Liberal Carnival: Hand Wringing on Bullying that Never Happened

I’m feeling charitable tonight. I think that their intentions were good – and they really thought that the way to get rid of institutional racism was by pushing for advantages for the those who had been discriminated against for so long.

But for how long? Slavery ended with the Civil War. Segregation ended in the ’60s. We got Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ – which effectively broke up a lot of homes and destroyed the inner cities. Yes – it was with the best of intentions, but you know the saying about what the road to hell is paved with…

A friend of mine in the Reserves was having problems with her husband. (They’d been separated close onto a decade – then he got off active duty and they started living together.) He was driving her nuts! She’d nag him about the shower curtain, about this, and that. She loved the man, but he was driving her crazy.

So I suggested she start using a dog trainer’s trick. Praise the things he did right, and just mention briefly the things he did wrong. She was dubious, but agreed to try it.

Next drill, she told me the results. By NOT harping on what he was doing wrong, she was seeing all the things he did right, and the things that irked her so much … he stopped doing them when she just asked “Hey, could you stop doing that?” without nagging – and when he did, she praised him. She said it turned their marriage around, but I think it would have settled down eventually as they got used to each other again.

When you stop harping on what’s wrong, it’s a lot easier to see what’s right. Things settle down.

But the trouble with race in our country, it’s never been allowed to settle down. Things are SO much better now than in the 50s and 60s, but you’ve got the professional grifters and poverty-pimp ‘spokesmen’, who ostensibly want to make things better… but see that if things DO get better, they’re out of a job. They know what their paychecks come from, and it’s not peaceful coexistence, I’m sorry to say. So you hear rhetoric about how the white man wants to put them all back in chains and equally ridiculous stuff – and nobody calls them out saying it’s bullshit.

So they get all sorts of advantages, and ‘affirmative action’ putting people who are barely qualified into jobs they can barely do. You have school systems that warehouse students who won’t learn because it’s ‘acting white’ – and they end up with crippling educational disadvantages. It’s a big damned mess, all created with good intentions.

And I don’t even have any real suggestions on how to fix it. There may be no solution for that, except for time.

But this is getting way off of the ‘bullying because of different (whatever) track. I think I’ll stop now.

;- )

“At the same time, there are indeed prejudiced, biased, and bigoted people in the world, so I do see value in talking about these kinds of issues (at home, in school, etc). Sometimes things truly are a “big deal” because there are in fact racists and bigots out there–but you’re right that sometimes certain folks are basically just throwing gasoline on the proverbial fire.”

You’re not going to find anyone above about 10 that hasn’t been exposed at length to the ideas of equality. SciFi on TV’s been on the cutting edge of it for decades now, (Ah, Firefly… a show cut down way before its prime, not to mention all the series that preceded it…) not to mention all the sitcoms where integration’s the norm, not to mention the entertainment industry where talent is the key instead of skin color.

(We won’t talk about the rap subculture there. Self-segregation, misogyny, violence, all sorts of good stuff going on that’d be soundly and rightly condemned if whites were doing it, but engenders a strange silence when blacks do it… It’s a boil on our society, and if it does burst it’s going to be nasty and difficult to cure without a lot of violence. But sometimes the best thing to do is leave a boil alone.)

Interracial marriage is common now, where it really wasn’t when I was a kid.

So if, by the age of 30 or so, someone’s a bigot / racist, you’re not going to change their minds by sitting them down in a ‘diversity training session’ for an hour or two. At best, they’ll roll their eyes and be slient about their attitudes in the workplace. At worst? They come away more convinced that they’re right, and angry and resentful over having their racist attitudes shoved in their faces. Yeah, that’ll make the workplace better.

And here’s a radical thought – why should you even try?

(Reflexive reply – because they’re bigots and they’re wrong. Okay, they’re wrong. How much time and effort are you willing to spend to convince them of that?)

You can sit them in lectures, you can browbeat them all day long – and what do you end up with? Someone who’s still a racist and/or a bigot. (And let’s be honest here – it ain’t all one way by a long shot.) But they’ve learned to be quiet about their feelings. (Which might be okay in itself.)

In my lifetime i’ve seen Segregation disappear. I’ve seen social mores and customs change wildly for the better regarding race relations. I’ve seen an explosion of diversity in the US. I’ve seen a hell of a lot of GOOD social changes.

And they’re ignored – with time, money, and effort focused like a laser on the things that are wrong… which are getting of less and less importance.

As Herddog posted above – “Because (and I realize that I’m preaching to the choir) it’s not about actually helping people or “justice” for lefties: it’s about political power.”

And he’s right. You never get political power by saying things are pretty much okay, all that has to happen is some minor changes. There’s always got to be a disaster in the offing, it’s always got to be the worst thing ever, it’s always got to be urgent that something be done right NOW or we’re going to (Insert scenario here). And they’re always the ones who know just the right thing to do, oddly enough. Just hand over a blank check, it’ll all be okay.

And in time, when the disaster doesn’t come about, and people are polite to each other without having the PC police beating ‘em with clubs, when the sun keeps coming up and the seasons flowing… all of it becomes much less important.

Sometimes we obsess about stuff that, in the long run, doesn’t matter at all.

Stay hydrated, man, and stay safe!

Wear a hat, man!

Re: “These positive changes are part of the story…are you saying that you think these aspects of our history are getting ignored? Or are you saying that some folks ignore all the good and only focus on the negative?”

When their paychecks depend on keeping the grievances going – you’re not going to hear any good news from the likes of Jackson, Sharpton, and Farrakhan. And for better or worse, they’re the spokesmen that are turned to by the MSM when the subject of race comes up. They’re reliable, they’re consistent.

And they’ll never say things are getting better.

Me? I try to focus on the good.

“Again, this is because something like racism is absolutely a socially learned behavior–we are not born with some hardwired tendency to fear and/or hate people with different levels of melanin–this has to be learned.”

Absolutely. In fact (as my lovely bride occasionally says) there’s a song about that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ve_Got_to_Be_Carefully_Taught has the history behind it in the musical “South Pacific”.

You’ve got to be taught
To hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught
From
year to year,
It’s got to be drummed
In your dear little ear
You’ve got
to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a diff’rent shade,
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate,
You’ve got to be carefully taught
—————

And what happens when you’re not taught that?

“So this leads to another issue: what’s to be done about groups of bigots and racists? How should a society deal with these groups? Of course, it all depends on what they are doing (if anything) with their prejudiced or racist worldviews.”

The idea of a quick fix is a nice one. Wouldn’t it be great if everyone could just take a pill before going to bed, and the next day nobody would want to make war, lie, steal, be prejudiced, ruin the environment and overrun their cell phone data plans?

Hmmm. Wonder what the market might be for time-release cyanide? Probably not many repeat buyers… well, never mind – I guess there’s no quick fix.

So we go for the long run… which is what we’re doing anyway. Smoking in the US used to be ubiquitous, now it’s actually fairly rare. You change the social climate, and the people will adjust. The social climate’s changed to a point where overt expressions of racism aren’t acceptable – or they’re laughed at. (Witness the mighty KKK, for example. Once a political force to be reckoned with – now an organization’s that’s pretty much a joke.)

Yes, there’s hard-core racists. But when they’ve got no power – and are basically ridiculed by folks around them who have two or more functioning neurons to rub together – the possibility that they’re going to GET power as our society integrates itself further seems pretty unlikely to me.

So – if they’re doing nothing, leave them be. We wait them out. If they’re openly advocating hurting others of the improper ‘type’ – shut ‘em down legally IF they act. If they’re attempting things (like the various Muslim sects attempting conversion through explosion in the ME) then shut them down hard.

Unless something exceedingly unfortunate happens… which I think some on both sides of the racial divide would actively like to see.. in a couple more decades, maybe a couple of generations – they’ll be gone.

And good riddance to them, I say!