[sandisk5]

America is a very different place now than in 1946.

I googled "most popular people in America" and Google shows me pictures and out of the top ten, half are African-American including Barack Obama, Michael Jackson, Muhammad Ali, MLK Jr, and Oprah Winfrey.

I looked at one page that had top ten most popular people in America in the 1940s and there were no African-Americans on the list.

> Your ancestors dragged these black people from their homes by force

Many slavers were African, particularly the ones dragging people out of their homes, and in 1946 very few Americans would have had ancestors who were either slave traders or slave owners.

[coldtea]

>I googled "most popular people in America" and Google shows me pictures and out of the top ten, half are African-American including Barack Obama, Michael Jackson, Muhammad Ali, MLK Jr, and Oprah Winfrey.

Try googling "over-represented race in incarcerations", "over-represented race in police shootings", "redlining", poverty stats, etc. too. Besides, of those popular people, Michael Jackson tried to turn himself white, MLK Jr was conveniently murdered, Muhammad Ali was persecuted by the state, and Barack Obama is routinely called racist slurs despite being the president.

Plus, it's easy to make popular idols of talented black artists and still view down on the majority of them. Louis Armstrong, boxers and other black entertainers were quite popular when the country was openly racist too.

>Many slavers were African

But none of them operated in the USA or kept slaves there.

The buyers of the millions of blacks that came to the US, those who used and abused them as slaves, and who made the trade profitable in the first place, were white Americans.

>Many slavers were African, and in 1946 very few Americans would have had ancestors who were either slave traders or slave owners.

No, but the majority of them had ancestors that were racist, enforcing double standards, unfair laws (segregation, Jim Crow laws, etc.), and in some cases violence (beatings, lynchings, etc.) to the black population. And most of them were racism themselves too.

[sandisk5]

> Try googling "over-represented race in incarcerations", "over-represented race in police shootings"

Why did you leave off "over-represented race in violent crimes"?

> Michael Jackson tried to turn himself white

So that makes him not black? Are the people who idolize him confused and don't realize he's black? People loved him before his transformation. One funny anecdote is Michael Jackson, refusing that he "turned himself white", said that his grandmother told him that the reason they called them colored people is that they come in all different colors. :)

> MLK Jr was conveniently murdered

Conveniently? I'd say tragically. Abraham Lincoln was also assassinated. I don't know how this changes that both are among the most admired people in America today.

> Muhammad Ali was persecuted by the state

As were many white people who openly violated the draft or spoke out against the war (I'm not saying avoiding the draft is a bad thing or that Ali wasn't a legitimate conscientious objector).

> Barack Obama is routinely called racist slurs despite being the president.

Not routinely by any major national publications or widely popular figures. Also, being the current president doesn't mean people don't call you mean things, if anything it means you're called more mean things. People said plenty of mean things about Bush or Clinton while they were president.

[tptacek]

Abraham Lincoln was assassinated because he ended the slavery of African Americans.

Obama doesn't face slurs "routinely from widely popular figures"? The fucking GOP Presidential nominee was the head of the birther movement!

[achievingApathy]

Lincoln had absolutely no interest in freeing slaves. His main purpose was to maintain the union at all costs. “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery.”

[idlewords]

Really you have no idea how Lincoln felt about slavery, nor how those feelings changed with time. His public statements are the carefully crafted words of a master politician.

For a guy with no interest in freeing slaves, he sure freed a lot of slaves.

[achievingApathy]

"I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator. As a law professor and civil rights lawyer and as an African American, I am fully aware of his limited views on race."

-- Someone who might know a little bit about being a politician

[aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA]

http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/hodges....

"I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling."

[achievingApathy]

He was very much against the expansion of slavery. This is clear in his writings and his voting record. I'm not saying that he was an outright racist, but take him in historical context. He resisted his party's call for emancipation for over two years into the Civil War, and he only issued the Proclamation once the North was all but sure to lose. And even then he only abolished it in states that were rebelling against the Union. He could never have abolished slavery outright given that there were six slave holding states that were fighting on his side that would have seceded immediately thereafter.

[coldtea]

>Why did you leave off "over-represented race in violent crimes"?

Because those crimes are (for anything above the baseline for people in general at the same poverty levels) are results of centuries of being abused, held down and denied opportunities.

Even if all white people (and people in power) in some city X stopped being racist, it wouldn't automatically mean that the blacks there living in the wrong side of the tracks, in an underfunded school district, and working shit jobs, will suddenly have the same opportunities as the average white person. For one, as parents they will still be the same poor folks that didn't have a good education and can't afford (or know) to raise their kids properly and send them off to some good school. This things take generations to overcome, slowly trickling upwards (and in an era when the middle class is squeezed down and the working class is fucked, that's even less likely to happen).

If you believe in blacks being inherently more violent etc as a race outside of systemic causes (poverty, bad school districts, lack of opportunities, etc, caused by centuries of slavery, double standards and racism) then you might as well believe that they have inferior DNA.

>So that makes him not black?

No, that makes him an example of the kind of forces of American society towards blacks, where even idols can't be satisfied in their black skin.

>Conveniently? I'd say tragically. Abraham Lincoln was also assassinated. I don't know how this changes that both are among the most admired people in America today.

It's easy to admire a non-threatening murdered person, especially if you make him into a convenient sugary version of what he stood for. Unlike Lincoln he wasn't much admired by white American society in his day, and a black rights advocate in his vein wouldn't be that admired today.

>Also, being the current president doesn't mean people don't call you mean things, if anything it means you're called more mean things. People said plenty of mean things about Bush or Clinton while they were president.

About their race? Were they drawn as monkeys? Asked about being muslim?

[powertower]

> Because those crimes are (for anything above the baseline for people in general at the same poverty levels) are results of centuries of being abused, held down and denied opportunities.

Yet no matter where you look on this planet, no matter what the history of that location is, no matter how far back in history you go, the pattern (of violence such as murder and rape) stays the same - and even more so when those places are absent of the other races/groups.

[coldtea]

>Yet no matter where you look on this planet, no matter what the history of that location is, no matter how far back in history you go, the pattern (of violence such as murder and rape) stays the same - and even more so when those places are absent of the other races/groups.

I'm not sure I follow. What you mean by "the pattern (of violence such as murder and rape) stays the same"? The pattern of violence that black people do?

If so, that's absolutely wrong that it stays the same "no matter where you look on this planet, no matter what the history of that location is, no matter how far back in history you go".

In fact the amount of violence perpetuated by "white people", from the Crusades to the Holocaust, colonial wars, Cold War proxy wars, etc, and onwards, is so much higher, it's not even funny. And not even at their own house -- they pissed all over the world.

[powertower]

What I was referring to can be summed up here - http://www.colorofcrime.com/2016/03/the-color-of-crime-2016-...

As far as medieval history and the other things you've mentioned go, every type of tribe on this planet has engaged in conquest and warfare. Some won. Some lost.

[djtriptych]

Where else were laws drafted specifically to deny rights to some race of people?

Google redlining and tell me who else we've done that to without restitution.

[powertower]

The conservative value on the amount of resources provided to minorities through affirmative action, welfare, charity, government programs and hiring quotas, and other forms of restitution is 20 trillion USD minimum.

Also the costs associated with absorbing the negative factors related to minorities (such as crime related costs, various social costs, etc) likely geometrically multiplies the above amount in various ways.

[chvid]

Why is it controversial to say USA is a different place today? When it clearly is: Black president, wealthy black actors, wealthy black sportsmen and so on.

sandisk5 is been down voted en masse.

[coldtea]

There's a saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

It might be a different place than in the era of KKK-cross-burnings, but it still ways from what a modern, racially just, society should be. Token black president or not.

I wrote above that blacks are for example over-represented in incarcerations, and somebody said that that's because they are over-represented in crime stats too.

Not understanding that that argument, far from being an answer ("see the law it's just doing its jobs, its just that blacks are more criminal") is a great example of racism itself.

It's a given to me, that blacks are not more criminal as a race (that is, in biological terms -- except if you agree with KKK and them having "faulty" criminal DNA etc.).

So if they are "more criminal" in actual life, this can mean mainly two things: (a) the white-dominated legal system has a prejudice against them (putting more of them in jail, giving them harsher punishment for the same crimes compared to whites etc) and (b) their life circumstances push them to commit more crimes.

And I say it's a combination of both (a) and (b).

So, let's put it this way: US would be non racist, not just when black people are less frequently shoot by the police, but when black people are less frequently participating in violent crime too.

Because that would mean that the systemic causes keeping them down and pushing them towards those means have finally been eradicated.

[peteretep]

Of course it's a different place.

But it's still a place with an obvious problem with institutionalised racism, and every argument in the original holds true, so what does it matter?

It's being downvoted because it's irrelevant, as an interjection it reeks of apologism.

[tptacek]

That there were Africans involved in the slave trade has no bearing whatsoever on Einstein's argument.

[empath75]

In the 1860s, black people were slaves. In the 1940s, they weren't. Obviously, no further progress needed to be made.

[JabavuAdams]

Oh, thanks. Next time I'm on business in SF and I start thinking about which cargo pocket to put my phone in to minimize my chance of being murdered by the police, I'll draw comfort from a bunch of token Negros in show-biz and politics.

[chvid]

It is a very different place today.

And yet this text pops up on the front page of hacker news.

I assume it is because of the events in Dallas; but why discuss this text and not the actual event or a million other things related to the topic of race and racism?

[Karunamon]

There's probably not much constructive discussion to be had on the event here. These are social problems at their roots, not technical ones.

[chvid]

It is obviously a "hard and controversial" problem to discuss - I don't really understand why. I sense it has something to do with the upcoming US election and maybe there is a lot of campaigning being done online.

HN in general has good discussions on economics and social issues but not on this.

[llamataboot]

Congratulations, that's two spaces on the "arguments white people make" bingo card.