(07-26-2018, 06:32 PM)pirkster Wrote: ...and the rabbit hole just hit one heck of a roller coaster twist.  You just illustrated how to inject racism into anything and everything.

If you don't let it die, you're keeping it alive for nefarious reasons.

Which circles us back to the need for victim status, where believers remain slave to the idea that we should label groups and pit them against one another, rather than treat everyone as the individual they are.  Because without victimhood, there are no need for surrogates of the individual.  It always turns darkly into the dehumanization of the individual, by replacing the individual with a label (and by association, groups.)  Much easier to paint a false caricature of a group than the individuals that make up that group.  But hey, it sells to those who want to hear what's being sold.

If people desire to be victims, then victims they will always be.  They will always look for any and every excuse to explain their lack of success, rather than fix what it is about themselves that lead to failure.

If people desire to take charge of their own destiny and rely on one's self, owning both their own success and failures, then forever they will be free.

I think we have a duty to teach all people that there used to be slavery and Jim Crow.  
We have a duty to teach that segregation in education is still going on at the primary level, and that as late as the 1960s states ran universities that were for whites only.
We have a duty to teach that even in areas in the North, continuing into the 1970s, mob violence would be threatened against a black person who tried to move into a white neighborhood. 
We have a duty to teach that, from 1934 to 1968, black people could not get mortgages on the same terms as white people.

To stop teaching these things is supressing the truth.  To stop teaching these things deprives students of all colors the ability to properly make sense of what they see.

It's up to the students to decide that they're not going to adopt a victim mentality.  We can certainly encourage them to not see themselves as victims, but, we can't re-write history either.  If they want to look at the clear facts and decide that they need to spend their lives feeling like a victim, that's a freedom that they have as Americans.

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