Mom beats son for participating in Baltimore riots

↑ Sadie ↓

Thu, Apr 30 2015, 11:41 am

debsey wrote:

death is the ultimate disenfranchisement. The Holocaust was 70 years ago. Then those survivors came HERE and faced yet more discrimination. Discriminatory attitudes towards Jews are quite pervasive until today.
I am not drawing an exact parallel, nor is there any way to compare suffering - it is too subjective. But I consider it the ultimate in discrimination (and yes, in disenfranchisement - the removal of voice) to say "well Jews don't face discrimination." we certainly did and we certainly do.

There is no point in discussing who had it worse.
Many Jews, Italians, and Irish came to the US and experienced harsh poverty and discrimination, but in one or two generations their descendants were considered white and were assimilated into mainstream American white society.
Black people have been in the US for 400 years and will never get this privilege afforded to their descendants.
Some black people who had white ancestry and appeared light skinned would "pass as white" in order to enter mainstream society; in order to do this they would move far away from their families, establish new identities, and hide their secret from their own children. That is how powerful the ability to access whiteness was. The benefits afforded to the children and grandchildren of European Jews by their ability to access whiteness cannot be overstated.

↑ PinkFridge ↓

Thu, Apr 30 2015, 11:58 am

debsey wrote:

Jews are never subject to racial discrimination? Wow, that's great news! Tell that to my grandmother, who came here after being slave labor in Siberia and faced signs on doors saying "No Jews or Irish need apply." or signs on BANKS saying "No Jews or Dogs allowed in here." This was as recent as 1949!
In the 1950s my parents were in Florida and they stopped at a motel and the guy said "We don't let Jews sleep in our motel!" No shame or fear to say this.
Do you really believe this, Squishy? That Jews don't face racial discrimination? I don't get how this whole "Jews don't face discrimination" narrative is being spouted mostly by JEWS.

Debsey, I was thinking this. Think Gentleman's Agreement. And all the Sinai Hospitals. And yet what does a Sinai Hospital mean, or the medical school quotas for that matter mean? That you got that far! And that you had aspirations! You could dream big and work hard to get there.
Someone needs to nurture true and good and big dreams....

↑ Sadie ↓

Thu, Apr 30 2015, 12:08 pm

Raisin wrote:

Why are so many black families so poor? Its a combination of legacies of slavery, plus years after of Jim Crow laws and violence against blacks, plus the continued racism to this day. Black men are less likely to gain employment, will get more severe prison sentences, etc.

Absolutely. Discrimination against blacks is built into our system. We don't have chattel slavery and Jim Crow anymore but we do have a justice system in which black children and teens are given disproportionate punishments for the same crime. For example, if you have a marijuana conviction you cannot get a federal loan for college (or at least you couldn't when I was applying). While black teens and white teens use marijuana at similar rates, black teens are more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested, and convicted than their white peers, and once convicted blacks receive longer sentences.
The black teen who is convicted loses out on college for that one mistake. The white teen who got off with a warning doesn't.
Ta-Nehesi Coates wrote an amazing article about the debate over whether descendants of black slaves should receive some form of reparations: http://www.theatlantic.com/fea.....1631/ In the article, he explains in vivid detail how blacks who attempted to pull themselves up into the respectable middle class were systematically thwarted by racism. I don't know if anyone bothered to read any of the other articles I posted so I'll quote some important sections.

Quote:

When Clyde Ross was still a child, Mississippi authorities claimed his father owed $3,000 in back taxes. The elder Ross could not read. He did not have a lawyer. He did not know anyone at the local courthouse. He could not expect the police to be impartial. Effectively, the Ross family had no way to contest the claim and no protection under the law. The authorities seized the land. They seized the buggy. They took the cows, hogs, and mules. And so for the upkeep of separate but equal, the entire Ross family was reduced to sharecropping.
This was hardly unusual. In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land valued at tens of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism. “Some of the land taken from black families has become a country club in Virginia,” the AP reported, as well as “oil fields in Mississippi” and “a baseball spring training facility in Florida.”

Quote:

The men who peddled contracts in North Lawndale would sell homes at inflated prices and then evict families who could not pay—taking their down payment and their monthly installments as profit. Then they’d bring in another black family, rinse, and repeat. “He loads them up with payments they can’t meet,” an office secretary told The Chicago Daily News of her boss, the speculator Lou Fushanis, in 1963. “Then he takes the property away from them. He’s sold some of the buildings three or four times.”

Ross had tried to get a legitimate mortgage in another neighborhood, but was told by a loan officer that there was no financing available. The truth was that there was no financing for people like Clyde Ross. From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from “restrictive covenants” to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated.

Quote:

“The Jim Crow South,” writes Ira Katznelson, a history and political-science professor at Columbia, “was the one collaborator America’s democracy could not do without.” The marks of that collaboration are all over the New Deal. The omnibus programs passed under the Social Security Act in 1935 were crafted in such a way as to protect the southern way of life. Old-age insurance (Social Security proper) and unemployment insurance excluded farmworkers and domestics—jobs heavily occupied by blacks. When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible. The NAACP protested, calling the new American safety net “a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.”

The oft-celebrated G.I. Bill similarly failed black Americans, by mirroring the broader country’s insistence on a racist housing policy. Though ostensibly color-blind, Title III of the bill, which aimed to give veterans access to low-interest home loans, left black veterans to tangle with white officials at their local Veterans Administration as well as with the same banks that had, for years, refused to grant mortgages to blacks. The historian Kathleen J. Frydl observes in her 2009 book, The GI Bill, that so many blacks were disqualified from receiving Title III benefits “that it is more accurate simply to say that blacks could not use this particular title.”

All the people on this thread who have asked why "the black community" has the problems that it has needs to read this whole article.

↑ debsey ↓

Thu, Apr 30 2015, 12:57 pm

Sadie wrote:

Agreed that you can't compare suffering, that's why I said so in my original post. But you also can't compare the jewish experience to the Italian or Irish experience. It is still socially acceptable to discriminate against Jews. You can say "don't Jew me down" in polite society, for example. You can't use a similar insult towards a person of Irish or Italian extraction in polite society.
But we are straying from the point I am making:
1) as Jews, a historically victimized nation, we get to live in this wonderful country as citizens,something my grandparents could hardly dream of. As pervasive as anti-semitic ATTITUDES can be, the laws do treat us as equals.
2) we owe a debt of gratitude to the rule of law in this country and the police officers who uphold it.
3) as a group that often finds itself tarred with the same brush (all Jews are sociopathic money grubbers like Madoff, for example) should we be doing that to the police? (ALL cops are brutal and out to beat people up)
4) none of these points have anything to do with the uneducated and unsophisticated views on the causes of African American poverty I have seen on this thread. I agree with maany of the posters here about the travesty of justice that community faces. What I takeissue with isthe blanket condemnation of law enforcement.

↑ Scrabble123 ↓

Thu, Apr 30 2015, 1:21 pm

Sadie wrote:

Yes, and I'd also like to add that if President Obama would have had dark skin, I do not believe that he would have be elected. He never pretended to be of a different ancestry, but he definitely has light skin and I believe that it had an impact in his campaign. I wanted to conduct a proper study on that, but I simply do not have the time.

↑ Sadie ↓

Thu, Apr 30 2015, 1:38 pm

debsey wrote:

The problem is that the rule of law hasn't applied to the black population, historically. In the Jim Crow south, the police force was a major participant in the terrorizing of black communities. If this is the historical reality of the police's relationship to your community, and to this day brutality against members of your community goes unpunished, you have no reason to feel any trust or gratitude to the police at all.
The police need to start earning that trust and gratitude from the communities they are supposed to be serving.
Saying that we shouldn't tar all cops with the same brush- that they aren't all violent or brutal- is a straw man argument. No one is saying that all cops are brutalizers (although someone who has been brutalized might be afraid of all cops afterwards). I don't have the source handy but I read that there was a study done showing that the vast majority of brutality cases (where the departments had to pay out settlements to victims) were caused by just a small group. The problem is that the cops belonging to the small group of troublemakers are not fired, and they're not prosecuted. They are allowed to stay in their positions and reoffend with new victims.
So we know that the majority of cops are not brutalizers- but they protect the brutalizers. Cops do not snitch on other cops and they don't testify against them. Check out the Frank Serpico article I posted earlier- Serpico, a "good cop" who was a whistleblower on department corruption and excessive force, was called in to a dangerous situation. When he feared for his life he radioed for backup and none of his police brothers responded. They left him to die; that was his punishment for whistleblowing on the "bad cops". If the good cops can't even speak up because they fear for their safety then the whole system is corrupt and has to be rebuilt with transparency and community involvement.

↑ 33055 ↓

Thu, Apr 30 2015, 2:03 pm

debsey wrote:

They were subject to religious discrimination which is different. Jew is not a race. No one can look at me and define me as jewish based on my genetics. I never said Jews don't face discrimination. I said there weren't government laws codifying this discrimination. There weren't separate public schools for jews for instance. Jews didn't have to drink from separate water fountains, use separate toilets, etc. Jews could vote.

↑ mille ↓

Thu, Apr 30 2015, 4:47 pm

shoshanim999 wrote:

I lump "the black community" together because of the absurdness of their collective actions. There isn't any crisis, that rallies them together as a group (I realize that not every single black person is participating) except when a black person is killed by a cop. The community as a whole doesn't seem to care about any issues facing their community, except for this one. On top of that its very debatable if blacks genuinely care about police brutality. Its hard for me to imagine that the lunatic walking out of his neighborhood CVS with 3 bags of cookies in 1 hand and pringles in the other, is really angered about what happened to Freddie Gray. I'm just not buying it. We all know that if tomorrow a black drug dealer shoots and kills 10 black people there will be no protests at all. If they burn down their school and there's no school for a year, again, nobody would care.

Replace black with jew and change the topic to weberman, east ramapo school board, or any other topic that jews were heavily involved in... And see how absolutely ridiculous and HORRIBLY racist you sound.

"Black" is a skin color. It is not something that ties every single person who shares that trait together. Again, who is the leader of black people? Who is the leader of blue eyed people? Who is the leader of Jews? Who is the leader of latinos? Who is the leader of Europeans? Who is the leader of people with almond eyes?

I don't have such a strong opinion on this topic (I fall in the middle), but I feel like you don't have a good grasp of the situation at all. You just come off as really ignorant and racist in your posts.

↑ 33055 ↓

Thu, Apr 30 2015, 4:55 pm

debsey wrote:

Would you kindly back up your sophisticated and educated views with some facts? Sonia Sotomayor regularly condemns the police abuse of power especially the erosion of 4th amendment rights. She lived with the prejudice and abuse so she can be counted on to champion reigning them in. She was a voice of reason when she was on the court of appeals and identified with plaintiffs. She did not buy the defense of how dangerous the profession of cops is. I trust she is educated and sophisticated enough. More important she actually knows first hand because she lived it in the Bronx projects.

BTW cops are not even in the top fatal injury work rates according to the Bureau of Labor statistics. Truck drivers are in a way more dangerous profession, but no one gives them a pass on homicides. They put their life on the line more often than cops as does, fisherman, farmers, garbageman. Garbageman go into minority areas and are exposed to more hostility than cops, yet we don't hear of them murdering minorities.

↑ Sadie

Thu, Apr 30 2015, 5:00 pm

shoshanim999 wrote:

The jews in meah shearim that destroy property and block traffic r disgraceful. I guess Iv'e lost respect for the black community because it just seems that they have very few redeeming qualities. It seems that they r on the top of every bad statistic. My main point was that I thought their "protest" was baloney. I still don't think they care one bit about Freddie Grey. I also think that if u would compile a list of problems facing the black community, police violence would not rank very high. Yet this is the single issue that bonds this community. They don't seem to protest anything else. Also, is the bar so low that we r actually giving credit for the fact that the first 6 days of protest was peaceful. You mean we don't have a right to completely expect that???

"Lost respect"? Like you ever had any respect for black people in your entire life. You were probably raised hearing that shvartzes zenen beheimas since you were in the womb. Your opinion on the "black community" is worthless.