Bi_3 wrote:There is little overt racism left operating now, just it's painful legacy and the population of those who won't let go of the idea that their skin color, not their actions, should entitle them to something.Orpheus wrote:I'm sorry, but the argument that people who aren't swayed by slavery will find themselves magically empathetic to the Jim Crow era seems inherently ridiculous to me. If anything our inability to get past even overt racism in an age when we are starting to think of hyperloops and space tourism is kind of a stunning indictment of our species.
The point about Jim Crow vs. slavery is about leveraging a person's ability to empathize, not about about the gravity of the terror each inflicted. There is a great bit in a recent Sam Harris podcast where he is talking with a German philosopher, and the gentleman brings up how he first learned about the holocaust and the behaviors of the average German while it was happening vs. what his parents told him about it, to sum it up it was "it wasn't us, we didn't know". But they knew, everyone knew, they just lied to themselves that it wasn't their issue. The German gentleman said it transformed his whole perspective on his country, it's history, and how we should treat other people. I think that same process could work here. If we could show it was our grandparents and great-grandparents that did this, and we do that by showing the living human face of that tragic time, the effect would be powerful.
I fully realize I'm about to lose you here, but I suspect your perspective is very different than most given that you have dedicated much of your life to helping others vs. just going through existence. You are immersed in the effects of various forms of oppression, most are not. The other part is that slavery was a very long time ago and civilization level change is still on a pretty steep upward slope. Someone born in the 21st century might look at slavery like they would look at the colonial Williamsburg, an unrelatable relic of human history from past with little bearing on today that might appear on the mid-term. So what I was saying is that while we still have living humans that went through Jim Crow on both sides, some of whom you and I may interact with regularly, I feel we need to get them to tell their stories so that they we can maintain some level of empathy before the connection is lost forever. The far more extreme stance that Colin K. is taking off the field is not going to do that.
Good god. No. That first sentence.
It's difficult for me to process your reaction to a podcast with a random German dude when you start out with there is little overt racism now. Also what is extreme with Colin's protest? It's a super peaceful form of civil disobedience that is inherently not extreme.
