Re: The Portrayal of Blacks in Popular Media

I fail to find the words "give up hope" in any of my posts. are you looking at the right posts. If you know how to read, you can find my solutions. One of them, if you can read English,is to urge African-American students to emulate Asian culture and the Asian mind set towards learning.

To continue with my responses to Aidan--

Aidan talks about new programs.

Very well, let us look at new programs and new approaches--


Suppose we could take one of the most underfunded and worst-performing big-city educational systems, pour lots of resources into it, build the best schools imagination can creat and then watch what happens.


What would happen?

Surprise: We've already done it. And the results should sober anyone WHO THINKS THAT BETTER EDUCATION CAN BE ACQUIRED WITH MERE DOLLARS>

Place- Kansas CIty, Mo.

Time- 1985

Action- Federal Judge Russell Clark ordered an ambitious overhaul of Kansas City Schools, largely at state expense, to overcome the effects of a racially segregated system.

Time Frame- 10years from 1985 to 1995

Events during 1985 to 1995- ONE AND A HALF BILLION, THAT'S ONE THOUSAND FIVE HUNDRED MILLION was spent on providing the newest and the best schools. Annual spending was DOUBLE that in even the highest spending nearby suburb.

Results: NO MEASURABLE IMPROVEMENT IN TEST SCORES.

Results: DROPOUT RATE HAS REMAINED THE SAME AS IN 1984- 60 PERCENT DROPPED OUT.

AN APPEALS COURT JUDGE FOUND THAT THE STUDENTS IN KANSAS CITY 'HAVE IN PLACE A SYSTEM THAT OFFERS MORE EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY THAN ANYWHERE IN AMERICA."


I await a rebuttal of the above post showing that it is erroneous and/or misleading.

You can not help those who do not want to be helped. All the best laid plans and ideas that are on this thread mean nothing if the people who need to make the changes refuse to. For example: If 30 students receive the same work assignment and only 15 put forth the effort and the other 15 simply choose not to do the work, is it societies fault because 15 chose not to do the work?
If I'm unemployed and do nothing to try and find a job, whose fault is that?
There have been some good points brought up in this thread. Some people elect to ignore some basic facts, others elect to interpet what's being posted.
What all this boils down to is this: If changes are to be made in American society, the people who are effected by the change need to step up and change themselves.
It's one thing to not have enough books for a class, It's another to have the book and not use it.

ralpheb, That's the reason why preschool is a good idea. It's also important to get parents involved in their children's education. There are things that can be done to help those other 15 students - to help themselves. That's the issue; not statistics that doesn't help resolve the problems.

To try to steer this post back on subject a bit...

What do you (anyone) think about the theory that there is anti-black bias intrinsic in the reporting of the news?

A couple of examples for your examination-

1) During the reporting on the looting in N.O. after Katrina, there were a couple of much publicized instances where the exact same scenarios were reported differently - and the only thing people could point to as a reason for this was the difference in skin colors. When a white man was seen sorting through the debris of a grocery store, he was said to be "looking for food". When a black woman was seen doing the same thing, she was said to be "looting the store".

2) Natalee Holloway's case is the latest in a long line of missing pretty white girls that the American press turns into a National Tragedy with 24/7 coverage. They don't do this for the blacks or hispanics that go missing. This phenomenon of the "Missing Pretty Girl Syndrome" has even been commented on by Michelle Malkin - hardly a whiny leftist.

http://michellemalkin.com/archives/002712.htm

I am of the opinion that these kinds of stories have the potential of leaving powerful subconscious impressions on the young. Impressions that they are less-than - impressions that their lives aren't somehow as valuable as white folks'.

What say you, true believers of A2K?

The Bluest Eye . . . Miss Morrison has canvassed this topic . . .

snood, I sincerely believe only those of us in the minority see the inconsistencies in our media. When anyone is shielded from discriminiation, it's hard to see the difference in how media reports the news. Experience has been our teacher; we still see many inequalities in how minorities and women are treated - many white folks haven't learned the lesson.

When I meet people in my many travels and tell them about how we were put into American concentration camps during WWII, they claim it's the first time they are hearing about it.

That was over 50 years ago, and most of the people I talk to are seniors in their 60s, 70s and 80s.

a) How do you know that was an anti-black bias, not an anti-woman bias? b) Were the two events reported by the same person? If not, the reporters may just have drawn different boundaries between "looting" and "searching". c) From following the Katrina story on CNN.com, the one consistent bias I noticed was pro-black,with a twist I found rather patronising. Several reporters pointed out that most people who couldn't make it out of towns were blacks, and what a shame that was for America. They didn't say that 2/3 of New Orleans' population was black, so most of the evacuees necessarily must have been black too. I'm not denying that race played a role in who managed to get out and who didn't. I have insufficient information to make that call. But the story as reported mislead the listener, and the bias was in the direction of encouraging white guilt and black indignation.


I haven't checked if the underlying facts are correct, since those stories don't make it into the international editions of American news outlets such as CNN or Radio Free Europe. (And I am too indifferent to them to check them out on the web.) Assuming the facts are as you describe them, I would count that as a racial bias -- plus sex bias, plus age bias, plus prettiness bias.

I have gotten that same responce CI when i tell people about that.

Or- the classic denial responce..

" They were not REAL concentration camps"

C.I., when i was raised in my grandparents home, racial epithets were never used, black people were treated as were any other people, and repeating racist comments or "jokes" would get you an ass whippin' . . . so, not unnaturally, i assumed the same values were imbibed by my mother. But when i was on leave before going overseas, she said to me: "Now don't you bring back any little yellow, slant-eyed bride!" and then laughed nervously, as though to cover the remark with "humor." I was flabergasted; i think that for a lot of Americans of the Dubya-Dubya Two generation, Asians in general, and the Japanese in pariticular, were less-than-human monsters.

There's been many studies done on "prettiness bias." They usually get better grades and better jobs just by their looks.

Some may be interested in a link I gave this last week on my ever-popular land use thread -
(which is at http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=62403)

http://www.archpaper.com/feature_articles/19_05_protest.html
Mike Davis on Ethnic Cleansing re New Orleans

I don't know. After Hitler, the word "concentration camp" acquired the connotation of "extermination camp", which the American camps were not. Conversely, the term somewhat lost the connotation of "detention camp", which the American camps were. I agree that denial about these things is generally annoying. (The most common denial phrase in Germany is "But they really got this Autobahn thing right.") But the specific phrase "they were not real concentration camps", is something I might have said too. And I have nothing to deny about this specific episode of American history.

Just another one of Bush's photo/tv ops that are full of BS.

In fact, the "concentration camp" was invented by the English during the Boer War. They could defeat the Boers in large-scale battles with the full array of forces, but they could not hold the countryside, and they could not trap and defeat the Boer Kommandos--their version of the militia. So they rounded up the Afrikaans women and children, and sent them to "concentration camps." These quickly turned into bywords for brutal repression because the English had not made provision for the number of people they rounded up and their needs-thousands died of septic diseases and among the children, of the diseases of malnutrition.

Thomas, You are free to define "concentration camp" any way you please, since you were never a victim.

Concentration camp
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.Jump to: navigation, search
A concentration camp is a large detention center created for political opponents, aliens, specific ethnic or religious groups, civilians of a critical war-zone, or other groups of people, often during a war. The term refers to situations where the internees are persons selected for their conformance to broad criteria without judicial process, rather than having been judged as individuals. Camps for prisoners of war are usually considered separately from this category, although informally (and in some other languages) they may also be called concentration camps. The word "concentration" indicates a regional concentration, but it also implies the crowded, and often unhealthy, state of the facilities.

The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. defines concentration camp as:

a camp where non-combatants of a district are accommodated, such as those instituted by Lord Kitchener during the South African war of 1899-1902; one for the internment of political prisoners, foreign nationals, etc., esp. as organized by the Nazi regime in Germany before and during the war of 1939-45

Does this describe what the American government did to its Japanese citizens as well?

Thomas, Why don't YOU tell us how we were treated, since you seem to be an expert on this topic.

No, I'm not an expert on this topic, and my previous understanding may well be wrong. That's why I'm asking.

My problem with people using that phrase , Thomas, is that they were making a crappy attempt at invalidating what really happened.
Just because there were not acd baths like there were in Germany, didnt mean it was any less of a torture chamber for people.
Just because MILLIONS werent killed there, doesnt make it any less of an evil.

A concentration camp is a concentration camp no matter how they kill the people inside.

And when I heard people say that, it sounded to me like they were saying.. since it wasnt like 'THIS'.. then it wasnt REAL..