Eminem (was: Influenced by GR?)

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> -- an excellent antidote against smug armchair critics who believe that
> black people are myths and discrimination is all in the victim's mind ...
> 
> best

I'm not so sure it is, I guess it depends on how it is used.
That color is the discriminating factor gives me pause. Here
in the states, discourse on race and racism was, up until,
say the the mid to late 70s, generally framed in simplistic
terms--color. The stark polarity of balck/white conflict, as
it has been propagated, we have always known, embraces none
of the true complexities of racist behavior. As Doug M.
noted, media sensationalism, political expedience,
intellectual laziness (I tossed that one in for good
measure), and legal constraints have "conspired" to narrow
the scope of cognizable racism. What we often talk about is
a pared-down image of racism, one that delimits the
definition of its forms, its perpetrators, and especially
its victims. Consider the so called "asian-american" (I
reject these hyphenated labels, for several reasons I don't
have the time to explain just now), often called, by
politicians and the media,  the "model-minority", whose
experiences exist only in the penumbra of actionable racial
affronts, whose cultural, linguistic, religious, national,
AND color differences do not, as one might imagine, form the
basis for a modified paradigm of racism, but rather exist on
the, at times, far more insidious periphery of
offensiveness. The racial insult that this "group" suffers
in America are usually trivialized, reactions to them are
more easily dismissed as "hypersensitivity" or regarded as
source of amusement by the media and even the liberal press.
The situation is so complex. In California recently, chinese
business owners claimed that Indians are white and should
not be entitled to special loans for asian-minorities. If
you go back and read the history of the second american
"slave" trade, you will discover that both the Indians and
the Chinese were treated as non-whites and that the legal
and economic labor practices of the second "slave" economy
in the West would not have satisfied George Washington's
economic objections to Slavery in the East. 

It's complicated, but every morning I see the black
Columbian students kiss the White Columbian students on the
cheek and the white Columbian students kiss the black
Columbian students, the Sudanese hang with Poles for some
reason, Communisim they tell me, but I suspect it's
something else,  the Korean and the Mexicans girls giggle
while they read the Voice, the and I say to myself, ain't
America great!