Your thoughts on this 50th anniversary? How far do you think the civil rights movement has come since then? Has understanding between the different ethnicities in the United States improved or worsened since then? What do you think needs to be done to keep MLK's legacy alive?

Well I'm no expert on civil rights in the US, but on paper everyone is granted the same rights regardless of ethnicity, and there are anti-discrimination laws, so that's an improvement I guess. Also these days mr. general public seems to be aware that racism is very bad.

there has been great improvements in all areas in the last 50 years. Except for a few deep rooted pockets in the South, widespread systematic discrimination is nearly gone. You don't have an apartheid-style system of segregation anymore like you once did. There are far more opportunities for blacks in this country than there ever were in the 50's. But discrimination and racism are not gone entirely.
The Trayvon Martin case is a good example of the legal system still being somewhat biased. And since Obama has become president, there has been a huge backlash by certain elements of the right wing in the United States- certain factions of the Tea Party movement for instance. And now you are seeing certain states in the south are trying pass laws to restrict voting rights among minorities now.

Things are better now than they were, but I think any American without his or her head in the sand can see it's still pretty far off from being 100% perfect. These are slow processes because a lot of the racist thoughts in peoples' heads won't just be dispelled that quickly. No matter how much social equality we can measure in the real world, there will still be pockets of people who are intolerant, uneducated and just plain spiteful. They learned it from their parents and so on back to the times of slavery, and until those types of people become the absolute smallest minority anywhere, we can't really have a perfectly equal society. However I am glad to live in these times where we have come as far as we have. It's remarkable how something as common-sense as equality for all people is such a relatively new thing.

Racism isn't just learned/cultural, it's also implicit, a really natural phenomenon. That doesn't mean it's a good thing, just means it's hard to eradicate. I do believe it can be overcome though.

Racism is at an all time high as far as I can see and its in equal measures from all sides, but I would also argue more now from blacks than ever. I can say this because I live in a city that is 70% black and it's a dangerous hell hole (it's Memphis!). I am sure the unseen hands of whitey are in the background keeping shit fucked up to some extent but there is also alot of freedom going around these days, I've been homeless, I've been broke, I've always managed to bounce back and keep myself stable, most people are just fucking lazy and have never been taught basic cognitive thinking skills.

My solution is to stay from herds of any color and watch them fail miserably.

You can't see very far, can you? Please show me something worse than enslavement going on today and then I'll agree.

I've always wondered at this as well. If a bunch of dudes look really different from you it's fairly natural to be taken aback/a bit scared, out of your comfort zone etc., whether it's just a bunch of bikies or a bunch of black dudes. Otherwise I'd agree with Empyreal. Racism's a rather different issue in Oz, and it's still definitely there, but I think it's fair to say that it's improved a ridiculous amount. It's hard though. We fucked our natives up pretty bad, but it's hard to balance the whole "the state they're in is almost entirely my country's fault" vs "man what a bunch of violent, stinking drunks" etc. It is what it is.

I don't know. If I see a bunch of thuggish or dangerous looking fellows, my instinctual reaction is going to be the same whether they're black, white, Hispanic or whatever. If you fear or look down on someone just based on color alone, it's most definitely learned.

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style ... 72460.html

This has nothing to do with whether racism is "correct" or not, I believe it isn't, but I do believe it's more than simply cultural/taught. An "us versus them" mentality is extremely natural, and race/color is just one of the things that falls under that umbrella of distrust toward those not similar to us. Of course, these things can be exacerbated or reduced/eliminated environmentally/culturally.

It's gotten better, but there are still racist fucks that pollute the world with their ignorant garbage. Even here in Canada, I've known some die-hard racists.

The good news is, as soon as we all fuck each other and turn grey, racism (as we know it) should end.

It can only be a good thing when most are light brown in colour, but it should happen naturally and not "forced" over a relatively short space of time, as this will lead to resentment and clannishness in society - inflaming racial tensions, which is evident in many places.


Next it would be nice to tackle the issue of rich and poor, if everyone should expect to be (rightfully)treated equally, no matter the colour of their skin, surely wealth should be distributed more evenly amongst communities? For the poorest in society also suffer discrimination and prejudice daily.

....and the millions of preschoolers who naturally wonder why someone looks different the first time they see someone of a different color? We are genetically ingrained to form bonds with "people who are like us," there's nothing learned about it. Cultural stereotypes are learned, but that comes later. The first thing that makes bigotry possible is the visual recognition that someone doesn't look like you and your family. Until that is gone by way of voluntary interracial marriage, we will always have racism. In other words, it will take many many generations of intermixing before racism will be completely gone. You can't have racist stereotypes if you eliminate the visual "evidence" of otherness.


As for King's message, we have come a long way and I don't really see how institutional racism can be eradicated by any further government action in the U.S. Ending the war on drugs might help, but to be honest that is no longer really a deliberately racist program like it was when it started. It's more of an organic racism. But it should have never been started regardless, so the sooner it goes the better we'll all be.

This is like trying to overturn millions of years of hominid evolution by government fiat. We as a species are here for the same reasons other species survived, conquest. We are naturally inclined to want more than our neighbor because that makes it more likely we will survive, regardless of what it is we want more of. Nobody naturally wants to be equal to anyone, they want to be better: a more attractive spouse (and more spouses, for that matter), a better and more plentiful food supply, bigger muscles, more natural resources.....and in modern times that means you want more money.

Naturalistic fallacy/appeal to nature fallacy.

But if we can't live in a more "enlightened" way, we're heading for trouble as the worlds population is soon to reach 9 billion. If we can teach the young in schools to be tolerant of others, why can't we teach them we need to change our attitudes to materialism?

Maybe like chivalry appeared as a code of conduct for knights, people will realise we need to adopt a new way of thinking that isn't rooted in old fears, ignorance and greed (which is partly to blame for the current high price of property), maybe technology will help us to do this?

Erm, no. I am not arguing it is immoral for there to be equal ends because it's unnatural. I am merely pointing out it is genetically impossible (and by extension, pretty much sociologically impossible) to eliminate the desire for inequality. Any attempts to do so on a large scale will (and so far have) fail spectacularly, as they have to overcome millions of years of genetics, and anyone who sets out to create a society with entirely equal ends has nearly two centuries of peer-reviewed research and pretty much the entire fields of genetics, neurobiology, psychology, history, sociology, and economics working against them. You are talking about immediately changing the way an entire species has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years (with millions more years from predecessor hominids) by writing a law on a piece of paper. It can't work and hasn't worked.

You can blame on genetics how a human being acts under certain conditions.

You cannot blame on genetics how societies behave. That is defined by the sum of how every member of that society acts plus how society is organized.

The organization of society cannot be simply traced back to genetics. The existing organization of society is what not only causes inequality to reach extremes beyond anything that can be called natural but what also leads this inequality to cause immesurable suffering and oppression. You cannot tell me we can't do better than that because of genetics. That is bullshit, the research that proves this does not exist. Society has been organized this way since, most likely, the dawn of agriculture, but "genetically" we are hunter-gatherers, not peasents which means slaves to few "lucky" ones who own the means production. If it was impossible to overcome this nightmarish world order then we probably should wipe mankind from the face of the earth to relieve all other species from that bane that we are to their existence and us from ourselves. Luckily it isn't.

My desire for the world to become a place worth living in, and even if I do not live to see that day the children of my species should (which is a wish that might be 100% rooted in genetical desires whose fulfillment however depends on reason - which actually is the evolutionary advantage of having such a thing as reason and advanced rationality), trumps my desire to have more stuff than other people any day. Chosing the latter over the former (because they are conflicting wishes) is only caused by the historically conditioned inability of people to use their natural gift of reason, not genetics.

Uh, that went pretty far afield.

These days, it seems to me that the biggest problem with racism is the distorted view the public has of what racism actually is. Everyone basically accepts that being "a racist" is a very bad thing, but people seem to think that racists are all card-carrying members of the KKK who openly talk about hating niggers and spics and kikes and can't wait for the Fourth Reich to wipe them off the face of the Earth. So, when someone is accused of racism, they often think to themselves "well, I'm not like THAT, so I can't possibly be racist! They're just playing the Race Card!"

In reality of course it's perfectly possible for people to be racist as hell without consciously harboring any deliberate hatred for any group, and it's equally possible for people to act racist and say racist things even when they don't mean to. Yet you still get people who claim that what they said wasn't racist at all because they didn't intend it to be.

I think things have gotten better in a lot of obvious and important ways, but worse in others. In King's time and before, racism was rampant but it was out in the open so was easier to tackle from a theoretical angle, even if it took a shitload of work to make progress in concrete ways. These days, though, racism is thought by so many people to be essentially a thing of the past that it manifests itself in more subtle but incredibly sinister ways. Some examples: you get loads of white people bitching about reverse racism all the time, and this phenomenon is essentially largely viewed as socially acceptable. Now that the red herring of "these people fail in society because they belong to X minority racial group which has Y intrinsic faults" is widely regarded as being a backwards way of thinking, many people have to come up with more convoluted ways of rationalizing social issues that often essentially serve as masks to cover up their underlying racism. In today's America, there are still a hell of a lot of racist people out there, but the vast majority of them are a) in denial about the depth of racism in American society and as an extension are b) in denial about their own latent racism.

On the whole I feel England is a very tolerant place because of the fast social changes which have happened here especially over the last 15 years, unfortunately this is being put under increasing strain and I feel many advances made in our society have recently taken a step back. Failure/refusal to discuss openly by some main media broadcasters (one in particular), peoples concerns hasn't made them go away but actually worsened them and led to an increase of tension/incidents (read daily news here).

Reading some of the above posts I can't help feel that they're written by people who haven't had much experience in the real world away from campus. Go to London and you'll soon realise all types of people can exhibit racism toward others, and it's not limited to any main group.

It doesn't help that people are still pouring in here ready to work for a relative pittance. Is it any wonder there is growing resentment. Certain people say we must have equality while at the same time happy to see others struggling with so much competition in the work place. I can only conclude something far deeper is going on than it being a simple issue of tolerance towards others of differing skin colour, here anyway. There is no incentive for employers to train people on apprenticeships now as they have such a large pool of labour from which to choose from, British youth is often referred to as the lost generation - how do you think that will affect their attitude?

I feel America is a different case as many of its inhabitants (whether forcibly put there or subjugated indigenous) were generally once treated with disdain because of their ethnicity - in England it was more a rich/poor (doff your cap) divide, only recently (past 20 years) has the general makeup been significantly changing, and non of the idealists seem to consider space and whether the infrastructure can cope (read recent news on struggling schools and NHS).




Do you think racism will ever be eradicated, people always like to think they're better than others. Some Asians, for example, look down on others because their skin tone is darker (denoting they've probably worked in the fields). Middle class women there try and stay out of the sun to keep their skin lighter, and an Indian actress (from a poorer background) talking on the radio said she was often "lightened up" with makeup before one day telling the director to accept her looks because that was who she was.
There was a report recently where the most racist countries around the world were highlighted, the results may surprise some.

Obviously discrimination based on cultural, ethnic, religious, and national differences will probably always exist in some form or another, but "race" is basically a scientifically meaningless term, and racism as we understand it today hasn't existed for more than 500-600 years, so it's clearly not some sort of inescapable facet of human nature and I'm confident it won't last forever.

It doesn't help matters when the last government here let in over 4 million people, and had all sorts of forms printed in over 20 languages, it didn't encourage people to learn the language and further isolated them. But much, most, of the reasons why there are problems here are due to politicians altering society for their own reasons - sheer spite and gerrymandering namely, so everyone suffers. If people here voiced concern/alarm they were automatically dismissed as rascists and bigots, thats changed now because the rapid changes that have been orchestrated over the last 15 years are undeniable, though a few still behave as nothing untoward has happened, like the bbc.


This article was written by Leo McKinstry, a former labour councillor in Islington and worked as a parliamentary aide

http://www.express.co.uk

Andrew Neather former labour aide
http://news.sky.com/story