
America Isn’t a Racist Country - andrenth
https://www.wsj.com/articles/america-isnt-a-racist-country-11595628914
======
sawaruna
>The operating thesis of a significant segment of the leadership in these
states is that America is a racist nation, governed by a horde of white male
supremacists who use the pretense of equality to maintain their superior
position. When asked for evidence to support the claim of white supremacy,”
the only response I have been given is, “Look all around.” They hold this
untruth to be self-evident.

I'm sure some are able to offer specific evidence beyond 'look all around' to
support their claim.

~~~
jfengel
Indeed, he seems to be illustrating the point. "I'm not listening, and a major
newspaper will publish my failure to listen as news."

------
foldr
My home country (UK) has plenty of its own problems with racism, but the one
thing that stands out about the US is the level of unquestioned de facto
racial segregation in society. For example, I lived for around a year in a
smallish town in a very progressive area of Massachusetts. Almost uniformly,
waiters in restaurants were white and kitchen staff were Latino. Similarly,
the town was almost all white, and almost all of the African Americans in the
local area lived in another town. Naturally, all of the white progressives
advised me in hushed tones not to live there. Racism is so deeply ingrained in
the US that a lot of it simply passes unnoticed. Similarly, a lot of British
people are blind to the amount of class snobbery that still exists in British
society. Sometimes you need an outsider's perspective to see clearly.

~~~
brudgers
Sure buddy.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Asians_in_association_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Asians_in_association_football)

~~~
foldr
I said quite explicitly that the UK also has problems with racism. In any
case, a UK/US comparison is not really the main focus of my comment. I'm not
saying that the UK is "less racist" than the US. (Amusingly, Brits and
Americans are often each equally convinced that the other country is the more
racist.) However, I do think that there is de facto racial segregation in the
US on a larger scale than there is in the UK. Certainly, this difference was
visible to me, and I think it is a notable feature of American society and
race politics.

Football is an odd one. For some reason professional sports in general, both
in the UK and the US, can be very socially regressive. For example, there are
hardly any out gay footballers either, but you'd be wrong to infer from this
that the UK is a massively homophobic country in comparison to others. (We
legalized gay marriage before the US did, and through legislation rather than
a court decision.)

Anyway, these are all complex issues, and "sure buddy" plus a link to a
Wikipedia article doesn't really add much to the discussion, does it? Anyone
can find innumerable examples of racism in both the US and the UK just by
googling.

~~~
brudgers
The US legalized same sex marriage in 2003 via a ruling of the Massachusetts
Supreme Court and it came into effect in 2004. That's ten years prior to the
UK. The Full Faith and Credit Clause of the Constitution made those marriages
binding everywhere in the US.

Comparing a European country to the US is, in the vast majority of cases,
_blub_ provincialism. On the US scale, Qaddafi's atrocities were in every
Londoner's back yard. England is the size of Alabama and the western leg of
the first US trans-continental railroad was longer than all the high speed
rail in France.

It's that convenient smugness that glosses over the historical fact that the
Trans-Atlantic slave trade was a European endeavor. Europeans in Europe were
turning profit by selling slaves to Europeans in the Americas.

And of course, same sex-marriage is still against the adopted policy of the
UK's official churches which in 2016 kicked the Episcopalians out for
performing same-sex marriages. The same year the Orlando Pride started
playing. The next year, they moved along with the Lions to the stadium with
the 49 rainbow seats.

~~~
foldr
>The US legalized same sex marriage in 2003

This an extremely disengenous thing to say. As you well know, in most of the
US, it was not possible for gay couples to get married in 2003. Nor, if they
did, were their rights as married couples guaranteed or enforceable across the
whole nation. You should also note that the UK introduced civil partnerships
in 2004. So for most of the period from 2003-2015, a typical British gay
couple had better legal protections available than their American
counterparts. But all this is off topic, really.

>And of course, same sex-marriage is still against the adopted policy of the
UK's official churches

It's also against the policy of many US churches, and they are similarly not
required by law to perform same sex marriages.

Beyond that, you are reading much into my comment that clearly isn't there,
and going off on a number of tangents. There's no "smugness", or suggestion
that the UK is better than the US. I am merely talking about one specific
feature of US society (extensive de facto racial segregation). Please take the
time to actually read what I'm saying rather than responding to some imaginary
caricature of a smug Brit.

In any case I'm at a loss to see what your overall point is. Suppose that the
UK is worse than the US in every way. Does that somehow mean that segregation
in the US is ok? Of course not.

>49 rainbow seats

Those are a memorial to the victims of the Pulse shooting. It's quite sick and
weird to use that memorial as evidence of progress in LGBT rights.

~~~
brudgers
The Church of England is a state supported institution headed by the monarch.
It's positions are those of the head-of-state. The US does not have an
official state church and it's head of state is not by right the head of any
church. Or to put it another way, the Queen could change CoE policy by the
same means Henry VIII created it.

The smugness is talking about the US like it is the UK. Nearly 300 million
Europeans live in countries with constitutional bans on same sex marriage.

Pulse happened less than two miles from the house where my parents live. Where
I grew up. In 1991 I had arthroscopic surgery in a building on the same block
but fronting Kaley. In the 80's I worked in a sandwich shop on the next block
north on Orange Ave, had a friend with an apartment on Esther two houses down
on the other side of Orange Ave. I took a date to eat in the building Pulse
was in during High School...it was an Italian restaurant for many many years.
I went to the site two months after the shooting while visiting my parents.

One of my high-school soccer teammates at the high school a mile down the road
from Pulse was a youth coach on the girls side of the Orlando Lions academy. I
was at the Lions first home game in 2015. I've been around Orlando's soccer
culture since 1977.

The WSL team is called "The Pride." It's a double-entendre. For the Lions and
for Gay Pride. The rainbow seats aren't military propaganda ala poppy pinning.
Yes, they honor the victims of Pulse. They honor them by recognizing that the
shooting was an act of hate. An act of homophobia. They honor the victims by
asserting that the hate at Pulse affected all Orlandoeans because it was hate.

I know people who went to Pulse while it was Pulse. My siblings have friends
who were directly touched by the shooting. What I said about Pulse makes me
sick, but not in the way you impute.

San Francisco has had domestic partnerships since 1990. California since 1999.
Vermont since 2000. Stonewall is a National Monument created by Obama.

England is about the same size as Alabama. And perhaps more provincial. The
Orlando Pride is full of "out footballers". And though Robbie Rogers had to
leave English football for coming out, he had full public support by the MLS
and was able to resume his career here.

~~~
foldr
I think you want to have a silly argument about the US vs the UK (or actually
the US vs Europe, which is even less relevant to my original comment). I did
not make any claims about which is "better", so there's really nothing to talk
about here. That is, unless you wish to continue going on long rants, telling
your life story, using the mass murder of gay people as an example of
progress, and making wholly inaccurate claims about the history of gay rights
in the US. State-level civil partnerships are, as you know, of marginal value
when not recognized by the federal government, which all Americans have to
deal with. And it's inarguable that in the years following the introducing of
civil partnerships in the UK, gay people in Britain were able to have their
relationships recognized legally more effectively than gay people in the US
(particularly with regard to e.g. spousal visas).

>England is about the same size as Alabama. And perhaps more provincial.

Alabama has a population of 5 million. The UK has a population of 67 million.
England has a population of 56 million. London by itself has a higher
population than Alabama and is vastly more diverse and outward-looking.

From the examples you use in your comment, I can only assume that you just
don't know much about the UK. E.g., there are also plenty of memorials to
various LGBT causes in the UK. There is nothing particularly remarkable about
this.

> [The Church of England's] positions are those of the head-of-state.

America doesn't have an established church, so it's hard to make a sensible
comparison. The current American head of state doesn't support gay marriage
either, by the way :) It's not really true that the Church's position is the
Queen's position. The Queen, though head of the Church, also signed into law
the legislation that legalized gay marriage. The girl wears a lot of hats.

>the Queen could change CoE policy

Actually she couldn't. This would be a violation of long-standing
constitutional norms.

~~~
brudgers
England doesn’t have a constitution. English “norms” are what forced Meghan
from royal duties. I mean it’s hard to come up with anything more inherently
racist than hereditary monarchy. But one which maintains an armed overseas
enclave to enforce anti-Roman Catholic policy is unfortunately a good start.

Saying “it’s our tradition” doesn’t make the monarch’s inaction any less a
condoning of hate and discrimination. Tradition, however, is how they justify
hate and discrimination in Alabama.

~~~
foldr
>England doesn’t have a constitution.

Yes it does. It doesn't have a _written_ constitution. (Or at least, the main
elements of the constitution are not codified in a single privileged written
document. There are documents such as magna carta that form an important part
of legal tradition that feeds into British constitutional law.). The
constitution of the UK defines quite clearly the role of the monarch, which is
not anywhere near as wide-ranging as you imagine. If you don't even know this
basic fact about the UK, you really have no business commenting on the UK vs
the US.

With regard to Northern Ireland, Meghan, etc., you are framing your comments
in a way that makes a sensible discussion impossible, so I won't take the
bait.

------
foxyv
America's racism is kind of lazy and cowardly. It's mostly just leftovers from
the 20th century that we keep because no one wants to reverse it all. We have
anti-homelessness laws, housing laws, education laws, drug laws and
prosecutorial discretion that all target or allow non-overt racial
discrimination.

On the surface they aren't specific to a racial group like the Jim Crow laws.
It's just like:

"Oh hey black people are doing this. Let's make that illegal!" (Crack,
Loitering, etc...)

"Let's give cops and prosecutors the ability to choose who they enforce this
law against." (White boys will be boys)

"White people already have an advantage in this area. Let's cement that
advantage with a carefully planned regulation." (Housing, tax incentives,
education system)

Then 50 years later we just keep those laws. Now it seems "Normal" to us to
say:

"School districts should be funded based on standardized test scores."

"Credit scores for those who buy a home will be higher than those who pay rent
on time."

"Student loans should be non-dischargeable so people don't run out on loans
after graduating."

------
torstenvl
> _put his knee and the full weight of his body on Floyd’s throat for roughly
> nine minutes_

I don't see any possible way in which dishonestly stretching the truth will
benefit the national conversation.

The knee on Floyd's neck was not the only load-bearing point of contact with
the ground, i.e., was not bearing Chauvin's full weight; and it was on the
side of his neck, not on his throat.

That is bad enough without exaggerating.

