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How Racist are You?
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
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Countries like the USA and Australia (where she initially conducted these experiments) have long histories of overt racism, either institutionally or personally. Governmental policies backed up by the will of the people to disadvantage peoples of different ethnic groups, be they aboriginal peoples in Oz or black people (and now hispanics) in the USA.
I think the UK is different. There has always been a native population here, when people have arrived as invaders they've included the native population, and adapted to it. We didn't import tens of thousands of slaves, and when immigrants have arrived they've integrated themselves into society.
Racism in this country is more subtle, nobody overtly thinks black people, asian people, eastern europeans are sub-human or anything like that. But if you divert the issue away from skin colour, it's always "they" are taking are jobs, "they are stealing our housing and benefits" e.t.c.
The only thing that changes over the years is who "they" are. Instead of doing anything about it, the government just sit back and let it happen. They could remind everyone that this country really is a nation of immigrants, most of us are either German, French or Italian with some Scandinavian thrown in.
Instead they leave it to the media, who whips everyone into a frenzy about immigrants making this country too over-crowded and bollocks like that. People in the UK will never admit to being racist, because they don't think that they are. They don't abuse people in the street, they don't daub swastikas on black peoples' houses (at least not often). But they get angry when you give them something other than skin colour to focus on.
My least favourite phrase is "I'm not Racist but" followed by a long diatrabe on how ethnics will be the death of us.
but i saw the whole thing, and i was like 'meh' as i'm unsure what she was trying to show other than power structures, and her chat at the end is a bit
i didn't see it as that, i saw it as someone rallying against a 'system' rather than just going along with it
I agree. It is 'meh'.
I know from a few family members and friends who have worked in Japan, for example, that racism is rife there ... but its harder to call them racists because that would sound racist. Innit?
well i know for a fact me and my mum don't
race in itself is rather pointless, it's only skin deep, there's a lot of other things like culture, class, wealth and politics that affect people more...
you should be blind to race cause if you are going to discriminate it's a relatively crap way, like discriminating on sex is crap too because to all intensive purposes, the 2 bands overlap so much, individual qualities show through it
i'd say it works well on children because children are easier to ply, with adults i couldn't see what she was trying to achieve other than making one group gang up on another because in our society they were in the power position historically, the people i rated were all the people who tried to bend it and sabotage it.
The people who went along with it in the brown eye catogory forgot they can be biased too, which is the problem - the stanford prison experiment is way better for showing how society positions affect people more as most people just go along with the crowd even if they disagree, which is well shown by the 'bystander effect'
btw, if you like this kind of thing it's well worth tracking down the BBC2 staging of the Stanford experiment - I won't spoil how it ended, but let's say it was both more hopefully and more surprising than the BBC were prepared for. Might have been called 'the Prison', I'm not certain though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Experiment
the experiment i belive, was really interesting programme, results were different to zimbardos but nonetheless show how power structures develop
I thought the programme was absolute tosh. These two guys put it better.
You wouldn't had exactly the same programme if you put a bunch of people in a room and said "all white people are racist - discuss." Which is ironically, a racist statement in itself.
The program was completely ridiculous. A cranky old woman spent an hour insinuating that all white people are racist, before finally coming out and saying it explicitly. A feisty black woman spends some time on her soap box arguing that white people can't understand racism - a more basic irony I challenge you to find. A mixed race chap pipes up and says he's completely white apart from his skin, then says that he doesn't pick his kids up from school because he thinks his kids might get shit for having a mixed-race dad. It was a complete fucking farce.
The whole show is tied together nicely by a Daily Mail reader who can't quite understand why he's not allowed to call people 'golliwogs' - which got a genui-lol out of me.
There's a massive difference between recognising that society favours one racial group over another (or one sex over another, incidentally), and saying that everyone who happens to be part of that group is therefore racist by default. And you'll always find a few idiots from the majority group who will claim that they are the ones that really have it worse, or at the very least, just as bad. Hell, there were people claiming this very thing at the height of slavery in America ffs, and it continues to be the BNP and Daily Mail's main message today. But that's not something exclusive to race, it seems to apply to everything. Complain about your working conditions, or how hard your job is, or how you don't get paid enough, and how long will it be before someone pipes up and says they've got it/had it much worse? But perhaps more important is that if all whites are by definition racist because they happen to live in a system that benefits them, what exactly was her programme proposing to do about it? Her methods suggested that combatting racism was merely about changing individual's perceptions, and yet all of her justification for doing so was societally based, not individually based.
But I agree, the discussion about non-whites "playing the game" was very interesting, particularly in the light of the Race & IQ documentary a couple of days only. It emerged that despite economic background, or family situation, the black kids that were successful were the ones whose parents had "middle class values" defined as putting massive value on education and ambitions of their kids becoming doctors, teachers, lawyers, etc, and attending Ivy League schools. Playing the game, rather than battling against it. And what exactly is wrong with that? I understood what she was saying, but I didn't understand the point she was making, and the objection she had with having to do so.
The programme was very black/white, and what was never mentioned was that despite a system that probably favours white people, East Asians are massively overrepresented at the higher income levels, are massively overrepresented at the top levels of education and academia. Again on the race and IQ documentary, they went to the uni in Berkeley, who a few years ago switched from an interview-based selection policy to one based purely on SAT results. It was a completely colour-blind system, and yet it resulted in 40% of their students being East Asian, despite Asian Americans making up just 4.5% of the US population (and that's all Asian Americans, not just East Asian Americans). How have they managed to achieve this in a society that presumably gives them the same disadvantage of not being white that black people have? The documentary suggested that it's because East Asian culture arguably puts even more emphasis on these middle class values than white society does (as does Jewish culture, which is why they are another group that is overrepresented at the top end of income and educational achievement). Whatever the reason for it, it is completely ludicrous to put all aspects of black underachievement at the door of a white-centric society, when other racial groups do even better than white people in that society. And I think the way you change the system to make it fair is by "playing the game" as she put it, and getting more people into positions of power. I don't understand the indignation of having to do so, and I think that the lack of respect for educational achievement (not just in certain black communities, because it's certainly common in white working-class areas like mine) is a major contributor in the situation many people in such communities find themselves in. How many black kids (or indeed white kids from working class backgrounds) have ambitions of going to the likes of Oxbridge? Now obviously, we need to address the social inequalities that cause certain groups to be at a disadvantage, but I can't accept that the groups themselves don't bear any responsibility to change their situation whatsoever.
Also, no-one seems to have pointed out that when the black fella was asked to "act white," at no stage was that challenged either by him or the other contestant. Apparently "acting white" is to look down your nose at people, and I think that in particular revealed that it's not just white people that are racist. Even if he was taking his prompts from the bitch, he was certainly in agreement all the way.
All of the black kids I gew up with, but I think that's an intersection of class and racial issues, where there is pressure on black children to overachieve in order to be equal.
No, I don't think you've understood what the game is.
Perhaps you'd like to explain then.
http://countercurrents.org/meade281009.htm
It is wrong that people have to play the game because it is a hurtful game to be caught up in, one where racism is actively ignored in order to get ahead.
When the poster jamelia says she has put the name "sarah" on job applications to better her cahnces of making it to interview, she is playing the game. It is bullshit and hurtfull and feels llike you are stabbing yourself in the stomach everytime you play but, if it gives you more chances you often play. Do you get it now?
I also have two Polish staff members at work whose names have a direct English translation. They use their full names for anything official, but they will both introduce themselves with the English shortened version of what their name would be in English. This is a very first-generation immigrant thing to do though, and is more about concerns about language barriers than anything else. I don't think it's an effort to prevent discrimination, because you can't really get around the fact that you talk with an East European accent.
It's not massively surprising that people would feel the need to lie about their name though, given the report only recently about the likelihood of CVs with African or Asian names getting a reply (although I'd be interested in the percentage of black Brits with African names). But maybe playing the game, succeeding, and then being in a position to change the rules of the game is the best way to go about it. Part of it is about getting more black people doing the hiring, but the greater part is addressing the prejudice in people's attitudes about black people, which aren't helped by reports of underachievement in certain aspects of society. And that is something that can only be changed by the community that is suffering that prejudice imo. It wouldn't surprise me if even black managers made decisions based on prejudice about their own race. And I'm sure people have prejudices against East Asians too, they just don't happen to be the particular prejudices that cause a manager to overlook a CV. They're probably more the sorts of prejudices that cause a sports coach to overlook an Asian athlete, for example. And of course I recognise that white people don't really have any of these sorts of prejudices, at least not in Europe (I dunno, maybe if you wanted to be a sprinter, but that's about it).
And of course I recognise the difficulty in this, because while you as an individual black person can put massive value on education, do extremely well, unless the rest of "the group" do the same thing, you're still going to be hit by that prejudice when you get to uni admissions, job applications, promotion opportunities, etc. And while you can implement laws preventing discrimination, I think this sort of low-level and not necessarily even malicious prejudice is something that is always going to be a factor.
I think there is a failure to replicate that huge emphasis on education and aspiration that I think is present in the East Asian and white middle class ethos, among the working classes of black, white and South Asian communities (and it just happens that black and South Asian people have a greater proportion of working class people as a percentage of their number). In fact, I think it's in danger of going even beyond a race issue to prejudice against the working class generally. Chavs, yobs, scroungers, etc - doesn't take long for this sort of attitude to start affecting people's opportunities. And this will mean that the majority of ethnic minorities in this country will then be doubly affected.
A lot of people don't seem to get that it was an exercise, not a discussion.