Race is only skin deep, but …
Recently, I received this e-mail from a Washington University professor who’s been keeping up with the dialogue on this blog:
“Unfortunately, all too often, when it comes to conversations about race, any real attempt to get good information goes out the window, and people go straight to their pre-existing biases, no matter how unfounded they may be.”
The professor suggested I provide a link to a “thought-provoking as well as informative” three-part documentary entitled Race: The Power of an Illusion.” The web site basically covers and expounds on the information provided in the series.
“Race: The Power of an Illusion” explores the history of racialized thought in America. From a scientific vantage point, it emphasizes that ”race” is but an illusion. However, it also documents the inequitable social and economic realities aligned with this race-based illusion.
This documentary, I believe, adds a counter argument to those who scoff at government intervention aimed at helping blacks and other minorities. The film and web site deconstructs the myth that whites earned wealth and stature through hard work and determination alone.
The series final episode, “The House We Live In,” explains how institutions and policies “quietly and often invisibly” benefited white people, not necessarily because of merit or hard work, but because of the racialized nature of our laws, courts, customs, and perhaps most pertinently, housing.”
Larry Adelman, the executive producer and co-director of the program writes:
“We hope this series can help clear away the biological underbrush and leave starkly visible the underlying social, economic, and political conditions that disproportionately channel advantages and opportunities to white people. Perhaps then we can shift the conversation from discussing diversity and respecting cultural difference to building a more just and equitable society.”
I didn’t receive permission to use his name, but I’d like to thank the Washington U. professor for sharing this information. I’d also like to invite him and other scholars to bring their insights and thoughts to this blog. Their input and expertise, may help more of us move beyond “pre-existing biases” and help decipher some of the misunderstandings that cloud the often contentious issue of “race.”





Sylvester Brown, Jr. often refers to himself as the "accidental columnist." He enrolled in college almost 25 years ago to pursue a career as a cartoonist. He ended up starting an award-winning newspaper and falling in love with journalism. Today, as a writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the "accidental columnist's" love affair continues.
Gosh. Institutions and policies benefiting those whose institutions the policies are expressed in.
There’s a way-out weird concept which would be utterly outlandish to every other nationality and culture the world-over…
What is it with people in this nation that they will actually allow someone to state that the institutions and policies pertinent to them created by and mostly of a group—”white” people (known by intelligent people as caucasians) as if it’s an indictment?
Wake up dweeble-knob ivory-tower impractizoids! There would be no institutions with policies to benefit anyone here on this continent were it not for those who–yes Kwaizumifumimugumbo–created them.
Give me one single good reason what caucasians wrought on this continent ought to NOT benefit them to a greater extent than others whose contributions do not begin to pay for their costs. I dare you.
Look to africa for what happens when negroes are a majority and thus able to skew their institutions to benefit them–in the short term sense of the word benefit. The whole stinking continent is a cess-pit of preventable diseases, environmental disasters and tragedy. These are not the doings of U.S.A. caucausians–save the tragedy of a once decent hardworking productive nation like South Africa turned into what it’s turning into now. I listened to a stream of a radio station from there one night. Know what their big sponsor was? It was a manufacturer of home safes and “other personal security devices”. The big item in the news that day was the astounding frequency with which negroes were driving up to ATM machines and blowing them up with explosives to try to get the money out of them.
In other news, everyone involved was trying to figure out why they can no longer do public works projects like digging tunnels for roadways without the excavations collapsing because someone wasn’t bright enough to figure out to test the soil and rock they were going through.
Yes, let’s do change our policies to reflect a more african-style of apportionment of benefit in our society so we can be just like africa.
I’ve always wanted to watch a crowd of savages in the street out in front of my home hacking at each other with cutlasses instead of hacking with one at their shrubbery…
Tell you whut… go over to jewsreal and do a big study about how the nation *they* did not create by themselves by *any* means is completely geared towards the benefit of the kibbutzunists. Here’s a little study-tool to take along with you. Go around trying to convert the kibbutzunists to jewusism. See what happens to you. If it happened to you in Clinton-era afganistan and the people doing it to you were known as “talibs” it would become a big story on “our” evening news, but even if everyone else can’t be educated by the little experiment I’m suggesting you do, you can be. That would be something, at least. And the same U.S. tax dollars that pay for the “institutions and policies that benefit (the) white people (who created them to the betterment at some level of all others as well as mostly to their own)” pay for what you would find happening to you if you did the experiment I suggest.
Go on! Then write a grant application and create a documentary on it. Who knows, maybe some neo-kibbutzunist here will write a ‘blog article suggesting everyone see it and educate themselves by your sad experience.
You know what Judy Tenuda says: “It could happen!”
(she’s a goddess you know–just ask her)
Frankly, I’m getting a little sick and tired of the constant lament of the terrible terrible (supposedly) un-earned privilege of the big bad caucasian race.
It seems to me that they just almost single-handedly installed the first negro President of the United States of America in office and it was mostly caucasians working in caucasian institutions which do, admittedly, most-of-the-time benefit mostly caucasians.
Of course their working to elect that particular President certainly wasn’t one case of the dread caucasian institutions and policies benefiting caucasians or ANYONE, for that matter, but nothing’s perfect, I guess.
Get a new hobby. Go down to the dump and observe the behavior of rats and report back to us on how vile and nasty they are. Or, maybe you can report to us on how horribly unfair it is that the oxygen eukaryotic life gives off then turns around and benefits eukaryotic life to the exclusion of prokaryotes. what a horrible injustice! God up in heaven must be weeping his eyes out and manufacturing devils and demons to inhabit a special hell for eukaryotic life to go to and be tormented for eternity for their perfidious self-serving biological activites.
That would be “jewsusism”, not “jewusism”–and you’ll find the kibbutzunist will show you no appreciation if you buttonhole their children and impressionable young people and try to get them to accept your “personal savior” (jewsus) as theirs.
UBL Another pre-Nobel Thesis.
I will say this, those whom you want to understand the gravity of what our nation is doing to self, won’t really understand. It would be best to ask those questions that really do define them. Where do you live? If you have children, do they attend a school district that has 50+% of African Americans children? These questions really get at the heart of most liberals. They spout their views for all to hear but don’t walk the walk.
So once again, it is my fault for being white. Once again, the sins of the past are thrown in our faces and we are obligated to hand out reparations for those were descendants of the ones harmed. If you keep this up, we will never achieve the goal. Folks of every shade need to simply worry about what they can accomplish and dream about what they want to do in life. This is not as racist of a society as everyone paints it to be.
Have whites received an unfair advantage over the years economically, politically, and so forth because of slavery and the post-slavery oppression of blacks? Absolutely and without question. And even though my family didn’t own slaves, I still benefited from that oppression because I was white. It’s not comfortable to admit that, but simple logic dictates that it is true.
Attempts have been made to reverse and repair this injustice by concepts such as affirmative action. The results have not been what people had hoped. Part of the reason for that is simple: You cannot force society to change what they don’t want to change. You can’t make people accept responsibility for something they don’t feel responsible for. It’s certainly not easy to admit the advantage you have received at the expense of others.
Obviously having some oppression of whites isn’t going to fix it either. Two wrongs won’t make it right.
The real question is: How to you get the playing field even? For all the blogs by the P-D staff in this area, and for all the Wash U profs who email in studies and documentaries, no one really bothers to attempt an answer to that. I don’t blame them because it isn’t easy. But it is the only discussion that will really lead anywhere to fixing the problem. All the rest of this stuff only places blame…
They are far too gone. The only thing any human being can do for the ones above is to pray that God will bless them and open their eyes up because there is absolutely nothing more another human being can say or do that will change their mind. Only a miracle will change their mind and hearts just as the miracle that took place with Elwin Wilson. It doesn’t do any good to be angry at them, hate them or hold unkind feelings towards them and ones like them, just pity them. If one can’t do this on their own, seek God’s strength to be able to because if you can’t, you are in just as much danger as these ones because we too must get to a point if not already there where you can wish these ones good will that God will save them.
You know that something must be really twisted in them as expressed by their comments. Pray for God’s grace towards them as He did with Elwin Wilson and as He has done with many of us because this is what we must do if we want to receive God’s grace and forgiveness for ourselves because we are all twisted in one way or another. So pray for your enemies because people like these ones are certainly enemies to Blacks and probably some other minorities too and certainly anyone White who do not share their same thoughts towards Blacks and some other groups.
Tim,
Beautifully genuinely stated and if only everyone could see as you do in this one area.
We’re all the same except other races besides white get to be different when they want to be and don’t have to be held to account like whites do which incidentally whites are not allowed to have their own race and culture anymore. So why is racism against whites okay but verboten against others?
No amount of indoctrination and liberal utopian idealogy will ever make me ashamed of my white skin. I am proud to be white and will never bow to anyone!
Tim how those shoulders? They must be acking you carry their water pretty good.
It seems you have bought into that notion that white skin has privileges assign once you come out the birth canal.
Hog CHIT. If there’s anyone in our society has that they look just like Jessie Jackson.
“You cannot force society to change what they don’t want to change”
Nor should you.
If I had a magic wand this country would really look much different.
I would give every African American the opportunity to take all their knowledge they have gain living in this society and show all those people that they are align with AFRICANS and boot strap them into the twenty century. They could build a nation un-equal to any others that have been on the face of this earth since man has roamed the planet.
I have great confidence in all of what they as a group have contributed to make America a great nation will spring forth.