Category Archives: Racism

Things Change

30 Monday Jun 2025

Posted by in Cultural Change, Racism

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Things are constantly changing for good or bad. Life used to be fairly simple compared to how we see them now. I was born and grew up in Southern Illinois in a town with only a 3,000 population. It wasn’t until high school I knew we had an extended family of ethnic Germans in the county. They were in a different school district for grade school. We had no non-white people living in the county and the only religious strife was Baptists sects against each other and both against the Pentecostal and Catholics. No fighting but lots of meaningless debating. It was a rare county to some extent because we had no non-white people in it. My family wasn’t racist because of my mother.

            At the time most of the names I knew were English so when I went to college I encountered other colors and saw nothing to be concerned about. They were just people like me. My first knowledge of racism in the Southern states was a girl who had moved up for junior college from a Jim Crow state. She had a huge inferiority complex and was uncomfortable around the rest of us and talking with us scared her. I hope she overcame it.

            My source of the wider world was the television and its programs. I had seldom watched the news so a university with Viet Nam protests and veterans, racial strife with Martin Luther King’s murder, studying population, food, and climate change was an eye opener. I started watching the national and international news and now I am a news junkie.

            Age old American Companies are now owned by foreign companies with CEOs who have distinct accents from the rest of the world. The internet companies have ethnic Asian Founders and CEOs. Oh, I have several Asian friends and my niece and nephew married into that ethnic German culture. Times have changed for the better for me but I still live in the good old days.

The bad is evident and I think the invention pushed by Al Gore is the basis for much of today’s problems. The newspapers and television were worried about not telling the truth about something and getting sued. Today we have media on the TV and internet that are so completely as to be propaganda status.

            Civility in politics has gone for the most part. Name calling and demeaning an opponent’s race and sex is now common. Having an immoral and despicable personality means nothing for millions of people. Lying has become an art form for some politicians. Religious people who run from any person wanting their vote now say they are not the second coming. What has happened to morals being their basis for supporting a person?

            Climate change has finally become evident with record high temperatures, and five hundred and thousand year storms are occurring every year. Home often are still in repair when another swamps it. Where I live in Northern Illinois a winter night reaching zero is extremely rare. Just a few decades ago that was a high temperature for days. Insects that burrowed down froze and died, but today the ground barely freezes.

Hates Everyone

11 Thursday May 2023

Posted by in Hate, Racism

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        I had a conversation with a 51 year old, hardworking, arthritic laborer who probably represents 10-20% of Americans. His entire philosophy is based on some fictional world that defies reality. Some of his beliefs are decade’s old fiction but some are modernized versions of those racist ideas from the 1950s.

            The basis for his beliefs was full of conflicts. He is against anyone who does not confirm with his “normal” views on gender. He thought something should be done with those who didn’t follow his “normal” views. We didn’t have time to go into any depth as to what he would do with those people. However he was adamant that he didn’t like the government interfering with his own rights.

            He cited the “1776 Constitution” for the Bill of Rights that was being taken away from him by Biden. He idolized Trump, and when I listed Trump’s crimes, conning people, and his getting kicked out of the Democratic Party in New York, he said he didn’t care about all that.

            I would have loved to have had more time to delve into his ideology but his boss came back. Since he isn’t on the internet his views don’t come from social media so where does it come from? He gave me a clue when he said “Trump should be president because he speaks the truth.” I doubt he watches any TV news that conflicts with the Fox talking heads.

            He is an unskilled “White American” who says people today don’t want to work. “On good or bad weather days, they call in or come for a few hours and leave.” Knowing his views on those crossing the southern border I asked if we needed more to do the jobs the younger white people wouldn’t do? That put his racist views into conflict since he felt whites won’t want to work but browns will. I don’t think he is going to stay with the landscaper if he hires a non-white person who will work as hard as him.

Critical Race Theory

08 Tuesday Mar 2022

Posted by in Racism

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            I don’t understand how the study of our history can be so upsetting when it shows how other races were involved in the creation of today’s America. Africans were bought and shipped to North America to be resold as slaves. Tens of thousands of Chinese were imported to build the railroads through the Sierra Mountains. Millions of Indians were killed so their land could be taken. We edged out thousands of Mexicans from their lands so ranches could be bigger or mined. Perhaps the latest of the ethnic mistreatment was in 1942 when we packed up all the Japanese and moved them to “relocation camps on plains east of the Rockies while their businesses, homes and possessions were taken by their neighbors and others.”

            I had a history class in high school in 1964-65 and twenty nine semester hours of history in college. Hardly any of the above was even mentioned. Perhaps because it was a Kentucky college with a small percentage of non-white students, it wasn’t part of the curriculum. We studied the Boston Massacre but we weren’t told the only person killed was a freed black man. We didn’t talk about the Trail of Tears displacement of the Cherokee to Oklahoma so President Andrew Jackson could sell the land to developers. The Supreme Court sided with the Cherokee but Jackson sent them on a forced march that killed hundreds of them.

            A great example of why all history should be taught in grade and high school is an East Tennessee reservation Cherokee who sat next to me in an American History class. He said they were taught Jefferson Davis was President and not Abraham Lincoln. Today a small group of Texans decide what is put in all school books.

Critical Race Theory

24 Monday Jan 2022

Posted by in America, Racism

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            At this time only a couple of universities teach a course in Critical Race Theory (CRT) as an elective. Many schools are prohibited from teaching CRT by school boards and states. All the states passing those laws are Republican making it a political issue and not necessarily a racial one.

            Critical Race Theory is a combination of culture, history, economics, and geography. The core of the course seems to be telling the History of black people in the United States from slavery to today. Why it doesn’t include others like Asians, and Indians, I don’t know. Maybe a follow-up course could be available.

            Teaching the truth is in the eye of the beholder just as with science. Many people are willing to deny facts and what they can see themselves. Obviously millions of black people are not doing as good as other races. In spite of all the equality laws, some people are unable to climb out of their situation because of external situation. This has created a separate culture among many other cultures. Some of those other cultures are biased against the black culture and its people. CRT should teach the complete history of how everyone got to where we are today.

Stirring the Melting Pot

06 Monday Jul 2020

Posted by in Racism, Uncategorized

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We have a cultural problem in this country and I don’t know if anyone knows how to fix it. We have struggled for decades to solve it with no solution in sight. One way not to fix it is by reducing or defunding police budgets just because of a few bad actors. This isn’t Japan or some European country where people are civil and don’t commit violent crime or carry guns. Here people carry guns with too many using them in committing crimes.

Sub-cultures develop within larger cultures and within some ethnic groups crime becomes commonplace. When that happens, people outside the larger culture start to believe all those within the larger culture are criminals too. When the culture can be easily identified by a skin color, demonizing all of them becomes easier. Once that line is crossed it is difficult for people to cross back over. Police and state’s attorneys are no different than anyone else. Once they become deeply involved in trying to arrest and convict people of the sub-culture, they look at all those of the same color or ethnic as being suspicious.

How to make a permanent change in this conditioned attitude in people and law enforcement will involve the people of all larger cultures working to eliminate the criminal sub-culture. If the subculture is heavily into drugs and guns, then the larger culture needs to totally commit to ending the criminal activity by intensive social pressure or helping to jail them.

Protests in and of themselves are baby steps toward solving the dilemma. Maybe the solution is for the larger culture to actively end the sub-culture’s activities.

Unbalanced Scales of Justice

14 Thursday Mar 2019

Posted by in Crime, Prejudice, Racism

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I have come to agree with a large majority of people – most of who are black – who say the justice sentencing is not color blind. The real tipping point was a black woman in Texas. She was a parolee and committed an atrocious crime in the eyes of the prosecutor and judge. She got five years in prison for voting! Texas is one of the states that doesn’t allow parolees to vote. In a few months her parole would have been over and she would have been legal but she didn’t know she couldn’t vote.

If she had been white and robbed a convenience store she would have gotten a smaller sentence. It’s the same across much of our country. It’s more than sad.

Equality Finally

11 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by in History, Military, Racism

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My schooling and books say General John J. Pershing, Commander of the troops in Europe during World War I. wouldn’t have spread his troops among the British and French Divisions. As usual history is written by the victors and glosses over the truth.

Pershing, like most of the Army, was racist. He ignored how the Black regiments had fought in the Civil War and against the Indians. They were considered unreliable so when Marshall Foch begged Pershing for some fresh troops, Pershing sent him all the Black troops he had. The French had thousands of Black troops from their colonies in Africa and the Caribbean. The French were glad to have them even if they didn’t understand French.

The American Black regiments fought very hard and won many individual and unit citations. After being treated as equals in France many stayed and married French women. Others immigrated with French passports to some of the colonies.

When World War II rolled around, Black Americans were put in logistics and many excelled in the Red Ball Express’s job of supplying Patton’s drives. Few of the millions fighting were Black troops. Even the ethnic Japanese got their own unit (442 Regiment) for a chance to make a patriotic reputation.

Equality didn’t come until Harry S. Truman mandated it. Now all colors of Americans can fight and die. A fine example of equality in the military is General Colin Powell. We could use more like him.

Can History Repeat Today

09 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by in History, Politics, Racism

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Is it some kind of gigantic coincidence so many Nationalists have taken power or attempting to take their country’s leadership positions? Philippines, Poland, Venezuela, Russia, Turkey, Israel, and the United States among others have openly Nationalist leaders. Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Belarus, and a few others have growing movements and political parties hoping to take control.

Nationalism means it’s me against them. The ‘them’ is often other countries, but more likely some easily identifiable ethnic group. One of the oldest targets is Jews. It was Hitler’s choice to explain Germany’s ills. The current European bogey man is the Syrian refugees.

Here Nationalism is Muslims and brown-skinned people. Just as elsewhere, their use of ethnic groups is to stimulate fear and hatred in people they want the support of in their quest for power. When this dangerous Nationalism erupts from the depths of depravity responsible Americans and Europeans have been trying to eliminate. It reminds me of the rise of the Nazi Party.

Just because the current administration didn’t rise from the beer haus of Munich, but in four-star restaurants, hotels, and grand homes of billionaires doesn’t mean it isn’t as dangerous. The Nazi loyalty oaths of 1935 sounds like the loyalty demands Trump says he expects of his appointees. Numerous times he has raved he requires absolute loyalty of his people. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has incurred his wrath because he is an honorable man which conflicts with his loyalty to Trump. Many others have left because of their conscious overriding loyalty. Too bad a lot of Germans hadn’t written letters to the big German papers or contributed to books about Hitler in the early 1930s.

Racism on the Rise

12 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by in Politics, President Trump, Racism

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I wish everyone would be as distressed as my wife and I were when we read about an “incident” in Los Angeles. A 91 year ethnic Mexican was beaten with a brick by a black woman with her daughter. He was a permanent resident walking on a sidewalk during the Fourth of July celebrations. After that, a group of young black men thought he was trying to abduct the girl so they kicked and punched him while he lay curled up on the sidewalk. He has broken bones and teeth. Both incidents were videoed with the mother yelling “go back to your country”.

Another incident occurred in a Cook County Park District Park. A man harassed a woman wearing a Puerto Rico flag shirt. He kept yelling at her for not being an American citizen. She had flawless English and he didn’t so I wonder whose family has been citizens longer (Puerto Ricans are citizens).

Most racial incidents are not recorded for the internet and TV audiences but those that are show racism is exploding. The incidents against brown skinned people are growing rapidly. In California, it has increased over 40 percent since Trump started his racist campaign against Latinos. He said they are rapists, murderers, and drug gangs.

White against black racism grew during Obama’s tenure with Trump pushing the birther lies. He has been shown to say he would undo everything Obama has done. He has repeatedly fired up crowds against Mexicans. The President’s rhetoric and actions have made racism acceptable or even patriotic. Not since Woodrow Wilson have we had such an openly racist President.

Diversity

11 Friday May 2018

Posted by in Gender, Racism, Women

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I remember when diversity meant a different color, or race. Now it means a different gender. Companies are trying to go along with this latest fashion by bringing women into upper management and boardrooms. I worked with women for many years and each had an ideocracy just like all the men I worked with. Some men and women I worked with were trying to do a job over their capability but I found that more women were working below their capability. If they were in my command structure they were promoted and paid equally to a man doing the same job.

I disagree with promoting a person no matter their race or gender if they are not capable of doing the job. Not everyone has the mindset to be in a supervisory role. Many companies are promoting women to upper management who had little or no experience in lower management. They are being put on corporate boards just because its fashionable.

Promoting people for any reason other than their capability is wrong for the organization and for the person. General Motors CEO has over thirty years in the company and is highly respected. Several others like the former Yahoo CEO did not have the ability. They were put into the office because they were women. Many men have failed as CEO, some disasterly. Doing a good job has nothing to do with gender, race, or religion. The main factor is training and experience. Just because a person can run one business doesn’t mean they can run another, no matter their gender or race.