Re: sundra's remark

In article <1166485628.210069.272960@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Ed Stasiak" <estasiak@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Top Poster wrote
Pokee wrote

Could you imagine if we had a "White's Only" magazine or
"WET" - White Entertainment Television? Or "White People's
Only Awards".

White people do have those things. They're called "every magazine
that exists," "television," and "every award show," respectively.

Except that's not really true.

While most magazines, TV shows, award shows, whatever in
the U.S. are heavily biased towards Whites,

Not just heavily biased, but disproprtionately biased. That's one of
the key issues. The US Senate is only 1% black, while the US
population is 12% black. The equivalent proportional difference
(being at less than one-tenth your expected numbers) for whites would
be if the Senate only had 7 white Senators (US population is 75%
white).

it's simply because
Whites are the majority ethnic group in the U.S.

While "tyranny of the majority" is certainly one major effect, there
is also the historical inertia from previous decades and centuries
that have built implicit and even explicit roadblocks to changes in
the (white) status quo.

Even after Hispanics become the largest ethnic group in the country,
the historical inertia will persist for a very long time.

But you'll still see plenty of non-Whites in these primarily White
magazines, TV shows, award shows, etc.

Plenty? Just on a lark, I pulled out my last issue of Entertainment
Weekly, and tallied up pictures of whites, blacks, Asians, and
Hispanics. Here's what I got, compared with actual population
percentages for the US as a whole (from the 2000 census):

EW% US%
whites 81% 75%
blacks 14% 12%
Asians 3% 4%
Hispan 3% 13%

White are majorly over-represented, while blacks are slightly
over-represented. No big shocker: the cover story is about Will
Smith. Asians are represented about right, but Hispanics are majorly
under-represented. (Part of this could be a flaw in my tallying; not
all self-identifying Hispanics "look" Hispanic.)

Now, since this is magazine primarily dedicated to "liberal
Hollywood", you *expect* them to get it right, but even they
over-represent whites.

How about something less stereotypically PC? The only other magazine
I have handy access to is Scientific American, so here goes:

SA% US%
whites 85% 75%
blacks 10% 12%
Asians 5% 4%
Hispan 0% 13%

Even more biased towards whites, and this time, slightly biased
towards Asians (thanks to a photo of Kim Jon Il and a Singapore
Airlines ad) and slightly biased against blacks (even more so than the
number would indicate: half of the blacks were native Africans in
Unicef ad). But again, Hispanics got shafted.

And Pokee makes a valid point in that there are no _mainstream_
White-only organizations that are _open_ about their beliefs and
practices and if they were, the shit would hit the fan.

That's because those who hold power *by definition* don't need to
selective organizations to empower them. It's just arrogant preening
for the group in power to form a group to help them become more
powerful.

This double standard exists everywhere we look: food stamps go to the
poor, not the rich; beneficial handicaps in games like golf and go are
given to the weak players, not the strong players; (most?) parents
give their children head starts in races; parking spots for the
disabled are usually the closest to the main entrance; etc.

The fact is that in the politically correct U.S. of today, only Whites
can be considered racist.

That's not true. Racism is claiming inherent superiority or working
towards enabling or creating effective superiority of one race over
others. If a black person claimed that blacks were superior to
whites, that would be racist. But a group of people banding together
to correct historical racial imbalances *in a larger effort to promote
racial equality as an end goal* is not racism.

Given our status quo, racial equality will not come about through race
blindness. There are institutional blockades to racial equality that
cannot be addressed without looking at precisely the people affected
by them, so they can be targeted for empowerment.

By analogy, does anyone really think non-disabled people would, on
their own, generously leave the first row of parking spots empty for
the disabled, if there were no markings and no fines (i.e., we were
"handicap blind", relying only human nature to equalize everything
naturally)?

The fact of the matter is, human beings are naturally greedy, and if
they've got power, they don't like anything that even has the
potential of remotely decreasing that power, no matter how
disproportionate their power already is ("power corrupts" and all that
jazz).

Nathan

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alt.tv.survivor Certainty Contest: Cook Islands
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/atscc/index.html

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