Posted by playa2:
When you guys start your own thread start it with this:
Hurricaine Katrina
Can you imagine the United States government waiting 5 days as little blonde haired blue eyed babies crying and dying in the streets with no food or water... or elderly white people dying in the streets ... news guy doing a report just a few steps from a dead elderly white man on a bridge. Young white women looking into the camera saying help us, and nothing happens for 5 days?
AS FOR OUR THIRD WORLD BLACK FOLKS
If its happening in a "third-world" country, so what right?
Its as though people read and hear the mortality numbers, see the starving, mutilated & dead Africans on TV and stare blankly in mute stupidity.
But if people in Great Britain are killed in a subway attack (which WAS horrible) we (Americans) can relate better to their suffering because they're white.
IMAGINE how the American, European;Caucasian world would have reacted if those torture images from Abu Gharib were of ALL WHITE PEOPLE!
Can you say "riots" and "revolution" in the streets, chidren?
But arabs? Nooooooo....They're lives are expendable.
Starving & executed Africans? Pass me the steak & potatos, honey!
Central & South Americans, Asians tortured, mutilated, prostituted and other abuses is just fine-As long as they don't cancel '24' with some stupid news report!!!
This is the world we live in and this is how the Majority who runs this country thinks.
I don't really dispute your general point, though I do wonder if there is any data to suggest that blacks are truly more sympathetic about, say, natural disasters in other parts of the globe than whites. For instance, is there documentation to show that blacks were more generous in sending support to tsunami victims, or the frequent floods in Bangladesh?
I think one will find that the reason the subway bombings and the like garner greater attention is not because they are occurring to white people per se, but because it's considered to have a greater transference to America -- as in destabilization of our government or financial systems.
We as a country don't need to feel as directly threatened by civil wars or natural disasters in impoverished nations because they don't directly affect our government or economic systems to the degree they, or terrorism, does when it occurs in countries our government shares deep military and economy ties with. The deeper those affiliations with a country, the more attention it will garner because the closer it strikes to home.
That said, the western world is the dominant force and it has been ruled by whites for a long time so it's no coincidence that the brunt our our international relations are with other "white" countries, and thus our greater ties and deeper concerns with them. That however is likely to change going forward as countries like India and China continue to grow at a faster rate than us and become powerhouses in their own rights that must be reckoned with.
IMO, racism isn't the only battle front here, nationalism also plays a very large role. People always wanting America to come out on top is like racism but on a larger scale. Please don't tell me that whites are the only nationalists who, for instance, believe in buying American products and don't want Asians, Indians, latinos, Mexicans, etc, taking "our" jobs. I hope it's not racist of me to assume that even blacks sometimes fear the arrival of new immigrants to their neighborhoods (like Koreans) out of fear they might be economically displaced by them.
It's hard to all get along when we constantly feel threatened by the other, and we are tribal by nature. As I've said before, much of this is human nature, not white or black nature.
[Edited by - blueseats on 09-28-2007 10:28 AM]
9/28/2007 8:17 AM