VIDEO: Race in America – by Phil Vischer
In this second video RACE IN AMERICA Part 2, I will answer some of the queries that came out after the first video Racism In America was published. I will add more detail to support the statements and conclusions that were outlined in that video (SEE LINK BELOW). Here I also suggest how we can all help to improve the race relations within the communities and cities we live in.
In my first video – RACE IN AMERICA – Part 1 of 2, I said:
We need to talk about race. Why are people angry? Why so upset? Didn’t we elect a black president? Pass civil rights laws? Isn’t racism illegal now? Three years ago my brother Rob and I co-taught a class that discussed issues of racial injustice. That class turned into a popular podcast episode, which we’ve now turned into this video. Why are people still angry? Let’s take a look at race in America…
https://guyaneseonline.net/2020/11/15/video-race-in-america-by-phil-vischer/
Comments
Simple Simon suggests
Discuss/debate/decide
The newly elected houses introduce anti racist
laws that are rigorously enforced/enforceable.
Similar-simultaneously to the “anti social” laws
already introduced/in-place. Poo poo used to enforce, public prosecutor press charges, try
convict and incarcerate/fined if proven/pleaded guilty. It will publicly send the right message and act as a deterrent to future abuses.
Nothing tried nothing achieved
No pain no gain
No IFs or But !
QED
Kamtan-uk-EU
Ps uk already has anti social laws which are rigorously enforced need to also introduce anti
racial ones.
Opinion: Beware The ‘Wilful Ignorance That Protects Our Innocence’
Donald Trump did not create the failed America he presided over:
Trump was its manifestation.
Author of the article: Pete McMartin | Vancouver Sun
Michael is a childhood friend, my best friend until we parted ways to go to university. I went north to Toronto and he went south to Tennessee, where he followed in the footsteps of an older brother.
We grew up in Windsor — Canada’s most southern city on a latitude that, if extended west to the Pacific Ocean, intersects the Oregon-California border.
Windsor’s neighbour and American alter ego is Detroit, a mile across the Detroit River. Detroit literally looms over Windsor, with its skyline rising like a stockade in front of Windsor’s low-slung waterfront. The two cities are so close that during Detroit’s horrible 1967 race riot, I sat by the river and watched the night sky turn a vivid orange as Detroit burned. I was watching the end of Detroit as a functioning entity.
If you look at a map of southern Ontario, it resembles an arrowhead that points directly at America’s heartland, and at the arrow’s tip is Windsor.
This geographical likeness mirrors Windsor’s predilection for things American, so when it came to our sense of national identity, Michael and I grew up as hybrids:
We looked south as easily as we did north. We shopped in Detroit, went to rock shows there, went to ball games at Tiger Stadium. We were comfortable with American proximity and dominance, yet we were aware, too, of the vast and fundamental differences between the two cities.
Windsor was safe and peaceful: Detroit was Murder City. Its ghetto — a misnomer because “ghetto” suggests a confined space — sprawled across the entire inner city. As a white person, it was understood that you were never to enter. Whenever we went to Detroit, we were dogged by a frisson of fear.
Underlying all of it was RACE. White flight to the suburbs was well underway, as were the restrictive policies — official or otherwise — that kept blacks out of the suburbs. The demarcation lines between black and white were stark in Detroit.
Racism wasn’t unknown in Windsor, either. When a black family moved into the house next door to us, the neighbour who lived on the other side of them appeared at our front door to ask my father if he was willing to let the new family know that they were not welcome in the neighbourhood. I was never so proud of my father when he told him to “get the f— off my porch.” Our new next-door neighbours turned out to be lovely people, and their teenage son became, like Michael, a lifelong friend.
Michael went on to become a lawyer. He set up a practice in Tennessee, raised a family, retired, and moved to a resort town in Colorado. Since then, and especially since the advent of the Trump presidency, we’ve maintained a steady correspondence. Michael’s political sympathies, not surprisingly given his Canadian upbringing, are Democratic. This was not the case, he wrote, for many of those in his social circle, who despite Trump’s destructive time in office, continued to support him.
IT NOT ONLY DEFIED ALL LOGIC FOR MICHAEL, IT CAUSED HIM SOME FEAR.
Michael is Jewish, and he was alarmed at the rise in anti-Semitism in the U.S. during Trump’s presidency. How, he wondered, could these educated, affluent people support a president whose policies were not just venal and racist but potentially dangerous to him and his family?
We both wondered what had happened to the country I once admired and Michael came to call home. Had that hate always simmered there? Were we only now waking up to what had existed all along?
Probably, we thought, because Trump did not create the failed America he presided over:
TRUMP WAS ITS MANIFESTATION. It was there waiting to be unleashed, waiting for him to give racism and xenophobia the licence of legitimate political expression. Trump gave voice to the hate America had muttered under its breath for decades.
“That is what Trump so skilfully tapped into,” Michael wrote. “The poor white schmuck in East Tennessee is going to vote against his immediate self-interest, but consciously or otherwise he will vote for Trump to keep his place as a white person at the top of the pecking order. … MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. THAT’S CODE FOR KEEPING THE U.S. CASTE SYSTEM IN PLACE.”
A Biden presidency will be a welcome relief to the exhaustion and chaos of the last four years, but it will not substantially change the political landscape. Seventy million voters supported Trump, and that hardly constitutes a repudiation. Those voters are still there. They are still a huge, unstable and radical constituency.
Those voters pose, I believe, a serious threat not just to the American union but to the future of Canada.
In his last email to me, Michael sent a video of Eddie Glaude Jr., chair of Princeton’s Center for African-American Studies. Glaude, who is black, said America was not unique in its evils, but it “was singular in its refusal to acknowledge them, and singular in the legends and myths we tell about our inherent goodness … so we can maintain a kind of wilful ignorance that protects our innocence.”
I felt a pang listening to Glaude’s words because they felt … familiar. He could have been describing Canada. We have our own sins and evils, ones deeply embedded in our national myths. We, too, believe ourselves to be inherently good, and, let us be honest, much better at being good than Americans.
Yet we are not as different from Americans as we smugly believe ourselves to be.
Could a Trump wannabe find an audience in Canada? I would like to think not. But there is a cautionary lesson to learn here from the U.S.:
If we are to succeed as a nation, we have to confront our own sins and evils, and our capacity for hate.