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Originally Posted by TheDuker
Financially-motivated racial pandering is not equivalent to ethnic cleansing. Your over-the-top language is making it harder to take you seriously.
The language is only slightly heated for effect. The Hawks owner states his intentions clearly. The problem isn't my language being over the top, it's the marketing euphemisms that are below the reality.
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as to whether this person can fairly be called a racist, I think motivation is a critical factor.
The problem with this narrow definition is that it is really a decision to give marketers a pass on their pernicious behavior. In fact, it gives a pass to the most damaging class of racial slights since low income crackers have few opportunities to discriminate -- business practices are the bigger problem.
The purpose of calling someone a racist is to stigmatize their behavior. By including people who benefit from and perpetuate racism, even though their personal feelings are different, we make the rhetoric more useful.
But let's complicate your narrow approach further. Imagine a cotton planter in 1880 who hires convict labor. Now this guy may truly prefer the company of his black mistress, have no time for Lost Cause blowhards, and be perfectly willing to hire white work gangs. But the reality is he benefits from a system that replaced slavery's control of labor with the criminalization of blackness. The Jim Crow laws weren't about keeping freed slaves out of restaurants, they ensnared workers in a massive prison labor system that was hired out to farmers. It solved the same problem as slavery -- retaining labor when other horizons beckoned.
But by the definition you use, since Jim Crow laws were primarily an economic measure, it wasn't racism it was just business. If I objected to six month prison terms for loitering as racist, the realists would explain how hard it was to keep cotton hands when there was so much work out west.
Money is at the heart of racism. If it is taken out of the definition, anti-racism is at best a parlor conversation for limousine liberals. But usually it's cover for unreconstructed racists who feel oppressed by the word.
Convict labor is no longer a pillar of Southern agriculture, but we've got other problems. Police who see a criminal class, not individuals, and behave accordingly. Employers who toss job applications from black-sounding names. Teachers who chuckle and humor
a young Neil Degrass Tyson who says he wants to be an astrophysicist. All those problem are addressable with integration of the social sphere. That's why the Hawks owner is a rat ***k.
Last edited by Bill Haywood; 09-11-2014 at 10:47 PM.