So not a hate crime?

[kandrathe]

Racism is again, overall structural. You cannot eliminate individual prejudice without first abolishing the system of racism then enables and perpetuates individual prejudice to begin with. The issue is neither that "some of X are bad" NOR "I hold all of X accountable for the bad X's", the issue is that a system that "favors X over Y that perpeuates inequality and oppression of Y" is in place.

In an interesting coincidence, I happened to be listening on my lengthy commute to a "black radio program" analyzing why black people are suffering in the US. They touched on all the usual subjects (we've covered).

I know you are on this whole SJW tear the sucka (meaning society) down kick, but most of us are content to melt into the pot of common American culture, earn a living wage, and hope to preserve some of our families identity traditions and culture, (at least especially at home around the holidays with our family.) For my great grandfather Lars (my fathers fathers father), who arrived in 1910, it wasn't "white privilege" he was after (consciously). He had relatives already here who told him of all the great things about America. He wanted mostly to escape the perpetual struggle of the common crofter of making just enough to get by, but never making enough to buy their own farm in an era of ever increasing demand. He came here for all the promises of a better life, totally unaware of the price paid to acquire it. But, mostly, the US inherited the British systems, so why is racism so much more an issue here and not so much a thing there? Maybe because the de-facto plantation culture was never dismantled after the civil war, perhaps? I often reflect that most ancestries of emigrant Americans, go back 200 or even 500 years (for Hispanic culture), regardless of ethnicity.

Here we are in 2017. I believe it would be more productive if we would shift dialog from one of blame, to one of making positive progress. Which to me is embedded in stuff like laws, and other social systems which subjugate us all but are least suffered by those who are established. The establishment was made hundreds of years ago by whites, for whites. Even though it is now leveled by Civil Rights Laws to include everyone, it structurally still benefits those who are already established. Perhaps rather than fling around the whole "white privilege" and "bourgeoisie" castigations, we might focus on the structures keeping us all in chains. We might actually agree on some of them, but maybe not the remedy.

But, then a black teacher talked about their self imposed constraints, (e.g. being accused of acting white ).

So, I think we all, including blacks, perpetuate the status quo, where we really need to address *real* known structural barriers (e.g. home ownership, access to loans, wealth inheritance, educational systems, wage discrimination, criminal justice, incarceration, etc.)

Harvard Lecture: Acting White? Rethinking Race in Post-Racial America (UnEdited) by Devon Carbado