"lets bust this watermelon open"

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It was just watching Ted Koppel on PBS with a town meeting in Jasper Texas where the black man was beaten to death and dragged behind a truck a few years ago. Two things struck me very directly and were difficult to comprehend. First of all in the poll that was done 69% of the whites believed that white and black are treated equally by law enforcement whereas only 26% of the blacks felt there was equal treatment. My uneducated guess is that this is consistent throughout our nation. The second that struck me was that with the trial of the white men who killed that man received the death penalty for their racist crime but it was the first time in our history that a white man was given the death penalty for a racist motivated murder of a black person. From this program i can only wonder to what extent this is still a very racist nation that as done an excellent job of keeping the surface looking good while harboring that same old bigotry. There may no longer be the separate water fountains, restrooms, sitting on the back of the bus or segregated schools and things are not as bad as they once were, there remains disequality that is being ignored mostly because we just don't want to see it.

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Re: "lets bust this watermelon open"

dyslexia wrote:

It was just watching Ted Koppel on PBS with a town meeting in Jasper Texas where the black man was beaten to death and dragged behind a truck a few years ago. Two things struck me very directly and were difficult to comprehend. First of all in the poll that was done 69% of the whites believed that white and black are treated equally by law enforcement whereas only 26% of the blacks felt there was equal treatment. My uneducated guess is that this is consistent throughout our nation.

As an interesting side line to that, there have been several studies on this and most reflect similar numbers regardless of the skin color of the police in question. Blacks, in general, don't feel they get a fair shake, even from other blacks...

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The second that struck me was that with the trial of the white men who killed that man received the death penalty for their racist crime but it was the first time in our history that a white man was given the death penalty for a racist motivated murder of a black person.

This is false. According to the Death Penalty Information Center this is the first case in Texas since 1854 where a white got the death penalty for killing a black. Nationally there have been 8 cases since the death penatly was restored a few decades ago.

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The general thrust of your statement appears to me to be correct, dys. Here in Texas I encounter racism almost daily.

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I will second edgarblythe racism is rampant in North Central Texas, the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex.

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We got a long way to go, and even further because we are currently taking some major giant steps backwards.

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fishin' so sorry i got that info from the program and if there were indeed other "race motivated" murders of blacks that resulted in the death penalty for whites, i apologize.

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No need to apologize dys!

Race issues have been with us for a very long time and they aren't going away any time soon.

Using the death penalty to highlight the problem (which everyone who has their eyes open can see pretty easily!) gets tricky because the raw numbers don't mean much and they get used/abused all the time. We hear repeatedly that blacks are disproportionatly convicted and sentenced to the death penalty yet seldom is it ever mentioned that since the death penalty was revived in 1977 57% percent of those executed were white while whites comprise 62% of the total US population (a 5% under-representation). Blacks comprise 12.2% of the total US population but they make up about 37% of those executed. (about a 25% over-representation..)

Together, blacks and whites make up right at 74% of the total population but they account for 94% of all the executions. Why is it that the people that make up the other 25% of the population only account for 6% of the death row executions?

Come up with the solution to that one and you win the big prize from the top shelf.

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fishin' - I don't have the stats, but the outcomes of some-

* it takes more than just a murder to get execution, there has to be extenuating cicumstances

* most murders by blacks are black on black

* the black community inherently has a more violent society caused by close living space, poverty, cycle of crime, etc.

* the appeal process does eliminate disparities and points of law (in most cases)

That is with your other stats. I have never understood where they get there numbers. Whenever I see people being executed, I know I see more "whites", so it "feels" more.

Thanks for the numbers - I always hate stats, people start with an outcome then get what they want!

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Racism does still exist, I believe, in just about all parts of the country. My only hope for eliminating it comes from the fact that we have made tremendous progress towards healing in the last 50 years.

Unfortunately, for some of us, we will not live 50 more years. Perhaps, in another half-century, Martin Luther King's dream that men and women will be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin will be more fully realized.

Time has a way of healing all wounds.

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While racism still exists today in the USA, it is no where as bad as it was >50 years ago. This country has come a long way since the day of Martin Luther King, Jr and JFK.

An interesting thing to note, is that Blacks in general would prefer to live in the South as opposed to the North. It seems that Black-White relations are better in the South than in the North for some reason.

I appreciated the comments of the Black ministers last night. Most of what they said, was relevant to some of the racism seen in Texas. As far as stats on police stops of cars in Texas, Latinos are picked out and stopped at almost the same frequency as Blacks.

I did not see any Latinos at the meeting last night.

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New Haven, good point about the hispanics, i wondered about that as well and wrote it off to perhaps that area of Texas does not have a significant hispanic population.

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It was either the WSJ or the NYTimes this past week, that showed the Hispanic distribution across the USA. Very high % in California, Florida, New Mexico, and Texas.

I thought the % in Texas was something like 35%.

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We're having our problems here:

Racial Controversy at GU

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New Haven: amazing what a little research can find:
Jasper Texas White population = 48.2%
Black population=43.9%
Hispanic = 8.6%

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