Iris The Tranny juggalette said

Noah Fence said
I'm in easily one of the most left leaning states, which krunk has called commiefornia, and it's just as racist as the South, even in academia. Even in "the arts".

And yeah, black people can't be racist because racism is experienced as a systemic burden. White people will never feel that systemic burden anymore than straight people will know what it's like feeling homophobia or an able bodied person to know what oppression is like for the disabled, etc.

The problem with racism is it was named wrong. 

Okey, so story time. I once knew a guy whose grandparents hired black house cleaners so that they could feel like they owned slaves, and forbade their kids from talking to the house cleaners or any other black people actually, and constantly talked about their calvanistic beliefs that all races were made separate and should remain that way. And surprise surprise he lived in the deep south. That is the kind of shit that goes on down there. I don't know how much experience you've had in the south, but I can assure you without a shadow of a doubt that they are not equally racist as the far left (or, at least not as equally racist towards minorities), and I've had thorough experience with people from both sides, I've met hardcore progressives and I've met modern day Calvinists, there ARE differences in different areas of the country, you can't act like there isn't, you even took a shot at fox news, you know what EVERYONE in my entire state watches for news, fox, because they view nearly everything else as far left propaganda. There are serious differences from place to place, and the same goes for people's perceptions of race.

Then there's the thing you said that black people can't be racist, you are using a new definition of racism, I am using the old one, why? Because I think its stupid to change the definition of a word, adding new words is fine, but when you take a word, and important word that is needed to describe certain people, and change the meaning, now I have nothing to call the actual racists I see. There is use for the definition you are using, but the use would be using another word to describe it. Hell, you could just say "systemic racial oppression" that actually gets the point and definition across without changing the definition of a pre-existing word.

Anyways lets not get too heated about this, disagreements are disagreements, we all still family (:  

See my reply to psyral about "systemic racism".

As far as the far left and the right both being equally racist, the people you mentioned seem pretty shitty. 

http://www.latimes.com/politic.....story.html

https://www.ocregister.com/2018/02/21/southern-poverty-law-centers-new-hate-map-shows-38-extremist-groups-in-southern-california/

https://www.propublica.org/article/california-murder-suspect-atomwaffen-division-extremist-hate-group

https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/hate-groups-in-america/

I could go on but since you started with personal information I feel like it might be helpful to include some of mine.

My elementary school was awarded the most racially diverse school in the state when I was in the 5th grade. I've always assumed that that implies it was one of the most diverse in the country.  It was nothing to meet kids from other cultures. Many didn't even speak English. I remember trying to teach a classmate how to identify himself and how to tell people where his home was in case of an emergency. He had just come to the US from Cambodia.

So one day this Procter sees the homie standing around the lunch benches (we didn't have a cafeteria) looking for me. Once you left the benches you were supposed to stay away from the area, stay on the playground. He saw me finishing lunch and started walking towards me. The procter grabbed him by the arm and through him to the ground, hard onto the black top. He told her his name and pointed to me and said friend. He didn't understand her commands and kept saying he didn't speak English. 

I walked over and told the procter to let him up. She said not until he apologizes for talking back. She said that he was cussing at her in Spanish. I told her that he isn't Mexican and that he doesn't understand English. She called him a racial slur and said he was lying. 

I went and found a teacher who knew me and the homie and when we got back the procter told the teacher that he was in trouble for throwing rocks.

She straight lied Because she didn't believe that the Cambodian kid wasn't cussing her out in Spanish.

This kinda thing happened often, but it didn't seem like a big deal. Like oh it was a misunderstanding.  

The Cambodian kid that I was friends with ended up being homeschooled. It took a few months. This adult woman bullied him out of public school. Out of one of the most racially diverse schools in the country and the most diverse in the state.

Throughout my education, I have watched people of color be treated differently by the system simply for not confirming to white people's ideas of acceptable behavior.

In jr. High I saw several people get dress coded, being sent home from school for not dressing appropriately, for things that I and other students would get away with. From sagging pants or wearing hats to having sports team logos on our clothes. Girls would get coded for having beads in their braided hair. Like these are everyday things that repeatedly targeted black kids in a community that was supposed to be "not racist".

I was only ever dress coded once. When i got coded, I was a sophomore in high school. I wore cutoff shorts and pearl jam t shirts. I had had long hair but was finally eligible to compete on the swim team (my gpa has been too low in 9th grade) and shaved my head.

A day after I shaved my head I was dress coded for "gang attire". When asked my name, I gave it to the security guard who said I was lying. He asked to see my id. I showed it to him. It had long hair. He said I stole it. 

I ended up getting suspended for a week for insubordination even though I complied with commands and was eventually found to be telling the truth. He read me as latino and associated that with gangs. 

On day one of my high school career I and much of my grade, were taken to the gym and divided into groups where guidance councillors looked at our transcripts and gave us "advice" for how to manage high school. I was told that I would never graduate high school, and that they thought something happened to my test scores because my English scores were "too high". I was put in remedial classes.

My high school was super hella gay. It was nothing to see two dudes making out in the halls or fucking in the bathroom. Saw it every day. Girls too. Our GSA broke up because it was "unnecessary". This was in the 90s. I'm saying this cuz it shows how attitudes were. It wasn't even like the administration went out and stamped out homophobia, shit was just cool. No one cared. 

Three separate times the school was vandalized with white supremacist graffiti, swastikas, racial slurs. 

Two times, skin heads showed up to school events and attacked someone. I never knew the people they attacked but a kid I did know who was super skinny and small, probably weighed 75lbs, was murdered two blocks away from the school the same week as one of these graffiti attacks. We never knew if it was the skinheads or not. It was a high crime area. It's possible it was gangs or a robbery or a misunderstanding. 

They stuck a broom handle through his neck.

When our swim and water polo teams played against the private schools, racial slurs were hurled in the locker room and in the pool. Even coaches and officials would make jokes about being surprised that the black kids on our team knew how to swim.

I dropped out of high school along with about half of my student body. It took me until my 30s before I went back to school because I hated the racism embodied in the education system, and the teachers, security, administration, and procters who were racist.

My university has less than 2% of its population that are African American compared to 6% population in the state. 

It's way disproportionately white and Asian. There are classes where I am the only latino and since I'm read as white we can say that there are classes with zero Latinos or African Americans. Zero.

I took two quarters on afro futurism and one quarter on African American women in art history. The afro futurism classes had two black students, total. The art history course was part of the African American studies program and to get a degree in African American studies (ie AA history) you have to take this class. 

There were 6 different black students and the two from afro futurism (total of 8) in a class of almost 50, in a course required for a black history degree.

I haven't checked the professors at my university but at my JC i had one professor who was black. He was one of three professors on the whole campus who was black.

When I took African American lit at the JC, I was one of three people who weren't black. 

After reading about the black panther party, someone tagged racial slurs on our classroom door.

We never knew who but the school didn't clean it up for two months. For two months black students had to read graf that told them they weren't wanted in the community.

At the UC that I attend, racial tagging has appeared but was immediately cleared up the following day. It was typically done in chalk and was easy to clear up.

All this is to say that in southern California, I've never experienced post racial America. Racism has been a systemic force that I have been aware of my entire life. 

It wasn't always school though. It was cops abusing their power (rampart!), it was housing practices which kept poc in certain communities (it was once illegal for my family to buy property in different cities, even as recent as the 70s, but even after it was considered illegal, people wouldn't sell houses to poc). This is why in LA you can be in Compton or crenshaw or south central and cross the street into Beverly hills or Brentwood etc. Million dollar homes across a freeway from housing projects because of zoning practices.

I don't speak Spanish because my grandmas family (who had been in the LA area since before California was a state) was targeted with racism for not assimilating. So my grandmas generation stopped speaking Spanish and didn't pass the language on to my mom, who couldn't pass it on to me.

I used to work at this job that hired undocumented workers by the (literal) truck load. Every two weeks, the Friday of payday, ICE would raid. It was cheaper for the company to pay the fines associated with hiring the workers illegally than to pay them their wages.

My mother works for a science museum. Her boss is the president of operations for several different campuses. I took my niece to one of the campuses and was talking to a docent about how my mother works for her bosses bosses boss and she asked if my mom speaks English when she starts texting her about something that happened with my niece. My niece and I don't speak Spanish but this woman assumed that my mother (with a job under the main boss) might not speak English.

But it's also skinheads rolling up at an ICP show during the bizzar bizaar tour.

Or our state prisons being rampant with gangs and racial groups, and disproportionate numbers of POC.

This is what i mean when I say systemic racism is redundant. There is no solitary racism. It's all a web. It's all interconnected and backed by systemic forces.

White supremacists thinking that they are better than POC wouldn't mean shit if there wasn't a system that reinforces them. That's why it's important to recognize that this racism is -everywhere-. It's cultural. It's systemic in nature. It goes beyond simple emotions. It goes beyond ignorant ideas. It's statistical. People treat people different because of perceived race in proximity to whiteness because our culture is rooted in lies that non white people are primitive, angry, violent, sex crazed, immoral beasts. That non white people are less human. 

And that shit is whack. Until we accept that it's part of every community, no matter left or right, rich or poor, etc we won't ever undo the damage done. And creating a false equivalence between poc being distrustful of whites and white people oppressing poc, does a disservice to all of us.

Fox news is racist, but so is cnn. I remember when Barack Obama was losing the primaries to Hillary, cnn compared him to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad because neither wore a tie.

Many of Bill Clinton's policies were used to disproportionately target POC by the justice system too.

And Hillary and even Joe Biden had made comments about Obama that were racially loaded.

Our communities can't heal if we ignore the disease and try to treat superficial symptoms. I'll pop off at assholes but the real way to create change is to empower poc and disrupt systems of power that contribute to the racist power structure.

Lastly, about your comment about being heated. I'm not. If I sound it, I apologize.