This article appears in Dec 18-24, 2008.
Officer alleges police racism
Re: Front page story on the herald I can’t comment on the specifics, because I wasn’t there, and I doubt you were either. However, this woman claims that there is “systemic racism” in the HPD. If this was the case, she would never have been accepted
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That all of Halifax’s black people haven’t been lynched and left hanging from trees proves that there is no racism whatsoever.
Ha ha, good one, Tim. I was trying to think of something to say along the same lines but couldn’t get the phrasing as concise. Good job.
You haven’t really heard of the concept of affirmative action, have you ZZ.
Which means slave owners couldn’t have been racist because they “employed” African slaves… I’m following the OP’s line of logic and it still makes no fucking sense at all.
ZZtop your logic is flawed. You are thinking “she was hired, therefore there must be no racism.” However, you are missing the fact that, in part, her hiring was specifically a result of institutionalized racism. As SwampDonkey pointed out, there is this thing called Affirmative Action; it was created to combat institutionalized racism. It is admittedly sort of racist in and of itself, but one could say, crudely, that it was designed to fight fire with fire. Its very existence demonstrates there must be racism; if there wasn’t, no one would have felt the need to create these programs.(And yes I know this is inductive and a bit of a circular argument, but I am at work and don’t have time to write something more linear; in any case I doubt you know what this sentence even means.)
A lot of people don’t understand what “institutional racism” is. It’s not, the guy on top hates blacks, or every third person in the organization is looking to put you down. In fact, most people today are have gotten way past the overt racism of the past– few people will accept racist jokes, openly racist behavior, etc. Good on them.That doesn’t, however, mean that the practices of an organization aren’t constructed to have an adverse affect on minorities, or those who have been historically discriminated against. The classic example is the woman who can’t move up the company ladder because she can’t smooze with the higher-ups in the all-male club. But there are all sorts of other barriers to advancement, including social cues, testing practices, etc., that many people simply aren’t aware of, haven’t thought about. Lots of nice, open-minded, tolerant people can come together in a racist organization.
Agreed Tim. I’d argue a little about the semantics of your suggestion that practices are “constructed to have an adverse affect on minorities”. This implies a purposeful design intended to exclude. I’m not sure I agree that is usually the case (of course sometimes it probably is). Normally though, I’d say the policies of an institution can and do unintentionally have a disproportionate adverse effect on some populations, due to OTHER historical and lasting conditions faced by those populations in most or all aspects of society.The classic example of course is the practice in education programs of only accepting people with certain educational backgrounds and grade histories, without recognizing that there are large groups of people who live in conditions that may preclude them from gaining that education as easily as people in other populations. The poverty, crime, poor nutrition, social stresses, etc. etc. etc. that kids in these groups have faced as they grew up in segregated and poorly resourced neighbourhoods made it that much more likely that they would miss school, for example, and therefore they did not fare as well educationally. So by excluding them from university only compounds the damage already done to them and their communities by previous generations of more overt racism.