Black Americans have no evidence that they can trust the people who benefit from historically and predominantly white institutions. Banks. Schools. Courts. Bureaucracies. Housing providers. Nonprofits and charities. All were built within a racist system and, intentionally or unintentionally, have in their DNA measures and barriers—from redlining to school segregation—meant to keep Black and Brown people out.
This is from the New America Foundation. This is the point of view that I do not share.
The problem with this type of analysis is that there are just way too many counter examples. Why is it that so many minority groups are able to successfully navigate these so called racist organizations? Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Indians, Pakistanis, ethnic Jews, Nigerians, West Indians, etc….
Lastly, but unrelated, why do black and brown people always seem to get bundled together as if the issues and experiences of these vastly different groups are somehow related.
Sorry, but the author is a young white woman
https://medium.com/@martin_57031
and after a short search, I have found no reason to pay attention to what she has to say about race or any other issue. The claim that people X don’t trust people non-X but that the latter must still engage the former with the expectation of establishing mutual trust is nonsense. Trust requires direct, personal relationships and cannot be extrapolated to any two sets of people within any type of society. She is depreciating trust, apparently to make it equal to “like” –a word that she cannot use because as she acknowledges it makes her look childish.
I would focus on her ideas vs. dismissing them based on her race.
She is expressing a very mainstream point of view even though it completely lacks in intellectual rigor or conclusive data.
A very mainstream point of view? Which of the many words she wrote are you talking about? That black Americans don’t trust non-black Americans? It may be a good slogan but nothing else.
Unfortunately, an increasingly mainstream point of view, at least here in the U.S. and even here in Texas. Any perspectives from Chile?
Hans, in Chile there are many “Molly Martin” people (they are white but in the U.S. they would be classified as Hispanics). They are the worse output of a poor education system (from K-12 to higer ed), but they cannot be ignored because in late October there will be a referendum about a process to reform the Constitution (this process was agreed by the government and the political opposition to put an end to the social outbreak of October 2019 and due to the pandemic has been delayed). It will be a very important event for what may happen in Chile over the next five years (if the process is approved it’s expected to take a few years to complete).
In Chile, the political competition involves many factions divided into two large coalitions plus a few independent ones. Factions fight each other daily, both within each coalition and between coalitions. Too much fight and consequently a lot of uncertainty about the policies the government and the opposition may agree: none of the two coalitions can claim to get an absolute majority in any new election. The elections of the past 30 years, except for the first two post-Pinochet, were determined by small margins. The fractured politics of Chile implies that several factions are decisive for an election’s outcome and have a “veto power” for policy-making.
Finally, in Chile, the Mapuche conflict is becoming important (not in Argentina). To understand why you can read Wikipedia’s Mapuche entry (in English). One issue for reforming the Constitution is to give special treatment to the Mapuche people (they are close to 10% of the population but the majority located in a limited area).
“About me these same revolutionaries have said: “Yes, of course, Bunin is an artistic talent who writes about this and that; what he writes is true but also not true. After all, he is not a peasant, and only a peasant can speak truthfully about other peasants.” Yes, they have said even more ignorant things about me, completely forgetting that to write King Lear, for example, one does not necessarily have to be king. I could even ask my critics: ‘How can you who are not kings criticize King Lear?'”
-Ivan Bunin
A pastor and local president of a Massachusetts NAACP chapter called on police officers and other supporters of the “Blue Lives Matter” narrative to stop comparing their career choice to he and other Black Americans’ lives.
“There’s no such thing as BLUE LIVES…Stop comparing your JOB with my LIFE…Your CAREER is a choice, my BLACKNESS isn’t.”
https://www.newsweek.com/no-such-thing-blue-lives-local-naacp-president-rips-police-race-comparisons-1531836
Some context…roughly 10 (unarmed) black males are killed per year by LEOs in the U.S. vs. roughly 50 LEOs that are killed by criminals. The population of black males outnumbers that of LEOs by a huge margin. But, I guess while all lives are equal, some are more equal than others?
She is expressing an ‘increasingly’ prominent progressive point of view. A related point of view is that middle class Americans have no evidence that the progressive elite institutions and their progressive elite leaders are trustworthy. Instead, they are contemptuous, scornful, dismissive, and outright hostile.
This is a very dangerous perception to have widespread.
Odd how blacks can absolutely thrive in sports and entertainment…but anywhere they don’t thrive must be racist (therefore sports must be racist from the vantage point of an Asian?). Arguments with glaring “anomalies” just aren’t worth much time.
Almost every major institution is (and many have been for decades) bending over backwards to help black people, against their supposed white supremacist self interest. That’s ample evidence that there is no white supremacy lurking beneath the surface in them. Even they were overtly white supremacist 70 years ago, so what? Institutions don’t have DNA (or if they do, it mutates a lot faster than organisms). All the old people ar gone and replaced by new ones with opposite ideologues. Institutions don’t have an ‘essence’ that outlives their people who make them up and the customs they abide by; once those change, it is a different institution in all but name.
Anyone who expects you to go the extra mile prove that they’re trustworthy because of your race (assuming she thinks it’s possible for white people to be trustworthy) thereby demonstrates that their trust isn’t worth seeking. The insistence that one through hoops to prove one is ‘one of the good ones’ insulting. This sentiment is annoyingly common in some circles.
Why does the US federal government pay this organization to publish racially divisive hate speech like this? Looking through their annual reports they say that they get 6-8 percent per year from the US federal government? Wikipedia says that they got bog money from the State Department. And why are they tax exempt? They have close ties to google and their biggest bit of business over the last six years was lobbying for net neutrality. They also get big donations from other corporations too, but still. And why is money that rightfully should go to shareholders being taken away and given to these creeps? The SEC should regulate in this area and and provide shareholders with a simple, inexpensive and effective means to recover their funds from these types of robberies.
If you want less nonsense, stop publicly subsidizing it. How about a ban on government money going to tax-exempt organizations? Better yet, widen the tax base by eliminating tax exemptions for think tanks. There are way too many of them and the social costs they impose far outweigh any perceived benefits generated.
“All were built within a racist system”: what a weak charge! Isn’t that true (according to the author) of everything that has been built?
There is a part of your brain responsible for your reasoning ability that scrutinizes arguments for rigor and validity. When it is force-fed a huge viral load of absurd baloney, it recoils in discomfort.
But, like Molly Martin says, your job is to “stay and be uncomfortable”. Not to reject error and argue against slanderous falsehoods, but to shut up, unless to say, “Thank you sir! May I have another?”
Society must be built from flawed components. There is nothing else to build it from.
Even Philip Hamburger jumps on the “structurally discriminatory” bandwagon for his anti-administrative state hobby horse.
https://americanmind.org/essays/administrative-discrimination/
Very disappointing to see something this clueless about current realities coming from Hamburger and the West Coast Straussians. I guess they just can’t resist another opportunity to bash Woodrow Wilson, even though the Left has now disowned him.