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Trên lý thuyết, Hoa kỳ không còn là một nước kỳ thị chủng tộc

Subject: ***_Nước_Mỹ_**_CH ƯA_TRỞ_THÀNH_**_một_thiên_đường_bì nh_đẳng_chủng_tộc_
From: Mike Wilson
Date: Wed, May 05, 2021 11:03 am

Trên lý thuyết,
Hoa kỳ không còn là một nước kỳ thị chủng tộc

nhưng trên thực hành,
Hoa kỳ vẫn còn hiệu ứng kỳ thị chủng tộc
do việc làm luật, thi hành luật, áp dụng luật
bởi đa số Mỹ trắng thiếu thành thật

Hệ quả vẫn còn tồn tại là sự thất thế bất lợi của dân Mỹ da màu
trong mọi hoàn cảnh kinh tế chính trị xã hội

Ngay cả trong việc sàng lọc và chấp nhận sinh viên vào đại học
cùng có vấn đề phân biệt chủng tộc, kể cả với dân Mỹ gốc Á châu
- vì họ cần phải có điểm thi tuyển SAT & ACT cao hơn dân Mỹ trắng !
[Is There Asian-American Discrimination in College Admissions and SAT / ACT Prep?
https://blog.prepscholar.com/is-there-asian-american-discrimination-in-college-admissions-and-test-prep ]

Nước Mỹ chưa trở thành một thiên đường bình đẳng chủng tộc

Và những kẻ Mỹ trắng cuồng trump, muốn "nước Mỹ (trắng) vĩ đại trở lại", "Mỹ (trắng) trước hết"
là minh chứng cho hố sâu giữa lý tưởng và thực tại
của một nước Mỹ chưa trở thành ước vọng của chính nó
- cho mọi màu da !

Mike Wilson
___________________________

https://tinyurl.com/kfvzdzaz
Saying US is racist is not radical statement
Charles Blow
Columnist, The New York Times

Last Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina added himself to the long list of Republicans who have denied the existence of systemic racism in this country. Graham said on "Fox New Sunday" that "our systems are not racist. America’s not a racist country."

Graham argued that the country can’t be racist because both Barack Obama and Kamala Harris had been elected and somehow, their overcoming racial hurdles proves the absence of racial hurdles. His view seems to be that the exceptions somehow negated the rule.

In the rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s address to a joint session of Congress, the other senator from South Carolina, Tim Scott, the lone Black Republican in the Senate, parroted Graham and became an apologist for these denials of racism, saying too that the country wasn’t racist. He argued that people are "making money and gaining power by pretending we haven’t made any progress at all, by doubling down on the divisions we’ve worked so hard to heal."

Scott’s argument seems to leave open the possibility that America may have been a racist country but that it has matured out of it, that it has graduated into egalitarianism.

I personally don’t make much of Scott’s ability to reason. This is the same man who said in March that "woke supremacy," whatever that is, "is as bad as white supremacy." There is no world in which recent efforts at enlightenment (woke supremacy) can be equated to enslavement, lynching and mass incarceration (white supremacy). None.
It seems to me that the disingenuousness (dishonesty, insincerety) on the question of racism is largely a question of language. The question turns on another question: "What, to you, is America?" Is America the people who now inhabit the land, divorced from its systems and its history? Or, is the meaning of America inclusive of those systems and history?

When people say that America is a racist country, they don’t necessarily mean that all or even most Americans are consciously racist. However, it is important to remember that nearly half the country just voted for a full-on racist in Donald Trump, and they did so by either denying his racism, becoming apologists for it, or applauding it. What do you call a country thus composed (a half-racist country ??)

Historically, however, there is no question that the country was founded by racists and white supremacists, and that much of the early wealth of this country was built on the backs of enslaved Africans, and much of the early expansion came at the expense of the massacre of the land’s Indigenous (American-Indian) people and broken treaties with them.

Eight of the first 10 presidents personally enslaved Africans. In 1856, the chief justice of the Supreme Court wrote on the Dred Scott case, in an infamous ruling that would be issued in 1857, that Black people "had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

The country went on to fight a Civil War over whether some states could maintain slavery as they wished. Even some of the people arguing for, and fighting for, an end to slavery had expressed their white supremacist beliefs.

Some will concede the historical point and insist on the progress point, arguing that was then and this is now, that racism simply doesn’t exist now as it did then. I would agree. American racism has evolved and became less blunt, but it has not become less effective. Now systems do the work that once required the overt actions of masses of individual racists.

So, what does it mean for a system to be racist? Does the appellation depend on the system in question being openly, explicitly racist from top to bottom, or simply that there is some degree of measurable bias embedded in those systems? I assert the latter.

America is not the same country it was, but neither is it the (racist-free) country it purports to be.

And the precise way we phrase the statement makes all the difference: America’s systems have a pro-white/anti-black bias, and an extraordinary portion of America (the trump followers) denies or defends those biases.

Saying that America is racist is not a radical statement. If that requires a longer explanation or definition, so be it. The fact, in the end, is not altered.
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Charles Blow is a columnist for the New York Times.

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