Is there systemic racism? Is there systemic love?

There are a cacophony of voices talking from every direction about systemic racism right now, and there are those who say our society is nothing but racism, others who say it doesn’t exist. Identifying and defining it is challenging.

President elect Biden announcing that one of his major focuses is combatting systemic racism has raised the topic to the forefront.

A lot of what is said is far from compelling. Michelle Obama talking about being in a store and having other customers cut in front of her in line, attributing it to her race. Black people are invisible, she says.

Yet I am a rather large white man and people do that to me all the time. I was just telling my wife that being in the grocery store, people are constantly acting like I am not there. The other day, I waited in the aisle while a couple looked at items on the shelf while blocking the aisle with themselves and their cart, and I was just looking at them like, hello, can you move your cart over? They seemed oblivious.

Things like that happen constantly to everyone.

I am not saying that is not example of racism, but it demonstrates the difficulty in clearly identifying racism. A lot of it is subjective.

Another thing that happens is a statistical analysis that is said to show racism based on numbers. For instance, with Covid, saying that blacks and POC are harder hit due to systemic racism, based on statistics.

But what about climate change policy then? In California, which has the highest number of minorities by percentage than anywhere in the US, electricity is at least 50 percent more expensive due mainly to regulations. Are climate change regulations the result of systemic racism too? Using a statistical analysis similar to that being done to proclaim racism on health care issues would indicate climate change regulations are the result of racism as well, which is obviously absurd.

It will take more than correlative statistics to prove systemic racism.

This article explores a few of my personal experiences dealing with race, and goes on to attempt to define what systemic racism is and the problems with confronting it.  It then looks at possible answers to systemic racism.

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Election Sniping

On Bill Maher’s show last night, as reported by Fox news this morning, a guest from MSNBC, Malcolm Nance, called all seventy million Trump voters racists and tribalists. You are seeing this kind of total denigration of half the country by liberals now, and there is even a movement started by some … Read more

Rage and Fear

At its most positive, Democrats believe that you should help other people, Republicans believe that individual responsibility is what matters. Both are true and any path forward has to include both those basic ideas.

At their darkest, the progressive left is enraged and punishing over lack of justice in the world, the far right fearful and poisonously paranoid over the loss of their culture and the world as they knew it. This is what happens when you hit the extreme ends of each viewpoint.

At the extremes, the right is driven by fear, the left by rage. This is a look at how that plays out.

For the right, what has happened to them? They are losing their culture and they believe it is due to the government, creating and enforcing laws that liberals have advocated that have undermined traditional American culture. The right is traditional America, Christian, patriotic, believers in liberty and that hard work will result in success. They believe that those values are being undermined by government edict and leftist values.

Environmental laws, affirmative action, immigration, trade regulations that have shipped manufacturing jobs they depended on overseas, restrictions on guns, there has been a host of negative impacts on them coming from the government, at least in their view.

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Notes on White Privilege

The concept of white privilege is something that has been thrown about for five years or more, but has recently become much more prevalent in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder.

It means if you were born white, you have certain inherent advantages that other races don’t have. It means, according to the critical race theory that it came out of, that because you are white you are inherently a racist oppressor over other races, usually black, and that they are inherently oppressed by you, and that therefore you are in an advantaged position. Just for being born.

It is absurd to think that literally everyone is anything in particular, including oppressed or oppressor.

I don’t think that most people take it like that, but it is important to understand that those promoting it, like Robin DiAngelo, do mean it like that.  Oppressed or oppressor, no in between, nobody exempt.

I think there is some truth to it, however. To be exact it is a half truth, and a dangerous one at that.  It is a way to frame things, a way to bracket life experiences from a particular point of view.

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A primer on Social Justice theory

Social JusticeTheory /Critical Race Theory

“I’m just repeating a core CRT belief – that attempting objectivity is an expression of white supremacy.

—Andrew Sullivan

 

I see a lot of my friends using SJT/CRT terminology like White Privilege and I don’t get the impression that they really understand the full scope of what SJ/CRT really is or stands for. I think if you did you may not want to use those terms, or at least understand them in a better context.

Do you know that they stand against liberalism, in fact one of the main focuses of SJ/CRT is that liberalism and liberals are a force to oppress black people?

Social Justice is a critique, a criticism of enlightenment values, which encompasses personal freedom, rule of law, progress, separation of church and state, science? All of the values that brought us out of the Dark Ages and led to the Renaissance, the US Constitution, and using fact based science to find truth.

SJT not only opposes liberalism, they say that it is something that somebody made up in order to dominate oppressed people, rather than recognize that liberalism in fact is the very belief system that has been the basis of progressivism.

There’s a lot of insanity hiding behind a lot of the terms and beliefs that people are starting to toss around more and more, so if you are interested I would like to fill you in on some of it. People are looking for answers as to how to deal with racism now and CRT is filling in that gap of what to do, but I don’t think it is a very good answer or one that is going to work, at all. It is actually making things worse.

This article is a criticism of social justice theory, and my intent is to point out what I feel are the enormous problems with it. That does not mean everything is wrong, however. There is certainly a lot of racism, the question is, is this the best way to approach it.?

So let me back up a bit and explain some things here.

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Ambiguity, or why I have hope

This morning I find myself debating with those who are outraged about right wing gun groups but deny that antifa/blm violence even exists. Is it possible both are true, that there is a threat from both ends? Of course there is.

One of the many problems that we see with the extreme partisanship that dominates media now is that people get in their own partisan rabbit holes and deny what they perceive to support the “other side” or simply ignore it. One example is Biden recently saying that antifa “is just an idea”. I am sure he is being told that by his lefty handlers, but it is really an ignorant statement.

The truth is that right now we live in a very ambiguous reality, with some truth and some lies coming from each side. It’s not an equivalence always, but then again it is not a competition either. That is another thing people do to deny it, well the other side is worse. Whataboutism it is called. Republicans have used that repeatedly to avoid criticism.

Consider these things we have been told, often from experts from the last few months:

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