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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Janx" data-source="post: 6182816" data-attributes="member: 8835">I might wonder if some of this perception (on the white people's part) is that they aren't seeing the racisim, so they don't think it's happening.In the old days, it was pretty obvious.  You got whipped, we didn't.  Then you had your crappy drinking fountain, we had our nice one.  And a bunch of us white people thought that was wrong.Stuff changed.  People got shot.  People got elected.but in some places, LA, NYC, apparently it's still a racist racehole.  Sorry.  We didn't know that (well, it keeps coming back in the news so we should).In other places, it's not as bad.  When Quannel X goes on a rant about racist police in Houston singling out a black suspect, he lacks credibility because over half of the police force isn't white.  Which means in all likelyhood over half of all black suspects arrested are probably arrested by non-white cops assuming a random distribution of who's going to arrest somebody on a given day.No doubt there's some racist jerks mixed in there, but it's likely harder to pull off a racism scam when your peers are looking out for that stuff.In Houston, and probably other places, the racial distribution virtually mirrors the economic distribution.  So while we all really know that it's poor people who commit the most crimes,  since that happens to be mostly non-white people, the terminology used is color based instead of money based.Teachers interviewing at schools get told the % white/non-white levels as a recruitment data-point.  Because the bad schools are fed by apartment housing which are low rent which are poor people, which are predominantly non-white.  Making it easier to describe by color which is visually obvious in the halls, than by census data.  Katy ISD is really nice. Spring ISD is going downhill (the influx of Katrina evacuees and the resulting crime rate increase at those schools being why my wife quite working there).  Spring High was just in the news for a murder-by-knife incident last week.In listening to my teacher friends talk, as an outsider, I suppose that can sound a little bit racist.  I don't think they hate black people.  But they aren't entirely impressed by the population sample's behavior.I reckon there's a case to be made that people talking about the problem at the schools should be using economic terms, instead of racial terms.  It's definitely not a good thing to say "the problem with Spring ISD is all the black kids."  Luckily, I don't literally hear that.  But I sense people are dancing around saying that.Likewise, that same demographic that is blamed for the trouble, has evolved a culture of "anti-whitism."  If a black kid shows up using proper grammar, not dressing like a gangster, he's picked on for "acting white."  Freakonomics has a section about this, and mentions some famous basketball star exprienced this (kareem abdul jabar if I recall).  I don't think this is a healthy culture. I can certainly see where black folks haven't gotten a good deal by some white folk.  But that disrespects that some chunk of us white folk who thought so highly of blacks' equality that we define the Civil War as being about helping them.So for as many white folk that are really racist (as in would take steps to hinder/harm a non-white person), there's as many who aren't.I reckon that we may not always realize that not everything's solved, because it's not as obvious as it was.  And we might not realize that how we say things isn't helping, but that doesn't mean an actual intent to harm.  Which is where true racism is.</blockquote>

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