by KaiserJeep » Tue 07 Mar 2017, 11:49:50
IMHO attitudes about race are primarily cultural, but with a large component of education or self-education. I was born in Illinois, North of the Mason-Dixon line. I was raised in North Carolina, Louisiana, Illinois, Virginia, and Guam. My parents were both Southerners, Dad a farm boy from Oklahoma and Mom a farm girl from Arkansas. We lived in segregated white neighborhoods, and I attended segregated schools, or as was the case in Illinois, in a town that did not have a single non-white face in over 5500 people.
I was the oldest of six kids, and the only one in a family of eight who was not to some degree a racist. The reason was simple. Somebody gifted me at the age of eight with a set of Mark Twain's novels. I saw the B&W 1930 version of Tom Sawyer on TV, and then I read the book. Then I read all of Twain's novels, and the one that marked my soul at the age of 10, after numerous attempts to read and understand what was not after all a children's book, was the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Then I got exposed to all those attitudes about race, everywhere we lived. Dad had joined the Merchant Marine at age 15, during WW2. Mom had joined the Army and was a clerk/typist during the Korean War. Dad ended up as a career USCG officer and Mom raised all six kids as her primary job. We were living in Manassas, VA during MLK's famous Civil Rights march, and I saw all of the Civil Rights movement on TV during the taught tension of the Cold War. Then I served during the Vietnam conflict, also in the USCG. Although Eisenhower had officially desegregated the military services in the 1950s and 1960s, it was not a thorough job. When I served, the USCG's cooks, aka "mess boys" were Filipino's at a ratio of 3:1. Most of the menial labor including janitorial duties were performed by minorities.
I saw the birth, life, and death of that racial policy called "affirmative action". One of the things that killed it was the 1994 publication of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Political Scientist Charles A. Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein who was a Phd Psychologist.
The book was savaged by the Left, and unfortunately the respectable Herrnstein was dead right about the time the book was published, before he could defend his work. Charles Alan Murray is an American libertarian conservative political scientist, sociologist, author, and columnist. He became well known for his book Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980 (1984), which discussed the failure of the American welfare system, and disclosed that Liberal social policies were savagely oppressing minorities.
IMHO Murray failed to successfully defend the book that Herrnstein and himself had written. That work has subsequently been defended by others. It is notable that when the Human Genome Project was finished and all their data was placed online, that Herrnstein and Murray were vindicated, when intelligence was linked to genetic clusters which were after all created when human populations were isolated from one another. It should also be noted that the results of the HGP thoroughly debunked the long-standing "three races" classification used in Anthropology, and with that the notion that intelligence was related to skin color.
IMHO anybody who still expresses the opinion that Herrnstein and Murray are racists after the exhaustive debate and the successful defense of both the book and the HGP, has got a serious case of cranial-rectal inversion. That such people are by and large members of the political Left is because at that end of the ideological spectrum, beliefs trump reality.
Because here we are in 2017, and many colleges and universities still have affirmative action quotas based on the 400+ year old Anthropological definitions of race, and still with harmful welfare policies that are the next thing to genocidal. If you doubt that, try moving to and living in inner-city Detroit, or St. Louis, or Harlem, or Watts.
KaiserJeep 2.0, Neural Subnode 0010 0000 0001 0110 - 1001 0011 0011, Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix 0000 0000 0001
Resistance is Futile, YOU will be Assimilated.
Warning: Messages timestamped before April 1, 2016, 06:00 PST were posted by the unmodified human KaiserJeep 1.0