Replies

Thanks so much for posting the link. I found the same flawed thinking as everywhere else. If I have a bad outcome, it’s because everyone is against me. Couldn’t possibly be anything else, ‘cause I’m never wrong, and I never do anything wrong.

Maybe the mortgages don’t go to folks in that neighborhood because the house is a bad risk - maybe, say, from vandalism, random violence, or drug traffic across the street?

Maybe the health risks and lack of care in that neighborhood are worse because no doctor short of John Wayne is brave enough to work there, especially if he has prescription narcotics on the premises.

I find it interesting that in the SA booklet, “culture” and “racism” are classified as equally artificial and wrong. In my view, racism is absolutely wrong, but culture is not arbitrary. It is a culmination of any group’s behavior. The way members of a community relate to each other and to outsiders is called “culture”.

Hostility to, or acceptance of others is one thing that helps define a community’s culture. Hostility may be based on skin color. That’s my definition of racism, whether it’s rednecks or gang-bangers. And please pardon me if I don’t want to hang out with a group of people who are hostile to me. Cultural considerations are the problem, not skin color.

I once wrote a letter to the editor (remember those?) condemning a practice that was going on within a certain group of people, and got three or four days worth of insane, childish rebuttal because I was RIGHT ON TARGET, and the group in question couldn’t handle it.

One comment that really got ‘em going? I wrote: “Look at the name at the bottom of this letter. My first name is Hebrew. My last name is popular among both blacks and whites. If you think you know the color of my skin just by reading my comments, you are part of the problem.”

You see - it was my CULTURE, my THINKING that they hated. They decided my skin color by looking at my ideas. The very idea that I might be their color and still disagreed with them sent them into irrational, explosive convulsions. Because anyone with “my skin color” is good, not bad.

I don’t hate people because they are a different color - THERE is your artificial, childish construct. I disagree with them because of how they behave. A great many people with whom I disagree are the same color I am. May God have mercy on us all.