Texas student athletes boycotting recruiting and alumni activities to push for racial inclusivity on campus
I get it. Any large group of people doing the same action(s) at the same time makes me nervous.
I consider myself to be one of the fortunate few who can distinguish between a large crowd cheering on their favorite sports team and a large crowd saluting a tyrant.
Orgies?
Yeah, I never wave at people for this exact same reason.
There's a difference between a wave and a crowd of tens of thousands of people making the same gesture in unison. Don't be dense.
I hope you are never in charge of any people, you will find fault in every human gesture ever motioned. You are going way too far. The pendulum doesn't need to swing way over to crazy town.
I will find fault in every human gesture? How did you glean that from my previous statements?
Lol! I can see Sharklover standing in front of his section “Hey gang, when we get to hail, how about we all try spirit fingers instead!”
You can change the lyrics of every song, rename every military base and building, remove every Confederate flag and knock down every statue of a Confederate general, but unless you change the attitude of people it's all window dressing.
True. But removing glowing memorializations of people that are obviously and objectively bad people that did bad things is a good start, even if it doesn't solve anything in and of itself.
Education and open, honest and ongoing dialog are also needed, as well as a long term commitment to redress historical wrongs and inequalities.
A clenched fist raised in the air is completely different than a fascist salute.
Fun fact, that salute was originally used by the Roman Empire. That's why Mussolini started using it.
Understood. There is a big difference. But there is a similar appearance when a massive crowd is gesturing in unison, even if the specific hand motions are different. And these types of public displays of fealty and reverence were employed by a number of different regimes.
Stop digging shark, that hole keeps getting deeper.
I stand by my statements and will continue to do so. Thank you very much.
I have a better idea which is something the country should do in general. Whenever some fascist, Nazi, or actual white supremacist organization decides to make some kind of gesture or sign theirs, just ignore them and don't let the little bitty tiny group of people dictate to the whole country what is and isn't theirs. Just tell them that's not yours instead of giving them everything. The OK sign does not have to all of a sudden mean "fuck black people" just because some basement-dwelling trolls decided to have fun with it on 4chan. I swear there is probably someone, somewhere, thinking, "Nazi flags were red, so the color red is racist."
I don't think anyone cares if a bunch of fascists use various gestures online or in public - it's when individuals in the armed forces or police departments that use it where people get concerned.
Tell that to the guy who got banned from Wrigley Field. Yes, people care about using it in public. The pictures I've seen even blur out the gesture.
Yeah and Pepe the frog had nothing to do with racism before right wing people adopted it was a symbol. The swastika was used by cultures as an inoffensive symbol for centuries until the Nazis adopted it. I'd love to just ignore Nazis, but they are actively recruiting and growing bolder. The basement trolls have been showing their faces in larger and larger gatherings, and the people that write for online publications that appeal to that crowd have been welcomed into the president's administration. I'd love to just ignore the Steve bannons and Steven Millers of the world. But they are crafting national policy as we speak.
We have been throwing money at the problem for over 50 years by giving minorities advantages in college and professional school admissions, educational programs for minority children, specials opportunities in business, housing and that's just the beginning. I'm just not sure how the problem gets solved and what can now be done that hasn't been tried before, not that we shouldn't try, but some new approaches are needed. I'm not talking about changing the way our laws are being enforced because there is an obvious police problem, although the solution needs to be carefully addressed or you will have another situation like what happened to Baltimore with Freddy Gray. After his death and subsequent trials of police that acquitted all those charged, policed stopped enforcing the law and murder rates went through the roof.
I see this issue as a two way street, with overly-aggressive police on one side but I don't give minority groups a complete pass either, and it's not just minority groups, although that is the topic of this thread and the protests we have seen for a few weeks now. Talk to cops that work in the inner cities about what they have to endure on a daily basis and the risks they face and you get a different perspective. I'm not attempting to justify what the police have done, but at the same time, what is going on must be looked at in its entirety or you won't solve the problem. Throwing money at a problem may be a way for some to assuage guilt but it doesn't necessarily do anything beyond that unless attitudinal change is accomplished and that won't come easy.
You hear that argument frequently about all the dollars thrown at black issues. In actuality much of the money ends up with other groups. The greatest beneficiaries of affirmation action are white women. Getting into college is great but it’s employment where the rubber meets road. Identical resumes were sent with the name being the only variable. The one with an identifiably black name got far fewer interviews.
In housing, realtors gave brown buyers a more difficult time in terms of income/credit verification, number of homes shown, neighborhoods steered away from etc. It was the same subtle discrimination in banking. You’ll find this sort of behavior is enmeshed in the fabric of our society and it compounds over time to create massive wealth disparities that impact every area of life.
Those programs you speak of are largely window dressing and played up by the media to arouse emotions in gullible viewers. Fear and anger are opposite sides of the same feeling. The media has reaped billions by making you angry when you see blacks getting handouts and fearful of the violent dark skinned criminal. They’re in the ad selling business and provide enough news and entertainment to get you to tune to exhibit more ads. They don’t really lie they simply show brown faces during stories about welfare, handouts etc. Whites outnumber blacks on the government dole but are rarely shown in that light. Viewers then internalize negative emotions about brown people and this has negative consequences for minorities.
most think slavery ended in 1865 but it was closer to 1970. LBJ passed the civil rights act of 1964 which Was essentially a reiteration of the emancipation proclamation since the rights were never really recognized. Unexercised rights are lost. A system called debt peonage existed in the south where blacks out of bondage were mostly illiterate and innumerate and worked as sharecroppers. If they were lucky, at season end the land owner would look at his books and say he broke even. I don’t owe you and you don’t owe me. Far too many would claim losses forcing the sharecroppers into an endless cycle of debt. If a black who could count objected, jail resulted. If word spread about an uppity negro people sometimes stormed the jail and police stepped aside allowing a lynching.
People would take appendages from the body and make necklaces and post cards as everyone came out for the spectacle. If a white man told police a black owed him money he was forced to work for free until the white man considered the debt satisfied. This went on until the late1960s and is why so many blacks are in the north where a less severe racism existed. It was called the great migration from 1865-1970. Part of the problem is so few people know about the nasty underbelly of US history.
Why do we have to settle for one or the other...you know its entirely possible to BOTH remove racist symbolism and work to shift attitudes.
Just wait til you learn about The Sprinkler!
Good.
Nice! Keep the momentum!
Still amazes me how so many great black athletes stay south of the Mason Dixon line for college. No institution has a perfect record, but just looking at the fight songs, flags, culture, and tradition of some of these SEC schools, Clemson and FSU, it amazes me how they managed to lure in so much talent over the years.
UM has a tradition of being at the forefront of addressing racial issues, and Jim Harbaugh has always had an open ear to players on these issues - even if he needed some time to come around on Kap kneeling during the anthem.
I get kids wanting to stay close to home, but it amazes me that UM is not more of a draw for the socially conscious athlete.
ole miss is the one thats wild to me
Yeah I was talking to a black guy in his 50s who grew up in Mississippi and I asked him if he had a favorite team growing up. And he said Miss St obviously because of the uh ole miss...colors and mascot.
He kind of had a hard time saying it so I could tell it bothered him growing up. I remember like 5 years ago or something there was a petition to change their mascot to Admiral Ackbar.
What is the black population in Ann Arbor (both on and off the campus) compared to those of southern cities?
The ethnic composition of the population of Ann Arbor, MI is composed of 81.9k White Alone residents (68.6%), 18.9k Asian Alone residents (15.9%), 8.22k Black or African American Alone residents (6.89%), 5.23k Hispanic or Latino residents (4.38%), 4.57k Two or More Races residents (3.83%), 240 Some Other Race Alone ...
Come visit the south sometime. It’s way more diverse and friendly than anyplace in the north by a mile. The north is the segregated part of the country. I grew up in Michigan and now live in the south. I saw a few African Americans in flint and Detroit. Not so much in the suburbs. Here in SC, it’s very mixed. My neighborhood (a quintessential suburb) is about 65%white, 25% African American,5% Indian, 5% other and I live in a pretty posh neighborhood.
for all the shit the south gets for being racist (a vocal minority) we’re way more integrated than the north. I’ve come to really appreciate how things are here, proud and glad to raise my kids here where they share a truly diverse classroom and culture as a whole.
While I can't doubt what you are saying, however, they still have a strong attachment to the confederate flag and confederate generals. While I am sure some view it as part of their history, just seems odd for those of us in the north.
There are a ton of white people in Michigan that are just as bigoted and racist as the minority of pro Confederate good old boys in the south. No way that Trump wins the state of Michigan without a whole bunch of those types filling the voting booth. You see tons of Confederate flag, Gadsden flag, and other right wing, militaristic paraphernalia in every corner of Michigan outside of Detroit and Ann arbor.
Also, Michigan and the rest of the northern states have a long history of using red lining and zoning to impose a social order of white supremacy. A large percentage of the minority population in Ann arbor live in subsidized housing south of I94. They didn't get there by accident. People made intentional decisions to locate those neighborhoods far away from the central city when they were first built. When the suburbs were built around the outskirts of Detroit post world war two, it was damn hard to get a house in those neighborhoods if you weren't white. The real estate and mortgage industry made damn sure to do whatever they could to keep the black people south of eight Mile. Michigan and most of the northern states are more segregated than the south, even though they never had any official segregationist laws on the books.
I moved to Oregon, which has a similar history of imposing exclusionary housing policies to segregate communities of color. It is not a welcoming place for minorites. The state Constitution specifically excluded black people until it was changed in the last half of the twentieth century (that clause wasn't enforced after world war two, to the best of my knowledge, but the words were still there). A lot of property deeds in historically affluent neighborhoods still contain clauses that prohibit the sale of the property to African Americans or Chinese Americans. If I was a person of color, I wouldn't want to live in a segregated community.
Kinda crazy that any time something gets said that points out the systemic racism that created the situation we see in the US today and the aspects of it that are still going on, it gets negged. Yet nobody has the ability to counter it with anything of substance.
It just screams of “this is uncomfortable, I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to hear about it, neg.”
None of what you just said was false. Our communities aren’t segregated by chance. It was systematically done. People of color were herded into neighborhoods and then those neighborhoods were stripped of government support, and they crumbled. Like what happened in Flint with the water crisis. Those pipes could easily have been fixed by now. Look at how fast the government was able to snap their fingers and provide trillions in stimulus money to people and businesses. Look at how fast they were able to snap their fingers and mobilize the militant police and the national guard in all of our major cities. Yet they can’t come up with a few million dollars to fix the water system that is literally poisoning its people in a predominantly black community.
This has gone on for decades. The methods have changed, but the systemic racism still exists and still has a lasting impact on people of color. But too many people are uncomfortable with it. They choose to ignore it when it doesn’t affect them. They choose to not talk about it. They choose to pretend it doesn’t exist. It’s easier to neg a post than it is to confront the racist undertones of our country.
Few hundred million...
One fundamental challenge of removing every lead line in Flint: finding them.
Rough estimates suggest more than 20,000 pipelines initially needed replacing, and more than 12,000 remain. The rest are likely copper, which is considered safe.
So where should contractors dig?
Flint initially relied on a University of Michigan algorithm that predicted the likely location of lead lines. Officials used the data to determine where to send hydrovac trucks, which dig small holes with high-pressure water, to confirm the makeup of a pipeline.
Costing little more than $200 per address, the trucks had been touted as an effective, low-cost investigative tool; When they found copper, contractors could avoid the cost of digging a trench.
But Weaver changed the plan in 2018. Calling the previous plan risky, she cancelled a $2 million hydrovac contract and required 10-foot trenches everywhere, costing a minimum of $1,700 per home.
The new plan means Flint is digging up more copper lines, only to rebury them.
From 2016 through 2017, Flint explored service lines at 8,833 homes across the city and found 6,228 potentially hazardous service lines to replace, according to city figures.
That’s a “hit rate” of nearly 71 percent.
This year, Flint found lead or galvanized steel at 16 percent of homes where contractors dug, replacing 1,360 of the 8,410 pipelines it investigated.
Now the state is threatening to withhold funds because of the wasted money. What a shit show.
I’d upvote this a million times if I could
"No way that Trump wins the state of Michigan without a whole bunch of those types filling the voting booth"
That's true, but the issue I'd have also with the other poster above who talks about how it's more inclusive is if that's the case, how does the South vote Republican so solidly despite having the largest black populations? Proximity to other races isn't the only measure of racism.
Good points.
I think systematic voter suppression and gerrymandering has something to do with the recent dominance of the right in elections held in the South. But there are probably a lot of other dynamics at play that I am unaware of.
Good points.
I think systematic voter suppression and gerrymandering has something to do with the recent dominance of the right in elections held in the South. But there are probably a lot of other dynamics at play that I am unaware of.
The 2016 result in Michigan was more about Hillary doing unusually poorly for a Democrat than Trump doing unusually well for a Republican.
2004 - Kerry received 2,479,183 votes to Bush's 2,313,746
2008 - Obama received 2,867,680 votes to McCain's 2,044,405
2012 - Obama received 2,564,569 votes to Romney's 2,115,256
2016 - Trump received 2,279,543 votes to Clinton's 2,268,839
Nearly 600,000 people that voted for Obama in 2008 didn't vote for Hillary in 2016. Presumably most weren't neo-Confederate types.
Good point. Hillary did extraordinarily poorly by recent historical standards in Michigan and the rest of the Midwest. I don't think it was an influx of new voters that propelled Trump to victory. Rather it was a failure of people of color and young people to turn out against him. Part of the problem is people like me leaving the state as the politics and the general atmosphere had become much less progressive minded.
But I still stand by my previous statement. I spent a lot of time cruising the back roads of communities in far flung corners of rural Michigan when I lived in the state. I encountered more than a fair share of Confederate flags and militia types over the years. This is especially true in the outer north suburbs of Detroit.
Yep. A lot of people in the Democratic party do not like Hillary and in 2015/16 people didn't know how Trump would govern. Everyone likes Biden and now we know exactly what a Trump presidency looks like.
The biggest problem with South Carolina is so many Ohio State people. But I see increasing numbers wearing the block M!
Go visit the corridor of shame. It should open your eyes. Better yet...
I have cousins in the South, and there argument has always been, racism is everywhere, we might as well stay with the devil we know. Plus, they hate cold weather. The south is just different. It's hard to explain, but it's really another world in some lower economic areas.
The money mattered more. . .
I will always be a Michigan man, but the reality is that the culture at Clemson is awesome. I have never been any place else where virtually everyone was absolutely in love with the place. I remember how during a bitter cold spell in my freshman year in Bursley Hall that we all were saying, "Why didn't we go to Florida, Auburn, or Clemson?" (The answer is obvious, of course.) My two sons went to Clemson and remained loyal to Michigan throughout, but we all found that Clemson is a great place. The only people who can't believe that people -- white or black -- want to go to a school like Clemson are those who know nothing about it.
This should go over well with the good ole boys clubs who run things down there.
Either way, good for the student athletes for taking a stand.
What about the Asian Americans on campus? And the Latinos?
Uh yes what about them ? What does one group of people taking a stand over injustice have to do with any other group of people that reside on UTs campus