Human nature. What is human nature? To bleed? To fight like animals? Or to think and use one's brain to discard bad ideas and replace them with rational ones? Is it human nature to accept fate or to change it? To fight and die for faulty truths or to adapt and overcome?
But it is a fact that in just about every culture and society in the world, people who are perceived as outsiders tend to be discriminated against and not trusted.
That's a fact. But this wasn't the case with blacks in the South. I grew up with blacks. Almost everybody in the South did even if it wasn't that way in other parts of America. Been that way for hundreds of years. It is only through willfull misperception that blacks in the South could've ever been seen as 'outsiders' even if the rest of America might have viewed them as being so.
And it wasn't that blacks 'tended to be discriminated against'. They were discriminated against. 24/7.
And what to say about the word 'trust' that you used? So a man works beside you all day long, sweats just like you, has hopes and dreams just like you, has kids just like you, speaks the same language as you, fights and dies in wars for his country just like you but isn't worthy of trust because he's got a different colour skin? Human nature? That's bullsh!t. That was the way it was in the South- I grew up there and know that- and that is still the way it is in too many people's hearts and minds. Richards demonstrated that.
Believe what you want. People usually do.
I lived in an apartment 2 years ago and next to me lived a black family. There were two teenagers a boy and a girl -- for reference this was in California.
Every day after school the boy would bring his friends home and they would sit on the back patio which was next to my home office. I would listen to the talk of the mixed racial group go on about various teenage topics. Everyone talked in the same accent you couldn't tell the whites from the blacks they all talked in Black Ghetto slang. (It appears that the Whites want to imitate the blacks and it seems very popular to be Black.) Not only did they all talk the same they dressed the same.
My question is if being Black is so bad why do so many kids want to act, dress and talk like African-Americans?
Can you imagine in your day growing up in Georgia -- Whites trying to act Black?
What I am saying is that things have changed a lot but I'd be happier if kids had better role models and learned to talk English in high-school rather than Ghetto talk.
Jim Crow died two generations ago. It does our society no good to attempt to right the wrongs of the past by perpetuating affirmative action, racial quotas, and the racial double standard.
Many may harbor bigotry in their hearts. But that's a matter of morality, not law. So to attempt to purge it by using the force of government is wrong and counterproductive. "Equality under the law" was the goal of the civil rights movement achieved by Dr. King and others, black and white, who struggled by his side. It would be a shame to see that lost in our attempt to right the wrongs of the past, by resorting to state sanctioned discrimination--just like the Jim Crow laws of the South.
It sounds to me like you've got a good dose of white guilt. In my opinion, black bitterness plus white guilt equals a dysfunctional multiracial society--with only escalating resentment as a result. "Equality under the law" is the law of the land. So at this point in American history, if one lacks the talent or the drive to succeed--they should have no one to blame but themselves.
Your experiences not withstanding, Richards is not from the south, so don't blame the south for this.