Re: Here's where you're incorrect.

Look, man. I loathe and despise Trumnp as much as anybody alive. I will be voting Democrat for literally the first time in my life because of that.

I furthermore agree that blacks have been treated as second-class citizens - and before the civil rights movement, as worse than that - throughout America's history. I furthermore believe that there are some massive economic inequalities baked into America's system and that this, far more than cops just hating black people, is the real problem.

Just my observation, cops treat people different based on perceived class status, not race. I've watch countless instances of cops giving known black celebs the same white-glove VIP treatment they give white celebrities....while also treating poor white people from trailer parks like, well, trailer trash, and flinging Jim-Bob into the back of their squad cars after a few righteous billy-club taps to the head. (Nobody cares. There's certainly no organization called "White Trash Lives Matter." Nobody speaks for poor white people, which is why they're getting increasingly hostile and angry, which primes them for recruitment by far-right causes and hate groups.) So I honestly think the problem nowawadays isn't racism so much as classism. The problem for black people is because they started as slaves with zero inherited wealth and then had to deal with decades of Jim Crow after that, there's just no generational wealth so blacks tend to get a worse shake, not because of the color of their skin anymore, but a lot more because of the absence of green in their wallets. Do blacks get stereotyped and profiled a lot more by cops? Absolutely. There's no arguing that. But again, I truly believe that the reason is perceived class status a lot more than inherent hostility to a race.

I likewise think the more blacks accuse whites of "racism", the less sympathetic ears they're going to find. There's some genuine racists out there, absolutely. But most white Americans do try to rise above that and resent having incessant cries of racism thrown in their face.

And then there's the BLM organizers themselves. They're loopy. And their loopiness is de-legitimizing their own cause.

The BLM movement, ultimately, is going to fizzle, IMHO, because of both the people who are running it...and the fact that ultimately it's just focused on policing when the real problem is wealth disparity, and making it about race instead of class. Race is, IMHO, 1960's game and the real problem just isn't race anymore: it's money, who has it...and how we as a civilization treat those who don't.

quozzel

Hall of Famer [20512]

TigerPulse: 100%

Posts: 11660

Joined: 10/15/02

Sep 12, 2020, 10:20 AM

I agree with that. One of the bigger insights I came to was when I took over a soccer team from an at-risk school a few years back. I'd always coached state-level Academy kids...who were mostly white. But owing mostly to schedule I didn't have a team one year, missed it, and was offered a school team that was almost entirely black and Latino players...I ended up loving it.

The thing I figured out real quick was these kids had a ton of desire, athletic ability, and especially with the Latin kids, foot skills - they'd always knocked the ball around with their brothers and uncles and cousins in the backyard; a lot of them knew how to make the ball do what they wanted it to do. They'd largely just never played organized ball so there was a whole raftload of basic game concepts they never gotten. They'd never won a game - ever - in the school's history (which the school had definitely not told me when I took the job!), but I got them up to third in the state by my second year there and found about a bazillion diamonds in the rough who then trotted over to the club teams and earned a bunch of scholarships. The clubs just never even knew those players were out there...and the players never knew the clubs would actually scholarship them to come play if they couldn't afford it.

The big thing with these guys was, nobody had bothered to invest in them before. Most of them came from broken homes where alcoholism and dysfunction were endemic. It broke my heart more than a little, because you always hear about "mute inglorious Miltons", talent going to waste, unheard and unseen...it kind of turned my head around because on that one soccer field I turned out more raw talent in tryouts than you could shake a stick at...but nobody had bothered to develop them. I had one kid who turned up for tryouts in a hand-me-down CESA Premier jersey he'd picked up somehow; it took me until almost the end of the season to figure out he not only was not in fact CESA Premier, he in fact had never played organized ball before...and I didn't figure that out because he was an extremely convincing imposter because he was really that good...when I realized that I took him over to Furman United and they scholarshipped him on the spot!) And most of the problem started with the fact that most of these kids didn't even have rides to practice; there was largely just nobody in their lives who cared enough to drive them. (A lot of these kids were from the so-called "Northern Triangle" countries, Guatamala, El Salvador, and Honduras...which is why I've always said: the second-gen kids from those countries are fine, it was the dads I often wasn't crazy about.)

At the same time, I started getting aware of Dabo Swinney at what he was doing that was so unusual, and it started to dawn on me that the secret sauce to any kid's success, hokey as it might appear to the outside, is that "love" thing Dabo always talks about. As a kid who grew up in an absolutely psychotic home situation myself and crawled out of it in fits and starts, the thing that came to me is that the biggest thing the world is missing isn't money; the world is suffering because of a lack of care. At the end of the day I related to these kids so well because I had lived the biggest insight into their existence: that they truly did not believe they could...or that they actually mattered. Raise a kid without love, they believe they're inferior...and life conforms to their expectations.

All the trust-fund money in the world doesn't equal care, and care overcomes a lack of money, almost every time, if there's enough of it. The problem is, poverty makes people desperate...and desperate people are not their best selves, either. I know I definitely wasn't when I was desperate...which has been more often than I like to remember, if I was being honest.

I dunno. How are you supposed to "legislate" that? "Care about people more." I think that's why I've always tended to lean heavily libertarian...that sort of solution is just nothing I've ever seen a government successfully provide, and governments that try to make the state your family end up being truly spectacular failures.

flag link

military_tech

thumb_down

thumb_up

BLM inc. never claimed to want an end to democracy.

I know- one of the co founders was trained as a Marxist- save it.

The only thing necessary for evil to triumph over good

Thank God for abolitionist over the ideals of our founding..

But america is not a disaster

Re: But america is not a disaster

Re: But america is not a disaster

Re: But america is not a disaster

it really doesn't matter though, right?

No. Biblical righteousness is only mitigated by grace not personal morality

I would agree with that, but my question...

I don't think people need to know you personally to know...

Re: I would agree with that, but my question...

So you're leaving when the rioting starts?

Dude, I honestly tried to follow all of that, but

Re: BLM inc. never claimed to want an end to democracy.

Here's where you're incorrect.

Re: Here's where you're incorrect.

Re: Here's where you're incorrect.

TigerBoard POTD