Originally Posted by
steelreserve
I don't want to drag this on indefinitely, so let me just say that you make some good points and there obviously is more to the story than "racism is everywhere" or "people are complaining for no reason." Unfortunately, the furthest the public dialogue gets are soundbites paraphrasing one of those, and shouted through a megaphone, because being loud and rude is what carries the most attention. So I don't have a lot of faith in that process to accomplish much that's meaningful.
The last couple of things I want to say: First, that a very big difference in the appearance of this current state of events, compared to civil rights movements in the past, is that the racial villain is more often than not an ambiguous "they" with unclear motives - whereas in, say, the 1960s, it was unmistakably clear who it was and why they were doing it. I won't pretend to argue the merits of one movement versus the other, but that appearance is why the present one leaves a sour taste in many people's mouths, as if they are being unfairly targeted in the chase for a hypothetical bogeyman.
Second is that many of the current grievances, on a macro level (as opposed to the isolated encounters with bottom-percentile racists-at-large) ... seem like they have much more to do with poverty than anything else, including race. No mistake about it, being poor sucks. On the other hand, you will find the same type of problems in Watts as you will in a favela in Sao Paulo, or for that matter in some dogshit town in the Jersey pine barrens. Just with different drugs and with different twists on it. As one family friend from just such a dogshit town remarked on his first trip through West Oakland (in which numerous examples of dangerous or cracked-out behavior were evident, complete with a dude getting arrested in an apparent domestic violence incident): "This ain't black people's problems, this is poor people's problems."
While tragic and undoubtedly frustrating, chalking that up to race rubs people the wrong way. Unless I'm mistaken, the public conversation about these subjects a decade ago was much more focused on the kinds of practical problems related to poverty, with a lot less of the racial vitriol - and may have actually been leading somewhere if they had let it. Instead it gets taken over by a bunch of shrieking extremists who clearly are in it for their own reasons, and as a result have probably set race relations back a good 20 years. The whole thing is just utterly disappointing.