece, I alluded to these policies and practices, but didn’t describe them. But it’s worth taking the time to do exactly that, given the extent to which they were a huge influence on the housing landscape of the United States, and key to creating the ghettos and housing projects that litter our inner-cities. Obviously, this won’t be comprehensive, so consider it an introduction to these issues.
Redlining is the practice of denying key services (like home loans and insurance) or increasing their costs for residents in a defined geographical area. In theory, this could be used against anyone. In reality, it was almost exclusively a tool to force blacks (and other minorities) into particular geographic areas. The practice began with the National Housing Act of 1934, which established the Federal Housing Administration, as well as the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. It was this agency which created “residential security maps” for several cities to determine the safety of real estate investments in selected areas.
You should already see where this is going: Existing black neighborhoods were lined as unsafe, and thus ineligible for financing. For prospective property owner, this was terrible: Absent cash on hand, there was no way to afford a home or a business in your area. What’s more, blacks were all but barred from entering white neighborhoods, if not by restrictive racial covenants (which forbid property sales to African Americans and other minorities) then by violence and intimidation. In Chicago, for instance, anti-black riots were a regular part of public life. Here’s Arnold Hirsch, author of Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960:
On July 28, 1957, a crowd of 6,000 to 7,000 whites attacked 100 black picnickers who occupied a portion of the park that had previously been “reserved” for whites. Though blacks had used the park in the past, they were customarily restricted to certain portions of it. More than 500 police were needed to calm the area after two days of disturbances. On the first day alone at least forty-seven persons were injured and sixty to seventy cars stoned. Rioters spilled out of the park, attacked police officers attempting arrests, and, eventually, placed the entire area between the nearby Trumbull Park Homes and Calumet Park in turmoil. Police squadrons had to form a “flying wedge” to break through the crowd to rescue blacks besieged in the park.
In the late 1940s, he writes, there was “one racially motivated bombing or arson” every twenty days.
In short, redlining forced blacks into particular areas and then starved those areas of affordable capital. Combined with widespread job discrimination—which barred blacks from public employment and forced them into low-wage labor—you had neighborhoods that were impoverished by design.
Of course, at the same time of all of this, there was a mass migration of African Americans from the South to the industrial cities of the Midwest and Northeast. Some were poor, yes, but many were what we’d call working or lower-middle class, and more still were prospective homebuyers. In places like Chicago, white real estate agents—often with the sanction of local government—took advantage of their hope with a practice called “contract buying.” Here’s Hirsch, again:
When selling on contract, the speculator offered the home to a black purchaser for a relatively low down payment – often several hundred dollars would suffice. For bringing the home within the reach of a black purchaser, however, the speculator extracted a considerable price. In the Commission on Human Relations study, the percentage increase in the cost of the home from the speculator’s purchase price to that of the black consumer ranged from a minimum of 35% to 115%; the average increase was 73%.
This, it should be said, bears an eerie similarity to the targeted, predatory lending of the last decade. Of course, it was dramatically worse. Tenants had no equity in their homes until the terms of the contract were fulfilled, and speculators could evict tenants for missing a payment, regardless of their history. At least one speculator, notes Hirsch, was able to retrieve more than 150% of his investment (in a year) by evicting those who missed installments and collecting successive down payments. And there was no recourse: Unlike their white counterparts, who in the 1940s and 50s, could take advantage of the G.I. Bill, blacks couldn’t obtain conventional financing or subsidized loans. Contact lending was the only option, and it amounted to large scale (and sanctioned) wealth theft.
Related to this was block-busting. Remember, many of these cities faced a housing shortage, due to the large number of black migrants. Panicked by the prospect of black neighbors—and facilitated by highways and subsidized mortgage loans—countless whites left the cities for the suburbs. They were pushed along by “block-busters”; unscrupulous realtors who encouraged blacks to move into white areas (or created the appearance of transition), sparking an exodus and driving down prices. Once completed, more respectable realtors converted the homes and apartments into multi-family dwellings, cramming large groups into row houses meant for a handful of people. “In one Oakland apartment,” writes Hirsch, “the space that was rented to one white family at $25 per month was able to house three black families at $100 per month.” Journalist Isabelle Wilkinson describes the human side of this in her wonderful book, The Warmth of Other Suns.
Block-busting inspired tremendous violence and anti-black sentiment, especially from working-class whites, who were often outbid by blacks, but couldn’t afford suburban housing outside of the city. What’s more, it—along with contract-buying and the destruction of the tax base—helped create the perception that blacks were responsible for the deterioration of a neighborhood.
All of these tools and approaches were facilitated by the federal government and its partners at the state and local level. For decades, it was a project of Democrats and Republicans, who worked to appease a white supremacist majority, and often, shared their assumptions. This continued into the 1960s, and arguably, never stopped: Public housing projects, for instance, were placed in these segregated, depressed neighborhoods as a compromise with conservatives who opposed them outright. This, in turn, ensured concentrated poverty and all its attendant problems, as well as bad schools and poor public services. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 was meant to tackle all of this, but as Nikole Hannah-Jonesdetails for ProPublica, it saw sporadic enforcement, if that.
After a half century (or more), it’s not hard to see how we get to here from there: When you prevent a whole class of people from building wealth, accessing capital, or leaving impoverished areas, you guarantee cultural dysfunction and deep, generational poverty. When it comes to inner-city poverty—we built that.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/13/how-we-built-the-ghettos.html