Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I think its been rising for decades. Its just becoming obvious now, as is common with such phenomena. It grows slowly out of sight and then blows up in a major recession. In 1929 Adolph Hitler was an all but forgotten street thug. Four years later he was Chancelor of Germany.
It actually was falling until recently. The USA from 1996 to 2007 was the least racist it had ever been in its history. Compare the reaction after 9/11 with the reaction after the Iranian hostage crisis, which did not happen on US soil and which there were few if any deaths. The popular sentiment in the US when the US Embassy in Tehran was taken hostage was "let's go kill those dirty camel jockeys" while after 9/11 - an infinitely worse disaster - the popular sentiment was "let's protect our Muslim friends and neighbors from any crazies out there".
Now, if you're talking about Europe and not the USA, you are correct, racism has been on the rise there for quite some time (including all throughout the '90s).
This sort of thing took place in many cities. In 1960 my parents were selling their home in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. The street and the immediate neighborhood around us was white. The neighbors found out that a black family was interested in buying the house and they pleaded with my father not to sell. He had already purchased a new home and needed to sell as quickly as he could. I was told later that there was even talk in the neighborhood about people chipping in and buying the house as a group just to keep the black family out. They breathed a massive sigh of relief when a white buyer came along with a higher bid and got the house.
Hasn't that always been the cynic's definition of integration - "The period in the history of a neighbourhood [or a school] between the arrival of the first black family [or student] and the departure of the last white one"?
Even in highly racist times, like the Second World War, the US of all races rallied around the colors. The biases in the US tend to be hidden from most, existing in rural areas and the inner city. Only in special cases such as the LA riots over the King beating do most see this reality.
Even in highly racist times, like the Second World War, the US of all races rallied around the colors. The biases in the US tend to be hidden from most, existing in rural areas and the inner city. Only in special cases such as the LA riots over the King beating do most see this reality.
There was no feeling after Pearl Harbor of "let's protect our Japanese friends and neighbors from crazies". Just the opposite.
The LA Riots were racist themselves and helped boost racism. If not for them the decline in US racism in the '90s would have started earlier. This is NOT to say there was a decline in prejudice during Clinton's second term and most of Bush's administration - there wasn't - but it took the form of classism not racism.
OTOH, European racism has indeed been rising for a long time, and your analysis if applied to Europe would be 100% correct.
I think the racism in the US is tied to the fact that the modern economy fundamentally benefits some more than others, minorities get treated differently (particularly by the police), and the general fragmentation of society tied to value change and technology. I also think our ignoring civil rights violations and the very different rates of progess by ethnic group and race, makes this worse. The Bush administration for instance consistantly claimed (wrongly) that there was no meaningful discrimination against minorities.
The LA police department commonly beat up or humiliated blacks in the inner city, a point that blacks but not those outside the city were painfully aware of. This included non-criminals, in one particularly egregious example they arrested Joe Morgan because they thought he looked out of place (something they never would have done to a white businessman). This boiled for years before finally exploading.
Researchers in human resource and credit decisions have found very different realities than that maintained by Bush incidently. I am sure the same is true in housing, education, and many other areas.
I think the racism in the US is tied to the fact that the modern economy fundamentally benefits some more than others
That's classism, not racism.
Quote:
minorities get treated differently (particularly by the police), and the general fragmentation of society tied to value change and technology. I also think our ignoring civil rights violations and the very different rates of progess by ethnic group and race, makes this worse. The Bush administration for instance consistantly claimed (wrongly) that there was no meaningful discrimination against minorities.
While the Bush years weren't particularly racist, they were incredibly classist.
Not all prejudice is racial. During the time period I mentioned racism reached an all time low in the US but classism reached an all time high.
Quote:
The LA police department commonly beat up or humiliated blacks in the inner city, a point that blacks but not those outside the city were painfully aware of.
I'm from Los Angeles originally (I lived there during the riots) and have family there - and I still live in California - and know very well what went on. The LAPD in the bad old days commonly beat up and humiliated EVERYONE. Blacks had it worse but nobody had it good. They were the worst police department west of New Orleans. Corrupt and ultraviolent, and not even effective in controlling crime, with no connection to the community unlike in eastern cities. I'm considered white in the US (although I have some Roma ancestry) and members of my family were shaken down by the LAPD, not to mention that virtually everyone I knew of any race growing up had problems with them. There were good reasons why being an LAPD officer wasn't considered an honorable career until the 2000s when Bratton cleaned up the force (and, unsurprisingly, crime went down)
Quote:
This included non-criminals, in one example they arrested Joe Morgan because they thought he looked out of place (something they never would have done to a white businessman).
I wouldn't be sure about that. If you're talking about some of the suburban police departments around LA, yes, you would be correct. (For example,from having black friends who grew up in Beverly Hills and who were treated like criminals by the Beverly Hills Police Department, I can't really blame wealthy African-Americans for moving to Ladera Heights or Windsor Hills because their sons won't be treated like they're gangbangers by the cops). LAPD were pretty nasty to everyone, not to mention the department was extremely poorly run in such a way that encouraged violence. Not to mention that city government was completely broken with the mayor having little power compared to most other US cities. The old L.A. city charter may have been the most dysfunctional government document in the entire USA - the "Progressive Charter" was set up in a way that no one was accountable for anything and the city council members effectively acted as mini-mayors, with the police force being completely independent of any oversight. A recipe for disaster waiting to happen. It's remarkable that anything in L.A. ever functioned at all. Gates had all the politicians running scared, he had cops spying on them and threatened blackmail against them if they didn't support him. I think I know a bit more about this than you do.
Quote:
This boiled for years before finally exploading.
It exploded due to unemployment, media demagoguery, and gang activity (which the LAPD and city government ignored and let fester for MANY years - even Coleman Young's Detroit did a better job fighting gangs than L.A. did) more than police misconduct. As bad as what they did to Rodney King was, they'd done much worse.
Not to mention that Gov. Wilson sat on his ass and didn't call the National Guard out for a few days when they should've been there ASAP. Ironically, the Guard and the Marines from Camp Pendelton acted much more like a civilian police force should than the LAPD did at the time. They treated people with respect.
However, the riots were in effect a racial war by certain elements of the African-American community (by no means all nor even most) against all other racial and ethnic groups in L.A. (the looting was multiracial - much of it was opportunistic, some of the looters didn't even know who King was but were just taking advantage of the situation- but the violence was almost all black)and history shows that racism always fuels more racism. In the end the entire African-American community wound up losing for the deeds of a few bad people. There was more black flight than white flight after the riots (and most of the white flight came from the Valley which was barely touched by the riots, not from areas that were hit by the riots) and black political power in L.A. declined tremendously and irreversibly.
Quote:
Researchers in human resource and credit decisions have found very different realities than that maintained by Bush incidently. I am sure the same is true in housing, education, and many other areas.
I did not say the Bush years were free of prejudice, only that racism continued to decline but classism continued to supplant it as America's major form of prejudice. (Funny, I never thought I'd be defending Bush)
It's a cause of racial tension. Blacks have done systematically worse than the population as a whole leading to much of the anger that causes the explosion. The LAPD, for example, clearly treated people differently based on income - because if they beat up someone with too much income it would cause a political stink and they would have gotten sued. Studies at the time consistantly showed worse treatment for blacks than whites in LA.
The irony of the Gate administration was that until the early 90's the LAPD was commonly seen as the best urban police force in the nation. Its a brillant example of how you can manage your image to make you look good when you are anything but.
It's a cause of racial tension. Blacks have done systematically worse than the population as a whole leading to much of the anger that causes the explosion.
It also had to do with the black gangs being more violent at that time than other gangs. At that time there was far more violence connected to black gangs than Latino gangs. Today it's different but the number of black gangbangers in L.A. itself is less than back then. (The Latino population has always been bigger than the black population in L.A., btw) There were causes for this, of course, like the misguided social policies of the Great Society and the War on Drugs propagated by Reagan, but it was the reality.
Quote:
The LAPD, for example, clearly treated people differently based on income - because if they beat up someone with too much income it would cause a political stink and they would have gotten sued.
That did not stop them. The city of L.A. had to pay out massive amounts of money for lawsuits over police misconduct. As I said, Gates had all the politicians scared, just like his mentor Parker, or J. Edgar Hoover, and he had many wealthy and prominent people scared. Of course, classism was a major factor, and the average Joe whatever his race was obviously going to be a potential mark for the LAPD rather than celebrities.
Quote:
Studies at the time consistantly showed worse treatment for blacks than whites in LA.
I admitted blacks had it worse than others did, but nobody had it good.
Quote:
The irony of the Gate administration was that until the early 90's the LAPD was commonly seen as the best urban police force in the nation.
Not by anyone in California who didn't work for it.
In California, the San Francisco Police Department was considered the best urban police force by the overwhelming majority of people.
The San Diego Police Department was also considered better than the LAPD - its chief in the '80s and '90s, Kollender, viewed the LAPD model as exactly what he wanted to avoid. That's why San Diego was the only city in the southwestern US that the rioting didn't spread to (albeit Las Vegas was the only other city in which the rioting reached L.A. levels, and actually lasted longer).
The Highway Patrol looked down on the LAPD so much that many of its officers dreaded cooperating with it.
Even the LASD, which under Pitchess and Block was as prone to violence as the LAPD and tolerated the same attitudes, was regarded better than the LAPD because at least it was more effective at fighting crime. The areas of L.A. under LASD jurisdiction didn't get hit by the riots as badly as those under LAPD jurisdiction for that reason.
Ironically, the LAPD in the 2000s under Bratton - who reshaped the department to be more like an East Coast police department - became a better police department than the SFPD under Fong, which is why Mayor Newsom brought in George Gascon from the LAPD to replace Fong as chief last year. That would have been unthinkable in the past.
Quote:
Its a brillant example of how you can manage your image to make you look good when you are anything but.
When you have the media on your side, you can convince anyone of anything who isn't actually there.
From 1961 to 1973 poverty rates were nearly cut in half. After we abandoned the active role of government in fighting poverty under Reagan the poverty rate went significantly higher. The problem was not the great society programs, it was that we gave up to focus on the wealthy.
From 1961 to 1973 poverty rates were nearly cut in half. After we abandoned the active role of government in fighting poverty under Reagan the poverty rate went significantly higher. The problem was not the great society programs, it was that we gave up to focus on the wealthy.
The IDEA of the Great Society programs was not necessarily bad. It was how they were executed and put together that was the problem. For example, universal health care would have been a much better way of fighting poverty than welfare (bet you're surprised hearing that from me!) There should have been more focus on encouraging entrepeneurship rather than government dependence. And programs that forbid intact families from recieving benefits resulted in a large number of single mothers raising families - single mothers raising boys often has disastrous effects.
As for how the Great Society was actually executed, it's hard not to agree with Malcolm X who thought that they were just another way of keeping down minorities.I don't agree with all of Malcolm's views but he was right about the growth of African-American economic power being necessary for African-Americans to have better lives in America.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
