Posted on 05/12/2015 10:41:49 PM PDT by South40
OK, here is something not so snide; remove my ignorance, show some examples.
Back to snide; Bet you can’t.
Sorry, my comment was to an earlier poster not you.
As I said, I do not have the time to police FR. If someone posts a racists comment to me, I will call it out.
While I will not attempt to locate examples, I will clarify what I consider to be racist. And I will point out that most overt cases ARE removed from FR. The ones that remain are typically more subtle.
For the record, I do not consider pointing out racial statistics and other facts to be racist. Pointing out and mocking the racial bias of the media is not racist.
However, mocking ethnic characteristics generally is. For example, posting a caricature of a black man with giant lips eating a watermelon could be construed by any reasonable person as trying to provoke a racial stereotype. The exception to this is if the discussion is a critique of such an image. In the latter case it is informative rather than provocative.
Another example would be a post about a black employee (based on a posted photo) who failed to do a good job in which the person posting describes the employee as obviously the result of EOC. The problem with such comments is that we have no way of knowing if a particular person has a job based on merit or racial quotas. Comments like this demean all black people because there are a huge number of black professionals who do an incredible job in their work and should not be stereotyped by their skin pigmentation.
Conservatism embraces personal responsibility which is incompatible with blaming a person who has a particular skin tone for the moral failure of people with a similar skin tone or other physical characteristics that are ethnically similar.
My comments are not directed at you or the vast majority of truly conservative Freepers who never have or would post a racist comment on this forum. For those who do, my best guess is they are probably a mix of leftists trolls seeing what they can get away with and some immature (think very young) conservative-leaning (meaning they have may have rejected liberalism but do not necessarily understand conservatism) participants who don’t know any better for whatever reason.
I certainly do not buy into the leftist meme that FR or tea party conservatives are racists. We are the least racist of any demographic.
Stereotypes are earned, not given.
The reason so many, myself included, complain about the Affirmative Action hires is because we have so much experience in the matter, primarily dealing with AA hires who are in jobs that we know, but can't prove, they got based on something other than ability. That's normally skin color, gender, or in the case of the train driver who just klled 8, his imagined gender.
We know that because they often aren't even aware of what their job is, let alone how to do it.
We aren't here to please the Leftists, we are here to talk about things as they are, and one of the things that is, is that large numbers of dark skinned people get jobs that are based entirely on their dark skin.
It's also indisputable that Black people, generally, have significantly lower IQs than White people. That's scientific fact.
In order to shut off discussion of such things, the word racist is bandied about.
I’m not saying that it is inappropriate to point out that poor customer service resulted from EOE if that is known to be the reason in a specific case. The problem is when the stereotype is applied to individuals without evidence to support it.
Conservatism advocates individual responsibility rather than collectivism.
“It’s also indisputable that Black people, generally, have significantly lower IQs than White people. That’s scientific fact.”
I don’t have a problem with facts. The issue is whether they are used in a way that is useful and relevant.
If you were to use the above statistics to argue for encouraging more workforce development degrees as opposed to degrees that are more rigorous academically, rather than lowering the bar on such degrees in order to fill quotas, then that might be appropriate. But if such statistics are used to demean and insult an individual for being “stupid” because of his or her skin pigmentation, such “facts” have been misappropriated.
“In order to shut off discussion of such things, the word racist is bandied about.”
There are people who see everything in racial terms. These people often scream the most about racism.
However, just because some people use accusations of racism in order to shut down a conversation when they cannot win an argument by merit of fact, does not mean that racism is okay or does not exist. And it is specifically against FR policy to post racist comments. So I am fairly confident that there is a general consensus among Freepers and conservatives in general that racism does not represent our values or beliefs.
I agree with you though that we cannot allow the left to define what constitutes racism, because the left does not know what it is and is unable to end the entrenched racism of left wing policies.
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