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Old 07-07-2009, 04:25 PM   #31
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I have to confess when I had a muslim from Pakistan working for me it made for some really interesting conversations in the office. I actually learnt a lot and found it was very rewarding.
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Old 07-07-2009, 04:25 PM   #32
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Racism (or any form of discrimination) is an evil that needs to be tackled at root cause, not legislated around to mitigate the symptoms of.
That's a pretty tall order, and one that has so far resisted all "attacks" on its existence. Racism is simply another shade (as it were) of prejudice; and prejudice never goes away... it just changes targets.

That's why we need laws, to level the playing field until the day we all become "perfect" and no longer harbor any prejudices that influence our actions... however long that may take. (I know I'm not holding my breath...)
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Old 07-07-2009, 04:30 PM   #33
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In my residency class, there were four of us. Me - a whitebread, midwestern, naive sumbitch who had never been off the farm. Rob - an African American from Arkansas who had gone to Meharry. AJ - an East Coast gay man who lived under the radar with his partner (we were in the Air Force). And Carl - a Guatemalan who was in his second career, having been a GP in the back areas of Guatemala. I learned so much about other cultures, both US and Central American in those years that I continue to treasure to this day.
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Old 07-07-2009, 04:34 PM   #34
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That's why we need laws, to level the playing field until the day we all become "perfect" and no longer harbor any prejudices that influence our actions... however long that may take. (I know I'm not holding my breath...)
Don't we need prejudice and discrimination to survive?

They're part of our decision making process; e.g. I am prejudiced against particular types of music. It helps keep things manageable and saves time - otherwise we could end up like Buridan's ass.
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Old 07-07-2009, 04:34 PM   #35
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That's a pretty tall order, and one that has so far resisted all "attacks" on its existence. Racism is simply another shade (as it were) of prejudice; and prejudice never goes away... it just changes targets.

That's why we need laws, to level the playing field until the day we all become "perfect" and no longer harbor any prejudices that influence our actions... however long that may take. (I know I'm not holding my breath...)
Yes, but the trouble with that is that the laws to level the playing field actually go some way to perpetuating the underlying root cause, i.e. people feel discriminated against and that manifests itself as racism (or other 'ism').

It seems like a "damned if you do and damned if you don't" type scenario to me and I really don't kow that any answer is better than the other.
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Old 07-07-2009, 04:45 PM   #36
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That's why we need laws, to level the playing field until the day we all become "perfect" and no longer harbor any prejudices that influence our actions... however long that may take. (I know I'm not holding my breath...)
I don't expect that to ever happen. I expect people to always have prejudices, and to have those prejudices influence their actions.

What laws can address is institutionalized prejudice--where individual biases have become so common, and so strong, that people who don't have the prejudice, still follow the bias because they've come to consider it "normal." For example, the idea that women should wear makeup in public. Or the idea that a group of black teens is more likely to be criminal than a group of white teens, and should be watched more carefully by police.

The people who follow and reinforce these biases may not think that natural-looking women are wrong or unappealing, nor that black people are inherently more greedy, violent or stupid than white people. They may just think that "it's normal for women to wear makeup" or "there's certainly a lot of crime in the mostly-black neighborhoods"--and so allow the prejudice of others, who do believe those things, to influence their actions.

And as mentioned, one of the biggest hurdles to overcome is the tendency to hire "people like me;" without any prejudice at all, an employer, or a university department, will chose people similar to itself, because there's a resonance that doesn't exist in other cases. What they think of as "similar to me" is based strongly on society's ideas of groups of people... in some cases, it splits along racial lines, in others, gender lines, in others, by religion or class or education level.
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Old 07-07-2009, 04:50 PM   #37
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Yes, but the trouble with that is that the laws to level the playing field actually go some way to perpetuating the underlying root cause, i.e. people feel discriminated against and that manifests itself as racism (or other 'ism').
The root cause is not "people feel discriminated against." It is that some groups of people are discriminated against. Fixing that is going to mean those who've gotten unfair privileges through that discrimination, are going to feel put out for a while, as the field is leveled. If you've been on top of the hill for a long time, and someone starts to level the area, you're going to think someone's "tearing you down."

In a lot of cases, there's no option for leveling the field by bringing everyone up to the top-of-the-hill level. There are only so many high-paying jobs; if men have 75% of them now, and we fix the gender imbalance, that means a third of the men currently employed in those spots are going to lose their jobs... and they're likely to perceive it as "discrimination," not equality.
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Old 07-07-2009, 04:52 PM   #38
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Yes, but the trouble with that is that the laws to level the playing field actually go some way to perpetuating the underlying root cause, i.e. people feel discriminated against and that manifests itself as racism (or other 'ism')..
What's significant is whether those "feelings" of discrimination are based on fact... or on supposition, which is often racist at its base. Racism doesn't need laws to perpetuate it... people perpetuate it by continuing to measure their world against it.

People often attribute personal intent to impersonal results... like saying God hates you because you got rained on, or the butcher favored someone else because he ran out of roast beef before you got there. The process seems to be hard-wired into us, so we will probably always seek something to blame for events which are, in fact, blameless, and labeling those we blame as a class (stupid kids, cheap Republicans, bleeding-heart Democrats, senile old people, etc).
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Old 07-07-2009, 04:55 PM   #39
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The root cause is not "people feel discriminated against." It is that some groups of people are discriminated against. Fixing that is going to mean those who've gotten unfair privileges through that discrimination, are going to feel put out for a while, as the field is leveled. If you've been on top of the hill for a long time, and someone starts to level the area, you're going to think someone's "tearing you down."

In a lot of cases, there's no option for leveling the field by bringing everyone up to the top-of-the-hill level. There are only so many high-paying jobs; if men have 75% of them now, and we fix the gender imbalance, that means a third of the men currently employed in those spots are going to lose their jobs... and they're likely to perceive it as "discrimination," not equality.
Sorry - I don't think I expressed myself very well in that post. The root cause is indeed, as you state, that people are discriminated against. When I mentioned the people feeling discriminated against I was referring to the people who feel they are discriminated against as a result of the affirmative action.
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Old 07-07-2009, 06:24 PM   #40
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as a female in a non trad job I gotta tell ya' that the biggest ball is in Equal Rights. I'm sitting here right now with our director raising holy hell over getting frick or frack out to fix a number TODAY!!! I tell her they are working offsite, but I can fix it. you know, lil' ol' me with a measly 30 years experience. no, she writes back, have frick or frack fix it nlt close of business tomorrow.

*tears hair out beats head on desk*
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