dont know how some idiots can say racism is dead in the country it is still very much alive and not going anywhere for along time.
It's not something that is going to disappear like a light switch being turned off. People of my generation (1943) see a tremendous improvement in race relations in the USA. At that time racism was institutionalized by the government in most of the USA! Afro-Americans were restricted to separate restrooms, water fountains, etc.
in public buildings! Their children had to go to
separate schools which the government insisted were "equal," but they were inferior by every measure except the quality of the dedicated and hard-working teachers.
In private settings the discrimination was much worse: there were entire stores where they could not shop, restaurants where they could not eat, parks where their kids could not play, theaters they could not attend. In movie houses they had to sit in the back, and the same for buses. Only Afro-American taxi drivers would stop for them, and they had to sit in the front seat. They could not apply for most jobs, and certainly not for any with a good career path. Very few universities accepted Afro-American students.
It was very dangerous for Afro- and Euro-Americans to date, and if it were a male Afro and female Euro it would very likely end in violence or even murder, especially in the South.
That said, I had a very unusual upbringing for a Euro-American in my era. My parents went out of their way to not teach me racism. When I was seven my mother took me to the hospital where my father was staying for a few days, and it had a playroom for visiting children. A group were playing in the center and I started to walk over to play with them. My mother stopped me and said, "Fraggle, see that little boy playing all by himself in the corner? Why don't you go play with him, he might be lonesome." Hey sure, why not? We had a great time. He
didn't look like me but he was a nice kid. It took me a long time to realize how remarkable that was--
in Chicago in 1950!
Then we moved to a small town in Arizona, and an interesting thing about the region that used to be the Frontier was that they still had the old Frontier sense of survival and ethics: If you could carry your weight you were okay, and it didn't matter what color your skin happened to be. There was some racism there, but it was at the individual level. Some places wouldn't let Afro-Americans in, and the city government didn't interfere, but other places didn't care. The schools were even integrated, long before
Brown v. Board of Education.
It wasn't until I was a teenager, and my sense of ethics and morality was well established, that I heard my parents slip up a couple of times and make racist remarks. Then I realized that
they couldn't help being who they were, but they knew it was wrong and they didn't want me to grow up like them!
Quite a gift. Unfortunately they were complete failures as parents in many other important ways, but in retrospect I'll always be grateful for that.
the color of ones skin has absolutly nothing to do with what type of person they are
As Ras Tafari Makonnen put it:
Haile Selassie said:
The color of a man's skin is no more important than the color of his eyes.
What there is, is South American countries that refuse to aknowledge the important role that race plays.
In Latin America, racism is directed heavily at the native peoples, not so much against people of African ancestry. In most places, anyway.
You are less Cherokee then I am German . . . .
He's one-sixteenth. That qualifies him for "head rights."
This is a science thread so why not take the subject scientifically? No one here has! What is the basis for racism?
Homo sapiens is a pack-social species, like wolves, lions, gorillas, etc. Until the Neolithic Revolution created the first food surplus in the history of the planet, our Paleolithic ancestors hunted and gathered for survival, and they required a certain size range to provide enough food for their tribe. During a bad year, neighboring tribes would try to encroach on each other's territory, in order to satsify their hunger. This made them mortal enemies: any food taken by another tribe meant that someone in your own tribe might starve to death.
So we have an instinct to regard people outside our own gene pool as hated and feared competitors for scarce resources.
Humans have always been more complicated than that because our enormous forebrain gives us the ability to stifle instinctive behavior, and there's plenty of evidence that during good times tribes did indeed get along peacefully, trading crafts and having festivals together where they'd mix up the gene pool a little. Nonetheless, that pack-social instinct is there and during bad times it percolates right back to the top of our priorities.
The problem with civilization is that there's always
something wrong so our pack-social "bad times" instinct is always fighting for dominance, and it's ridiculously easy for us to regard people who are obviously not members of our own "tribe" as hated and feared competitors.
