Racism

[Bill Ryan]

Well, here we go.

* Bill takes a deep breath :) *

This thread has its genesis in some discussion in the mods team over the last few months about this subject in general. (Some of what we shared with each other might actually be very interesting to members and guests, but of course only with everyone's permission.)

Out of that, came a suggestion to post what is now this thread: a historical overview of the realities of the roots, causes and history of racism. I undertook to do it myself.

At this point, and at this point only, I'll state a personal caveat: (Or, maybe it's a disclosure.)



I do NOT believe any current member of Avalon is a racist in any way that I understand the meaning of the term. I DO believe there are current major issues about the forced integration of different cultures, in both North America and Europe, and there may be hidden agendas behind that, and that these issues are worth understanding and discussing.
That's my personal view. Others may have different angles on this, by 5º or 180º. :)

I thought I'd look up a definition, first. That's because, as best as I can see, the word is loosely used and MISued in a wide variety of ways.

Here's just a few: (try looking this up yourself... it's interesting)


prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.

[example] "Aborigines are the main victims of racism in Australia"





Note: I included the stated example because a widely-respected Avalon member, a good friend, told me and some others of how she was repeatedly bullied BY Aborigines when she was a young child in Australia.

Was this racism? Probably not. The Aborigine bullies did not feel 'superior'. Just bigger. And, undoubtedly, there was a cycle of abuse that led to their attitude towards a vulnerable, small white girl.

I would like to say, I do hope that person chooses to share her story here. But it's not mine to tell, at all.


a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to dominate others or that a particular racial group is inferior to the others.



a policy, system of government, etc., based upon or fostering such a doctrine; discrimination.



hatred or intolerance of another race or other races.



Racism is the practice of discriminating against people based on their race, national or ethnic background. Although old prejudices often live on, most people will agree that racism is unacceptable.



Someone who practices racism is called a racist. Racism comes from the idea that the different races are intrinsically different. It’s racism when a white person discriminates against a black person, just as it’s racism if a Japanese person discriminates against a German person. Many worldwide political movements have fought to end racism.

And there are 101 other definitions, too. It didn't help all that much.

I then turned to Wikipedia, which has a LONG and interesting page:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism

It starts with


Racism is the belief in the superiority of one race over another, which often results in discrimination and prejudice towards people based on their race or ethnicity. Today, the use of the term "racism" does not easily fall under a single definition.

"Does not easily fall under a single definition" — no kidding. That gives carte blanche for the term to be used loosely as a general criticism (or, more bluntly, sometimes a targeted, demeaning, put-down) that may not necessarily be warranted or accurate.

The Wiki article is way too long and detailed to quote here. But what might grab one's attention are the images on that page, depicting (accurately, in my opinion) what racism is, and certainly used to be, about.
* I've not selected these personally: just copied them from the page. Some may be found offensive, of course, in our present-day culture, but then that's what concerns us all: how we may possibly be able to learn from history.
There are way too many for this one post, so I'll paste the images into the three posts below. Then, please dive in with your views — intelligent and educated ones, please. In this context, 'educated' means well-informed... which can definitely include citing one's personal experience.

[Bill Ryan]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/32/Vivian_Malone_registering.jpg/522px-Vivian_Malone_registering.jpg

African-American university student Vivian Malone entering the University of Alabama in the U.S. to register for classes as one of the first non-white students to attend the institution. Until 1963, the university was racially segregated and non-white students were not allowed to attend.

~~~

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/Boycot_Jews_april_1_1933.jpeg

Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, Germany, 1933.

~~~

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/46/1899BalanceCartoon.jpg

In 1899 Uncle Sam (a personification of the United States) balances his new possessions which are depicted as savage children. The figures are Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Cuba, Philippines and "Lad robes" (the Mariana Islands).

~~~

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Little_Rock_integration_protest.jpg/440px-Little_Rock_integration_protest.jpg

A rally against school integration in 1959.

~~~

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c9/Racistcampaignposter1.jpg/440px-Racistcampaignposter1.jpg

A racist political campaign poster from the 1866 Pennsylvania gubernatorial election.

~~~

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/81/DurbanSign1989.jpg/440px-DurbanSign1989.jpg

A sign on a racially segregated beach during the era of Apartheid in South Africa.

~~~

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a9/Woundedknee1891.jpg/440px-Woundedknee1891.jpg

A mass grave being dug for frozen bodies from the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Massacre), in which the U.S. Army killed 150 Lakota people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakota_people), marking the end of the American Indian Wars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_Wars).

~~~

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/25/Eug%C3%A8ne_Ferdinand_Victor_Delacroix_030.jpg/440px-Eug%C3%A8ne_Ferdinand_Victor_Delacroix_030.jpg

Eugène Delacroix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Delacroix)'s Scene of the massacre at Chios (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Massacre_at_Chios) (1824); Greek families awaiting death or slavery.

~~~

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5d/Ksenophontov_noah.jpg/440px-Ksenophontov_noah.jpg

The Book of Genesis's biblical curse on Canaan, which was often misinterpreted as a curse on his father Ham, was used to justify slavery in 19th century America.[96] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism#cite_note-96)

[Bill Ryan]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/51/Slaves_Zadib_Yemen_13th_century_BNF_Paris.jpg/440px-Slaves_Zadib_Yemen_13th_century_BNF_Paris.jpg

13th-century slave market in Yemen. Yemen officially abolished slavery in 1962.[102] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism#cite_note-102)

~~~

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/16/De_Bry_1c.JPG/440px-De_Bry_1c.JPG

A 16th-century illustration by Flemish Protestant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Revolt#Protestantism) Theodor de Bry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_de_Bry) for Las Casas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolom%C3%A9_de_las_Casas)'s Brevisima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, depicting Spanish atrocities during the conquest of Cuba (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Cuba#Spanish_conquest_and_early_colonization).

~~~

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f6/Advert_for_Pears%27_Soap_Wellcome_L0030380.jpg/440px-Advert_for_Pears%27_Soap_Wellcome_L0030380.jpg

Advertisement for Pears' Soap Caption reads, "Matchless for the complexion..." Illustration of 'before and after' use of soap by black child in the bath. Showing soap washes off his dark complexion.

~~~

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/Scientific_racism_irish.jpg/440px-Scientific_racism_irish.jpg

A late-19th-century illustration from Ireland from One or Two Neglected Points of View by H. Strickland Constable shows an alleged similarity between "Irish Iberian" and "Negro" features in contrast to the "higher" "Anglo-Teutonic."

~~~

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/33/Freedman%27s_bureau.jpg/440px-Freedman%27s_bureau.jpg

One in a series of posters attacking Radical Republicans on the issue of black suffrage, issued during the Pennsylvania gubernatorial election of 1866 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_gubernatorial_election,_1866).

~~~

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5c/WannseeList.jpg/440px-WannseeList.jpg

Eichmann (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Eichmann)'s list of the Jewish population in Europe, drafted for the Wannsee Conference (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference), held to ensure the cooperation of various levels of the Nazi government in the Final Solution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Solution).

~~~

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/59/Bundesarchiv_Bild_192-208%2C_KZ_Mauthausen%2C_Sowjetische_Kriegsgefangene.jpg/440px-Bundesarchiv_Bild_192-208%2C_KZ_Mauthausen%2C_Sowjetische_Kriegsgefangene.jpg

Naked Soviet POWs in Mauthausen concentration camp

~~~

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4a/%22Colored%22_drinking_fountain_from_mid-20th_century_with_african-american_drinking.jpg/440px-%22Colored%22_drinking_fountain_from_mid-20th_century_with_african-american_drinking.jpg

A drinking fountain from the mid-20th century labelled "Colored" with a picture of an African-American man drinking.

~~~

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6a/No_beer_sold_to_indians.jpg/440px-No_beer_sold_to_indians.jpg

A sign posted above a bar that reads "No beer sold to Indians [Native Americans]". Birney, Montana, 1941.

[Bill Ryan]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/74/Julius_Malema_2011-09-14.jpg/440px-Julius_Malema_2011-09-14.jpg

On 12 September 2011, Julius Malema (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Malema), the youth leader of South Africa's ruling ANC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_National_Congress), was found guilty of hate speech for singing 'Shoot the Boer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_African_farm_attacks#.22Shoot_the_boer.22_controversy)' at a number of public events.[168] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism#cite_note-168)

~~~

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7e/Fiji-0050.JPG/440px-Fiji-0050.JPG

The burnt out remains of Govinda's Indian Restaurant in Fiji, May 2000.

~~~

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8b/Races_and_skulls.png/340px-Races_and_skulls.png

Drawings from Josiah C. Nott (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_C._Nott) and George Gliddon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gliddon)'s Indigenous races of the earth (1857), which suggested black people ranked between white people and chimpanzees in terms of intelligence.

~~~

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4a/Passing_of_the_Great_Race_-_Map_4.jpg/440px-Passing_of_the_Great_Race_-_Map_4.jpg

Madison Grant's map, from 1916, charting the "present distribution of European races", with the Nordics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_race) in red, the Alpines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpine_race) in green, and the Mediterraneans (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_race) in yellow.

~~~

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Humanzoogermany.jpg

A human zoo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_zoo) (Völkerschau, "People Show") in Stuttgart (Germany) in 1928.

~~~

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/03/WhiteDoorColoredDoor.jpg/440px-WhiteDoorColoredDoor.jpg

Separate "white" and "colored" entrances to a café in North Carolina, 1940.

~~~

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/Neurenberger_Rassenwetten_NL.JPG/440px-Neurenberger_Rassenwetten_NL.JPG

1935 Chart from Nazi Germany used to explain the Nuremberg Laws (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Laws), defining which Germans were to be considered Jews and stripped of their citizenship. Germans with three or more Jewish grandparents were defined as Jews, Germans with one or two Jewish grandparents were deemed Mischling (mixed-blood).

~~~

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/38/Coolieusa.jpg/440px-Coolieusa.jpg

19th century political cartoon: Uncle Sam kicks out the Chinaman, referring to the Chinese Exclusion Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act).

[Bill Ryan]

And, a really interesting flow chart, which itself might be the central theme of a book (or two :) ).

http://projectavalon.net/Model_of_ethnic_and_racial_conflict.gif
Model of ethnic and racial conflict. Based on Jonathan H. Turner (2005). Sociology. Page 238

[Bill Ryan]

Finally, worth a thread in itself: here's the most marvelous, heart-wrenching, and inspiring true-story film, Rabbit-Proof Fence.


http://avalonlibrary.net/Rabbit-Proof_Fence.avi (1.18 Gb)



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit-Proof_Fence_(film)

This is the extraordinary story of three young Aborigine girls, aged 14, 10 and 8, who escaped from their forced indoctrination school, 1,500 miles (2400 km) from their home — and followed a fence, at the time by far the longest in the world, across the desert, that led them all the way back to their village where they arrived nine weeks later. This really happened, in 1931.

It's a staggering story, and particularly interesting is the character played by Kenneth Branagh: A. O. Neville, a local public servant, the "Chief Protector of Aborigines" in Western Australia. (This was his real title.)

Branagh expertly portrays Neville as a good man, who means no harm, but is simply a product of his Colonial era. His depiction is poignant and (for me) deeply thought-provoking. He was an educated and cultured man, dedicated to serving the community. Anyone now would brand him as a clear-cut racist... but he himself did not know that.

http://yemensur24.weebly.com/uploads/4/5/1/4/4514750/3023199.jpg?402

[neutronstar]

I believe that racism started with early primitive tribes. Small groups of people in a tribe is how we started, and has been theorized, is how we thrive and are happiest.

When tribes meet outsiders many times things did not go well and it was instilled in us to be wary of people not of our own tribe (Our people, race). It has evolved over time, but at it's roots, I think it all goes back to that. Blacks and whites show the greatest difference in appearance, so that seems to always take center stage, but I think it is about not trusting outsiders. We don't live in tribes anymore so outsiders are identified easier by appearance or race.

[neutronstar]

I recently watched a Doc. on netflix about the KKK, well about 10min., that was all I could bare to watch. The clan members had a look like they breed within the family and they didn't seem very intelligent.

Ignorance is why racism still exists and unfortunately I don't see it changing anytime soon. In fact, sometimes I think it might get worse before it gets better. There seems to be a large part of the population that is getting dumber rather than smarter. Maybe that is changing with the internet, but I don't know.

[Foxie Loxie]

One can be an "outsider" within a family situation, as well! :ROFL:

[Mike]

I begin a book of mine with the line: "The Mexican's were everywhere, like air."

A woman I had been seeing not too long ago declared it racist. I asked why she thought so. But she wouldn't elaborate. She just let out a big sigh, as if to say "if you can't figure it out on your own it's no use telling you."

That was maybe 6 months ago. And I still don't quite understand her opinion. The book is about some experiences I had in my late 20's, and during that particular time I'd arrived in California from upstate NY. It was a culture shock. The Mexicans really were everywhere. Like air.

I bring it up because one person's harmless observation is often another's racist comment. It's such a slippery slope. A difficult topic to discuss, for all sorts of reasons.

One very simple reason are the basic labels we use to describe races. When I see someone write or utter the word "blacks" , it sounds crass and dismissive. And yet, that is usually the term I use myself! Same with "whites", but to a lesser degree. And of course, the absurdist in me also sees the humor. So called black people are really varying shades of brown, and white people are varying shades of.....what? Peach? I'm not even sure!

But even those comments will offend people! And they are just simple, true observations.

Why and how people get "offended" and "outraged" might be a thread unto itself.

I certainly don't think people should be going around using the word ni**er. Non blacks especially. And yet, it sounds awfully silly hearing grown adults referring to this as "the 'N' word" when discussing racial matters. In fact, in a way it even gives the word *more* power. Again, a slippery slope.

I recall many years ago, in upstate NY, the Native American vendors were getting some tax break on cigarettes. Something like that. And my initial thought was "well, good for them." If they sold 10 billion cigarettes the aggregate benefit wouldn't even match a fraction of the horrors they and their ancestors had suffered,...and yet, the local community went berserk with "outrage". I couldn't believe it! And here we have another issue that no one can seem to agree on, which is this: what, if any reparations should be made for past transgressions between one race of people and another?

Anyone wanna tackle that one?:)

Honestly when I witness things like that cigarette fiasco, it disgusts me. It makes me embarrassed to be human. And thats small beer compared to the real horrors we've perpetrated upon one another.

It could be said that I was bullied by some black guys my freshman year of high school. I weighed 135lbs then. And I was a huge pussy. But I was still kind of a wise ass and I got myself into trouble with my mouth occasionally. And luckily i was protected from beatings several times by this big tough guy named Travis. A black guy LOL. Thought I'd just drop that little tidbit in here. Food for thought...

[JohanB]

The flip side of the the coin is "Reverse racism" .... A phenomina that unfortunately also exist, especially here in my country. How sad that your skin colour somehow "counts" - how i wish we all could just accept each other as a human being of equal importance.

[Bill Ryan]

The flip side of the the coin is "Reverse racism" .... A phenomina that unfortunately also exist, especially here in my country. How sad that your skin colour somehow "counts" - how i wish we all could just accept each other as a human being of equal importance.

Yes... maybe like the story I mentioned here:
...a widely-respected Avalon member, a good friend, told me and some others of how she was repeatedly bullied BY Aborigines when she was a young child in Australia.

Was this racism? Probably not. The Aborigine bullies did not feel 'superior'. Just bigger. And, undoubtedly, there was a cycle of abuse that led to their attitude towards a vulnerable, small white girl.

The young white girl, always trying to mind her own business, was picked on and often beaten by the Aborigines, and given an extremely hard time — for years. No way did the Aborigines regard themselves as superior (though, as I remarked, maybe just bigger).

Venturing a guess, the roots may have been because the Aborigines felt inferior... and their own violence and clear seething hatred was purely because of that.

So it may well be a cycle of abuse that's really hard to stop. Repress a culture or society (or even a single person) for long enough, and eventually they may start to fight back indiscriminately — at anyone they see.

That's not racism. It's the bullied becoming bullies... but maybe a generation later, exactly as if it's a Morphic Field in place.

[neutronstar]

what, if any reparations should be made for past transgressions between one race of people and another?

Anyone wanna tackle that one?:)



I will, NONE. I am not racist so why should I or any other non racist person pay for the actions of racist people. Lumping me in with another group of people is racist in itself.

[neutronstar]

One can be an "outsider" within a family situation, as well! :ROFL:

Yes and in tribes a person that didn't pull their own weight in the tribe were outcast and forced to fend for themselves. It is one of the reasons people are happy in small tribes, everyone is needed. We are happy when we feel needed.

[Bill Ryan]

One can be an "outsider" within a family situation, as well! :ROFL:

Yes, 'racism' is just one example of discrimination.

Anyone can be discriminated against, by any person, for any reason, or any whim.

Sometimes the reasons are justified, and sometimes they aren't.

[Mike]

what, if any reparations should be made for past transgressions between one race of people and another?

Anyone wanna tackle that one?:)



I will, NONE. I am not racist so why should I or any other non racist person pay for the actions of racist people. Lumping me in with another group of people is racist in itself.


Last week my sister and her ex husband got into an argument. Some silly thing. He was supposed to pick up their daughter the next day, but out of sheer pettiness, he said to her "you keep her for the week. I'll pick her up Sunday." He knew she couldn't do that; she had to work. But he did it anyway.

Well I had several days off last week. So she asked me if I'd watch her. I love the little girl and enjoy watching her, but I despised being dictated to by the pettiness of her asshole ex husband. It infuriated me. I walked around that day with clenched fists. He was dumping his responsibility on me, indirectly, and it pissed me off. This isn't my responsibility, I kept telling myself. How did I get stuck with it? I had every reason in the world to say "no", and be perfectly justified in doing so. And I almost did. There were things I'd been planning on doing those days that I wouldn't be able to do if I had my niece.

I wound up watching my little niece. I don't tell this story to hold myself up as some shining beacon of goodness. I tell it because sometimes you just gotta do the right thing. You know it's the right thing because even when you're done making all the perfectly sensible arguments to yourself as to why it's not your responsibility, it still chases you around..in your heart.

I don't know what reparations should me made exactly or who should pay for them etc, I just know something needs to be done. It's something I feel in my heart.

However, I get your angle and I completely understand your frustration. I keep using this phrase here and I'll use it again - "slippery slope".

[neutronstar]

what, if any reparations should be made for past transgressions between one race of people and another?

Anyone wanna tackle that one?:)



I will, NONE. I am not racist so why should I or any other non racist person pay for the actions of racist people. Lumping me in with another group of people is racist in itself.


Last week my sister and her ex husband got into an argument. Some silly thing. He was supposed to pick up their daughter the next day, but out of sheer pettiness, he said to her "you keep her for the week. I'll pick her up Sunday." He knew she couldn't do that; she had to work. But he did it anyway.

Well I had several days off last week. So she asked me if I'd watch her. I love the little girl and enjoy watching her, but I despised being dictated to by the pettiness of her asshole ex husband. It infuriated me. I walked around that day with clenched fists. He was dumping his responsibility on me, indirectly, and it pissed me off. This isn't my responsibility, I kept telling myself. How did I get stuck with it? I had every reason in the world to say "no", and be perfectly justified in doing so. And I almost did. There were things I'd been planning on doing those days that I wouldn't be able to do if I had my niece.

I wound up watching my little niece. I don't tell this story to hold myself up as some shining beacon of goodness. I tell it because sometimes you just gotta do the right thing. You know it's the right thing because even when you're done making all the perfectly sensible arguments to yourself as to why it's not your responsibility, it still chases you around..in your heart.

I don't know what reparations should me made exactly or who should pay for them etc, I just know something needs to be done. It's something I feel in my heart.

However, I get your angle and I completely understand your frustration. I keep using this phrase here and I'll use it again - "slippery slope".

There is no frustration.

Lets use to example of the native americans. The ones that were harmed are dead and have been for a long time. So too the ones that did the harming. Don't look at them as a race, but as people. People are harming other people today. Whatever their motives are, I don't see it as a race problem even though they may. I see it as people harming other people. You can't make a wrong a right to people that are dead, only to people that are alive and were directly effected.

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

Yeh...what to say! So many things I think. Essays worth. I believe neutronstar's assessment is right, that racism has its origin in tribal identities and the tensions that arose from those identities (differences). These tribes competed for the same thing, water, food, land, resources, or whatever. They argued and they fought, eventually killing one another or subjugating each other for control of these things.

Intrinsically, racism is a psychological throwback to the tribal hostility of ancient Man. This throwback comes in many other hues, for example, in a much more subtle way, the fans who support the football team in the red shirt despising the fans who support the team in the blue shirt etc. I've seen many a massive fight in the streets after the match on saturday afternoon...

Racism (like football hooliganism) is commensurate with the thinking of the 'savage', and that it's still so prevalent in these modern times is especially sad (and damning).

I see race differentiation as nothing more than the varying level, scale, density (etc) of pigmentation in the skin. That this should be the focus of what divides us, and a subject of suspicion or even hate, is insane.

Another issue for someone to tackle, is what part have the Powers That Be played in this? There is no doubt that social engineering had a vast role in shaping the 20th century. For example, I have no doubt that the persecution of black people, and the strained relations between blacks and whites ever since, was most definitely something 'they' were largely responsible for, and have perpetuated by design. It may have been as simple as deploying agent provocateurs - or just corrupt policemen - at certain times in certain places. The infamous Watts riots (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_riots) of 1965 spring to mind. And the whole Rodney King (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots) horror. But enough on that for now.

This video has been posted before somewhere, but is most appropriate to re-post here. It is a must watch:

Kids reaction to controversial bi-racial Cheerios Commercial.....

VifdBFp5pnw

I think this video perfectly encapsulates the issue. Particularly the youngest children in the clip have the most important message. They have not yet fallen into the social trappings and conditioning that have made racism (or any kind of prejudice) a continuing social disease. As they grow, that might sadly change. They will be subjected eventually to corrupt cultural programming, parental influence, and peer pressure. Whatever is experienced will become learned behaviour (until they break out of it – hopefully!) This is how racism is sustained. And how it spreads.

But these young minds are not yet infected. Their wisdom is uncontaminated. In their minds, and through their eyes, race isn't even a thing. It doesn't even occur to them! Only later will the negativity and distortion of society, capitalism, religion, politics, and all the rest of it, wrap their tentacles around them, doing their utmost to engender separation and stifle love.

[Mike]

what, if any reparations should be made for past transgressions between one race of people and another?

Anyone wanna tackle that one?:)



I will, NONE. I am not racist so why should I or any other non racist person pay for the actions of racist people. Lumping me in with another group of people is racist in itself.


Last week my sister and her ex husband got into an argument. Some silly thing. He was supposed to pick up their daughter the next day, but out of sheer pettiness, he said to her "you keep her for the week. I'll pick her up Sunday." He knew she couldn't do that; she had to work. But he did it anyway.

Well I had several days off last week. So she asked me if I'd watch her. I love the little girl and enjoy watching her, but I despised being dictated to by the pettiness of her asshole ex husband. It infuriated me. I walked around that day with clenched fists. He was dumping his responsibility on me, indirectly, and it pissed me off. This isn't my responsibility, I kept telling myself. How did I get stuck with it? I had every reason in the world to say "no", and be perfectly justified in doing so. And I almost did. There were things I'd been planning on doing those days that I wouldn't be able to do if I had my niece.

I wound up watching my little niece. I don't tell this story to hold myself up as some shining beacon of goodness. I tell it because sometimes you just gotta do the right thing. You know it's the right thing because even when you're done making all the perfectly sensible arguments to yourself as to why it's not your responsibility, it still chases you around..in your heart.

I don't know what reparations should me made exactly or who should pay for them etc, I just know something needs to be done. It's something I feel in my heart.

However, I get your angle and I completely understand your frustration. I keep using this phrase here and I'll use it again - "slippery slope".

There is no frustration.

Lets use to example of the native americans. The ones that were harmed are dead and have been for a long time. So too the ones that did the harming. Don't look at them as a race, but as people. People are harming other people today. Whatever their motives are, I don't see it as a race problem even though they may. I see it as people harming other people. You can't make a wrong a right to people that are dead, only to people that are alive and were directly effected.



I might call that an intellectual justification. And honestly, I'm tempted to agree with you!

But it still leaves my heart feeling unsettled somehow. It just doesnt end there for me.

I appreciate your take. Truly . We just see the issue a little differently is all. I predict we won't be the first to disagree in this thread:)

[neutronstar]

I think this video perfectly encapsulates the issue. Particularly the youngest children in the clip have the most important message. They have not yet fallen into the social trappings and conditioning that have made racism (or any kind of prejudice) a continuing social disease. As they grow, that might sadly change. They will be subjected eventually to corrupt cultural programming, parental influence, and peer pressure. Whatever is experienced will become learned behaviour (until they break out of it – hopefully!) .

I don't see it in Omaha. Omaha is a fairly large and has a very diverse culture, but I grew up in a small town in Iowa where there is not much diversity at all, and I see the racism there.

[neutronstar]

I might call that an intellectual justification. And honestly, I'm tempted to agree with you!

But it still leaves my heart feeling unsettled somehow. It just doesnt end there for me.

I appreciate your take. Truly . We just see the issue a little differently is all. I predict we won't be the first to disagree in this thread:)



Well the initial question was "if any reparations should be made for past transgressions between one race of people and another?"

I took that to mean Americans paying back the Native Americans, sense that was the example. But what about the the fact that the Native Americans were warrior tribes doing that to each other, which they did. The American military was just much better at it. The Native American didn't see themselves as one race but each tribe was their own race so to speak.

It is what happens over and over again threw out history. The larger more powerful tribe concurs the less powerful.

What happens is by taking the position you are is your falling into the trap of associating yourself with the american tribe and you are feeling guilt for what your tribe has done to another. It is at the hart of racism. Your taking a side. It is like white shaming that is going on now. White privilege.

I'm am not being cold. I think what humans do to other humans now or in the past is really sad. I would much rather live in a world were it isn't so. But I am not going to play the race game and say I am a white man and I need to pay for the sins of the white men before me.

[Bill Ryan]

I grew up in a small town in Iowa where there is not much diversity at all, and I see the racism there.

Okay... can you build on this thread, as an educational vehicle (hopefully!), and explain what you saw, what form it took, and why it was there? (And, importantly, why you call it or regard it as racism? (Maybe it was! But we can't tell, because we don't know what you're describing.)

You see, the word is loosely used... that's my thesis. What I'm really interested in is what the roots of it are, and why it's there — and if it's NOT racism, what is it really?

[Bill Ryan]

I grew up in a small town in Iowa where there is not much diversity at all, and I see the racism there.

Okay... can you build on this thread, as an educational vehicle (hopefully!), and explain what you saw, what form it took, and why it was there? (And, importantly, why you call it or regard it as racism? (Maybe it was! But we can't tell, because we don't know what you're describing.)

You see, the word is loosely used... that's my thesis. What I'm really interested in is what the roots of it are, and why it's there — and if it's NOT racism, what is it really?

I can be more specific. Because here, In Ecuador, I'm in the cultural minority situation.

I'm a migrant, living in Ecuador. I'm not an Ecuadorian. I barely speak the language. This not my country. I really don't properly belong here, and I know that.

I like the local people, and I don't much like most of the Americans I see here. But I can feel the quiet, low-key, silent attitudes towards me... sometimes, in some places.

This isn't about race. No-one dislikes my white skin. Quite a few Ecuadorians have fairly white skin, too.

They just think I don't really belong here, and they disrespect (I believe) that I've not taken more trouble to learn the language. I think they see me (and the other Europeans and Americans) as a kind of economic migrant ... because it's cheap here. So we take advantage of that, and the truth is that we give very little back, indeed.

I'll say it again. This is not racism. But the locals are worried. They don't know, and are given no safeguards, where this is all going. I can feel it.

To put it even more bluntly: I'm here because I legally can be, but it's 100% entirely selfish.

It's all about me, and my safety, comfort, enjoyment, and personal well-being. I'm as friendly as I possibly can be to the local people (I live in a farming community, as one of the only gringos for miles). Some of them are really friendly back. Others literally look the other way. I can feel their thoughts.

Is this their racism? Not the way I understand it. They simply don't want me to be here.

Should I go home? Where's home? I don't have one. I have no family, anywhere. I might as well be a Syrian refugee.

If there were forums in Ecuador (and maybe there are! How would I know?), the local people might well be discussing, with some emotion, the problem of their country being overrun with Americanos. And they'd be entitled to.

At least, unlike in some other parts of the world, the migrants aren't bringing degrees of crime and abuse with them. But that doesn't stop the locals from being worried, and I'm part of the problem here: I'm certainly no part of any solution.

The local people's attitudes about this would not be racism. They're simply worried about the integrity of their country, and their culture.

Just as I was, when I lived in Britain, and went into that hairdresser's in Leicester... before I immediately turned round and instinctively walked out.


http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?97318-Trump-Illegal-immigration-Sam-s-view&p=1149826&viewfull=1#post1149826

[Mike]

Hi Bill,

Nice post there.

But referring to one of the last lines in your linked post: doesnt skin, religion and race all add up to culture? If not, what's the difference?

[neutronstar]

I grew up in a small town in Iowa where there is not much diversity at all, and I see the racism there.

Okay... can you build on this thread, as an educational vehicle (hopefully!), and explain what you saw, what form it took, and why it was there? (And, importantly, why you call it or regard it as racism? (Maybe it was! But we can't tell, because we don't know what you're describing.)

You see, the word is loosely used... that's my thesis. What I'm really interested in is what the roots of it are, and why it's there — and if it's NOT racism, what is it really?

I have a step father and bother in-law that refers to blacks as niggers and they don't speak very highly of Mexicans either. The town I grew up in has two large industries and both are slaughterhouses. Corporations have taken them over and have used up the native town people, (low wages, poor working conditions) so they advertise on the boarder and in inner cities and bring in the poor, and not the most productive of their race. They haven't been exposed to other cultures, and now they get exposed to the lower class of these races.

They don't see the more educated and productive members of other races. They also are plugged into the mainstream media. I think when people are in a area that doesn't have much diversity, they are more prone to believe what is presented to them on the TV. I also believe what I have already said, that we have evolved to fear outsiders, and other races or cultures we associate as outsiders.

My grandmother (now passes on) hated blacks and Mexicans. They were just no good criminals. She was a hard cor Iowa Hawkeye basketball fan. They had a guard by the name of BJ Armstrong (went on to play for the bulls in their title years he was black). She couldn't say enough good things about him though. That was so funny. She had never been exposed to other races, never new any. He was probably one of the first she ever really took notice of. Because he was really good and played for the Hawkeyes he was the cats mew. But she hated all other blacks. lol

[neutronstar]

I grew up in a small town in Iowa where there is not much diversity at all, and I see the racism there.

Okay... can you build on this thread, as an educational vehicle (hopefully!), and explain what you saw, what form it took, and why it was there? (And, importantly, why you call it or regard it as racism? (Maybe it was! But we can't tell, because we don't know what you're describing.)

You see, the word is loosely used... that's my thesis. What I'm really interested in is what the roots of it are, and why it's there — and if it's NOT racism, what is it really?

I can be more specific. Because here, In Ecuador, I'm in the cultural minority situation.

I'm a migrant, living in Ecuador. I'm not an Ecuadorian. I barely speak the language. This not my country. I really don't properly belong here, and I know that.

I like the local people, and I don't much like most of the Americans I see here. But I can feel the quiet, low-key, silent attitudes towards me... sometimes, in some places.

This isn't about race. No-one dislikes my white skin. Quite a few Ecuadorians have fairly white skin, too.

They just think I don't really belong here, and they disrespect (I believe) that I've not taken more trouble to learn the language. I think they see me (and the other Europeans and Americans) as a kind of economic migrant ... because it's cheap here. So we take advantage of that, and the truth is that we give very little back, indeed.

I'll say it again. This is not racism. But the locals are worried. They don't know, and are given no safeguards, where this is all going. I can feel it.

To put it even more bluntly: I'm here because I legally can be, but it's 100% entirely selfish.

It's all about me, and my safety, comfort, enjoyment, and personal well-being. I'm as friendly as I possibly can be to the local people (I live in a farming community, as one of the only gringos for miles). Some of them are really friendly back. Others literally look the other way. I can feel their thoughts.

Is this their racism? Not the way I understand it. They simply don't want me to be here.

Should I go home? Where's home? I don't have one. I have no family, anywhere. I might as well be a Syrian refugee.

If there were forums in Ecuador (and maybe there are! How would I know?), the local people might well be discussing, with some emotion, the problem of their country being overrun with Americanos. And they'd be entitled to.

At least, unlike in some other parts of the world, the migrants aren't bringing degrees of crime and abuse with them. But that doesn't stop the locals from being worried, and I'm part of the problem here: I'm certainly no part of any solution.

The local people's attitudes about this would not be racism. They're simply worried about the integrity of their country, and their culture.

Just as I was, when I lived in Britain, and went into that hairdresser's in Leicester... before I immediately turned round and instinctively walked out.


http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?97318-Trump-Illegal-immigration-Sam-s-view&p=1149826&viewfull=1#post1149826


You are feeling what other minorities feel when they are in a community that is small with little diversity. We fear what we don't understand, we don't understand outsiders. Many people in the US don't like the fact that people come to this country and don't try to learn the language. I understand that because it feeds the misunderstanding.

They see you as an outsider and always will if you can't talk to them. I like other cultures, but when they don't speak English they are strangers and always will be.

If you are looking for advice all I could say is learn their language.

[Mike]

Oh man, Neutronstar you just reminded me of something...

My Grampa on my Mom's side was sick and wheelchair bound at the end of his life. I went to visit him in the nursing home one day. I waited in his room until a kind black gentleman brought him back from a walk.

The black man walked out, and gesturing towards him my gramps said "that's Leon". And as if to allay some fear he imagined I might have, he added "don't worry, he's a good nig*er Michael!"

And I'll just flat out admit right here that I laughed out loud. I couldn't help it. It just came out of me. It was visceral, like a bark almost. Yes, it's a horrifying comment. But It was wrapped in such a hopelessly sad innocence and ignorance that one couldn't help but react that way. I mean, he *really* thought he was giving Leon a compliment. He had *no idea* that what he'd just said was a horrible thing. The juxtaposition was so absurd that it kind of entered the arena of humor.

I hope I haven't horrified anybody. For the record, I've told my sister's boyfriend that story (black guy) and 2 of my black friends, and they all laughed as well. To be clear, I was laughing at the absurd irony of it all, not the racial element.

That little story speaks volumes, really.

[neutronstar]

Here you go Bill.
https://www.rosettastone.com/lp/ppc/sale/?cid=se-br-gg-bfmonthsaleadi&cid=se-br-gg-ppcsale&iv_=__iv_p_1_a_15481_g_5235515175_c_223131634741_k_rosetta%20stone_m_e_w_kwd-35245020_n_g_d_c_v__l__t__r_1t1_x__y__f__o__z__i__j__s__e__h_9024578_ii__vi__&gclid=CjwKCAiAxuTQBRBmEiwAAkFF1pIvLSMQN38OXmeThivLZ9eeMZlpDMVz-0GiexotJcRE15LD5EkUXxoCE54QAvD_BwE

[Noelle]

what, if any reparations should be made for past transgressions between one race of people and another?

Anyone wanna tackle that one?:)



I will, NONE. I am not racist so why should I or any other non racist person pay for the actions of racist people. Lumping me in with another group of people is racist in itself.


Last week my sister and her ex husband got into an argument. Some silly thing. He was supposed to pick up their daughter the next day, but out of sheer pettiness, he said to her "you keep her for the week. I'll pick her up Sunday." He knew she couldn't do that; she had to work. But he did it anyway.

Well I had several days off last week. So she asked me if I'd watch her. I love the little girl and enjoy watching her, but I despised being dictated to by the pettiness of her asshole ex husband. It infuriated me. I walked around that day with clenched fists. He was dumping his responsibility on me, indirectly, and it pissed me off. This isn't my responsibility, I kept telling myself. How did I get stuck with it? I had every reason in the world to say "no", and be perfectly justified in doing so. And I almost did. There were things I'd been planning on doing those days that I wouldn't be able to do if I had my niece.

I wound up watching my little niece. I don't tell this story to hold myself up as some shining beacon of goodness. I tell it because sometimes you just gotta do the right thing. You know it's the right thing because even when you're done making all the perfectly sensible arguments to yourself as to why it's not your responsibility, it still chases you around..in your heart.

I don't know what reparations should me made exactly or who should pay for them etc, I just know something needs to be done. It's something I feel in my heart.

However, I get your angle and I completely understand your frustration. I keep using this phrase here and I'll use it again - "slippery slope".

There is no frustration.

Lets use to example of the native americans. The ones that were harmed are dead and have been for a long time. So too the ones that did the harming. Don't look at them as a race, but as people. People are harming other people today. Whatever their motives are, I don't see it as a race problem even though they may. I see it as people harming other people. You can't make a wrong a right to people that are dead, only to people that are alive and were directly effected.

I'm not sure many Native Americans would agree that the harm ended a long time ago. They still deal with much oppression and discrimination; it's just not covered by media that much of the world gets their information from. And it really exists at all levels, federal, state, and local governments, off-reservation school systems, etc.

As for reparation, as far as tribes go -- they were utterly ripped off, those that signed treaties and those that did not, and the ripping off of Native peoples has continued. The Cobell Settlement (http://www.indiantrust.com/) is a recent example. I don't know. It's difficult for me to see how reparation or even a national apology would make a hoot of difference when they are still being harmed. :facepalm:

[Bill Ryan]

If you are looking for advice all I could say is learn their language.


Here you go Bill.
https://www.rosettastone.com/lp/ppc/sale/?cid=se-br-gg-bfmonthsaleadi&cid=se-br-gg-ppcsale&iv_=__iv_p_1_a_15481_g_5235515175_c_223131634741_k_rosetta%20stone_m_e_w_kwd-35245020_n_g_d_c_v__l__t__r_1t1_x__y__f__o__z__i__j__s__e__h_9024578_ii__vi__&gclid=CjwKCAiAxuTQBRBmEiwAAkFF1pIvLSMQN38OXmeThivLZ9eeMZlpDMVz-0GiexotJcRE15LD5EkUXxoCE54QAvD_BwE

I'm not looking for advice. Or a language program. :)

You mean well, and thank you, but you didn't understand a single word I was really saying.

I'm saying that the Ecuadorians who'd prefer I wasn't in their country are NOT racist.

I'm also trying to get intelligent people, reading this, to THINK.

[neutronstar]

As for reparation, as far as tribes go -- they were utterly ripped off, those that signed treaties and those that did not, and the ripping off of Native peoples has continued. :

Sure they were ripped off. But they weren't the first and wont be the last.

But sense you probably haven't read a follow up to that post I'll copy and past it here.


But what about the the fact that the Native Americans were warrior tribes doing that to each other, which they did. The American military was just much better at it. The Native American didn't see themselves as one race but each tribe was their own race so to speak.

It is what happens over and over again threw out history. The larger more powerful tribe concurs the less powerful.

What happens is by taking the position you are is your falling into the trap of associating yourself with the american tribe and you are feeling guilt for what your tribe has done to another. It is at the hart of racism. Your taking a side. It is like white shaming that is going on now. White privilege.

I'm am not being cold. I think what humans do to other humans now or in the past is really sad. I would much rather live in a world were it isn't so. But I am not going to play the race game and say I am a white man and I need to pay for the sins of the white men before me.

[DNA]

This thread takes some pretty big balls for a white guy to put together. My hat is off to you Bill, you have done a splendid job.

As a 45 year old white male it seems I have kept my head down and my mouth shut pretty much my whole life unless of course I was apologizing or speaking in an apologetic tone or some variation of acknowledging I had done some wrong that needed to be atoned for.
In all honesty I don't think I have wronged anyone. I've certainly never attacked anyone for being non-white, far from it.
But I have been attacked for being white. Myself and my family.
As a four year old, me, my toddler sister and my mother were mugged at knife point by four black men who were screaming profanities at us for being white while rifling through my mothers purse they had pulled from her shoulder.
In the same time period our house was broken into and what little possessions we had were stolen.
When I was five I would find out much later that three black men broke into our house while we were sleeping, they raped my mother and the whole time warned her to keep her mouth shut or they would kill her children.
Through all of this my mother never blamed black people in general for the assaults on her, and her resolve in this area was passed on to myself in so far as recognizing and understanding her demeanor.
And although I've honestly never resented black people for mistreatment of myself and family, I do understand the social dynamics taking place, and it would be unadvisable to put yourself in a situation to be the focal point of hostilities.
I love my mother and I admire her ability to remain impassive in her conviction that people are all equal, but my mother was completely naïve and wrong for putting her family in harms way and living in an area where she was a target for the social unrest and reprisal.


I can segue here into what is going on with the attempt to bring refugees into the United States and Europe.
I understand what is going on here.
I'm absolutely abhorred by the creation of so many displaced human beings.
But this situation occurred at the hands of the USA bombing the sh!t out of the middle east, and attempting to have their militia army in the guise of ISIS destabilize and bring about a regime change in Syria.
All these folks have been wronged to a very large extent by the United States, and it would be foolish to think that they do not hold resentment, anger and hostility towards the US for their abuse.
I empathize with the refugees of Libya, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and other countries that have suffered hostilities at the hands of the United States.
So just as my mom was naïve in thinking she could move into a black neighborhood in the United States and not suffer being an easy target for social hostilities that were bubbling over at the time and her ease of access made her a readily accessible target so to would it be naïve to think refugees coming from recently bombed countries are going to soon forget the 500,000 children Madelyn Albright said would be acceptable casualties through the Iraq occupation.
People do not soon forget their family being blown apart for political purposes that had nothing what so ever to do with them.
I empathize with the plight of the refugees of the middle east, but they are not going to integrate into western society.
I see an attempt by social engineers to recreate the Gaza strip and make this the norm in the USA and most of Europe.


End of segue.




Thanks again for the conversation. :)

[neutronstar]

If you are looking for advice all I could say is learn their language.


Here you go Bill.
https://www.rosettastone.com/lp/ppc/sale/?cid=se-br-gg-bfmonthsaleadi&cid=se-br-gg-ppcsale&iv_=__iv_p_1_a_15481_g_5235515175_c_223131634741_k_rosetta%20stone_m_e_w_kwd-35245020_n_g_d_c_v__l__t__r_1t1_x__y__f__o__z__i__j__s__e__h_9024578_ii__vi__&gclid=CjwKCAiAxuTQBRBmEiwAAkFF1pIvLSMQN38OXmeThivLZ9eeMZlpDMVz-0GiexotJcRE15LD5EkUXxoCE54QAvD_BwE

I'm not looking for advice. Or a language program. :)

You mean well, and thank you, but you didn't understand a single word I was really saying.

I'm saying that the Ecuadorians who'd prefer I wasn't in their country are NOT racist.

I'm also trying to get intelligent people, reading this, to THINK.

I'm not talking about race.

You say "But I can feel the quiet, low-key, silent attitudes towards me... sometimes, in some places."

You say they don't want you there. That is what I am getting at. You can't communicate with them. I wouldn't want you there either if I couldn't talk to you. You are an unknown to them. They fear that. You are a stranger that doesn't want to communicate with them. You prove that by not learning there language.

I would never move to another country without learning their language, because of the things you are saying of how you are being treated. How could I expect to be accepted by a people that I don't want to talk to. That is what they think.

[Noelle]

Hi Bill,

Nice post there.

But referring to one of the last lines in your linked post: doesnt skin, religion and race all add up to culture? If not, what's the difference?

Maybe it's just distrust, one that has been carried down through the generations after colonization. I've heard that said about how some Native Americans feel when non-Native Americans come to live in their communities. Then again, maybe there is tad or more of racism, but it could be a product of being victimized generations before.

[Innocent Warrior]

Oh man, Neutronstar you just reminded me of something...

My Grampa on my Mom's side was sick and wheelchair bound at the end of his life. I went to visit him in the nursing home one day. I waited in his room until a kind black gentleman brought him back from a walk.

The black man walked out, and gesturing towards him my gramps said "that's Leon". And as if to allay some fear he imagined I might have, he added "don't worry, he's a good nig*er Michael!"

And I'll just flat out admit right here that I laughed out loud. I couldn't help it. It just came out of me. It was visceral, like a bark almost. Yes, it's a horrifying comment. But It was wrapped in such a hopelessly sad innocence and ignorance that one couldn't help but react that way. I mean, he *really* thought he was giving Leon a compliment. He had *no idea* that what he'd just said was a horrible thing. The juxtaposition was so absurd that it kind of entered the arena of humor.

I hope I haven't horrified anybody. For the record, I've told my sister's boyfriend that story (black guy) and 2 of my black friends, and they all laughed as well. To be clear, I was laughing at the absurd irony of it all, not the racial element.

That little story speaks volumes, really.

I know exactly what you mean, Mike, I laughed while reading your post, same reason. :)

My BF's boss said something similar in a similar situation, I don't remember the details but my BF immediately dropped his face in his hand. His boss was confused at my BF's reaction and said, "what?! I was complimenting him!". Recognising his boss' ignorance and the pointlessness of explaining his reaction (his boss is an older man and very stubborn) my BF dropped his face back in his hand after looking up to listen to his boss and then just walked away.

I grew up with the view that targetting anyone because of their 'race' is racism but recently I've challenged that view and it doesn't hold, I've observed it's most often out of ignorance and fear, not a belief of inferiority, it's more like they seem them as their enemy. I see quite a lot of fear of Muslims here and it's really sad, it's really so sad. Because of all the war on terror stuff, some people seem to think it's OK to openly and loudly make comments at or about Muslims, and I see how the Muslims manage it and it breaks my heart to see them so uncomfortable, looking straight ahead, making sure they don't do anything that may escalate the situation. I try to catch their eye and give them a smile (I've also told the bullies to cut it out, loudly, when I know it won't escalate the situation) but they're zoning it out too much and I can't lock eyes with them.

[Bill Ryan]

If you are looking for advice all I could say is learn their language.


Here you go Bill.
https://www.rosettastone.com/lp/ppc/sale/?cid=se-br-gg-bfmonthsaleadi&cid=se-br-gg-ppcsale&iv_=__iv_p_1_a_15481_g_5235515175_c_223131634741_k_rosetta%20stone_m_e_w_kwd-35245020_n_g_d_c_v__l__t__r_1t1_x__y__f__o__z__i__j__s__e__h_9024578_ii__vi__&gclid=CjwKCAiAxuTQBRBmEiwAAkFF1pIvLSMQN38OXmeThivLZ9eeMZlpDMVz-0GiexotJcRE15LD5EkUXxoCE54QAvD_BwE

I'm not looking for advice. Or a language program. :)

You mean well, and thank you, but you didn't understand a single word I was really saying.

I'm saying that the Ecuadorians who'd prefer I wasn't in their country are NOT racist.

I'm also trying to get intelligent people, reading this, to THINK.

I'm not talking about race.

You say "But I can feel the quiet, low-key, silent attitudes towards me... sometimes, in some places."

You say they don't want you there. That is what I am getting at. You can't communicate with them. I wouldn't want you there either if I couldn't talk to you. You are an unknown to them. They fear that. You are a stranger that doesn't want to communicate with them. You prove that by not learning there language.

I would never move to another country without learning their language, because of the things you are saying of how you are being treated. How could I expect to be accepted by a people that I don't want to talk to. That is what they think.

Thanks again — but you're totally not getting it.

Let me spell it out. :)

I wrote:



I'm saying that the Ecuadorians who'd prefer I wasn't in their country are NOT racist.

I'm also trying to get intelligent people, reading this, to THINK.

What this means — and I'm sure of it — is that most of the people in the US or Canada who don't want non-integrated people from other cultures there are not racist.

French, German, Swedish or British people who don't want Middle Eastern immigrants there aren't racist, either.

Of course it's not about race. It's about the preservation of culture. This is my entire point.

[Mike]

Ah, the preservation of culture. I see.

I think I needed it spelled out for me too.:)

[Cardillac]

the concept of racism is rationed according to which political agenda has the upper hand at the moment (EVERYTHING is politics)-

as far as racism goes (and I abhorr it- so don't misunderstand me) but we have a double standard:

it seems to be tolerated if people of pigment are racist but not if whites are racist; please let me explain before hot coals are reaped over my head:

as I am an opera singer by profession I (am white) was once offered the role of Porgy in "Porgy and Bess"- but the offer only lasted 2 days- I was subsequently informed the performance rights to the Gershwin classic is reserved for blacks alone and not allowed for me- isn't that racist?- it is for me-

in the US we have the org. known as "Black Lives Matter," (well, shouldn't ALL lives matter?) a George Soros-funded org. where Blacks have excepted a Trojan horse and are being played like violins in the game of "divide and rule" which members of this org. cannot yet see-

if whites were to found an organization entitled "White Lives Matter" people of pigment would be screaming from the rooftops "that's racist!"-

back to "Porgy and Bess":

3 yrs. ago the Geneva, Switzerland opera staged a production of the piece and the Bess was a SWISS national (I sang with her once in Basel so I know her looks and voice; it's an OK voice but nothing special) who obviously has a bit of African DNA but she looks 85/90 % white up close but on the stage looks almost completely white; SHE was alowed to sing Bess (guess Geneva had to have at least one Swiss national in the cast) where there are many darker-skinned people with better voices suited to the role-

I could write for hrs. how in many situations many (me included) were disenfranchised because we weren't of "pigment"- and that isn't racist?

the concept of racism is a political movement to divide and rule us and the biggest losers in the concept of racism are not people of pigment but whites; we whites, blamed the biggest racists, have become the deepest victims of racism; look what's happening in Europe with all the refugies of pigment, all given a free ride and above the law, who are literally pushing and eradicating out tax-paying whites from their paid-for territory-

the concept of racism is a political movement-

Larry

[neutronstar]

Of course it's not about race. It's about the preservation of culture. This is my entire point.

Ok, yes i needed it spelled out, :bigsmile: and maybe that is part of it for some people.

Your situation doesn't sound like that, beings it is a small community. In the city with a lot of diversity a person can get away with it. But in small communities outsiders are always looked at with suspicion. I know that I have lived in small communities half my life. I hated it.

It may be the preservation of culture or simply the fear of or lack of tolerance of other cultures. Maybe it is all tied together. People fear change.

[gord]

Nearly all of the racism I've encountered personally in my area of the US in the last 25 years or so has been reverse racism. That's because it's been heavily promoted while disguised as something else, and that's because "divide and rule" works very well.

[Bill Ryan]

People fear change.

I suspect it's more like people fear loss.

Loss of things they very deeply love and value, like their sense of culture, history, and what their nationality means to them.

Here are some interesting questions to ponder on. Please just regard them as simply more to think carefully about.


Have Native Americans lost their culture?
Have Aborigines (and Maoris) lost their culture?
Are Americans, Canadians, and Europeans of each nation, losing their culture?
Which major ethnic group does not appear to be losing its culture?

[DNA]

Ah, the preservation of culture. I see.

I think I needed it spelled out for me too.:)

Culture is indeed a component, one is never truly autonomous until one has recognized what is the result of culture in oneself and what is truly you. :)

I remember reading the Urantia Book and a statement from it really stuck with me in terms of racism.
The book was written in the 1920's, so it should be understood from that context.
It states, "Do not be so hard on yourself with what you perceive to be your present faults with racism.
Not so long ago if a human saw a human who was not from his tribe he would hunt him, kill him and eat him.
Culture then evolved to the point that strangers were no longer hunted and eaten, they were just killed.
Culture then evolved to the point that people were no longer killed, but instead taken as slaves.
And now you are no longer practicing slavery, so this is a good thing.
Change does not come over night".


As for myself, I think racism is directly correlated with soul age.
I'm of the opinion that as long as there are younger souls there will always be racism.
We shouldn't get mad and state that we no longer wish to have younger souls around.
We were all young souls at one time, and the older souls had to put up with us :blushing: .
So too do we have to put up with younger souls now.
As such, I think to an extent we have to tolerate non-violent and non-threatening racism and understand that it will probably always exist.
As long as folks are not acting out in a violent matter I think we can all manage.

[neutronstar]

People fear change.

I suspect it's more like people fear loss.

Loss of things they very deeply love and value, like their sense of culture, history, and what their nationality means to them.

Here are some interesting questions to ponder on. Please just regard them as simply more to think carefully about.


Have Native Americans lost their culture?
Have Aborigines (and Maoris) lost their culture?
Are Americans, Canadians, and Europeans of each nation, losing their culture?
Which major ethnic group does not appear to be losing its culture?


They fear both.
1 yes
2 yes
3 yes except america. We don't have a single culture we are a melting pot of different cultures that is ever evolving.
4 I would say none.

Everything must either evolve or devolve, being static is unstable so cultures are going change for the better or worse, but they will change. No culture has ever lasted very long.

[guyres]

Here on Réunion Island, there is a great mix of races and cultures on a small pebble. After two years of presence, I notice a good life, a great tolerance, but the races and cultures mix little ... The "racism" is more related to the fact of not being born here, as if the migrant came stealing a part of life that does not belong to him.

[bluestflame]

like many other things the term racist has been weaponised , most people that use it frequently don't seem to actually know what it means

[Mike]

Oh man, Neutronstar you just reminded me of something...

My Grampa on my Mom's side was sick and wheelchair bound at the end of his life. I went to visit him in the nursing home one day. I waited in his room until a kind black gentleman brought him back from a walk.

The black man walked out, and gesturing towards him my gramps said "that's Leon". And as if to allay some fear he imagined I might have, he added "don't worry, he's a good nig*er Michael!"

And I'll just flat out admit right here that I laughed out loud. I couldn't help it. It just came out of me. It was visceral, like a bark almost. Yes, it's a horrifying comment. But It was wrapped in such a hopelessly sad innocence and ignorance that one couldn't help but react that way. I mean, he *really* thought he was giving Leon a compliment. He had *no idea* that what he'd just said was a horrible thing. The juxtaposition was so absurd that it kind of entered the arena of humor.

I hope I haven't horrified anybody. For the record, I've told my sister's boyfriend that story (black guy) and 2 of my black friends, and they all laughed as well. To be clear, I was laughing at the absurd irony of it all, not the racial element.

That little story speaks volumes, really.

I know exactly what you mean, Mike, I laughed while reading your post, same reason. :)

My BF's boss said something similar in a similar situation, I don't remember the details but my BF immediately dropped his face in his hand. His boss was confused at my BF's reaction and said, "what?! I was complimenting him!". Recognising his boss' ignorance and the pointlessness of explaining his reaction (his boss is an older man and very stubborn) my BF dropped his face back in his hand after looking up to listen to his boss and then just walked away.

I grew up with the view that targetting anyone because of their 'race' is racism but recently I've challenged that view and it doesn't hold, I've observed it's most often out of ignorance and fear, not a belief of inferiority, it's more like they seem them as their enemy. I see quite a lot of fear of Muslims here and it's really sad, it's really so sad. Because of all the war on terror stuff, some people seem to think it's OK to openly and loudly make comments at or about Muslims, and I see how the Muslims manage it and it breaks my heart to see them so uncomfortable, looking straight ahead, making sure they don't do anything that may escalate the situation. I try to catch their eye and give them a smile (I've also told the bullies to cut it out, loudly, when I know it won't escalate the situation) but they're zoning it out too much and I can't lock eyes with them.


Hey Rach, Ive been making a conscious effort to look people in the eye and offer a smile too. The shared energy changes almost immediately. This sounds remarkably simple, and maybe even trite, but I think if everyone was doing that it would make a big difference in the world. I really do.

It really does start with the simple things, doesn't it? Have gratitude. Be humble. Be kind. Offer a smile to a fellow human being. I think miracles can spawn from that!

Fear and ignorance, like you said. Fear of losing culture, like Bill said. Very true. Fear fear fear. Since our inception, we've been taught to fear those that are different. One has to spend years deprogramming themselves to see this situation clearly. That takes effort. And people are inherently lazy. It's easier for them to continue with the same thoughts than it is to change them. Change takes effort. And intellectual effort is something of a novelty these days.

I don't think racism can be resolved from a 3d perspective. It has to be viewed from a higher place. We can put things in place like affirmative action, reparations and so on but those are just band aids attempting to treat symptoms of a much deeper disease.

I totally get it when someone says "I'm not racist, I didn't enslave anyone. I don't owe anyone anything " and so forth. That view has merit. It's relevant to the discussion. But it's only one dimension of many. This is a very layered issue. It requires layers and nuance. I don't think absolutes are helpful. We have to be flexible, not just mentally but emotionally and spiritually as well.

Americans, especially, are encouraged to have strong opinions. This is seen as a strength. But an overplayed strength eventually becomes a weakness. These "strong opinions" ultimately become dogma. People get rigid. Dogmatic, rigid people = divisiveness. Nothing ever changes that way. It results in people like my gramps and Rachel's BF boss.

[Innocent Warrior]

I don't think racism can be resolved from a 3d perspective. It has to be viewed from a higher place. We can put things in place like affirmative action, reparations and so on but those are just band aids attempting to treat symptoms of a much deeper disease.

Oh, that aspect completely escaped me, how true! Imagine if everyone addressed it from a 5D perspective - no identifying with the physical, we are all one, we've all been the oppressed and the oppressor etc. etc. - problem solved.

I was pondering the question Bill posed about the cause, I had cultural programming/social engineering and xenophobia, I'm adding spiritual ignorance to that list. :)

* * *

P.S. I should add for clarification, I don't want to give an inaccurate impression of Aussies, or the impression that Muslims feel unsafe here. When I said I'm unable to catch their eye etc., I was referring to that particular situation when they're being bullied. Also, I see a lot of fear but it's not like there's bullying going on all over the place, it's not common but the ignorance I see in private is, they've gotta stop watching the news. (either that or I attract all the knuckleheads).

[Jantje]

I live in a country that is often described as multi-cultural. My family is made up of people with differing ethnic backgrounds married into the family.
The part of the counrty where I live, there is quite a bit of racism. The funny thing is that we also live in the part with probably the least immigrants and enthically differing backgrounds.

As somebody who just could not be racist because I love my family members who just happen to be of different skin colour or cultural background, I sometimes had a hard time listening to racist comments by people.
I would sometimes confront people with their own words. Just repeating their words would sometimes be enough to make them realize how wrong their words are.

From my point of view racism is based on one of the 4 sources of fear. In this case the fear of the unknown.

Still there is something to be said for the right to protect "your" cultural heritage. Cultures don't mix, that's something I am sure of.

One other observation though is that some imported cultures cause more trouble than others.

Racism is a great tool to divide and control people.
The sad part is that people are controlled and led so easily

[guyres]

The ego is the great bag of the archivist, the fortress of memory. And because of that he does not want to lose anything, so keeping everything, even suffering, he creates the personality.
Looking in the axis of fear of loss, racism is an excuse for stupidity.

[Patient]

If you are looking for advice all I could say is learn their language.


Here you go Bill.
https://www.rosettastone.com/lp/ppc/sale/?cid=se-br-gg-bfmonthsaleadi&cid=se-br-gg-ppcsale&iv_=__iv_p_1_a_15481_g_5235515175_c_223131634741_k_rosetta%20stone_m_e_w_kwd-35245020_n_g_d_c_v__l__t__r_1t1_x__y__f__o__z__i__j__s__e__h_9024578_ii__vi__&gclid=CjwKCAiAxuTQBRBmEiwAAkFF1pIvLSMQN38OXmeThivLZ9eeMZlpDMVz-0GiexotJcRE15LD5EkUXxoCE54QAvD_BwE

I'm not looking for advice. Or a language program. :)

You mean well, and thank you, but you didn't understand a single word I was really saying.

I'm saying that the Ecuadorians who'd prefer I wasn't in their country are NOT racist.

I'm also trying to get intelligent people, reading this, to THINK.

I'm not talking about race.

You say "But I can feel the quiet, low-key, silent attitudes towards me... sometimes, in some places."

You say they don't want you there. That is what I am getting at. You can't communicate with them. I wouldn't want you there either if I couldn't talk to you. You are an unknown to them. They fear that. You are a stranger that doesn't want to communicate with them. You prove that by not learning there language.

I would never move to another country without learning their language, because of the things you are saying of how you are being treated. How could I expect to be accepted by a people that I don't want to talk to. That is what they think.

Thanks again — but you're totally not getting it.

Let me spell it out. :)

I wrote:



I'm saying that the Ecuadorians who'd prefer I wasn't in their country are NOT racist.

I'm also trying to get intelligent people, reading this, to THINK.

What this means — and I'm sure of it — is that most of the people in the US or Canada who don't want non-integrated people from other cultures there are not racist.

French, German, Swedish or British people who don't want Middle Eastern immigrants there aren't racist, either.

Of course it's not about race. It's about the preservation of culture. This is my entire point.

"The preservation of culture." I think many people are happy to see different cultures preserved. People enjoy special events where they can experience another culture, see the dances and taste the foods. Most people are proud of their own culture.

If people push or try to force their culture upon other people, the result is often negative. The person who is in their home country, who does not want to have another culture forced upon them, or woven around their culture , thus giving the impression of maybe distorting or weakening their own culture is often deemed to be racist.

If I was to move to a different country, I would of course want to preserve my culture to a certain degree. But I would have to do this without offending other people.
I wouldn't/shouldn't expect the country that I moved into to change their ways. I would have to accept their culture and respect it or I should not have moved there in the first place.

When you enter a person's home and they ask you to take off your shoes, and you do so without making an issue out of it you are welcomed into their home. If you do so and question them, and be grumpy about it, there is tension that could escalate. If you refuse to take off your shoes you are always free to choose to not enter, and politely excuse yourself. (Next time you visit, you can be better prepared.)
Imagine if the guest refuses to take off their shoes, enters the home and tells everyone there that they should all be wearing their shoes and to not listen to the host. That will not end well.

[Ewan]

Many cultures have been going through a process of erosion for a long time, that may be a fairly natural process as few things tend to truly stand still. There is always some change taking place. So perhaps those natural changes should not be referred to as erosion for undoubtedly there have been some real efforts to destroy cultures, often from within a country itself - a top down plan to disenfranchise the masses? Culture is utilised for purely political reasons when it is needed to sway public opinion. Local communities were always a strong source of identity and culture. In many western countries those communities are all but gone, an accidental happening from various circumstance or a driven agenda, both most likely?

I was but 6 years old when I encountered a black person. A boy joined our school and was the, unfortunate, subject of much interest. Much of that interest was quite nasty, it is only with hindisight I can see that many of those other children already knew about black people. The boy got called a 'wog' and 'gollywog'. I had a gollywog, it was the mid 1960's and I never realised my 'cuddly toy person' was supposed to represent a black person until that boy arrived at school. Anyway, from the age of 6 I knew I wasn't a racist even if I could not have articulated that thought.

Fast forward 20 years and I'm backpacking around Australia. Compared to my only other experience of a country I found Australia to be more racist than the UK - and that from seeing black footballers getting monkey chants from the stands and even bananas thrown on the pitch. In the Northern Territory I learnt how racism was taught and not inherent, a horrible example of a man that would air his views about the 'abo's' at any given chance, in front of his 7/8 yr old son. It took me a while to consider that perhaps he had also had such a father himself.

A conversation with an Aunt once, she informed me 'oh no, I'm not racist' - Ok, so you'd have no problem with me marrying a black girl? - 'Oh, I think it would be different if one came into your family'.

2010, Newcastle, England, lying in a hospital bed, 6 patients in the room. A black female Doctor came in and went over to examine the newest arrival, a rather frail looking old man. In the process of the examination I assume she has had to check his groin or rear-end, the man raised himself up slightly and balled his fist. I was already looking out the door to try and attract attention from the nurses station which was right there. I heard the man saying "Get your hands off me you uncertain". I heard her reply "We were all taught the same". As she walked from the room I was watching her go, hoping for some eye-contact. I got it and offered her a sympathetic look, which on reflection may have looked more like a painful grimace. I should have just said 'Sorry' and wish I had. Some people may not understand why I would want to say sorry but to my way of thinking it wasn't about the racism, which it clearly was from the man's point of view, but to me it was just about the injustice of the situation born of an ignorant/fearful attitude.

My experiences of over 5 years in Thailand largely reflect your own experience and feelings of Ecuador, Bill. My wife's family on her mothers side were rice farmers and we bought a piece of land from an Uncle. I would agree that it is not racism, uncertainty of possible future changes are at root I think, an uneasy, mostly unidentified, small fear.

[mgray]

I work in the alleged "melting pot" of America: Manhattan. "Give us your poor, huddled masses, yearning to breathe free," it says on the tablet Lady Liberty is holding in the harbor.

And yet NYC has Little Italy, Chinatown, Koreatown and many neighborhoods where these masses settled.

This is not racism, it's driven by culture and economic opportunity for the immigrants to cluster together because of shared experiences.

Second point, I have a big problem with third parties calling racism. If the person is not a part of the group that is being slighted, then how can they know an innocuous term or phrase is racist?

[Hervé]

[...]
... The "racism" is more related to the fact of not being born here, as if the migrant came stealing a part of life that does not belong to him.

So real... and that's a template which could be applied anywhere (for the Francophone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WscVYSu-O2w Lyrics (http://www.brassens-cahierdechanson.fr/OEUVRES/CHANSONS/gens.html)).

All that, simply because the focus is on differences... any difference will do! Stark examples of such are the fate of albinos in Africa (http://listverse.com/2017/06/20/10-tragic-facts-about-albino-hunting-in-africa/)...

[Ernie Nemeth]

I do not see much culture in the USA or in Canada. It seems to me that these two countries, along with a few others around the world, are multi-cultural. That means they have no specific culture of their own but a mixture of culture from the many countries that have immigrated there.

What is the culture of North America is quickly becoming the culture of the entire world. A modern culture of consumerism and fleeting attention spans forever looking for the next fad, the next gimmick, the next sale. This is the culture of the modern world. Truly, our biggest cultural contribution is our landfills and the pollution of the entire planet.

Some countries have ancient memories and with those memories come unique rites and celebrations, specific attitudes and sense of national pride. These countries have a bond and a bloodline that is proportionally unassailable and untainted by outside influence.

Racism is where cultures clash. It is a widely used method of social cohesion to over-emphasize the differences and make a mockery of another's culture. It is an ancient means of in-group forming, as Wade might say.

I've had the experience of being where I shouldn't be and having disapproving eyes looking at me. It is very disconcerting and uncomfortable. Yet under different circumstances, as a guest of a member of that culture, the looks are of an entirely different nature and the welcome is genuine if not universal.

We need to invent a new culture inclusive of all people that celebrates life again, not rampant consumerism for dull and bored automatons.

[starlight]

I grew up in a small town in Iowa where there is not much diversity at all, and I see the racism there.

Okay... can you build on this thread, as an educational vehicle (hopefully!), and explain what you saw, what form it took, and why it was there? (And, importantly, why you call it or regard it as racism? (Maybe it was! But we can't tell, because we don't know what you're describing.)

You see, the word is loosely used... that's my thesis. What I'm really interested in is what the roots of it are, and why it's there — and if it's NOT racism, what is it really?

I can be more specific. Because here, In Ecuador, I'm in the cultural minority situation.

I'm a migrant, living in Ecuador. I'm not an Ecuadorian. I barely speak the language. This not my country. I really don't properly belong here, and I know that.

I like the local people, and I don't much like most of the Americans I see here. But I can feel the quiet, low-key, silent attitudes towards me... sometimes, in some places.

This isn't about race. No-one dislikes my white skin. Quite a few Ecuadorians have fairly white skin, too.

They just think I don't really belong here, and they disrespect (I believe) that I've not taken more trouble to learn the language. I think they see me (and the other Europeans and Americans) as a kind of economic migrant ... because it's cheap here. So we take advantage of that, and the truth is that we give very little back, indeed.

I'll say it again. This is not racism. But the locals are worried. They don't know, and are given no safeguards, where this is all going. I can feel it.

To put it even more bluntly: I'm here because I legally can be, but it's 100% entirely selfish.

It's all about me, and my safety, comfort, enjoyment, and personal well-being. I'm as friendly as I possibly can be to the local people (I live in a farming community, as one of the only gringos for miles). Some of them are really friendly back. Others literally look the other way. I can feel their thoughts.

Is this their racism? Not the way I understand it. They simply don't want me to be here.

Should I go home? Where's home? I don't have one. I have no family, anywhere. I might as well be a Syrian refugee.

If there were forums in Ecuador (and maybe there are! How would I know?), the local people might well be discussing, with some emotion, the problem of their country being overrun with Americanos. And they'd be entitled to.

At least, unlike in some other parts of the world, the migrants aren't bringing degrees of crime and abuse with them. But that doesn't stop the locals from being worried, and I'm part of the problem here: I'm certainly no part of any solution.

The local people's attitudes about this would not be racism. They're simply worried about the integrity of their country, and their culture.

Just as I was, when I lived in Britain, and went into that hairdresser's in Leicester... before I immediately turned round and instinctively walked out.


http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?97318-Trump-Illegal-immigration-Sam-s-view&p=1149826&viewfull=1#post1149826


Thanks for this detailed explanation, Bill! :clapping:

I think often times we are quick to regard one's behavior as demeaning and hateful when in fact it is not. Maybe if we take the time to see things from their perspective (as you surely have) we can begin to understand their point of view for what it really is. And you're right, the word racism is thrown around all too often. I guess it is much easier to label it as such rather than dissect the true meaning behind their behavior.

[neutronstar]

We need to invent a new culture inclusive of all people that celebrates life again, not rampant consumerism for dull and bored automatons.


We are. I can't speak for Canada because I have never been there, but the US is the template for what the world will become. Barring an event that sets us back, the world will continue to get smaller and different cultures will continue to interact. When we interact we then see, although we have differences we also have many things in common. That is what ends the hatred or fear that we have for each other.

The process happens slowly because some people just can't change, but children are much more receptive to change. 100, 200 years from now the world will be a much different place. Eventually we will be the human race and it will be about learning to accept beings from other planets.

[happyuk]

I once had friends who were brothers having mixed parentage, a British mother and Pakistani father.

They got it the neck from both sides - when visiting Pakistan with his father, he and his brother experienced racism from villagers for being of British extraction.

And while the UK they received similar abuse from small-minded indigenous people for being part-Pakistani.

They realised at an early age they couldn't possibly win, so they rejected both British and Pakistani cultural traits they felt were of no use to them. When their father died they not only rejected the strict Islamic cultural values of their father (which sadly included harsh/unjustified physical punishments meted out to them as children), changed their Arabic names into western ones by deed poll while also rejecting the values of their mother, who had since became a devout Jehovas Witness.

[happyuk]

Racism is the arbitrary utilisation of race as a point of inappropriate discrimination or personal malice. Racism is the personal hatred, for example, held against a specific race, due to race, itself, not the characteristics of a person.

Racism is personal but it can be leveraged by politicians (and it is).

As Bill has pointed out, one may dislike or disapprove of a cultural distinctive while maintaining no personal malice towards people of a specific race.

For example one might dislike Celtic music, but it does not mean you despise the Irish/Scottish/Welsh descendants from which the music arose. I don't like the fact that many Spanish appear to enjoy seeing cattle being tortured inside large arenas, but do not use this an excuse to express revulsion towards all Spaniards.

Disliking a cultural distinctive is not irrational fear, moral dearth, or, in today's politically-correct-speak: being a Nazi. It is exercising one's discrimination in taste. In ancient language, racism was called a "respecter of faces", that is, the skin pigmentation which, having no bearing on a person's character, is called "arbitrary." It is not rational or intelligent.

To deny one equality of opportunity (not equality of outcome) based upon race is an example of institutionalized racism.

In the United States, this is mostly illegal. There is an exception: the denial of opportunity is constituted by politicians. Here, they can deny someone employment opportunity based upon race called "affirmative action." The need to call it "affirmative", itself, indicates the negative consequence attendant.

In a truly free market this makes absolutely no sense because if the goal is for a successful thriving business, the business is going to seek talent first and foremost, not skin pigmentation.

[Cardillac]

@Bill

"Which major ethnic group does not appear to be losing its culture?"

the ethnic group/s who have no culture whatsoever except for a rape culture-

ALL cultures are being destroyed by those who have no culture whatsoever; welcome to the "New World Order"-

with respect to all on this forum-

Larry

[Flash]

A lot of times, racism is compounded with sexual harassment for women. She is black, she wil hear detrimental comments or lust comments on her body. Same with Asian, I remember the adopted daughter of a woman I knew who was in love, just to find out her boyfriend was claiming high and loud to his friends that he finally had laid an Asian woman. She was devastated.

My little niece suffers the same, wow, wow could tried out a black girl! maybe! comments from some guys.

As for me, I remember very well in my early twenties, living in an Indian reserve in Ontario and hearing about all the racism women would encounter, paired with sexual harassment, from white men. Then we went, the girls and I (I am whiter than white, but French Canadian, in Ontario - which is English hating French), went to a bar in Toronto. Some Indians guys were around. Then I got talked to by a white guy who discovered through my accent that I was French Canadian and started to harass me. The indians had to defend me. After that, they told me all they were living with the whites and that they could not believe a white would suffer the same.

When I lived in Mexico, i was at all times very aware of being white.... and still more a white woman. With the Mexican history about Americans and whites, Gringos are not very much appreciated on average. Telling I was Canadian would help at times. However, being a white woman was at time extremely dangerous. I never heard a white man telling me that he was in much danger compared with a white woman. Since then, decades later, I still have this instinct I had build in Mexico, of knowing without seeing or hearing that I am followed or that there is someone 10 feet behind me.

To me, this is sexual predation compounded by racism.

[Beren]

Dear Avalonians,

There is a major clue which almost everyone in the non Slavic countries miss, though even in the Slavic countries 90% of the people will miss this connection through real history and the meaning of the following.

The term or a word itself "Race".

It comes directly (even it`s spoken similarly in all European languages) from proto Slavic word "Rasa".
There are experts and scholars on ancient Serbian and other Slavic languages of whom you never heard of since west was not interested in anything beyond Austrian border through history.

"Rasa" means something else completely. The first meaning is obviously the "race" in its modern understanding but dig deeper and you'll find the following:

1. Rasa - kin or one unity among the ancient Serbian people and all Slavic
2. Rasa - "Rod" - another name for the word in English - "Kin"
3. Rasa - whenever a Serbian or Russian would address to its fellow Serbian neighbor or friend as "Rod" that means they are giving them an exalted respect as they are their kin. It can be a person on the street not related to anyone. This is the sign of high respect and love in its true meaning.
4. Rasa - Ancient name (one of many) for Serbian was "Ras", thus we had medieval country of ours named Raska (pronounced as Rashka), also the English sound of the name of the Russia is heard like Rasha. When we say "The old Rasi" we mean of old Serbs from the past. We pronounce Russia as it is written - Rusia (Rusiah- kind of like people from north of England would say the letter U as U - not as the sound eu (picture the the sound of the beginning of the word "under"- not like "aender" sound).
5 Rasa - we have a term when something is superb in its quality that it is "Rasan, rasno, rasna" - Rasan Konj - Pure bred horse, something untainted by anything, pure, pristine - Rasno. Rasna lepotica - unmatched beauty. So as you can see the ultimate meaning of exaltness is deeply written in our language and DNA.
6 Rasa - that also means one people, one enormous people that have their own quality and culture that is excellent.

Anyways, I hope you folks will understand my effort here to draw closer what the true meaning of the word Race is.
All white people came from one root. We are one race - rasa.
Other people of black, yellow and red are different race - different rasa. You cannot be racist by default. You simply cannot because the true meaning isn't in this word.
That is the clever and malicious word play by the dark entities through time to divide races. You cannot be a racist if you are white and hate blacks - you cannot be a racist - you are a hater and a person with malicious intent towards another man from a different race. Also if you are black and you hate whites - you are a hater and malicious person.

You cannot be a racist because that isn't existing. What persist is hatred, prejudice, fear and most of all ignorance.
I grew up in Serbia before I moved to USA. There are no black people there save for the ones working in African embassies. There were few Gypsies along the way but that is about 1%. But despite this I never harbored any kind of hatred for a man or a woman based on their skin color or culture.

I simply know that it would be wrong to do this. I may not like some cultures and behaviours but I don't dislike the people. Everyone first and foremost is responsible for their own being and person.

When I moved to US, I had so many black and other races wanting to be friends because they felt that I treated them like any other human being, with respect. We talk openly about everything.

If you are lazy, dirty, evil, bad mouthed, criminal or hater, it is YOU who are doing this, not your skin. If you are black and doing bad stuff, I am going to call you out because of the doing not because of your skin, same goes if you are white, yellow or red - you will be called out, just like I would be if I do wrong.
I ask openly as European and Serbian to my black friends why some of their people are so often offended but they (my friends of color) aren`t? The answer is always about ignorance and else, it is never about skin.



There is no racism, there is hate, ignorance and fear.

[Tangri]

"and for me the only logical remedy is tolerance"

Which below statement is a Racist remark ?

1-'Entry forbidden to Jews, Commies, and all thieves and traitors of Poland'

2-"Would you want a male Muslim babysitting for your children, and would you trust them alone with your daughters and wives. If the answer is no then that is because it is unwise to invite someone whom believes in violence and rape into your home. I just call that common sense. Would you put your child in a room with many poisonous snakes and some snakes that are not, would you risk it that they may get bitten by a poisonous snake."


"If we give to much attention to what separates us, we forget to recognize the beauty within us all"

[Michi]

In my eyes racism is an openly expressed and acted upon "dislike" against people from other cultures.
I caught myself thinking bad about foreign strangers but the key point is that I recognized it at such and I did not dramatize it any longer and I didn't treat that other person as inferior.
It's actually by design that the human mind (as opposed to the actual spiritual being) gets in the way by posing critical thoughts about foreigners.
It's a crude response-react system. If a person isn't aware of this artificial system, (I call it mind) and dramatises it and acts it out on others we have -- racism.
I suspect everyone has had critical thoughts and "opinions" about people from other cultures but while many say - ah the heck with it - others really rub this in and ride this wave and act it out on others.
Also part of this mind is this collective agreeing on those critical thoughts and in that way, many witch hunts have been started.
Thus things like racism against Judes in Germany got started prior to WW II.
As a teenager I once went into the Karl Valentin museum in Munich. I was appalled by the newspaper and propaganda exposes from post WW I time. It is that the collective mindset of the people was centered around dark humour. The only thing missing was a leader for the "sheeple".
By looking for a word to describe for a harmonic society I found the word civilization but that word doesn't really cut it.
A civilized society still has this mind which decides in place of the spiritual being and dictates what is right or wrong.
So, I conclude it's about knowing of the above and rising beyond that crude react-response system and perhaps clear out those ingrained beliefs.

[petra]

I see two problems... vengeance from the ones who feel they have been wronged, and lack of common sense from the ones who are propagating it. Where is the common sense?!? Pardon my cynicism. I watched the Jerry Springer video where he tries to reason with the KKK leader, and bless him for trying, but he got nowhere. The KKK man even took a few stabs at Jerry because he's Jewish .... ho my.

I just feel as if racism / racists will become extinct eventually, just like the the Latin language has phased out into deadness, so will this philosophy of "I'm better than you" type of thinking.

[Foxie Loxie]

A great deal has to do with what a child is taught, or observes, during the formative years....IMHO! :bigsmile:

[Iloveyou]

An additional aspect I‘m missing yet is power. Lust for power, power struggle (and who knows which forces behind that). If I’m not mistaken, racism was originally based on the belief that certain physical/biological factors are directly related to certain intellectual (in-)abilities or character traits - but I think it cannot be separated from oppression, from hierarchy and (economic, technological) disparity. It has always been a justification for plundering and extinction of lesser violent, lesser ruthless groups. It works only top-down, not vice versa imo. Well, that could be disputed.

Modern racism has as little to do with skin color or skull shape as rape has to do with sexuality. That‘s just the surface. But the concept is too convenient for the string pullers, they cannot waste it. They mix it with all kind of political, social, cultural aspects and reinvent it over and over. It‘s an empty formula and a perfect projection screen for anything. Just my two cents, so far.

[yelik]

A great deal has to do with what a child is taught, or observes, during the formative years....IMHO! :bigsmile:

Absolutely and the Establishment controls it


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHxFuO2Nk-0
Brown eyes and blue eyes Racism experiment (Children Session) - Jane Elliott

[christian]

Here are some facts about racism in Europe and in the US, all confirmed by recent studies.


Most Europeans are in favor of supporting refugees (http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/umfrage-in-europa-die-mehrheit-der-deutschen-will-nationale-grenzen-zurueck-1.2933368), and in line with that they are in favor of better border controls in order to deter those who would enter the EU to abuse the asylum welfare system.


Most of the Germans who attend the anti-Islamic "PEGIDA" rallies in Dresden are actually less concerned about Muslims or Islam (http://www.wz.de/home/politik/inland/studie-typischer-pegida-demonstrant-in-dresden-ist-gar-nicht-gegen-den-islam-1.1836840) than about the failure of their elected politicians and the political system in general. "PEGIDA" simply seems to be a welcome anti-establishment movement.


European political movements of the far left and far right are growing mainly because of people's concerns about the global political and economical developments (http://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2016-11/globalisierung-bertelsmann-stiftung-bedrohung).


While it is true that Trump was more popular with white Americans, the polarization during this election was less extreme (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/behind-trumps-victory-divisions-by-race-gender-education/) than during the previous election. Trump got more votes from blacks and hispanics than Romney during the election of 2012.


What could have been critical for Trump's victory were the states that suffered the most casualties from America's wars (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2989040). They shifted to Trump because he was seen as less eager than Hillary to get involved in new wars.


It seems fairly obvious therefore that the establishment is attempting to shift the narrative by talking about race all day.

It goes like this.

"We're in a mess politically and economically. An oligarchy is ruling us. It's terrible."

"Do I hear racism?"

That's it. And if you say, "no, it's not about racism," then you will be mocked, ridiculed and berated for not caring about "what matters." It's a psychopathic tactic, plain and simple. It doesn't require much intelligence from those who are employing it, but rather insolence and perseverance.

The establishment is trying to shift attention away from their own role in the enslavement of humanity. They attempt to shift the attention to an emotionally charged issue such as racism, so that people start infighting and navel-gazing, preventing them effectively from having any time or focus to figure out what really keeps humanity down.

Caveat: Of course racism is a real issue in the US, in Europe and all over the world. I know enough people who suffered heavily from this. However, given the mess that we're in as a human race, it is not the issue that should concern us the most when the world is transforming into a corporatocratic police state.

[Tangri]

Well, here we go.

* Bill takes a deep breath :) *

This thread has its genesis in some discussion in the mods team over the last few months about this subject in general.

Out of that, came a suggestion to post what is now this thread: a historical overview of the realities of the roots, causes and history of racism. I undertook to do it myself.

At this point, and at this point only, I'll state a personal caveat: (Or, maybe it's a disclosure.)



I do NOT believe any current member of Avalon is a racist in any way that I understand the meaning of the term. I DO believe there are current major issues about the forced integration of different cultures, in both North America and Europe, and there may be hidden agendas behind that, and that these issues are worth understanding and discussing.
That's my personal view. Others may have different angles on this, by 5º or 180º. :)

I thought I'd look up a definition, first. That's because, as best as I can see, the word is loosely used and MISued in a wide variety of ways.

Here's just a few: (try looking this up yourself... it's interesting)


prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.


a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to dominate others or that a particular racial group is inferior to the others.



a policy, system of government, etc., based upon or fostering such a doctrine; discrimination.



hatred or intolerance of another race or other races.



Racism is the practice of discriminating against people based on their race, national or ethnic background. Although old prejudices often live on, most people will agree that racism is unacceptable.



Someone who practices racism is called a racist. Racism comes from the idea that the different races are intrinsically different. It’s racism when a white person discriminates against a black person, just as it’s racism if a Japanese person discriminates against a German person. Many worldwide political movements have fought to end racism.

And there are 101 other definitions, too. It didn't help all that much.

I then turned to Wikipedia, which has a LONG and interesting page:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism

It starts with


Racism is the belief in the superiority of one race over another, which often results in discrimination and prejudice towards people based on their race or ethnicity. Today, the use of the term "racism" does not easily fall under a single definition.

"Does not easily fall under a single definition" — no kidding. That gives carte blanche for the term to be used loosely as a general criticism (or, more bluntly, sometimes a targeted, demeaning, put-down) that may not necessarily be warranted or accurate.


"This thread has its genesis in some discussion in the mods team over the last few months about this subject in general."

Probably those mods were right when they were pointing Racism. If they used word of " Discrimination" it wouldn't rightfully emphasized their feeling.

Racism wasn't a problem and a curse word until 1950's. It became curse word when western countries criticized Nazis to killing civilians because they were Judaic and/or Gypsy. But they never emphasized Gypsies. As Americans did not for Black people.

."a belief or doctrine that inherent differences among the various human racial groups determine cultural or individual achievement, usually involving the idea that one's own race is superior and has the right to dominate others or that a particular racial group is inferior to the others.

.a policy, system of government, etc., based upon or fostering such a doctrine; discrimination.
hatred or intolerance of another race or other races.

.Racism is the practice of discriminating against people based on their race, national or ethnic background. Although old prejudices often live on, most people will agree that racism is unacceptable."

Of course, the term will be used loosely as a general criticism to point out "stop what you are doing , it is wrong" It is a crying toward ignorance .

Do you think Israelis are Racist? If you ask them, they would say "not necessarily be warranted or accurate" :o maybe "a little bit of Fascist(?)

I will repeat again with my respect.

"and for me the only logical remedy is tolerance"

qHwSSuaR2QA

[Hervé]

From the "practical" side of things, this excerpt taken from here (https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/10/how-colonial-violence-came-home-the-ugly-truth-of-the-first-world-war) (<---):


Instead of remembering the first world war in a way that flatters our contemporary prejudices, we should recall what Hannah Arendt pointed out in The Origins of Totalitarianism - one of the west's first major reckonings with Europe's grievous 20th-century experience of wars, racism and genocide. Arendt observes that it was Europeans who initially reordered "humanity into master and slave races" during their conquest and exploitation of much of Asia, Africa and America. This debasing hierarchy of races was established because the promise of equality and liberty at home required imperial expansion abroad in order to be even partially fulfilled. We tend to forget that imperialism, with its promise of land, food and raw materials, was widely seen in the late 19th century as crucial to national progress and prosperity. Racism was - and is - more than an ugly prejudice, something to be eradicated through legal and social proscription. It involved real attempts to solve, through exclusion and degradation, the problems of establishing political order, and pacifying the disaffected, in societies roiled by rapid social and economic change.

[Foxie Loxie]

Thanks for the article from The Guardian, Herve.....makes one wonder who the REAL Controllers are??? :facepalm:

[Huntress]

Long but worthy. I found this fascinating. I am sharing this because I see in the thread broad commentary ranging from dominance hierarchy, political correctness, broader discrimination and so on. These videos are collectively 7hrs long, I found them riveting. They have helped me to understand better why western civilisation is heading where it is.

https://youtu.be/USg3NR76XpQ

https://youtu.be/6G59zsjM2UI. <<<<< especially this one

And, post modern Marxism

https://youtu.be/PfH8IG7Awk0

Although not strictly re: racism it is about discrimination an the PC police

[Huntress]

Dear Avalonians,

There is a major clue which almost everyone in the non Slavic countries miss, though even in the Slavic countries 90% of the people will miss this connection through real history and the meaning of the following.

The term or a word itself "Race".

It comes directly (even it`s spoken similarly in all European languages) from proto Slavic word "Rasa".
There are experts and scholars on ancient Serbian and other Slavic languages of whom you never heard of since west was not interested in anything beyond Austrian border through history.

"Rasa" means something else completely. The first meaning is obviously the "race" in its modern understanding but dig deeper and you'll find the following:

1. Rasa - kin or one unity among the ancient Serbian people and all Slavic
2. Rasa - "Rod" - another name for the word in English - "Kin"
3. Rasa - whenever a Serbian or Russian would address to its fellow Serbian neighbor



Anyways, I hope you folks will understand my effort here to draw closer what the true meaning of the word Race is.
All white people came from one root. We are one race - rasa.
Other people of black, yellow and red are different race - different rasa. You cannot be racist by default. You simply cannot because the true meaning isn't in this word.
That is the clever and malicious word play by the dark entities through time to divide races. You cannot be a racist if you are white and hate blacks - you cannot be a racist - you are a hater and a person with malicious intent towards another man from a different race. Also if you are black and you hate whites - you are a hater and malicious person.

You cannot be a racist because that isn't existing. What persist is hatred, prejudice, fear and most of all ignorance.
I grew up in Serbia before I moved to USA. There are no black people there save for the ones working in African embassies. There were few Gypsies along the way but that is about 1%. But despite this I never harbored any kind of hatred for a man or a woman based on their skin color or culture.

I simply know that it would be wrong to do this. I may not like some cultures and behaviours but I don't dislike the people. Everyone first and foremost is responsible for their own being and person.

When I moved to US, I had so many black and other races wanting to be friends because they felt that I treated them like any other human being, with respect. We talk openly about everything

There is no racism, there is hate, ignorance and fear.

Hi Beren, raca actually is borrowed directly from the German Rasse which means race. I appreciate what you are trying to say though, I think that accepting the uniqueness of the individual enriches the collective and so adopting a more inclusive mindset would do wonders for the world.

[Pam]

If you are looking for advice all I could say is learn their language.


Here you go Bill.
https://www.rosettastone.com/lp/ppc/sale/?cid=se-br-gg-bfmonthsaleadi&cid=se-br-gg-ppcsale&iv_=__iv_p_1_a_15481_g_5235515175_c_223131634741_k_rosetta%20stone_m_e_w_kwd-35245020_n_g_d_c_v__l__t__r_1t1_x__y__f__o__z__i__j__s__e__h_9024578_ii__vi__&gclid=CjwKCAiAxuTQBRBmEiwAAkFF1pIvLSMQN38OXmeThivLZ9eeMZlpDMVz-0GiexotJcRE15LD5EkUXxoCE54QAvD_BwE

I'm not looking for advice. Or a language program. :)

You mean well, and thank you, but you didn't understand a single word I was really saying.

I'm saying that the Ecuadorians who'd prefer I wasn't in their country are NOT racist.

I'm also trying to get intelligent people, reading this, to THINK.

I'm not talking about race.

You say "But I can feel the quiet, low-key, silent attitudes towards me... sometimes, in some places."

You say they don't want you there. That is what I am getting at. You can't communicate with them. I wouldn't want you there either if I couldn't talk to you. You are an unknown to them. They fear that. You are a stranger that doesn't want to communicate with them. You prove that by not learning there language.

I would never move to another country without learning their language, because of the things you are saying of how you are being treated. How could I expect to be accepted by a people that I don't want to talk to. That is what they think.

As a dialysis nurse, I remember taking care of a woman, originally from China, that did not speak a word of English. I have to be honest and admit my empathy hardened when I looked at her history and found out she had lived in the US for almost 25 years! Although it might not be true, I felt she must really have some hostility towards the US if she has refused to learn the language. I don't think I would have felt that if she was able to speak just a few words of English, if she had put forth the tiniest effort.I interpreted the total lack of effort as a sort of stubborn dislike and an attempt to have no part in the country she has lived in and benefited from for the past 25 years, whether that was true or not.

I don't think this is racism, but looking back, I was unconsciously making a lot of assumptions on my part. Did I really know she could speak no English just because she wasn't speaking it? Was I sure she could learn a second language? Did her lack of communication mean she really did have disdain for the culture she was currently living in?

[lunaflare]

Culture, like Racism, can be tricky to conclusively define; perhaps impossible.

I see culture as ever changing, ever varied; the wordplay of culture-- grown in the Petri dish is not an unintended metaphor, surely...
Is it possible to preserve culture? Yes, some parts of a culture maintain tradition- but more often than not culture goes through its own metamorphosis. I am thinking of the fusion of culture in Iberian peninsula (Spain) with the Moors, Saracens, Jews, Christians etc. People are ultimately nomadic.
Like the introduction of a new bacterium, culture changes.
And to "Preserve" suggests something that has to be added- something which is, in essence, artificial.

In terms of variations, consider the many strains and expressions of Christianity: from fundamental orthodox to more "fluid" faiths (churches that sanction woman as priests/deacons/ and accept homosexuality; gay marriage).
My point is that culture is fluid; ever changing.

The Roman Catholics were responsible for killing the early Gnostics and Christian Cathars; due to varying cultural beliefs and practices (and posed a threat -illogical?-to the prevailing power structure).

so, as many have posted, there is fear...

which seems to be why Bill is shunned by Ecuadoreans (not all) and why there is resistance to the great number of Muslims entering European countries.

I know a nurse in a regional hospital in Outback Australia. In Aboriginal culture, there are various skin clans (different tribes/skin colours within aboriginal communities). An elder of one clan refused to take a bed next to a person of a different clan. Is this racism? Intolerance? Or just honouring one's free will?

Ha, a complex issue with many varying shades...

[Flash]

From the "practical" side of things, this excerpt taken from here (https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/10/how-colonial-violence-came-home-the-ugly-truth-of-the-first-world-war) (<---):


Instead of remembering the first world war in a way that flatters our contemporary prejudices, we should recall what Hannah Arendt pointed out in The Origins of Totalitarianism - one of the west's first major reckonings with Europe's grievous 20th-century experience of wars, racism and genocide. Arendt observes that it was Europeans who initially reordered "humanity into master and slave races" during their conquest and exploitation of much of Asia, Africa and America. This debasing hierarchy of races was established because the promise of equality and liberty at home required imperial expansion abroad in order to be even partially fulfilled. We tend to forget that imperialism, with its promise of land, food and raw materials, was widely seen in the late 19th century as crucial to national progress and prosperity. Racism was - and is - more than an ugly prejudice, something to be eradicated through legal and social proscription. It involved real attempts to solve, through exclusion and degradation, the problems of establishing political order, and pacifying the disaffected, in societies roiled by rapid social and economic change.


Come on, racism and/or intolerance has always existed - it is the fear of the unknown that provokes it. From Ghengis Kahn to Attila the Hun to the Japanese perception of foreigners and of Chinese to fights between tribes, to..... name it, it has always existed.

Of course, then it will be curtailed into classes and hierarchy as well. Which has always happened as well amongst all great apea and humans. The stronger making sure the weaker remains below.

As well as sexism - the only time sexims is slightly giving away is since we have contraception on one hand and since education is a must in the work force on the other hand, making women as able as man to compete and succeed (the strongest has become the mentally stronger). Yet, even there, having babies is socially detrimental .

In fact, the main problem is that we still are, as a humanity, excessively primitive in our thinking and behaving.

So, to me, the problems is not only to declare and name racism and sexism, but also to find ways to have a majority of humans to evolve pass those primitive ways of thinking and behaving.

[Wind]

We are not really our race, our gender or anything like that, because we are much more than that. Those are just external things that people tend to identify with.

As long as people fail to see that we are eternal spirits coming to this Earth in different shapes, sizes and colors, there will continue to be backwards thinking and incredibly ignorant things such as racism.

[christian]

As long as people fail to see that we are eternal spirits coming to this Earth in different shapes, sizes and colors, there will continue to be backwards thinking and incredibly ignorant things such as racism.

We all intuitively understand that evolution tends towards greater understanding of each other and therefore increased integration of cultures. Therefore it's something we intuitively strive for and appreciate. We see it as a sign of progress.

The social engineers know this. Therefore they want to give us a taste of what we strive for, but in a twisted way. It's a bait-and-switch in order to engineer outcomes that fit their agenda. They present us with a counterfeit version of cultural integration. The very term forced integration implies that it's a shortcut, it's not the real thing.

Cultural integration is our destiny, I believe. This challenge right now is about humans having the discernment, patience and determination to tell organic integration from forced integration.

Or in more simple terms, humanity is being enslaved all over the world and it won't fix things to merely ship as many people from poorer countries into richer countries as possible. However, living in Berlin and talking to refugees often, I do also see positive seeds sprouting in all of this mess. It's never that black and white, it seems, but always what we make out of it.

[Amenjo]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43gm3CJePn0

Love and Truth,


Amenjo

[Omi]

Bill, I honour your courage to share your personal experience of living in Ecuador,
and for raising this issue of racism and discrimination among humans.

I'm curious to know why you've brought up this topic for discussion at this timing now,
and what you wish to achieve from this.

I had to think for some time about whether I should post on this thread or not.
I'd actually started writing, then deleted it, repeating this maybe 3 or 4 times.

After all the thinking, I could see the necessity of taking a big step forward and share my experiences.

So here goes.



Since age 3, I've been labeled a 'legal alien' for living in a foreign country, was raised in a 'melting pot' where there was a great diversity of races, ethnicities, nationalities, religious beliefs, skin color, etc. We all lived together in one area, there was respect for each other's family roots, and appreciated the many different cultural backgrounds.

For those interested in the definition of a 'melting pot', here's one part of the description on Wikipedia.


Melting pot

Origins of the term
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the metaphor of a "crucible" or "smelting pot" was used to describe the fusion of different nationalities, ethnicities and cultures. It was a metaphor for the idealized process of immigration and colonization by which different nationalities, cultures and "races" (a term that could encompass nationality, ethnicity and race proper) were to blend into a new, virtuous community, and it was connected to utopian visions of the emergence of an American "new man".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melting_pot


I had a very difficult time integrating myself into the country of my origin at age 12. I was bullied for not being able to speak my mother tongue nearly as well as the kids who'd grown up there. I really could not fit into the people or the culture at all. My physical growth stopped for some time due to culture shock and stress, and my height remains to be the same since then, a little over 150cm. This was the same story for my twin sister as well, at least we had each other to support ourselves through this, as our parents could not relate to nor understand what we were going through.

I've made a lot of effort to learn the language, connect with the people there, appreciate their culture, but despite all the efforts, somehow I could never be considered as one of them and was discriminated for not having the same upbringing as them. Eventually I couldn't care any less about it anymore, it seems that the people of the country of my origin have a lot of issues regarding racism and discrimination throughout its history, which I prefer to have as little association with as possible, nor with the people and country in general, including my parents, relatives and friends. I still give my full respect and keep contact with them, but only at a minimum as necessity requires.

I currently live in a country that's miles away from the country of my roots, living among the natives as well as foreigners, where I feel I belong and could offer my services. But is there really such a place on earth in our current time, where people are truly accepting and respecting of the different races, ethnicities, religious beliefs? Law enforcements and regulations in each country seem to brainwash the people to think it's normal for foreigners to be treated differently. "Love thy neighbor as thy self" is easier said than done, really, as it has so many layers of depth to it.


Now here's the part where I had to really stumble upon.




Someone who practices racism is called a racist. Racism comes from the idea that the different races are intrinsically different. It’s racism when a white person discriminates against a black person, just as it’s racism if a Japanese person discriminates against a German person. Many worldwide political movements have fought to end racism.


I will honestly confess that in the past, I've caught myself doing exactly this, and even possibly still now. I actually had chills go down my spine when I read these lines.

Well Bill, I'm very sure you mean no harm by tuning into my consciousness and pinpointing my greater issues, if anything it would be to bring more awareness and wisdom to it, and I'm very grateful that you've brought this opportunity.

I'm not sure if you've read my previous posts in other threads about one of my pastlife memories as a teenage Jewish boy who died in Auschwitz. My parents are witness to this and saw me suffer as a child from traumatic nightmares of dying. I was put under heavy experimentations then, which could possibly still be going on.

To make long story short, I have resistance against German people deep down in my subconsciousness. Some of my colleagues I work with are Germans, as there's a fair amount of them where I currently live, and some of them I've become good friends with. But when they try to have any further personal contact with me, I reject them out of natural instincts and put a distance between them.

Does this make me a racist?
How do I justify my mindset and attitude when the majority of the people still do not understand the truths to having reincarnations and past lives as part of our reality, and for me to explain my past life memory would most likely fail in vain? Moreover, how is it possible to end this eye-to-eye mentality by victimizing myself of discrimination?



What will it take for human beings to truly understand that each one of us is as equally valuable and important?
That we are all of the same souls, experiencing physical lives on earth as human beings of wisdom, justice, and love?

Why do we keep giving ourselves excuses to discriminate and despise those that we dislike or disagree with, just because of the slight differences?
Is this just the effects of 'divide and conquer' agenda of the dark forces, or is there something else?
Is this ever going to find a resolution?
If only we could let go of all our fears and hatred.



For what it is worth, I try to make a positive contribution to the people and this world by connecting more with those whom I can give and receive genuine love and compassion with, regardless of race (yes German people too), in the best way that I can. This includes family, partner, friends, colleagues, neighbors, that person walking down the street, anyone and everyone I meet, get to know, and can hold close to each others' hearts, both near and far.



While I was writing this post, my computer froze twice, my phone restarted itself, then recieved a call from an unknown number (it has a similar but slightly altered number each time), and I was feeling very fearful for no apparent reason, which was all interesting to experience. Putting on some songs like 'No Woman No Cry' by Bob Marley helped this time :)

My deepest gratitude to Bill, mods, fellow Avalonians, and guests, for allowing me a voice to speak out my personal life experiences here, and for reading through it.

[Bruno]

I was considering making a political correctness and social justice warriors thread to hash out some ideas and pose some questions but my thoughts likely belong here as much as anywhere.

Firstly, personality wise I am an INFJ, so I tend to be an idealist and sometimes I get admittedly overly concerned about peoples feelings. That being said I do see the dangers in political correctness and the social justice warriors who often divorce themselves from facts.

I have recently become obsessed with the ideas of Jordan Peterson, between Peterson and my exposure to the wonderful people here on Avalon I have moved my dial quite a bit.

Peterson for those unfamiliar is a Psychology Professor from the University of Toronto who has come to international attention as of late for his "controversial" remarks regarding gender identity and the LGBT community. Peterson however is much more than a one issue man. Peterson's critiques of political correctness, postmodernism, postmodern feminism, white privilege, cultural appropriation, and environmentalism are all worth looking at.

I mentioned my personality profile earlier because he has done some interesting research on personality and political belief.

According to his studies the relationship between political belief and personality are very much connected. In terms of political correctness for instance he believes there are two types:

PC-Egalitarianism- tend to be classic liberals
PC-Authoritarianism- tend to be the social justice warriors - (this group also has some cross over with right wing authoritarians as well interestingly)


Peterson feels that Universities have let students down by not fully educating students about extremism. For instance little is taught about the exterminations and crimes by Stalin-ism and Maoism, while Fascism and Nazism which are equally horrific are over emphasized.


So politically I am from the left and that's unlikely to change, but I sure hope to be egalitarian and not authoritarian.

In this increasingly polarizing world it is such a balancing act, this trying to find the middle way.

I want free speech and don't want people to feel policed by myself or others. I also don't want to live in a world where under the guise of free speech
people think they can say or write anything they want consequence free. (By consequences I simply mean other people's reactions to their words, not in a legal sense.)

Right now Trump is the American President. He is unabashedly not PC and is celebrated by many for it. How far is too far? Should we not care if a President generalizes Mexicans as rapists? or Uses the name "Pocahontas" as a pejorative word at a ceremony to honour Native American veterans? I mean shouldn't he be held to a higher standard then someone shooting the shi*t at the local coffee shop? Again I don't mean there needs to be a MSM firestorm over everything that comes out of his mouth which sadly is what happens on the daily right now. Where is the middle way?!!


I keep making comments on here that I am done with left leaning politicians that talk PC but don't walk their talk or change anything. I feel I have been tolerating Trump's routine insults of various groups because I was hoping against hope that he would make changes, but I think he is just the next pendulum swing to right that is further polarizing not only his own country but all of us. My concern is that there is not going to be a swing back to the left before we are at each others throats in civil or race war. We often talk on here about how the powers that be are goading us into this. It's so hard to not fall for the polarization- speaking personally.

I know I have gotten into some disagreements on here with TargeT, Sammy, Helen and most recently Oddball. Even when things get heated I am learning from our opposing viewpoints and value your opinions.

Sorry- this got longer and more rambly then likely necessary. I am genuinely interested in hearing about people thoughts and feelings on racism, political correctness, SJW's, authoritarianism and extremism of all stripes. Is there a middle way?

:grouphug:

[Hervé]

[...]
Right now Trump is the American President. He is unabashedly not PC and is celebrated by many for it. How far is too far? Should we not care if a President generalizes Mexicans as rapists? or Uses the name "Pocahontas" as a pejorative word at a ceremony to honour Native American veterans?
[...]
Straightening up some records:


Trump honored three Native Americans, all in their 90s, who helped the US Marine Corps develop a secret code using the Navajo language during the Second World War.
“I just want to thank you because you’re very, very special people. You were here long before any of us were here,” Trump said.

“Although we have a representative in Congress who, they say, was here a long time ago. They call her Pocahontas.”
[...]

Trump has repeatedly used the nickname to mock Warren, specifically her claims of Native American heritage during her time at Harvard Law School in the 1990s. Warren has recently clashed with Trump over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She was one of the driving forces behind the agency’s establishment under the Obama administration.

From: https://www.rt.com/usa/411121-trump-navajo-pocahontas-warren/
... and so, for the record:


What's more offensive and criminal than anything is that Elizabeth Warren has advanced her career and made millions of dollars off of a lie that she is Native American.

The media sycophants let her attack President Trump rather than call her out for lying about her heritage.

From: http://thegatewaypundit.com/2017/11/liar-elizabeth-warren-triggered-lashes-trump-pocahontas-slam-video/... how many ways can a marble be spun around...

:focus:

[Foxie Loxie]

Excellent post, Bruno! It does get very complicated doesn't it?! :crazy: I really think a lot depends upon how a child was raised...into which culture one was inculcated. Personally, I don't bother watching or listening to what Trump says or doesn't say. I DO understand the mindset that applauds his Make America Great theme, because that was the mindset I was raised in. It took an odd series of events to lead me to Avalon where I was exposed to totally different ways of thinking.

I have a dear friend who has dedicated his entire adult life to spreading the Biblical 6,000 year old earth Creation Story, as from the book of Genesis. :bigsmile: He is highly intelligent, but cannot realize that what he believes is based upon a false premise. Indeed, not many question anything about The Bible & still accept it as The Word of God. Within the circle he inhabits, he is quite the "hero" for defending the 6 Days of Creation & Noah's Flood as "scientific"; proving it from The Word of God. :usa2:

I can do nothing to "change" him; just as no one could do anything to "change" me while I was still operating under my childhood brainwashing! :ballchain: I guess we each have to focus on being "the change we want to see" within our own personal circles....to influence those we are able to in a non-confrontational way. Anyone who is here on Avalon is already thinking "outside the box"....so to speak! We each have our own personality as well, so that plays into any discussions we may have.

Personally, I count myself VERY fortunate to have been able to join Avalon & broaden my vista & learn from some very mature members! Thanks to ALL who have played a part in my Journey of Discovery! :clapping:

:heart:

[Bill Ryan]

To bump the interesting thread, here's some pure racism (the real thing, but harmless and actually very funny) that went viral on social media 10 days ago. :)


https://indy100.com/article/viral-facebook-racism-america-flight-first-class-queue-8095251

This viral Facebook post sums up America's race problem

https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/styles/story_large/public/thumbnails/image/2017/12/08/10/untitled-35-0.jpg

This man's story sums up the kind of everyday racism that black Americans face.

In a post to Facebook that has since gone viral, Emmit Eclass Walker alleged a woman in Ronald Reagan Washington Airport assumed he was not a first class passenger.

She reportedly refused to believe him and assumed he had to be a member of the military to be able to enjoy first class.

In his own words, he is just a 'n***a with money'.

After the exchange, he took a selfie.

Eclass Walker shared the photo and the story, and captioned it with the exchange he claimed had taken place.

On Facebook, his original post was shared over 182,000 times.

It went up on Instagram account @TheShadeRoom where it received almost 300,000 likes.

https://scontent.fgye1-1.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-0/p296x100/24296782_10214581842808771_7924299010024311409_n.jpg?oh=092fc95fcd10efe4712c21a71d289e07&oe=5A88D8F8

In the caption Eclass-Walker wrote:



Her: excuse me i believe you may be in the wrong place you need to let us thru. This line is for priority boarding
Me: priority meaning first class correct?
Her: Yes...now excuse me they will call y’all after we board
Me: *shove first class priority boarding pass in her face* you can relax ma’am I’m in the right spot, been here longer, so you can board after me
Her: *still won’t let It go* he must be military or something, but we paid for our seats so he still should have to wait
Me: nope too big to ever be in anybody's military. I’m just a n***a with money https://www.facebook.com/images/emoji.php/v9/f5a/1/16/1f4b0.png💰 https://www.facebook.com/images/emoji.php/v9/fa3/1/16/1f937_1f3fe_200d_2642.png🤷🏾‍♂️
Everybody waiting in line: starts to clap lmao https://www.facebook.com/images/emoji.php/v9/fd0/1/16/1f602.png😂

[Bill Ryan]

And another recent instance, this time not so funny at all:


https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10206

Student op-ed calls white people 'an abomination'


Texas State University’s student newspaper published an op-ed Tuesday telling “white people” that “your DNA is an abomination.”



The op-ed generated intense criticism from readers who felt that it was simply designed to inflame racial tensions and should have raised red flags for the paper's editors.

Texas State University’s student newspaper published an op-ed Tuesday telling “white people” that “your DNA is an abomination.”

“When I think of all the white people I’ve ever encountered—whether they’ve been professors, peers, lovers, friends, police officers, et cetera—there is perhaps only a dozen I would consider ‘decent,’” student columnist Rudy Martinez begins the op-ed, which The University Star has not posted on its website.

The piece documents Martinez’s personal opinion of “whiteness” and “white people,” which he defines to include anyone who is “a descendant of those Europeans who chose to abandon their identity in search of something ‘new’—stolen land.”

Contending that racial categories “are used to subjugate non-white people,” Martinez complains that “in Texas, a bizarre state I have now inhabited for four years, I continuously meet individuals that either deny the existence of white privilege or fail to do something productive with it.”

Addressing white classmates, he asserts that “you were not born white,” but rather “became white” and “actively remain white” through “allegiance to a country that was never great.”

Martinez then warns white people that “the oppressive world you have built...is coming apart at the seams,” describing Donald Trump as the last gasp of white supremacy.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/campusreform/10206/TexasStateOp-Ed.jpg

[Ewan]

That student newspaper article reminded me of the closing chapters of Shikasta (by Doris Lessing), which was the first in a series of novels entitled Canopus in Argos: Archives.

The disaffected youth of all nations gather in Greece for a trial, holding a representative of the white races to account for all the horrific history of said race. Namely the avarice, rape and murder with which they greeted virtually every nation they encountered, from a false arrogance of superiority. By the end of the trial however the majority had concluded that pretty much every nation had been the same in their own way to various different subsets of humanity. Rather than the white race being alone they were all guilty of man's inhumanity to man.

On p417 I just noticed an interesting part from which to quote. It is with the trial ended and the various factions heading off home..


..I was getting reports of rumours - very strong and persistent - particularly in India and Africa, that there were plans for 'mass transfer of populations' to all parts of Europe
(snip-snip-snip)
.... but the fact is, coincidence or not, massacres, a determined and planned wiping out of the remaining European populations was on the cards and being actively endorsed...

Shikasta was first published in 1979

What else was happening in 1979 (http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/1979.html)

Thatcher became the first female PM of Britain.
63 Americans are taken hostage in the American Embassy in Tehran
Iran's government becomes Islamic Republic when the Shah of Persia is forced to leave
400 Armed Sunni Islamic Muslims, seize the Grand Mosque in Mecca taking pilgrims present for the annual hajj hostage. The crisis ends after two weeks and more than 250 dead.
A mob attack destroys the US Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan
The Sahara Desert experiences snow for 30 minutes. [You go global warming!]
Rhodesia becomes Zimbabwe.

[Flash]

This below is precisely the same exact thinking and behaving as the Klu Klux Klan ones. There will always be bigots and stupid people in every race it seems


And another recent instance, this time not so funny at all:


https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=10206

Student op-ed calls white people 'an abomination'


Texas State University’s student newspaper published an op-ed Tuesday telling “white people” that “your DNA is an abomination.”



The op-ed generated intense criticism from readers who felt that it was simply designed to inflame racial tensions and should have raised red flags for the paper's editors.

Texas State University’s student newspaper published an op-ed Tuesday telling “white people” that “your DNA is an abomination.”

“When I think of all the white people I’ve ever encountered—whether they’ve been professors, peers, lovers, friends, police officers, et cetera—there is perhaps only a dozen I would consider ‘decent,’” student columnist Rudy Martinez begins the op-ed, which The University Star has not posted on its website.

The piece documents Martinez’s personal opinion of “whiteness” and “white people,” which he defines to include anyone who is “a descendant of those Europeans who chose to abandon their identity in search of something ‘new’—stolen land.”

Contending that racial categories “are used to subjugate non-white people,” Martinez complains that “in Texas, a bizarre state I have now inhabited for four years, I continuously meet individuals that either deny the existence of white privilege or fail to do something productive with it.”

Addressing white classmates, he asserts that “you were not born white,” but rather “became white” and “actively remain white” through “allegiance to a country that was never great.”

Martinez then warns white people that “the oppressive world you have built...is coming apart at the seams,” describing Donald Trump as the last gasp of white supremacy.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/campusreform/10206/TexasStateOp-Ed.jpg

[Star Tsar]

Dear Avalonians,

There is a major clue which almost everyone in the non Slavic countries miss, though even in the Slavic countries 90% of the people will miss this connection through real history and the meaning of the following.

The term or a word itself "Race".

Yes excellent as none of us are born with a number printed on ourselves....

http://eventracetiming.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Runing-Race-Timing.jpg

[Helene West]

One of the more glaring, obvious flaw with racists of color, note I'm not saying people of color, is that they Never go after those with privilege. That is how you know it's an elitist scam. For all the blather about privilege they never go after privilege. The roc's (racists of color) go after their fellow white classmates, neighbors, work mates, etc. Do you ever hear about them protesting outside the Rockefeller Foundation or talking about the Rothchilds, etc? You won't, because they are being funded and/or provocateured by elitist sponsored money or agents.

When I was a college activist many years ago class rule as the source of problems and misery was a given, today the elites have succeeded in deleting class awareness from the student activist brain, everything is race and gender. How convenient for the elites.
Roc's will go after the 18 yr old white male college student who barely has left his parents house, doesn't own anything and doesn't know jack from jack. Racists of color never go after privilege because they're too busy taking the trinkets the privileged give them.

In the past I've brought up these issues on this forum and have been called racist myself or accused of wanting to start a race war when all I've been doing is reacting to the reality around me. I'm glad other people on the forum are starting to be open to dealing with the crap as in the above posts.

It's an additional bitter pill for whites to swallow that they are being set up for discrimination and violence by whites (the elites).
Ordinary whites are like lunch meat in a sandwich. One slice of bread is racists of color and the other slice of bread are the white ruling class (elitists) who hate them as much or more than the racists of color.

[Hervé]

From something seemingly unrelated (https://www.sott.net/article/371602-Investigations-of-Trump-and-Clinton-stacked-with-conflicts-upon-conflicts-upon-conflicts-of-interest):
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/images/misc/quote_icon.png... a huge problem with bureaucrats in Washington, DC.

I would point people to a book that was written just a couple of years ago by two Johns Hopkins University scholars, called What Washington Gets Wrong (https://www.amazon.com/What-Washington-Gets-Wrong-Misconceptionsabout-ebook/dp/B01E2H52TU/?tag=breitbart035-20). They did a survey of precisely people like Peter Strzok, thousands of people who are senior government officials, and they asked them their attitudes towards all kinds of things. One of the things that stands out is, the vast majority of people in those positions they surveyed have basically contempt for the average American. They also believe - in shocking numbers - that if the American people want a constitutional course of action that they - as bureaucrats - don't agree with, then they feel justified in trying to stop it," Schweizer related.

"It's an attitude that goes to the heart of what is being debated about the Deep State. I think it's a debate we have to have because it's clearly a problem - not just in this case with Trump, but I think in general, their attitude and their willingness to, in a sense, ignore what the American people in our democratic republic want," he warned.
Basically, that's the clichéd attitude of aristocrats or any group which deem anyone else being devoid of even a parcel of soul...

[Flash]

From something seemingly unrelated (https://www.sott.net/article/371602-Investigations-of-Trump-and-Clinton-stacked-with-conflicts-upon-conflicts-upon-conflicts-of-interest):
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/images/misc/quote_icon.png... a huge problem with bureaucrats in Washington, DC.

I would point people to a book that was written just a couple of years ago by two Johns Hopkins University scholars, called What Washington Gets Wrong (https://www.amazon.com/What-Washington-Gets-Wrong-Misconceptionsabout-ebook/dp/B01E2H52TU/?tag=breitbart035-20). They did a survey of precisely people like Peter Strzok, thousands of people who are senior government officials, and they asked them their attitudes towards all kinds of things. One of the things that stands out is, the vast majority of people in those positions they surveyed have basically contempt for the average American. They also believe - in shocking numbers - that if the American people want a constitutional course of action that they - as bureaucrats - don't agree with, then they feel justified in trying to stop it," Schweizer related.

"It's an attitude that goes to the heart of what is being debated about the Deep State. I think it's a debate we have to have because it's clearly a problem - not just in this case with Trump, but I think in general, their attitude and their willingness to, in a sense, ignore what the American people in our democratic republic want," he warned.
Basically, that's the clichéd attitude of aristocrats or any group which deem anyone else being devoid of even a parcel of soul...

Someone I know, when he was a young politician, was with a losing party when he was approached for dinner with the head of the winning party. He was told during dinner that if he were to join his winning party, they would make him a renown figure in the party to attract the youth all over. AS my acquaintance was reluctant, the winning party head told him 'what is your problem son, don't you know we are the ones dictating to the people what they must want, we think for them because they cannot think for themselves, and we are right to do so'.

Sadly, my acquaintance quit politics after this encounter - he would have been an honest politician.

Contempt for the people all the way up and won in government hierarchies.

The most close minded, bitchy and knife backing people I have known in my career were working for governments. Employees in the private sectors have no time to be that low, they work too hard (except for those at the top of course, there it is the name of the game sometimes).

[Valerie Villars]

I think racism is simply the result of not looking in the mirror and taking responsibility for who you are. Tall order that will probably never be filled in all people.

There was a story in one of Joseph Campbell's books about this. How a black man sat down and talked with Joseph Campbell and went on and on about things he could or couldn't be because he was a black man in a racist society. I wish I had the exact words but Joseph somehow made this man see how he was making himself less than a man for not accepting responsibility for who he was himself. It was that man's problem and no one else's.

The last time I overtly encountered racism was at a small park by my old home. I was sort of on the edge of a "black" section and in between there was a park. I went there one day to metal detect and as I was leaving in my car with the window down, there was a car parked that I passed. In it was a black man who spewed the most venom filled hatred for me when he said "You get out of here you white b*tch."

I was so stunned I could hardly breathe. I couldn't imagine such hatred toward a stranger for no (good) reason. It really affected me.

Bill, I wonder if you had been born and raised in Ecaudor (still being British) if you would still get the same feedback.

And finally, my boyfriend, who is one of the kindest and used to be, least prejudiced people in the world, was in jail here in Louisiana for a DWI conviction. We're from New Orleans and we all generally get along down here. Anyway, he came out of jail prejudiced because he said every black person in there hated him because he was white. It was totally irrational. He was in prison, just like them, and not receiving any special treatment and they HATED him. Would constantly belittle the white boy for all the things in life they imagined he got because he was white. Really sad.

People not taking responsibility for themselves and blaming their hardships on someone else. Ultimately, we are all responsible for ourselves. It doesn't matter what others do to us. That's their problem.

[bluestflame]

similar to what we see a lot of now where seems to be a trend of trying to make other people responsible for what thier words trigger (bring up) in us , from one perspective a tremendous opportunity to examine the background programs running in our head just under the radar ( yet of course we are also responsible for the effect we have on the world )

what we seem to see from many activists (though likely instigated from "higher up the foodchain") is to attempt to suppress the sources of the external triggers under the guise of empowerment ( nothing could be further from the truth) the ones behind it seem to be utilising the method to KEEP people fixated IN the underlying trauma , a deliberate attempt to prevent the natural healing process that would result from examination and correction of "bad programming "

more to it , just a rough perspective from me ( they want us to remain wounded cos the wounds are thier joystick, triggers are the buttons on thier control panel , emotions are the battery that drives it )

ie responsible handling of triggers as opposed to how they are created purposefully in various methods of trauma based mind control, disarming , dismantling the "backdoor trojan"

emotional manipulation is one of thier greatest weapons against us because the majority of people are still not in control of them , many in fact deliberately let them run free and in control

[Mark]

Hello, Bill. Thank you for this discussion. I was perusing Avalon for the first time in a while yesterday and saw you'd started this thread. I was very happy to see it and decided it was time for me to return.

As an interesting aside, I live in San Marcos, Texas and actually know the young man, Rudy Martinez, who wrote that article. He is very young. And is also one of those arrested at Drumpf's inauguration who is now facing 60 years in jail for the damage Antifa did that day. Rudy used language that was problematic and that got in the way of his discussion about the construct "whiteness", formulated in the 1600s to bind the working class together - adding Italians and Irish etc to the white race - in solidarity against the enslaved black population, indigenous Americans and others of a darker hue.

All of that was lost in the hue and din created by his title and the use of a singular word, "ontological", which, apparently, was too abstract as the general interpretation of the article was that he wanted all whites dead.

Rudy looks Italian or Spanish himself.

Anyway, great thread.

[Bill Ryan]

Hello, Bill. Thank you for this discussion. I was perusing Avalon for the first time in a while yesterday and saw you'd started this thread. I was very happy to see it and decided it was time for me to return.

Hey, welcome back. It's very good to have you here. :star:

I'd love you to add what value, perspectives, and insights you feel you can. (There may be a lot to read! But some of it I think may be quite interesting. :) )

[Mark]

There are very specific historical causes that point to the mid-1600s. The end of Indentured Servitude, Bacon's Rebellion; a relatively successful multiracial revolt that put the fear of God into the ruling class. Of course the deeper, linguistic and philosophical aspects you mention are a part of it all. But before the United States of that time, Europeans did not consider themselves, formally, a united white race. And there were very specific economic and cultural tools used from that point on to consolidate this new cultural grouping, from land to jobs.

[Flash]

Hello, Bill. Thank you for this thread. I was perusing Avalon for the first time in a while yesterday and saw youd started this thread. I was very happy to see it and decided it was time for me to return.

As an interesting aside, I live in San Marcos, Texas and actually know the young man, Rudy Martinez, who wrote that article. He is very young. And is also one of those arrested at Drumpf's inauguration who is now facing 60 years in jail for the damage Antifa did that day. Rudy used language that was problematic and that got in the way of his discussion about the construct "whiteness", formulated in the 1600s to bind the working class together - adding Italians and Irish etc to the white race - in solidarity against the enslaved black population, indigenous Americans and others of a darker hue.

All of that was lost in the hue and din created by his title and the use of a singular word, "ontological", which, apparently, was too abstract as the general interpretation of the article was that he wanted all whites dead.

Rudy looks Italian or Spanish himself.

Anyway, great thread.

I think the construct of whiteness comes from much earlier than the 1600's Rakhyt. It certainly comes from at least at the beginning of the Roman (catholic) church when white was pitted against black (in French and latin) in terms of godlike vs evil forces, light vs darkness, naming ligt or white as being the right thing to be/do in terms or enegies.

Then you had stupid people who translated it as being applicable to skin colour to name the outside and the inside.

This way of thinking has become so ingrained (the religious one) that people from both races confounded it with good vs bad, etc. I remember a young neighbour of ours (friend with my daughter) who got very upset when I mentioned that someone had received blackmail - she cursed at me for being so racist naming the mail as from black. Her mother had to stop her and explain that it is only a word usage, having nothing to do with the skin color.

[Helene West]

Villival says above in Post #92 her reaction to the hate spewed against her was she was so stunned she could hardly breathe. Most whites would react that way because imo many whites are still in a bubble regarding race. They believe if they love or respect everybody then surely the world will reciprocate likewise.

I read over a decade ago that social scientists found that of all the races whites are the least likely to discuss race in their homes. Don't know if that is still the case since the hatred towards caucasians is becoming more upfront but my experience is that many whites are going to try and hold on tight to their kumbaya bubble.

[Bill Ryan]

Villival says above in Post #92 her reaction to the hate spewed against her was she was so stunned she could hardly breathe. Most whites would react that way because imo many whites are still in a bubble regarding race. They believe if they love or respect everybody then surely the world will reciprocate likewise.

That sparked an interesting thought sequence in myself. It went like this:


Here in Ecuador, if any Ecuadorian vented like that to me I too would be utterly shocked. (Nothing like that has ever happened to me.)
But in Ecuador, the locals wouldn't do that. They just don't behave like that. They're far more contained and introverted as a culture.
But, some of them may think it.
So if they just think it, and never express it, does that make the sentiment okay?
Is holding the sentiment 'racism', even if it's never acted on externally?
If only overt expression or action constitutes racism, then is it all just fine for people to think or believe whatever they like, as long as they never express it?

[DNA]

Rahkyt, I'm a huge fan. You are one of the smartest guys I've ever had the privilege of interacting with on this forum.
We agree on a host of abstract topics that make you a joy to converse with.
You are not only an intellect, you are a soul, you are a man with the rare ability to make soul felt abstract intuitions something everyone can understand.
I hope you remain a member here for a long time to come. :)



As an interesting aside, I live in San Marcos, Texas and actually know the young man, Rudy Martinez, who wrote that article. He is very young. And is also one of those arrested at Drumpf's inauguration who is now facing 60 years in jail for the damage Antifa did that day.

I'm not a fan of Antifa, from what I understand it is a movement funded by George Soros to help destroy the Middle Class of the United States, as the Middle Class of the United States is one of the greatest obstacles to a one world government.
It seems to me that there is a globalist agenda in regards to social engineering, and right now we are seeing the United States experiencing the full brunt of this social engineering via a controlled media.
This controlled media has attempted to create a divide in the United States, a racial divide, and now there seems to be an attempt at making a divide between the sexes as well.
I believe Antifa to be one of the tools used in creating a racial divide, and I also believe Donald Trump to be aware of many of the machinations put in place and that Donald Trump is attempting as best he can to thwart the attempts of the Globalists to destroy the Middle Class of the United States.
I'm a huge fan of Donald Trump and if we as a country are to survive the onslaught of what is to come, then folks like myself are going to have to try and communicate the situation we see to folks who are quite capable of understanding it, but as of right now appear to not.
I've never had your tact and or grace of the pen Rahkyt, I've always been more of a bull in a china shop, but there you are.

[Helene West]

Villival says above in Post #92 her reaction to the hate spewed against her was she was so stunned she could hardly breathe. Most whites would react that way because imo many whites are still in a bubble regarding race. They believe if they love or respect everybody then surely the world will reciprocate likewise.

That sparked an interesting thought sequence in myself. It went like this:


Here in Ecuador, if any Ecuadorian vented like that to me I too would be utterly shocked. (Nothing like that has ever happened to me.)
But in Ecuador, the locals wouldn't do that. They just don't behave like that. They're far more contained and introverted as a culture.
But, some of them may think it.
So if they just think it, and never express it, does that make the sentiment okay?
Is holding the sentiment 'racism', even if it's never acted on externally?
If only overt expression or action constitutes racism, then is it all just fine for people to think or believe whatever they like, as long as they never express it?



Bill

#6 almost sounds like you're heading towards social justice warrior territory and their subconscious racism crap. Which will lead to certain groups needing to be monitored for thought crimes. Guess which groups? lol

I think we all have in-laws, relatives, neighbors, teachers, etc. that we don't like but we don't act on it. I call it Life.

[Michelle Marie]

We are not really our race, our gender or anything like that, because we are much more than that. Those are just external things that people tend to identify with.

As long as people fail to see that we are eternal spirits coming to this Earth in different shapes, sizes and colors, there will continue to be backwards thinking and incredibly ignorant things such as racism.

As I was catching up on these posts about racism, I kept thinking about this one factor: identification.

When we don't realize our essential eternal spiritual nature, we identify with culture, color, gender, religion, etc. I missed that ID program somehow. I would have been taught to be racist, but it didn't stick because I had an innate sense of soul.

I did not operate as being confined to one culture or color. When I made friends outside my color/culture, I received the hate vibes from those who didn't approve. When in an ebony and ivory relationship, I was "disowned" for not following along the path of hate. Strangers would give the evil eye, do mean things because of their ignorance. When I was in the minority in a social situation, I could feel the energy of acceptance, tolerance, or hatred. I was in Detroit as the ivory person at an ebony event. It feels different to be in the minority.

When our identity shifts to our true essence and our character is expressed, that's how we are truly perceived. But when we are taught limited identity, then the idea of being different or superior or inferior plays on our sense of self-esteem and equality is obscured.

I see the divide and conquer strategies being played out with the media. Much of the racism is fabricated. I understand the ignorance, but I don't like it. I don't like that innocent people are being hurt by this type of ignorance. Not just feelings hurt, but killed.

There were many incidents where I experienced negative behavior towards me and those I care for as a result of racism. When I first saw the title of this thread, it brought up so many memories that I had to process before I could participate in the conversation.

When I tried to explain to my dad that we are souls and have been many races and cultures, I stated that he may have been black before. He just said, by God I better not have! He just doesn't know any better...yet. There must have been some change, or some seed planted, because I got to see and talk to my family again after a few years of communication isolation. They gave in. They listened to my perspective.

When I lived in France, I was around people from many diverse cultures. I experienced diversity and friendliness. The variety in language (different forms of English and how same words have different meanings, I.e. British English, American English, and Aussie English) was fascinating and often humorous. But we interacted face to face. No TV programming to influence true friendship. The vibration of loving kindness can co-exist with diversity while feeling the sameness within the heart. Love overrides all of the external stuff. We all can smile -- the universal language. 😀

Thanks, Wind! My sentiments exactly.

MM

Re: Bill--we are responsible for our vibes. (From thoughts) We can feel them. Better to lead by example and master one's own vibes. I would never cast the first stone, as my vibes are not continuously perfectly high and loving and kind. I can only change myself, and I promuse--I'm working on it!

Moods and attitudes destined for purification!

It seems that when we are in high states of vibration, we can lift the vibration of those around us. Humor, love, smiles, acts of kindness...we lift each other up with these. Sometimes, I am the one lifting vibes; other times, my vibes are lifted by others. 😊

[Antagenet]

OK. I'll give this a go. In my way of thinking, mild rascism, sexism or classism, ageism, is just a preference for your own sort. A kind of affirmative stance liking who one is and ones family and culture. Sure it is based on being against someone else, but until we have a utopian world, I think this will always happen. There are positive reasons that people like to preserve their own culture.

I don't see anything wrong with this.

Then there is the sort of racism that starts to exclude others. Being libertarian minded, I am conflicted about this. I like the idea of people being able to make any sort of group they want and including who they want in it. For example, I lived in an all female dorm in college, and really was thankful for this.

Then there is marginalizing others based on their color, race, sexual preference, and this is utterly unfair in a world of huge countries, where it is hard to find out how to exist. Being white, I was very uncomfortable being hated by the locals in Hawaii when I lived there, so I left. What I didn't do was moan and groan and feel I was entitled to encroach on someone else's culture.

Then there is hatred in all its myriad forms. Hatred which expresses in violence, murder and evil. No matter what group this is against,
it seems that hatred and violence always rears up. So for me, the real question is, what produces hatred? Why is there Evil? What is it about excluding others, hogging all the good things in life, punishing others, walling oneself off from others, what is it that causes this?

For myself I recognize that the times I have come to hate have been times I felt humiliated, particularly by people that I either liked or valued at the time. Humiliation produced a feeling of wanting revenge. I had to hang on to my religious upbringing (Catholic) and pray to not express this rage. So I see Christianity, prayer, and having a conscience as forces in myself that prevented my acting on hatred.

so much to explore here... I could go on and on....

[Ewan]

Villival says above in Post #92 her reaction to the hate spewed against her was she was so stunned she could hardly breathe. Most whites would react that way because imo many whites are still in a bubble regarding race. They believe if they love or respect everybody then surely the world will reciprocate likewise.

That sparked an interesting thought sequence in myself. It went like this:


Here in Ecuador, if any Ecuadorian vented like that to me I too would be utterly shocked. (Nothing like that has ever happened to me.)
But in Ecuador, the locals wouldn't do that. They just don't behave like that. They're far more contained and introverted as a culture.
But, some of them may think it.
So if they just think it, and never express it, does that make the sentiment okay?
Is holding the sentiment 'racism', even if it's never acted on externally?
If only overt expression or action constitutes racism, then is it all just fine for people to think or believe whatever they like, as long as they never express it?


It is still racist, the speaking is the least of it. In order to act racist it has to come from a racist mindset. Many a word of wisom in old adages, it is the thought that counts and the quantum folk would likely be the first to agree.

Another question is how do so many learn to be racist, for it is an acquired trait. Is it simple osmosis from cultural values or something more sinister, most likely a mix of both. Then why do some people resist and never become like (some of) their peers.

[Helene West]

I appreciate Antaganet's post #103 in terms of a 'spectrum' of feelings and perceptions as I feel this is very much reality.
There are many attributes today that are being called racist when they're just plain human.

[Valerie Villars]

Helene, with all due respect, it had nothing to do with living in a kumbaya bubble. It was the intensity of the hateful emotion directed at me by a stranger. It wouldn't have mattered if the person was white, yellow, brown or red. It was like being sucker punched when I was simply out enjoying the world and not bothering a soul.

[Hervé]

...

... it started long, long ago... at the pale of "humanity's" dawn... as a matter of "survival" in warding off the competition.

Things like families/tribes and the forming of clans and their distinctive clothes/tattoos/symbols/markings... that went all the way up the line to bar brawls and feuds between "clans" and/or parochial battles (any need to mention football/soccer team supporters/hooligans?).

Always the same underlying "survival" program at work, like this one which is the backbone of Agenda 21:


[...]
The next standard ritual in the 1920’s was for them to sacrifice a young white girl who was a virgin by first gang raping her and then cutting out her heart and eating it raw. The girl captured was often the daughter of their father’s business competitor to help cut off his blood line.

Always the same template, whether one considers the Goth, Slavic, Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, African, Amerindian, Middle Eastern, Asian, etc... tribes.

So, yes, re-incarnation throws a big wrench (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?93518-Charlotte-Riots...-NOT-protests....WTF-is-going-on-with-the-brewing-Race-war&p=1101994&viewfull=1#post1101994) in those programming cogwheels...

[Helene West]

Helene, with all due respect, it had nothing to do with living in a kumbaya bubble. It was the intensity of the hateful emotion directed at me by a stranger. It wouldn't have mattered if the person was white, yellow, brown or red. It was like being sucker punched when I was simply out enjoying the world and not bothering a soul.

V, I understand that. And though I said "many whites" I should have made sure you wouldn't have felt it was personalized towards you so that was careless of me and I apologize. I would not have been "stunned". Why is that? I would have been just focused on getting away from there but neither stunned nor surprised. And though you wouldn't have cared if the person was "..white, yellow, brown or black" for both you and your boyfriend it was the predictable, for this current era, black towards white.

At any rate, I had resisted for a while in participating in this thread because I saw it was going to be pretty largely general and intellectual which is fine and it has been good, but not what interests me but I caved in and started writing when I shouldn't have. I'm interested in the cultural genocide of the caucasian race that is going on by the elites, the why's of it, the disabling of whites by the psy-ops guilt tripping which includes scapegoating, disempowerment and deliberately being made into minority groups and what the prognosis of that is, and the robbing of our young by this process. Many young whites do not know how to defend themselves from the slandering and disparaging going on in the colleges towards whites. They have taken in messages that they are bad people since In Utero and they so desperately now do not want to be hated that they are self-loathing advocating for those who don't care about them at best or hate their guts at worst. There is a very active connection to me between the elites desire and need to dilute and trivialize ordinary caucasians, the part that they want non-whites to play in helping them do so and the success of the one world government.

Ten or twenty years ago I would have been more interested in general, intellectual discussions of racism. I no longer am. I feel we're on the cusp of a globalist takeover utilizing their boots on the ground infantry, the far left. If that happens the experience you had described will become more common and perhaps worse.

At any rate, I prattle on and will remove myself from the discussion as I don't feel my concerns are relevant here nor probably wanted. I hope you will accept my apology for my wording in the previous post, I was grateful for your sharing.

[petra]

4. So if they just think it, and never express it, does that make the sentiment okay?
5. Is holding the sentiment 'racism', even if it's never acted on externally?
6. If only overt expression or action constitutes racism, then is it all just fine for people to think or believe whatever they like, as long as they never express it?


This is where we want to go. Let's just hop right into the thick of it. I'd have to say - 4. NO 5. YES and 6. YES

We need our freedom of thought. If I were to lose the ability to think what I want.... well, that wouldn't be good at all.

My friend is dealing with racism at work - the Nazi kind. I try to imagine, what would I do in my workplace if someone was standing around doing the Hitler salute? I don't think I'd ask them to stop... but I might ask them to do it someplace where I cannot see them doing it.

[Valerie Villars]

Helene, don't leave on my account. There was simply clarification from me to you. That's it. And I agree with every single thing you said in the above post. It's such an obvious agenda, I don't understand how people can't see it.

I caved and posted because Bill's teacher persona tickled me and I miss learning. I was always in the world in a big way and now don't work due to the same agenda you mention above. And I really, really miss the interaction with other people. I loved waiting tables for that reason; it taught me to handle myself no matter the circumstances. And humans are interesting, comical and amazing.

[Helene West]

Helene, don't leave on my account. There was simply clarification from me to you. That's it. And I agree with every single thing you said in the above post. It's such an obvious agenda, I don't understand how people can't see it.

I caved and posted because Bill's teacher personal tickled me and I miss learning. I was always in the world in a big way and now don't work due to the same agenda you mention above. And I really, really miss the interaction with other people. I loved waiting tables for that reason; it taught me to handle myself no matter the circumstances. And humans are interesting, comical and amazing.

Don't worry V. I'm a weakling and will probably keep caving in! It's incredible that I initially joined this forum for the wonderful health threads. but I did not anticipate the 'trump phenomenon' which has turned everything askew. I'm getting angry at myself for becoming an addict to the political threads, always waiting for the next shoe to drop or looking for some good news. Thx for responding

[petra]

Another question is how do so many learn to be racist, for it is an acquired trait. Is it simple osmosis from cultural values or something more sinister, most likely a mix of both. Then why do some people resist and never become like (some of) their peers.

Maybe learning to be racist works like how I learned to by cynical. It's not exactly what I would call a good quality, but I definitely feel like I am going to be cynical forever. I think there's a mix of conditioning and something more sinister going on. At the same time though, it could also be a learning experience. I could be wrong, maybe eventually I won't be cynical anymore. If that happens though, I still think I will remember what it was like to be a cynic.

[Foxie Loxie]

I often think of the "strange fruit" we had hanging from the trees in the U.S. south pre-WWII era; children believe what they are taught while growing up, whether it makes sense or not. :facepalm: Can't remember the name of the female singer who introduced a song about it....ah, yes! I think it was Lena Horne.

[petra]

Children believe what they are taught while growing up, whether it makes sense or not. :facepalm:

Well... not necessarily. I remember my father telling me tall tales, and when I asked him "Is that true?" he'd say "NO" and laugh at me.

If I were to say to a little child of any color "This person is not as good as you are because of the color of their skin", I kind of feel like the child would end up giving me a dirty look 9/10 times.

[Wind]

I personally grew up with people from different backgrounds, with different colors. A child sees no distinction, the mind of an child adapts easily and understands diversity. Why would it hate it or even fear it? That probably helped me to become a more open-minded person, but then again I always had love in my heart towards everyone. Hate is a thing where I'm not very good at, or least I have a hard time focusing it on any individuals instead of the actions they commit.

I suppose, if people would realize that over eons they have incarnated on this planet (and in other ones too) as white, black & people of many different colors.... As male, female, they would understand themselves and the illusion of separation in a better way. Then there would be no room for ignorance or hatred, but alas... Here we are. Trying to make sense of it all, this human condition. Sometimes I wonder why things like these are even an issue, how are we at such a kindergarten level as a species. Education, we need more of it.

[Valerie Villars]

Foxie, it was Billie Holiday-no stranger to the unkinder aspects of the system. She had a lifelong struggle with heroin addiction.

When I was a very little girl, we had a maid who was black. Many had maids back then (we were not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination). Her name was Valentina. I must have been two or three and I really wanted to know the answer. It was not meant in any way ugly. I was a curious kid and I asked her if she was black all the way through.

Well, we lost a maid. The sixties were touchy times. Just like now.

[DNA]

Villival says above in Post #92 her reaction to the hate spewed against her was she was so stunned she could hardly breathe. Most whites would react that way because imo many whites are still in a bubble regarding race. They believe if they love or respect everybody then surely the world will reciprocate likewise.

That sparked an interesting thought sequence in myself. It went like this:



Here in Ecuador, if any Ecuadorian vented like that to me I too would be utterly shocked. (Nothing like that has ever happened to me.)
But in Ecuador, the locals wouldn't do that. They just don't behave like that. They're far more contained and introverted as a culture.
But, some of them may think it.
So if they just think it, and never express it, does that make the sentiment okay?

Is holding the sentiment 'racism', even if it's never acted on externally?
If only overt expression or action constitutes racism, then is it all just fine for people to think or believe whatever they like, as long as they never express it?



It is still racist, the speaking is the least of it. In order to act racist it has to come from a racist mindset. Many a word of wisom in old adages, it is the thought that counts and the quantum folk would likely be the first to agree.

Another question is how do so many learn to be racist, for it is an acquired trait. Is it simple osmosis from cultural values or something more sinister, most likely a mix of both. Then why do some people resist and never become like (some of) their peers.
I disagree Ewan. We are judged by our actions, not our thoughts.

And no one is perfect, we all have differing fleeting thoughts that are occasionally at odds with one another.

[Mike]

Villival says above in Post #92 her reaction to the hate spewed against her was she was so stunned she could hardly breathe. Most whites would react that way because imo many whites are still in a bubble regarding race. They believe if they love or respect everybody then surely the world will reciprocate likewise.

That sparked an interesting thought sequence in myself. It went like this:



Here in Ecuador, if any Ecuadorian vented like that to me I too would be utterly shocked. (Nothing like that has ever happened to me.)
But in Ecuador, the locals wouldn't do that. They just don't behave like that. They're far more contained and introverted as a culture.
But, some of them may think it.
So if they just think it, and never express it, does that make the sentiment okay?

Is holding the sentiment 'racism', even if it's never acted on externally?
If only overt expression or action constitutes racism, then is it all just fine for people to think or believe whatever they like, as long as they never express it?



It is still racist, the speaking is the least of it. In order to act racist it has to come from a racist mindset. Many a word of wisom in old adages, it is the thought that counts and the quantum folk would likely be the first to agree.

Another question is how do so many learn to be racist, for it is an acquired trait. Is it simple osmosis from cultural values or something more sinister, most likely a mix of both. Then why do some people resist and never become like (some of) their peers.
I disagree Ewan. We are judged by our actions, not our thoughts.

And no one is perfect, we all have differing fleeting thoughts that are occasionally at odds with one another.



If my daily thoughts were made public, I'd probably get locked up:) My friends and family would be horrified.

I don't even know where some of them come from. Sometimes I don't even feel like they're my thoughts! Sometimes I feel like an observer, just watching these thoughts flit thru my brain.

It doesn't really disturb me anymore. What you resist, persists. I don't fight them, I just watch them come and go.

I think it's the thoughts that you nurture and act on that's the important thing, and perhaps what we should be judged on. We're all capable of the very worst and the very best. The difference between individuals, in my view, is what cognitive aspects they choose to stress and which they choose to discard. This is like grooming the mental garden. Over time those lesser desired thoughts will dissipate some, and the job becomes easier and easier.

[Michelle Marie]

My mental garden has been groomed and cultivated by my heart and soul. Certainly, I have intentionally improved. Meditation and self-reflection develops my conscience. I can have a gatekeeper to reject thoughts that don't resonate with my soul. We are transmitters and receivers; telepathic. Feeling vibrations that sometimes get clarified in the mind as distinct thoughts. I'm attempting to transmit only pure and loving thoughts. I'm working on distinguishing between incoming and outgoing. I'm attempting to attune and stay calibrated to the highest vibrations and thoughts.

My life is full of experiments!

But I have felt the negative vibrations from hateful thoughts, and I don't choose to be that way. One thought I repeat is that I am a tuning fork for higher vibrations-pure light; pure love. Hoping that I can lift up others and not be pulled down. I'm not that good at it, but everything takes practice. I might be getting better. I do focus on improving myself at the level of causal consciousness. And I just accept others for who they are and where they are at.

When I feel hurt, I try to reflect until I understand. I don't want to take things personally, but there's no denying my feelings, either. Another practice--being the neutral observer.

Sometimes neutral, sometimes projecting or expressing, noticing the mirror of life--just plain learning.

It is natural to have thoughts and feelings and then to process them. I'm just honest with myself and go from there.
Masters teach us to master our thoughts. That's quite an endeavor!!!🌹🌞🌹

🌹🌞🌹MM🌹🎅🌹

[Flash]

With ETs going mainstream it seems, racism amongst human will finally be short lived. We will have too much to do creating racism against different ETs races.

Unless Chinese decide to align with one ET race while Europe and US align with another one, and Africa with a third one.

[Wind]

If my daily thoughts were made public, I'd probably get locked up:) My friends and family would be horrified.

I don't even know where some of them come from. Sometimes I don't even feel like they're my thoughts! Sometimes I feel like an observer, just watching these thoughts flit thru my brain.

It doesn't really disturb me anymore. What you resist, persists. I don't fight them, I just watch them come and go.

I definitely know what you mean. This could be a topic of it's own, but I certainly feel that not all of "my" thoughts originate from my Self (pardon the pun), because they feel so alien in their origin. I do believe that our brains are receivers of consciousness and also they are running the thought program which they are supposed to and we get the constant loop of thoughts from the collective unconscious or what ever name you like to use... Rupert Sheldrake talks about the morphic resonance or nature's mind.

It's just interesting indeed to observe thoughts and wonder where on Earth are they coming from. It's a meditative practice to remain as the witness and just observe the thoughts without becoming attached or identifying with them. With self-reflection we become less impulsive and we are able to make more rational and heart-based decisions instead of hasty or even terrible ones which we sometimes happen to do thanks to our limited human judgment.

[Ewan]

Villival says above in Post #92 her reaction to the hate spewed against her was she was so stunned she could hardly breathe. Most whites would react that way because imo many whites are still in a bubble regarding race. They believe if they love or respect everybody then surely the world will reciprocate likewise.

That sparked an interesting thought sequence in myself. It went like this:



Here in Ecuador, if any Ecuadorian vented like that to me I too would be utterly shocked. (Nothing like that has ever happened to me.)
But in Ecuador, the locals wouldn't do that. They just don't behave like that. They're far more contained and introverted as a culture.
But, some of them may think it.
So if they just think it, and never express it, does that make the sentiment okay?

Is holding the sentiment 'racism', even if it's never acted on externally?
If only overt expression or action constitutes racism, then is it all just fine for people to think or believe whatever they like, as long as they never express it?



It is still racist, the speaking is the least of it. In order to act racist it has to come from a racist mindset. Many a word of wisom in old adages, it is the thought that counts and the quantum folk would likely be the first to agree.

Another question is how do so many learn to be racist, for it is an acquired trait. Is it simple osmosis from cultural values or something more sinister, most likely a mix of both. Then why do some people resist and never become like (some of) their peers.
I disagree Ewan. We are judged by our actions, not our thoughts.

And no one is perfect, we all have differing fleeting thoughts that are occasionally at odds with one another.

We are judged by our peers on this level by our actions, yes. But outside the third dimension, where we have no idea the result of thought?

[Mark]

Hey, welcome back. It's very good to have you here. :star:

I'd love you to add what value, perspectives, and insights you feel you can. (There may be a lot to read! But some of it I think may be quite interesting. :) )

Thank you, Bill. I think there might be a few areas where I can add value by presenting a certain perspective that has not been presented in this thread thus far. I have read every post in it and I appreciate every single entry. I value the personal insights from a diverse range of souls who have thought deeply about this issue and its effect upon the human entity, our cultures and institutions.

It is very important that this record exists here, in Project Avalon, as one of the vaunted portals of the so-called Alternative Community (AltCom). These are fateful days and every, single one of the choices we each make is very, very important. Not only for the sake of our own souls but for our collective futures and those of our children.

[Valerie Villars]

Mike, the first part of your post made me laugh from the gut.

[Flash]

Mike, the first part of your post made me laugh from the gut.

yes, I laughed too. Then I thought, but did not say (well, now writing it):

Mike who tells you your friends and family are not already horrified by your thoughts they know about but, like you, haven't told you what they think. lolllllll
Vive la télépathie!!! lollll

[DNA]

Villival says above in Post #92 her reaction to the hate spewed against her was she was so stunned she could hardly breathe. Most whites would react that way because imo many whites are still in a bubble regarding race. They believe if they love or respect everybody then surely the world will reciprocate likewise.

That sparked an interesting thought sequence in myself. It went like this:




Here in Ecuador, if any Ecuadorian vented like that to me I too would be utterly shocked. (Nothing like that has ever happened to me.)
But in Ecuador, the locals wouldn't do that. They just don't behave like that. They're far more contained and introverted as a culture.
But, some of them may think it.
So if they just think it, and never express it, does that make the sentiment okay?

Is holding the sentiment 'racism', even if it's never acted on externally?
If only overt expression or action constitutes racism, then is it all just fine for people to think or believe whatever they like, as long as they never express it?




It is still racist, the speaking is the least of it. In order to act racist it has to come from a racist mindset. Many a word of wisom in old adages, it is the thought that counts and the quantum folk would likely be the first to agree.

Another question is how do so many learn to be racist, for it is an acquired trait. Is it simple osmosis from cultural values or something more sinister, most likely a mix of both. Then why do some people resist and never become like (some of) their peers.
I disagree Ewan. We are judged by our actions, not our thoughts.

And no one is perfect, we all have differing fleeting thoughts that are occasionally at odds with one another.

We are judged by our peers on this level by our actions, yes. But outside the third dimension, where we have no idea the result of thought?

Mike alluded to it earlier but I will out and out say it. You are not your thoughts. And when you die your thoughts will no longer appear to you as now.
This is just basic "credo mutwa" archon class 101 stuff.
You are not your thoughts, you are judged by how you react, endure and act upon such thoughts.

[Mark]

I hope you remain a member here for a long time to come. :)

Hi DNA, thank you for your kind words. I consider you a man of firm conviction and knowledge as well. It is good to be back.


I'm not a fan of Antifa, from what I understand it is a movement funded by George Soros to help destroy the Middle Class of the United States, as the Middle Class of the United States is one of the greatest obstacles to a one world government.
It seems to me that there is a globalist agenda in regards to social engineering, and right now we are seeing the United States experiencing the full brunt of this social engineering via a controlled media.

I agree without qualification. I do have a caveat though: that there is another elite Cabal that works on the opposite side of things, the Koch brothers and others being potential representatives, that seek to socially engineer as well. Perhaps there is some collusion on both sides of the coin, as their goals seem to be the same. The destruction of a thinking, involved, financially stable segment of the national and global population.


This controlled media has attempted to create a divide in the United States, a racial divide, and now there seems to be an attempt at making a divide between the sexes as well.

I would say that the controlled media is exacerbating a racial divide that is already there. That is historic and has been documented for many decades and over a century now. That has resulted in real world negative externalities and internalities that some populations of this nation and the world seem to want to forget or minimize.



I believe Antifa to be one of the tools used in creating a racial divide, and I also believe Donald Trump to be aware of many of the machinations put in place and that Donald Trump is attempting as best he can to thwart the attempts of the Globalists to destroy the Middle Class of the United States.

I'm a huge fan of Donald Trump and if we as a country are to survive the onslaught of what is to come, then folks like myself are going to have to try and communicate the situation we see to folks who are quite capable of understanding it, but as of right now appear to not.

When I left PA at the dawn of the Drumpf era, I didn't just leave this forum I left the entire AltCom. I've been AltCom since before there was AltCom. Reading Von Danniken in the 70s, experiencing psychic and spiritual revelations at young ages, Sitchen and Cooper in the 90s and many, many others, while coming to terms with the nature of my own youthful experiences in the military industrial complex, my journey has encompassed decades and a total commitment to discovering the truth and the whole truth by parsing data and creating an holistic and comprehensive world view that included all aspects of people activity. When a certain form of White Nationalism began to achieve ascendency about 4, 5 years ago, my comfort with the AltCom diminished and as it grew stronger and stronger I felt I had to retreat from what had become an increasingly hostile environment where I had very few allies with the knowledge or understanding to recognize the nature of my particular journey.

There are very few black folks with my experiences. The President you support does not support me and those who are a part of me. Not just black folks, but brown folks, red folks. People I know.

All I can say in regards to him, is that I hope that your faith in him is well-placed. By stating that, and in this I am speaking to all that support him, I am, in an even greater sense, hoping that there is some common belief and understanding out there that all people are indeed created equal, that souls possess egalitarian qualities, even if our bodies do not in these worldly cultures and material spaces and places.

[Ewan]

We are judged by our peers on this level by our actions, yes. But outside the third dimension, where we have no idea the result of thought?

Mike alluded to it earlier but I will out and out say it. You are not your thoughts. And when you die your thoughts will no longer appear to you as now.


Yes indeed. And I was alluding to acting upon those thoughts as opposed to watching them fly by. I hope this clarifies things. Act on the thought and the butterflies wings tremble.

[TargeT]

The President you support does not support me and those who are a part of me. Not just black folks, but brown folks, red folks. People I know.

Is this based on policy, or actions, or history or what?

I (and I assume I'm not alone in this thought process) do not see how what you are saying is backed by actions of the current president . I know there is a large volume of vitriol on both sides of the false D/R dichotomy, but how much of it is based on actions and current situations?


is This (http://www.dw.com/en/the-racist-comments-of-donald-trump/a-40127122) the proof? Or maybe This (https://newrepublic.com/minutes/144992/donald-trump-will-never-stop-racist-president)? I'm reading these articles (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/trumps-long-history-of-racism-w497876) and they seem like hit pieces with very little actual backing.

I would assume that by now we would either see this as an injected divide and conquer issue (my vote), or a provable case of racism.

[petra]

We are judged by our peers on this level by our actions, yes. But outside the third dimension, where we have no idea the result of thought?

Mike alluded to it earlier but I will out and out say it. You are not your thoughts. And when you die your thoughts will no longer appear to you as now.


Yes indeed. And I was alluding to acting upon those thoughts as opposed to watching them fly by. I hope this clarifies things. Act on the thought and the butterflies wings tremble.

I consider it might be possible for powerful thoughts in this level to sort of "bleed over" to other places that overlap. By powerful thoughts I mean ones with a lot of emotion attached too. Violent thoughts especially. We all know what feelings are like - they're powerful and we can feel it. Maybe what wasn't possible before could be now. I consider that about other things as well... because it's certainly possible for something which was once safe to cease to be safe any longer.

Violent thoughts I've considered at some length, because I don't seem to have any. I only recall two violent thoughts I had ever, and one of those is regretting not punching someone. The other was more scary, I actually visualized a violent thought about punching a friend of mine in the nose when she made a snotty remark to me, and the image kindof frightened me. A few days later the girl I visualized had a series of unfortunate occurrences which coincidentally made her look like she had been punched in the face a bunch of times. I remember joking she looked like Rocky...I guess we can both be pretty snotty. Anyway my point is, maybe it's possible for there to be some kind of "side effects" at this level.

[DNA]

I agree without qualification. I do have a caveat though: that there is another elite Cabal that works on the opposite side of things, the Koch brothers and others being potential representatives, that seek to socially engineer as well. Perhaps there is some collusion on both sides of the coin, as their goals seem to be the same. The destruction of a thinking, involved, financially stable segment of the national and global population.
Indeed.
I will tell you without hesitation that I am absolutely through with partisan politics.
The politicians for the last four or five decades have been subverted and controlled.
This has been done by the intelligence agencies, especially the CIA.
The CIA's job is not to monitor foreign threats but to monitor,spy and control domestic policy and the men who make that policy.
Who gives the CIA it's orders? We can see with how at odds the CIA is with Trump that it is not the President of the USA who controls the CIA.
I'll tell you who gives the CIA it's orders. It's guys like this.
http://impiousdigest.com/wp-content/uploads/david-rockefeller-nwo.jpg

The CIA and the banking elite control the media as well.

http://2012patriot.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/david_rockefeller_msm_world_government_quote1.jpg

The fact that we see the deep state at such odds with Donald Trump is evidence enough to me to at least consider that he is not in line with the banking elite and their invasion of the middle east war agendas and their destroying the middle class of America agendas.



I would say that the controlled media is exacerbating a racial divide that is already there. That is historic and has been documented for many decades and over a century now. That has resulted in real world negative externalities and internalities that some populations of this nation and the world seem to want to forget or minimize.
Indeed, but do you want to burn it all down in the hopes that doing so will make it easier to start from scratch and make it right?
The elite would like us to think so. I on the other hand do not want that. Things are not perfect but when have they ever been?
You and I are of about the same age, we have seen amazing changes happen in our life times. Great things.
These changes have come quite rapidly if you think about where things where when we were kids.


When I left PA at the dawn of the Drumpf era, I didn't just leave this forum I left the entire AltCom. I've been AltCom since before there was AltCom. Reading Von Danniken in the 70s, experiencing psychic and spiritual revelations at young ages, Sitchen and Cooper in the 90s and many, many others, while coming to terms with the nature of my own youthful experiences in the military industrial complex, my journey has encompassed decades and a total commitment to discovering the truth and the whole truth by parsing data and creating an holistic and comprehensive world view that included all aspects of people activity. When a certain form of White Nationalism began to achieve ascendency about 4, 5 years ago, my comfort with the AltCom diminished and as it grew stronger and stronger I felt I had to retreat from what had become an increasingly hostile environment where I had very few allies with the knowledge or understanding to recognize the nature of my particular journey.
I'm guessing you are talking about the tea party. I kind of felt that way about the tea party as well. The tea party seemed to be a reaction against the election of a black President. I do not associate that movement with Trump.
That movement has not endeared itself to Trump, look how at odds Paul Ryan has been with Trump.

There are very few black folks with my experiences. The President you support does not support me and those who are a part of me. Not just black folks, but brown folks, red folks. People I know.
Let me ask you this. How did Hilary and the left support those same people?
Bill Clinton's NAFTA and trade agreements like it have gutted American manufacturing. Environmental accords have acted to make the USA as completely unacceptable in terms of what businesses would have to do in order to appease draconian global warming laws while the rest of the world would not have to abide by them.
People of all colors need jobs not social services. I've seen up close and personal in so far as social services and what welfare and the like do to people. I grew up on welfare as a kid. It doesn't help people it retards them in their progress. I live next to one of the largest Native American reservations in the world. I deal with Natives daily who are not being done any favors in terms of reservations, welfare and isolation. Social services and welfare will no longer exist if the economy continues to be as gutted and strangled as it has become. And then where will folks be? Things will be 100X times worse than the great depression if the economy collapses and those social services are terminated.


All I can say in regards to him, is that I hope that your faith in him is well-placed. By stating that, and in this I am speaking to all that support him, I am, in an even greater sense, hoping that there is some common belief and understanding out there that all people are indeed created equal, that souls possess egalitarian qualities, even if our bodies do not in these worldly cultures and material spaces and places.

I don't see Trump as a racist. I just don't.
Trump doesn't have to be an equality activist to prove he is not a racist.
PS
I borrowed the Rockefeller pics from Bluegreen, thanks. :)

[Mark]

The President you support does not support me and those who are a part of me. Not just black folks, but brown folks, red folks. People I know.[...]
I would assume that by now we would either see this as an injected divide and conquer issue (my vote), or a provable case of racism.

If you don't see it I can't help you. That is actually not my issue nor concern. I'm not here to argue anyone's position. As I've perused this thread I've been very happy to see that people have allowed each other their opinions and understandings without being belligerent or ugly about it. I hope that shall continue. My response about the president was based upon my perspective as a black American man of a certain socioeconomic level. And upon my perusal of a wealth of information. I do not require the validation of anyone here to support or dismiss what I know to be true. It should be very clear by now that perspective is everything. That "truth" depends upon where you sit. Ultimate Truth is something else altogether.

[Flash]

The President you support does not support me and those who are a part of me. Not just black folks, but brown folks, red folks. People I know.[...]
I would assume that by now we would either see this as an injected divide and conquer issue (my vote), or a provable case of racism.

If you don't see it I can't help you. That is actually not my issue nor concern. I'm not here to argue anyone's position. As I've perused this thread I've been very happy to see that people have allowed each other their opinions and understandings without being belligerent or ugly about it. I hope that shall continue. My response about the president was based upon my perspective as a black American man of a certain socioeconomic level. And upon my perusal of a wealth of information. I do not require the validation of anyone here to support or dismiss what I know to be true. It should be very clear by now that perspective is everything. That "truth" depends upon where you sit. Ultimate Truth is something else altogether.

I personally am very interested in your truth Rakhyt, from your perspective. when do we have the opportunity to truly listen at what others on the other sides of A fence, can tell us about their experience.

And those experiences have to do with biaises, policies, culture, but definitely not with politics in my views. Political party will only use what is already ingrained in people.

I was talking a deep talk with a black woman, friend of mine lately. We were having coffee in a coffee shop, talking about difficulties of having good positions and making decent money. I was telling her about the sexism I often encountered in my career, and now the ageism, which is incredibly very much prevalent, and how it made me feel so insecure and at some point doubt about myself.

She started telling me about racism, you know, the racism that those doing it are not even aware they are acting racists.

Having been raised in a country of black people, and being very well educated, she used to have full confidence in herself in her country of origin. She told me that nothing could stop her, she truly believed she could succeed in anything she decided to do. A bit like some North American thing of themselves.

So she decided to immigrate to Canada, despite the odds against her being admitted. And, as she knew she could, because she did not doubt herself, well, she did and came to Canada as an full fledge immigrant from the start.

Once here, she started to look for jobs. The only jobs she would find were little bit above minimal salary. Not enough to pay for her living expense, so she got 2 jobs, day and evening. We are talking here of a University graduate.

She continued to apply for jobs, but was over and over and over again rejected.

Then, at her two workplaces, she started to hear subtle comments on her skills, her abilities, her being different because not originally Canadian, her not understanding our culture, whatever. So many comments over time that she started to doubt herself.

Also, being a pretty woman, men would chase her, often low life men who thought a black woman would take them since no white ones would, not seeing that it had nothing to do with the women's color but rather with their own behavior. So she started to think she did not deserve that much in terms of companion you see. Day in day out, tens of comments or non verbal cues or behaviors, everywhere.

She was slowly telling me all she lived, and ended up saying : you cannot imagine how destructive racism is. You have no clue, it is soooooo insidious.

What she was sharing felt to me like sexism in a Middle East countries, which I had lived (not in turkey, Turks are no more sexists than Italians, but definitely in Jordan).

There, you cannot talk to men, if you do, your words are like puff of air passing by, no grabbing any of your thoughts, no interest, no nothing, you do not exist, you are just a stupid woman. And with time, you start feeling stupid (and I very well know here in Canada that I am not stupid at all).

It is really like constant mental torture imposed by a sadistic narcissistic husband to his wife years over years over years. she ends up with no more inner power, completely destroyed.

Same with racism or sexism, I think

[DNA]

I would assume that by now we would either see this as an injected divide and conquer issue (my vote), or a provable case of racism.

If you don't see it I can't help you. That is actually not my issue nor concern.

Okay, I'll bite.
Obama invades, kills and displaces tens of millions of people.
Yet Trump is the bad guy when he ends all of this? Think about that.
Note the countries invaded and wars that have been started during Trump's tenure?
What about the rhetoric of "change" Obama ran his campaign on?
Obama out bombed, killed and invaded his predecessor, so what change was he talking about?

You are living in a dream world Rahkyt. A world where Obama is a good person.
My guess is you left the alternative community due to cognitive dissonance, you saw the truth and refused to believe it.

[Flash]

I would assume that by now we would either see this as an injected divide and conquer issue (my vote), or a provable case of racism.

If you don't see it I can't help you. That is actually not my issue nor concern.

Okay, I'll bite.
Obama invades, kills and displaces tens of millions of people.
Yet Trump is the bad guy when he ends all of this? Think about that.
Note the countries invaded and wars that have been started during Trump's tenure?
What about the rhetoric of "change" Obama ran his campaign on?
Obama out bombed, killed and invaded his predecessor, so what change was he talking about?

You are living in a dream world Rahkyt. A world where Obama is a good person.
My guess is you left the alternative community due to cognitive dissonance, you saw the truth and refused to believe it.

Maybe you should not bite DNA

Obama obeyed, Trump obeys, they all obey to a pyramidal structure in which they are pretty much at the bottom of the top.

Racism has nothing to do with politics, it has to do with culture and personal or group entitlement. Most of Rome population were slaves. Vicking would invade, kidnap and sell the slaves to Rome where some would be made ennuques to be sold in Sultanat and Harems as guards. That is where racism starts. Entitlement to use free labor without giving any condition in return for slavery, or to use subgroups in order to get either their labor or their goods for a very cheap return to them.

In these terms, we are discriminated against if we think of the hierarchy to which Obama and Trump obey. If you were listening to the very rich, or to some politicians, this is exactly what they think of us, we are the labor, the unthinking masses to be used, stolen, etc. This is racism often called discrimination.

Now, there is no way I will ever think that there is no culturally based racism based on race differences in North america, no way, I have seen too much of it myself.

[Helene West]

"....When a certain form of White Nationalism began to achieve ascendency about 4, 5 years ago...,


"White Nationalism"? As if "nationalism" alone wasn't bad enough! Two words, both defamed. Nationalism traditionally meant patriotism, pride in one's country. Or at least it did when I was younger. It could possibly today be expanded to also mean protectiveness of one's country in the face of (globalist) assault/attack. But it is increasingly being used in a pejorative way, mainly because of it purposely linked with the word "white". There are among those whom you purport to speak for that would place the word "white" in the dictionary as a synonym for the word "evil" if they could get away with it.

Two words, both individually defamed and now strung together for a double dose of defamation. Strange that I've been white for decades and never met a 'white nationalist'. Could it be because there is no such thing? At least not in reality, but as a racist construct it exists along with "white privilege" and other weaponized buzz phrases sourced from jealousy, envy, fear and a desire to hurt - at best to shut up and disempower, at worst to eradicate, caucasian people.

Today's linguistic elaboration of defamation of a race of people comes to us in varying communication media. It's coupled with classes and workshops in "whiteness" (the badness thereof) in our educational system. Two large institutions/industries, media and education, both embodying a degree of authority, allow, some would be tempted to say, encourage, this. And who owns these institutions/industries? The owners of these industries are giving a wide berth of freedom and safety for the defamatory techniques and activities of those who are cavalierly making use of them. What's more, this latter group seems to be blissfully unaware that they are relying on the backing of the richest white boys in the world in having this freedom to publicly nurture their linguistic and activist psy-ops.

That's a dangerous basket to put one's eggs in.

It's not entirely true what you say about the divide. At least not amongst activists it wasn't. I was a socialist/feminist in college post vietnam war and I attended many functions of black, latin american and the budding gay movement, AND vice-verse.

Why did we feel unity with eachother back then as opposed to now???
Because back then class oppression was seen as the source of oppressions. Today everything is race and gender. How galactically convenient for the (white) ruling class of the west. (the east has its own ruling class). The corporate, international oligarchs know the omission of class consciousness in activism and the emphasis on race and gender as the source of oppression is a major form of protection for themselves. Ordinary whites are the patsies, the sacrifice, the distraction, while the western oligarchs press on with their one world government goals almost unnoticed, existence denied by the race and gender crowd. The irony of life! Those who blather on about white privilege doom themselves to protecting it.

I've already typed too much. I'm getting older and the predictable focus on survival is predominating over caring much more about all this anyhow. Pray the elites don't panic and pull the economic plug... On the other hand if they do, we ALL will find out right quick what our real priorities should have been... thx

[petra]

She was slowly telling me all she lived, and ended up saying : you cannot imagine how destructive racism is. You have no clue, it is soooooo insidious.

....

It is really like constant mental torture imposed by a sadistic narcissistic husband to his wife years over years over years. she ends up with no more inner power, completely destroyed.

Same with racism or sexism, I think

Very well put Flash. This story puts a lot into perspective. Torture.. insidious.... harsh words, but if the shoe fits. If only we would realize that by hurting other people in this way, we're only hurting ourselves in the long run.

EDIT: Side thought... If I were to offend anyone in this way, without realizing it, even in the slightest, I sure would appreciate if they told me so!!

[Mark]

By way of explanation, I will use folks quotes to highlight certain ideas pertaining to racism but I am not responding just to those quotes but also to the larger audience as well. I will not respond to personal attacks.


I will tell you without hesitation that I am absolutely through with partisan politics.

Yes. I understand. That is fine and your choice. I am not through with them. In my life, directly, and the life of my children and extended family, politics plays a real and valid role. If I do not engage in politics, then my interests are not represented and it affects me materially. I suppose it is nice if your life is beyond such things but mine is not. Nor are the lives of those I love.

What many do not realize is how much politics affects those who are not a part of the "American Dream". It is literally life and death. What, to people of the majority culture, are merely slight differences in position between the two parties, each leading to an insufferable and totalitarian end, are to folks upon whom those positions are enacted, major, life-changing policy shifts that either improve or reduce their quality of life. There is a wealth of information and statistics out there that show it.

Knowing this space, many would scoff at statistics provided by government bodies and organizations you may consider "Fake News" so I have no intention of going that route. This has been a personalized discussion throughout, so I am going to keep it that way in my contributions. Perhaps some of y'all's lived experience, driving over freeway arches beneath which hovels and ghettos are huddled, or through city streets where sullen young men lurk, has given you some indication that not everyone has access to the same perception of reality. That there is, literally, another world directly beneath the one that some of you may inhabit, that was created by more than just the depredations of a capitalist class system, but by some other greater, all-encompassing system of exclusion and repression.

But then, since they wear combat boots and street gear, perhaps some think their bootstraps are strong enough to pull themselves up by? My story is different. I grew up in the military industrial complex, on Air Force bases around the world, going to Department of Defense schools, receiving one of the best educations possible for children who come from no means. I have had opportunities that even other black kids who came up the same way I did, did not have. Those of us who are blessed or cursed that way have a responsibility to those who have not had the same opportunities. To represent a perspective that is not widely shared or known. To show what the possibilities of this great nation truly are and should be, if we only open to it instead of shut it down and wall it off.


The fact that we see the deep state at such odds with Donald Trump is evidence enough to me to at least consider that he is not in line with the banking elite and their invasion of the middle east war agendas and their destroying the middle class of America agendas.

That is all well and good. I applaud his stance and, to a certain extent, I agree that this is what it looks like. But, to address the aspect of racism implicit in this subject, what is troubling is that he embraces policies that are being enacted that will have a demonstrably negative effect upon black, brown and red populations. When it doesn't have to be that way. He supports groups that, if empowered further than they already have been, will actively attempt to reduce the quality of my life and the lives of those I love. If this is what the new world is going to look like once the Cabals hold over the American political, economic and cultural system is broken, it is not in my interest to support it. Lives are and will continue to be lost and homes and people broken. Black, brown and red people, disproportionately so.


I'm guessing you are talking about the tea party.

No. That was in 2008-9 right after Obama's first election. What stands out as a turning point in my mind - in the AltCom specifically - is when Red Ice Radio interviewed John Lash.

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Much of what he spoke about in this video, I'd been teaching in my Intro to World Geography classes since the mid-1990s. That demographic shift, the urbanism of Europe as well as economic stratification had made europe-descended folk less fertile than other ethnic/racial groups, sending their birth rates into a spiral and below the replacement rate in most European countries as well as european-majority nations like the USA and Australia.

This is also something that the KKK and Aryan Nations have highlighted as well for a long time. What they fail to also make note of is that this has often been a side-effect of economic and personal choices, as children are more expensive and distractive from the complete gamut of urban experience, it seems. The idea of white genocide as something being enacted upon whites is, therefore, questionable. Also, the fear of being a demographic minority has led to a mass projection/psychosis by whites, as it seems many are truly falling into the trap of believing that whites would be overtly persecuted by masses of black, brown and red folk. In fact, this is the kind of perceptive error that has always led to what ended up being mass murder by majority populations upon minority populations in the United States of America. As has always been the case, sparse evidence, in the modern case, videos of blacks or browns being prejudice, or instances of whites being hurt by blacks or browns, is used to justify the further repression of those who have been historically oppressed. We are indeed at a critical juncture in the history of this nation. Where the past has caught up to the present and, as is always and ever the case the world across, those born into the generations of payment rail uselessly against fate and destiny.



Let me ask you this. How did Hilary and the left support those same people?
Bill Clinton's NAFTA and trade agreements like it have gutted American manufacturing. Environmental accords have acted to make the USA as completely unacceptable in terms of what businesses would have to do in order to appease draconian global warming laws while the rest of the world would not have to abide by them.

j0uCrA7ePno

m-pzqMUTyfI

Let’s keep it moving.


People of all colors need jobs not social services. I've seen up close and personal in so far as social services and what welfare and the like do to people. I grew up on welfare as a kid. It doesn't help people it retards them in their progress. I live next to one of the largest Native American reservations in the world. I deal with Natives daily who are not being done any favors in terms of reservations, welfare and isolation. Social services and welfare will no longer exist if the economy continues to be as gutted and strangled as it has become. And then where will folks be? Things will be 100X times worse than the great depression if the economy collapses and those social services are terminated.

Thank you for sharing your experience. It is valid, as far as it goes. Do I have to talk about the repression experienced on Reservations? The ways in which they are limited in their ability to gain control of their destinies? To apply economic solutions to their problems? Their relationship to the US Government? Since you live next to one, you should be very familiar with the issues. The same types of issues are endemic to other communities as well, all disaffected populations share similar stories and solidarity based upon the same experiences of direct and indirect genocide, as do Americans in general these days.

But the Robots are going to take all the “good” jobs (https://www.recode.net/2017/3/28/15094424/jobs-eliminated-new-robots-workforce-industrial). People these days need something more than just jobs. They need freedom.


I don't see Trump as a racist. I just don't.

Trump doesn't have to be an equality activist to prove he is not a racist.

I would not expect you to see him as a racist, DNA. It is all about perspective and where you sit. We sit in different spaces in these physical bodies, born into our peculiar circumstances for reasoning beyond our ken. Doing what we are doing because we are fated to do so, in the Here and Now.

[Mark]

I'm going to take a break from responding to posts for a moment. I will get to all of your posts, I look forward to it.

I have and will continue to speak about perspective, about differing interpretations of data and perceptions of value and meaning, as these are ontological queries into the nature of reality, as we live it day to day. Ideologies and mores gird our thoughts daily in a sub-conscious process that for most becomes much like the heart beating, or the breath going in and out day to day, unconscious and relegated to the status of divine dispensation, in our arrogant disregard of the gift of life and preoccupation with the minutia of "meaningful" existence. This minutia represents the "devil in the details", that occupies the preponderance of our attention. What happened at the job today, my wife has the flu, my kid got suspended today, he said she said down the hall around the corner.

Racial experience exemplifies this perceptive blindness we each co-inhabit and co-create daily. Empathy is a primary requirement in the acquisition of knowledge, which becomes understanding and then, through the application of heart-centered compassion, becomes wisdom.

I wake up and get dressed, leave my house to go to work. At the stop light, I happen to look over at a lady in the car next to me. She meets my gaze and looks away quickly, then I see the lock in her car go down. I return my eyes to the road. A little later, a car veers into my lane and I honk. As I move up by the guy, an older man, he looks at me, shakes his fist and I can see his mouth moving. He is still screaming and gesticulating to himself as I leave him behind.

I arrive at work and breath deeply before getting out of the car, looking into the mirror, raising my brow and smiling. I center and ground consciously, releasing thought and misgiving to prepare for the day.

I get out and enter the building, speaking to those I know jovially, adjusting my auric output to openness and caring, making sure to meet eyes and respond individually, reinforcing the sense of community. I get on the elevator and a woman I don't know is there. She sees me and her eyes widen a bit before she looks away and moves to the side of the elevator, clasping her purse firmly to her side and staring straight ahead. During the day, all progresses usually, a story about Drumpf comes on the radio and, since the job is tense around politics, people are silent for the most part but eyes rise above cubicles and dog whistles blare loudly. I go to get a drink of water at the cooler and interrupt a small group of liberals talking quietly. I laugh at something they say and the group breaks up and each moves back to their spaces.

At lunch I go out alone and see a group of my coworkers behind me as we enter a restaurant. I sit first and order, and see them order about five minutes later with another wait staff on the other side of the restaurant. We only have half an hour but I make note of the fact that all of their orders came 10 minutes before mine did. The afternoon passes relatively uneventfully except for a short meeting after work, where the boss remonstrates the staff for talking about politics around the water cooler. I hadn't seen him around and wonder idly who told him. It could have been anyone, really.

That evening, as I walk the dog into the park I ignore numerous instances of the "calling of the children" and the belligerent stares of protective fathers. Later, returning home and going down the street a woman at the other end of the block crosses the street and continues along her path. As I near my house a police cruiser slows down and I do not look but sense the eyes hard on me. I make it home and close the door, lean on it and close my eyes, breathing deeply.

The above is a dramatization of different times and spaces in my daily life. While this particular series of events has never happened in exactly this order on any day of my life, each event that you see represented here has happened countless times in my life. Beyond count. Over and over again.

In a nation where so many people consider themselves to be individuals, far too many seem to be acting out some sort of program. Engaging in the same seeming thought pattern and reaction as others a quarter or a half or a full nation away.

[Mark]

I personally am very interested in your truth Rakhyt, from your perspective. when do we have the opportunity to truly listen at what others on the other sides of A fence, can tell us about their experience.

Thank you, Flash. The view from the other side of the street may be a bit different, but some humans are blessed with the ability to feel compassion, which allows them to understand that their version of reality is not necessarily the only version. Some humans do not have that ability and that is our true battle, the true division, in this world, as I hope some folks recall at some point.


I was talking a deep talk with a black woman, friend of mine lately.

Thank you also for sharing that tale. I have heard similar tales from Africans and folks from the Caribbean who have come to the US of A over the years as well. As a black American male with a very extensive educational background, I have been underemployed now for decades. It is not because of my qualifications, as I am qualified for many things and certainly all jobs I have ever applied for. But I do not get the jobs. It seems like a conspiracy of some sort.


It is really like constant mental torture imposed by a sadistic narcissistic husband to his wife years over years over years. she ends up with no more inner power, completely destroyed.

Same with racism or sexism, I think

Yeh. They say many black folks in America have PTSD (https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/culturally-speaking/201509/the-link-between-racism-and-ptsd) just because we have to deal with racism all day every day. Not to mention high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, heart conditions (http://www.heart.org/HEARTORG/Conditions/More/MyHeartandStrokeNews/African-Americans-and-Heart-Disease_UCM_444863_Article.jsp#.WjwPNN-nGDI) and other negative internalities. It's a hard knock life.

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[Mark]

Hello, Helene. I believe this may be the first time you and I have engaged directly, although I was well aware of your presence before I left PA, having read many of your posts of the time. I’d like to preface my comments by stating that I respect your perspective and position, as well as your passion in this area of people activity. Thank you for engaging so directly.


"White Nationalism"? As if "nationalism" alone wasn't bad enough! Two words, both defamed. Nationalism traditionally meant patriotism, pride in one's country. Or at least it did when I was younger. It could possibly today be expanded to also mean protectiveness of one's country in the face of (globalist) assault/attack. But it is increasingly being used in a pejorative way, mainly because of it purposely linked with the word "white". There are among those whom you purport to speak for that would place the word "white" in the dictionary as a synonym for the word "evil" if they could get away with it.

I use the phrase “White Nationalism” because that is how it has been presented and is familiar to most as being described. Insofar as your description above goes, it is accurate. If it is being used as a pejorative, it is because it represents a movement to return to a past that this nation has been attempting to move beyond consciously for at least a century and a half. A past that encompasses what many see as a proud and respectable history of violence and oppression, one well in line with the general imperial and colonialist historical context within which America was birthed.

I understand that pride. We are all inculcated with it for most of our lives, to greater or lesser degrees, here in the United States. I myself, being an Air Force brat who lived overseas, had to stand stock still twice a day as a child on American bases overseas as America the Beautiful, God Bless America, the Star Spangled Banner and other nationalistic songs blared over loudspeakers and the cars around me ceased their movement in respect. This is deep conditioning in nationalism. But, I would submit to you, it was also a deep conditioning in support of “White Nationalism” as well, a subliminal and pervasive “tuning” of an elaborate and “mind-controlling” nature that was reinforced on a daily basis by systemic programming.

I only speak for myself. Often, I speak in generalities that evoke a collective experience of blackness or Otherness, yes. But I do not purport to speak for any groups or any other individual who may share some of my experiences because, obviously, I cannot. I can say that there are indeed groups of blacks and reds that I am familiar with that espouse a form of race hatred. That call white people “The Devil” collectively, that call for the carrying of arms for protection and self-defense.

But there is a difference and I am quite certain that you are well aware of what that difference is.

That there is a well-documented and storied history of individual, mob and systemic attacks against blacks and reds particularly in this nation and browns and yellows also. A history that is not dead, to people of those persuasions.

There is no similar history to "justify" the unjustifiable, for whites. To hate systemically.

Many of us of the Global Majority who come from Ancestor-based traditions, where those of our dead who lived before us remain with us, observing, interacting and advising through myriad magical, imminently natural means, live every day as the culmination of all who have come before, even if it is not consciously realized. Science calls it Epigenetics, now. And it affects the Oppressed and the Oppressors alike in ways that should be clear to anyone who thinks about it in-depth. While oppression and repression are not new among humans, right here and now, we are dealing with 400-plus years of a particularly vile and onerous form of such that seems to arise for reckoning at different periods of time, each representing a higher iteration of a cyclic process.

The ongoing genocide against the native people of this continent. That began so long ago and continues today. The Haitian Revolution at the end of the 18th Century and beginning of 19th ended slavery in every part of the Americas except for the US of A, which responded by doubling down on human trafficking. Being “sold down the river” was being sent to the worst area of enslavement; in the cane fields of Louisiana, where life expectancy for the enslaved was drastically reduced and where one side of my mother's people came from in the not-so-distant past. The Mexican-American War which I, as a 6th generation black Texan, view as an attempt by Mexico to halt the spread of slavery. It was too late though, as my direct ancestors on both sides were already here, leading to my eventual birth in the West Texas red dirt and big sky lands of the lower Panhandle.

I "remember the Alamo" alright, see it almost every time I go to the Riverwalk in Downtown San Antonio. The Civil War and both World Wars, where America has had the chance - and has in many ways - transcended those ancient material excesses and attacks against black and red bodies. Wars which failed to bring the promise of this nation to full fruition for its oppressed populations, even those representatives of those populations that fought and gave up blood, limbs and lives in those conflicts. Then came home to the racism they didn't experience overseas, which they rebelled against! And paid the price (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42116688). Resulting in the Red Summer of 1919 (http://www.pbs.org/thisfarbyfaith/popup/3_red_summer.html). The strange fruit of black bodies hanging from poplar trees.

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Bodies whose descendants are still here. The vast majority of whom claim THIS country as their only home because their bloodlines, like mine, are comprised of the seed of white slave masters, native American indigenous and African enslaved women, making us quintessentially American, the living proof of the promise of this nation to become something more than the sum of its parts.

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I would submit to you that those material excesses have been refined to a point of near perfection, so much so that a vast number of the majority population actually do not believe that the nation that they love continues to mistreat its Othered populations! Or that they are not the authors of their own disenfranchisement! Because of their intellectual deficiencies, or lack of willpower and intention, as well as many, many, many other stereotypes and mental gymnastics designed to continue generations of oppression. Entire sciences (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism) have sprung up around these belief systems that have been debunked over and over again.

So “white” and “evil” being deemed synonymous? I would not agree with that. The truth is more nuanced, because people are more nuanced. History is more nuanced.

White people as a whole are not evil, the system itself is, and evil people take advantage of the built-in preferences. Take on the ideology of "White Supremacy" because it reduces competition and satisfies their need to be all-powerful within a pre-existing context. How that looks, is that they and people like them, other white people, are empowered. Systematically. They are in charge and occupy the positions of economic stability and excess, success and power. Because most people across the world are indeed tribal. Including European-descended folks. And white psychopaths rule. They employ white, black, red, yellow and brown sociopaths who do their will. Who repress white, black, yellow, brown and red empaths, which is as it has been since the Hunter/Gatherer days.

The system was designed that way. That design has been continually reinforced for almost 400 years because it has been successful and serves as a "transport" of sorts, a "time-machine" that carries these ancient, tribal imperatives from prehistory into the future, protected by increasingly sophisticated modalities of transmission of envelopment with corporate and technological carriers/containers. It is a system that has continually produced succedent populations of whites here in America generation after generation who really do have it better as a group. Who really did benefit from that compact between the Elite of the nascent colonies that became America in the 1600s and the poor Irish and others who found common cause with blacks against the class-based economic system.

Still, and as quiet as it is kept, even poor whites today possess economic power superior to that of minority groups (https://qz.com/1040841/poor-whites-feel-worse-about-life-than-poor-blacks-even-though-theyre-better-off/) even though they apparently don't realize it.

Alongside the hate, there was also love. Included with the violence were instances of compassion. If none of it would have happened, the world would not be what it is and we would not be here to witness it and to engage in these interactions, which are so very important as we move forward. Even in our division there is unity, even in our separateness there is togetherness.


Strange that I've been white for decades and never met a 'white nationalist'. Could it be because there is no such thing? At least not in reality, but as a racist construct it exists along with "white privilege" and other weaponized buzz phrases sourced from jealousy, envy, fear and a desire to hurt - at best to shut up and disempower, at worst to eradicate, caucasian people.

Ok. May I ask who is attempting to eradicate Caucasian people?


Today's linguistic elaboration of defamation of a race of people comes to us in varying communication media. It's coupled with classes and workshops in "whiteness" (the badness thereof) in our educational system. Two large institutions/industries, media and education, both embodying a degree of authority, allow, some would be tempted to say, encourage, this. And who owns these institutions/industries? The owners of these industries are giving a wide berth of freedom and safety for the defamatory techniques and activities of those who are cavalierly making use of them. What's more, this latter group seems to be blissfully unaware that they are relying on the backing of the richest white boys in the world in having this freedom to publicly nurture their linguistic and activist psy-ops.

So white people are genociding white people? Aren't whites one cohesive and monumental group? As blacks are? Or browns, reds and yellows? Isn't it much more nuanced? These questions are only slightly facetious, I want to understand clearly. Thank you for your time and attention.


It's not entirely true what you say about the divide. At least not amongst activists it wasn't. I was a socialist/feminist in college post vietnam war and I attended many functions of black, latin american and the budding gay movement, AND vice-verse.

Why did we feel unity with eachother back then as opposed to now???

I would agree with you and DNA about the massive PsyOp that has been proceeding for some time now and that has been exascerbated by the usual tropes, dog whistle politics, police depradations, increasing inequities at every level of society. The divide between white and black as the two extreme ends of the spectrum has been stoked by policies that are further alienating and disenfranchising blacks and browns and reds (https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2017/12/06/wisconsin-budget-tax-plan-will-widen-racial-wealth-gap/), while simultaneously goading whites into taking on the mantle of identity politics and an aggrieved minority racial status (https://www.google.com/search?q=whites+believe+reverse+racism&oq=whites+believe+reverse+racism+&aqs=chrome..69i57.17701j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8) that is not reflective of the reality on the ground nor the dispensation of privilege and power.

The current political regime seems to be "pulling up the ladder behind them", so to speak. Protecting the status of those who are already "aboard the Malthusian life boat". Consolidating economic and political power by hook and crook, laws, rules and regulations.

I would also like to offer the opinion that the reason why that unity is not felt now is because of the directed murders of the 1960s, JFK, RFK, MLK, that traumatized the Baby Boomer generation and revealed the power and directed animus of an unknown Cabal that was too fearsome for most to face directly in their thoughts and belief systems. A Cabal that has since been unmasked, but whose efforts still contribute to the misinformation of the masses through many different programs, from COINTELPRO and its successor programs to the Monarch initiative and its children. The media mind control and directed cultural evolution, the generally known reality of continuing mass assassinations and the pervasive belief in the inassailability of the system directly by groups too small and divided through even more byzantine control modalities. At this point, realities between populations have diverged in the USA so widely that it will require traumatic events to release the hold that the dream has upon so many.

I am very happy to read that you were engaged in such a manner back in the day. Thank you for your service to humanity and our country.


Because back then class oppression was seen as the source of oppressions. Today everything is race and gender. How galactically convenient for the (white) ruling class of the west. (the east has its own ruling class). The corporate, international oligarchs know the omission of class consciousness in activism and the emphasis on race and gender as the source of oppression is a major form of protection for themselves. Ordinary whites are the patsies, the sacrifice, the distraction, while the western oligarchs press on with their one world government goals almost unnoticed, existence denied by the race and gender crowd. The irony of life! Those who blather on about white privilege doom themselves to protecting it.

I do not disagree with you on any of your above points. Well said.


I've already typed too much. I'm getting older and the predictable focus on survival is predominating over caring much more about all this anyhow. Pray the elites don't panic and pull the economic plug... On the other hand if they do, we ALL will find out right quick what our real priorities should have been... thx

I’m happy to say that I do not agree. You did not type too much. And you're absolutely right about your final point. And perhaps that is the point, eh? Keeping us all distracted until whatever it is they see coming happens and it is too late to do anything about them and what they have done and are continuing to do to us all. I look forward to your response.

[Helene West]

Hello

Well let me jump in.

Our premises are very different. Mine is that Life is change, it's nothing but change. Racism is an aspect of life so also changes. In the present year 2017 I feel most of the active racism in the country is going towards caucasians not coming from whites. Racism has changed.

That's in contrast to your "... we have to deal with racism all day every day." Your selling, I'm not buying. I feel I'm reading posts of someone who enjoys, who relishes, not who is suffering 24 hrs a day, every day and because of your fellow white citizens.

When I started reading this thread recently I noticed that you were warmly welcomed as someone who had been a member but no one had heard from in a long time but here you are, specifically for this thread. Interesting. I also understand you have a considerable facebook following. You love to write, are a wordsmith and have a teaching, pedantic nature. You may have other activist activities where those talents for expression are utilized, I don't know. Combine all of the above and my hunch tells me you're not here for a camaraderie meeting of the minds, you're shopping. Looking for grist for your mill. See what's up with current meanderings of the misguided, or racist mind so you can take back to your following and deconstruct for their edification. Do I want to help you with this? Not really...

As mentioned when I was an activist long ago I was a sponge, reading much black and feminist literature and learned a lot. Decades and seeminly worlds later if I read any black activist articles, etc. at all it's not line by line consumption. I first quickly scan to get a sense of something very important I'm looking for and if I don't get it, I leave it. I'm looking to see if the person is interested in unity of ALL citizens, brotherhood, friendship and creating together or are they interested in perpetuating the Tired Usual - viewing whites as the 'other' to be controlled, limited, defined by pejoratives, shut up, excluded... Don't get me wrong, you're very polite which is always appreciated but I don't sense the former set of qualities that would interest me in communicating much. Had enough of the latter.

I've been listening to black perspectives my entire adult life way more than white perspectives. Isn't that odd? At this point, I'm more interested in what is being done to my race which is kind of a futile interest cause so many whites will head for the hills rather than engage in this plus the fact that there is hardly any place where we can go to discuss such without being monitored, pejoratively labeled or potentially threatened. I remember reading back in 2008 around the time BO got elected an article about a white teenage girl in some high school in CA. She told the reporter that everyday she watched black, chicana, asian kids have extracurricular activities just for their own kind. She was feeling I guess isolated and put up some posters for forming some club for white kids. Somehow the naacp in the city got wind of this and called the principal who forbade her to continue. What small, mean little people the naacp. But that is an aspect of white reality, we don't really have a venue for sharing all the aspects of what life is like for us in the here and now changing western culture and i'm not talking some stupid cointelpro creation like stormfront. I'm talking ordinary folks, like the teenage girl.

You say "I use the phrase “White Nationalism” because that is how it has been presented and is familiar to most as being described." You let yourself off the hook. You're too smart and too much of a wordsmith to use a phrase "because that is how it is presented." If you didn't want to use the current racist labeling, you're versed enough to have not done so. You used it because you like it.

Labeling is a racist technique. It didn't stop being a racist technique because now blacks use it against whites instead of whites using it against blacks.
I didn't read everything you wrote in every post so I don't know if you used the handy-dandy 'white privilege' as well as 'white nationalism' but what I really enjoyed was (from a post to DNA) "... the fear of being a demographic minority has led to a mass projection/psychosis by whites..." So we can now add "white psychosis" to the list of weaponized labels? great, not too racist.

The latter above is also another oppression technique - trivialization. There is no real 'cultural' genocide of caucasians going on - it's in our heads. Ring a bell??

You want to bring up everything and the kitchen sink: the Alamo, MLK, slavery, KKK, Von Daniken, Haiti, PTSD and on and on. Not sure if you're trying to impress me or tranquilize me.
I don't need a history lesson or a psych analysis. I wasn't there, couldn't control it and I don't accept your definitions.

You'll emphasize "Many of us of the Global Majority.." yet at the same time say, as again mentioned above "the fear of being a demographic minority has led to a mass projection/psychosis by whites..." (Could this be called mind f**king?)... "who come from Ancestor-based traditions..." Hoity-toity, where do I come from, a pickle?

I see you go to Red Ice Creations which confirms my initial hunch. You troll where somewhat more intellectual whites gather and take note of our concerns, perceptions, etc. to take back as grist for your mill, to deconstruct and objectify us for your audience to help make us more impersonal, more 'the other'... I see your schtick.

Well, it's been a long day. This is a wrap for me for better or worse. I'd say 'Have fun' but I already know you are.

[Flash]

oHHHH Gosh, do I dislike your post. You are sooooo far from reality that it hurts seeing such. I have seen, read, looked at Rakhyt's participation or absence for years. Yes he is an excellent writer, but a troll, definitely not.

You see, he has lived racism days in and days out, just for being black. Not against the whites, but plainly just for being black. And yes, you heard about what the white did for your entire life, you know why? because the minorities have to scream out again and again and again, like women have to impose their birth rights, like cripple people have to ask for clemency and help, until it is acquired - and it ain't yet.

So, he knows the topic inside out, more inside than out, more than you can ever think or see.

And he decided to use his pen to expose what he sees.

As women did and do for receiving a blatant treatment of second classe citizen all over the world, as victim of pedophilia did and do and hopefully will do to change the horrific trade and situation. As color people do in a white world. As I would do as a woman in a Orthodox or fundamentalist Muslim or Christian world.

The troll behavior here seems rather to be coming from you at the present (which I am surprised of, usually I like your posts), doing personal attacks and judging - condemning before having heard and read what someone of Rakhyt's high brain abilities and huge heart knowhow can contribute.

I have witness Rakhyt being submitted to racism here on Avalon and on other forums years past, having to get away because of it, rather than having writing words that would not give any results on blatantly blind racist comments and behaviors.

You see? No..... you don't...

As One of the white niggers of America, as we were called, from generation to generation, here in Quebec, our own land much before the British came here, treated as menial worthless workforce who will never attain any position of power, will be stopped at the door of lower level management because of its origin and language, would not be part of its destiny decided by others. We had to forcefully, through political and creation of laws, take the power of our own destiny. I am old enough to have seen it in action.

I have been, in my own city, despised, not answered if asking for help, spit on by older men, told that French Canadian are pretty from the toe to the neck, harass for being French, and I know how insidious, insulting, and demeaning, destructive it is.

I can read, feel, see racism from miles away (as well as sexism).

And this is the reason why we still impose our rights in Canada, and why they are still regularly trampled - so we have to keep being vigilant.

Here this was not racism due to skin color, but racism due to culture, language and religion. It had the same impact, we truly believed on an individual basis, that we were born for little crumbs. Until enough was enough.

Helen, here you are wrong, period.

You are doing exactly, precisely, what I have seen some men doing when I wanted to start thread about the women situation worldwide - they would so blindly believe what they wrote while being so over bearing and personally attacking on the thread that women could not contribute intelligently anymore and the thread died out.

This is what I see you bringing in this thread.

Why not instead of screaming victimhood for the white, anglo saxons, provoking wars all over the planet, taking from the planet and rarely giving back - gosh this is so blind that it becomes almost funny. why not take the actual attitudes of Germans learning in their own school about the second world war in order to never repeat again? Why not find solution instead of


Hello

Well let me jump in.

Our premises are very different. Mine is that Life is change, it's nothing but change. Racism is an aspect of life so also changes. In the present year 2017 I feel most of the active racism in the country is going towards caucasians not coming from whites. Racism has changed.

That's in contrast to your "... we have to deal with racism all day every day." Your selling, I'm not buying. I feel I'm reading posts of someone who enjoys, who relishes, not who is suffering 24 hrs a day, every day and because of your fellow white citizens.

When I started reading this thread recently I noticed that you were warmly welcomed as someone who had been a member but no one had heard from in a long time but here you are, specifically for this thread. Interesting. I also understand you have a considerable facebook following. You love to write, are a wordsmith and have a teaching, pedantic nature. You may have other activist activities where those talents for expression are utilized, I don't know. Combine all of the above and my hunch tells me you're not here for a camaraderie meeting of the minds, you're shopping. Looking for grist for your mill. See what's up with current meanderings of the misguided, or racist mind so you can take back to your following and deconstruct for their edification. Do I want to help you with this? Not really...

As mentioned when I was an activist long ago I was a sponge, reading much black and feminist literature and learned a lot. Decades and seeminly worlds later if I read any black activist articles, etc. at all it's not line by line consumption. I first quickly scan to get a sense of something very important I'm looking for and if I don't get it, I leave it. I'm looking to see if the person is interested in unity of ALL citizens, brotherhood, friendship and creating together or are they interested in perpetuating the Tired Usual - viewing whites as the 'other' to be controlled, limited, defined by pejoratives, shut up, excluded... Don't get me wrong, you're very polite which is always appreciated but I don't sense the former set of qualities that would interest me in communicating much. Had enough of the latter.

I've been listening to black perspectives my entire adult life way more than white perspectives. Isn't that odd? At this point, I'm more interested in what is being done to my race which is kind of a futile interest cause so many whites will head for the hills rather than engage in this plus the fact that there is hardly any place where we can go to discuss such without being monitored, pejoratively labeled or potentially threatened. I remember reading back in 2008 around the time BO got elected an article about a white teenage girl in some high school in CA. She told the reporter that everyday she watched black, chicana, asian kids have extracurricular activities just for their own kind. She was feeling I guess isolated and put up some posters for forming some club for white kids. Somehow the naacp in the city got wind of this and called the principal who forbade her to continue. What small, mean little people the naacp. But that is an aspect of white reality, we don't really have a venue for sharing all the aspects of what life is like for us in the here and now changing western culture and i'm not talking some stupid cointelpro creation like stormfront. I'm talking ordinary folks, like the teenage girl.

You say "I use the phrase “White Nationalism” because that is how it has been presented and is familiar to most as being described." You let yourself off the hook. You're too smart and too much of a wordsmith to use a phrase "because that is how it is presented." If you didn't want to use the current racist labeling, you're versed enough to have not done so. You used it because you like it.

Labeling is a racist technique. It didn't stop being a racist technique because now blacks use it against whites instead of whites using it against blacks.
I didn't read everything you wrote in every post so I don't know if you used the handy-dandy 'white privilege' as well as 'white nationalism' but what I really enjoyed was (from a post to DNA) "... the fear of being a demographic minority has led to a mass projection/psychosis by whites..." So we can now add "white psychosis" to the list of weaponized labels? great, not too racist.

The latter above is also another oppression technique - trivialization. There is no real 'cultural' genocide of caucasians going on - it's in our heads. Ring a bell??

You want to bring up everything and the kitchen sink: the Alamo, MLK, slavery, KKK, Von Daniken, Haiti, PTSD and on and on. Not sure if you're trying to impress me or tranquilize me.
I don't need a history lesson or a psych analysis. I wasn't there, couldn't control it and I don't accept your definitions.

You'll emphasize "Many of us of the Global Majority.." yet at the same time say, as again mentioned above "the fear of being a demographic minority has led to a mass projection/psychosis by whites..." (Could this be called mind f**king?)... "who come from Ancestor-based traditions..." Hoity-toity, where do I come from, a pickle?

I see you go to Red Ice Creations which confirms my initial hunch. You troll where somewhat more intellectual whites gather and take note of our concerns, perceptions, etc. to take back as grist for your mill, to deconstruct and objectify us for your audience to help make us more impersonal, more 'the other'... I see your schtick.

Well, it's been a long day. This is a wrap for me for better or worse. I'd say 'Have fun' but I already know you are.

[DNA]

Maybe you should not bite DNA
Obama obeyed, Trump obeys, they all obey to a pyramidal structure in which they are pretty much at the bottom of the top.

The intelligence agency controls the federal government and the elite Rockefeller type bankers control the intelligence agencies.
This same deep state controls the main stream media.
Why did the main stream media and the deep state love Obama so much?
Why is the deep state's opinion so polarized when it comes to Trump?

Trump is not following the Globalist agenda.



Racism has nothing to do with politics
I disagree.
The deep state is using the main stream media to mold public opinion.
Race is being reported by the main stream media with a powerful charge that is meant to emotionally trigger people.
Democrats are accusing Trump of being a racist at every turn, they have weaponized the word racist and they hurl it with self righteous impunity.

The globalist agenda had various steps.
One involved bombing and destabalizing the Middle East through regime changes.
Notice the latest victim of this regime change was Assad of Syria, and he would have been killed and beheaded by now if Hillary was in office, but instead Trump has stopped this.

Hillary would have invited all of these refugees from the Middle East into the USA.
And just like Europe right now we would have hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring into the United States from countries the USA has been bombing non-stop for fifteen years. Refugees who hate the United States, who hate the western way of life. Thus we would have a Gaza Strip type scenario playing out all over the USA with suicide bombers and such attacking this country from within and destroying it. And when the Globalists offer their solution of a "new world order" a one world government, Americans at this point would be all too happy to join because of how devastated the country had become.

Trump right now is being called a racist non-stop because he is preventing this.

No one called Obama a racist when he was drone bombing, killing, displacing and causing mass chaos via regime change.

So yes, racism plays into politics in my humble opinion.

[DNA]

By way of explanation, I will use folks quotes to highlight certain ideas pertaining to racism but I am not responding just to those quotes but also to the larger audience as well. I will not respond to personal attacks.
I apologize for my "living in a dream world" comment if it was something you considered a personal attack. If it is any consolation I lived in a similar dream world for a while.
I'm a recovered democrat. I considered voting democrat and applying myself to a liberal philosophy to be the antithesis of the Bush regime.
9/11 was just so obviously a inside job.
I voted for Obama the first time around and I fell into many fierce debates, arguments and out and out fights defending him.
The national defense act that was passed on new years eve was an eye opener for me. I was to soon learn that I had been duped.
And no man that calls himself a humanitarian drone bombs. As a consequence Obama has drone bombed and killed more people via this method than any other president including George W.
Obama's bungling of Iraq was entirely intentional in my opinion and wikileaks has shown so many instances of Obama's regime via Hillary creating Isis to act as a proxy army in Syria as to remove all doubt in my mind that this is what has happened.
So Obama is absolutely responsible for human trafficking in terms of Isis selling women and slaves.
You must pardon me how I have to find some humor in the left referring to Trump as a racist when Obama is responsible for so much death, destruction and misery.

https://talktomichaelmccartney.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/isisobamameme211.jpg





I will tell you without hesitation that I am absolutely through with partisan politics.

Yes. I understand. That is fine and your choice. I am not through with them. In my life, directly, and the life of my children and extended family, politics plays a real and valid role. If I do not engage in politics, then my interests are not represented and it affects me materially. I suppose it is nice if your life is beyond such things but mine is not. Nor are the lives of those I love.

This is an argument for ignoring the truth if it does not enable happiness in you. That is a dangerous game as far as I'm concerned.


What many do not realize is how much politics affects those who are not a part of the "American Dream". It is literally life and death.

So you ignore America's actions in the rest of the world as long as your domestic policy suits you?




Knowing this space, many would scoff at statistics provided by government bodies and organizations you may consider "Fake News"
You are very correct here.


so I have no intention of going that route. This has been a personalized discussion throughout, so I am going to keep it that way in my contributions. Perhaps some of y'all's lived experience, driving over freeway arches beneath which hovels and ghettos are huddled, or through city streets where sullen young men lurk, has given you some indication that not everyone has access to the same perception of reality. That there is, literally, another world directly beneath the one that some of you may inhabit, that was created by more than just the depredations of a capitalist class system, but by some other greater, all-encompassing system of exclusion and repression.
But then, since they wear combat boots and street gear, perhaps some think their bootstraps are strong enough to pull themselves up by? My story is different. I grew up in the military industrial complex, on Air Force bases around the world, going to Department of Defense schools, receiving one of the best educations possible for children who come from no means. I have had opportunities that even other black kids who came up the same way I did, did not have. Those of us who are blessed or cursed that way have a responsibility to those who have not had the same opportunities. To represent a perspective that is not widely shared or known. To show what the possibilities of this great nation truly are and should be, if we only open to it instead of shut it down and wall it off.

Statements such as this can usually be boiled down to a more concise and streamlined message. I'm taking a chance here, as such please tell me if I'm wrong.
Here is the message I see.
"It is more important that disenfranchised people who have given up on hope in America in the black community see Obama as an image of hope and equality rather than the truth, and I feel it is my job to contribute to that image so as to foster hope rather than hopelessness".







The fact that we see the deep state at such odds with Donald Trump is evidence enough to me to at least consider that he is not in line with the banking elite and their invasion of the middle east war agendas and their destroying the middle class of America agendas.

That is all well and good. I applaud his stance and, to a certain extent, I agree that this is what it looks like. But, to address the aspect of racism implicit in this subject, what is troubling is that he embraces policies that are being enacted that will have a demonstrably negative effect upon black, brown and red populations.

You should share the policies in question. There were policies I initially found myself quite angry about until I figured out the bigger picture. I might be able to shed some light here.



When it doesn't have to be that way. He supports groups that, if empowered further than they already have been, will actively attempt to reduce the quality of my life and the lives of those I love. If this is what the new world is going to look like once the Cabals hold over the American political, economic and cultural system is broken, it is not in my interest to support it. Lives are and will continue to be lost and homes and people broken. Black, brown and red people, disproportionately so.
You have to be more specific if we are to have a conversation when it comes to these groups.
When it comes to the Cabals, I will tell you what I think. Donald Trump seems to be in opposition to them at every turn.
In the end the Cabals only want 500,000,000 people in the world.
And for the most part, they feel they can fall far below that initially as they craft their one world government.
I'm guessing for the most part you, I and everyone we know and love will not be a part of that.



I'm guessing you are talking about the tea party.

No. That was in 2008-9 right after Obama's first election. What stands out as a turning point in my mind - in the AltCom specifically - is when Red Ice Radio interviewed John Lash.

Just for the record quite a few folks around here look at John Lash as a turd in the punch bowl. For the last few years he has been accused of succumbing to some kind of rock star ego mania and attempting to bed a great deal of his female students while saying disparaging and sexist things about women in general.
I never understood the attraction to Lash in the first place having read the Nag Hummadi Library and Castaneda already myself when he had come to prominance, Lash made a living out of quoting people. He is kind of like a cover band that got famous for covering other people's songs.



This is also something that the KKK and Aryan Nations have highlighted as well for a long time.

If these two groups exist outside of the prison system then they are so minute as to hardly be a concern.
I've lived in predominately black neighborhoods and I've known racist black people that tolerated me while we worked together or shared mutual friends.
I've also known racist white people under the same circumstances.
I've seen culture erode some of these hatreds in whites to an amazing degree.
Siblings or children marrying a person of color and then having relatives that were of color. Nothing melts hatred like having your grandchild bouncing on your knee and they were of the color you used to hate.
Mean while people on facebook are sharing instances of the stupidest white people doing ignorant/mean/racist things as if this is representitive of the whole.
And the media is feeding an emotional charge to folks in regards to there being a kkk or aryan brotherhood.
I'm telling you these groups are a boogeyman for the left to help create anger and hatred to be politically harvested.



Just for the record I could present data to you that would show you that many of the racist KKK rallies of late were orchestrated by the left who even added actors to try and present the white boogeyman, but you would probably call that fake news. :)


Okay Rahkyt
I gotta run.
Take care
And I hope you have a good day

[Ewan]

More about Thailand, or at least a 'farang' perception of it. (Farang simply means foreigner, not a local, not like us - probably comes from F(a)r-an-cais.)

There is a general consensus amongst Thais that white people are awkward, ungainly, they lack grace and are rather like bumbling oafs. I can't say I disagree too much as far as generalisations go.

Within the Thai population there is also a largely unspoken eliticism based on skin colour, and results in a distinct class system, which seems rather at odds with the above generalisation regarding 'farangs'. You see the whiter your skin the more noble/regal you are. The wealthy tend to be white, whilst the poor are more brown. Someone suggested having money afforded one to stay out of the sun and not labour in the fields under a hot sun. Over a few generations I guess such people would be growing 'whiter'.

The poor of Thai society still have a subset of humanity they can mock if they need to gain some false comfort that way. They ridicule the hill-tribe peoples as backward/stupid/uneducated.

It would seem, taking a lot of posts/points into consideration that a driving force behind all these isms may be forming out of group-think as Herve pointed out here (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?100738-Racism&p=1197033&viewfull=1#post1197033).

Ultimately though it comes down to ego, wanting to feel 'special'. A bunch of like-minded egos are apt to conjure up an 'enemy' to strengthen their false securities just as the individual ego will.

I've noticed a few defensive posts appearing in this thread but when one is only discussing experience and opinion there is nothing to defend.

If one feel the need to resist another idea/viewpoint to such an extent then perhaps it is time for a little self-reflection - for we are all sharing this same reality, merely viewing it from different perspectives.

[Helene West]

Flash
I'm out of touch with reality but you are in touch? Fine. My family is white, southeast asian and black. I've lived in 3 cities, all working class, heavily diversified neighborhoods and I've been an activist. If that is out of touch well then very few will live up to your high standards. I called him on what I feel he is doing. And that's that. You want to believe he is bringing 'peace on earth good will towards men..." so you believe it. I don't. I've read him and many like him, he's contributing to whites being "the other". So my interest up and walks out of the room...

the only thing I have to add is the way he likes to say "black, brown and red" notice he leaves out yellow?
I think it's because he can't BS yellow.
thx

[TargeT]

The fact that we see the deep state at such odds with Donald Trump is evidence enough to me to at least consider that he is not in line with the banking elite and their invasion of the middle east war agendas and their destroying the middle class of America agendas.

That is all well and good. I applaud his stance and, to a certain extent, I agree that this is what it looks like. But, to address the aspect of racism implicit in this subject, what is troubling is that he embraces policies that are being enacted that will have a demonstrably negative effect upon black, brown and red populations.

You should share the policies in question. There were policies I initially found myself quite angry about until I figured out the bigger picture. I might be able to shed some light here.







The President you support does not support me and those who are a part of me. Not just black folks, but brown folks, red folks. People I know.[...]
I would assume that by now we would either see this as an injected divide and conquer issue (my vote), or a provable case of racism.

If you don't see it I can't help you. That is actually not my issue nor concern. I'm not here to argue anyone's position. As I've perused this thread I've been very happy to see that people have allowed each other their opinions and understandings without being belligerent or ugly about it. I hope that shall continue. My response about the president was based upon my perspective as a black American man of a certain socioeconomic level. And upon my perusal of a wealth of information. I do not require the validation of anyone here to support or dismiss what I know to be true. It should be very clear by now that perspective is everything. That "truth" depends upon where you sit. Ultimate Truth is something else altogether.


When I asked I was told it was perspective and opinion, which is fair enough.

But when the word policy is used.... well that was my original question, which policies exactly (ie what are the references)? I don't have time to read them all, there's very possibly something I've missed; I also think this would lend support to your apparent position. I certainly would be providing links by now, many links to why I have formed an opinion or idea on something.

But then I approach topics with the mentality that I know very little about most topics and need to find "backing" or "references" to help come to an opinion. I understand that this (unfortunately) is an area you are well versed in and may not need to do the same but for the "audience" it is still highly useful.

[Mark]

Hello, Helene. I said I was looking forward to your response and you do not disappoint. :)


Hello Our premises are very different. Mine is that Life is change, it's nothing but change. Racism is an aspect of life so also changes. In the present year 2017 I feel most of the active racism in the country is going towards caucasians not coming from whites. Racism has changed.

Racism: prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior.

Racism is not the same as prejudice. Those whom you consider engaging in racism do not believe they are superior. They are prejudiced, instead. Another way of viewing it is that Racism = Prejudice + Power. Those who are merely prejudiced therefore cannot be racist as they hold no power.


That's in contrast to your "... we have to deal with racism all day every day." Your selling, I'm not buying. I feel I'm reading posts of someone who enjoys, who relishes, not who is suffering 24 hrs a day, every day and because of your fellow white citizens.

I do not consciously relish suffering, although I am incarnate in this earthly realm, which implies a certain amount of desire on the part of my Oversoul to engage in such. But if that is so on my part, it is so on all of our parts, as we are all in the same boat.


When I started reading this thread recently I noticed that you were warmly welcomed as someone who had been a member but no one had heard from in a long time but here you are, specifically for this thread. Interesting. I also understand you have a considerable facebook following.

I have 1500 or so friends, which is relatively small considering FB allows 5000. My posts get some discussion it is true, as those 1500 friends are primarily people I know personally and we engage about issues of interest to us all. I generally post spiritual and personal development memes tho', and everyone likes those because we all need uplifting sometimes. I have a blog with 3 pages, one devoted to spiritual writing, another devoted to race and culture, another devoted to poetry and prose. Visitation is relatively sparse, I get likes every now and then, 2 - 4 on average for a single post. Just google my moniker "Rahkyt" if you really want to know who I am.



You love to write, are a wordsmith and have a teaching, pedantic nature.

Guilty as charged.


You may have other activist activities where those talents for expression are utilized, I don't know. Combine all of the above and my hunch tells me you're not here for a camaraderie meeting of the minds, you're shopping. Looking for grist for your mill. See what's up with current meanderings of the misguided, or racist mind so you can take back to your following and deconstruct for their edification. Do I want to help you with this? Not really...

I said when I first returned, that I was here to create a record. To engage in this discussion here, in PA, one of the major AltCom venues. I came back here because I know people here. Because I have friends who are still here. And because Bill posted up a thread about racism, which, I felt, was long overdue. If you do not want to communicate that is fine, Helene. Because you responded to me I am responding back, but if further interaction is not desired, that is fine as well. Thank you for what we have already shared in creating together.


As mentioned when I was an activist long ago I was a sponge, reading much black and feminist literature and learned a lot. Decades and seeminly worlds later if I read any black activist articles, etc. at all it's not line by line consumption. I first quickly scan to get a sense of something very important I'm looking for and if I don't get it, I leave it. I'm looking to see if the person is interested in unity of ALL citizens, brotherhood, friendship and creating together or are they interested in perpetuating the Tired Usual - viewing whites as the 'other' to be controlled, limited, defined by pejoratives, shut up, excluded... Don't get me wrong, you're very polite which is always appreciated but I don't sense the former set of qualities that would interest me in communicating much. Had enough of the latter.

That is exactly what I am interested in. And a google search of my writings will show you exactly that. The "unity of ALL citizens, brotherhood, friendship and creating together". Just because you don't see it does not mean it is not so. There are many others who have seen it. And there will always be those who disagree based upon their perceptions. And that is fine.


I've been listening to black perspectives my entire adult life way more than white perspectives. Isn't that odd? At this point, I'm more interested in what is being done to my race which is kind of a futile interest cause so many whites will head for the hills rather than engage in this plus the fact that there is hardly any place where we can go to discuss such without being monitored, pejoratively labeled or potentially threatened.

I see. I'm sure there are private forums and sites where such things are possible without outside interference.


I remember reading back in 2008 around the time BO got elected an article about a white teenage girl in some high school in CA. She told the reporter that everyday she watched black, chicana, asian kids have extracurricular activities just for their own kind. She was feeling I guess isolated and put up some posters for forming some club for white kids. Somehow the naacp in the city got wind of this and called the principal who forbade her to continue. What small, mean little people the naacp. But that is an aspect of white reality, we don't really have a venue for sharing all the aspects of what life is like for us in the here and now changing western culture and i'm not talking some stupid cointelpro creation like stormfront. I'm talking ordinary folks, like the teenage girl.

Thank you for sharing that perspective. To the extent that there are many young whites out there now who have no context for what is happening, because they have been sorely mis-educated and have very little idea about how the world got to be the way that it is, I agree with you that such a space is necessary. All of the Millennials have been, regardless of race. They have almost no idea about the true nature of the creation of this nation or the depths of the events that have occurred on this continent because the schools do not teach it. And so misinformation is rife, as is conflation, on both sides.


You say "I use the phrase “White Nationalism” because that is how it has been presented and is familiar to most as being described." You let yourself off the hook. You're too smart and too much of a wordsmith to use a phrase "because that is how it is presented." If you didn't want to use the current racist labeling, you're versed enough to have not done so. You used it because you like it.

No, I use it because it is the common vernacular. It is not a matter of "like" or "dislike". Like it or not, certain phrases have achieved mainstream approbation. This is one.


Labeling is a racist technique. It didn't stop being a racist technique because now blacks use it against whites instead of whites using it against blacks.

Labeling, stereotyping, generalizing, are human techniques.



I didn't read everything you wrote in every post so I don't know if you used the handy-dandy 'white privilege' as well as 'white nationalism' but what I really enjoyed was (from a post to DNA) "... the fear of being a demographic minority has led to a mass projection/psychosis by whites..." So we can now add "white psychosis" to the list of weaponized labels? great, not too racist.

No, it is not.


The latter above is also another oppression technique - trivialization. There is no real 'cultural' genocide of caucasians going on - it's in our heads. Ring a bell??

It is not trivial because it is resulting in death and destruction. A continuation of policies of oppression and a fear-based response to the inevitable demographic shift of this nation.


You want to bring up everything and the kitchen sink: the Alamo, MLK, slavery, KKK, Von Daniken, Haiti, PTSD and on and on. Not sure if you're trying to impress me or tranquilize me.
I don't need a history lesson or a psych analysis. I wasn't there, couldn't control it and I don't accept your definitions.

Neither. This is really not about you. As I've also said, I may answer people in specific quotations, but I am writing for those who are out there reading. Creating a record.


You'll emphasize "Many of us of the Global Majority.." yet at the same time say, as again mentioned above "the fear of being a demographic minority has led to a mass projection/psychosis by whites..." (Could this be called mind f**king?)... "who come from Ancestor-based traditions..." Hoity-toity, where do I come from, a pickle?

I do not know. But it is true that Europeans also come from such a tradition. Because of Christianity and the Reformation and the Protestant Ethic and the Scientific Method and many other causes, those traditions have been suppressed historically. It is good that they are returning to the forefront as more Europeans embrace their ethnic roots. I'm thinking particularly here of Asatru (https://www.asatru.org/) and traditions like it.


I see you go to Red Ice Creations which confirms my initial hunch.

The last time I went to Red Ice was in 2014, I believe, when that John Lash interview was posted. I may have gone back within that year or 2015 once or twice.


You troll where somewhat more intellectual whites gather and take note of our concerns, perceptions, etc. to take back as grist for your mill, to deconstruct and objectify us for your audience to help make us more impersonal, more 'the other'... I see your schtick.

It is good to be seen. Even when that "seeing" is incorrect.


Well, it's been a long day. This is a wrap for me for better or worse. I'd say 'Have fun' but I already know you are.

Thank you, Helene. Have a wonderful day.

[Mark]

I have seen, read, looked at Rakhyt's participation or absence for years. Yes he is an excellent writer, but a troll, definitely not.

Thank you for the gift of presence, Flash. For these years of intense and transformatory interaction in the AltCom, regardless of Forum or topic.

[Bill Ryan]

I have seen, read, looked at Rakhyt's participation or absence for years. Yes he is an excellent writer, but a troll, definitely not.

Thank you for the gift of presence, Flash. For these years of intense and transformatory interaction in the AltCom, regardless of Forum or topic.

I wrote this to the mods' team just now. Kudos to everyone who's contributing so thoughtfully to this most excellent thread.




The Racism thread is now raising the bar re the remarkable quality and intelligence of the discussion, very much further catalyzed by Rahkyt returning to offer his views. It was doing really well before, but now among all our recent threads it may be in a league of its own. Do take a look.
:star:

[Helene West]

Rahkyt

I see you posted another disquisition. Just letting you know I'm not reading it. I read enough of them. I'm sure others will like it and support you. I understand where you're coming from and I stick to my assessment thereof... there are sites and social media of black and Hispanic folk, you could probably call them more independent and conservative who feel and value something different than you. Thank God. They uplift me. You don't. I'm jealous of my time and energy and I will give it to those who don't intend to view me and mine as "the other" and keep the divide going. They do exist. H

[Mark]

Dude. DNA. LOL

I have searched all of my posts in this thread and the only time I mentioned Obama was in speaking of the Red Ice Radio video and the fact that it came out in 2014, during the Obama era. Where did you get the idea that I am a big Obama fan?


I apologize for my "living in a dream world" comment if it was something you considered a personal attack. If it is any consolation I lived in a similar dream world for a while.

I saw you sitting in a red chair with mirror glasses on, staring at me as the Matrix claims me when I read that. It was more your final statement in that comment that I found to be an attack. S'all good.


I'm a recovered democrat. I considered voting democrat and applying myself to a liberal philosophy to be the antithesis of the Bush regime.

I am not a Democrat. But my family members are. They are not me, although we support many of the same goals. My sight is much higher, as I hope you remember. In regards to Obama tho', since we're here, the drone bombing plus when he sanction Hillary's destruction of Libya was the clearest indication for me that he was just another tool of the elite. It actually was before then as well. I wrote about it here (https://rahkyt.com/2008/10/13/african-american-ness-and-barack-obama-self-versus-other-on-the-court-of-political-awakening/) in 2008. Here (https://rahkyt.com/2011/03/01/the-obama-nation-control-systems-as-political-carnival/) in 2012. And here (https://rahkyt.com/2013/11/17/the-obama-phenomenon-alternative-knowledge-elite-machinations-and-the-fulcrum-of-destiny/) in 2013. These are very old articles and I haven't read them in years. Enjoy if you feel inclined to read them to see what I really thought about Obama.


This is an argument for ignoring the truth if it does not enable happiness in you. That is a dangerous game as far as I'm concerned.

truth. Or Truth. Determining such is a dangerous game. Being incarnate upon a prison planet is a dangerous game. Life, is a dangerous game. I am very wary of conflating the higher Truths with the lower truths these days. It is a way that people use semantics in order to project different things that, while seeming to be objective, are subjective. Happiness is not at issue. It is fleeting and a transitory state in the best of times.



So you ignore America's actions in the rest of the world as long as your domestic policy suits you?

Not at all. What are you talking about? Is this about Obama again?


You should share the policies in question. There were policies I initially found myself quite angry about until I figured out the bigger picture. I might be able to shed some light here.

I am very much open to hearing what you have to say on this matter.

GOP tax bill: A new mechanism for reinforcing white power (https://www.salon.com/2017/12/11/gop-tax-bill-a-new-mechanism-for-reinforcing-white-power/)

5 Ways the Republican Tax-Reform Plan Hits Black Folks the Hardest (https://www.theroot.com/5-ways-the-republican-tax-reform-plan-hits-black-folks-1820516643)

Poor kids eating free breakfast? Not if congressional Republicans have their way (https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/2/15/1634033/-Poor-kids-eating-free-breakfast-Not-if-congressional-Republicans-have-their-way)

Trump travel ban: supreme court allows enforcement as appeals proceed (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/04/donald-trump-travel-ban-on-six-mostly-muslim-countries)

Senators, White House lay groundwork for Dreamers dea (https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/19/senate-white-house-trump-lay-groundwork-for-daca-deal-306298)

Look past the sites themselves and address the topics they cover, please, to all that may choose to respond to this particular listing of articles.



You have to be more specific if we are to have a conversation when it comes to these groups.
When it comes to the Cabals, I will tell you what I think. Donald Trump seems to be in opposition to them at every turn.
In the end the Cabals only want 500,000,000 people in the world. And for the most part, they feel they can fall far below that initially as they craft their one world government.I'm guessing for the most part you, I and everyone we know and love will not be a part of that.

Any group that espouses that race-mixing is wrong, that other ethnic groups outside of white are lesser, that policies of segregation and separate and unequal are necessary. Also those who preach genocide against any other group. Agreed re the Cabals.


Just for the record quite a few folks around here look at John Lash as a turd in the punch bowl. For the last few years he has been accused of succumbing to some kind of rock star ego mania and attempting to bed a great deal of his female students while saying disparaging and sexist things about women in general.
I never understood the attraction to Lash in the first place having read the Nag Hummadi Library and Castaneda already myself when he had come to prominance, Lash made a living out of quoting people. He is kind of like a cover band that got famous for covering other people's songs.

Now that is a perspective I can get with and I'm glad to hear it.



I've seen culture erode some of these hatreds in whites to an amazing degree.
Siblings or children marrying a person of color and then having relatives that were of color. Nothing melts hatred like having your grandchild bouncing on your knee and they were of the color you used to hate.
Mean while people on facebook are sharing instances of the stupidest white people doing ignorant/mean/racist things as if this is representitive of the whole. And the media is feeding an emotional charge to folks in regards to there being a kkk or aryan brotherhood. I'm telling you these groups are a boogeyman for the left to help create anger and hatred to be politically harvested.

Agreed.


Just for the record I could present data to you that would show you that many of the racist KKK rallies of late were orchestrated by the left who even added actors to try and present the white boogeyman, but you would probably call that fake news. :)

This would be a good thread to share such info in.



Okay Rahkyt
I gotta run.
Take care
And I hope you have a good day

The same to you!

[Mark]

When I asked I was told it was perspective and opinion, which is fair enough.

But when the word policy is used.... well that was my original question, which policies exactly (ie what are the references)? I don't have time to read them all, there's very possibly something I've missed; I also think this would lend support to your apparent position. I certainly would be providing links by now, many links to why I have formed an opinion or idea on something.

But then I approach topics with the mentality that I know very little about most topics and need to find "backing" or "references" to help come to an opinion. I understand that this (unfortunately) is an area you are well versed in and may not need to do the same but for the "audience" it is still highly useful.

You are absolutely right. Forgive my seeming flippant reply. I have provided some above in my response to DNA (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?100738-Racism&p=1197658&viewfull=1#post1197658), in regards to policy. To recount quickly, the Dreamers, the Muslim Ban, the Tax Bill, Free Lunch for poor kids are a few of the issues I question. I look forward to your response. I am here to engage actively with those who think differently than I, and I suppose you are one of those. Thank you for your engagement.

[Mark]

the only thing I have to add is the way he likes to say "black, brown and red" notice he leaves out yellow? I think it's because he can't BS yellow.

Because this is referring to me, I will respond. Anytime I am mentioned as if I am not present, i will respond.

Asians are called the model minority (https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2017/04/19/524571669/model-minority-myth-again-used-as-a-racial-wedge-between-asians-and-blacks). As I have said previously, East Asians and Southeast/west Asians DO experience racism here in the United States (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-asian-american-awakening-that-moment-when-you_us_59307537e4b042ffa289e880), for some it can be as intense and psychologically devastating as it is for other groups. I do not include them in my designation of "black, brown and red" because of that difference in economic and social interaction with whites. Chinese and Japanese culture in particular - and intermittent examples of Southeast Asian culture - are considered by many to be "High Cultures", because they are so old, as is the Hindu Aryan culture of India. Even tho' some of those folks are as dark as I am they can check "white" on American and Global race checklists.

I have no idea what Helene means by BS'ing yellow.

[turiya]

It should be very clear by now that perspective is everything.



perspective (https://www.google.com/search?ei=Q8I-WpXvM-aGjwTH57boAw&q=perspective&oq=perspective&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0i67k1j0j0i67k1j0j0i7i30k1l6.1198313.1209126 .0.1209833.38.11.0.0.0.0.330.1196.0j7j0j1.8.0....0 ...1c.1.64.psy-ab..34.1.122....0.bq-rmCkQ-40)

2. a particular attitude toward or way of regarding something; a point of view.

projection (https://www.google.com/search?ei=_sY-WuTaJujcjwSoqIboAQ&q=projection&oq=projection&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0l4j0i67k1j0l5.308358.311069.0.313829.10.6.0 .4.4.0.132.666.3j3.6.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..0.10.697...0i131k1.0.eI-xfQsfmc4)

1. an estimate or forecast of a future situation or trend based on a study of present ones.
2. the presentation of an image on a surface, especially a movie screen.

Psychological projection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection)

- a theory in psychology in which humans defend themselves against their own unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others.

For example, a person who is habitually intolerant may constantly accuse other people of being intolerant. It incorporates blame shifting.




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPTjtZ31lwk

_______Late Add_______




That "truth" depends upon where you [psychologically] sit. Ultimate Truth is something else altogether. -- (Added Empahsis mine.) :)

[Valerie Villars]

Well, it's a hard knock life for a lot of folks. Refusing to conform to that which makes no sense to me has put me outside the fence surrounding the party the "in" crowd is having. And that's fine with me. I'm a white woman and life has been a real struggle for me.

I don't think a woman president is going to make it any better for me. I have to make it better for me by changing my perspective.

[Mark]

It should be very clear by now that perspective is everything.



perspective (https://www.google.com/search?ei=Q8I-WpXvM-aGjwTH57boAw&q=perspective&oq=perspective&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0i67k1j0j0i67k1j0j0i7i30k1l6.1198313.1209126 .0.1209833.38.11.0.0.0.0.330.1196.0j7j0j1.8.0....0 ...1c.1.64.psy-ab..34.1.122....0.bq-rmCkQ-40)

2. a particular attitude toward or way of regarding something; a point of view.

projection (https://www.google.com/search?ei=_sY-WuTaJujcjwSoqIboAQ&q=projection&oq=projection&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0l4j0i67k1j0l5.308358.311069.0.313829.10.6.0 .4.4.0.132.666.3j3.6.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..0.10.697...0i131k1.0.eI-xfQsfmc4)

1. an estimate or forecast of a future situation or trend based on a study of present ones.
2. the presentation of an image on a surface, especially a movie screen.

Psychological projection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection)

- a theory in psychology in which humans defend themselves against their own unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others.

For example, a person who is habitually intolerant may constantly accuse other people of being intolerant. It incorporates blame shifting.




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPTjtZ31lwk

_______Late Add_______




That "truth" depends upon where you [psychologically] sit. Ultimate Truth is something else altogether. -- (Added Empahsis mine.) :)



Perspective is indeed everything, Turiyah. In this matter of racism though, there is a truth beyond perspective. Because that is so, I would like for you to clarify what you are referring to when you speak of psychological projection in reference to this topic. I do not want to reply in depth without being absolutely certain to what you are referring.

If you've read all of my offerings you will realize that I am not proceeding from a Democrat/Left Wing perspective dependent upon talking points and support from political positions or personalities. So please keep that in mind, I would very much like to know your thoughts directly.

[turiya]

It should be very clear by now that perspective is everything.

perspective (https://www.google.com/search?ei=Q8I-WpXvM-aGjwTH57boAw&q=perspective&oq=perspective&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0i67k1j0j0i67k1j0j0i7i30k1l6.1198313.1209126 .0.1209833.38.11.0.0.0.0.330.1196.0j7j0j1.8.0....0 ...1c.1.64.psy-ab..34.1.122....0.bq-rmCkQ-40)

2. a particular attitude toward or way of regarding something; a point of view.
projection (https://www.google.com/search?ei=_sY-WuTaJujcjwSoqIboAQ&q=projection&oq=projection&gs_l=psy-ab.3..0l4j0i67k1j0l5.308358.311069.0.313829.10.6.0 .4.4.0.132.666.3j3.6.0....0...1c.1.64.psy-ab..0.10.697...0i131k1.0.eI-xfQsfmc4)

1. an estimate or forecast of a future situation or trend based on a study of present ones.
2. the presentation of an image on a surface, especially a movie screen.Psychological projection (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection)

- a theory in psychology in which humans defend themselves against their own unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others.

For example, a person who is habitually intolerant may constantly accuse other people of being intolerant. It incorporates blame shifting.




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPTjtZ31lwk

_______Late Add_______




That "truth" depends upon where you [psychologically] sit. Ultimate Truth is something else altogether. -- (Added Empahsis mine.) :)


Perspective is indeed everything, Turiya. In this matter of racism though, there is a truth beyond perspective. Because that is so, I would like for you to clarify what you are referring to when you speak of psychological projection in reference to this topic. I do not want to reply in depth without being absolutely certain to what you are referring.

If you've read all of my offerings you will realize that I am not proceeding from a Democrat/Left Wing perspective dependent upon talking points and support from political positions or personalities. So please keep that in mind, I would very much like to know your thoughts directly.



Mind changes. That's what mind does - it changes.

I have to re-mind the woman I live with of that, continually. Because she always is bothered when I suddenly change my mind about something. Whether it be about going to this restaurant or that one, whether to see this movie or that one. Or, to make this for dinner or something else. Mind continually changes. That's what mind is about. It changes.

To know my thoughts directly is not possible. It is not really possible. To know anybody's thoughts directly is not possible. The best that has been ever done is by analogy, or by metaphor, or by parable. That is the closest. And that would be for that specific moment at that particular time.

I say this because distortions will always be present to one degree or another. Mind wavers. There's always new information coming in, and old information that is discarded. Mind is in constant flux.

A speaker says something. Chances are that the listerner will hear something different. Its because minds are different. Something said is distorted by the listener as it passes through the mind. The mind will interpret something different than what had been said. It may be a slight difference, but it still will not be exact to what the speaker is transmitting. There will always be an interpretation that is being made.

Yes, you can say,

'What is said gets lost in translation.'Consider a white light passing through a prism, it will come out divided into many different colored perspectives. Mind is very good at breaking things down into its separate parts. Its good at analyzing, dissecting, categorizing, interpreting. It is what mind does best. It is a tool. It serves science well.


https://i.ytimg.com/vi/5DLreOgMIOQ/hqdefault.jpg
Mind is like a prism.


Consider, meditation is a mind without thoughts moving through it. Like a still, calm lake reflecting the moon in the night sky. Reflecting perfectly what is brought in front of it.


https://tuswallpapersgratis.com/wp-content/plugins/download-wallpaper-resized/wallpaper.php?x=480&y=320&file=https://tuswallpapersgratis.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/260522__full-moon-reflection_p.jpg

Now consider, a thought rising in the mind - like a pebble dropped into that still calm lake. And with it comes a rippling harmonic-like effect that moves across the surface of that still, calm lake...


http://wallpaperpulse.com/thumb/1952613.jpg

Can you really say that the mind moving with thought, with many thoughts, with a whirlwind of thoughts - will such a mind reflect the moon in the same way?


https://stat.ameba.jp/user_images/20170608/06/kuuyogakuuyoga/ab/0e/j/o0480048013955780362.jpg?caw=800

Michael Jackson says (paraphrasing),






"Look at the man in the mirror.
Deal with that man in the mirror.
If you want to change the world,
then change that man in the mirror."
Most of what has affected our lives has been done to us at a very young age.
It is when we are children that much of what has been done to us, what has been taught to us, what has been conditioned into us, had been done when we were young. It makes a huge impression. Alot of it comes from our parents, or lack of having parents being there.

The basic reason why one would have a disdain for another is because they have a basic disdain for themselves. If you want more love to bloom in this world, then start with yourself, start with loving yourself.

If you see that another has a problem with the color of another's skin, with the opposite sex, with different nationalities, with cultural differences, then its that person's individual problem. The person needs therapy. Why make it your problem? Why make a bigger problem by involving yourself with another's problem. It would be making it a greater problem than what it already is. It would soon be on its way to becoming a world problem. And that's what is happening, here-now.

The other is obviously living in a kind of hell of his own making. Why would you also want go to hell with him? It would be an entire waste of time. There's much better things to do..... Or, not...


A Storm of Thoughts Distorts
the Ability to See Clearly

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMUTJCatIAE

[Mark]

The basic reason why one would have a disdain for another is because they have a basic disdain for themselves. If you want more love to bloom in this world, then start with yourself, start with loving yourself.

Thank you for that balm of higher energy. I always appreciate a return to reality within the dream. The dream that we all cohabitate to greater or lesser degrees. Would you say the hermetic "As Above, So Below" is relevant here as well? If individuals who hate do so through forms of personal prejudice - empowered as racism - do groups hate as expressions of racism? Hutus racist against Tutsis? Japanese racist against Koreans?

Does "group love" then consist of people within the dominant group determining what it is about themselves they do not love and beginning to work with that in order to self-heal? And the institutions they have implemented over time to support themselves and their progeny through the deliberate codification of hate? National days of atonement perhaps? Legislative review parties to overturn laws that benefit them?


If you see that another has a problem with the color of another's skin, with the opposite sex, with different nationalities, with cultural differences, then its that person's individual problem.

It becomes others' problem when they act on that hate. Find others to hate with them. Have hater parties where they lynch, rape and make laws that treat them differently than those they abuse. Foment cultural and societal niceties that are more lenient toward those like them when they fall astray of those laws. That punish those unlike them strictly according to the letter pf the law at the same time, bolstering their prison-industrial complex and providing cheap labor for the corporations they buy from and work for and invest in for retirement.


The person needs therapy. Why make it your problem? Why make a bigger problem by involving yourself with another's problem. It would be making it a greater problem than what it already is. It would soon be on its way to becoming a world problem. And that's what is happening, here-now.

I would submit to you that that is not in the least what is happening here. The problem is not new. The hate is not new. Both are culturally programmed and endemic spanning generations. That the genesis of the problem was a great crime against humanity that has not been resolved. And that the real problem is the refusal of those who feel put upon by the existence of this crime to recognize their culpability as inheritors of the system created to cover up the crime and erase it from the history books.


The other is obviously living in a kind of hell of his own making. Why would you also want go to hell with him? It would be an entire waste of time. There's much better things to do..... Or, not...

That is absolutely so. That hell is so clearly seen to those who may not have the wealth but do possess the peace of mind provided by a clear conscience. Those with justice on their side do not want to go to hell and will not be taking on the dark dreams of their oppressors no matter how much they project their own fears upon us. Fears that the oppressed will oppress them. Or that they will be subjected to genocide. We do have better things to do.

[Michelle Marie]

The President you support does not support me and those who are a part of me. Not just black folks, but brown folks, red folks. People I know.[...]
I would assume that by now we would either see this as an injected divide and conquer issue (my vote), or a provable case of racism.

If you don't see it I can't help you. That is actually not my issue nor concern. I'm not here to argue anyone's position. As I've perused this thread I've been very happy to see that people have allowed each other their opinions and understandings without being belligerent or ugly about it. I hope that shall continue. My response about the president was based upon my perspective as a black American man of a certain socioeconomic level. And upon my perusal of a wealth of information. I do not require the validation of anyone here to support or dismiss what I know to be true. It should be very clear by now that perspective is everything. That "truth" depends upon where you sit. Ultimate Truth is something else altogether.

Well put. Allowing perspective instead of defending a position feels more open and loving and kind. It's the higher vibration in expression. Being belligerent or ugly is the lower vibration.

Racism is a form of hate. It's the lower vibration I was referring to when I could feel the energy of racism towards me and others. I feel the vibration, too, when this openness toward other perspectives is not present.

Our hearts feel these vibes. Maybe some are more sensitive to vibrations, or conscientious about them.

Ewan, I liked what you said about self-reflection and perspective. Nice.

TargeT, when someone presents a perspective based on life experience, there are no links other than the emanations from one's heart that is being put into words. From the :heart:links!

RahKyt, the slave labor in the prison industrial complex is one aspect of our modern times that deeply disturbs me. I'll get the link to the thread I made about it and add it here...
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?100407-Judicial-System-corporate-profits-slave-labor-innocents-imprisoned-conflicts-of-interest-etc&p=1188360&viewfull=1#post1188360

:heart:MM

[turiya]

Does "group love" then consist of people within the dominant group determining what it is about themselves they do not love and beginning to work with that in order to self-heal?


The individual is the only thing that really exists. For it is individuals that make up groups, communities, societies, bureaucracies, corporations, governments, nations. Realization occurs on an individual basis. There isn't any mass transit system that can take any number of individuals to a place of being more consciously aware. Individuals can join together & individually experience a silent moment together. In this regard, awareness can be contagious, just as any disease can be contagious.


If individuals who hate do so through forms of personal prejudice - empowered as racism - do groups hate as expressions of racism? Hutus racist against Tutsis? Japanese racist against Koreans?


I would have to say that its the other way round - racism is an expression of the disdain (hate) one has for oneself. The same with bigotry, misogyny, religious intolerance, being bothered by another's skin color, hair color, eye color shape of one's nose, the size of the body, etc.

Non acceptance of oneself (for who one is). It is the fundamental reason why there is the non acceptance of others (for who they are).

Moving from the identification in being an individual to the identification of that in being part of a group, one will become less conscious, more unconscious. One will identify with the group. A group identification leads to greater unconsciousness. What the group collectively thinks will prevail. It's likened to having a kind of hive-mind mentality. If survival of the group is the necessity, then it works.

http://www.azpestcontrol.co.uk/images/pic12.jpg

In impoverished situations, where survival is the priority, then it would be a matter of competition for resources. Under more affluent circumstances, where resources are abundant, then one is less dependent on being a part of a collective group. One becomes more free to think & create & act for oneself.

Hence, global affluence is the best way to raise the consciousness of humanity as a whole. Get rid of wasteful wars, and the chances are that racism will become non existent, imo.


It becomes others' problem when they act on that hate. Find others to hate with them. Have hater parties where they lynch, rape and make laws that treat them differently than those they abuse. Foment cultural and societal niceties that are more lenient toward those like them when they fall astray of those laws. That punish those unlike them strictly according to the letter pf the law at the same time, bolstering their prison-industrial complex and providing cheap labor for the corporations they buy from and work for and invest in for retirement.


Its a good point you make.
Yes. It would be a rather difficult situation to find oneself in - surrounded by a 'swarm' (speaking of hive) of people that have worked themselves up to a fever pitch - wanting to inflict harm on another (or own pleasure), seemingly for no reason. Again, the hive-mind mentality at work. The 'disease' goes deep & is widespread, indeed.


The problem is not new. The hate is not new. Both are culturally programmed and endemic spanning generations.


Certainly the disease has been around for a number of generations. And it is a disease. More a disease of the mind than anything else. This disease is not based on genetics, on the contrary, it is learned behavior. It is taught & learned by society. And so often, it is in the name of "good intentions."

The disease is passed on from generation to generation by the society - various aspects of the society - mother, father, siblings, relatives, teaches, pastors, ministers, educational institutions, religious institutions, bureaucracies, social mores to conform, so to be socially accepted.

Society conditions its members to be masochistic. And one is rewarded for doing so. The society trains its members not to love themselves (no reward by society for doing so). But rather, to sacrifice oneself for the betterment of others. "Become a 'team member. Be a part of the team." To sacrifice yourself, so your employer will increase his profit & may (no guarantee) increase your pay for doing so.

Team sports is based on this type of psychological entrainment - masochism - sacrificing one's own physical human body, so the team wins, and the owners make money. And that winning moment is quite a fleeting one. It only lasts for a very brief moment. But the injury done to one's own human body - the sacrifice - it will last, probably, for the rest of one's life.

And this is taught from generation to generation to generation.... on & on & on it goes. For generations upon generations... One is rewarded for sacrificing one's own self, one's own life.

Can you really say that having such an attitude towards oneself - living life with a self-sacrificing attitude - is truly loving oneself?

The more unconscious people are (as in a group), the more laws are required to be on the books.

It is still a matter of individual choices made by each individual member of the collective that will determine how conscious & unconscious any given group will be.


That the genesis of the problem was a great crime against humanity that has not been resolved. And that the real problem is the refusal of those who feel put upon by the existence of this crime to recognize their culpability as inheritors of the system created to cover up the crime and erase it from the history books.


The past is no longer. Its gone. Just like when I was a 16 year-old youth. That person doesn't exist anymore, either. There were times in my life when I did foolish things. Yeah, I was a fool at times, did some stupid things. Said some ugly things. But learned along the way. People that were good to me. People that I respect & care for. Learned that there were choices that could be made. And choose what kind of life I would like to live. What kind of individual I would want to be, and what kind not to be. It comes down to each making a conscious decision.


http://www.shoutsofjoyministries.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/157612899-500x383.jpg



I asked myself:

What good would it do if I would endlessly regret the way I had been to another in my earlier days? And the answer came:

Forget about the past, learn from it, use it. And then, move forward with that learning and with how I am to be with others that I will meet along the way.

[DNA]

Ok. May I ask who is attempting to eradicate Caucasian people?

This was a question posed to Helene and I would like to answer that because it is the root of everything that is going on here.
The biggest obstacle to a one world Government is the middle class of the USA and Europe. The largest race represented here would be white, so what you have is a global agenda with the middle class blocking the way and white people forming a large constituency .
This isn't me coming up with this. This is Dr. John Coleman the original scholar who unlocked so much data in this area. Coleman stated this stuff was the objective of the comittee of 300 back in 92'.
He has been quite prophetic. I have a thread on him here.
Dr. John Coleman is who I thought Jordan Maxwell would be (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?89738-Dr.-John-Coleman-is-who-I-thought-Jordan-Maxwell-would-be)



So white people are genociding white people? Aren't whites one cohesive and monumental group? As blacks are? Or browns, reds and yellows? Isn't it much more nuanced? These questions are only slightly facetious, I want to understand clearly. Thank you for your time and attention.
I understand the facetiousness but again this is an orchestration with the aim of destroying the middle class of America. And when that is done they will begin the depopulation of the entire planet. In my opinion this story is told in the Denver Mural as well as the Georgia Guide stones.
The media is so base and monochromatic as to be see through to all who would see.


I would submit to you that that is not in the least what is happening here. The problem is not new. The hate is not new. Both are culturally programmed and endemic spanning generations.
I would agree.
Have you ever seen the kids movie "inside out"?
The movie was really good and I highly recommend it.
In the movie we have a series of five characters living inside of a little girl's head who represent her emotions.
Anger, fear, happiness, disgust and sadness.
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/image/jpeg;base64,/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQAAAQABAAD/2wCEAAkGBxIRDxUQEBMWFRIVFRUVFhUVFRgXFxYXFxcXFhUVFxUYHSggGBolHxYXITEhJSkrLjIuGB8zODMtNygtLisBCgoKDg0O GxAQGy0lICYtMi0vLS0tLS0vKy0tLS8vLy0vLS8tLy0tLS0tLS8tLS01Ky0tKy0tLS0tLS0tLSstLf/AABEIAKgBLAMBIgACEQEDEQH/xAAcAAEAAQUBAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAABgEDBAUHAgj/xAA/EAACAQIEAwUFBQcEAQUAAAABAgADEQQFEiExQVEGEyJhcQcygZGhFEKxwdEjUmJyguHwFWOi8bIIJDM0Q//EABoBAQADAQEBAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACAwQFAQb/xAAvEQACAgEEAAMHAwUBAAAAAAAAAQIDEQQSITEFE0EiMlFhcYGxkcHwFBUjQuFS/9oADAMBAAIRAxEAPwDhsREAREQBERAEREAREQBERAEREARE9KhMA8xMhaE9GhJbWR3oxYl5qM8FJ40z1NM8RETw9EREAREQBERAE REAREQBERAEREAREQBERAEREAREQBERAEREAREQBET0guYB7pU7zOoUJTDUryR5Fhj3qlTY342uN+RHOa6atzMd1201lLBHhb1Ev HL/ACk6zHF4cgIyqpUndLW1GxN9rtz285iUBSqE2UgcRtc25bCdBaQwu2b5IRVwNpgV8PadMr5Erpqphr24ED8jzkTzPLypIIlFumcS yvUNPDInUpy1NliKNpgVFtOdOODpQnuR4iIkCwREQBERAEREAREQBERAEREAREQBERAEREAREQBERAEREARE90U1MF6kD5m0A8gX 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But I would insert another character and that would be culture.
I'm of the opinion that this insert of culture into our being is a strange and difficult to identify organism for some.
I'm of the opinion that young souls often confuse this slice of their being as something that is truly part of their being.
But I do not think that is the case.
For folks who have done a little introspection I'm of the opinion that most realize that culture is a foreign entity that habituates our mind and that no one can be called truly autonomous until they have identified this instalation as something that is indeed foreign.


That the genesis of the problem was a great crime against humanity that has not been resolved. And that the real problem is the refusal of those who feel put upon by the existence of this crime to recognize their culpability as inheritors of the system created to cover up the crime and erase it from the history books.
History is full of bad behavior like this.
The Catholics and the Protistents did some truly horrible things to each other over the name of religion which was really a cultural difference.
Slavery is a long storied practice, should the coliseum of Rome be tore down due to the slaves used to build it?
Should the Pyramids of Egypt be torn down because slavery was in use to create them?
You get my drift? At what point do we stop making a race feel guilty and responsible for their ancestors shortcomings?
Reincarnationally speaking I could have been the black man and the black man who wants my apology could have been my white plantation slave owner.
How ironic it would be should I have to apologize considering the truth behind our real situation.

[Valerie Villars]

Thanks DNA. The last two lines of your post were especially thought provoking.

[Bill Ryan]

Ok. May I ask who is attempting to eradicate Caucasian people?

Taking the risk of stepping in here! :bigsmile:

It really does seem that in Europe, to focus on that as a case study, there's a focused, conscious high-level plan at governmental and supra-governmental levels to eradicate not the European people, but European culture and society. Personally, I'm pretty much convinced that is in play.

And we know that Europe has often been the beta-testing ground for what later reaches North America.

[Michelle Marie]

Turiya, I loved your post. Very inspiring and wise.

And now, for a moment, back to identification, if you will. In my view, as I identify with my Self as soul (microcosm of Spirit) and holographic component of Spirit, I can feel connection and resonance. I know that others have different experiences and perspectives, and I honor that.

I wonder if the disease of the mind that you mention does not cause a "Disease of the heart" where the mental sense of separation infiltrates the feeling world with a vibration of hate, irritation, or intolerance? With reflection in stillness those walls seem to dissolve. (Ewan referred to this.)

Though we can only change ourselves, I feel compelled to ask for acceptance. In return, I am committed to exercise my intention to accept all others. Of course, I am a work in progress!

I'm going to share a video here. It is me reading a book I wrote. I do wish to clarify: this book is not for sale. At one time I self-published a small number of them, but they are gone and no longer available. Some day, I will publish it again.

"Clothing of the Soul"
NiFF3xUluYw

:heart: MM

[turiya]

Turiya, I loved your post. Very inspiring and wise.

And now, for a moment, back to identification, if you will. In my view, as I identify with my Self as soul (microcosm of Spirit) and holographic component of Spirit, I can feel connection and resonance. I know that others have different experiences and perspectives, and I honor that.

I wonder if the disease of the mind that you mention does not cause a "Disease of the heart" where the mental sense of separation infiltrates the feeling world with a vibration of hate, irritation, or intolerance? With reflection in stillness those walls seem to dissolve. (Ewan referred to this.)

Though we can only change ourselves, I feel compelled to ask for acceptance. In return, I am committed to exercise my intention to accept all others. Of course, I am a work in progress!

I'm going to share a video here. It is me reading a book I wrote. I do wish to clarify: this book is not for sale. At one time I self-published a small number of them, but they are gone and no longer available. Some day, I will publish it again.

"Clothing of the Soul"
NiFF3xUluYw

:heart: MM

Thanks, :heart: MM Michelle Marie

Very nice book. Good colorful graphics, as well.
Did you also do the artwork?
I also have given a children's book a try, didn't get as far as you did.
I even took a book binding course one time. Learned how to make a book from scratch, but never put a binding around the pages I made. You did a good job, imo.

Regarding the disease of the mind, I should have probably did a more proper spelling of the word ==> dis-ease.
With this spelling, dis-ease, it implies more correctly that there is a tension that comes with non acceptance of oneself.
With a conditioned unacceptance of oneself, one feels that they cannot truly be who they truly are. This is as you said, it causes a feeling of separation to exist. An obvious tense situation develops over time.

The body-mind mechanism is one phenomenon. They are not separate. The body is the external part of the mind & the mind is the internal part of the body. It is one whole mechanism. So they are linked. Really no hyphen is needed to separate the one word, 'bodymind.'

As a consequence, if there is tension within the mind, then this will likewise affect the body with tension. One will not be able to completely relax. And since heart is part of body, then it can cause it to be affected with physical problems.

We are all a work in progress.

[Michelle Marie]

I did not do the artwork, Turiya. I used clip art. I did select and combine images for each passage. My vision is to have a real artist do the illustrations some day.

The heart encompasses the emotional realm, which, to me is the portal to the soul. Of course all are integrated and interrelated (heart-mind-body-soul=Spirit) and the "innate" that is referred to in another thread is a good term for this holistic view.

Love :heart: vibes to all!

MM

[Mark]

Well put. Allowing perspective instead of defending a position feels more open and loving and kind. It's the higher vibration in expression. Being belligerent or ugly is the lower vibration.

Unfortunately my entry into the thread shifted things energetically a bit and folks stopped participating so freely. When the "Other" is directly present, things shift and I suppose that is only to be expected. I hope that my presence is not such that people feel as if they may be attacked for their views or beliefs, as that is not generally my way of being in the world. I want to post up some articles and things as we go forward, things that are examples that people might call racism or not, it is up for discussion. Thoughts are all that are important in this, understanding how and why people feel the way they do and how much of this is real and how much is memorex which of course we all here believe is quite a lot of it in the end.


Racism is a form of hate. It's the lower vibration I was referring to when I could feel the energy of racism towards me and others. I feel the vibration, too, when this openness toward other perspectives is not present.

Yes. And, often, if you are sensitive to vibrations, not even a word needs to be said for you to feel the energy.

And how do you explain that to others who cannot feel it or have never experienced the like?

A difficult proposition in the best of times. And these are definitely not those, currently. Or, are they? Hm.


RahKyt, the slave labor in the prison industrial complex is one aspect of our modern times that deeply disturbs me. I'll get the link to the thread I made about it and add it here...
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?100407-Judicial-System-corporate-profits-slave-labor-innocents-imprisoned-conflicts-of-interest-etc&p=1188360&viewfull=1#post1188360

Thank you for that. I will take the time to visit and comment. The holidays are about over so it's back to a normal schedule, so I expect to be able to be a bit more present in the early months of 2018.

It is concerning because it speaks to something that is very peculiar about the United States of America that many Americans, white, black or other, do not want to touch. But that I will touch upon here and that underlies Bill's original premise for writing this thread. Something that it takes going through "all of this", this kind of surface, definition-oriented, example-full back-and-forth to get beyond and beneath, to expose to the light. And Project Avalon has been here before. There is at least one entire thread dedicated to this topic. A pretty traumatic thread, from what I recall. One that DNA upped a couple of months ago I think I saw. Anyway...Onward.

[Mark]

Does "group love" then consist of people within the dominant group determining what it is about themselves they do not love and beginning to work with that in order to self-heal?
The individual is the only thing that really exists. For it is individuals that make up groups, communities, societies, bureaucracies, corporations, governments, nations. Realization occurs on an individual basis. There isn't any mass transit system that can take any number of individuals to a place of being more consciously aware. Individuals can join together & individually experience a silent moment together. In this regard, awareness can be contagious, just as any disease can be contagious.

No belief in a collective unconscious? No morphogenic field? No zero point information field from whence all matter emanates, displaying the world of forms in an infinite and eternal, ever-shifting, morphing variety of potentialities? Dark matter/energy (or whatever it is that most of the mass in creation is hiding, within, behind, under, above, through) as a further manifestation of light/information processing medium? I'm quite certain that I can't agree that the individual is the only thing that really exists. It belies my lived experience. The genetic cellular database? the multitude within each of us, comprising our material journey into creation across untold generations of incarnative history and future possibility?



If individuals who hate do so through forms of personal prejudice - empowered as racism - do groups hate as expressions of racism? Hutus racist against Tutsis? Japanese racist against Koreans?


I would have to say that its the other way round - racism is an expression of the disdain (hate) one has for oneself. The same with bigotry, misogyny, religious intolerance, being bothered by another's skin color, hair color, eye color shape of one's nose, the size of the body, etc.

Non acceptance of oneself (for who one is). It is the fundamental reason why there is the non acceptance of others (for who they are).

I really like that formulation. It is both equally. That is dependent upon the "level" of consciousness manifestation to which we are speaking, the Higher or the lower. Both are true simultaneously. The conflation of the two levels of consciousness manifestation lead to the majority of the disagreements in the consciousness community, let alone the general communicative venue that we share as a globally public peoples.


Moving from the identification in being an individual to the identification of that in being part of a group, one will become less conscious, more unconscious. One will identify with the group. A group identification leads to greater unconsciousness. What the group collectively thinks will prevail. It's likened to having a kind of hive-mind mentality. If survival of the group is the necessity, then it works.


Even while being part of a group, it is quite possible for a self and group-selected cadre to maintain individuated awareness to the extent that its designs assist in the cohesive characteristics of the group as well as its local and global evolutionary qualities. Any type of "priesthood" or "elite" serves this function. The quotidian nature of this group serves a purpose as we each represent certain interests and qualities of our particular collectives in an individuated manner, while still being a part of those groups. Again, I see little use in the dichotomous separation of poles that require each other for their very existence. If you are speaking of a particular form of "mob mentality", wherein one is truly subsumed within the imperatives of the moment and the group needs, that is something quite different from our every day sojourn within the societal bookends of our lives and the choices we make. To be or not to be, our choices generally occur within very highly bounded parameters that we are rarely directly aware of.


In impoverished situations, where survival is the priority, then it would be a matter of competition for resources. Under more affluent circumstances, where resources are abundant, then one is less dependent on being a part of a collective group. One becomes more free to think & create & act for oneself.

And vice versa. Yes?


Hence, global affluence is the best way to raise the consciousness of humanity as a whole. Get rid of wasteful wars, and the chances are that racism will become non existent, imo.

That's deep. And that has been a theory of some for quite some time. I'm not certain that it is true, as there are people in the world, and always have been, who relish violence. Psychopaths. Who foment war. Who time after time rise to the top of their social stratas because of their ability to separate themselves from the group. See themselves as different. And call that difference superiority.


Team sports is based on this type of psychological entrainment - masochism - sacrificing one's own physical human body, so the team wins, and the owners make money. And that winning moment is quite a fleeting one. It only lasts for a very brief moment. But the injury done to one's own human body - the sacrifice - it will last, probably, for the rest of one's life.

Hear, hear. My knees and shoulders will bear the scars and the pain of that youthful "sacrifice" on my part for the rest of my life. And, of course, like so many millions of others, I did it for free in High School and college.


Can you really say that having such an attitude towards oneself - living life with a self-sacrificing attitude - is truly loving oneself?

If you know as a matter of course, that you are your group, then yes. Loving others is loving yourself. If you believe yourself to be singular, an individual, with no connection to others, then of course, to see sacrifice of self as a form of greater love would seem foolish.

Depends upon your own personal experience of consciousness and how deeply you have, personally, extended outwards into the multiverse to "see" what is truly going on out there and in here.

But then, who is to say that the wisdom of the ages in this regard is not just more of the illusion? There are certainly enough channelers and energy workers out there right now who wax poetic on the prison-like nature of our world and the energetic sheaths that surround us at every level, who speak of chakras as artificial binding forces upon our holistic energetic selves, as there being gatekeepers at every dimensional/density level to keep us mired in the lower energetic forms of material expression as we continue to serve as sustenance for the higher.



The past is no longer. Its gone. Just like when I was a 16 year-old youth. That person doesn't exist anymore, either. There were times in my life when I did foolish things. Yeah, I was a fool at times, did some stupid things. Said some ugly things. But learned along the way. People that were good to me. People that I respect & care for. Learned that there were choices that could be made. And choose what kind of life I would like to live. What kind of individual I would want to be, and what kind not to be. It comes down to each making a conscious decision.

It is gone indeed. But it is not gone at all. It remains within us. And also without. Another potential area for "belief" versus "knowledge" to contend, I expect. Going back to the idea that polar realities can coexist with both being simultaneously true and false. :)

So, I will leave it be only with the addition that perspective in the timestream, in the Now, is paramount. Also, one's own decision about who to be and why. If there is only me, am I living only for myself? If there is also we, can I live for others? What is the medium in between and what does that mean for me and my way forward? Did I become who I am by myself? With no assistance from anyone? What do I owe others? Karma, equal and opposite energetic exchange, however you wish to perceive or define it, does it pertain to me? We?




I asked myself:What good would it do if I would endlessly regret the way I had been to another in my earlier days?

And the answer came:Forget about the past, learn from it, use it. And then, move forward with that learning and with how I am to be with others that I will meet along the way.

Diggin' that right there. Peace.

[Mark]

This was a question posed to Helene and I would like to answer that because it is the root of everything that is going on here.
The biggest obstacle to a one world Government is the middle class of the USA and Europe. The largest race represented here would be white, so what you have is a global agenda with the middle class blocking the way and white people forming a large constituency.

Ok. You'll get no argument from me about what the global elite are doing to the world now. White Genocide, though? Really? Or could it just be considered Genocide in general, since all people of all groups now are being culled for nefarious purposes? Because what the title, White Genocide, does, is it creates a layer of unnecessary fear on the part of people who have every reason to be fearful and, I'm not talking about white people. I'm talking about people who SHOULD BE THE NATURAL ALLIES OF middle class and lower class whites, and that is middle class and lower class blacks browns reds AND YELLOWS.

What it puts blacks and reds in fear of in particular is this very visceral and epigenetic realization that when white people as a large group get scared, black and red people die en mass. That is historic.

It will be very difficult to point to any aspect of White Genocide and say that only white people are experiencing it. That black and red people have not been experiencing it already for decades if not hundreds of years. These folks, national minority groups, are canary in the coalmine populations, and the governments use the expendables first before they branch out into more mainstream experimentation, right? Then when they do branch out to include the majority population, it is because the most draconian of their plans has finally reached the point of fruition.

The point where, they think, it is too late for people to do anything about it because it has been deployed systemically. The point at which agendas that PA loves to highlight have become so ubiquitous and mundane as to be little remarked upon as anything other than an accepted aside, a necessary negative externality of living in "civilized" countries. Bad water, chemtrails, sex-change drugs and plastic. Things that affect more than just the white population of the United States and other western nations, but that affect all of us to greater and lesser degrees, depending upon our distance from the middling norms, which grows increasingly greater as the ladder continues to be pulled up behind those who consider themselves elite and the ones who serve them and wish their children or grandchildren to be among them, eventually.


I would agree.
Have you ever seen the kids movie "inside out"?
The movie was really good and I highly recommend it.
In the movie we have a series of five characters living inside of a little girl's head who represent her emotions.
Anger, fear, happiness, disgust and sadness.

But I would insert another character and that would be culture.
I'm of the opinion that this insert of culture into our being is a strange and difficult to identify organism for some.
I'm of the opinion that young souls often confuse this slice of their being as something that is truly part of their being.
But I do not think that is the case.
For folks who have done a little introspection I'm of the opinion that most realize that culture is a foreign entity that habituates our mind and that no one can be called truly autonomous until they have identified this instalation as something that is indeed foreign.

Yes. I have seen that movie.

Ok. Now we're getting to it, DNA. Since we're getting to it, it is time to be very careful.

We've talked about "foreign entities" inside the mind before, haven't we.



That the genesis of the problem was a great crime against humanity that has not been resolved. And that the real problem is the refusal of those who feel put upon by the existence of this crime to recognize their culpability as inheritors of the system created to cover up the crime and erase it from the history books.
History is full of bad behavior like this.
The Catholics and the Protistents did some truly horrible things to each other over the name of religion which was really a cultural difference.
Slavery is a long storied practice, should the coliseum of Rome be tore down due to the slaves used to build it?
Should the Pyramids of Egypt be torn down because slavery was in use to create them?
You get my drift? At what point do we stop making a race feel guilty and responsible for their ancestors shortcomings?
Reincarnationally speaking I could have been the black man and the black man who wants my apology could have been my white plantation slave owner.
How ironic it would be should I have to apologize considering the truth behind our real situation.

No. History is not full of bad behavior of the exact same nature as what has occurred upon the American continent in the last 400 odd years. Search as much as you want for as long as you want and you will not find another example of the type of experiment that has been going on here in these United States for all this time. I will not allow you to minimize it and, remember, I am coming from a studied perspective. Not just American history but world history, a study that continues into each moment as, each day, I continuously scour the news, new perspectives on history, science, genetics, all looking for keys to the puzzle.

I will grant you that history is full of genocidal behavior and murderous instances, but the American Experiment has taken all of that to the next level and created something new on the face of this planet. What that is, is still up for debate and full exploration, but it has never existed in this same way before, ever.

Speaking on this issue at the multidimensional level, we could include the idea of "Soul families" very easily. But as there is little agreement in the AltCom about such things or even acceptance of them in the traditional Hindu or Buddhist form, I'm not sure it would be helpful. So I'll limit my response to the imperatives of the genetic cellular database and what we are each dealing with right here and now, within our own bodies and within the ancient memories of our cells and molecules. Who are we right now in these bodies and who has made up these bodies, from whence have their genetic memories come?

So you can speak of reincarnation and of perhaps being black in another life or this one if you want, but it bears little weight upon the fact that our biologies, right here and now, are connected to this nation and others, regardless of where our energetics arose from. Which means that the imperative that brought each of our souls into incarnation during this time in this place has some work to do pertaining to these biologies and the histories interrelated. That cannot be minimized, nor can it be put aside as if it were meaningless, as it has everything to do with the lessons each and every single one of us were born on this earth to live.

[Mark]

Ok. May I ask who is attempting to eradicate Caucasian people?

Taking the risk of stepping in here! :bigsmile:

Thank you for that! Would love to see some more of your thoughtful posts about current events too!


It really does seem that in Europe, to focus on that as a case study, there's a focused, conscious high-level plan at governmental and supra-governmental levels to eradicate not the European people, but European culture and society. Personally, I'm pretty much convinced that is in play.

And we know that Europe has often been the beta-testing ground for what later reaches North America.

I have a question in that regard.

Something that is pertinent to the over-all topic. As I've mentioned before, as an associate instructor of Geography in American universities, ever since the mid-90s, the textbooks I've used have all mentioned the demographic shift in Europe, Australia and the United States, as a side-effect of urbanization and wealth. As populations shift from agricultural to urban, it is cheaper to have fewer children, don't need numerous kids to work the farm, things of that sort and it has always made sense in that regard.

But now, as it is becoming more apparent to whites in this country and Europe also, that the lowered birthrate is not abating, people think of it differently. They think of it as something being done to them, rather than something that multiple generations of affluence results in.

For whatever reason, white people chose at some point in Europe and also in the United States, to have fewer children. We also know that other groups do it as well as they gain affluence, at least, historically that has been shown to be the case, even if that vaunted minority group affluence still cannot compare to general white affluence in the USA and probably throughout Europe as well. After World War II, when Germany experienced a dearth of working age men, they brought in Turkish workers in the Gast Arbeiter program and those Turkish men provided a work force that was genetically "other" to the Teutonic tradition of that part of Europe, or, as it had been for some millennia, at least.

My question is this: since the entirety of Europe is now undergoing a similar demographic shift, in that their Boomers and Gen-X populations are swelling and they still require a youthful population to work certain types of service industry jobs to take care of the aging population, could it be possible that the current influx of young people from these Southwest Asian nations are being brought in for exactly that reason? But people aren't being told that this is why they are coming?

[Foxie Loxie]

Excellent question, Rahkyt!! It does seem to go back to The Controllers of Society, doesn't it?! :confused:

[Beren]

Rahkyt, that is a good question. I deem it very true that it is happening like this but the people were not told. Another thing is that truly a lot of people are let in without a proper vetting time of who they are. Lots of them passing as refugees are actually what you may call today as bad apples.
Ideology of radical islam is helping this situation to get from bad to worse. If the process of integration lasted for few decades then maybe it would be different but now you have situation of oil and water...

In America anyone can say they are American as long as they are citizens because America is an experiment first and foremost of white Europeans mixed together before there were infusions of other peoples of black, brown or yellow heritage.
But in Europe you cannot really say that you are Austrian or German or Russian if you are not white and having a history of belonging to that nation for centuries. The very names of nations are deeply connected with appearance, culture, language and else so let`s say you end up an immigrant in Germany. You can never be called German but you can become German citizen.

Same with Russian or any other European nation.

You can become British Citizen but you will never be English or Scottish or Welsh. But in America you can be American. That is a huge difference.

So by trying to change those ancient old cultural paradigms nowadays, Europeans are resisting that because they feel they do not want to lose their identity.
Even me, who am white, blue eyed dark blond Serbian - I cannot be German ever. I live in Boston and many people who don`t know my ethnicity say that either I am German or Russian or French... But when there - I can never be German or French because I will be for them always a foreigner, despite looking like them... because I am white European- Serbian and I don`t have their name and I don`t speak their language perfectly.


The problem lies deeply in forceful mixing of people by will of the quasi elite who do not care about human life.
Their minds are controlled by non human entities who are hell bent to keep practicing parasitism on Earth.

[Michelle Marie]

Here are some current events:

Farmers Markets
Are racist?!?
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/dec/27/farmers-markets-called-racist-habits-of-white-peop/

Cabal promotes racism
More divide and conquer strategies to not buy into.
https://needtoknow.news/2018/01/left-promotes-racism-white-people/

Understanding their motives, agendas, and strategies makes me want to laugh.
Knowing that many people buy into it makes me want to cry.

:) :(
MM

[Bill Ryan]

I'm bumping this excellent thread by copying over a post I just wrote elsewhere (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?94588-Not-Quite-Farewell&p=1212864&viewfull=1#post1212864). Iloveyou is referring to the immigration problems in Europe.

~~~



With the refugee/immigrant influx they created a large, heterogeneous group of people (including criminal gangs and provocateurs brought in on purpose) as scapegoat - so that the population is divided in opposite factions and ready to fight each other - to keep them busy and distract them from looking at the satanic pedophilia practices of the elite (which are essential for their existence).



I'd say there's a huge amount of truth in that. http://projectavalon.net/forum4/images/smilies/0701%20Yes.gif

[B]The point is that it's a deliberate agenda. And it's gradually destroying Europe. (The USA is next, folks.)

Anyone who's concerned about these issues is NOT a racist. And they are NOT against liberty and freedom for all good people.

[Mark]

Greetings, PA.

I'm sharing this post because it is an historical and thoughtful exploration of what is currently going on in the USA right now, under the tenure of Jeff Sessions as the Attorney General of the United States. There are A LOT of links here. Many of them from historical and uploaded government documents as well as other articles detailing whatever aspect of the main article is being referenced by the hyperlink. I would appreciate cogent and detailed criticism of the article and its points leading to direct discussion of the points raised pertaining to any dissent.

I recognize that many of the links are MSM. If there are challenges to the accuracy of those articles, I'm ready to entertain discussion about them. The purpose of this post is to clarify what one perspective of our current situation is in regards to Civil Rights and what exactly the general AltCom vision is to Civil Rights and what alternatives might be raised by those in this community who don't appreciate what has been going on historically in this area, but who are NOT racist or seeking to regress back to some point where black and brown people are enslaved by whites to service and inferior social and economic status.

I think this is important, right now, in order to differentiate between what the MSM has called the Alt Right and what is a more accepting and less White Nationalist vision of the present and future. This conception, is the Alt Community that I belonged to for years and that I've been pining for now, for a couple of years. I don't think it has gone, it is still present, but it is being overridden in the public eye by a view of the Alternative that is being associated with racism and hate.

That is NOT the folks I have known for years here in PA but, in order to move forward, it is important to differentiate HOW the view here is different. I proffer this article and its characterization of Jeff Sessions and his initiatives, for discussion.

From my personal perspective, I see the creation of what I call "Fortress/Apartheid America", which is a state-by-state retrenchment and consolidation of economic and political power in preparation for the upcoming demographic shift, in which the white national majority will be equaled by a combined minority population. In my estimation, it is an effort doomed to failure by sheer dint of its overt, fear-based nature. The violence and repression that may accompany this period in our history will forever be imprinted upon our collective consciousness moving forward, IF it gets to that extreme. I believe it does not have to, yet. What do y'all think?

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=38262&d=1529449406&thumb=1&stc=1

The End of Civil Rights (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/sessions/563006/)

Across immigration, policing, criminal justice, and voting rights, the attorney general is pushing an agenda that could erase many of the legal gains of modern America's defining movement.

The fires on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, had barely stopped burning when the Department of Justice released an extraordinary report on the city’s police department. In the findings of the 2015 investigation (https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf) of the Ferguson Police Department, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division detailed how a municipality had built its social contract on a slow-rolling racist heist. Activists hoped that the Ferguson report—which was prompted by the 2014 police killing of an unarmed black teenager and found that police conduct had “severely damaged the relationship between African Americans and the Ferguson Police Department”—would not only change the city, but would signal that the United States was finally willing to confront the legacy of white supremacy. The Ferguson City Council reluctantly agreed (https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/03/15/470598733/ferguson-city-council-accepts-deal-with-justice-department) to a consent decree (https://www.justice.gov/opa/file/833431/download) with the DOJ that would overhaul city policing. Federal courts rejected voter-suppression schemes and reaffirmed affirmative action (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/fisher-university-of-texas/470676/). Movements from Black Lives Matter to LGBTQ advocacy saw an opportunity to broaden the national civil-rights agenda.

Then Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III took over.

More than a year has elapsed since Sessions, formerly a senator from Alabama, was appointed U.S. attorney general by President Donald Trump. For the Trump administration, much of the last 18 months has been spent fighting the fires of one scandal after the next, and watching as the sprawling investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election—led by Sessions’s own department—has threatened to consume Washington. In that particular drama, the president and his attorney general have clashed. Trump has openly insulted Sessions, claiming that Sessions took a “weak position” (http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/history-trump-jeff-sessions-feud.html) on investigating intelligence leaks, and saying that he “would have quickly picked someone else” (https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/1003962584352030720?lang=en) had he known how Sessions would handle the Russia investigation.

But behind the scenes, even as the president has agitated in public about firing his attorney general, Sessions is the true architect of much of what people believe to be Trump’s domestic-policy agenda. As implemented in recent decisions to curtail asylum grants, ramp up immigration enforcement, and dial back criminal-justice reform and voting-rights protections, this agenda is more than just the reversal of policies enacted during the Barack Obama era, which Trump promised during his campaign. Rather, from the Black Belt in Alabama in the 1980s to the farthest reaches of the border fence today, the Sessions Doctrine is the endgame of a long legal tradition of undermining minority civil rights.

The Sessions Doctrine has moved somewhat suddenly to the forefront of the national conversation in the wake of aggressive moves by the Justice Department against immigration. Sessions has recently pushed for changes in the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the immigration-court system embedded within the DOJ. He’s considering ways to force judges to process more deportation cases, changes that several experts say will undoubtedly mean that fewer people receive due process or fair hearings.

The attorney general has also moved to firmly limit asylum grants, and last week announced that he could effectively eliminate the ability of immigrants who face domestic or gang violence back home to successfully apply for asylum (https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/11/politics/jeff-sessions-asylum-decision/index.html). That decision risks sending more vulnerable women and targets of gang violence back to dangerous situations.

The asylum announcement came after a Mother Jones investigation (https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/06/she-was-enslaved-by-salvadoran-guerrillas-us-judges-say-that-makes-her-ineligible-for-asylum/) found that a Salvadoran woman pressed into slavery by a gang that had killed her husband had been denied an asylum request under the Obama-era Board of Immigration Appeals in 2016 because her slave labor had constituted “material support” for a terrorist group. In a 2018 decision upholding the denial (https://www.justice.gov/eoir/page/file/1068811/download), the Board of Immigration Appeals reasoned that her denial was justified on the grounds that “any contributions to terrorist organizations further their terrorism.”

That justification—like several other pieces of immigration and asylum policy—is merely a continuance of Obama-era decisions, but the request from the current board to reconsider her protection from deportation is another sign of a shift toward a stark black-and-white view of immigration, and a much more powerful deportation engine. Sessions successfully pushed Trump to end the Obama “catch and release” policy, under which unverified immigrants arrested in the immigration dragnet were let go before trial, and has enforced the “zero tolerance” policy (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/06/15/jeff-sessions-says-bible-justifies-separating-children-illegal/) in its place, one detaining all arrested immigrants pending trial. He’s instructed U.S. Attorneys (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-ends-catch-and-release_us_5ac7fd65e4b07a3485e4bd95) to prioritize prosecuting first-time offenders among undocumented immigrants, and last week cited the Bible in defending the decision to separate mothers and children at the border, telling critics “to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.”

When reached by email, a DOJ spokesperson said of the department’s immigration efforts: “In an effort to combat years of neglect and a lack of leadership in the immigration court system, the Justice Department has implemented a number of common-sense reforms designed to reduce the backlog without compromising due process.”

For Paul W. Schmidt, former chairman of EOIR’s Board of Immigration Appeals from 1995 to 2001 and a former EOIR immigration judge, the immigration system has always been vulnerable to naked political plays by the attorney general, but Sessions has so far been the boldest in making such plays. EOIR is “a division of the Justice Department, which is ridiculous,” he says. “You have a biased attorney general who’s jamming more cases into the system, and he reaches down and pulls out individual decisions he doesn’t like—a lot of them relating to asylum-seekers, women, and vulnerable groups—so he can rewrite the law to fit his white-nationalist agenda. It’s basically a kangaroo court.”

Sessions’s immigration agenda extends well beyond his tightening grip over immigration courts and asylum boards. Even in the framework of the Justice Department’s new opioid policy (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/killing-drug-dealers-opioid-epidemic/555782/), Sessions made clear he believed that so-called sanctuary cities and unverified immigrants had essentially imported the opioid problem into the U.S. In retaliation for such cities’ continued refusal to enforce strict federal immigration detentions and referrals, Sessions has fought to strip them of certain avenues of federal-grant funding (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4496315-6-6-18-Philadelphia-v-Sessions-Opinion.html). Under his guidance, the DOJ’s current top civil-rights lawyer (https://www.propublica.org/article/john-gore-trump-appointee-citizenship-question-census) has fought to add a controversial citizenship question to the 2020 census, a change that many immigration advocates and researchers believe (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/the-weaponized-census/556592/) will make unverified immigrants more vulnerable to raids and reduce response rates among all immigrants, and in the process punish population centers where immigrants are heavily represented.

According to Schmidt, the recent moves on immigration reflect a broader set of priorities that share several common threads. “He’s abandoned prison reform,” Schmidt says. “He’s favoring gerrymandering and other ways of cutting down minority voters. He’s cut protections for LGBT people. Foreign nationals are at the top of his hit list, but basically all vulnerable minorities and people of color are somewhere on his hit list.”

The attorney general didn’t waste any time in making his priorities clear. Upon taking up his office in the Robert F. Kennedy building, just 12 days after his confirmation and swearing in, Sessions issued the first of many memos that would roll back the Obama administration’s criminal-justice priorities. On February 21, 2017 (https://www.justice.gov/oip/foia-library/attorney_general_memorandum_advising_the_federal_bureau_of_prisons_that_the_department_will_continue _to_use_private_prisons.pdf/download), the DOJ rescinded a memo from the previous fall (https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/file/886311/download) that had pledged to wind down the federal government’s contracts with private prisons. Following years of pressure from criminal-justice advocates, and reporting that outlined massive racial disparities (https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/03/13/289000532/why-for-profit-prisons-house-more-inmates-of-color), rampant abuse (https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/cca-private-prisons-corrections-corporation-inmates-investigation-bauer/)—especially of immigrants (https://www.texastribune.org/2014/06/10/shocking-abuse-immigrants-profit-prisons/)—and administrative inefficiencies (https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/19/us/19prisons.html) in federal private prisons, the 2016 decision rested on a review from the Office of the Inspector General (https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2016/e1606.pdf), which found that “contract prisons incurred more safety and security incidents per capita than comparable [Federal Bureau of Prisons] institutions.”

In rescinding former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates’s private-prison memo, Sessions did not mention the OIG’s report, or any of the allegations of brutality and misconduct in private prisons. He merely stated that the policy “impaired the Bureau’s ability to meet the future needs of the federal correctional system.” With that, the DOJ set the course for an approach to law-and-order that relied more heavily on incarceration, one that pays little attention to data and statistics, and even less attention to the voices of the communities most in need.

In one of his first prepared remarks as attorney general (https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-jeff-sessions-delivers-remarks-national-association-attorneys-general), Sessions outlined his doctrine as such:


Rather than dictating to local police how to do their jobs – or spending scarce federal resources to sue them in court – we should use our money, research and expertise to help them figure out what is happening and determine the best ways to fight crime.

[...]

We need to resist the temptation to ignore or downplay this crisis and instead tackle it head-on, to ensure justice and safety for all Americans. We need to enforce our laws and put bad men behind bars. And we need to support the brave men and women of law enforcement as they work day and night to protect us.

But Sessions “has definitely been a force for a regressive approach to criminal justice,” says Inimai Chettiar, the director of the justice program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “Since the day he set foot in office, he has one by one repealed the vast majority of items put forward by the Obama administration to advance reforms, not only in policing but with prosecutors and private prisons.”

According to Vanita Gupta, the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division from 2014 to 2017, the pace and extent of retrenchment under the first year of Sessions’s tenure have been extraordinary. “This DOJ and Jeff Sessions are rolling back civil-rights progress and undermining fundamental American values of equality and justice in a fairly unprecedented manner,” Gupta told me. “Across every issue, from criminal-justice reform to voting rights to LGBTQ rights, the attorney general is advancing a vision of America that is narrow, and abdicating some of the Justice Department’s core responsibilities and mandate to ensure equal rights and access to justice for all.”

The Trump administration sees the Trump Doctrine as a negation of the Obama presidency, as Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, reported (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/a-senior-white-house-official-defines-the-trump-doctrine-were-america-bitch/562511/), or perhaps more crassly, as “the ‘**** Obama’ Doctrine.” This portrayal of the current executive line as a hindbrain-level reaction to even the slightest whiff of the White House’s previous occupant makes sense, and is probably the only way to consistently interpret Trump’s wildly impulsive policy gesticulation. But just as Obama himself is tied to a deeper tradition of racial discourse and civil rights in this country, so is his backlash.

The history of voting rights and desegregation in America over the past 50 years—from the civil-rights movement through the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, which to gutted a key provision of the Voting Rights Act—might be told well by the story of Alabama alone. It is a story in which Sessions’s own career is rooted, and one in which he’s played a central role over the past few decades.

Sessions was only a teenager in 1963, when Governor George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door at the University of Alabama. To keep his promise to resist the integration of schools in the state, Wallace took things into his own hands, personally obstructing the federally mandated enrollment of two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood. With his largely symbolic action, Wallace firmly cemented himself as a champion of “massive resistance,” a scorched-earth policy of state and local pushback against federally enforced civil-rights protections. Massive resistance had begun in Virginia after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, and spread through the South. Through Wallace, it became the official policy platform of the entire state of Alabama (http://www.alabamamoments.alabama.gov/sec60det.html).

Arrayed against Wallace’s resistance was the Justice Department, including its relatively new Civil Rights Division. President John F. Kennedy, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach engaged in an intricate dance with Wallace, including the famed confrontation between Katzenbach and Wallace outside the door frame of the university, after which—facing an intervention by the National Guard—Wallace stood down.

The crucial role of the Civil Rights Division in defusing the situation in Alabama, and the growing and changing mandate of the department as a whole, is often overlooked. The 1963 incident came after years of similar resistance from southern states to integration. Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall oversaw much of the federal response, and developed a standard doctrine (http://digital.wustl.edu/e/eop/eopweb/mar0015.0180.067burkemarshall.html) for dealing with education-related intransigence to integration. The approach had been solidified a year before Wallace’s big stand, during a lethal series of riots at Ole Miss over the attempt by James Meredith, a black student and activist, to integrate (https://www.npr.org/2012/10/01/161573289/integrating-ole-miss-a-transformative-deadly-riot). Meredith was successfully able to attend the school with the help of an armed intervention by the National Guard, a moment made possible by black activists, the White House, white state officials, and, most notably, Marshall and the Civil Rights Division.

These incidents changed the nature of the modern relationship between state and federal governments, and established the role of the Justice Department in securing civil rights. The theory of massive resistance was based in provocation, forcing the federal government to flex muscles—such as the potential mobilization of troops—that it had been loathe to use against state governments for almost a century. In Mississippi and Alabama, however, the Kennedys, Katzenbach, and Marshall put that option back on the table to defend the civil rights of former second-class citizens, and in doing so, recast the DOJ as a powerful ally for the aggrieved. In a sense, the biggest new advantage of the 1960s civil-rights movement compared with previous eras was the presence of federal leadership in the form of the DOJ (https://www.thenation.com/article/the-civil-rights-movement-had-one-powerful-tool-that-we-dont-have/), and a willingness by the attorney general and other top officials to use the full extent of the department’s power. As Marshall said in a 1985 interview, “The use of federal force is a last resort was our policy and I still think it was a proper policy.”

As the federal government’s role in civil rights evolved, state obstruction grew more sophisticated. Faced with automatic scrutiny of new voting laws from the DOJ and courts, southern leaders nevertheless pushed ahead with schemes such as at-large voting plans (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/04/voting-rights-at-large-voting-louisiana/524691/), integration-busting private schools, and school-district secessions that in the aggregate helped maintain de facto segregation. Alabama was once again on the front line.

The state that had served as ground zero for much of the struggle over black voting rights during the civil-rights movement was also—predictably—the theater for the long guerrilla war against the Voting Rights Act after its passage, so much so that many of the cases cited most often as precedent on VRA enforcement come from Alabama. As detailed in a report from some of Alabama’s most iconic civil-rights litigators (https://gould.usc.edu/students/journals/rlsj/issues/assets/docs/issue_17/04_Alabama_Macro.pdf), “Between the 1965 enactment of the Voting Rights Act and the 1982 reauthorization … the Department of Justice objected fifty-nine times,” to new elections laws that the state had to submit to federal scrutiny.. “In addition,” the litigators wrote, “the Department of Justice sent observers to Alabama jurisdictions 107 times during the same period.”

Into that fray stepped Jeff Sessions, a lawyer from Selma who rose through the ranks in the Southern District of Alabama. In 1985 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1985/09/12/us-fails-to-obtain-convictions-in-alabama-voting-fraud-cases/7ad040d1-9c82-4094-affd-654d98dbaa06/?utm_term=.d9938b850fb4), as a U.S. attorney for the Southern District, Sessions chose to pursue a voter-fraud investigation against three black organizers in Alabama’s Black Belt, including one former aide to Martin Luther King Jr., Al Turner. The case, built on allegations of tampering with absentee ballots, didn’t net any convictions, but inflamed the still-raw wounds left after Jim Crow. Sessions faced accusations that his investigation was racist, that he ignored similarly clever absentee schemes that had been used by whites for decades, and that federal attorneys used intimidating tactics that could easily chill black political participation over what seemed to be minor discrepancies.

Sessions and the DOJ defended his prosecution with the charge that he’d actually protected the voting rights of black belt citizens against three potential fraudsters. Sessions always maintained that he should’ve won the case. “I guarantee you there was sufficient evidence for a conviction," he said after the trial.

Still, the prosecution that Turner described as a “witch hunt” made enemies of none other than Coretta Scott King, the civil-rights activist and widow of Martin Luther King Jr., who submitted a letter opposing Sessions’s 1986 nomination (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/01/10/read-the-letter-coretta-scott-king-wrote-opposing-sessionss-1986-federal-nomination/?utm_term=.b44f349fe93d)to the judgeship of the court for which he served as attorney. Scott King wrote:


I urge you to consider carefully Mr. Sessions’ conduct in these matters. Such a review, I believe, raises serious questions about his commitment to the protection of the voting rights of all American citizens and consequently his fair and unbiased judgment regarding this fundamental right. When the circumstances and facts surrounding the indictments of Al Turner, his wife, Evelyn, and Spencer Hogue are analyzed, it becomes clear that the motivation was political, and the result frightening—the wide-scale chill of the exercise of the ballot for blacks, who suffered so much to receive that right in the first place.

The nomination failed. But Sessions’s career continued apace. As the state’s attorney general, he pushed an expansive capital-punishment agenda (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/08/opinion/jeff-sessions-the-grim-reaper-of-alabama.html), fighting to execute some intellectually disabled people. In an appeals court, he successfully argued in favor of the death penalty for a black defendant whose conviction had come after a trial during which a prosecutor rebutted the defense’s insanity case by arguing that “this is not another case of niggeritous.” (https://law.justia.com/cases/alabama/court-of-appeals-criminal/1996/cr-93-0766-0-0.html) Sessions supported a failed bill to execute people who received two or more serious drug offenses. And as a ProPublica investigation chronicles, while the state attorney general, Sessions also fought a long legal battle (https://www.propublica.org/article/how-jeff-sessions-helped-kill-equitable-school-funding-in-alabama) against a court order seeking to equalize funding for Alabama’s still-segregated schools.

Sessions has professed a long career (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/the-fiction-of-jeff-sessions-civil-rights-champion/516237/) of ameliorating the injustices of Alabama’s herrenvolk regime. “I deeply understand the history of civil rights and the horrendous impact that relentless and systemic discrimination and the denial of voting rights has had on our African-American brothers and sisters. I have witnessed it,” he told the Senate last January.

But the historical record often places his work in conflict with those of civil-rights activists and federal watchdogs. As he told the Montgomery Advertiser in 1995 after becoming Alabama Attorney General, his agenda was to “defend the state aggressively” in what the paper calls “certain types of lawsuits”—namely federal civil-rights cases. After 12 years as the main federal prosecutor in the state, two years as the state’s attorney general, and 20 years as a senator, the abysmal racial disparities in Alabama persist (https://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2017/07/alabamas_achievement_gap.html), and racially disparate disenfranchisement laws remained on the books even in 2017 (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/alabama-felon-voting-right-restoration_us_59286e72e4b0df57cbfb840e).

While Barack Obama’s civil-rights and civil-liberties legacy is more than complicated as a result of his foreign-policy and domestic-surveillance records, his Justice Department was built with the heritage of aggressive civil-rights enforcement in mind. Notably, Obama’s first assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, Tom Perez, had worked for years as a federal prosecutor of hate crimes (https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=114223708). Perez’s boss at the time, Attorney General Eric Holder, testified twice in favor of anti-hate-crime legislation passed in memory of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr., two men killed in separate hate-related incidents in 1998.

Under Holder and then his successor, Loretta Lynch, the department moved to address some racial disparities and the most punitive federally enforced crime policies. In addition to rolling back private prisons; moving toward more systemic civil-rights enforcement of police departments and brutality; and leveraging that move for arranging consent decrees, court-enforced agreements between a municipality and the DOJ to implement recommendations for improvement; one of the most consequential policies of Holder’s DOJ was the Smart on Crime initiative (https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/ag/legacy/2013/08/12/smart-on-crime.pdf), which began in early 2013. That initiative was intended to give federal prosecutors more discretion to avoid triggering mandatory minimum sentences for low-level drug offenses. Additionally, DOJ memos dialed back federal marijuana prosecutions where state law had decriminalized or legalized the drug, and the department ended a federal-asset-forfeiture program that in its final year of operation had netted local, state, and federal officials $65 million in cash, homes, and other property (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/07/19/jeff-sessions-justice-department-turns-a-65-million-asset-forfeiture-spigot-back-on/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.89b2f25d2de9&wpisrc=nl_evening&wpm=1)—even from some suspects who’d never been charged with a crime.

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/album.php?albumid=620&attachmentid=38263

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has rolled back the policies of his predecessors, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch. (Matthieu Bourel)
In his tenure as attorney general, Jeff Sessions has made it a point to end each of these policies. In fact, he has expressed deep suspicion of the very idea of criminal-justice reform, and of any scrutiny of police actions. Instead of the aggressive “patterns and practice” investigations of whole police departments, the DOJ has emphasized “local control and accountability” (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-announces-changes-collaborative-reform-initiative) in its collaborative initiatives. The department has ramped up the surveillance of black activists (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/11/documents-show-monitoring-black-lives-matter-171128110538134.html)—even as the ranks of white-supremacist extremism and hate crimes surge—and brought to bear a narrative that crime in America increased under previous reforms. Sessions has led the DOJ away from some of its most expansive voting-rights enforcement, and reinvigorated the War on Drugs. And he has placed undocumented immigration as a major part of the problem in all phases of his criminal-justice, drug, and voting-rights changes.

“The attorney general is advancing a vision of America that is narrow and abdicating some of the Justice Department’s core responsibilities and mandate to ensure equal rights and access to justice for all,” Vanita Gupta said.

The DOJ declined to comment on “ongoing matters” related to criminal-justice reforms and consent decrees.

In a sense, the narrow vision of America bellowed from Trump’s bully pulpit and advanced more incisively through Sessions’s canon of memos is a fulfillment of a promise first made by President Richard Nixon and his Attorney General, John Mitchell, when they married (https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/the-war-on-drugs-how-president-nixon-tied-addiction-to-crime/254319/) the “southern strategy” with an urban War on Drugs. The union of those platforms creates a paradigm that favors expanding federal enforcement when it comes to crimes in which minorities are often considered perpetrators, but pushes against federal enforcement when civil rights are involved.

Consider one of the FBI’s newest domestic-terrorism classifications, the “black identity extremist,” a designation first created in an August 2017 report from the FBI Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit, and first made public by Foreign Policy in October (http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/10/06/the-fbi-has-identified-a-new-domestic-terrorist-threat-and-its-black-identity-extremists/). According to The New York Times, the report asserts that “black activists’ grievances about racialized police violence and inequities in the criminal justice system have spurred retaliatory violence against law enforcement officers,” citing sparse incidents of violence against police officers as proof that the Black Lives Matter movement engenders violence.

In his testimony to the Congressional Black Caucus (https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/analysis/CBC%20MGerman%20statement%20final.pdf), Brennan Center fellow and former FBI agent Mike German said, “The [black identity extremist] assessment is of such poor analytic quality that it raises serious questions about the FBI’s purpose in producing it.” With no clear, evidence-driven purpose, the report and surveillance had the “potential to incite irrational police fear of black political activists.”

The black-identity-extremist designation was an abstract idea—until it wasn’t. In January, Foreign Policy reported that (http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/01/30/is-a-court-case-in-texas-the-first-prosecution-of-a-black-identity-extremist/) the home of the Dallas activist Christopher Daniels, known to many as “Rakem Balogun,” had been raided in December by FBI agents, who seized two firearms and a copy of Robert F. Williams’s Negroes With Guns, and arrested him in front of his teenage son. The Guardian has speculated (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/11/rakem-balogun-interview-black-identity-extremists-fbi-surveillance) and Balogun himself has stated that he was the first target to be prosecuted using the aforementioned FBI designation. After two years of investigation and five months in FBI custody, Rakem Balogun was let go, the case built on his Facebook posts and protests apparently insufficient to establish that anything he did had actually endangered police.

Even in the realm of voting rights, where the DOJ has most consistently acted as a watchdog against the remnants of Jim Crow, the Sessions Doctrine manages to target people of color instead of protecting them.

The department under Sessions has reversed its position on the gerrymandering and voter-ID cases in which it was an active litigant until 2017. In July 2017, the DOJ shifted its position (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/the-department-of-justice-stands-by-texass-voter-id-law/532980/) in the middle of a marathon series of lawsuits over a voter-ID law passed in Texas, which faced a federal lawsuit on the grounds that it discriminates based on race. The department originally served as a plaintiff against the law, but under Sessions submitted a brief supporting a modified form that allowed more kinds of acceptable identification and created an affidavit process for people who don’t have identification because of reasonable impediments.

According to Sherrilyn Ifill, the president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund—and an active litigant in several voting-rights cases—the Sessions era, while brief, is unprecedented. “Let's start with voting,” Ifill told me. “The Department of Justice has essentially abandoned that area of civil-rights enforcement, even in the cases in which they were present, such as the Texas voter-ID case, in which we were co-counsel.” Among a civil-rights enforcement ecosystem that has already had to adjust on the fly to the loss of judicial and DOJ preclearance of state- and local-elections laws after the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision, the Justice Department’s withdrawal from its voting-rights docket basically creates a massive vacuum, one ripe for exploitation in the 2018 and 2020 election cycles.

Whether Sessions himself will make it to the 2020 or even the 2018 elections is still anyone’s guess. The Russia investigation is ongoing, and every day it chafes a president who could fire Sessions. But the core irony in the acrimony between Trump and his attorney general is that Sessions—more so than just about anyone else in the Trump administration—has faithfully and skillfully executed the president’s policy agenda. He’s doubled down on “tough on crime” policies, sought to punish drug dealers, surveilled fierce critics of police, deflated the bipartisan movement for meaningful criminal-justice reform, supported voter-ID requirements, and used law enforcement and policy to build his own impediments at the border when Trump’s wall couldn’t find support.

Each of those policies, however, doesn’t originate merely in the craw of Trump’s id. They are all seedlings from a well-tended garden of legal and intellectual resistance to the post-civil-rights era in the United States. If Trump’s promise is a return to status quo ante—a land before Black Lives Matter protests and Ferguson reports, one where police are unquestioned heroes and a black presidency is nothing more than a line in a Tupac song—then Jeff Sessions’s doctrine suggests that he represents a return to status quo ante ante, a regime more plainly constructed on the hierarchies and divisions that have for centuries defined America.

The sense among several longtime civil-rights advocates and even former DOJ officials is that many of the signature victories of the civil-rights movement are now more precarious than ever.

“I don't know that there’s been a time quite like this,” Ifill told me. “Certainly in the modern era, since 1957 when the Civil Rights Division was created, I don’t think that there has been a relationship like this.”

There has never really been a golden age for civil-rights protections. Each of the previous presidential administrations has failed in protecting some group’s rights, or actively violated others’. “But that’s completely different than an abdication of leadership in the civil-rights base entirely, and that's what we're facing,” Ifill continued.

Still, the current turn can’t be too surprising for people plugged into the system. Aftershocks from the Supreme Court’s decision to undermine the Voting Rights Act, in Shelby County, continue to disrupt civil-rights enforcement efforts. A class of crusaders against desegregation, in favor of the War on Drugs, and skeptical of an expansive, federally enforced voter-protection agenda has made the conservative movement its home, awaiting leaders at the highest levels of power who could continue on its behalf. This pathway always existed for Sessions, a man who has inherited much, and intends to bequeath more.

Or, as Gupta put it, “it wasn't a mystery about who Jeff Sessions is and was and what he stood for."

[Mark]

In America anyone can say they are American as long as they are citizens because America is an experiment first and foremost of white Europeans mixed together before there were infusions of other peoples of black, brown or yellow heritage.

Well, the red folk were here first in this Age I suppose (en mass), enslaved black folks since 1619, the beginning of the Great Experiment. Free black folk came over with Columbus. I agree overall with your point, this is what makes America different from the Ethnic nations of Europe. I submit to you that, in lieu of race war the world across, accepting people from around the world in what have previously been homogenous nations might be necessary, especially since the ethnic populations of Europe have been dwindling with lower childbirth rates and the replacement level has dropped.


But in Europe you cannot really say that you are Austrian or German or Russian if you are not white and having a history of belonging to that nation for centuries. The very names of nations are deeply connected with appearance, culture, language and else so let`s say you end up an immigrant in Germany. You can never be called German but you can become German citizen.

How long will it take for that to change? You think, ever?


You can become British Citizen but you will never be English or Scottish or Welsh. But in America you can be American. That is a huge difference.

When did this start? At what point? At some point, a good proportion of all folks inhabiting Europe were black and brown, and there was also a racial divide by type of human, Neanderthal versus Homo Sapien, if you want to go back that far. As we all interbreed and share a collective unconscious, at what point does belonging to the human race supersede ethnicity, no matter the starseed/rh negative background, if you hold such additional beliefs in difference?


Anyone who's concerned about these issues is NOT a racist. And they are NOT against liberty and freedom for all good people.

Agreed, Bill. It is a concern when ways of life change. America has been the exemplar of a diverse society because all humans from all nations in all parts of the world are here. Everybody in every country knows, knows someone who knows or is related to someone in the USA, so all nations and all people are invested in this country. It is an experiment because what is happening here is, in microcosm, what is happening across the entire world. It is not racist to uphold a love and understanding of those to whom one is most closely related genetically and socially. It is racist to believe one is superior to another because of their ethnic difference, and to uphold laws and mores that support that belief.

[DNA]

Hi Rahkyt
I've not been happy with Jeff Session in the least. Alex Jones has gone on record stating that he believes Sessions is compromised by the deep state and he has speculated that Jeff Sessions has some specific dirt on him that the deep state is using for leverage.
Alex has also speculated that according to his sources Jeff Sessions has had some affiliation with the KKK in his younger days while growing up in the South and that this is the dirt the deep state is holding over his head. Alex has proven to me that he does in fact have some pretty legit sources with the intelligence and military community. Nothing concrete here but I just thought I would throw that out there.

[Bill Ryan]

:bump:

I'm bumping this thread again to draw attention to the quality and detail of Rahkyt's replies. Do read them all carefully.

:star:

[turiya]

Greetings, PA.

I'm sharing this post because it is an historical and thoughtful exploration of what is currently going on in the USA right now, under the tenure of Jeff Sessions as the Attorney General of the United States. There are A LOT of links here. Many of them from historical and uploaded government documents as well as other articles detailing whatever aspect of the main article is being referenced by the hyperlink. I would appreciate cogent and detailed criticism of the article and its points leading to direct discussion of the points raised pertaining to any dissent.

I recognize that many of the links are MSM. If there are challenges to the accuracy of those articles, I'm ready to entertain discussion about them. The purpose of this post is to clarify what one perspective of our current situation is in regards to Civil Rights and what exactly the general AltCom vision is to Civil Rights and what alternatives might be raised by those in this community who don't appreciate what has been going on historically in this area, but who are NOT racist or seeking to regress back to some point where black and brown people are enslaved by whites to service and inferior social and economic status.

I think this is important, right now, in order to differentiate between what the MSM has called the Alt Right and what is a more accepting and less White Nationalist vision of the present and future. This conception, is the Alt Community that I belonged to for years and that I've been pining for now, for a couple of years. I don't think it has gone, it is still present, but it is being overridden in the public eye by a view of the Alternative that is being associated with racism and hate.

That is NOT the folks I have known for years here in PA but, in order to move forward, it is important to differentiate HOW the view here is different. I proffer this article and its characterization of Jeff Sessions and his initiatives, for discussion.

From my personal perspective, I see the creation of what I call "Fortress/Apartheid America", which is a state-by-state retrenchment and consolidation of economic and political power in preparation for the upcoming demographic shift, in which the white national majority will be equaled by a combined minority population. In my estimation, it is an effort doomed to failure by sheer dint of its overt, fear-based nature. The violence and repression that may accompany this period in our history will forever be imprinted upon our collective consciousness moving forward, IF it gets to that extreme. I believe it does not have to, yet. What do y'all think?

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=38262&d=1529449406&thumb=1&stc=1

The End of Civil Rights (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/06/sessions/563006/)

Across immigration, policing, criminal justice, and voting rights, the attorney general is pushing an agenda that could erase many of the legal gains of modern America's defining movement.

The fires on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, had barely stopped burning when the Department of Justice released an extraordinary report on the city’s police department. In the findings of the 2015 investigation (https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf) of the Ferguson Police Department, the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division detailed how a municipality had built its social contract on a slow-rolling racist heist. Activists hoped that the Ferguson report—which was prompted by the 2014 police killing of an unarmed black teenager and found that police conduct had “severely damaged the relationship between African Americans and the Ferguson Police Department”—would not only change the city, but would signal that the United States was finally willing to confront the legacy of white supremacy. The Ferguson City Council reluctantly agreed (https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/03/15/470598733/ferguson-city-council-accepts-deal-with-justice-department) to a consent decree (https://www.justice.gov/opa/file/833431/download) with the DOJ that would overhaul city policing. Federal courts rejected voter-suppression schemes and reaffirmed affirmative action (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/fisher-university-of-texas/470676/). Movements from Black Lives Matter to LGBTQ advocacy saw an opportunity to broaden the national civil-rights agenda.

Then Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III took over.



Well, Rahkyt, I started out reading the article you've posted, but soon realized that it was quite a lengthy piece. So, before going any further with the reading, I decided to go look at the journalist that wrote this piece. And, trust me, I did spend a bit of time skimming over some of his past articles that he'd written.


https://static1.squarespace.com/static/555b9b18e4b09c1197156865/t/5a9c67d0f9619a449868cc49/1520199636366/rZ6q2gSF.jpg (http://www.anamariecox.com/with-friends-like-these/2018/2/24/look-in-the-mirror-with-vann-r-newkirk-ii-and-helen-rosner)
Vann R. Newkirk II @fivefiths
After doing that, I decided to look & see at whatever Twitter tweets would reveal about this man. As, what one tweets can go a bit more deeper and can often reveal more clearly of what this particular individual is about, rather than what can be revealed from an article provided by a 'supposed' upstanding publication - such as one of which The Atlantic would like to promote itself to be. This, of course, would demand a journalist to dot his i's & to cross one's t's - in other words, one would have to be on one's best behavior for an article to be accepted for publication.

And unfortunately, from what I found, it seems to me that any notion to which The End of Civil Rights article would have its basis grounded on, it is obvious that this basis had already been predecided upon many years in advance of the date of publication of the above article provided by The Atlantic that you've posted.

This, unfortunately, short-circuits any want or desire to continue reading this man's work, let alone seeing any benefit that would be derived from engaging in such an activity of talking about what he had written. The bias on which this article was written runs pretty deep with this particular so-called 'journalist'.

Notice that the tweets are dated years before Trump announced his run for the presidency.

Best regards...
turiya


http://www.curezone.org/upload/_T_Forums/Turiya_Files_/AVALON/TRUMP/GENRL_TWEETS/The_Atlantic_Vann_s_Tweet_to_Trump_2.png (https://twitter.com/jackposobiec/status/874454383219683329)

http://www.curezone.org/upload/_T_Forums/Turiya_Files_/AVALON/TRUMP/GENRL_TWEETS/Vann_R_Newkirk_II_8_8_11_Trump_can_eat_dick.png (https://twitter.com/jackposobiec/status/874458010785128448)

http://www.curezone.org/upload/_T_Forums/Turiya_Files_/AVALON/TRUMP/GENRL_TWEETS/Vann_R_Newkirk_II_11_28_8_12_Eat_a_dick_Donald_Trump.png (https://twitter.com/jackposobiec/status/874458010785128448)

[Beren]

Rahkyt;

All legit questions as far as I can see here. But layers are many. This onion keeps getting thicker and thicker. Europe will never change but by force or war. Being a person of any color but white in Europe will not guarantee you a prosperous life. You may live nicely and thrive in certain big metro cities, but you will never be fully embraced as long as you have Asian or African or South American features. But interestingly enough in USA white Europeans are embracing others a bit more. But my point here is that white people in Europe are aware acutely of their heritage and language and culture and whoever is trying to change this, they resist, heck they even despise American culture deeming it peasant like and low class, I hear this often when few drinks were drunk, and people are looser.

Europe will not accept Africa in the sense of mixing of the blood, but in all other ways, it is accepting. What I find interesting living in USA is that Blacks don't treat me like other white Americans. They treat me much better and with respect and we talk openly about all. But the minute there is white American in the mix, the energy shifts. I can only speculate why is that.

But I always had this inner feeling that whenever I speak with a man of different color, I treat him like a man, so I guess they feel not stigmatized hence the relaxed attitude.
I openly ask them: " Why do you call yourselves niggers? That is idiotic, first of all, but second - you don't allow anyone else but a black person to call you like that, why is that, double standards or what?"

When I openly and without hesitation ask them in the presence of other whites and blacks, I see odd reactions. Namely white women pretend shocked and cover their open mouths in the faux shock, blacks are stopped in their tracks because nobody asked them this... so the quality conversation starts and I remember this black guy from Chicago felt relieved and said that finally, someone asks this because he hates how other blacks call him a nigga. That is rude and he doesn't want to be called like that by anyone.

Then I got so many friends among blacks afterwards.

I felt kinda strange because for me it is normal not to insult anyone and not to be hypocritical even within your own folks.


So to finally cut to the chase, the point is racism comes from ignorance. You cannot hate if you are in the knowledge. Thus this reverse racism of blacks to whites is not going to help blacks in the long run just like whites who were racist to blacks were not going anywhere with this. The worst thing to do nowadays because of fear of backlash is to favor all of a sudden certain races just to keep things politically correct. Just look at the Asians, they never complain but they advance despite obstacles. Whites kinda of slowed down in progress but advanced in this guilt transfer, Blacks are stuck in their shouts for yesterday and today.

Make your voice count by being a man, by being of virtue and class, by being good and wise and with heart and soul, then no one will care if you are white or black or yellow or brown or red, you will be looked upon as human.

[Mark]

Alex has also speculated that according to his sources Jeff Sessions has had some affiliation with the KKK in his younger days while growing up in the South and that this is the dirt the deep state is holding over his head. Alex has proven to me that he does in fact have some pretty legit sources with the intelligence and military community. Nothing concrete here but I just thought I would throw that out there.

Thanks for sharing that, DNA. I don't listen to Alex often but he does just live right up the street from me in Austin and I do agree that he is indeed receiving information from sources familiar with the backstage maneuverings of political and military actors involved in the current shake-ups. Overt association that he can't deny would still be career-ending for Sessions, even in the current political milieu. The pressure for him to resign would be too great for him to resist or be protected from. Beyond political association, it seems that a goodly proportion of Americans want us to move forward into a more equitable society and to put the institutionalized aspect of the racial divide finally and fully behind us.

I believe this is true of the world in general. Because of the nature of my understanding of reality and the times, it is incumbent upon us to work through this period of upheaval honoring all visions of a future potentiality, because it is only by being presented with ALL OF THE CHOICES that people can make informed decisions. With the "coming out of the closet" of the Alt Community - which I primarily credit Mr. Trump with having facilitated in this particular phase of our cultural and societal evolution - more people are being exposed to more information that allows them to make informed decisions and that can be nothing but "good". Simultaneous to the "good" is what some would consider the "bad", which would be the virulence of xenophobia, which never disappeared but only went underground in a sense, hidden by a flimsy veneer of language and enforced cultural preferences that protected the institutionalized benefits that have been built into the system since the 16th century and have been honed and perfected in the centuries since.

This microcosmic example, of the USA, in its current throes of dysfunction, are actually representative of a functional process of actualizing a way of being that has not existed upon this planet in this Age. A way that is still theoretical, but that is coming closer and closer to reality with each day. A way that is fearsome and paradigm-ending for many, which is why "these things must be". And we are the ones to live this. What a blessing, eh? And curse, simultaneously.

[Mark]

One Common Ancestor Behind Blue Eyes

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=38354&d=1530123049&thumb=1
January 31, 2008

People with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor, according to new research.

A team of scientists has tracked down a genetic (https://www.livescience.com/10486-genes-instruction-manuals-life.html) mutation that leads to blue eyes. The mutation occurred between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. Before then, there were no blue eyes.

"Originally, we all had brown eyes," said Hans Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Copenhagen.

The mutation affected the so-called OCA2 gene, which is involved in the production of melanin, the pigment that gives color to our hair, eyes and skin.

"A genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a 'switch,' which literally 'turned off' the ability to produce brown eyes," Eiberg said.

The genetic switch is located in the gene adjacent to OCA2 and rather than completely turning off the gene, the switch limits its action, which reduces the production of melanin in the iris. In effect, the turned-down switch diluted brown eyes to blue.

If the OCA2 gene had been completely shut down, our hair, eyes and skin would be melanin-less, a condition known as albinism.

"It's exactly what I sort of expected to see from what we know about selection around this area," said John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, referring to the study results regarding the OCA2 gene. Hawks was not involved in the current study.

Baby blues

Eiberg and his team examined DNA from mitochondria, the cells' energy-making structures, of blue-eyed individuals in countries including Jordan, Denmark and Turkey. This genetic material comes from females, so it can trace maternal lineages.

They specifically looked at sequences of DNA on the OCA2 gene and the genetic mutation associated with turning down melanin production.

Over the course of several generations, segments of ancestral DNA get shuffled so that individuals have varying sequences. Some of these segments, however, that haven't been reshuffled are called haplotypes. If a group of individuals shares long haplotypes, that means the sequence arose relatively recently in our human ancestors. The DNA sequence didn't have enough time to get mixed up.

"What they were able to show is that the people who have blue eyes in Denmark, as far as Jordan, these people all have this same haplotype, they all have exactly the same gene changes that are all linked to this one mutation that makes eyes blue," Hawks said in a telephone interview.

Melanin switch

The mutation is what regulates the OCA2 switch for melanin production. And depending on the amount of melanin in the iris (https://www.livescience.com/3919-human-eye-works.html), a person can end up with eye color ranging from brown to green. Brown-eyed individuals have considerable individual variation in the area of their DNA that controls melanin production. But they found that blue-eyed individuals only have a small degree of variation in the amount of melanin in their eyes.

"Out of 800 persons we have only found one person which didn't fit — but his eye color was blue with a single brown spot," Eiberg told LiveScience, referring to the finding that blue-eyed individuals all had the same sequence of DNA linked with melanin production.

"From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor," Eiberg said. "They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA." Eiberg and his colleagues detailed their study in the Jan. 3 online edition of the journal Human Genetics.

That genetic switch somehow spread throughout Europe and now other parts of the world.

"The question really is, 'Why did we go from having nobody on Earth with blue eyes 10,000 years ago to having 20 or 40 percent of Europeans having blue eyes now?" Hawks said. "This gene does something good for people. It makes them have more kids."

[Mark]

And unfortunately, from what I found, it seems to me that any notion to which The End of Civil Rights article would have its basis grounded on, it is obvious that this basis had already been predecided upon many years in advance of the date of publication of the above article provided by The Atlantic that you've posted.

This, unfortunately, short-circuits any want or desire to continue reading this man's work, let alone seeing any benefit that would be derived from engaging in such an activity of talking about what he had written. The bias on which this article was written runs pretty deep with this particular so-called 'journalist'.

Turiya, thanks for sharing those twitter quotes. It is amazing to me how many people use that particular venue to vent what are obviously in-the-moment, emotional flare-ups that would have been best left unsaid, or at least, stated in less inflammatory and civil language. I must admit I did not look up the author, nor his background but I am not surprised by his statements as, 1) from his appearance he is very obviously of the Hip Hop generations and that is just how they talk in general and, 2), he has an apparent distaste for the current POTUS, which many people do.

I'm disappointed that you did not see fit to actually read the article, as I took quite a long time to format it and accurately share the links, which, to me, are the heart and soul of the piece. The young man actually took some time to back up his statements with historical articles and documents that are beyond political affiliation and animus and he actually refrains from such lingo or statements in his write-up and shares the facts with a minimum of hyperbole. If you could take the time to read what was actually written, as it is a very serious topic on an issue of generational importance here in the USA, it would be greatly appreciated. I would like to engage with you on the merits of the history and our current trajectory, rather than this, what I would call, an aside to the deeper and more meaningful implications. Thanks in advance, if you choose to take up my challenge. If not, thanks for your comment and research!

[Mark]

Hello, Beren. So much you comment on, lol, I'm afraid I'm going to have to answer you in detail. ;)


Europe will never change but by force or war. Being a person of any color but white in Europe will not guarantee you a prosperous life. You may live nicely and thrive in certain big metro cities, but you will never be fully embraced as long as you have Asian or African or South American features.

Ok, this was the gist of my primary question regarding change, when and if. There have been very successful and metropolitan cultures on the Mediterranean, historically. We can look at ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia or even Greece for such examples, where the proximity to the world's crossroads allowed people to constantly interact with those who did not look or act like them. Some of these civilizations existed in such a state for many thousands of years. Why were they able to do it and modern Europe cannot?

In other words, since you say that "Europe will never change but by force or war", why is that? Is it culture? Or something deeper?


But interestingly enough in USA white Europeans are embracing others a bit more.

For this one, I'm going to share a quote by the black American comedian, Chris Rock (http://www.chrisrock.com/) in an article he wrote for VOX (https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/12/1/7313467/chris-rock-interview):


When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it's all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they're not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before…

So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he's the first black person that is qualified to be president. That's not black progress. That's white progress. There's been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship's improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, "Oh, he stopped punching her in the face." It's not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner. Nothing. It just doesn't. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let's hope America keeps producing nicer white people.

The quote is a bit dated - from 2016 - but I think the sentiment is one that echoes what you mention above when you state that "...USA white Europeans are embracing others a bit more." When the Founders of the United States wrote their Declaration of Independence and Constitution, despite the fact that a good number of them were slave-owning at the time, they understood that this nation was something new upon the face of the earth. At first, and until 1809 or thereabouts when it was made illegal to import enslaved Africans into the continental USA, the strictures of the racial hierarchy were fully understood to include European White Males only in the compact of universal brotherhood and belonging to this land and they deliberately called it the Great Experiment. It took from the late 1800s until the mid-1900s for white women and members of the Global Majority - and American minority - to gain access, at least nominally, to those same rights.

I continuously return to this understanding because I believe that they fully knew the implications of their documents and what the future held for this nation, once, inevitably, the enslaved descendants of those Africans were freed and became part of the polity and cultural life of the nation. That it meant integration. That it meant miscegenation. That it meant that America would produce progressively "nicer white people" because they were no longer locked up in Europe by glaciers and distance, far away from the lands that brown and black people inhabited. Instead, for generations, the ruling class and some substantial number of nouveau riche bourgeois and working class whites had their children nursed by blacks and browns and reds and yellows, were exposed to them on a daily basis, ruled over them and lived with them, sometimes working alongside them, marrying them, having children with them, coming eventually and over a relatively short period of time to love them and know them.

Love/Hate is a function of relative proximity and subjective interpretation of meaning and, as is colloquially understood, there is a thin line between them both. Hate is not the opposite of love, indifference is, according to someone famous. Hate is, instead, an expression of intensity of connection as the subject of that emotion is inordinately important to the one experiencing it, much as is someone they love.




But my point here is that white people in Europe are aware acutely of their heritage and language and culture and whoever is trying to change this, they resist, heck they even despise American culture deeming it peasant like and low class, I hear this often when few drinks were drunk, and people are looser.

So European culture is superior, then, as a common understanding? Is this because it is unsullied by the cultures of those they deem lesser, like red, brown and black folk? More pure?


What I find interesting living in USA is that Blacks don't treat me like other white Americans. They treat me much better and with respect and we talk openly about all. But the minute there is white American in the mix, the energy shifts. I can only speculate why is that.

Black Americans find Europeans to be more direct and less filled with the kinds of ingrained beliefs in superiority than white Americans. Since I lived in Europe for almost 5 years, I know this is not true. The difference really is that American racism's "flavor" is more intimate than is European racism to black Americans. It is comprised of hundreds of years of knowledge and interaction at the most intimate of levels and speaks directly to an epigenetic understanding shared by both black and white Americans that is literally "in the genes" at this point. The genetic mutation is shared on both sides, but still oppositional, the trauma of the oppressed and the oppressor, encoded in interactions in a way that is not so for recent European immigrants to the USA or European nationals. Of course, choice and free will reigns, so the biological imprisonment of genetic imperatives rules only those who have not chosen or sought freedom, but that is so many people, still, that the problems and differences seem almost intractable when they are not and the opposite is actually true.

White Europeans are just as racist as some white Americans, it is just less obvious to black Americans who have never been overseas. I remember a German girlfriend I had back in the late 1980s whose grandfather was a Nazi. When she took me home with her to meet her father, the grandfather's pictures were proudly on display. I had no problem with that, it was her family, fine. I loved her and her father was nice enough to me. We went to a store and I saw a candy called Negerkusses (https://www.dw.com/en/haribo-takes-racist-sweets-off-the-market/a-17376231), with a caricature of blackface children, called "pickaninnys" here in the USA. I looked at them amazed and then at her and she was like, "What's wrong? They're just candies."

I had no idea where to even start. Such a candy would have been removed from American stores probably in the 50s or 60s.



I openly ask them: " Why do you call yourselves niggers? That is idiotic, first of all, but second - you don't allow anyone else but a black person to call you like that, why is that, double standards or what?"

When I openly and without hesitation ask them in the presence of other whites and blacks, I see odd reactions. Namely white women pretend shocked and cover their open mouths in the faux shock, blacks are stopped in their tracks because nobody asked them this... so the quality conversation starts and I remember this black guy from Chicago felt relieved and said that finally, someone asks this because he hates how other blacks call him a nigga. That is rude and he doesn't want to be called like that by anyone.

Then I got so many friends among blacks afterwards.

You have to understand the possible etymology of the word.

"****** or nigga" is the european/american adaptation of the Spanish "negro", meaning black, root of which is the Latin, "nigrum", also meaning black. Some etymologists say that it derives from the proto-indo-european nókʷts, which could mean naked or night, while others state that the Latin word's root is in the Greek "necro", meaning death. The roots of the Greek are unknown, although there are many correlates across europe where words of a similar sound have a similar meaning. But right across the Mediterranean, there were a people closely associated with death and the worship thereof that the Greeks were intimately familiar with. A black people, whose word for the gods/goddesses was "netjer/neter", which sounds a lot closer to neger/niger/negro/******/nigga than almost all of the potential European candidates for its origin.

Whatever the case may be, the word is very powerful. And its reconsitution and usage by black Americans and others now is a form of revolutionary ownership and repurposing that is quite controversial, as you have experienced, even among blacks. Now, things have gotten even more convoluted and complicated. I work in an American High School and ALL the kids use it, white, brown, yellow and black, because they ALL listen to and know Hip Hop and it is the world's undisputed youth culture. I hear the word 20-50 times a day in the classrooms, the hallways, wherever. The word no longer has the power it once had as a curse, instead, it has been turned into a benediction, a blessing of friendship and love and understanding and companionship. It is used among compatriots, brothers and sisters, in deed and word if not blood. Which, if the Egyptian option is true, is closer to its original meaning anyway.



So to finally cut to the chase, the point is racism comes from ignorance.

I'm not sure if your statements support this conclusion. Is it "just" ignorance? Or is it more? Does the racial science of the Nazis and others speak of something inherent in the European mentality that craves distinction and separation from the rest of humanity and the natural world itself? Is there a basis in culture for the rejection of others' cultures or is this something imminently human? To be separate, to uphold all forms of separation from those unlike us in order to preserve something nebulous and unreal in the first place, which is the conception of race rather than ethnicity?

And for us, here in the AltCom, what does it say about us who speak of starseeds and alien races genetically integrating with human hominid forms to create new types of beings, to attempt to continue to maintain some form of separation when our genesis is in mutation and mixing bloodlines? If the "ignorance" of ethnic hatred is environmentally chosen for, epigenetically, and personal choice is the way beyond the limitations of biological programming, what is the purpose of the energies attempting to keep us separate as opposed to those energies that seek to bring us together?


Just look at the Asians, they never complain but they advance despite obstacles. Whites kinda of slowed down in progress but advanced in this guilt transfer, Blacks are stuck in their shouts for yesterday and today.

Make your voice count by being a man, by being of virtue and class, by being good and wise and with heart and soul, then no one will care if you are white or black or yellow or brown or red, you will be looked upon as human.

The ethnicities/races of the people you're calling Asian have their own color codes, with those from the North like the Han, the Japanese and Koreans (perhaps Tibetans as well, considering the current Dali Lama's youthful affiliation with a Nazi (https://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/21/movies/dalai-lama-s-tutor-portrayed-brad-pitt-wasn-t-just-roving-through-himalayas.html)) being as prejudiced against the darker Southeast Asian folks of the South just like Europeans and, potentially, the rest of the world's families. That Asian folks have less of an issue than other, darker people in European cultures and lands, has more to do with the strength of their kinship networks and continuing connection with the lands they originated in than it does with their ethnicity. The same is true of Hindus of th Brahmin variety, who proudly claim original Aryan descent, still, even as their skin colors approach mine or are even darker in shade. Despite prejudice against these folks, brown and yellow, they continue to succeed because they have access to their histories, their bloodlines and the wealth built up intergenerationally. They have had the traditional respect of European cultures for the age of their cultures and the traditions and religions associated with them, which African cultures have not. All of that was taken from black Americans and Africans in the triangular trade, so it is not a fair or accurate comparison in any way.

All that "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" conversation should be held between those who have boots in the first place. It is like comparing apples and oranges, the descendants of enslaved Africans had their boots taken away systematically, their descendants - until very, very recently - not allowed to purchase or wear boots or even think aloud and talk about touching them. We've come a LONG way in a very short time and that progress will not stop.

Peace and blessings, Beren, and THANK YOU for stepping up to the conversation. Big ups.

[Mark]

How Europeans evolved white skin (http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/04/how-europeans-evolved-white-skin)


http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=38359&d=1530132200&thumb=1&stc=1


Most of us think of Europe as the ancestral home of white people. But a new study shows that pale skin, as well as other traits such as tallness and the ability to digest milk as adults, arrived in most of the continent relatively recently. The work, presented here last week at the 84th annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, offers dramatic evidence of recent evolution in Europe and shows that most modern Europeans don’t look much like those of 8000 years ago.

The origins of Europeans have come into sharp focus in the past year as researchers have sequenced the genomes of ancient populations, rather than only a few individuals. By comparing key parts of the DNA across the genomes of 83 ancient individuals from archaeological sites throughout Europe, the international team of researchers reported earlier this year that Europeans today are a mix of the blending of at least three ancient populations of hunter-gatherers and farmers who moved into Europe in separate migrations over the past 8000 years. The study revealed that a massive migration of Yamnaya herders from the steppes north of the Black Sea may have brought Indo-European languages to Europe (http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2015/02/mysterious-indo-european-homeland-may-have-been-steppes-ukraine-and-russia) about 4500 years ago.

Now, a new study from the same team drills down further into that remarkable data to search for genes that were under strong natural selection—including traits so favorable that they spread rapidly throughout Europe in the past 8000 years. By comparing the ancient European genomes with those of recent ones from the 1000 Genomes Project, population geneticist Iain Mathieson, a postdoc in the Harvard University lab of population geneticist David Reich, found five genes associated with changes in diet and skin pigmentation that underwent strong natural selection.

First, the scientists confirmed an earlier report that the hunter-gatherers in Europe could not digest the sugars in milk 8000 years ago, according to a poster. They also noted an interesting twist: The first farmers also couldn’t digest milk. The farmers who came from the Near East about 7800 years ago and the Yamnaya pastoralists who came from the steppes 4800 years ago lacked the version of the LCT gene that allows adults to digest sugars in milk. It wasn’t until about 4300 years ago that lactose tolerance swept through Europe.

When it comes to skin color, the team found a patchwork of evolution in different places, and three separate genes that produce light skin, telling a complex story for how European’s skin evolved to be much lighter during the past 8000 years. The modern humans who came out of Africa to originally settle Europe about 40,000 years are presumed to have had dark skin, which is advantageous in sunny latitudes. And the new data confirm that about 8500 years ago, early hunter-gatherers in Spain, Luxembourg, and Hungary also had darker skin: They lacked versions of two genes—SLC24A5 and SLC45A2—that lead to depigmentation and, therefore, pale skin in Europeans today.

But in the far north—where low light levels would favor pale skin—the team found a different picture in hunter-gatherers: Seven people from the 7700-year-old Motala archaeological site in southern Sweden had both light skin gene variants, SLC24A5 and SLC45A2. They also had a third gene, HERC2/OCA2, which causes blue eyes and may also contribute to light skin and blond hair. Thus ancient hunter-gatherers of the far north were already pale and blue-eyed, but those of central and southern Europe had darker skin.

Then, the first farmers from the Near East arrived in Europe; they carried both genes for light skin. As they interbred with the indigenous hunter-gatherers, one of their light-skin genes swept through Europe, so that central and southern Europeans also began to have lighter skin. The other gene variant, SLC45A2, was at low levels until about 5800 years ago when it swept up to high frequency.

The team also tracked complex traits, such as height, which are the result of the interaction of many genes. They found that selection strongly favored several gene variants for tallness in northern and central Europeans, starting 8000 years ago, with a boost coming from the Yamnaya migration, starting 4800 years ago. The Yamnaya have the greatest genetic potential for being tall of any of the populations, which is consistent with measurements of their ancient skeletons. In contrast, selection favored shorter people in Italy and Spain starting 8000 years ago (http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/03/13/016477), according to the paper now posted on the bioRxiv preprint server. Spaniards, in particular, shrank in stature 6000 years ago, perhaps as a result of adapting to colder temperatures and a poor diet.

Surprisingly, the team found no immune genes under intense selection, which is counter to hypotheses that diseases would have increased after the development of agriculture.

The paper doesn’t specify why these genes might have been under such strong selection. But the likely explanation for the pigmentation genes is to maximize vitamin D synthesis (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/346/6212/934.summary?sid=91e8ebfd-8581-4bd7-bac5-26dc16bf5a87), said paleoanthropologist Nina Jablonski of Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), University Park, as she looked at the poster’s results at the meeting. People living in northern latitudes often don’t get enough UV to synthesize vitamin D in their skin so natural selection has favored two genetic solutions to that problem—evolving pale skin that absorbs UV more efficiently or favoring lactose tolerance to be able to digest the sugars and vitamin D naturally found in milk. “What we thought was a fairly simple picture of the emergence of depigmented skin in Europe is an exciting patchwork of selection as populations disperse into northern latitudes,” Jablonski says. “This data is fun because it shows how much recent evolution has taken place.”

Anthropological geneticist George Perry, also of Penn State, notes that the work reveals how an individual’s genetic potential is shaped by their diet and adaptation to their habitat. “We’re getting a much more detailed picture now of how selection works.”

[Mark]

Britain's Dark-Skinned, Blue-Eyed Ancestor Explained (https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/ancient-face-cheddar-man-reconstructed-dna-spd/)

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=38360&d=1530132541&thumb=1&stc=1
Thanks to technological advances, scientists can see ancient DNA in new detail.

By Sarah Gibbens
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 7, 2018

A recent facial reconstruction of a 10,000-year-old skeleton called the "Cheddar Man" (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0218/070218-Face-of-cheddar-man-revealed) has revealed a man with bright blue eyes, slightly curly hair, and dark skin.

"It might surprise the public, but not ancient DNA geneticists," says Mark Thomas, a scientist at the University College London.

That's because a new analysis of the ancient man's DNA proves he's genetically similar to other dark-skinned individuals from the Mesolithic era found in Spain, Hungary, and Luxemborg whose DNA has already been sequenced. The new revelation places the Cheddar Man among a group of hunter-gatherers that are thought to have migrated to Europe at the end of the last Ice Age some 11,000 years ago.

The Cheddar Man earned his name, not because of his fondness for cheese, which likely wasn't cultivated until around 3,000 years later (http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/0/20695015), but because he was found in Cheddar Gorge in Somerset, England (which is, incidentally, where cheddar cheese (https://www.splendidtable.org/story/the-history-of-cheddar-cheese-reflects-the-development-of-the-us-food-system) originates).

Thomas is part of a large team that worked with London's Natural History Museum to reconstruct the Cheddar Man's face.

They started the reconstruction by taking measurements of the skull.

"He had a thick, heavy cranium and a relatively light jaw," says Thomas.

Researchers then sequenced the Cheddar Man's entire genome. He's the oldest British individual whose genes scientists have mapped. From the sequence, they learned skin color, eye color, and hair type.

Finally, to bring the Cheddar Man to life, experienced Dutch model makers Adrie and Alfons Kennis used 3D scans and printing to add the "flesh" to his reconstructed bones.

CREATING COLOR FROM ANCIENT GENES
It's thanks to new sequencing technology that researchers can sift through vast quantities of data, says Thomas. This allowed the team to get a clear idea of what the Cheddar Man looked like.

The genes that determine skin color are mapped across various chromosomes, says Miguel Vilar (https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/author/miguelvilar/), the science manager for National Geographic's genome project. Vilar was not involved in the reconstruction but says scientists would have had to look at billions of data points, something we have previously been unable to do with ancient DNA.

New DNA sequencing techniques make those scattered chromosomes easier to read, he says.

"It's like taking an ancient book and looking at a whole chapter, versus looking at single word. Now we can read full paragraphs."

"Eye pigmentation is determined by a specific gene and a particular variant in the gene," says Thomas. "For skin there are a number of variants."

How and when Britons developed lighter skin over time is unclear.

"We think it's because light skin allows for more UV radiation, which helps break down vitamin D," says Vilar. In more temperate regions, where ancient humans were less exposed to sunlight, they would have needed to absorb more radiation to break down the essential vitamin needed for healthy bones.

"In my view, that's the most robust theory for skin pigmentation," says Thomas. "But it doesn't explain eye pigmentation. There are other processes that go on. It could be sexual selection. It could even be something else we don't yet understand."

Another theory put forth in a 2014 study (http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/03/new-diet-sexual-attraction-may-have-spurred-europeans-lighter-skin) suggested that as humans began cultivating farms, their diets became less diverse and thus they would have needed to absorb more vitamin D from the sun.

Today, he adds, modern diets help people consume vitamin D without sunlight exposure.

Determining skin color is only a minor part of the project, says Thomas. Researchers are looking more broadly at how dietary changes and exposure to pathogens influenced populations over the last ten thousand years.

Their research will the subject of a documentary on the UK's Channel4 network airing later this month (http://www.channel4.com/info/press/news/natural-history-museum-ucl-unveil-face-of-cheddar-man-in-c4-doc).

"If you can measure changes in genetic variances over time," he adds, "You can catch evolution as it happens."

[Beren]

Rahkyt,

First of all, thank you for the detailed reply because it shows me your way of rationalization and thinking which is admirable.

I will say one thing and that is the whole west and its countries are basically stumbling in the dark for one simple reason, the west isn`t concerned with anything that has not either English or other conquering nations spice in this. I as Serbian am far more aware of the true history of planet and races than a modern western man of any color because you guys do not speak Serbian and Russian. If you knew those two languages deeply you would know the true histories which were openly stolen by England, Vatican, Spain and France and the latest of them all Germany. Because west is refusing to even acknowledge our historians and books and works of such precious things that your mind would spin for days.

You would know the true history of Europe and the world with real evidence and locations and such.

Do you know that everything we think it is history was invented about 200 years ago?

No, you don't. Not because you won't, but because the west is systematically refusing to translate the books and works from those two languages. It pretends that they do not exist at all. There you would find to the minute precision of what happened to this planet to the very day today.

This science pieces you showed here are, to say the least laughable, because they explain things like the first grader would explain how supersonic flight works. Because they are straightforward lies. Why? Because west needs to perpetuate this lie by erasing the history and making up as they go their own version.

What if I tell you that for example, Serbia has the calendar that is measuring the year 7527 now?
Were you aware of this? I don't think so. What if I tell you that before English, there were other quasi-white parasitic entities in the form of various countries who waged the genocidal war for thousands of years against my kin which Russians are as well? Africans were last in line to be enslaved by them.

It is the admirable effort today that people of another color than white are trying to get back to their senses. But they should know that Serbian and Russian whites were first to die and be exterminated by those entity states.

You will find no word about this in western sources. In order to do this, you would need to learn Russian and Serbian fluently and then you will start to discover the wealth of information, it spans to the 600000 years back of uninterrupted tradition of space age on Earth to the last recording of space contact and trade up to about 400 years ago.

You will find root causes of all this that we face now on the planet and here on Avalon we only brushed the surface in all these years. Ten for me at least.
Tip of the tip of the iceberg.

This may seem like the atypical reply but you inspired me because I like the way your mind works.

The only ones that preserved a trace of this memory in oral form outside of Serbian and Russian documents and tradition and memory are Dogon people in Africa.
Their story is written in our history and is closely related to how they were brought by my ancestors to where they are now.

For all this, you are free to not believe me a single word but I deem the truth shall find the way to the ones that seek for it.

[Mark]

For all this, you are free to not believe me a single word but I deem the truth shall find the way to the ones that seek for it.

Hi, Beren. Thank you for sharing your perspective. As i have no access point to the information you speak of I take you at your word. Your participation is appreciated.

[amor]

Last week I looked at my life and asked myself, "How many humans have I met in my life that I actually truly liked and not just endured because I felt It was the right thing to do?" On my fingers, I had six left over. I am a gentle and compliant person who looks into the souls of others to find the common ground with my own heart, whatever the outward appearance of the other, in the spirit of the Lord Jesus, whether you believe he existed or not. What is wrong with me? I have lived among people of different races and my own. Within one lifetime, I feel as though I have lived several different lives because the environments were so different. It has all taken a toll on me, adapting to all the varying people and circumstances. At nearly 80, I am angry with God and Man that life has been so stressful that I only wish to be ALONE. Apply this to intermingling racial (genetic) environments, biological differences, and differing ideas on how to live life. We might be asking too much of the nervous system of man in the interim situation of the unmelted pot.

[amor]

Dear Beren: Since I feel too old to learn any language, especially ones as difficult as Russian and Serbian, please please give us an outline of what you have learned to be the TRUE history of earth. We really really need to know now.

[Spellbound]

Does it make me racist to be concerned about the fact that, as a white person, I'm now a minority at my place of work (very large office with over 100 people...I work for a multinational freight logistics company)....and I'm a minority where I live. I don't think I'm better than anyone else (and vice versa).....but I am concerned where this is headed. Sorry if that sounds racist....but that's how I feel.

Dave - Toronto

[Mark]

Does it make me racist to be concerned about the fact that, as a white person, I'm now a minority at my place of work (very large office with over 100 people...

What does it make me to have worked as a minority in such environments my entire working life? Should i be concerned about where it has been? And also where it is going?

[Franny]

..........

[Helene West]

Does it make me racist to be concerned about the fact that, as a white person, I'm now a minority at my place of work (very large office with over 100 people...

What does it make me to have worked as a minority in such environments my entire working life? Should i be concerned about where it has been? And also where it is going?

@latte - Loved, loved the song above! It so captures the self-absorption and self-justification of EVERY group of humans. It quickly without artifice speaks on our flaws with humor which is refreshing.

@rahkyt - thanks for finally saying something simple and honest above

@spellbound - re: your question above - 'are you racist for being concerned about being a minority group?' -If there is one group that needs a 'safe space' to be able to merely express themselves it's Caucasians. We've needed it for almost 20 years now, to be able to express and share our experiences, our perceptions, our feelings, give eachother validation, question what is going on - Without interference of threat, harrassment, trivialization, etc...

Alas, the human brain is wired to avoid pain, it's part of survival that doesn't always help us. The question you succinctly pose above is irrelevant, threatening or annoying to many non-whites, and to most whites - it's painful - so they will therefore run/avoid. Is the short-term avoidance of pain doing anything good for caucasians? nope, it's part of deliberate dynamics to create psychological apartheid and make them compliant with their own cultural eradication.... Human inertia is a B***h

[Mark]

@rahkyt - thanks for finally saying something simple and honest above

You're very welcome. Excuse me if my earlier responses were not simple enough. It is a complex topic as you know well and encompassing all quickly and succinctly is often difficult. Thank you also for returning to the thread. 😊

[Mark]

The dangers of the current split in the American polity are apparent to all who are paying attention. Centuries now in the making and decades in the dismantling of are the effects and institutions of racial discrimination and enslavement, which have left the inhabitants of this nation - and, insofar as they have more or less inculcated diverse habitation, other nations in the world - with ingrained beliefs and biases that most of us are barely conscious of. What used to be racial is now oceanic, psychological and physical enslavement to paradigms and jobs are the lure beckoning the world to take the bait, be a part of this.

Alternatively, the ideas of freedom and personal responsibility have their own dangers, tied too closely to racial dominance and mistaken for personal belief when, instead, it is a form of group-think masking as individualism.

An individualism that dovetails quite nicely into authoritarianism, if not carefully guarded against by protecting those who are defenseless against collective predatory behaviors.



Racism and authoritarianism go hand in hand (https://www.vox.com/mischiefs-of-faction/2018/7/2/17524960/racism-authoritarianism-hand-in-hand)


Two features of American politics are omnipresent in the current media landscape. First, Donald Trump’s rhetoric regarding nonwhites (https://newrepublic.com/article/149232/tyrants-dehumanize-powerless) routinely betrays a dehumanizing prejudice. Second, there has been a proliferation of what Duke University law professor Jedediah Purdy sardonically labels (https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/normcore-trump-resistance-books-crisis-of-democracy) “crisis-of-democracy literature,” involving Americans’ apparent rebuke of democratic norms.

Neither social intolerance nor inconsistent support for democratic norms, however, is particularly new.

In fact, the one constant thread woven throughout American democracy is that white Americans’ track records regarding matters of racial and democratic equality is poor. To what extent, then, is prejudice related to negative assessments of democracy? Analyzing World Values Survey data from 1995 to 2011, our recent working paper (https://github.com/svmiller/woi/blob/master/woi.pdf) finds a worrying negative relationship between social intolerance and support for democracy.

Social identities, intolerance, and democracy
Linking social (in)tolerance to attitudes about democracy draws from what social and political psychologists know about group identification (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.458.5322&rep=rep1&type=pdf) and how group identification leads to discrimination against out-groups (https://spssi.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/0022-4537.00126). First, the emergence of prejudice — like the belief that a member of an out-group is lazy, that integration is bad, or that immigrants are gang members — occurs when a pressing social situation like an election or economic crisis emphasizes distinctions between groups.

Second, members of a group need to attach pride or significance to their sense of group belonging. When this occurs, the social environment is restructured into a simplistic arena of opponents and allies (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/pops.12167).

Race has long been a — if not the — social and political categorization within American society. Opposition to the extension of the Voting Rights Act, support for cruel immigration policies, and negative responses to Muslims after 9/11, for example, are inexorably rooted in these intergroup dynamics. Throughout American history more generally, the extension of civil rights and access to levers of power in American politics have been grounded in race.

If social intolerance involves high levels of expressive identity (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279866972_The_consequences_of_social_intolerance_on_non-violent_protest), then people who feel threatened by racial or ethnic diversity ought to feel less positively toward systems of governance that extend political access to these individuals. Thus, white Americans who exhibit social intolerance may actually prefer undemocratic alternatives because democracy provides the political pretext for persons belonging to “undesirable” out-groups to accumulate resources or power that undercut the perceived well-being of the intolerant person.

Studies show social intolerance correlates with authoritarian preferences
We investigated World Values Survey (WVS) data covering the period 1995 to 2011 to explore the relationship between social intolerance and democracy. (As such, our analytical window of time predates the election of Donald Trump, but not the social forces that may have propelled him to the White House.) To construct a measure of social intolerance, we used the WVS’ “least-liked” groups instrument, which asks survey respondents whether or not they would not want a person from a variety of groups as a neighbor.

As the figure below indicates, most people possess relatively benign attitudes toward various groups of interest. However, among white Americans in our full sample, we calculate that roughly 17 percent of persons listed that they would not want a member of a different race, or an immigrant/foreign worker, or individuals who spoke a different language as a neighbor. (By 2011, the share of intolerant persons increased to almost a quarter of all white respondents.) This group of persons comprise our group of “socially intolerant” people.

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=38411&d=1530562397&thumb=1&stc=1
Nicholas T. Davis and Steven Miller

We then analyzed the relationship between social intolerance and attitudes toward democracy: support for army rule, a preference for a strong leader, and opposition to democracy. The results are striking. In each case, social intolerance correlates with authoritarian preferences.

Using a simulation-based analysis, we estimate that social intolerance increases the odds of an anti-democratic orientation by an average of about 10 percent across the three dependent variables. In 3,000 total simulations, a socially intolerant person on our measure is more supportive of autocratic alternatives than a socially tolerant person 100 percent of the time.

Finally, because past research alleges that education should encourage good citizenship by emphasizing the importance of participatory behaviors and the value of reasoned debate, we tested to see whether a college education, for example, undercuts the negative effect of social intolerance on support for democracy. In fact, it seems to amplify it. We speculate that well-educated persons may be sensitive to the idea that democracy equalizes access to power, which broadly matches other research that shows that education may strengthen (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1468-2508.2006.00448.x) racial judgments.


http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=38412&d=1530562406&thumb=1&stc=1
Nicholas T. Davis and Steven Miller

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=38413&d=1530562655&thumb=1&stc=1
Nicholas T. Davis and Steven Miller

Democracy isn’t living up to its billing
In theory, democracy is designed to safeguard the rights of minorities. Yet because the integrity of these protections relies on the strength of social norms of tolerance (https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=Hoz-fNJDnwMC&oi=fnd&pg=PA26&dq=tolerance+and+democracy&ots=6FX2GVV_o7&sig=v1aPOqPy2woANa9oFLoo-HDwAgg#v=onepage&q=tolerance%20and%20democracy&f=false) and political values that prevent illiberal behavior (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/forget-norms-our-democracy-depends-on-values/), it should come as no surprise that democracy often fails to live up to its billing in practice. American history, after all, is replete with human rights catastrophes (https://theintercept.com/2018/06/20/family-separation-immigration-history-slavery-mass-incarceration/).

Whether social intolerance causally degrades support for democracy is something we hope to answer via survey experiments. However, our analysis establishes a clear and robust connection between social intolerance and anti-democratic orientations among white Americans — a relationship that manifests a full 20 years prior to Donald Trump’s callous rhetoric linking words (https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/27/opinions/how-trump-is-dehumanizing-latinos-perez-oleary-carmona/index.html) like “animals,” “thugs,” and “rapists” to immigrants.

The policies we have observed since Trump’s inauguration, the human rights indignities that migrants and their children are suffering at the hands of the US government, and the support that Trump still enjoys from his core voters, may well be an ugly manifestation of the argument we provide. In some sense, this social intolerance is a rejection of the struggle to maintain “full” democracy.

Nicholas Davis is a Research Scientist at Texas A&M University. He studies the sorting of political and social identities and the popular meanings citizens associate with democracy. Steven Miller is an Assistant Professor at Clemson University. His research focuses on international conflict, democratic peace and conflict behavior, and public opinion.

[Mark]

Understanding that border laws privilege immigrants from certain classes and locations is essential to understanding why it is so easy for so many to approve of what is going on at our southern border. Despite the nature of the current political imbroglios, beneath the positioning, there are very real, human tragedies going on right now.

The refugees coming from the South are indeed people who have been affected by the depredations of the Elite factions, from "economic hitmen" and the USA's propensity to control by way of corporate personhood, the political and economic lives of Southern nations.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVsB07CcSNw

This has ramifications. These are the ramifications. Despite the desire to wish these ramifications away, the onrushing "hoards" coming from the South into the North, they are what they are. When the living environments of those within countries that have been eviscerated by the USA and Europe are no longer livable, when their economies are torn apart and when their children must join gangs and armies just in order to survive, what other option do they have but to come North? To the places that they see in the movies where it is relatively safe, and where their dreams for their children's futures, may still come true?

Since they can, no longer, in their own countries?

No one wants to leave their home. No one. Unless they have a spirit of adventure, what some call the "American" spirit, to be all they can be, and emigrate. Then, the economic requirements of doing so favor certain classes within countries and we see that happening daily.

Not everyone can afford it. Or have the education. But still want the opportunities because jobs in their nations are either gone, priced out by global economics, or pittances. The attitude of Americans and Europeans of all ethnic groups toward incoming populations is notoriously bad, I've seen it in black, brown, yellow, white and red populations alike. Acknowledging the implicit bias that exists within our perceptions and looking at the very real tragedies that often typify these migrants' lives necessitates us looking at our own attitudes, and seeing where we might have some personal bias toward them, whether acknowledged or not.

All of us here in the developed nations, from black to white and all shades in-between, benefit from being here, if only for the relative perception of safety and the ability to take advantage of the enshrined socialized benefits, as much or little as they may be for each nation. That makes each of us a part of these nations, and responsible for what the Elites have done, as we benefit, every day, in every way, little and large, in our qualities of life as compared to those seeking to come here now to experience that selfsame benefit for themselves. And why should they not deserve it, considering what the Elite have put them through? And why should we not be responsible, given the advantages we live every day and have gained by being the homes or origin points of these out-of-control corporations?

It was Europe's expansion and creation of companies like the East and West India Corporations, that acted in the place of governments, America's cooptation of the 14th amendment that gave them "personhood", all if it has created the predatory, psychopathic global climate within which we currently exist.

Since we are here, now, no matter where we are on the scale of oppressor and oppressed, we are all responsible for each other and the state of these nations and this world because we choose it, consciously and unconsciously, collectively and individually, with our inactions and actions. Owning up to our individual, familial and societal responsibilities - and our national and cultural birthrights and the ramifications of our greater or lesser level of inclusion within them - seems to be one of the hardest things in the world to do.




The research on race that helps explain Trump’s use of family separation at the border (https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/6/19/17478970/trump-family-separation-immigration-policy-racism)
The dehumanization of people of other races makes it easier to carry out atrocities.


Crying. Screaming. Shouts of “Mami!” and “Papá!” This is what President Donald Trump’s policies sound like on the ground as asylum-seeking families are split apart (https://www.vox.com/2018/6/11/17443198/children-immigrant-families-separated-parents). In the audio published by ProPublica, though, Border Patrol agents do not appear to show empathy, with one agent hearing the sobbing children and joking that “we have an orchestra here” and that “what’s missing is a conductor.”

In just five weeks, US officials separated more than 2,300 children (https://www.vox.com/2018/6/19/17479138/how-many-families-separated-border-immigration) from their parents at the US-Mexico border. While the Trump administration has been deliberately obtuse (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/6/18/17474476/trump-tweet-dhs-separated-border) about its intents, the “zero tolerance” approach appears to be part of a strategy to scare people from illegally crossing the border — by, essentially, using the possibility of parents losing their kids as a threat.

It’s easy to wonder how any of this is possible. How can someone care so little about children and families that they’re willing to use kids — and separation from their parents — as pawns in immigration policy? And how can the people implementing that policy on the ground hear sobbing children and joke about what’s going on?

One inescapable answer is race. These are, after all, immigrants of color coming from Latin America. Many of the people implementing these immigration policies, from Trump and his Cabinet down to border agents, are predominantly white. And based on the research, that makes them much less likely to view brown kids and their parents with a sense of humanity.

The dehumanization of minority groups
Consider a small 2007 study (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1368430207071344) that examined the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. In that study, researchers found that people tended to believe that victims in racial groups that they don’t belong to suffered fewer “uniquely human” emotions like anguish, mourning, and remorse than victims in racial groups that they did belong to. They also found that the aftermath of a natural disaster, perception of fewer “uniquely human” emotions led participants to be less willing to help victims of a different race.

A 2009 study (http://www.jneurosci.org/content/29/26/8525) similarly found that when participants looked at images of people in pain, the parts of their brains that respond to pain tended to show more activity if the person in the image was of the same race as the participant. Those researchers concluded that their findings “support the view that shared common membership enhances a perceiver’s empathic concerns for others.” Other studies (http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(10)00515-4) reached similar conclusions (http://www.pnas.org/content/113/16/4296.abstract).

There’s a basic concept behind this: Once someone can relate to the person who’s suffering, it becomes much easier to empathize. But since the majority of the public and policymakers in America are white, this line of research suggests that Americans are simply less likely to care for suffering Latinx families.

There’s also research, which Brian Resnick covered for Vox in greater detail (https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/3/7/14456154/dehumanization-psychology-explained), looking at dehumanization, which history and psychological studies show is a key contributor to violence and antipathy toward minority groups. This research has found that Americans outright dehumanize people of certain groups, including Mexican immigrants. (Many of the asylum-seeking families are actually from other Latin American countries, but in the public dialogue, they are often mischaracterized as “Mexican immigrants” — so it’s a useful proxy when looking at this kind of research.)

In one study (https://pcnlab.asc.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/2015_-The-Ascent-of-Man-Theoretical-and-Empirical-Evidence-for-Blatant-Dehumanization.pdf) led by Northwestern University psychologist Nour Kteily, participants — who were mostly white Americans — are asked to rate “how evolved you consider each of the following individuals or groups to be,” based on (inaccurate (https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2012/10/27/what-our-most-famous-evolutionary-cartoon-gets-wrong/drKMD5121W6EUxXJ4pF0YL/story.html)) images of human ancestors slowly changing to walk upright on two legs.

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=38415&d=1530564537&thumb=1
Javier Zarracina/Vox

The results: Mexican immigrants, along with Arabs and Muslims, are much more likely to be dehumanized. On a scale of 1 to 100, Americans were rated 91.5 and Europeans were 91.9, while Mexican immigrants were rated 83.7.

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=38416&d=1530564633&thumb=1&stc=1
Javier Zarracina/Vox

This dehumanization appears to be more common among Trump supporters, another study led by Kteily found. That’s “consistent with the idea that support for some of the Republican candidates (and Trump in particular) comes not despite their dehumanizing rhetoric but in part because of it,” Kteily and his co-author, Emile Bruneau, wrote. (This is part of a growing body of research tying racism to support for Trump.)

There are, of course, other possible explanations for Trump’s policies. Some people really do believe in doing everything possible — even carrying out horrific acts — to stop illegal immigration, regardless of the race of the immigrant. And, in general, the American system affords fewer rights to foreigners than it does to US citizens, enabling the poor treatment of foreign families.

But it’s impossible to escape that the victims here are people of color. So when I heard those little children crying for their parents as a Border Patrol agent mocked them, the research on race and dehumanization provided some clarity for what was going on.

[Mark]

What is often called racism is merely prejudice, mis-characterized. What people often consider to be expressions of hate are sometimes just preferences for people of a similar type. That is understandable, tribal and human.

There is only one human race, throughout creation that, apparently, has the ability to interact and procreate. The presence of so many different tribes of the human family upon our beautiful, blue orb must be for a reason. And if that reason isn't to work out difference and find a higher way, beyond the physical, then what might it be?

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=40624&d=1558627553

Medieval Scholars Joust With White Nationalists. And One Another. (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/05/arts/the-battle-for-medieval-studies-white-supremacy.html)

Each May, some 3,000 people descend on Kalamazoo, Mich., for the International Congress on Medieval Studies, which brings together academics and enthusiasts for four days of scholarly panels, performances and after-hours mead drinking.

But in recent years, the gathering affectionately known as “K’zoo” — and the field of medieval studies itself — has been shadowed by conflicts right out of the 21st century.

Since the 2016 presidential election, scholars have hotly debated the best way to counter the “weaponization” of the Middle Ages by a rising tide of far-right extremists, whether it’s white nationalist marchers in Charlottesville, Va., displaying medieval symbols or the white terrorist who murdered 50 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, using weapons inscribed with references to the Crusades.

And hanging over it all is an even more fraught question: Does medieval studies have a white supremacy problem of its own?

To some scholars, the answer is yes, and not just because the field is overwhelmingly white. Scholarship on the Middle Ages, they argue, helped create the idea of white European superiority, and still bolsters it today. There have been calls to “decolonize” medieval studies (https://aha.confex.com/aha/2019/webprogram/Session17520.html) by confronting the structural racism that has kept both nonwhite scholars and nonwhite perspectives outside its gates.

On the other side are those who see the field as under siege by activists seeking to replace scholarship with ritualistic denunciations of white male privilege, pursued with a with-us-or-against-us zeal.

There have been vitriolic blog exchanges, expletive-laced social media conflagrations and conference blowups (https://www.chronicle.com/article/Medievalists-Recoiling-From/240666). (Some members of the group Medievalists of Color have announced they will be boycotting this year’s Kalamazoo conference, which begins on Thursday.) Facebook groups have splintered amid charges and countercharges of bullying, cybermobbing and infiltration by trolls.

In the middle are the broad mass of medievalists, who may sympathize with one camp or the other, but mostly want to stay out of the fray.

“People don’t become medievalists because they want to be political,” said Richard Utz (https://www.iac.gatech.edu/people/faculty/utz), a literary scholar at Georgia Tech and president of the International Society for the Study of Medievalism. “Most are monkish creatures who just want to live in their cells and write their manuscripts.”

The term “medieval” came into use in the 19th century, to refer to Europe from roughly 500 to 1500, between the end of the Roman Empire and the rise of modernity. But while the field may seem divorced from the contemporary world, its own origins were hardly apolitical.

In Europe, academic study of the Middle Ages developed in tandem with a romantic nationalism that rooted the nation-state in an idealized past populated by Anglo-Saxons and other supposedly distinct “races.”

In the United States, universities, cultural institutions and wealthy elites drew on Gothic architecture, heraldry and other medieval trappings to ground American identity (https://daily.jstor.org/america-medieval/) in a noble (and implicitly white) European history. So did Southern slaveholders and the Ku Klux Klan.

Today, the field is sprawling and interdisciplinary, and includes historians, literary scholars, art historians, philologists, archaeologists and others. Its boundaries have expanded past its traditional focus on Northwest Europe to include the Mediterranean, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and even, among those advocating a “global Middle Ages,” (http://www.globalmiddleages.org/) the entire world.

But it remains an intellectually conservative field that has largely resisted the waves of critical theory that have washed over much of the humanities in recent decades. It has also been slow to take up the subject of race (https://newbooksnetwork.com/geraldine-heng-the-invention-of-race-in-the-european-middle-ages-cambridge-up-2018/).

While archaeological evidence shows that Africans and other nonwhite people were present (https://www.publicmedievalist.com/race-racism-middle-ages-toc/) in medieval Europe, some scholars argue that race is a modern construct, with limited relevance in a period when differences in religion mattered more than skin color.

But other medievalists see in such arguments a desire to wall off medieval scholarship from uncomfortable questions.

“It’s about asserting the racial and political innocence of the Middle Ages,” said Cord Whitake (https://www.wellesley.edu/english/faculty/whitaker)r, an assistant professor of English at Wellesley College and a member of Medievalists of Color (https://medievalistsofcolor.com/). “For medievalists to try to protect the field from engagement with race is ultimately to try to withdraw from the world.”

If withdrawal from the world was ever possible, it has become harder lately. During the 2016 election, memes like Donald Trump in armor on a horse and the Crusader slogan “Deus vult” (https://oilab.eu/deus-vult-tracing-the-many-misuses-of-a-meme/) (God wills it) began proliferating on social media. White nationalists stepped up recruiting (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/us/hate-groups-campus-recruiting.html?module=inline) on college campuses, sometimes co-opting the language of identity politics with calls for students to explore their “white heritage.”


http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=40625&d=1558628711
Some marchers at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 displayed medieval symbols, like the rune shown on this flag, which was also used by the Nazis.
Credit: Edu Bayer for The New York Times

Then came Charlottesville, where the sight of marchers carrying shields evoking the Knights Templar or holding banners with Anglo-Saxon runes came as a shock to many scholars.

“Medieval Studies always wants to be relevant,” said Ruth Mazo Karras (https://www.tcd.ie/history/staff/ruth-karras.php), a historian at Trinity College, Dublin, and president of the Medieval Academy of America. “But now we’ve become relevant in the wrong way.”

A week after Charlottesville, the Medieval Academy and 28 other scholarly groups released a statement condemning the “fantasy of a pure, white Europe that bears no relationship to reality.” Some medievalists overhauled their teaching, discussing misappropriations of history along with the history itself. Suddenly, professors began worrying about how to respond to students who might bring up white nationalist themes in class — or who might assume that medievalists themselves are white supremacists.

“We had to think about, ‘Who do they think we are?” said Nicholas Paul, director of the Center for Medieval Studies at Fordham University and a co-editor of the forthcoming book “Whose Middle Ages? Teachable Moments for an Ill-Used Past.”
(https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823285563/whose-middle-ages/)
The idea of medieval studies as a haven for white nationalist ideas gained ground when Rachel Fulton Brown, an associate professor of medieval history at the University of Chicago, began feuding with Dorothy Kim, an assistant professor of medieval English literature at Brandeis, after Dr. Kim, writing on Facebook, highlighted an old blog post (https://fencingbearatprayer.blogspot.com/2015/06/talking-points-three-cheers-for-white.html) of Dr. Fulton Brown’s titled “Three Cheers for White Men,” calling it (http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2016/01/antifeminism-whiteness-and-medieval.html) an example of “medievalists upholding white supremacy.”

Many scholars were outraged (https://www.chronicle.com/article/A-Debate-About-White-Supremacy/241234) when Dr. Fulton Brown, in a riposte to Dr. Kim written a few weeks after Charlottesville, tagged the right-wing writer Milo Yiannopoulos, whose website then ran an article about the dispute. Last July Mr. Yiannopoulos followed up with a 16,000-word attack on the field, which assailed Dr. Kim and others as “an angry social justice mob.”

The article caused a furor, as scholars accused colleagues of providing screenshots of private Facebook conversations and surreptitious recordings of conference sessions to Mr. Yiannopoulos.

Since then, Dr. Fulton Brown has become more isolated, as some who initially supported her have distanced themselves (http://www.milesstrenuus.com/2019/04/03/medieval-studies-bloodlands-edition/) after she began citing the far-right writer Vox Day and even, in a recent blog post, entertained the idea that the Christchurch shooting might have been a “false flag operation.” (https://fencingbearatprayer.blogspot.com/2019/03/the-14-words.html) (Dr. Fulton Brown, in an interview, said the depiction of her as a white supremacist or a member of the alt-right is “a misnomer” that “depends on a fantasy about me.”)


But the climate of intense suspicion and division the feud helped foster, particularly on social media, remains.

Paul Halsall, editor of the Internet Medieval Sourceboo (https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/sbook.asp)k, is among the scholars who remain friendly with Dr. Fulton Brown, the author of highly regarded studies of medieval devotion to the Virgin Mary, though he said he disagrees with her political views “profoundly.”

Last summer, he started two open Facebook groups after one dedicated to the Kalamazoo conference erupted in a dispute about racism and its comments policy, which resulted in a number of people, including its moderator, leaving or being expelled from the group.

Dr. Halsall deplored what he called the “cooties” approach that he says has taken hold, chilling debate.

“There’s this idea that if you talk to someone, you are stained,” he said. He added: “Anyone who is vaguely middle of the road or conservative is suddenly racist or white nationalist.”

Dr. Kim, a member of Medievalists of Color, said white medievalists who say they fear weighing in, lest they be accused of racism, are enacting a “classic white fragility script.”

“Those of us from marginal, targeted groups have no choice” about speaking up, she said. “This is about our own survival in the field.”

Some efforts to make the field more inclusive have met with resistance. Last year, the Medieval Academy created an annual award for scholars of color named for Belle da Costa Greene (https://www.medievalacademy.org/page/GreeneAward), the first manuscript librarian of the Pierpont Morgan collection, and an African-American woman who passed as white.

An anonymous group left a donation of $350 with a letter declaring support for the idea of inclusion but objecting to “skin pigmentation as grounds for a scholarly grant,” according to Lisa Fagin Davis, the academy’s executive director.

Last year, there was an outcry after the Kalamazoo conference, which is run by the Medieval Institute at Western Michigan University, rejected a number of panels proposed by Medievalists of Color. An open letter (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdReGZAQJiSSDWTRV0kT2tO2b9LEaAPLTjDJGCeH6auDczBhA/viewform), signed by more than 600 scholars, denounced the organizers for “a bias against, or lack of interest in, sessions that are self-critical of medieval studies, or focused on the politics of the field.” The panels about race that were accepted, some scholars noted, were organized by white scholars.

Jana Schulman, the director of the Medieval Institute, said procedures for selecting panels (https://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/working-group) this year were being overhauled to be more inclusive and transparent. She said she regretted that members of Medievalists of Color were staying away (https://medievalistsofcolor.com/race-in-the-profession/statement-regarding-icms-kalamazoo/), calling their critique of the field “important.”

“An individual’s area of interest completely colors what it is they look at” in the past, Dr. Schulman said. “Those of us in the field need to be aware that ours was maybe limited.”

[Strat]

Hopefully I didn't miss this, but what are your thoughts on reparations?

I don't have a hard lined opinion but as I read more US history I tend to be pro reparations. I dunno what that would entail, but I feel it'd be great for the country overall. I don't think 40 acres and a mule is a good idea, not sure how much help that would be. I think monetary reparations is a huge figure, close to the entire countries GDP. So what do you think?

[Mark]

Hopefully I didn't miss this, but what are your thoughts on reparations?

Here is a good discussion by current presidential candidate, Marianne Williamson.
Ms3AzS6Zbk0

To me, there seem to be no doubt that the creation of what is called "whiteness" back in the 1600s, done to bind the European colonists into one cohesive political and social body, has been extraordinarily successful. So much so, that its formulation has spread throughout the world and even to countries where the European presence is negligible. In these nations, you find color consciousness and class stratification based upon skin color as well. But it is here, in the United States of America, the genesis of the modern understanding of "racism", that it finds its highest and purest expression.

My personal thoughts about Reparations are conflicted.

On the one hand, I agree with Marianne and Farrakhan and many others that Reparations were promised to my ancestors after the Civil War, by the government, for economic compensation for unpaid labor and that promise must be honored fully. I agree with Marianne that there is a psychic cost to European-descended folk surrounding the continuing refusal to pay reparations. The heavy, undeniable toll of generation after generation, refusing to acknowledge the full personhood of an entire ethnic family of humanity does something to those who practice that kind of mentality and social classification. It does something to those who impose that social system as well as those upon whom the system is imposed. Epigenetics might come into play, here, and some of the intergenerational psychological stressors and conditions we currently see in effect in certain populations here in the USA and other places, might be the result.

On the other hand, I think actually making a plan and paying reparations to the Descendants of Slaves (DOS), will drive a segment of our population absolutely crazy. Bat-shiza insane. To the point of extreme violence, psychopathically expressive.

I keep hoping we won't have to go there, here. That we can get beyond the race issue without having that fateful blowout that will tear this nation apart.

I don't know if we can.

[Valerie Villars]

I've thought about this subject. My initial thoughts question how this can be practically carried out.

Who gets the money? Every single descendant of every single slave? In some cases you are talking about 12 generations of people from one slave. How much? Does it end with the last descendant that gets money or does it go on in perpetuity?

I'm just not sure where it would end.

[Mark]

Who gets the money? Every single descendant of every single slave? In some cases you are talking about 12 generations of people from one slave. How much? Does it end with the last descendant that gets money or does it go on in perpetuity?

These things would have to be worked out carefully. I highly recommend you watch the video with Marianne that I left above. Here is another, shorter one where she gives a concise rendition of her stance:

8tKvaP2LKfs

I'm a 5th and 6th Generation Texan, on both sides of my family, which is a big deal, down here in Texas. :)

But it means that my ancestors were enslaved in this state before it became a part of the union. I have a direct line of oral memory, stories told that have been passed down through the generations about those times and even unto Africa herself. On my mother's side, there is the story of Great-Grandmother Elvira, who was stolen with her sister. They saw a red flag waving down by a river and went to go see what it was, and they were taken. This story only goes back about 7 generations, which means this happened in the early 1800s, when importing stolen Africans was patently illegal but still happened, down off the Gulf coast in places like Galveston and the South Carolina sea isles.

Her descendants came out of Louisiana into Texas and worked hard and long. My extended family is the result and we are strong and proud of who we are and where, as well as what, we came from. My mother (RIP) did a genetic test and found that her maternal side came out of Southern Africa, which is NOT the norm (most enslaved Africans came from West Africa) and speaks to the unusual nature of the theft of my Great Grandmother Elvira and the genetic bequeathment of my family on that side.

However it happens, if and when it does, it will have to be equitable and serve the purpose of elevating those DOS who remain mired in abject poverty and ignorance by situation and circumstance.

[Flash]

I've thought about this subject. My initial thoughts question how this can be practically carried out.

Who gets the money? Every single descendant of every single slave? In some cases you are talking about 12 generations of people from one slave. How much? Does it end with the last descendant that gets money or does it go on in perpetuity?

I'm just not sure where it would end.

being at it, maybe the Cajuns should have reparation too from the British, since they were deported to Louisiana and thrown into the swamps to survive. And maybe French Canadian should have reparation for all the very cheap labor and finance they provided to the British/English Canadians for centuries (I will make my Western Canadians avalonian jump with this comment. You know what they would say: we already paid enough for Quebec.

And here is the point. I do not think money directly given to any kind of descendent, here it would be also to the natives, will make any difference. It would just create entitlement.

But yes, helping the descendent to cross the racial barriers, by giving more sustenance for achieving goals, this would be a step. In this category, the help given by other provinces to Quebec when Quebec was still dam poor did make a difference. It in parts allowed us to overcome centuries of exploitation.

So giving to specific groups, in different forms, such as some positive discrimination for jobs, some financial help to the poorer of the slave descendent, some help to start businesses, etc. in order to offer, on the long run, equal opportunities to develop (which takes into account racial discrimination), this would help.

Same for women by the way, who still over alife time make 30% less than their male counterpart. This has to be balanced somehow. It stems from discrimination on gender and specific gender oriented work.

------------------

Rakhyt, your post on medieval studies and the colored medieval expert input or lack of is very interesting, instructive and well written, thank you.

Unconsciously, I always considered the appellation "middle ages" as being white European. To me, else where did not have middle ages period lollllll. Asia did not have a Middle age, they developed following a different structure and pathways with corresponding dates to the middle age in Europe or not, same for India or Africa. This is how I was perceiving it, not having studied it at all.

[Mark]

being at it, maybe the Cajuns should have reparation too from the British, since they were deported to Louisiana and thrown into the swamps to survive. And maybe French Canadian should have reparation for all the very cheap labor and finance they provided to the British/English Canadians for centuries (I will make my Western Canadians avalonian jump with this comment. You know what they would say: we already paid enough for Quebec.

Were these groups promised reparations by a governmental entity? What we are speaking about here, is very specific and has to do with the Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and General Sherman back in 1865. Then President Abraham Lincoln approved it. Sherman's Field Order #15 (https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/shermans-field-order-no-15) is the document at issue. So we are not speaking of a claim made merely by enslaved humans after a devastating war. This discussion is a continuation of a promise, made by the American government.

There is an entire story about what happened after this, how the Black Codes became Jim Crow etcetera, which we can have here. But the point I hope to make is that universalizing this issue by pointing to every other group that has experienced hardships does little to shed light on the issue and more to obscure it and minimize it even further.

But, this is a real strategy by some. And has been quite effective, for quite some time. And probably will continue to be, moving forward, if the history of this country continues into its future.


I do not think money directly given to any kind of descendent, here it would be also to the natives, will make any difference. It would just create entitlement.

That has not been the case for the descendants of Japanese people held in internment camps, nor the descendants of those Jewish folk also held in camps, paid by Germany over time. I expect this discussion to provide good tinder to those who hold that there were no internment camps and it was all a part of a conspiracy to redistribute wealth from the German state to the Zionists.

[Flash]

Good Rakhyt, I did not know about this part of the American history. The consideration might be different then, since it was agreed upon and never delivered.

But I did about the internment camps.

[Mark]

Forgot to answer this part:


Rakhyt, your post on medieval studies and the colored medieval expert input or lack of is very interesting, instructive and well written, thank you.

Unconsciously, I always considered the appellation "middle ages" as being white European. To me, else where did not have middle ages period lollllll. Asia did not have a Middle age, they developed following a different structure and pathways with corresponding dates to the middle age in Europe or not, same for India or Africa. This is how I was perceiving it, not having studied it at all.

I liked it, found it interesting upon reading and thought it would be a way to delve back into this topic without being too inflammatory, on an issue which is of concern to all of us without being a flash point. How you viewed it is probably how most do, who have never studied those times. Movies are getting better at depicting them, although people still blink two or three times when they see brown-skinned people wearing armor or fancy European clothing of the times. Some European royalty was also brown-skinned, as has been made famously public with the marriage of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle and the admission that one of the royal ancestors, Queen Charlotte of Mecklenberg (http://greaterdiversity.com/englands-first-black-queen-sophie-charlotte-born-1744/) would be considered black under our current paradigmatic view of ethnic interrelation.



http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=40626&d=1558640982

[Strat]

I'm gonna get back to you on reparations. I need to do a bit more homework on the figures. I think that gals figure was very low, but again I haven't researched it.


President Abraham Lincoln

Sorta big question I know, but what's your opinion on him, and this quote:
"If I could save the union without freeing any slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that." - Lincoln

It would be easy to say that he may be considered racist. Fredrick Douglass (probably in my top 3 fav US historical figures) though once said Lincoln was the only white man he ever met that didn't immediately remind him of his race (I really butchered that quote, but should be easy enough to look up).

[Mark]

Sorta big question I know, but what's your opinion on him, and this quote:
"If I could save the union without freeing any slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that." - Lincoln

It just tells me that he was a President. A pragmatist, willing to do whatever it took to keep this nation going during his watch.

I see all of the Presidents in that light, every single one of them. They have all been absolute products of their time and have represented the zeitgeist of this nation at the level of Avatar. They have almost all been initiates of the secret societies and shared certain genetics as well.

I have a slightly different understanding of what the United States actually is, than most people and that is informed by my own studies. I don't like or dislike Lincoln's comments, it is a cold recognition of his situation and the necessity of continuing the American Experiment.


It would be easy to say that he may be considered racist.

Not directed at you, but, so what?

An unfiltered and honest look at American history since the colony days of the mid-1600s reveals a metanarrational milieu within which every, single American is born into. Within this sociological construct we are all immersed in data, even back then, that informed our viewpoint of the world. Lincoln was then, just like we are, today and as every person to engage in this experiment has been since the nation's inception. Today, we might call his viewpoint racist. He was a white man in the ultimate position of power in a land where the descendants of enslaved Africans were chattel. Without being an apologist or accusing, it just was what it was. Ever read this quote, from the fourth Lincoln-Douglas debate (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/hard-truths-abraham-lincoln-was-a-racist-and-the-confederacy_b_59932564e4b0a88ac1bc3758):


While I was at the hotel to-day, an elderly gentleman called upon me to know whether I was really in favor of producing a perfect equality between the negroes and white people. [Great Laughter.] While I had not proposed to myself on this occasion to say much on that subject, yet as the question was asked me I thought I would occupy perhaps five minutes in saying something in regard to it. I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races, [applause]-that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.

And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied every thing. I do not understand that because I do not want a negro woman for a slave I must necessarily want her for a wife. [Cheers and laughter.] My understanding is that I can just let her alone. I am now in my fiftieth year, and I certainly never have had a black woman for either a slave or a wife.

So it seems to me quite possible for us to get along without making either slaves or wives of negroes. I will add to this that I have never seen, to my knowledge, a man, woman or child who was in favor of producing a perfect equality, social and political, between negroes and white men. … I will also add to the remarks I have made (for I am not going to enter at large upon this subject,) that I have never had the least apprehension that I or my friends would marry negroes if there was no law to keep them from it, [laughter] but as Judge Douglas and his friends seem to be in great apprehension that they might, if there were no law to keep them from it, [roars of laughter] I give him the most solemn pledge that I will to the very last stand by the law of this State, which forbids the marrying of white people with negroes. [Continued laughter and applause.]”

Imagine an American president saying this today in a debate. :silent:

The thing is, there are enough people in the world who believe this today and plenty here in PA that do. The question of whether or not it is racist to just want to be with people who are like you is in the framing of that perspective. Is the belief that those whom one does not want to interact with are lesser in any way, shape or form, present?

If it is, then elements of ethnic supremacy are being expressed. As Lincoln does in this quote.

[Valerie Villars]

being at it, maybe the Cajuns should have reparation too from the British, since they were deported to Louisiana and thrown into the swamps to survive. And maybe French Canadian should have reparation for all the very cheap labor and finance they provided to the British/English Canadians for centuries (I will make my Western Canadians avalonian jump with this comment. You know what they would say: we already paid enough for Quebec.

Were these groups promised reparations by a governmental entity? What we are speaking about here, is very specific and has to do with the Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and General Sherman back in 1865. Then President Abraham Lincoln approved it. Sherman's Field Order #15 (https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/shermans-field-order-no-15) is the document at issue. So we are not speaking of a claim made merely by enslaved humans after a devastating war. This discussion is a continuation of a promise, made by the American government.

There is an entire story about what happened after this, how the Black Codes became Jim Crow etcetera, which we can have here. But the point I hope to make is that universalizing this issue by pointing to every other group that has experienced hardships does little to shed light on the issue and more to obscure it and minimize it even further.

But, this is a real strategy by some. And has been quite effective, for quite some time. And probably will continue to be, moving forward, if the history of this country continues into its future.


I do not think money directly given to any kind of descendent, here it would be also to the natives, will make any difference. It would just create entitlement.

That has not been the case for the descendants of Japanese people held in internment camps, nor the descendants of those Jewish folk also held in camps, paid by Germany over time. I expect this discussion to provide good tinder to those who hold that there were no internment camps and it was all a part of a conspiracy to redistribute wealth from the German state to the Zionists.

My initial and gut level response is this. Since time immemorial government has made promises that were never kept. They are more in the business of breaking promises than keeping them.

[Franny]

My initial and gut level response is this. Since time immemorial government has made promises that were never kept. They are more in the business of breaking promises than keeping them.

I had to laugh rather wryly at this one. Of over 500 treaties between Native Americans and the US government, not one was honored to any extent.

That brings up the question of whether or not Native Indians should receive any reparations.

My great grandmother was removed from her Potawotami family in present-day Michigan and sent to a government school. The whole family was broken up and scattered to several states as was not unusual at that time. Do they deserve reparations?

[Denise/Dizi]

I agree with Val. It all comes down to personal accountability. TEACHING personal accountability, and learning from our prior mistakes.. Learning from them rather than repeating them. We need to CELEBRATE our differences, learn from them, grow , diversify, not bash everyone into submission.. TO CONFORM..

The world will change as we grow and evolve and change. Trying to protect a few places from that change well, it's impossible but we can limit the negative IMPACT we have on those places. But keep cultures thriving.. Sadly there will always be someone who thinks that something else is good, and the influence will have come from another culture. Those who can't handle the change will grow resentful.

I have been the victim of actual racism. Much like Bill's friend as he suggests. I was born in the San Francisco, in the Bay Area, white hair, and bright blue eyes, certainly I must have been one of those that were white and privileged right? Absolutely NOT.. I WAS the "MINORITY" And I was abused accordingly. I have been verbally assaulted, physically assaulted, and I was in a house once, visiting some of my mothers friends when someone threw a molitoff cocktail through the window of their house LIT, and we had to avoid the fire. Why? They were BLACK... Guilty of having pigment in their skin, nothing more..

Did I blame a RACE for doing this? NOPE.. I blamed the ignorant HUMANS who felt that was ok to do to ANY other human being..

Recently I went into a local store, and there was a young man working there. I had met him years before, and I chat with him each time I see him. He is the same age as my oldest son, and a very nice guy.. He comes from a Muslim background, and there was some major propaganda playing out on the news.. "Hate Muslims if you're American" essentially.. I walked into the store, found him, and we talked. A few minutes later I told him, We're "Breaking the rules you know". And he looked at me with a blank look of curiosity, and I told him.. "Apparently the tv wants me to believe that you and I can't gt along" HE LAUGHED..

This planet belongs to EVERYONE, Every continent, Every island belongs to EVERYONE, and until people begin to take personal responsibility for themselves, their own feelings, actions, reactions, and beliefs, we are going to be facing issues such as these. If someone wants to tell me it happens because of cultures being harmed, then they're not protecting their way of life. They're not perpetuating their culture. You can share your way of life, and still share land. And I don't mean by killing others, chasing them off, but by SHARING the beauty in it.

We live in a beautiful place, with such diversity, we're welcome to go and enjoy everything, one bite at a time, so long as we don't go taking our own expectations to every region we visit. We don't need walls, we need to educate people grow as a species, not as individual races.

I can't express why people behave the way they do, but I can observe they're learning absolutely NOTHING from the past mistakes, and they're repeating them. And if we continue to do so, we are going to have ONE look on this planet. ONE way of life, and everyone will be expected to conform.

Celebrate our differences.. Enjoy them, learn from them, grow from them. To me racism is worse than so many other things. But I don't want to understand it.. I want it to end. And if we're going to give it attention, perhaps the attention that we should give it, is how to get beyond it.. Just my 2 cents.

[Mark]

My initial and gut level response is this. Since time immemorial government has made promises that were never kept. They are more in the business of breaking promises than keeping them.

Governments have also kept a lot of promises as well. Which populations they keep promises to, is what is really at issue.

[Mark]

That brings up the question of whether or not Native Indians should receive any reparations.

My great grandmother was removed from her Potawotami family in present-day Michigan and sent to a government school. The whole family was broken up and scattered to several states as was not unusual at that time. Do they deserve reparations?

That is a bit more difficult to respond to. Canada has done this:

CANADA AGREES TO REPARATIONS FOR ALL RESIDENTIAL SCHOOL STUDENTS (https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/canada-agrees-reparations-all-residential-school-students)

On May 30, the Canadian government signed an agreement with the Assembly of First Nations pledging to pay a lump sum in compensation for former students of Indian residential schools.

The Residential School Political Agreement marks an unprecedented policy shift for Canada. Previously, only former students who were victims of sexual or physical abuses were to receive monetary reparation. Indian activists complained that the earlier plan ignored the damage the schools caused through their suppression of Native languages and cultures.

"This accord will not only result in a better, faster, and more economic claims process for residential schools survivors who were abused, it is a commitment for the entire country to move forward through a national dialogue on healing, reconciliation, commemoration, and truth-sharing," states National Chief Phil Fontaine in an Assembly of First Nations press release. "This is a holistic way to deal with this terrible, tragic legacy of our shared past."

According to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, throughout the history of the residential schools from the late 19th century to the 1980s, many Indian residential school children were victims of physical and sexual abuse. Similar atrocities occurred in the United States from the colonial missionary times to the 1970s.

In 1998, Canada instituted Gathering Strength, a policy framework designed to address the legacy of residential school physical and sexual abuse. That same year, the Canadian government issued a Statement of Reconciliation to all victims outlining its regret over the treatment endured by aboriginal peoples. The apology states, "As a country we are burdened by past actions that resulted in weakening the identity of Aboriginal peoples, suppressing their languages and cultures, and outlawing spiritual practices."

As a result of Gathering Strength, the government allocated $350 million to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, which provides funding for community-based wellness projects. In addition, the policy established procedures for government and church officials to jointly develop solutions for dealing with the schools’ aftermath and litigation strategies for promoting settlement and reconciliation out of court.

The government also created the Alternative Dispute Resolution Project in order to move the dialogue among the victims, churches, and government out of the courts. But many victims complained and were discouraged by the project’s long administrative process for addressing reparations.

Irwin Colter, minister of justice and attorney general of Canada, and Andy Scott, minister of Indian affairs, recently announced the appointment of Frank Iacobucci as the government’s representative to lead discussions between the surviving residential school victims and the Canadian government. Iacobucci will recommend the actual amount that should be paid out for reparation. He has until March 31, 2006, to propose his settlement package to the federal Cabinet.

The Canadian government has suggested that reparations be based on recommendations outlined in a November report by the Assembly of First Nations. The report recommended that the lump sum payment be at least $10,000 per student, plus $3,000 for each year each student spent in school. The lump sum payment will be made to any student who attended an Indian residential school. The assembly said the lump sum payment should not affect other claims for serious abuses, and individuals who have already settled claims should still be eligible. The sick and elderly should receive their payments first, the assembly’s report says. Negotiations between the government and survivors will determine how the reparations will be dispersed.

[Mark]

I have been the victim of actual racism. Much like Bill's friend as he suggests. I was born in the San Francisco, in the Bay Area, white hair, and bright blue eyes, certainly I must have been one of those that were white and privileged right? Absolutely NOT.. I WAS the "MINORITY" And I was abused accordingly. I have been verbally assaulted, physically assaulted, and I was in a house once, visiting some of my mothers friends when someone threw a molitoff cocktail through the window of their house LIT, and we had to avoid the fire. Why? They were BLACK... Guilty of having pigment in their skin, nothing more..

Did I blame a RACE for doing this? NOPE.. I blamed the ignorant HUMANS who felt that was ok to do to ANY other human being..

I'm sorry you experienced that as a youth. I can imagine how it made you feel and commiserate with the position you were in, being a minority in a larger group. In that instance, I would agree with you that it is an expression of racism. Whenever another group holds actual, physical power over a person, or another group, that IS racism. It is not mere prejudice. It is prejudice plus power.

For blacks and browns and others the power being held is in the hands of the white majority. Often, when whites tell me they have experienced racism they are talking about a time they may have been beat up by a black or brown person or verbally accosted. The vast majority of their lives have been lived experiencing white privilege in the context of the greater society, where that metanarrative is institutionalized.

I think this is often an area of unnecessary rancor and ire, frankly. The concentration on the experience for individuals acts to mask greater patterns of interactions within society itself that affect groups. In your experience, I do not believe that is so. Thank you for sharing.

[Strat]

It would be easy to say that he may be considered racist.

Not directed at you, but, so what?

The thing is, there are enough people in the world who believe this today and plenty here in PA that do. The question of whether or not it is racist to just want to be with people who are like you is in the framing of that perspective. Is the belief that those whom one does not want to interact with are lesser in any way, shape or form, present?


I want to address a couple things here but will have to get back to ya. I say that as someone offering thoughts, not proving points or even debating. I am a student of these matters I don't know enough to have a solid opinion.

Another question:
My family comes from different backgrounds, mother is from NJ/NY and father is from here in FL. Traditional understanding of US race relations would suggest the south is heavily racist and the north is not. However my mother says that in Jersey it was highly segregated and when she came to FL it was totally different. The only racism she saw came from someone dropping the n bomb but there wasn't blatant segregation like she saw up north. The segregation extended to all folks. There was (/is) a tier system.

Thoughts?

I appreciate this dialogue cause it's hard for me to do it in real life.

[Patient]

This is such a huge and very important topic.

In just reading 2 pages of posts I felt a strong line of thought that I feel I need to post. Of course it could be washed away and forgotten like a sand scratch drawing that is washed away by a wave on the beach....and if so that is ok.

There have been so many reparation promises made by so many governments and that knowledge surfaced very quickly here in this conversation.

But do you know what else was apparent? How many people would be on those lists for compensations due. We are all a part of many and that is because we learned to live and love together.

I think that is what we should focus on - who we are. And yeah, people can and should be proud of their heritage, why not? But that should be viewed also as a celebration of how people began with a strong family heritage and shared it with another bringing us forward to where we can and will all go togther.

I know. If dreams could come true, but it was said to me once "Dreams come true when the dreaming part stops."

So I see our discussion here as being a part of the path to a better place.

Reparation promises should be honoured, but the older they are the more difficult it becomes, obviously. Based on my roots, I could have claim to a small handful of settlements - but I think that is a very good point to show that living together in peace and harmony is very possible.

[Mark]

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=40655&d=1559074354


The Disturbing Resilience of Scientific Racism (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/disturbing-resilience-scientific-racism-180972243/)

A new book explores how racist biases continue to maintain a foothold in research today

Scientists, including those who study race, like to see themselves as objectively exploring the world, above the political fray. But such views of scientific neutrality are naive, as study findings, inevitably, are influenced by the biases of the people conducting the work.

The American sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/first-time-together-and-color-book-displays-web-du-bois-visionary-infographics-180970826/) once wrote, “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” His words were borne out, in part, by science. It was the century when the scientifically backed enterprise of eugenics—improving the genetic quality of white, European races by removing people deemed inferior—gained massive popularity, with advocates on both sides of the Atlantic. It would take the Holocaust to show the world the logical endpoint of such horrific ideology, discrediting much race-based science and forcing eugenics’ most hardline adherents into the shadows.

The post-war era saw scientists on the right-wing fringe find ways to cloak their racist views in more palatable language and concepts. And as Angela Saini convincingly argues in her new book, Superior: The Return of Race Science (https://www.amazon.com/Superior-Return-Science-Angela-Saini/dp/0807076910), published May 21 by Beacon Press, the “problem of the color line” still survives today in 21st-century science.

In her thoroughly researched book, Saini, a London-based science journalist, provides clear explanations of racist concepts while diving into the history of race science, from archaeology and anthropology to biology and genetics. Her work involved poring through technical papers, reports and books, and interviewing numerous scientists across various fields, sometimes asking uncomfortable questions about their research.

“Mainstream scientists, geneticists and medical researchers still invoke race and use these categories in their work, even though we have been told for 70 years that they have no biological meaning, that they have only social meaning,” Saini says.

Scientific research has struggled with concepts of race for centuries, often proposing misleading or erroneous explanations of racial differences. Contentious debates among Europeans about the origins of modern humans began in the 19th century, and many of the continent’s leading scientists believed firmly that Europeans exemplified the most evolved and intelligent humans. Human fossils in Europe provided the first data points in the budding field of paleoanthropology, but the region was in reality just where European archaeologists happened to start looking. Fossils, as well as cave art, DNA samples and other evidence later uncovered around the world pointed to a more complex picture of human origins (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/what-we-learned-about-our-human-origins-2018-180971129/): Elements of modern humans emerged throughout Africa, and those people migrated east and then north and west in waves.

Rather than distinct races, groupings or borders, the continually mixing populations produced only gradients, with some traits slightly more common in some regions than others. Lighter skin color in northern climates emerged late; some Britons were shocked to learn that Cheddar Man, (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ancient-briton-had-dark-skin-and-light-eyes-dna-analysis-shows-180968097/) the remains of a man who lived in southwest England almost 10,000 years ago, would today have been considered black.

In the 1950s, geneticists began to confirm what some archaeologists had already surmised: “Individual variation within population groups, overlapping with other population groups, turned out to be so large that the boundaries of race made less and less sense,” Saini writes. The conclusion was that no “pure” races exist that are distinct from others. Despite this evidence, those eugenicists still practicing sought to prevent their supposedly superior race from being overrun by immigration, miscegenation and higher birth rates among other ethnicities.

While few people study or advocate for eugenics today, some scientists in the rapidly advancing field of genetics held onto related ideologies after World War II. They simply used different terms, Saini points out, as some continued with race-focused research while referring to “populations” and “human variation” rather than “races” and “racial differences.” Geneticist James Watson, for instance, a co-discoverer of DNA’s double helix structure, has frequently been the subject of withering criticism for voicing racist beliefs (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dna-pioneer-james-watson-loses-honorary-titles-over-racist-comments-180971266/), including that differences on tests of intelligence have a racial component (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/01/science/watson-dna-genetics-race.html), and arguing that Indians are servile and that Chinese people have somehow become genetically conformist (https://twitter.com/anupampom/status/985714425750605824).

A handful of researchers with similar beliefs, including former Nazi scientist Otmar von Verschuer and British eugenicist Roger Pearson, had trouble getting their research published in reputable journals and formed their own journal in 1961. Mankind Quarterly (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/134/3493/1928) became a platform for race science—a place to publish questionable research under the trappings of objective science. Intelligence, a more respected psychology journal that’s published by the major publishing company Elsevier, also occasionally included papers with pseudoscientific findings about intelligence differences between races. Until recently, that journal had two eugenics supporters, Gerhard Heisenberg and Richard Lynn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lynn), on its editorial board. But by the time Saini finished her book late last year, after interviewing the journal’s editor-in-chief, she saw that the pair had been removed from the journal’s list of board members (https://www.journals.elsevier.com/intelligence/editorial-board).

“The extreme stuff poses a dilemma for legitimate scientists, since you can’t read every crank’s work and falsify it,” says Aaron Panofsky, a sociologist of science at UCLA and author of the book, Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the Development of Behavior Genetics (https://www.amazon.com/Misbehaving-Science-Controversy-Development-Behavior/dp/022605845X). Researchers don’t want to endow these papers with more legitimacy than they deserve, but they don’t want to ignore them and risk fueling conspiracy theories, either.

While Mankind Quarterly has managed to hang on into the 21st century, “hard-core scientific racists are mostly old white men, and they’re not being reproduced in academia,” Panofsky says. Even so, plenty of racist, young white men continue to promote concepts of scientific racism, such as the participants in the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—an event that even the scientific journal Natur (https://www.nature.com/news/against-discrimination-1.22459)e felt the need to condemn.

Even more well-meaning epidemiological scientists nonetheless still use race as a crude proxy for myriad social and environmental factors. Saini cites an example of a 2017 study (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28069248) with statistical errors claiming that race and biology indicate that the airways of asthmatic black Americans become more inflamed than those of asthmatic white Americans. Black Americans do suffer more from asthma than whites do, but they’re also affected more by environmental hazards like air pollution from highways and factories as well as disparities in access to high-quality healthcare. These many forms of inequality and structural racism—which sociologists have documented for decades—were swept under the rug in favor of a race variable that led to findings that could be easily misinterpreted.

In another example, Saini describes the ill-fated 1990s Human Genome Diversity Project, which analyzed the genetic variations of small, remote populations referred to as “isolates,” including the Basques in Europe, the Kurds of eastern Turkey and Native American tribes. Indigenous rights activists, understandably sensitive to being exploited, resisted the project, surprising the naive scientists.

Time and time again, groupings by race, even if they don’t use the term “race,” can be dangerous and misleading to people looking for inherent biological differences. But Saini doesn’t think we can be “colorblind” or “post-race” in scientific research either. Scientists who claim to be so tend to have the same problem as the asthma study, ignoring racial inequalities all around that influence a study’s findings. Saini also explores the possibility of affirmative action policies, reparations or environmental justice advocacy, all intended to mitigate structural, historical and scientific racism.

Like many geneticist (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6273/564)s, Saini argues that since race is a social construct (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-genetics-science-africa/), it doesn’t belong in genetics research. Scientists in other fields have the freedom to study race, she writes, but with that freedom comes responsibility. They can’t afford to leave room for misinterpretation. Researchers using racial categories “should fully understand what they mean, be able to define them, and know their history,” Saini writes.

The rest of us, too, need to be aware of racial stereotypes, lest we fall prey to them. “That’s part of the reason that we’re fascinated by DNA ancestry testing,” Saini says. “The reason it matters to us is because we feel that these racial categories have some meaning, that they can tell us something about ourselves, and that’s just wrong. They can’t.”

[Mark]

My family comes from different backgrounds, mother is from NJ/NY and father is from here in FL. Traditional understanding of US race relations would suggest the south is heavily racist and the north is not. However my mother says that in Jersey it was highly segregated and when she came to FL it was totally different. The only racism she saw came from someone dropping the n bomb but there wasn't blatant segregation like she saw up north. The segregation extended to all folks. There was (/is) a tier system.

Thoughts?

Most of my most intense and harrowing experiences of racism have been in Midwest and Northern states. I lived outside of Spokane Washington, on Fairchild AFB back in the 80s when Coeur d'alene, Idaho, was home to the Aryan Nations and the kids in the small northern Washington towns our military school would go play basketball against had never seen black people in person before except on TV. Oklahoma and Illinois in the late 1970s early 1980s was a proving ground for me in my ability to stand in the face of direct and sustained racial abuse from individuals, groups, other children and adults.

I've never lived on the East Coast but I've read about it and heard stories from friends who came up over there who confirm that opinion in their lived experience. The Northern states had these places called Sundown Towns (https://sundown.tougaloo.edu/sundowntowns.php), where black Americans were kept out by force, custom or law. Could only be in town during the day to work, things like that. Segregation was generally practiced and still is in many cities north and south (https://www.usnews.com/news/the-report/articles/2018-04-20/us-is-still-segregated-even-after-fair-housing-act). We have not come anywhere near as many people to think to desegregation as it is generally believed.


I appreciate this dialogue cause it's hard for me to do it in real life.

Why might that be so?

[Mark]

Reparation promises should be honoured, but the older they are the more difficult it becomes, obviously. Based on my roots, I could have claim to a small handful of settlements - but I think that is a very good point to show that living together in peace and harmony is very possible.

It is true that the human condition has always been what it is. But it is also true that a relatively privileged elite in every society have the wherewithall and the space in time to contemplate the deeper mysteries and conditions within which oceanic humanity toils, enslaved to the pyramidal system of economic and political hegemony. Most people are trying to make it through the day in jobs they hate from which they escape into more escapism in the forms of drugs and alcohol, video games and other distractions, so they can be ready for the next day and the next injustice and self-immolating happenstance they have to face in a long series of such events.

Living together in peace and harmony is not a general way that most people think, is what I'm saying. Most people in the world are trying to get by and live life in the visceral crucible of hard experience, which compounds upon itself to harden the heart and deaden the soul and they seek answers beyond themselves like flowers casting stems into the sky reaching for the sun. When those answers seem to appear, they grasp and strain, as is evidenced in political race after race, election after election, to find themselves once again used and abused, their hearts hardening just that much more, their souls greying and stilling in the face of absolute and abject despair.

Their lives are not harmonic, peace is only found in the solace of drugs or the afterglow of sex, or the seeming nothingness of slumber. I say all of this to say that I appreciate the higher ideals you bring to the table with your discussion and understand the reality you posit as existing and it does, but not for everyone. Much of that has to do with exposure to higher ideals and experiences that reinforce them as living possibilities not just for random and disparate individuals, but for groups also. Right now, for very many people, the question at hand is very much a material, now beingness kind of thing. There is nothing abstract about it and abstract arguments and recourses that posit some non-existing reality (at least for those affected) do more to obscure than to reveal answers to these issues. Universalizing the issue certainly does nothing to help, either, as I've mentioned before and is, in fact, a conscious and - apparently - sub-conscious strategy used by whites to minimize this particular issue and diffuse it into obscurity.

Which solves nothing. Nor affect the very real and very palpable racial disparities faced in the US of A in the past, now and into the foreseeable future.

[Strat]

I appreciate this dialogue cause it's hard for me to do it in real life.

Why might that be so?

Dunno, I suppose it just doesn't pop up in conversations and I feel weird asking. I do from time to time but not often. White/black relation discourse is usually half sarcastic and there's no real info being exchanged.

[TomKat]

Someone needs to point out that the word racism, as used, is biologically incorrect. By definition, every human is of the same race. And most humans are racist, in that they value human life over other forms.

[Franny]

This vid is a bit controversial, black African type people in the Americas before Aisan type people. People got quite contentious in the comments when I first saw it a few months ago.

What does it mean?

I came upon it while investigating some areas of interest, mainly history that is hard to find. Led to some very interesting related discoveries which I will look for and post eventually. I'll be heading to the mainland for a couple of weeks and may be sort of out of touch. But it's a fascinating area of investigation, to me anyway.

r6IrMjfbh6E

[Franny]

I pulled these from some old photo collections and books published in the 1700 and 1800s.

American Indians. I saw many of these type pictures but did not clip them out :( Early American Indians were a very mixed lot, not just Asian types. Goes against everything we know about American Indians.
40667


Natives of Tierra Del Fuego
40668


Nutka Tribe. I like this because it shows varied types and that the painter did not make them all look alike but showed the differences. The discussion in the book I took it from mentions people that looked like Asians, Africans, Moroccans and Europeans. They were varied but one tribe. Obviously before race became an issue.

40669

40670

Patagonians
40671

There's more, much more about the people of the Americas when the Europeans officially arrived.

[Mark]

Dunno, I suppose it just doesn't pop up in conversations and I feel weird asking. I do from time to time but not often. White/black relation discourse is usually half sarcastic and there's no real info being exchanged.

Sure. It can be difficult in Real Life (iRL), because you actually have to look at the other person and engage directly with their energetic field and realm of information. A lot of yellow, red, brown and black folks also do not really know the history. I am able to speak on these topics because I have studied them in-depth over decades at the graduate level of Academia as well as personally. I have also written extensively and professionally on these topics. So, you can consider me and this space as a "safe space" to ask any questions or make any arguments you have wanted to but have not felt secure enough in your off-line relationships to assay.


Someone needs to point out that the word racism, as used, is biologically incorrect. By definition, every human is of the same race. And most humans are racist, in that they value human life over other forms.

Thank you for pointing that fact out. I would contend your definition of racism, though, as what you are describing is now called speciesism (https://www.britannica.com/topic/speciesism). If you were referring to disliking other persons of a different skin coloration or any other distinguishing characteristic, that is mere prejudice. Racism is something more.

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=40673&d=1559314722

There’s No Scientific Basis for Race—It's a Made-Up Label (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-genetics-science-africa/)

IN THE FIRST half of the 19th century, one of America’s most prominent scientists was a doctor named Samuel Morton. Morton lived in Philadelphia, and he collected skulls.

He wasn’t choosy about his suppliers. He accepted skulls scavenged from battlefields and snatched from catacombs. One of his most famous craniums belonged to an Irishman who’d been sent as a convict to Tasmania (and ultimately hanged for killing and eating other convicts). With each skull Morton performed the same procedure: He stuffed it with pepper seeds—later he switched to lead shot—which he then decanted to ascertain the volume of the braincase.

Morton believed that people could be divided into five races and that these represented separate acts of creation. The races had distinct characters, which corresponded to their place in a divinely determined hierarchy. Morton’s “craniometry” showed, he claimed, that whites, or “Caucasians,” were the most intelligent of the races. East Asians—Morton used the term “Mongolian”—though “ingenious” and “susceptible of cultivation,” were one step down. Next came Southeast Asians, followed by Native Americans. Blacks, or “Ethiopians,” were at the bottom. In the decades before the Civil War, Morton’s ideas were quickly taken up by the defenders of slavery.

“He had a lot of influence, particularly in the South,” says Paul Wolff Mitchell, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania who is showing me the skull collection, now housed at the Penn Museum. We’re standing over the braincase of a particularly large-headed Dutchman who helped inflate Morton’s estimate of Caucasian capacities. When Morton died, in 1851, the Charleston Medical Journal in South Carolina praised him for “giving to the negro his true position as an inferior race.”

Today Morton is known as the father of scientific racism. So many of the horrors of the past few centuries can be traced to the idea that one race is inferior to another that a tour of his collection is a haunting experience. To an uncomfortable degree we still live with Morton’s legacy: Racial distinctions continue to shape our politics, our neighborhoods, and our sense of self.

This is the case even though what science actually has to tell us about race is just the opposite of what Morton contended.

Morton thought he’d identified immutable and inherited differences among people, but at the time he was working—shortly before Charles Darwin put forth his theory of evolution and long before the discovery of DNA—scientists had no idea how traits were passed on. Researchers who have since looked at people at the genetic level now say that the whole category of race is misconceived. Indeed, when scientists set out to assemble the first complete human genome, which was a composite of several individuals, they deliberately gathered samples from people who self-identified as members of different races. In June 2000, when the results were announced at a White House ceremony, Craig Venter, a pioneer of DNA sequencing, observed, “The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.”

Over the past few decades, genetic research has revealed two deep truths about people. The first is that all humans are closely related—more closely related than all chimps, even though there are many more humans around today. Everyone has the same collection of genes, but with the exception of identical twins, everyone has slightly different versions of some of them. Studies of this genetic diversity have allowed scientists to reconstruct a kind of family tree of human populations. That has revealed the second deep truth: In a very real sense, all people alive today are Africans.

Our species, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa—no one is sure of the exact time or place. The most recent fossil find, from Morocco, suggests that anatomically modern human features began appearing as long as 300,000 years ago. For the next 200,000 years or so, we remained in Africa, but already during that period, groups began to move to different parts of the continent and become isolated from one another—in effect founding new populations.

In humans, as in all species, genetic changes are the result of random mutations—tiny tweaks to DNA, the code of life. Mutations occur at a more or less constant rate, so the longer a group persists, handing down its genes generation after generation, the more tweaks these genes will accumulate. Meanwhile, the longer two groups are separated, the more distinctive tweaks they will acquire.

By analyzing the genes of present-day Africans, researchers have concluded that the Khoe-San, who now live in southern Africa, represent one of the oldest branches of the human family tree. The Pygmies of central Africa also have a very long history as a distinct group. What this means is that the deepest splits in the human family aren’t between what are usually thought of as different races—whites, say, or blacks or Asians or Native Americans. They’re between African populations such as the Khoe-San and the Pygmies, who spent tens of thousands of years separated from one another even before humans left Africa.

All non-Africans today, the genetics tells us, are descended from a few thousand humans who left Africa maybe 60,000 years ago. These migrants were most closely related to groups that today live in East Africa, including the Hadza of Tanzania. Because they were just a small subset of Africa’s population, the migrants took with them only a fraction of its genetic diversity.

Somewhere along the way, perhaps in the Middle East, the travelers met and had sex with another human species, the Neanderthals; farther east they encountered yet another, the Denisovans. It’s believed that both species evolved in Eurasia from a hominin that had migrated out of Africa much earlier. Some scientists also believe the exodus 60,000 years ago was actually the second wave of modern humans to leave Africa. If so, judging from our genomes today, the second wave swamped the first.

In what was, relatively speaking, a great rush, the offspring of all these migrants dispersed around the world. By 50,000 years ago they had reached Australia. By 45,000 years ago they’d settled in Siberia, and by 15,000 years ago they’d reached South America. As they moved into different parts of the world, they formed new groups that became geographically isolated from one another and, in the process, acquired their own distinctive set of genetic mutations.

Most of these tweaks were neither helpful nor harmful. But occasionally a mutation arose that turned out to be advantageous in a new setting. Under the pressure of natural selection, it spread quickly through the local population. At high altitudes, for instance, oxygen levels are low, so for people moving into the Ethiopian highlands, Tibet, or the Andean Altiplano, there was a premium on mutations that helped them cope with the rarefied air. Similarly, Inuit people, who adopted a marine-based diet high in fatty acids, have genetic tweaks that helped them adapt to it.

Sometimes it’s clear that natural selection has favored a mutation, but it’s not clear why. Such is the case with a variant of a gene called EDAR (pronounced ee-dar). Most people of East Asian and Native American ancestry possess at least one copy of the variant, known as 370A, and many possess two. But it’s rare among people of African and European descent.

At the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, geneticist Yana Kamberov has equipped mice with the East Asian variant of EDAR in hopes of understanding what it does. “They’re cute, aren’t they?” she says, opening the cage to show me. The mice look ordinary, with sleek brown coats and shiny black eyes. But examined under a microscope, they are different from their equally cute cousins in subtle yet significant ways. Their hair strands are thicker; their sweat glands are more numerous; and the fat pads around their mammary glands are smaller.

Kamberov’s mice help explain why some East Asians and Native Americans have thicker hair and more sweat glands. (EDAR’s effect on human breasts is unclear.) But they don’t provide an evolutionary reason. Perhaps, Kamberov speculates, the ancestors of contemporary East Asians at some point encountered climate conditions that made more sweat glands useful. Or maybe thicker hair helped them ward off parasites. Or it could be that 370A produced other benefits she’s yet to discover and the changes she has identified were, in effect, just tagalongs. Genetics frequently works like this: A tiny tweak can have many disparate effects. Only one may be useful—and it may outlive the conditions that made it so, the way families hand down old photos long past the point when anyone remembers who’s in them.

“Unless you have a time machine, you’re not going to know,” Kamberov sighs.

DNA is often compared to a text, with the letters standing for chemical bases—A for adenine, C for cytosine, G for guanine, and T for thymine. The human genome consists of three billion base pairs—page after page of A’s, C’s, G’s, and T’s—divided into roughly 20,000 genes. The tweak that gives East Asians thicker hair is a single base change in a single gene, from a T to a C.

Similarly, the mutation that’s most responsible for giving Europeans lighter skin is a single tweak in a gene known as SLC24A5, which consists of roughly 20,000 base pairs. In one position, where most sub-Saharan Africans have a G, Europeans have an A. About a decade ago a pathologist and geneticist named Keith Cheng, at Penn State College of Medicine, discovered the mutation by studying zebrafish that had been bred to have lighter stripes. The fish, it turned out, possessed a mutation in a pigment gene analogous to the one that is mutated in Europeans.

Studying DNA extracted from ancient bones, paleogeneticists have found that the G-to-A substitution was introduced into western Europe relatively recently—about 8,000 years ago—by people migrating from the Middle East, who also brought a newfangled technology: farming. That means the people already in Europe—hunter-gatherers who created the spectacular cave paintings at Lascaux, for example—probably were not white but brown. The ancient DNA suggests that many of those dark-skinned Europeans also had blue eyes, a combination rarely seen today.

“What the genetics shows is that mixture and displacement have happened again and again and that our pictures of past ‘racial structures’ are almost always wrong,” says David Reich, a Harvard University paleogeneticist whose new book on the subject is called Who We Are and How We Got Here. There are no fixed traits associated with specific geographic locations, Reich says, because as often as isolation has created differences among populations, migration and mixing have blurred or erased them.

Across the world today, skin color is highly variable. Much of the difference correlates with latitude. Near the Equator lots of sunlight makes dark skin a useful shield against ultraviolet radiation; toward the poles, where the problem is too little sun, paler skin promotes the production of vitamin D. Several genes work together to determine skin tone, and different groups may possess any number of combinations of different tweaks. Among Africans, some people, such as the Mursi of Ethiopia, have skin that’s almost ebony, while others, such as the Khoe-San, have skin the color of copper. Many dark-skinned East Africans, researchers were surprised to learn, possess the light-skinned variant of SLC24A5. (It seems to have been introduced to Africa, just as it was to Europe, from the Middle East.) East Asians, for their part, generally have light skin but possess the dark-skinned version of the gene. Cheng has been using zebrafish to try to figure out why. “It’s not simple,” he says.

When people speak about race, usually they seem to be referring to skin color and, at the same time, to something more than skin color. This is the legacy of people such as Morton, who developed the “science” of race to suit his own prejudices and got the actual science totally wrong. Science today tells us that the visible differences between peoples are accidents of history. They reflect how our ancestors dealt with sun exposure, and not much else.

“We often have this idea that if I know your skin color, I know X, Y, and Z about you,” says Heather Norton, a molecular anthropologist at the University of Cincinnati who studies pigmentation. “So I think it can be very powerful to explain to people that all these changes we see, it’s just because I have an A in my genome and she has a G.”

About an hour away from Morton’s collection, at West Chester University, Anita Foeman directs the DNA Discussion Project. On a bright fall morning, she’s addressing the latest participants in the project—a dozen students of varying hues, each peering at a laptop screen. A few weeks earlier the students had filled out questionnaires about their ancestry. What did they believe their background to be? The students had then submitted saliva samples for genetic testing. Now, via their computers, they are getting back their results. Their faces register their reactions.

One young woman, whose family has lived in India as far back as anyone can recall, is shocked to discover some of her ancestry is Irish. Another young woman, who has grown up believing one of her grandparents was Native American, is disappointed to learn this isn’t so. A third describes herself as “confused.” “I was expecting a lot more Middle Eastern,” she says.

Foeman, a professor of communications, is accustomed to such responses. She started the DNA Discussion Project in 2006 because she was interested in stories, both the kind that families tell and the kind that genes tell. From early on in the project, it was clear these were often not the same. A young man who identified as biracial was angry to discover his background was, in fact, almost entirely European. Several students who had been raised in Christian households were surprised to learn some of their ancestors were Jewish.

“All these stories that have been suppressed pop out in the genes,” Foeman says. Even Foeman, who identifies as African-American, was caught off guard by her results. They showed that some of her ancestors were from Ghana, others from Scandinavia.

“I grew up in the 1960s, when light skin was really a big deal,” she explains. “So I think of myself as being pretty brown skinned. I was surprised that a quarter of my background was European.”

“It really brought home this idea that we make race up,” she says.

Of course, just because race is “made up” doesn’t make it any less powerful. To a disturbing extent, race still determines people’s perceptions, their opportunities, and their experiences. It is enshrined in the U.S. census, which last time it was taken, in 2010, asked Americans to choose their race from a list that reflects the history of the concept; choices included “White,” “Black,” “American Indian,” “Asian Indian,” “Chinese,” “Japanese,” and “Samoan.” Racial distinctions were written into the Jim Crow laws of the post-Reconstruction South and are now written into statutes like the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race or color. To the victims of racism, it’s small consolation to say that the category has no scientific basis.

Genetic sequencing, which has allowed researchers to trace the path of human migration and now allows individuals to trace their own ancestry, has introduced new ways of thinking about human diversity. Or at least so Foeman hopes. The DNA Discussion Project gives participants insight into their own background, which is generally a lot more complicated than they’d been led to believe. And this, in turn, opens up a conversation about the long, tangled, and often brutal history that all of us ultimately share.

“That race is a human construction doesn’t mean that we don’t fall into different groups or there’s no variation,” Foeman says. “But if we made racial categories up, maybe we can make new categories that function better.”

[Mark]

Racism has a toxic effect (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/05/190531100558.htm?fbclid=IwAR191dR5S8W8gGjdx63E6LJyZ1r17J0eyW473D7sxhobpP-a07J859pC_po)

Study may explain how racial discrimination raises the risks of disease among African Americans

Date: May 31, 2019
Source: University of Southern California
Summary: Researchers have long known that racism is linked to health problems, but now results from a small study using RNA tests show that racism appears to increase chronic inflammation among African Americans.

A new study indicates that racism is toxic to humans.

A team of USC and UCLA scientists found that racist experiences appear to increase inflammation in African American individuals, raising their risk of chronic illness, according to the study published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology on April 18.

"We know discrimination is linked to health outcomes, but no one was sure exactly how it harmed health," said April Thames, associate professor of psychology and psychiatry at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. "I looked at it as a chronic stressor. Our results showed that racial discrimination appears to trigger an inflammatory response among African Americans at the cellular level."

The survival of all living things depends on their ability to respond to infections, stresses and injuries. Such threats trigger an immune system response to fend off pathogens and repair damaged tissues. A select group of genes are key to this defense mechanism, and inflammation is a sign that those genes are working to counter the threat or repair the damage.

Inflammation serves to protect an organism from a health threat. But if someone feels under threat for long periods of time, their health may suffer significantly with chronic inflammation.

"If those genes remain active for an extended period of time, that can promote heart attacks, neurodegenerative diseases, and metastatic cancer," says co-author Steve Cole of the University of California, Los Angeles.

In previous studies, Cole had found that inflammatory responses are heightened among people in socially-marginalized, isolated groups. "We've seen this before in chronic loneliness, poverty, PTSD, and other types of adversity," he says. "But until now, nobody had looked at the effects of discrimination."

Inflammation's link to racism

For the study, Thames and her co-authors focused on a group of 71 subjects: two-thirds of them were African Americans; the others were white.

In addition, 38 of the participants were positive for HIV. Their participation gave scientists a chance to study the effects of racism independently from the effects of the disease.

The scientists extracted RNA from the participants' cells and measured molecules that trigger inflammation, as well as those involved in antiviral responses. The research team found higher levels of the inflammatory molecules in African American participants.

The results also indicate that racism may account for as much as 50 percent of the heightened inflammation among African Americans, including those who were positive for HIV.

Ruling out other stressors

The scientists made sure that all the participants had similar socioeconomic background to account for financial stressors, which eliminated poverty as a potential factor for chronic inflammation among the people in the study.

"Racial discrimination is a different type of chronic stressor than poverty," Thames says. "People navigate poverty on a day-to-day basis and are aware that it is happening. They might even be able to address financial stressors through job changes, changes in earnings and financial management. But with discrimination, you don't always realize that it's happening."

Individuals' decisions or lifestyles can reduce the ill effects of some stressors, but racial discrimination is a chronic stressor that people have no control over. "You can't change your skin color," she says.

Thames notes that this latest study has an obvious limitation: The sample size was small. But she says the results signal that scientists should repeat the study with a larger sample to fully determine the inflammatory effects of racism on people of color.

Co-authors of the study included Cole, Michael Irwin and Elizabeth Breen from UCLA.

The study was supported by an estimated $1 million in grants from multiple sources, including the National Institute of Health's National Center for Advancing Translational Science, UCLA, the USC/UCLA Center on Biodemography and Population Health and the Claude D. Pepper Older Adults Independent Centers at the National Institute on Aging.

Story Source:

Materials (https://dornsife.usc.edu/news/stories/3021/racism-linked-to-chronic-inflammation-disease-risk/) provided by University of Southern California (http://www.usc.edu/). Original written by Emily Gersema. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

April D. Thames, Michael R. Irwin, Elizabeth C. Breen, Steve W. Cole. Experienced discrimination and racial differences in leukocyte gene expression. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2019; 106: 277 DOI: 10.1016/j.psyneuen.2019.04.016 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2019.04.016)

[Mark]

I pulled these from some old photo collections and books published in the 1700 and 1800s.

Amazing images. Yes, this is contentious and goes against the official narrative. It is well known in Western Africa that there were Kings who sent fleets out into the Atlantic (http://en.lisapoyakama.org/mansa-abubakari-ii-the-emperor-of-mali-who-travelled-to-america/), never to be seen again, but those fleets were headed for western lands and it was assumed they arrived there safely.

The problem is and has been that the scholarship of the Africans has never been considered to be valid, nor the histories that they shared which, often, had a strong oral tradition component. If you look at the page I linked above, for instance, it will be easy for European scholars who read it to dismiss the entire thing as Afrocentrism (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Afrocentrism), as if by doing so that totally invalidates the article.

Thanks for sharing!

[Mark]

Transgenerational Consequences of Racial Discrimination for African American Health (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4026365/)

Abstract

Disparities in African American health remain pervasive and persist transgenerationally. There is a growing consensus that both structural and interpersonal racial discrimination are key mechanisms affecting African American health. The Biopsychosocial Model of Racism as a Stressor posits that the persistent stress of experiencing discrimination take a physical toll on the health of African Americans and is ultimately manifested in the onset of illness. However, the degree to which the health consequences of racism and discrimination can be passed down from one generation to the next is an important avenue of exploration. In this review, we discuss and link literature across disciplines demonstrating the harmful impact of racism on African American physical health and the health of their offspring.

Racial differences in health outcomes in the United States are widespread and stark. Though there have been important technological advances contributing to the increase in population life expectancy in the past fifty years (Gortmaker and Wise 1997), the gap in health outcomes between whites and certain minority groups remains substantial. According to the Center for the Disease Control’s most recent report, rates of morbidity and mortality over the life course remain higher for African Americans than for most other race/ethnic groups (CDC/NCHS 2011). Moreover, African Americans have the highest rates of low birth weight births and substantially higher rates of infant mortality than other racial groups (Williams 2002). African American children also experience higher rates of chronic health conditions such as asthma and obesity across socioeconomic status (CDC/NCHS 2011), and during adulthood, African Americans exhibit the highest rates of hypertension and cancer mortality (Williams 2002). Though life expectancy has risen for all populations in the U.S., both African American men and women still exhibit the lowest life expectancy across race ethnic groups with men’s average life expectancy at 70 years old and women’s at 77 compared to 76 for White men and 81 for White women (CDC/NCHS 2011).

Sociologists systematically demonstrate the pervasive, harmful nature of social inequality for minority disparities across a range of outcomes including health, education, income, and family processes (Reskin 2012). There is an increasing awareness that racial discrimination is a salient mechanism perpetuating racial gaps in health with African Americans showing some of the most substantial differences in prevalence and severity of certain health conditions across the life course (Williams 2012). The Biopsychosocial Model of Racism as a Stressor (BMRS) elucidates the psychosocial and biological pathways through which racism functions as a mechanism for perpetuating declines in health, particularly among African Americans (Clark et al. 1999). Though there have been important strides in uncovering the life course pathways through which racial inequality perpetuates health outcomes across the life course of racial minorities, the sociological literature has yet to effectively examine the degree to which the health consequences of racial discrimination are transmitted transgenerationally.

The health consequences of racism and discrimination can be persistent and passed from one generation to the next through the body’s ‘biological memory’ of harmful experiences (Thayer and Kuzawa 2011). Specifically, the psychosocial and biological pathways through which racism affects racial minority health can also have consequences for their offspring, potentially perpetuating the existing disparities in the next generation, in part, by the embodiment of inequality transmitted through epigenetic influences (Kuzawa and Sweet 2009). In other words, stressful conditions and poor health experienced by mothers can lead to alterations in her offspring’s gene expression without changing his or her genotype. These changes in gene expression can have important implications for the healthy functioning of bodily systems in mothers and their offspring.

The goal of this paper is to elaborate on the contribution of the complex, interactive dynamics of racism and racial discrimination for driving persistent racial disparities in health across generations. In this review we draw upon an interdisciplinary literature to inform our sociological understanding of the persistence of health disparities across generations. We use African American women’s health as a descriptive example illustrating the importance of eradicating racial inequality as a key solution to improving health outcomes of marginalized groups. Specifically, we argue that discrimination is a socially generated but physiologically disruptive force that influences health across generations.


The Biopsychosocial Consequences of Racial Discrimination as a Stressor

Racism refers to the beliefs, attitudes, institutional arrangements, and interpersonal acts that malign a person or group people based on their racial or ethnic affiliation (Clark et al. 1999). Racist ideology and beliefs have been historically used as justification for discrimination both at the individual and institutional levels in the Unites States and remain ubiquitous (Reskin 2012; Williams 2012). The consequences of this racially discriminatory structure have given rise to system wide inequities and disparate racial differences in health outcomes. Structurally, discrimination was instrumental in creating the most harmful conditions for minority health- economic marginalization and segregation, which have been examined at length in the sociological literature (Williams and Sternthal 2010). While structural inequality is instrumental in creating unequal access to goods and resources including quality education and health care, safe communities, and economic mobility (Geronimus and Thompson 2004), racial discrimination also takes a toll on the physiological and psychological health of minority group members who may internalize racial discrimination (Clark et al. 1999).

The Biopsychosocial Model of Racism as a Stressor (BMRS) posits that the stress of racial discrimination is instrumental in African American health disparities due to the physiological responses to chronic and acute stress brought on by racist experiences (Clark et al. 1999). Specifically, the exposure to environments perceived as racist can result in an overactive physiological stress response. In other words, normal bodily systems responsible for adjusting to stressful conditions remain perpetually activated in the presence of chronic stress, leaving individuals vulnerable to illness due to elevated wear and tear on the body (McKewen 1998; McKewen and Seeman 1999)- conditions which we will elaborate in more detail in the following section. We expand the original BMRS model to suggest that not only is the perception of racial discrimination important for African American health, but also just as important, is the disproportionate exposure to social stressors brought on by being part of a racial group that is systematically discriminated against and marginalized (Geronimus 2001).

Recent findings indicate that African Americans are disproportionately exposed to social stressors of higher frequency and severity (Sternthal et al. 2011). The high prevalence of African Americans living in racially segregated conditions is a key structural mechanism through which they are exposed to elevated numbers of stressors (Williams and Sternthal 2010). African Americans, even in the middle class, are more likely to live in conditions where they are exposed to, or in close proximity, to concentrated disadvantage, high unemployment rates, pollution, violent crime, and poor housing conditions (Reskin 2012; Geronimus and Thompson 2004; Sternthal et al. 2011). Subjection to such stressful, noxious conditions can play a harmful role in overall well-being and illness onset and progression.

Although disproportionately represented in poverty, African Americans across socioeconomic strata exhibit poorer health on average relative to Caucasians. Middle class African Americans are more likely to be exposed to discrimination at the individual or interpersonal levels, with more frequency because they are more likely to work in predominantly white environments, elevating the risk of discriminatory experiences and racist microaggressions (Colen 2011). Furthermore, socioeconomic status does not share equivalent meanings across race/ethnic groups with middle class African Americans having less overall wealth than their Caucasian counterparts thereby living in more economically tenuous conditions (Williams and Sternthal 2010). Consequently, middle class African Americans are more vulnerable to descending into poverty during economic downturns and are at an elevated risk for experiencing perpetual stress (Sternthal et al. 2011).


The Physiologic Consequences of Stress

The Biopsychosocial Model (BMRS) asserts that African Americans who perceive certain circumstances as racist experience physiological stress responses that can be exacerbated by sociodemographic (e.g.- socioeconomic status) and psychological characteristics (e.g.- depression) along with behavioral factors (e.g.- smoking, alcohol use), and coping responses (e.g.- ability to mobilize social support) to such experiences (Clark et al. 1999). Consequently, perpetual stress responses to acute and chronically stressful conditions elevate one’s vulnerability to disease. Both human and animal model studies of health and disease progression demonstrate that individuals lower in the social hierarchy have poorer health and higher disease risk than those who occupy higher social strata (Sapolsky 2006; McKewen and Seeman 1999). Although among humans, health risk behaviors such as smoking, drinking, and unhealthy eating habits are more likely to happen among socially marginalized groups, these behaviors do not completely account for health differences across social strata (Williams 2008). The psychosocial stress and burden of coping with limited access to resources and the harmful challenges associated with social marginalization can place substantial wear and tear on bodily systems important for managing stress and coping (allostatic load), thus leaving individuals vulnerable to disease (McEwen and Seeman 1999).

The human body’s physiologic response to stressful conditions can elevate vulnerability to disease through metabolic, cardiovascular, and immune function (McEwen and Gianaros 2010). Moreover, the body’s stress response is also tied to accelerated aging and cellular degradation (Epel et al. 2004). The body is made up complimentary systems that work synergistically to maintain normal functioning or homeostasis. In order to enable stability, the body works to create allostasis by adjusting bodily systems according to changes in the environment. In the event of abnormal functioning in the body, for instance when the body experiences chronic stressors, wear and tear may occur as a consequence of the of the body attempting to turn on or shut down certain systems to maintain allostasis - this condition is called allostatic load (McEwen and Seeman 1999).


Cardiovascular and Metabolic Function

The cardiovascular and metabolic systems are linked to diseases including atherosclerosis, insulin resistance, and cardiovascular disease. In the presence of negative stressors, the body’s cardiovascular system can respond by increasing blood circulation through elevated heart rate, a protective measure in the presence of acute stress, but if left unchecked can lead to the thickening and rigidity of the arterial walls (Sapolsky 2006). This process happens in concert with the mobilization of metabolic hormones such as cortisol, which are controlled by the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrencortal (HPA) axis (McEwen 2000). Cortisol is a glucocorticoid hormone that is, in large part, responsible for managing energy storage and expenditures, immune function, mood, and the processing of fat, protein, and carbohydrates in the body. Cortisol also regulates the release of glucose (i.e.- blood sugar) into the blood stream in order to provide energy during times of stress (Sapolsky 2006).

Chronically high levels of glucose in the blood stream can escalate arterial thickening due to inflammation and scarring from the viscous blood containing high levels of glucose and cholesterol that damage the arterial walls. The consequences are twofold - first, the combinations of elevated blood pressure with high levels of glucose and cholesterol particles circulating in the blood exacerbates the risk of cardiovascular conditions including hypertension and atherosclerosis (Brindly and Rolland 1989). Second, high levels of unregulated glucose circulation elevate the risk of other conditions associated with cardiovascular disease including insulin resistance, abdominal obesity, and Type 2 diabetes, which when present together are defined as metabolic syndrome (Seeman et al. 2010; Black 2003).


Immune function

Adrenal steroids including the hormone cortisol also help regulate immune function by controlling movement of immune cells to organs or tissues that require protection from infections or other noxious conditions (McEwen and Seeman 1999). In the same way that stress responses can lead to dysregulation among the metabolic and cardiovascular systems, unchecked immune dysregulation can elevate disease risk through immune suppression or immune overactivity by way of a complex feedback loop. Specifically, in response to stress, the body prepares for infection by increasing immune function for wound healing by mobilizing energy (i.e.- releasing glucose into the blood stream) and increasing levels of hormone secretion related to immune function including cortisol (Sapolsky 2006). When there is chronic overactivity of these processes, perpetually high levels of cortisol secretion actually suppresses the immune system thus leading to elevated risk of infections (McEwen 1998). In certain cases, however, exposure to stress can lead to overactivity of immune function where the immune system begins to attack the body in the absence of infections causing inflammation and autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and lupus (Segerstrom et al. 2004).


Accelerated Aging or Cell Degradation

Recently, emerging evidence points to the consequences of both perceived stress and the presence of chronic stressors for the rate at which cells age and degrade (Epel et al. 2004). Telemores are stabilizing caps at the ends of chromosomes that shorten through cell division until a cell destabilizes or begins to deteriorate with age (senescence) (Allsopp 1992; see Geronimus et al. 2010). Oxidative stress is a key biological process through which people experience accelerated aging or cell senescence. There is evidence that the presence of social stressors and psychological distress are linked to elevated levels of oxidative stress, consequently leading to shortened telomeres (Eppel et al. 2004). Furthermore, overactivity of the HPA axis, discussed in prior sections, has been linked to oxidative stress as a consequence of excessive secretion of glucocorticoids such as cortisol (McIntosh et al. 1998). Shortened telomeres are particularly important for health outcomes because as telomere lengths shorten, risk of mortality increases. Moreover, there is clinical evidence that heart attack patients have similar telomere lengths to healthy individuals who are approximately 11 years older. Strikingly, in a study assessing telomere lengths in premenopausal women who experience chronic stress, the researchers found that women who experienced chronic stressors had telomere lengths that resembled those of people who had experienced heart attacks in early middle age (Epel et al. 2004).


Racial Discrimination and African American Health

The health consequences of racial discrimination are produced through structural (e.g. - chronic poverty, poor infrastructure in non-white communities), institutional (e.g. - educational institutions and employment discrimination), and individual processes (e.g. - interpersonal discriminatory acts; Harrell et al. 2011; Clark et al. 1999). Stress related chronic illness is a leading reason for the high rates of morbidity and mortality among African Americans, particularly in urban areas (Geronimus and Thompson 2004). African American women are especially vulnerable to the harsh conditions brought about by the combination of racial inequality and poor socioeconomic conditions as evidenced by markedly higher rates of chronic illness and earlier onset of functional impairment across socioeconomic strata (Gorman and Read 2006). In this section, we discuss the processes through which racial discrimination contributes to stress-related illness and accelerated aging among African Americans in general and African American women specifically.


Structural Discrimination and Health

For African Americans living in a race conscious society, persistently experiencing stigmatization and disadvantage leaves them susceptible to physiological deterioration, subsequent illness and early mortality (Geronimus et al. 2006). African Americans have disproportionately higher numbers of co-occuring stressors such as job discrimination, relationship stress, and financial hardship, that when experienced, are of greater intensity in their lives relative to Caucasians even after accounting for socioeconomic status (Sternthal et al. 2011). A key suggested structural mechanism for such differences in stress exposure and African American health is racial segregation and the risks associated with it. African Americans, particularly African American women, are more likely to live in racially segregated conditions with high rates of poverty regardless of their socioeconomic status (Williams 2012). Those living in such segregated conditions are more likely to be exposed to stressors such as concentrated poverty, exposure to violent crime, limited access to institutional resources, poorer schools, and fewer safe outdoor spaces (Williams 2008). Consequently these conditions are associated with elevated levels of stress and hardship.

African American Women’s Health Profiles
African American women’s health profiles show marked differences in the prevalence, onset, and severity of certain health conditions. Though African American men have lower life expectancy relative to African American women, women suffer from higher rates of chronic illness and experience functional impairment with earlier onset (Gorman and Read 2006). Furthermore, comorbid chronic illnesses are more prevalent in African American women relative to white women (Williams 2002). African American women also show different health profiles in cancer risk; African American women have a lower incidence of breast cancer than white women, but are more likely to experience a more aggressive form that is associated with substantially higher rates of cancer mortality relative to Caucasian women (Williams 2002).

African Americans, in general, have higher rates of cardiovascular and diabetes related mortality relative to their Caucasian counterparts (Mensah et al. 2005) and are more likely to experience blindness, amputations, and end stage kidney failure from diabetes (Williams 2002). There are gender differences in morbidity and mortality, however, with women being more likely to live with heart disease and other chronic conditions such as arthritis over time, while men are more likely to experience cardiovascular disease related mortality (Crimmins et al. 2002). Among African Americans, there is variation in health conditions by socioeconomic strata as well. Low-income African American women are more likely to exhibit symptoms of accelerated aging manifested in higher allostatic load (Geronimus et al. 2006) compared to their Caucasian counterparts. In higher socioeconomic strata, however, African American women show stark health differences relative to Caucasian women, with evidence that in addition to structural racial inequality, perceptions of racism and discrimination also take a toll on their health.


Discrimination and African American Women’s Health

There are important social pathways that contribute to African American female health outcomes. African American women even at higher levels of SES are more likely to live in highly racially segregated areas (Williams 2002). Low-income African American women experience alarming rates of early onset chronic illness and related mortality such as cardiovascular disease (Geronimus 2001), however, there are also marked black-white health differences among African American women occupying the upper socioeconomic echelons. Such differences are suggested to be related not only to their high risk of living in residentially segregated environments, but also due their likelihood of exposure to both structural and interpersonal discrimination. Middle class African American women, specifically, are more likely to be exposed to discrimination in the form of structural (i.e. encountering the ‘glass’ ceiling effect in employment mobility) and interpersonal discrimination due to their presence in predominantly white environments (Colen 2011; Thomas et al. 2008). The perpetual stress of being in a predominantly white work place may contribute to feelings of social isolation due to their ‘token’ status as an African American female (Jackson 1995; Colen 2011).

Across socioeconomic status obesity rates among African American women are higher than that of Caucasian women, which may in part be due to structural differences in their proximity to racially segregated communities which limit opportunities for physical activity (Geronimus 2001). However, the stress of experiencing racial discrimination is also linked to cardiovascular and metabolic conditions along with immune function in African American women. Specifically, African Americans who reported higher levels of racism in their lives report poorer self-rated health, higher rates of diseases including immunological, infectious, or endocrine conditions and more frequent common colds (Kwate et al. 2003). The stress of experiencing high levels of both lifetime and everyday discrimination is positively associated with weight gain and abdominal obesity in African American women (Cozier et al. 2009). Experiencing racial discrimination is also associated with coronary artery calcification (Lewis et al. 2006), glucose intolerance, and diabetes (Tull and Chambers 2001; Tull et al. ł999), suggesting long-term impacts on health.

Although not directly linked to the stressor of discrimination specifically, but to stress more generally, African American women are more vulnerable to experiencing accelerated aging. Specifically, Geronimus and colleagues found that middle age African American women had markedly higher rates of aging, with telomere lengths by age 49–55 that signified being approximately 7.5 years biologically older than white women. The authors note that these findings persisted even after accounting for perceived stress, poverty, and waist to hip ratio (WHR). They posited that increased waist to hip ratio (an indicator of abdominal fat) may be a key pathway through which race and also poverty impact telomere length and overall health (Geronimus et al 2010). Such conditions are also linked African American women’s birth outcomes.


Biological Memory of Racism and the Role of Epigenetics

Racial discrimination is linked to birth outcomes among African American women even after accounting for psychological well-being, educational attainment, and risk behaviors such as alcohol use and smoking. African American women who are exposed to and internalize racial discrimination over their lifetime and during pregnancy are more likely to have preterm and/or low birth weight births (Mustillo et al. 2004; Collins et al. 2004; Collins et al. 2000; Rosenberg et al. 2002). Kuzawa and Sweet (2009) argue that the process through which African Americans experience elevated risks of lower birth weight and subsequent chronic health conditions such as cardiovascular disease in adulthood are the result of a complex biosocial process where fetal exposure to maternal stress is manifested through biological modifications during fetal development (Kuzawa and Sweet 2009; Thayer and Kuzawa 2011).

As mentioned in the previous section, chronic and acute stressors can initiate and perpetuate heightened activity in various bodily systems that impact metabolic and immune function. These processes, however, are not only harmful for mothers experiencing such conditions, but for their offspring as well. Figure 1 illustrates the pathways through which maternal stress experiences can influence health across generations through the interactions of biological and social contexts. In their discussion of the epigenetic consequences of racial inequalities for African American cardiovascular disease risk, Kuzawa and Sweet (2009) outline the pathways through which the health consequences of racial inequality can persist across generations. The authors argue that the human body has a ‘biological memory’ of early life exposure to harmful conditions that can impact gene expression without changing the underlying nucleotide sequences-, which in the case of African Americans includes the deleterious impact of discrimination.

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/attachment.php?attachmentid=40709&d=1559745363

Much dialogue regarding genetic predispositions and phenotypic characteristics imply that genes are static; however, the epigenetic research indicates that social and physical environments can influence specific gene expression (i.e. epigenesis). For example, fetal undernourishment and other environmental conditions associated with low birth weight can lead to epigenetic alterations of genes in offspring, elevating their risk of hypertension, insulin resistance, and changing the composition of body fat cells contained in adipose tissue (i.e. body fat; Lampl et al. 2002; Jensen 2007; Zhang 2005). These epigenetic changes, however, do not alter the underlying DNA sequence, but instead ‘turn on’ or ‘off’ certain sets of genes associated with specific physiologic functions.

There is evidence that chronically stressful social conditions that impact African American women’s health in adulthood can be transferred as health risk to her children due to the fetal environment in which their offspring develop (i.e. prenatal stress), thus altering their metabolic and physiological development, demonstrated through the first and second arrows in Figure 1. Specifically, women who experience severe stress during pregnancy are at elevated risk for passing the stress hormone cortisol (third arrow) through their placenta which can restrict fetal growth and increase risk for preterm and low birth weight births (Phillips et al. 1998). Consequently, such exposure alters fetal HPA axis development and subsequent offspring biological stress reactivity.

In addition, women experiencing hypertension, insulin resistance, and diabetes during pregnancy are also at risk for low birth weight offspring (see Kuzawa and Sweet 2009). Because African American mothers are more likely themselves be low birth weight, her own prenatal experience may influence the in utero environment of her offspring through the above health conditions. In addition to low birth weight risk, insulin resistance and diabetes in pregnant mothers elevate the likelihood of similar weight gain patterns and metabolic dysregulation in their offspring into adulthood through the transmission of high levels of glucose (e.g. blood sugar) via the placenta to the fetus (Dabelea et al. 2000; Lampl and Jeanty 2004; Silverman et al. 1995). Likewise, it is also important to note that in addition to fetal exposure to maternal stress and health conditions, transgenerational transmission of health is also passed through the ‘the continuity of [sic] environment’ (Kuzawa and Sweet 2009, p9). In other words, offspring are born into the stressful environments in which their mothers lived and are also likely to experience similar risk factors including racial discrimination, that their mothers did, thus perpetuating a cycle of health risks across generations.

Racial inequalities in birth outcomes remain a persistent deleterious condition that disproportionately impacts African American’s long-term health prospects. A key social force driving such marked differences is African Americans’ disproportionate experiences with poverty and economic hardship, demonstrated by the similarity in birth outcomes between low-income African American and Caucasian mothers. Specifically, among this particular population, both groups of women have similar rates of low birth weight births, however, once health risk behaviors such as smoking and drinking are accounted for, the birth weight disparity between black and white women widens (Reichman et al. 2008) suggesting that additional factors beyond poverty and risk behavior may contribute to disparities in birth outcomes. Furthermore, more marked black-white differences in birth outcomes emerge more starkly among middle class women.

Economic mobility among African American women who were poor in childhood does not provide the same protections from low-birth weight risk that it does for white women. Specifically, for white women who spent their childhoods in poverty, their risk of having a low birth weight child was reduced by 48% for every unit increase in family income while for African American women who experience income increases, there was not a statistically significant effect (Colen et al. 2006). Moreover, African American females with a college degree have higher infant mortality rates than Hispanic and white women with a high school degree (Williams 2012). These findings compliment prior literature showing that middle class, college educated African American women are at a substantially higher risk of having low birth weight children compared to their comparable Caucasian counterparts (Foster et al. 2000; McGrady et al. 1992; Schoendorf et al. 1992).

Birth weight is a particularly salient outcome to consider for later African American health over the life course because birth weight is associated with a wide array of outcomes correlated with overall life chances. Being born low birth weight is associated with a variety of health conditions such as obesity, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease (Phillips et al. 1998). Moreover, low birth weight status elevates the risk of poor cognitive development, lower academic achievement (Goosby and Cheadle 2009), and reduced chances of high school completion (Cheadle and Goosby 2010).


The ‘Long Arm’ of Discrimination

Assumptions of inherent immutable biological (i.e. genetic) differences between racial ethnic groups can lead health care providers specifically and the medical establishment in general to ignore the clear structural and social processes that perpetuate racial and ethnic differences in health outcomes. Several months ago, the popular press reported on a study released that suggested African American girls who engaged in comparable levels of exercise relative to their Caucasian counter parts did not exhibit the same levels of weight loss. The headline of the article was ‘Exercise Not As Beneficial For Black Girls As Whites, Study Says’ (Huffington Post 6/5/12) and the authors of the article suggested that different strategies are needed such as reducing energy (i.e. caloric) intake for African American girls (White and Jago 2012) to address this disparity.

The popular press article went on to discuss the markedly high rates of obesity among African Americans and then cited an editorial in the New York Times where writer Alice Randall argued that African American women ‘want to be fat’ in response to the article and the study it was based on (New York Times 5/5/2012). This study and the perception that African American women want to be fat is a gross oversimplification of the complex challenges that lead to persistent issues with obesity and related health conditions. An important omission left from this dialogue was the uniqueness of environmental factors facing African American children generally and girls specifically that may predispose them to risk for obesity and chronic illness.

As discussed in previous section, African American health trajectories are shaped in part by maternal life conditions including the experiences of racism and discrimination that can shape later outcomes of their offspring through potential changes in the child’s metabolic functioning subsequently elevating the risk of experiencing obesity and other chronic illnesses. So, in fact, the metabolic differences exhibited in the medical literature suggesting that African Americans have phenotypes predisposed to obesity and other risk factors for cardiovascular disease (White and Jago 2012; Lee Arslanian 2008) makes a remarkable omission by not accounting for or even mentioning the harmful nature of structural inequality and discrimination for the differences among youth obesity rates. Indeed, there is evidence that among adolescents of African descent experiencing racism is associated with body fat distribution and insulin resistance (Chambers et al. 2004), two conditions strongly associated with the body’s physiological response to chronic stress (Sapolsky 2006). Taken together with early risk consequences minority youth may experience as early as in utero, the ‘long arm’ of discrimination becomes increasingly more evident.

While there is growing acceptance that racial inequality does play a role in differential minority health outcomes, the example above demonstrates that the assumption of inherent genetic differences between racial groups still exists. These arguments do not account for deep systemic inequalities established based on racist ideology and the fact that much of the socioeconomic disadvantages and stressful conditions brought about by social marginalization can have lasting impacts on the overall health of people in marginalized groups. It has been established and accepted in the field of sociology, that racial categories in the U.S. are socially constructed and have been used as a tool to maintain power and oppress disenfranchised groups. Interestingly, however, there is more genetic variation within racial groups than across groups (Krieger 2005) indicating flawed assumptions in how racial differences in health occur.

Racial discrimination is persistent, systemic, and pervasive- emerging in multiple social contexts over life course for African American youth. For those already susceptible to stress related conditions, additional noxious experiences related to racial inequality can exacerbate health risks. There is an expanding literature demonstrating that interpersonal interactions as well as larger structural environments such as neighborhoods and schools can also play a salient role for shaping African American life course health. There is evidence regarding the youth physiological stress responses to racism and discrimination, where particularly African American girls who experience racism have higher waist circumference (Chambers et al. 2004). Moreover economic and neighborhood disadvantage are linked to gender differences in physiological stress responses among African American youth (Hackman et al. 2012) both conditions in which African American youth are disproportionately represented.

Interestingly, there is also evidence that school context is a key factor during childhood and adolescence that can exacerbate existing health risks among African American youth by perpetuating exposure to racism and discrimination as well as social alienation (Goosby and Walsemann 2012; Juvonen et al. 2006). Specifically, African American adolescents attending predominantly white schools report more depressive symptoms and somatic complaints (stomach aches, nausea, headaches, etc.) and poorer self-rated health in early adulthood relative to youth in more integrated schools (Walsemann et al. 2011a,b; Goosby and Walsemann 2011). Such studies illustrate the emerging cycle of racial discrimination across generations and can exacerbate already existing health risk brought about by their parents’ experiences with discrimination.


Conclusion

While protective social conditions such as family support and higher income may offset some of these risks for African Americans, the added stress of being part of a marginalized group and experiencing discrimination may curtail potential gains made by economic mobility, thus leading to continued health risks associated poor birth outcomes in the next generation. Increasingly, policy makers are escalating strategies to address health disparities through eliminating differential treatment among health care providers, increasing access to care, and altering health risk behaviors. While these are important systemic changes, more attention is required to target the underlying social mechanism of racial discrimination at the structural and interpersonal levels that contribute to these disparities. The physiological consequences created by racial and economic inequality are not inalterable, however. But without addressing the harmful consequences of racial discrimination, improving the health of African Americans as well as other marginalized groups, will remain inadequately addressed.


Biographies

Dr. Bridget Goosby is interested in the consequences of social inequality generally and racial discrimination specifically for African American health over the life course. She is currently funded by a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Mentored Research Award (NICHD K01), where she is studying and identifying the biological stress processes that interact with social contexts to create health disparities that persist across generations. Her work has recently appeared in Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Society and Mental Health, Health and Place, Social Science Research, and Journal of African American Studies. Before becoming an assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, she was a National Institute of Mental Health Racial, Ethnic, and Cultural Disparities in Mental Health Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan Institute of Social Research Program for Research on Black Americans. She received her PhD in Sociology and Demography from the Pennsylvania State University and her BA in Sociology from Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas.


Chelsea Heidbrink is currently working towards a Masters of Education in Educational Administration and a post-baccalaureate degree in pre-medicine at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she also received her B.A. in History. Her current research examines how social stress in underrepresented populations triggers epigenetic modifications that lead to elevated risks for chronic disease. She also works as a Nebraska Legends Coordinator in the University of Nebraska Undergraduate Admissions office.

References (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4026365/) at end of article.

[Ernie Nemeth]

The problem is that everyone is stressed in this unnatural lifestyle we lead. Not only African Americans. Lots of words all trying to hijack a very serious condition that affects us all.

However, the stress of constantly demeaning and disrespectful attitudes does add an addition stressor - that makes sense.

[Mark]

The problem is that everyone is stressed in this unnatural lifestyle we lead. Not only African Americans. Lots of words all trying to hijack a very serious condition that affects us all.

That is certainly true. What has not been studied overtly over the past 100 years is the opposite side of the equation. What and how, exactly, have populations that have been on the other side of racism, who have had to deny the humanity of an entire family of planetary co-inhabitants, merely because society demanded it? How has the creation of "whiteness" as a political and social entity in the United States in the mid-1600s caused those who had to take on sociopathic tendencies just in order to survive their neighbors' and leaders' psychopathy affected the past participants, from that time until the present? What is the epigenetic effect upon those who call themselves white, of generations of oppression?

Of having to engage, at a certain point, unconsciously, in the perpetuation of an inherently racist system of governance and economics?

Black folks have been studied for a long time by science. Some would say that black Americans in particular have been subject to a genetic experiment and manipulation since the 1600s. By those who call themselves white and, most likely, Others as well. But how this social hierarchical system, the Orion Monetary System plus the Terran racial hierarchy, has affected succedent generations has not been directly studied.


However, the stress of constantly demeaning and disrespectful attitudes does add an addition stressor - that makes sense.

I'm glad it makes sense to you.

[A Voice from the Mountains]

There’s No Scientific Basis for Race—It's a Made-Up Label (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-genetics-science-africa/)

Then how do DNA tests determine ancestry?

These are the same people who claim that there is also no biological basis for gender, and that gender is also a social construct, and even that physical sex organs are also social constructs. If this sounds like a different level of insanity than the headline above, it's really not, and I can post the same sorts of academic sources making the same claims.

If race is purely a social construct, then what social conditions are required for two white people to have a black baby, or two black people to have a white baby? Are there instructions from sociologists as to how to pull that off yet?

[Mark]

Then how do DNA tests determine ancestry?

It's not race. There is only one human race. We are all ethnicities within that race. It is that simple.

[ThePythonicCow]

Then how do DNA tests determine ancestry?

It's not race. There is only one human race. We are all ethnicities within that race. It is that simple.

One can not successfully rebut someone else's statement by insisting on using a definition for a key word that is not one of the (quite reasonable alternative) possible definitions of that word that the other person was using.

[A Voice from the Mountains]

Then how do DNA tests determine ancestry?

It's not race. There is only one human race. We are all ethnicities within that race. It is that simple.

So really you are just redefining what the word "race" means to avoid the whole genetic science thing.

I will wait until I see two Chinese parents legitimately have a black baby before I believe that race is purely a social phenomenon.

[DNA]

Then how do DNA tests determine ancestry?

It's not race. There is only one human race. We are all ethnicities within that race. It is that simple.


I can't read anything you write without thinking of your facebook posts in 2015. You have a huge following on facebook and you were playing up to the liberal anti-white demographic by posting daily isolated incidents of stupid white people doing something racist and wrong to a black person. You and most of your followers would respond to how horrible racist white people are and I responded to one of those posts stating I could just as easily find videos of black people doing horrible things to white people and I asked what good would that serve, to which your response to me was unfriending me and telling me I was a racist.



Your posts on this page have hinted that you understand that there is a liberal agenda related to globalism, but that since folks of color benefit from this liberalism you stop short of condemning it.

I have to tell you bro, this is the same logic used by the American Indians when the United States calvary divided and conquered the Native populations by arming smaller tribes and telling them to go and kill off a larger tribe that had culturally been their enemy.

The smaller newly armed tribe would not look at the big picture and understand that they were going to be wiped out as well once their usefulness was over.

Globalism and it's engineers are the enemies, not the folks they are attempting to pit against one another.

[A Voice from the Mountains]

I can't read anything you write without thinking of your facebook posts in 2015. You have a huge following on facebook and you were playing up to the liberal anti-white demographic by posting daily isolated incidents of stupid white people doing something racist and wrong to a black person.

Oh Lord. Do you know how easy it would be to play the opposite narrative using cherry-picked news items?.

Rahkyt, after the internationalists gut masculine white men from American society, I hope you realize that black masculine men are #2 on their chopping block. They already target black men with emasculating feminist/"toxic masculinity" nonsense just like they do white men in corporate advertizing, because strong, masculine black American men are the #2 threat to authoritarianism in the US right behind the millions of armed white men.

[Mark]

One can not successfully rebut someone else's statement by insisting on using a definition for a key word that is not one of the (quite reasonable alternative) possible definitions of that word that the other person was using.

I'm not attempting to rebut or to argue. It is a truth, that there is only one human race. Science supports that understanding.

¤=[Post Update]=¤



So really you are just redefining what the word "race" means to avoid the whole genetic science thing.I'm not doing anything. I am sharing the most recent genetic understanding of how the human family is divided into ethnicities. The concept of race as you are using is as a social construct. Which has its reality but is not at all scientific.

¤=[Post Update]=¤


I can't read anything you write without thinking of your facebook posts in 2015. You have a huge following on facebook and you were playing up to the liberal anti-white demographic by posting daily isolated incidents of stupid white people doing something racist and wrong to a black person. You and most of your followers would respond to how horrible racist white people are and I responded to one of those posts stating I could just as easily find videos of black people doing horrible things to white people and I asked what good would that serve, to which your response to me was unfriending me and telling me I was a racist.

DNA.

It's good to see you. It has been a while. I hope life has been treating you well. :)

My following on FB consists of a couple thousand people in my friendlist. But due to the algorithms I do not reach all of those poeple.

Your characterization of what I post is inaccurate. We would not respond in such a way and do not now. You have never been a FB friend of mine that I can recall.


Your posts on this page have hinted that you understand that there is a liberal agenda related to globalism, but that since folks of color benefit from this liberalism you stop short of condemning it.

I have to tell you bro, this is the same logic used by the American Indians when the United States calvary divided and conquered the Native populations by arming smaller tribes and telling them to go and kill off a larger tribe that had culturally been their enemy.

The smaller newly armed tribe would not look at the big picture and understand that they were going to be wiped out as well once their usefulness was over.

Globalism and it's engineers are the enemies, not the folks they are attempting to pit against one another.

It looks like we are doing all of the pitting against each other without the help of anyone outside of each other.

[Mark]

Oh Lord. Do you know how easy it would be to play the opposite narrative using cherry-picked news items?.

I do. As do you. We are grown, aware and know how the games of media manipulation are played.


Rahkyt, after the internationalists gut masculine white men from American society, I hope you realize that black masculine men are #2 on their chopping block. They already target black men with emasculating feminist/"toxic masculinity" nonsense just like they do white men in corporate advertizing, because strong, masculine black American men are the #2 threat to authoritarianism in the US right behind the millions of armed white men.

I do realize that fully. Please do not misunderstand what I am doing here. Awareness is KEY. I am continuing the thread that Bill began, attempting to look at issues and begin such discussions as this so we can work through it, together. It is why I returned. So I am GLAD to see y'all here today. :)

What we say and write will serve as a record. People will make up their own minds about whether they agree or not. We will just be ourselves.

[A Voice from the Mountains]

Meanwhile, in an actual science lab:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4WOy-0I1oA

[Mark]

Meanwhile, in an actual science lab

Nice. I used to teach at IUPUI back in the 90s. This is good stuff.

[DNA]

DNA.

It's good to see you. It has been a while. I hope life has been treating you well. :)

My following on FB consists of a couple thousand people in my friendlist. But due to the algorithms I do not reach all of those poeple.

Your characterization of what I post is inaccurate. We would not respond in such a way and do not now. You have never been a FB friend of mine that I can recall.


Look Rahkyt some of my absolute favorite threads have had a huge dialogue contribution from yourself. As such I was absolutely thrilled to start facebooking and began by seeking you out. We talked at length about 9eagle9 and LordSidious, I read one of your links where you wrote about the skyfish/Castaneda/mudshadow angle using a lot of the source material from the thread here on Avalon where we discussed such things.
I understand you having thousands of friends on Facebook would cause you to possibly not remember me, but the incident I outlined was pretty impactful for myself and as such caused me to quit facebook and erase my account at the time.

And yes, you held nothing back in labeling me a racist because I did not agree with the practice of finding filmed acts done by the lowest common denominator of a race and using that criteria as a means to judge that race as a whole.

You did not want my voice in opposition to your own and unfriended me along with throwing the racist label on me to help justify your action. I've only been back on facebook for maybe two months since that happened.

My total time on facebook is maybe five months including my short stint in my earlier facebook incarnation.

[greybeard]

Maybe slightly off topic.
If a blood transfusion is required does one investigate the DNA--the race--the religion etc of the donor?

My wife, who's photo can be seen on the signature link, is an African born in Cameroon.

She has qualified in various subjects including entrepreneurship at Edinburgh University.
She works as a support worker--enjoys looking after her clients but is underpaid and is working well below her qualifications.
Prejudice she has experience--its subtle but there.
Chris

[enfoldedblue]

I feel this discussion is so important as a means to move forward. And I admire the gentle way you are handling it Rahkyt.

I feel compelled to say I know what DNA is talking about as i too witnessesd that on FB. I watched some people, who genuinely seemed to want to understand more from your perspective, who from their limited perspective (we all have our own unique but ultimately limited perspective) may not have the experience to innately know the reality of living in a racist society, be lambasted and deleted. I did not dare say a peep, though healing the inequalities in our siciety is extremely important to me. I wanted to join in the discussion, but was afraid i would unknowingly incite an attack because of my limited perspective. As empath, the fear of being a target to this powerful, gererationaly deep anger, was enough to shut me right down. I saw how what one percieved as an innocent question stirred up huge rage, because from the perspective of someone who lives with racism on a daily basis the question doesn't come across as innocent..it comes across as ignorant...and is attacked as such. I understand the argument that it should not be up to those experiencing the inequality to have to educate the priviledged, But my question comes back again to how to move forward.

As a woman in a society in which everyday in so many little ways i am shown that I am less important than my male couterparts, I have some understanding of the inequality built into the system, and how privilege tends to be completely invisible to those that have it. But lI feel that in order to move forward it is important to unite where we can...especially with those genuinely wanting to heal. Of course anger is justified...the injustice is real....but to me change will come through healing, and healing will come through diologue....like what is occuring here.

Thank you to everyone willing to put down their defences enough to say i know i don't have the whole picture, the reference point that i see reality from is different to yours, but lets accept that we all feel vulnerable, that none of us created the inequality, regardless of if we benefitted from it, and that we can unite with the common goal of working towards a more equal society.

[A Voice from the Mountains]

Maybe slightly off topic.
If a blood transfusion is required does one investigate the DNA--the race--the religion etc of the donor?

Race is sometimes a factor in giving blood transfusions, but moreso for organ donation and bone marrow transplants, which often present real problems when it comes to a lack of donors and waiting for medical treatments. Of course religion has nothing to do with biology in any way, unless certain psychological traits can be argued to predispose certain groups to certain religions, which I've never seen studied.

The basic medical idea for transplants (and blood transfusions) is that the closer someone is related to you genetically, the more easily your body will adapt to whatever antigens are in it and all the rest. People can generally accept blood from any race as long as the blood types match, but some diseases require blood to be as similar as possible because of biological/genetic similarity.

This Chicago Tribune article mentions all this:


It’s true that in common uses of transfusions, the race of the donor and recipient make no difference as long as their blood types are compatible. But sickle-cell anemia patients develop fewer bad reactions to donated blood that’s as close a match to their own as possible. Some 100,000 people have the disease in the U.S., and they’re almost all African-American. More black blood donors would help these patients have successful transfusions, the Tribune’s Lisa Schencker reports.

Closer genetic matches are also necessary for bone marrow transplants and organ donations. Here, too, the need for more black donors is great.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/editorials/ct-edit-blood-donors-sickle-cell-20190422-story.html

There are lots of more technical medical papers out there too, like this one, which took no time at all to find: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1895180/


I don't think the solution to discrimination (of any type) is to pretend that things don't exist and try to rewrite physical sciences to try to force reality into "politically correct" ideologies. What passes for "politically correct" nowadays is pretty self-evidently just clown-world insanity dictated for legions of NPCs to repeat mindlessly anyway.

Speaking of which, they know their identity politics narrative is utterly collapsing in the face of scientific advances, so they're already preparing within their inner circles for how to handle inconvenient knowledge coming down the drain:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nu1qi2CXEc

That's Neocon Zionist and Iraq War cheerleader Bill Kristol essentially interviewing a bestselling author about how they need to get ahead of the narrative change that is about to be forced by revolutions in genetics and find a way to use it to their advantage.

We're talking about science that can now not only identify physical appearance by DNA, but also what is going on inside of your body, including elevated risks of diseases, predispositions to various behaviors, and even intelligence. All of those things have been linked to some level of genetic inheritance, even if environmental factors also play a substantial role. And they can trace your ancestors all the way back to someone in the Neolithic era now, and even pinpoint specific regions that your ancestors have historically inhabited, based on people with similar genetics in those areas.

They touch on the implications of all of this science coming out in the video, and are already trying to figure out ways to control the narrative to suit some political end. This is what globalists do to erode the national identities they are trying to destroy in order to replace them.

[Mark]

What and how, exactly, have populations that have been on the other side of racism, who have had to deny the humanity of an entire family of planetary co-inhabitants, merely because society demanded it? How has the creation of "whiteness" as a political and social entity in the United States in the mid-1600s caused those who had to take on sociopathic tendencies...
***

This is the most offensive and racist comment I have yet seen on Avalon. Black racism towards whites has been culturally acceptable for my lifetime, and it’s not right. I cringe when I hear this kind of divisive language on Avalon, but it’s all to common today by people who repeat what they hear in the media and from “higher” education experts.

Another example of this cultural creep is the mainstream acceptable statement, “Black Lives Matter”, implying in my reading that white lives don’t matter. To show an example of a similar divisive comment that is culturally unacceptable; for example, “Nazis Lives Matter”, it’s the same turn of phrase and equally true, but can you see how racially divisive that statement could be interpreted?

Racism? Really?

You have no idea who I am.


And, you've added quite a bit of hype to what is a serious topic. HOW HAS BEING PART OF AN OPPRESSOR GROUP AFFECTED WHITE PEOPLE.

It is simple. Answer the question instead of using all of those code words and asides meant to label me. Stick to the topic.

We can talk about how it has affected black and brown and red and yellow folks all day. BUT HOW HAS IT AFFECTED WHITE PEOPLE?

[Mark]

I understand you having thousands of friends on Facebook would cause you to possibly not remember me, but the incident I outlined was pretty impactful for myself and as such caused me to quit facebook and erase my account at the time.

And yes, you held nothing back in labeling me a racist because I did not agree with the practice of finding filmed acts done by the lowest common denominator of a race and using that criteria as a means to judge that race as a whole.

I see.

As I can see that happening and, as I can read in your words that you are very serious about this, I believe that it happened. Whatever the reason was, it is past for both of us and I'm glad you went back to FB. It is the Village Commons and everything terrible that everyone says that it is also. I will not apologize for something I do not recall but I will claim and own the fact that I do call out what I consider to be racist behavior when I see it. As you and I have been friends, I can't believe I made a snap judgement as that is generally not my modus operandi.

So let's have that conversation again, now, if you are interested in doing so. You called me out for finding films done by the lowest common denominator of a race, is that correct? So I assume I posted a video about some racist event that occurred and then made a generalization about white people. In response to a generalization that I might have made and your answer, that it does not apply to all white people, I agree with you now, if I did not then.

When Bill made this thread and I returned, it was to have these conversations. Unbarred, unadulterated, so I'm glad you are here and that we are engaged again to complete what was unfinished business.


You did not want my voice in opposition to your own and unfriended me along with throwing the racist label on me to help justify your action. I've only been back on facebook for maybe two months since that happened.

My total time on facebook is maybe five months including my short stint in my earlier facebook incarnation.

If I was speaking to you in private conversation and called you a racist, it had nothing to do with your voice being in opposition to mine in public. It is because I believed that whatever you said in that moment was, indeed, racist. I suppose I'll have to go back and look in my messages to see how that discussion went, as it is probably still way back in there somewhere.

[A Voice from the Mountains]

HOW HAS BEING PART OF AN OPPRESSOR GROUP AFFECTED WHITE PEOPLE.

Let's break this idea down into details and see how much this really makes sense.

First of all, am I personally responsible, morally or legally, or what my father, grandfather, or other ancestors did?

Second of all, how are you determining that all white people are oppressors? Do you think that no white people have ever experienced oppression, and have only been the ones dealing it out to everyone else?

Turks and Arabs enslaved millions of Europeans and other whites during the Middle Ages, either capturing them during the crusades or else during pirate raids. There are historical sources on all of this. So whites were enslaved by other races as well. Whites also enslaved other whites, just as blacks have enslaved other blacks, same for Arabs, and so on.

There are so many holes in this idea that white people are solely and collectively responsible for all oppression throughout history that all it really needs to be refuted is a world history course taught by anyone other than an SJW Marxist.

[Mark]

I feel compelled to say I know what DNA is talking about as i too witnessesd that on FB. I watched some people, who genuinely seemed to want to understand more from your perspective, who from their limited perspective (we all have our own unique but ultimately limited perspective) may not have the experience to innately know the reality of living in a racist society, be lambasted and deleted.

If I delete someone, it is not because of ignorance alone. It is because the ignorance is willful and the interaction has gotten emotional and accusatory. If someone enters any thread that I have created or am interacting on and they genuinely come from a position of wanting to know, I answer in kind. If I perceive that they have come to proselytize an agenda that I do not agree with then yes, I generally delete them.

The reason why is simple. I don't have the time or the willingness to teach each person what I know about race relations in the world. I can't do it. Nor can I let people with that perspective run loose on my profile in Facebook, because they often engage with others in that same vein and it turns into flame wars. As I cannot be present always to moderate these discussions, it is always easier to delete that person. What you probably witnessed, if you are refering to me directly above and not someone else on my FB, is my interaction with someone who I'd had multiple engagements with and whom I decided, when you were looking, had taken enough of my time and I had spent enough time attempting to reason with them.

There are many, many others who look at the things I post and actually take something from them. Put them selves in the Other's shoes to see what it feels like.

Not a lot do that, but when they do, it feels like there is hope in the world.




I did not dare say a peep, though healing the inequalities in our siciety is extremely important to me. I wanted to join in the discussion, but was afraid i would unknowingly incite an attack because of my limited perspective.

You felt like I would attack you?


As empath, the fear of being a target to this powerful, gererationaly deep anger, was enough to shut me right down. I saw how what one percieved as an innocent question stirred up huge rage, because from the perspective of someone who lives with racism on a daily basis the question doesn't come across as innocent..it comes across as ignorant...and is attacked as such. I understand the argument that it should not be up to thosxperiencing the inequality to have to educate the priviledged, But my question comes back again to how to move forward.

You saw rage in my response? I do not know if that is true as I have not been enraged per say in many years. I am often determined and direct when I am in that mode of engaging in educational conversations. Perhaps that looked like rage to you. I have often been called angry when I have not been. Merely direct and impassioned.


But lI feel that in order to move forward it is important to unite where we can...especially with those genuinely wanting to heal. Of course anger is justified...the injustice is real....but to me change will come through healing, and healing will come through diologue....like what is occuring here.

And how would you determine those who genuinely want to heal and not just spread propaganda?

[Mark]

First of all, am I personally responsible, morally or legally, or what my father, grandfather, or other ancestors did?

Do you benefit today from what your father, grandfather, or other ancestors did?


Second of all, how are you determining that all white people are oppressors? Do you think that no white people have ever experienced oppression, and have only been the ones dealing it out to everyone else?

The political and economic systems of all western european countries favor whites. All people in these nations are indoctrinated in white supremacy from childhood on. It is institutionalized.


Turks and Arabs enslaved millions of Europeans and other whites during the Middle Ages, either capturing them during the crusades or else during pirate raids. There are historical sources on all of this. So whites were enslaved by other races as well. Whites also enslaved other whites, just as blacks have enslaved other blacks, same for Arabs, and so on.

Yes. That was Turk and Arab supremacy. Your other examples, supremacy of those ethnic groups over whomever was suppressed and controlled.


There are so many holes in this idea that white people are solely and collectively responsible for all oppression throughout history that all it really needs to be refuted is a world history course taught by anyone other than an SJW Marxist.

Only you said they are solely and collectively responsible for all oppression throughout history.