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by SamUK96 3497 days ago
Oh, no, I don't feel oppressed. I am pointing out the ironic nature of a museum, and a general culture, that has the mindset of trying to "account" for past racism with treating one race differently to another, far since the effects of the past have dwindled to nothing but natural human impulses.
2 comments
tptacek 3497 days ago
You need to stop using the word "race" this way. It's not a museum about "race". It's a museum about a cultural history shared among millions of Americans. It's got slavery, Jim Crow, and the civil rights movement, but also James Baldwin's passport. Black history in the US is an enormous rich topic; it would clearly deserve a museum even if blacks had never been discriminated against.
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burkaman 3497 days ago
I think this is maybe the core of your argument, that racism and its effects are no longer noticeable, so this kind of thing isn't necessary. I would encourage you to look up the many studies of how simply having a black sounding name can affect job prospects and other things, and ask some black people if they've ever been affected by discrimination.
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SamUK96 3497 days ago
a) there hasn't been many studies. Many headlines about few studies which makes you think there are lots however...

b) If you read past the headlines into the correlation and probability theory of each study, you'll find that the reason why there is the difference is because of education and lower ambitions and goals of black people. You could say there is no real racism, only perceived racism, which then mentally affects the perceiever, and dissaudes them from getting better qualifications and therefore worse job prospects.

That is not in itself racism. That is a false perception of reality ends up affecting reality later on. I think it's called the self-fulfillment fallacy.

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wang_li 3497 days ago
> a) there hasn't been many studies. Many headlines about few studies which makes you think there are lots however...

The social sciences suffer massive publication bias. Results ranging from failure of the study to support the hypothesis to the gathered data having being politically incorrect lead to research being abandoned.

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burkaman 3497 days ago
This sort of seems like a semantics argument. If the effects of "perceived racism" are the same as the effects of real racism, isn't it still a problem? Don't we still need to deal with it?
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