lowing wrote:
Ummmm, Most of the white people you are referring to came to America with little or nothing in their pockets, hardly coddled. Some came as indentured servants themselves. These people came here to BUILD their own American dream. Which means they pulled their pants up from off of their fuckin' asses and went to work and build it, without blaming everyone else for their failures.
Perhaps whites do not have trends and traditions solely our own, because we put being American first and not AFRICAN American, or MEXICAN American. While you try and figure out YOUR heritage from 200 years ago and figure out how much "whitey" owes you for being black, the rest of us are building our own personal dreams. GO to work, give it a try. Oh but wait, any successful black person in America is viewed as a "sell out" to whitey by the black community. Oh well I guess just keep plugging away at your fashion trends, for whitey to adopt and figuring out ways to get everything for nothing. Hence the race ( credit ) card .
lowing wrote:
there is white trash as well, not every white person is a success. The common denominator is, both races who do not succeed in some measure, is personal choices, and irresponsibility not "whitey", keeping ya down. It is YOU keeping YOU down.
I gauge people on their merit not their race. I respect everyone that builds their dreams regardless of race, and wouldn't piss on ANYONE that blames EVERYONE for their failures.
...my exhaustive reply...
there you go with your fairy-tale arbitrary belief in the internal locus of control leveling all other worldly factors. lol, "YOU keeping YOU down," how does one hog tie themself and drag themself behind a pickup truck? how does one invade their own country and force a foreign system of trade on themself? this is a profoundly simplistic way of interpreting events and you should move past it.
okay, so if everyone is the champion of their own destiny and could take a big slice of the pie if they tried (via the american dream) then who comes up empty handed when pretty much
everyone gives a significant effort? And particularly, who loses when certain tiny (predominantly white, coincidentally) fragments of the world population stake claim to nearly 25% of earth's resources? a lot of hard-working people start losing when the system is controlled that way. LOL. I suppose you think the present distribution of wealth was just built on hard work. I'm sure J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie worked a billion times harder than everyone else! its a simple fact that a person's ability to achieve is as much a function of their own personal effort as it is environmental constraints, ie., social class, geography, family, education, politics, connections, institutional racism, etc.
if you really want to blame individuals and hold everybody accountable for their personal effect on the world and the costs they incur to others, then as much as you denigrate those that fail to achieve, like "white trash" you might also point a finger at the several rich, predominantly white, institutions and social classes which profit from the racist and class-discriminatory conflicts that have shaped world trade. the richest white people have as much of a right to the "claims" and "assets" from century-old titles, as the average african-american or native-american has the right to 'steal' them back in just retribution. isnt it ironic how minorities sometimes use the white man's gun when they forcibly take things back?
its just a hilarious double standard that all historical conquests like slavery must be forgiven, and forgotten about, and yet nobody wants to forget about the reason why their white family has money or a well paying job. we wouldn't have the wealth we do today in white America without having taken it as Europeans throughout hundreds of years of imperialism and colonialism while structuring the hijacked system of world trade that persists today. if you are going to say that our history is legitimate and that our country owns the land in the United States, then you also have to admit the reverse statement, that the people we displaced and enslaved were robbed and have as much of a right to forcibly reclaim their natural wealth as we do to hold its title in 2008. the system of world trade is actually designed to devalue the labor of the rest of the world so that we can (mostly the corporate oligarchy), with little effort, take much more than we contribute. all the tiny countries of the world didn't just choose to have their weak currencies, many of them were forced into their place in the world economy by first invading them, and then "freeing" them (ie, africa) in the 1900's with an interchangeable currency and enough debt to the white banking cabal that their people could never get as much for a day of work as the average white boy in america or western europe. and now when a white person in america makes $30 an hour as a plumber, they think to themself, "hard work pays off" without realizing that in much of the world, there isnt even enough money to create stable demand for useful specialists like plumbers, despite the fact that the land and people might be quite productive. if they could trade the wealth of their labor for as much as the average american, then the people wouldnt be impoverished and we wouldnt find them looking for work, or god forbid, on welfare, in american cities. a person can work all day farming enough food for hundreds of people and then not take enough money to buy food for their family. people are robbed like this every day because its institutional poverty and its history happens to be quite racist.
i dont think its in any way practical to try to track down who owns what in a legal-historical sense--to, in effect, redistribute wealth based on past events, not least because there is no unbiased authority in this enterprise. but until our society has some consciousness about what crimes were committed in the past, then we are pretty much doomed to perpetuate the status quo in its present form, and always live on a planet dominated by tiny groups of individuals that take billions of times more wealth from society than they contribute. don't take my post as a flame, just realize that your "personal responsibility" argument is incomplete without considering why the "american dream" actually functions the way it does. u mentioned indentured servitude, and its true, white people have also lived as slaves, much like the factory workers in the third world today. as a culture, we need to learn to recognize when labor is devalued and when people are dehumanized, regardless of their race, and we need to oppose this kind of treatment on a moral basis and on the basis that we would not want to be cheated the same way. i know white people are diverse in their access to wealth like all people, but in a statistical sense, they get a lot more wealth per unit of labor because of the organization of world trade and politics which were all forced on the world down the barrel of a gun.
that some people of all races are lazy and a drain on others is true. true to the extent that there is no reason to even view it racially. to characterize races in such a way is simply racist. yet its also racist to be "colorblind" and pretend that racism has nothing to do with the present state of the world, as if everybody is responsible for the slaver, exploitative factory, or creditor that owns them. and lowing this post isn't soley directed at you, its just my response to the thread.
Last edited by Marinejuana (2008-01-09 10:25:21)