Best african american history books according to redditors
We found 140 Reddit comments discussing the best african american history books. We ranked the 73 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
We found 140 Reddit comments discussing the best african american history books. We ranked the 73 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
I have always been horrified by how little attention the Tulsa Massacre receives. It was a Kristalnacht against people of color. We hear all the time about the race riots of the late 1960s, especially following the death of Martin Luther King. The riots after the police beat the shit out of Rodney King are fresh in our minds are replayed all the time on television. These are perceived as being instigated by black people.
What happened to an entire community in Tulsa is never discussed.
IMNSHO, It is a clear example of how the white community treats "uppity" POC when they are perceived as doing well.
I also think it is an example of how the capitalist oligarchy will use race to turn the working class against each other, but that is a whole other discussion.
I suggest the following for more information:
​
There are more books, but I feel those 2 are the best, especially the first book
How? With what money? With what resources? With what education? You're talking about an entire population that was intentionally deprived of familial connections, cultural connections, the ability to organize, the ability to build wealth, the ability to exercise any autonomy, literacy, and education.
Africa is not exactly a small place, and most ex-slaves didn't even know where their ancestors had been kidnapped from.
Also keep in mind how much different things looked at the end of the Civil War than much later. Ex-slaves were promised equality with whites, full rights as citizens of the US, and given the promise of reparations for slavery. Congress passed a law in 1865 that guaranteed full citizenship regardless of race and the 14th amendment was circulated starting in 1866 and became part of the constitution in 1868. For a decade following the end of the Civil War Reconstruction proceeded at a fast pace. Laws were changed, progress was made, historical iniquities were being redressed. The vast majority of ex-slaves in this situation who were offered the possibility of staying wherever they were and using the labor skills they already had to attempt to make a living in America (either through sharecropping or on their own) seemed enormously enticing.
At a minimum the situation looked to be superior to their previous situation of enslavement. They were ostensibly free. They could keep their families together, they could build their lives up (in terms of wealth, community, education, skills, ambition, etc.), and they had the prospect of attaining true equality of stature and accomplishment with whites in perhaps a generation or so.
It was not until two or three decades later when Reconstruction had been destroyed and dismantled, when slavery had been replaced with a racial caste system that was becoming enshrined in custom and law (Jim Crow et al), and when it became abundantly clear that the end of slavery did not mean the end of white supremacy in America that black Americans began to comprehend that the society they lived in was going to limit the extent of their advancements to a very narrowly defined box not much expanded from where it had been before. And then there really was a huge debate on what to do. Black communities felt the oppression, understood the long-term implications and generally understood that the status quo was untenable.
Eventually they did take action and move, out of the South and into the North and the West in one of the most significant demographic shifts in the 20th century called The Great Migration. By then they had more money, more resources, more education, much greater literacy, and greater ability to move around (due to the advent of automobiles and the advancement of railroads). But even so, and even moving within the US alone, it was an enormously challenging endeavor that not all African-Americans undertook.
If you want to get some additional perspective on what things were like I'd suggest reading "The Warmth of Other Suns" by Isabel Wilkerson.
Expecting the world to work in a certain way just because you've never heard of something is a quick way to be wrong all the time. Trust me, yesterday I called bullshit on tattoos interacting with MRI machines. Turns out I was completely wrong, metal based inks will cause skin burn and distort the image for an MRI.
Eugenics was created by racist scientists. The nazis go their best ideas from US eugenics proponents who were coming up with reasons why black people should be slaves. Medical attrociities have been performed on people of color, because "they didn't matter". Science is in no way shape or form objective. It is as flawed as the humans who pursue it. Seriously, read a Howard Zinn book.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/22/eugenics-racism-mainstream-science
https://www.amazon.com/Medical-Apartheid-Experimentation-Americans-Colonial/dp/076791547X
http://newafricanmagazine.com/medical-scandal/
https://www.history.com/news/the-father-of-modern-gynecology-performed-shocking-experiments-on-slaves
Because that's how they got the country in the first place. And because that type of person who takes and "defends" "his" land by force has been glorified since the very beginning. I recommend this book, especially if the claim that the second amendment and gun culture today stems from the trauma of British rule always seemed somewhat fishy to you as well (or maybe especially if it didn't).
If you haven’t read the book, Medical Apartheid by Harriet Washington , please do! It’s an excellent and easy to follow chronological explanation of the medical experimentation on Black people 👍🏾
Hey folks - I've lurked on Reddit for a long time, and finally decided to post.
This is my Ruger GP100 and my Sunday morning reading material - Hammer and Hoe by Robin D.G. Kelley
I've got my CCW and act as "backup security" at a church that hosts immigration workshops in a predominantly Latino neighborhood in Chicago. The church is also the base of a long-running, Latina-led community organization dedicated to immigration justice.
I (and a few of my friends) have been working on getting a group of left-leaning shooters together as a "Left Wing Gun Club" - not as explicitly political as Redneck Revolt or a John Brown Gun Club, but also a bit more left than center-leftish "liberal gun owners." Some folks want to join just to shoot in a more politically sympathetic environment, others are interested in providing security for protests/community events.
Are there any Chicagoans that frequent this sub that'd be interested in meeting up and possibly collaborating?
If someone in a Reddit thread with 16 comments came up with this - you think national media won't? To counter your "no, it's okay, I swear" explanation... someone already wrote a bestselling novel titled Forty Million Dollar Slaves.
It's not an erroneous criticism. It's 100% legitimate.
I'll probably get downvoted for this, but hopefully I can offer some insight into Jackson's comments.
A sports columnist for The New York Times by the name of William C. Rhoden wrote a book entitled Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete. In his book, Rhoden draws parallels between how the owners and/or management of sports franchises dictate the fate of their players irrespective of their wishes to how a slave master values a slave as a piece of property in which the slave master owns.
A lot of people will preemptively dismiss anything Jesse Jackson has to say because of the baggage he carries, but in all fairness, Jackson didn't say anything about race or even accuse Dan Gilbert of racism. Spike Lee also made a (less brash, but) similar statement about Dan Gilbert not owning LeBron on ESPN.
If you're interested in reading Rhoden's reaction to all the LeBron James drama, you can read it on The New York Times website.
Don't kill the messenger.
That story is from page 208 in "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration." It's gobsmacking. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster was a physician and a veteran. If he couldn't get a room, imagine what it was like for an ordinary African-American. http://www.amazon.com/The-Warmth-Other-Suns-Migration/dp/0679763880
I got it on audible and listened to it in about 2weeks. If we were going to have a "book list for the resistance" I'd say this one is crucial. Also, maybe think of these as prerequisites, I think everyone should read or listen to The Warmth of Other Suns and Hillbilly Elegy because, in my opinion, they describe the past in way that informs the present social strife that Trump used to divide and conquer to win the Republican primary and general elections. If the Left is going to have a political answer in 2 and 4yrs for the people who either declined to vote altogether or who voted Trump, we have to understand and have compassion for their plight.
I understand the emotional need to point the finger at Trump voters and say "Ha! You get what you voted for!" when their healthcare is taken away or their jobs are automated without a proper safety net, but that's such a vindictive and shortsighted outlook that isn't going to help with coalition building.
Edit: the hardcover edition of Nothing is True and Everything is Possible is in stock
>because the rapid demographic shifts from rural to urban areas would have threatened the Republicans' majority in the House.
Ahhh, the Great Migration. Anytime I hear mention of it I feel compelled to recommend The Warmth of Other Suns. It's a fantastic book that's well worth the read.
Be forewarned though; don't read this if you don't want to end up empathizing with black folk, because it'll getcha in the feels.
Whew, okay. Pulled out my actual computer to answer this.
So, a lot of what I could recommend isn't short stuff you could read in an afternoon because 1. it's depressing as fuck, and 2. it's likely heavy with the sheer volume of references wherein at least one book attempts to bludgeon you with the facts that "this was depressing as fuck." Frequent breaks or alternating history-related books with fiction/poetry/other topics is rather recommended from my experience. Can't remember if I got onto this topic through Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States or Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong or just some random book found in the library.
The very clean cut, textbook Wikipedia definition of "sundown town", aka "Don't let the sun set (down) on you here.", (Ref: BlackThen.com), is:
> sometimes known as sunset towns or gray towns, are all-white municipalities or neighborhoods in the United States that practice a form of segregation by enforcing restrictions excluding people of other races via some combination of discriminatory local laws, intimidation, and violence.
For my intro into the subject however, read Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America. This is a very emotionally draining, mentally exhausting book though, frequently with lists of atrocities in paragraph form. I think it's an important read, one which frankly should've been covered my senior year of highschool or so, but it's a difficult one. Also on my reading list is The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration which is a surprising and sneakily hopeful title for such a depressing topic, so only guessing the narration may be somewhat more accessible.
Also, 'cause I totally didn't run to my kindle app to list out titles before fully reading your post, here's some below, and relisted one above, by timeline placement, best as can be figured. These might not be the best on each topic, but they're the ones available to my budget at the time and some are still on my reading list.
The Fires of Jubilee: Nat Turner's Fierce Rebellion
Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America
The Mis-Education of the Negro
At the Dark End of the Street: A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
Assata
Revolutionary Suicide
Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion
Sister Outsider
See also:
Black Street Speech: Its History, Structure, and Survival
Women, Race, & Class by Angela Y. Davis
Black Feminist Thought
Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations by Bell Hooks
Brainwashed: Challenging the Myth of Black Inferiority
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
There's quite a few good books I'd recommend on the subject:
tagging /u/NotGerkonanaken since they said they were interested
edit: obligatory 'thanks for the gold' edit. :)
That's so cool! I'm glad you know so much already about your family. Some things I'd wonder about (and might answer through talking to relatives or reading books):
I don't know if you've read it, but I would suggest the book "Our Kind of People"--it's flawed in many ways, and my family was never an upper-class black family, but I found a lot of resonances to my own family in it, and from your description of your family, I think you may too. Another suggestion would be "The Warmth of Other Suns", and particularly the experiences of Robert Foster, a Creole doctor who moved from Louisiana to California in the 1950s. (I'm not sure if your family is readers, but see if you can get your parents to read it; I suspect they'd really enjoy it, and it would open some good conversations.) Finally, keep an eye out for "Black Elephants in the Room", which is being released in October and is about the particular experiences of black Republicans.
How about the natives, and afrikans fighting against their genocide and enslavement?
I haven't read it yet, but it I've heard it covers this topic well:
The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America
The more militaristic and expansionist aspects of pro-slavery politics even spread beyond the official military policy of the Federal government to embrace private military ventures like the filibusterers of the 1850s - e.g., William Walker - and attempts at bully diplomacy in which the United States pressured other countries to cede territory in Central America and the Caribbean destined to become slave states. (The long Cuban controversy and the Ostend Manifesto of 1854 are a good demonstration of the latter.) Our memory of the Knights of the Golden Circle is tainted by their own self-aggrandizement and a bundle of conspiracy theories, but the fact of their existence - and their commitment to the idea of a slave-holding empire ringing the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean - is revealing enough.
As many Southerners understood, slavery required expansion in order to survive. The chattel slavery economy did not naturally produce the demographic explosion necessary to sustain its political life in an era when the Northern population was growing exponentially in just that way. Slave-grown cotton sapped the soil, and new agricultural vistas for slavery's consumption were not just desirable but fast becoming necessary by mid-century. Slaves themselves reproduced at a rate sufficient to ensure that they would not die out as a people, but the political and geographic preconditions necessary for the institution's survival were forever uncertain.
Northerners understood this, too. The entire raison d'etre of the Republican Party was to establish a "cordon of freedom" around the institution, which anti-slavery Northerners believed would starve it into submission. (James Oakes' book The Scorpion's Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War makes this point quite well.) Southern expansionism was politically palatable to Northerners as long as it was paired with non-slavery expansionism (e.g., the acquisition of Oregon alongside Texas). But the moment it became clear that the acquisition of new territory was not actually a bi-sectional affair, support collapsed. See, for example, widespread opposition in the North to the Mexican War and the Ostend Manifesto.
I'm traditionally more into literary fiction, but I've been exploring non-fiction recently.
Currently Reading: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
Recently Finished: The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration and Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam Trilogy
Next on the List: Either Guns Germs and Steel or Devil in the White City. Haven't decided yet
Currently working on Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War.
Thanks! I just bought it. Here's an Amazon link if anyone else wants to, it's $8 on Kindle.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00DK40HR4/ref=mp_s_a_1_8?qid=1450453539&sr=1-8&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=The+burning
https://www.amazon.com/Racism-Kansas-City-Short-History/dp/1943338027
So does this count as a counterpoint?
@MaxTemkin
> 2017-06-02 02:01 UTC
> The @RLisDead interview on Chapo is 🔥🔥🔥🔥 https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/episode-113-hit-and-run-feat-rl-stephens-53117
>
> Here's the Fields sisters' book he recommends: https://www.amazon.com/Racecraft-Soul-Inequality-American-Life-ebook/dp/B007LCYZCE/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
----
^This ^message ^was ^created ^by ^a ^bot
^[Contact ^creator]^[Source ^code]
So we're going the birther route. Okay, where was he born? Where did he live in his early years?
Edit - I looked it up:
>Mckesson was born in Baltimore to parents who were both addicted to drugs at the time. He and his sister were raised by their father, Calvin, and great-grandmother in West Baltimore; their mother left when DeRay was just three (and has since gotten clean). Mckesson told “Interview” magazine, “…we grew up in a tough neighborhood. I remember sleeping on the floor when the gunshots got too close. And we moved so we could be in a different neighborhood and go to different schools.” After his father kicked his drug addiction, the family moved to Catonsville, Maryland, when Mckesson was in middle school.
Also in this book, it notes he was born and raised not far from where Freddie Gray grew up. I think we can rest the birther case. Deray is from West Baltimore.
Not the OP, but The Warmth of Other Suns is a really good book about the era of mass black migration from the South to the North and West between WWI and the 1970s. Lots about Jim Crow in the South but also about the less-obvious racism in their new homes.
I heard a talk from the authors of Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation's Capital which was very interesting. I have a copy of the book, but haven't yet gotten to it. Might be another to look into.
The challenge before us is very difficult, it is not easy to lift up a group of people that has been historically disenfranchised. But consider this, we had slavery for a longer period of time than we've had our independence. We have statistics, and we have the interpretation of statistics. Information helps us, but we need to look at the root causes of those statistics.
Why are more black Americans incarcerated? Why are more of them living in poverty? Is it biological? Or was it because of what we've done?
I highly suggest any material written Ta-Nehisi Coates to better understand and take in that broad view of how American and her citizens came to be.
> People are colorless and genderless as far as laws are concerned.
Statistically this is not true. Your color and gender have an astounding affect on the unique challenges you face. And we all face our own challenges, but that does not diminish the challenges others face. I highly suggest The Warmth of Other Suns and Crabgrass Frontier to better understand how policy and government has affected us.
Racism and bigotry is very, very alive today. We're not even seventy years out from the civil rights movement. 1960 was only 57 years ago. You can talk with people that lived with segregation, lived during periods of more lynching. We have to come to terms with this and address the harm we've done.
And yes it will be difficult, I don't have all the solutions to fix the problem, but being aware of our history helps us identify the wounds we need to treat. Listen to some James Baldwin, he says so much so well.
Not only did they neglect to treat them, they actively prevented them from obtaining treatment once effective treatment for syphilis was made available, blacklisting them from public anti-syphilis campaigns. Also, they never actually told them they had syphilis, instead claiming that they had "bad blood', so none of the men knew that they were at risk of infecting their wives, many of whom then gave birth to syphilitic children. Lots of them died too.
This was pretty typical of how the medical establishment treated black people for a long, long time. Still does today to some extend. I'd recommend Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington.
Oh yeah you'll definitely have that in Waukesha, you're literally in one of the destination counties of "white flight"ers from the 40's and 50's, after southern blacks started coming up here looking for work. (Called the "WOW" counties anectodally - Washington, Ozaukee, Waukesha). Typically white, growing older, vote R, listen to talk radio, commute all the way to Milwaukee to work - if they have to. They talk about how much of a pity it is how "downhill" and "urban" (read: black) Milwaukee has gotten, considering how "nice" (white) it was in the mid 20th century. Despite the fact that there are parts of the city that are thriving and modernizing, and attracting young people to live there.
​
Source: my boomer parents live in Washington Co, and my grandma has lived in Ozaukee Co since the 50's. They are the exact epitome of all of these things.
​
Edit: this book has been on my to-read list for a while, I believe it covers some of these very concepts. Or just look up the racial history of Milwaukee to understand why they probably feel uncomfortable in Waukesha.
http://www.amazon.com/Burning-Massacre-Destruction-Tulsa-Race/dp/0312302479/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1413517777&sr=1-4&keywords=the+burning
I posted this in a reply, but let me comment with it too. This book is all about the burning of Greenwood, including stories from survivors and much more detail and back story than wiki can offer.
Actually, there is a book that makes that exact argument.
Add in a pretty horrific history of black people being experimented on, infected and maimed without their consent by doctors in the US, I find it really easy to believe that it would be hard for some African-Americans to trust their bodies to medical practitioners in full faith.
A couple of the worst examples: Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
Black women sterilised without their knowledge - right up to the 1970s
There's a whole book about it - Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
> After the war, the Great Migration caused thousands to leave their homes for a better life in the North and in Canada.
One of the best books I've read on the Great Migration is The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. A wonderful read, it's about three individuals who do just as you say, move to find a better life away from the oppression of Jim Crow.
edit: accidentally some words
KEEP HOPE ALIVE: Doctors Put a Patient in Suspended Animation for the First Time
>“This is cutting-edge science, and if it turns out to be something, it could have a massive impact on the way we treat people,” says Marko Bukur, a trauma surgeon at New York University’s Bellevue Hospital Center who is not affiliated with the trial.
Why I finally placed an order for two books that have been moldering on mah wish list for a decade.
>Intertwined with that is the medical community’s long history of using disadvantaged communities for experimental technology. More than 90 percent of gunshot victims in Baltimore are men and of those, 90 percent are black men, most under the age of 30, according to the Baltimore Sun.
Medical Apartheid and The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900
This may not be quite what you mean, in that instead of a bunch of smaller vignettes that are overlooked or miscast it's about one very large thing that isn't well understood because it hadn't before been looked at as one large phenomenon.
The Warmth of Other Suns
Links:
"So black males accounting for over 50% of VIOLENT CRIME (murder, asssault etc) are because cops are framing them and letting white people get away with murder? That's a pretty intelligent position to take."
Did I say that? No I did not. You are again intentionally trying to promote a misleading position because you have no real argument. You are trying to make a point that black people do more crime just because they are black. You are ignoring the social constructs, documented patterns of prejudice, and much more. I gave an example relating to drugs to highlight how our justice system systemically targets people of color. There are more white people in this country, therefore more drugs are used and sold by white people. Yet black people are arrested at disproportionate rates for crimes they commit less of. They are sentenced to much tougher fines and jail time. They are in every way targeted. So now, how about you actually focus on the point that I made which is that crime is directly correlated to poverty. You can look up the fbi crime statistics and see that it is just about even across socioeconomic lines regardless of race. So the issue here is poverty and not race and or skin color. So that leads us to your next point
"And please explain this systematic racism to me because I don't know of any law or system in place that promotes racism or oppression of anyone, except for affirmative action. If people don't start taking responsibility for themselves instead of putting the blame on other people nothing is going to change. If a black and white man go for the same job with the same resume the black man is going to get it. Affirmative action is the only form of systematic racism that ACTUALLY exists and it favors colored people."
Since the inception of this country black people have been oppressed. They were denied health care. They were denied an education. They were denied housing. They were denied government benefits. Lets take a look at this across a systemic and historical context. The slaves were freed as a result of the civil war. Those slaves had no education and no prospects for work. Those people were then let out into the country and were then faced with Jim Crow laws. They were again denied equal access to education, denied jobs, denied health care, denied basic goods and services. Are you going to try to tell me that people without an education have equal access? Do not be dumb. Let us then move into WW2. Black men fought for this country. Many came back severely injured. Want to guess what they got? Nothing. White people who fought got benefits of the GI bill. They got schooling. They got medical coverage. They got cash. I implore you to look up generational poverty that is directly related to the GI bill. There is a HUGE amount of wealth that is still in the economy from that bill. Wealth black people were not allowed to have. White people came back and got money and bought houses. They bought land and started a business. Black people with no arms were given nothing and told it was their fault because they were not working hard enough. There was then an influx in multi generational household living as a result of this. The child of the white family could go to school and get a job because their father had health coverage and money and a house. The child of the black father got to stay at home and take care of their disabled father. They did not get to go to school or get a job.
Let's go even further and point out that black people were denied access to loans to buy houses. They were not allowed to marry who they wanted in every state until the 90's. They were literally tortured in "scientific" experiments until the 70's. Now let us go even further into it. After separate but equal was done away with schools began to get funding based on scores of tests. So we have people who were always denied education for many generations. Then when they got it it was in low quality forced ghetto environments that had nowhere near equal status. Then when the law changes we give funding based on score of tests. So we have poverty stricken areas with schools that are just as segregated as before (see the book the new jim crow for more info) that have been systemically provided low levels of access and education and then take away their funding because they are not performing as well. Then they continue to get worse and worse because they still do not get the resources they need. So they of course are stuck in generational poverty which surprise surprise as we have already gone over leads to increased crime.
It has nothing to do with them being black. It has nothing to do with not working hard enough. It is in every way a systemic issue from the founding of our country. This nation is still very much racially divided and it is still oppressing people of color. Your comments more than make that apparent. You very much need to look into generational poverty, look into the many systemic constructs that have existed and continue to exist.
Now to respond to the last part of your racist rant.
"Affirmative action is the only form of systematic racism that ACTUALLY exists and it favors colored people.
Please try to put any sort of explanation into anything you said with some actual facts because you are just spewing talking points that have been proven false time and time again."
Affirmative action is not racist. It is also not effective and does not fix any of the problems I have covered in great detail.
I have provided you with a more than sufficient narrative. If you seriously come away from this and still believe the things that you are saying then that means you are just deluded and do not care about facts.
Now I will post a bunch of links that I am sure you will actively disregard
http://www.socialwatch.org/node/16324
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Americans_and_the_G.I._Bill
http://americanexperience.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/After-the-War-Blacks-and-the-GI-Bill.pdf
http://www.apa.org/monitor/2010/11/gi-bill.aspx
https://www.amazon.com/Medical-Apartheid-Experimentation-Americans-Colonial/dp/076791547X
http://newjimcrow.com/
https://eji.org/history-racial-injustice-racialized-poverty
https://www.vox.com/2016/6/6/11852640/cartoon-poor-neighborhoods
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4097310/
http://www.newsweek.com/why-are-black-americans-greater-risk-being-poor-361543
I have not even begun to touch on other things like the war on drugs which is widely documented as being a way to oppress people of color. I have not gone into the way that the media reports and represents people of color. Or any of the dozens of other avenues of systemic oppression directly related to this topic.
So your move. Are you going to change your bigoted views in favor of reality? I hope so. If you actually want to engage in a conversation about this then let me know. If you are just going to respond and say I am wrong (I am not) then do not bother. I will not respond any more past this point as I have already expended a great deal of time responding to you.
An older article (2005) from a bill with the same effect.
I discovered this from Harriet Washington's book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. Not exactly a happy read but a pretty thorough treatment of the subject.
Tony Horwitz's book was awesome as well. (https://www.amazon.com/Midnight-Rising-Brown-Sparked-Civil/dp/0312429266)
I recently read a book that explained that the reason there weren't black bank owners was because black people did not trust other black people with their money.
That was from this book. It's some 60 years old, but I found it to be insightful for laying out challenges with blacks truly integrating with white society.
Almost done with Wesley Lowery's They Can't Kill Us All. It's about police shootings, the birth of BLM and modern journalism in general. If you're on a non-fiction kick, I think you'd probably appreciate it.
I'm in the middle of a few, including The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson, about African-American migration from the rural South to urban areas of the US. A compelling and fascinating read.
Also reading a book about decorating your home (I know, right?) and of course continuing my rather informal Bengali lessons.
https://www.amazon.com/Scorpions-Sting-Antislavery-Coming-Civil/dp/0393351211
https://www.amazon.com/Freedom-National-Destruction-Slavery-1861-1865/dp/0393347753
The author's a sexist ass but he's an excellent historian
I am a physicist, who enjoyed watching Destiny’s infestor antics as a postdoc and have occasionally watched him the last couple of years when I travelled. I found the falsehoods provided without source by the recent ‘debater’ to be frustrating.
I have always done very well academically, missing only a couple questions in the SAT/GRE and skipped a grade. I had the honour of having a seminar with Prof. Gates in Maryland but was not good enough to work with him as his student. Prof. Gates was one of the leaders of the first string theory revolution. The lack of African Americans in physics is something that racists point to as a reason for their racism, I can respond with personal observations:
Very few AfricanAmerican study physics in the first place, so it isn’t that they try and prove incapable.
One time I was speaking with an AfricanAmerican friend of mine from church (he was very intelligent, was an accountant and had skipped a grade) about his niece. He said something to the effect of ‘she wants to be a scientist, a chemist, isn’t that crazy?’. I use this as an example of the cultural barriers in place even for the middle class African Americans.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvester_James_Gates)
There have been many other summaries, here is one (and surely much better than my post here):
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/j/jencks-gap.html I am often giving wiki links not because they are the best, but because they provide a summary with links to other places.
The standard tests (like SAT) have a significant racial basis. Basically, they are biased in favour of the intelligence displayed by ‘white' males. This is because their purpose is to measure the population of western communities and not to give an independent measure of intelligence. In fact, if there is a problem that whites of ‘white’ median intelligence have difficulty with but blacks of ‘black’ median intelligence do well on, it would be deselected and not used.
(https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/06/21/sat
http://diverseeducation.com/article/49830/
)
Additionally, all intelligence tests (SAT, GRE, IQ, etc) are made for the ‘average’ and lose applicability for people away from the ‘average’. Most IQ tests just can not be meaningfully interpreted for people outside of one std deviation. By ‘average’ I mean the median person in western countries (Europe/US) and not a world average. Most importantly, the tests assume a given cultural and academic experience and would not test intelligence in an easily interpretable manner for those with a different cultural and academic experience (the score could not be interpreted in the same way). This difference is due both to what ‘type' of intelligence is valued/useful as well as how the variation is understood. These points are noted even in the study of Australian aborigines; are strong at spatial IQ which is very important but not measured well by traditional IQ tests.
(http://wilderdom.com/personality/intelligenceCulturalBias.html
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1813596
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/recognizing-spatial-intel/)
Race is entirely a social construct. If you were going to divide people into genetic populations you would end up with very different divisions then those made by people who divide by race. Even those academics who think that genetic populations and geographic populations are correlated still say that differences between populations account for 5% of genetic differences while differences within a population accounts for 95% of genetic differences. If there are no correlation between 'race' and genetic populations or minimal correlation, then differences in measured intelligence of different groups should be accounted for by differences in environment and not genetics.
( https://www.amazon.com/Racecraft-Soul-Inequality-American-Life-ebook/dp/B007LCYZCE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_genetic_clustering
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC515312/)
Not only the environment of an individual matters, but also the environment of his ancestors. This is not just for the obvious social reasons (does the person value academics/etc?) but also for that persons biology. You can’t just try to make a change in one generation and expect the effects of previous generations (living through famine, apartheid, jim crow, etc) to be unimportant.
(http://www.livescience.com/21902-diet-epigenetics-grandchildren.html)
The total population of people with Indian ancestry in the UK is about 1.5 million people and Pakistan ancestry is about 1.2 million people(UK divides them). The total population of people with Indian ancestry in the US is about 3 million people. This ‘regression to the mean’ argument is just ridiculous. The difference is that those who came to the US in the last couple of decades came into the upper class and so demonstrate the intelligence associated with an upper class environment while those who came to the UK came as shopkeepers/etc (Indians) or factory workers (Pakistanis). Additionally, Pakistani and Indian are classified differently in the UK (despite the two nations being an artefact of the British colonisation). In terms of economic success, Indians are the second highest ‘ethnic’ group while the Pakistanis are one of the lowest ‘ethnic’ groups.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Pakistanis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Americans)
I am probably not responding to all of the ridiculousness (I only listened to a bit of the end of the 'debate'), but here is a responce to at least some of it.
> hundred year old talking points
Official redlining didn't start until 1934. Other forms of discrimination and segregation existed during that same time period. For example, the realtors association of Grosse Pointe had an informal racial point system until the 1960s. This is hardly a hundred-year-old issue. Elderly people alive today spent a good portion of their lives living under these conditions. There are plenty of excellent, thoroughly-sourced books on the subject. Enjoy!
1 2 3 4
p.s. Wealth may not last for three generations, but that doesn't necessarily mean that poverty (and its effect) also does not last for three generations. It's much easier to lose wealth than it is to gain it in the first place.
I don't know of any particular source to point you on that directly, but I think you should read From Slavery to Mass Incarceration by Lois Wacquant, and Racecraft by Karen and Barbara Fields, and The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.
[From Slavery to Mass Incarceration article and PDF] (http://newleftreview.org/II/13/loic-wacquant-from-slavery-to-mass-incarceration)
Racecraft (book)
New Jim Crow
None of these sources addresses for-profit prisons directly, I don't think (I don't recall maybe New Jim Crow does) but I think they'll be informative. I know you aren't talking about race but you can't talk about poverty and incarceration in this country without talking about race. From Slavery demonstrates how the economic system of the US has always depended on the extraction of cheap or free labor from black people while socially ostracizing black bodies. This began with slavery and it tracks its evolution to mass incarceration, and ends with a note about how there is developing a for-profit prison system which is basically extracting slave labor from large numbers of blacks and repeating the same pattern. The New Jim Crow does a good job of explaining how mass incarceration is the direct result of post Civil Rights era attempts to roll back the gains made during the Civil Rights movement, and goes into detail about the suppression and theft of black productivity that it institutes.
You asked about for profit prisons, but here I am talking about black people - why? This is where Racecraft comes in because it demonstrates how the entire purpose of racial distinctions and classifications is not only to create hierarchies between black and white, but to create hierarchies between rich whites and everyone else. The effect of this for hundreds of years has been, by injecting racial divisions, to destroy the ability of the lower classes, black white or otherwise, to unite and act productively in order to achieve class equality.
Thinking about that, it follows that the drug war, and the irrational, racist fears of the crack epidemic, and extremely harsh penalties in favor of "law and order" spiraled into a system where all poor people are at risk of being scooped up and enslaved in a system where their labor can be extracted for almost no wage -they are still economically productive but they can't actually reap the benefits of their own production. But whenever we talk about the issue, notice the discussion always devolves into a discussion about "black culture" and "white privilege" and so on...Racecraft really made me believe that it's not just that race and class are "linked" - in America, they are identical issues, whose two facets are obscured from each other.
You might also want to read Discipline and Punish for a background on prison systems generally, and how they are designed to perpetuate criminality and create a criminal underclass for the exploitation of the rest of society.
I'd recommend these books to anyone in this conversation:
Honestly, after reading “Medical Apartheid”, I don’t really blame any black person who doesn’t entirely trust medical institutions. The history there... well, it’s not pretty. Not saying going to your local hospital is going to leave you missing a kidney in a bathtub of ice or anything, but reading that left me giving even Dr Seuss some side eye.
Why does that cat need those gloves, anyways?
> Liar. We talk about it all the time.
Who is we? Are you talking about institutions that educate children and teenagers (all the whilst they're being taught about Britain and the US saving the world from Nazism)? Are we talking about Prime Ministers and Presidents? What you said it just wrong. Now of course Universities talk about it. That's besides the point. But even then, institutionally, Universities have to be in line with the wishes of the government, such as banning boycotts of Israel and enforcing the ideological agendas of the government. Student bodies are granted a degree of independence because that's the culture of academic institutions. Just because there is an event about debating a war or Zionism doesn't mean the mass graves of skeletons in the closet are being addressed as a nation.
> What examples of genocide are there in Iraq by the US?
In total, you have an estimated over 24,865 civilians killed in the first two years and an estimated over 1 million killed till today, thousands killed directly by the US led coalition/ by the US army. In the first two years, 37% of civilians were killed directly by the US led forces. That amount does not happen by accident. If that was done by ISIS and their media was the US media and their President was telling the world God told them to do it, you can damn well bet you would be calling it an Islamist genocide. There are many cases of indiscriminate killing of civilians (eg. drone bombings on hospitals, weddings and funerals), not just in Iraq, by the US and it's all caused and exacerbated by genocidal rhetoric by politicians and the media. Even worse, and why I accuse it of being intentional, is inside the military and by the political/legal establishment, there is a longstanding practice of turning a blind eye to war crimes and giving those soldiers who carry out egregious crimes a slap on the wrist.
Iraq itself as a whole was a genocide. And not just Iraq but the wars and conflicts that have started as a result of it. If someone tells you not to flick the dominos because the rest of them will fall and you do it, you are responsible for those other dominos and if you do not even pick them up, you are even more guilty.
Your propaganda strategy is the same as that of the UK government. That they (to the press) emphasised focusing on individual attacks (and then blaming terrorists) rather than focusing on Iraq holistically: that they went to war on a known lie, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians knowing full well that they would kill so many, knowing full well that they didn’t care for the lives of the innocent, knowing full well that they were serving a selfish political agenda and knowing full well that they were not prioritising the national security and stability of Iraq. The nations that started the war are responsible for the lives of those that have suffered and/or perished, which is why I said you would be calling it genocide if your enemies done that. You are selective in how you treat war crimes. You consider Iraq as a small footnote in history and not the most important and vile crimes of the last several decades.
https://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/reference/press-releases/12/
https://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/reference/pdf/a_dossier_of_civilian_casualties_2003-2005.pdf
https://www.iraqbodycount.org/analysis/beyond/chilcot2016/
https://www.iraqbodycount.org/
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-deaths-survey-idUSL3048857920080130
> What examples are there of Israel committing genocide?
I rarely talk to people like this on Reddit but that was the most stupid comment I have read (from memory) on Reddit. Not only that, but I am confident from that comment to accuse you of having no regard or care for human life as long as it suits your political ideology.
The current occupation and colonisation of the West Bank and the Golan Heights is genocide. Not only that, but Israeli society and culture itself has forcibly adopted Palestinian culture, labelled it it’s own, all the while claiming Palestinian culture does not exist. That is the definition of genocide. They are eradicating and have been eradicating the Palestinian people since 1948. Also, their actions towards the Palestinians in Gaza are genocide. The state of Israel has already successfully committed a genocide against Palestinians who were living outside of the West Bank and Gaza.
It is also telling that Holocaust survivors themselves and their descendants have also accused Israel of genocide. That in and of itself should tell you something. Just because those who have hijacked the Holocaust (politicians) in politics and make money off of other peoples’ suffering 80 years ago, doesn’t mean they speak for them and doesn’t mean that their own actions are not the same as those who caused that Holocaust. They pretend they care about and are doing it in memory of the Holocaust, all the while being condemned by survivors of the Holocaust.
> Finally, prominent Israeli politicians have publicly called for action against the Palestinian people that unequivocally meets the definition of genocide under the 1948 Convention. For instance, in February 2008, Matan Vilnai, Israel’s deputy defense minister, declared that increasing tensions between the Israelis and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip could bring on themselves what he called a shoah, or holocaust, “The more Qassam [rocket] fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”[33]
>
> Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked posted a statement on Facebook in June 2014 claiming that “the entire Palestinian people is the enemy” and called for the destruction of Palestine, “including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.” Her post also called for the killing of Palestinian mothers who give birth to “little snakes.”[34]
>
> In August 2014, Moshe Feiglin, then-deputy speaker of the Israeli Knesset and member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party, called for the destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza and offered a detailed plan for shipping Palestinians living in Gaza across the world. Specifically, he envisioned a scenario where the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) would find areas on the Sinai border to establish “tent encampments...until relevant emigration destinations are determined.” He further suggested that the IDF would then “exterminate nests of resistance, in the event that any should remain.”[35] He subsequently wrote in an op-ed, “After the IDF completes the ‘softening’ of the targets with its fire-power, the IDF will conquer the entire Gaza, using all the means necessary to minimize any harm to our soldiers, with no other considerations.”[36] He continued, “Gaza is part of our Land and we will remain there forever. Liberation of parts of our land forever is the only thing that justifies endangering our soldiers in battle to capture land. Subsequent to the elimination of terror from Gaza, it will become part of sovereign Israel and will be populated by Jews. This will also serve to ease the housing crisis in Israel. The coastal train line will be extended, as soon as possible, to reach the entire length of Gaza.”
https://ccrjustice.org/genocide-palestinian-people-international-law-and-human-rights-perspective
> Japan has a standing military, its probably the 6th strongest in the world. Japan's military is just as much of a "defense force" as israel's in term of scale. Japan is heavily reliant on the US for its defense treaties.
That was my mistake. From further research, they do have a standing army. I had confused that with the fact that their constitution since WW2 bans them from using an army for offensive purposes and that they are not allowed to use their army for offensive purposes. Thus, their military is technically a self-defence force and the Japanese are very strict on this issue.
And I never said there were not some people who wanted to revive the Japan of old, nor that there is not a popular demand for this.
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/8264/does-japan-have-the-constitutional-and-legal-right-to-have-its-own-army-or-navy
I should also note that again, you have changed the topic to something irrelevant (Japan’s Empire), when we were talking about US concentration camps and this Reddit post is talking about Uyghur Muslims in East Turkistan.
> I didn't change the topic
You have changed the topic numerous times.
> I simply brought perspective since you are obviously so bias trying to make out Americans as the next Nazis
This is a nice book for you to read to your family.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Medical-Apartheid-Experimentation-Americans-Colonial/dp/076791547X
As I have said before, I am not comparing injustices or genocides. I tend not to do that by principle. And it was you who started talking about Nazi Germany (in terms of comparing it to US concentration camps), not me. As for bias, that is up for you to decide. I try to be as unbiased as I can be and call out wrong when I see it, but I do make moral judgements about what I read and see. And what I read and see about US history is really quite disgusting. Even recent treatment of African and Native Americans, Mexicans, Muslims and others. You really have no argument if you start talking about the sins of an Empire 100 years ago, on the other side of the planet, when someone criticises your country. I don’t see any indications of the crimes of the old being stopped, nor do I see reparations. I see consistent police killings motivated directly by racism.
This will be my last comment to you. I have said what I wanted to say and more. Salaam.
The Warmth of Other Suns is about the migration Northeast and to the Midwest to escape the Jim Crow laws of the South.
And early on, NYC absolutely had slaves, freed slaves and indentured servants. Look up the NYC Slave Revolt of 1741.
Any book or are their specifications?
If not I would suggest Midnight Rising. It is about the abolitionist career of John Brown and reads better than most history books about the time period.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_Americans_and_the_G.I._Bill
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/05/28/736199/-GI-Bill:-White-male-affirmative-action-program
http://www.amazon.com/When-Affirmative-Action-White-Twentieth-Century/dp/0393052133
Wasn't technically "whites only" but in effect was whites only.
>Thankyou. That's a really interesting perspective, and a big difference from the usual viewpoints I see.
Honestly this was a refreshing surprise thank you. After coming home from the beach I had a mailbox full of insulting replies.
You would do well to understand that most Americans have this view. It is ingrained in us. Just most are not so able to articulate it with historical context (Because our schools are atrocious.)
>Any favourite books?
Book wise here for black history:
https://www.amazon.com/Black-against-Empire-Politics-Foundation-ebook/dp/B01LVU8UUT
And here:
https://www.amazon.com/Fighting-Devil-Dixie-Activists-Alabama/dp/1613734166
And here:
https://www.amazon.com/Carry-Home-Birmingham-Climactic-Revolution/dp/1476709513
And here:
https://www.amazon.com/Burning-Massacre-Destruction-Tulsa-Race/dp/0312302479
For further reading google:
Mass lynching in the US
KKK and Black Activism
MLK and CC permit (he tried to arm himself before he was assassinated and was denied)
Race Riots during ww2 (even in Northern states)
A riveting Criminal Podcast (one of my favorite podcasts) about a KKK counter-protest where the KKK showed up and killed people:
http://wunc.org/post/criminal-birth-massacre#stream/0
These violent clashes were ALL OVER, even in the North. The history of the Civil Rights in the US has been largely whitewashed as if it was all a bunch of people peacefully holding hands. What happened recently here in the US in Charleston was how it used to be daily. Blacks too were denied the right to bear arms even to the end of the era. In fact the right to bear arms was first mentioned as an individual right (citizen's right) in the Supreme Court when it denied all Black people from this right in Dred Scott vs. Stanford in 1856. Blacks were not citizens therefore they had no right to keep and bear arms for their individual safety.
And regarding Labor Rights:
http://www.signature-reads.com/2017/09/history-movement-labor-day-books-read-now/
This list looks actually perfect. I've read Death in Haymarket and The Jungle by Upton Singclair. From Synopsis alone, I recommend "The Devil Is Here in These Hills" about the Blair Mountain Massacre (which is insane btw) and "Meet You In Hell" about another really bloody labor battle.
>The police are way, way less likely to kill you here too; they're not primed to assume everything is a gun and everyone's carrying, and they aren't as militarized
They used to be militarized, but bloody sunday caused the entire UK populace to rise up and disarm their police (even after strict gun laws - this had to be a separate thing), which was a good thing and I'm proud of you guys for that. It would never happen here though in the US.
I also HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend the Wild Wild West documentary on Netflix if you can get it. It's about a violent hindu cult that takes over a tiny tiny town in Oregon (near where I live about 2 hours away), and basically becomes the police. Although I warn you the doc takes an overly sympathetic view to the cultists and does not show how aboslutely fucked they were from the beginning.
>I'll keep your thoughts in mind, thanks again for sharing. It doesn't make me any more inclined to own a gun where I live. But it helps me see some more understandable reasons why some people want them.
Actually I appreciate that. TBH, reading our comments again I feel the need to explain to you about how totally wrong the idea of "random (home) searches" are.
That's a violation of the 4th amendment in the US. A massive violation of due process.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/fourth_amendment
For that to be made possible do you understand that a kind of martial law would have to be declared over the whole country?
Also you should know too that the people who would be harassed in these circumstances would primarily be the poor and minorities, political enemies of the state (of whomever is in power), sex workers and immigrants.
Rich peoples/politicians mansions will never be searched.
You should also know that part of what lead to the rise of Nazism in Germany was a bloody massacre of communist/socialists that was associated with orders like these - random searches (read excuses to trash, steal, rape and abuse) of suspected communists in Berlin (for banned weapons). This lead to a massive protest, which lead to a massive massacre, which lead to radicalism spreading, which lead to the Nazis being popular.
>FTFY
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=FTFY
Double meaning actually. Sorry lol : ).
Black people are concentrated in urban areas in the US as a direct consequence of discriminatory mortgage lending and realty practices in the mid 20th century that forced them into de-facto segregated neighborhoods.
Now, granted. Dems have taken advantage of that concentration to use these folks as a power base constituency. But those neighborhood circumstances were not created for political advantage. They were created to marginalize black people as much as possible during the period now known as the Great Migration when so many were fleeing the Jim Crow south.
Sources:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration https://www.amazon.com/dp/0679763880/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_vlJkDbTN6HPGS
Well the old school of thought was that democrats just played this identity politics game so they could get votes (see: Dixiecrats and the southern strategy evolution from the 1960s-1980s.) If just half of the black vote woke up and turned to republican principles instead of the welfare state, the dems would never win an election again.
The new school of thought is that these people are so brainwashed they actually believe their own bullshit.
_
For more educaton on the history of the democratic party racism please read Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party's Buried Secret by Bruce Bartlett.
Bonus: Tucker Carlson interviewing Bruce Bartlett on MSNBC in 2008. (I bet that pissed his dem bosses off something fierce lol.)
_
Fun facts about the democratic party:
http://russp.us/racism.htm
check out the 40 million dollar slave https://www.amazon.com/Forty-Million-Dollar-Slaves-Redemption/dp/0307353141, its not literal, but irs interesting to look at sports in a greater context of American capitalist systems.
1776 was fought partly because slavery was dying out. US colonists saw Britain tending towards emancipation, and thought it would ruin their project in their new world. A book was recently released about this.
Search for interviews with the author on youtube for more information.
Neither the north nor the south did anything for some time. The Warmth of Other Suns is an AMAZING book about southern blacks moving north and west during the first half of the 20th century, and just generally depicts how terrible it was for them even decades after emancipation.
There was no slavery in the US in the early 20th century.
Read this book:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DK40HR4/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
The post-reconstruction US wasn't too bad for black folks. America was rebuilt. Remade. African Americans had a huge hand in that. For the first time in history, they owned a piece of it. Built their own homes and started their own businesses. Folks who could probably still remember a time when they weren't allowed to learn how to read were able to build schools and educate their children. It was far from perfect. It was good though.
The Civil Rights Movement was a wonderful thing. I would have supported whole-heartedly, but I think the end result was detrimental to black folks. The government started social-engineering and moving people into huge housing projects in the inner-city. Essentially took a proud and self-sustaining people and made them dependent upon the government.
You can do your own digging and form your own opinions, of course. What is taught in schools and propagated by the media is rarely the whole story. Or the truth, for that matter.
> Tell me when it actually happens.
https://www.amazon.com/Burning-Massacre-Destruction-Tulsa-Race/dp/0312302479
This is the book my daughter read in school.
Do you have example for a book published IN China that talk about the Tiananmen massacre? Maybe your friend can send the link
There is actually a really good book about this that will lend some context. Hammer and Hoe.
"A groundbreaking contribution to the history of the "long Civil Rights movement," Hammer and Hoe tells the story of how, during the 1930s and 40s, Communists took on Alabama's repressive, racist police state to fight for economic justice, civil and political rights, and racial equality.
"The Alabama Communist Party was made up of working people without a Euro-American radical political tradition: devoutly religious and semiliterate black laborers and sharecroppers, and a handful of whites, including unemployed industrial workers, housewives, youth, and renegade liberals. In this book, Robin D. G. Kelley reveals how the experiences and identities of these people from Alabama's farms, factories, mines, kitchens, and city streets shaped the Party's tactics and unique political culture. The result was a remarkably resilient movement forged in a racist world that had little tolerance for radicals."
Forty Million Dollar Slaves?
No, a single cell can tell you where your ancestors came from, not whether you are white or black.
I think we are talking in circles here, so I'll just recommend Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Karen and Barbara Fields.
Good book
Forty Million Dollar Slaves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307353141/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_BqyQCb57SFKZ7
Classism definitely exists, but like everything else doesn't exist in a bubble. Class, race, gender, sex, age...these things all intersect and interact in ways that make social realities for people. Academics (which I am not) have different opinions about the extent to which one is more important than another. I would say yes, historically it has been far more difficult for a person of color to move up in American society and yes, that is still the case today. But I'm just a guy on reddit who likes to read. If you're interested in this stuff here's where I started: The Color of Law, New Jim Crow, Ta-Nehisi Coates, the autobiography of Malcolm X, The Warmth of Other Suns
>To reiterate, you are disagreeing with the belief that people aren't equal, rather than the physical reality of racism? Because that's the question I asked.
Race doesn't exist as physical reality , the process of "othering" people is what socially constructed racism is.
>Inconsistent definition which relies on stereotyping and gross overgeneralisation, no? Feel free to expand on this too though.
Huh ? No, I generally follow the Fields' sisters explanation.
>Most people assume that racism grows from a perception of human difference: the fact of race gives rise to the practice of racism. Sociologist Karen E. Fields and historian Barbara J. Fields argue otherwise: the practice of racism produces the illusion of race, through what they call “racecraft.” And this phenomenon is intimately entwined with other forms of inequality in American life.
https://www.amazon.com/Racecraft-Soul-Inequality-American-Life-ebook/dp/B007LCYZCE
Oh, that old nugget. The alleged "switcheroo" that suddenly made the Republican party racist and the Democrats' dirty history sparkly clean.
It's bullshit.
You might want to read up a little more on the subject.
unless one of those 'numerous' professionals were Bell, it's irrelevant and people looking to get offended for the sake of being offended.
And it's not like there isn't actual reasoning for the comparison if you take the 10 seconds to actually think rather then just going, durr slaves didn't get paid end of conversation hurr.
You should read this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Wrong-Race-Democratic-Partys-Buried/dp/B003R4ZJNE/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1340347576&sr=1-1&keywords=Wrong+on+Race