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>There are better civil leaders to look up to -- some don't even require you to skim past their evil past.

>He's was never an angel, he just improved with age.

This is actually precisely what I find interesting and relevant about Malcolm X. I read his story not just as a man that people followed, but also as a man continuously undergoing a transformation. By virtue of his intellectual integrity in the face of his life experiences "El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz" manages to appear as a completely different person than "Malcolm Little". I am in agreement with you that the much of the activities of the NOI, and even things that Malcolm X was involved with on behalf of them, are absolutely not things to look up to. But again, that is why I think his story affects me, in that I see a man who has attained a degree of enlightenment by inspection of his own self. I find it easier to follow such a person than a saint.

His transformation is the most powerful part of this story and probably one of the reasons why so many readers of HN, who value continuous learning and self-improvement, can relate to it.

"When one condemns a group for the actions of a few -- i'll never believe that to be correct."

Racism in America is not an act, it's a caste system. It's not something you do, it's a form of social structuring. Black people are systematically disadvantaged, and white people receive privileges due to their race.

So you're wrong that racism is just "the actions of a few". This implies that you are a neutral white person, and shouldn't be blamed for hate crimes or whatever, which are done by a minority of bad white racists whom you don't even like.

In fact, the caste system of racism is maintained by all of us, in the same way the rest of the status quo is maintained. Mostly just by people being comfortable enough with the status quo that they don't try very hard to change it, and end up reinforcing it without even realizing. The caste system puts in place all the preconditions for the police brutality, the hate crimes, the denial of employment, etc. None of those things could happen without the caste system supporting and incentivizing them.

So we're all responsible for the existence of racism - the whole society. But in particular, consider the group of people who systematically benefits from said caste system, and who despite having drastically more power, are doing pathetically little to eliminate the caste system.

Were I looking at the situation from afar, it would seem completely reasonable to say "hey, fuck those people".

What if you are wrong?

You seem to think it's important to believe there is a caste system, which is moving close to Abrahamic Religion territory - you have to believe because (sometimes irrational) faith becomes the very bedrock of your belief system.

You you don't believe, you are part of the problem, right?

Well if tehblackbloc's wrong then racism in america is the action of quite a lot of people and the inaction of many more.

"fuck those people" still aint exactly unreasonable.

Though I'm not sure where you got the idea that it was "important to believe there is a caste system" from what was pretty much a cut and paste definition of racism as used in large chunks of civil rights activism/academia.

From the parent:

> In fact, the caste system of racism is maintained by all of us, in the same way the rest of the status quo is maintained. Mostly just by people being comfortable enough with the status quo that they don't try very hard to change it, and end up reinforcing it without even realising.

By implication, if you're not against there caste system, you're for it. And if you don't believe in the caste system, how can you be against it?

And I don't think it's a helpful definition. It could confuse a stupid person into thinking a dumb celebrity twitting a racial slur is one of the primary causes of inequality.

The "caste system" is entrenched poverty. Visual markers (skin colour) might make it harder to fight the poverty cycle (as it speeds up white flight, and causes some profiling and other discrimination), but the fundamental problem is no longer about race.

The poverty cycle in the US was caused by racism, and is to some extent worsened by racism. But if you want to stop it, you have to fight poverty. Free community college level education to young mothers (and young fathers), remedial literacy (for the kids who need it) in K-6. A few busses, to prevent the segregation due to white flight. That's just IMO, there's probably some things I'm missing.

Fighting the caste system is more or less orthogonal to fighting racism.

  In fact, the caste system of racism is maintained by all
  of us, in the same way the rest of the status quo is 
  maintained. Mostly just by people being comfortable 
  enough with the status quo that they don't try very hard 
  to change it

Thank you for posting this. This is so important for people to realize.

This finally "clicked" for me a few years ago when somebody explained it to me like this:

Murder is problem, right? And each of us knows that we have to go beyond simply not murdering people. We instinctively understand that if we witness an attempted murder in progress, we must do something: help, or call for help. We know that we need to punish murderers, maintain a police force to catch murderers, and hopefully defuse situations before they get to the point of people murdering each other.

Problems like racism are similar in one way: it's not enough for each of us to simply "not be racist."

(It's not an exact analogy, I know: racism is institutional whereas murder often isn't. However, it got me to think about racism differently...)

Your concept of hatred here is what I would describe as self defense. I draw a distinction between racial prejudice - that is, prejudging people based on their race - and racism - which I understand as a social-political-economic system of institutionalized racial oppression.

Racial prejudice is an order of magnitude less interesting to me than racial oppression. I am a person of color and I know that people see me and think all sorts of things about me because of things beyond my control; this bothers me, but it doesn't bother me as much as the fact that I've been physically attacked and harassed for walking around my own neighborhood, and it doesn't bother me as much as the fact that I know that I and many of my loved ones will, even holding all else equal, have worse outcomes with job interviews, police, and law enforcement because of our race. To me that's real racism, and it's not something that white people can experience in our society.

Stamping out racial prejudice is a worthwhile goal, but in my opinion it's an order of magnitude less important than ending racist systems. The focus on racial prejudice is likely to create lots of bad analysis (e.g. people who aspire to make the world "colorblind") from otherwise well-intentioned people, so I don't think it's tactically sound to focus on prejudice. I also do not believe there is any moral standing to criticize survivors of racism for having prejudicial feelings towards white people. It is a response. People build these walls because they're tired of getting hurt.

I have tactical objections and moral concerns with many things concerning the NOI but I do not judge people for their involvement or promotion of it, for as long as it's motivated by a desire for self-liberation. I'm not sure what the "atrocious stuff" you're worried about from his past is, but nothing I know from his past I consider as "evil" that I have to "ignore." The coffee and creamer allegory, etc. simply don't bother me, because I understand them in historical context.

White people can and do experience this. I have experienced harassment by blacks because I am white. Never a physical attack, but certainly verbal slurs and taunting. Am I therefore morally justified to have a predjudicial opinion of blacks, because a few anonymous ones have harassed me?

There isn't any institionalized discrimination in the USA any longer. There's a perception of it, but that's largely self reinforced. It's easier on my ego to tell myself I didn't get a job because of my race, rather than because another applicant was more qualified. Yes, there are individual prejudiced/racist people of all races and there always will be. But the institutionalized discrimination is gone.

You say that "people see me and think all sorts of things about me because of things beyond my control." This is just reality. People judge others based on looks, whether they are obese, skinny, muscular, how they dress, whether they have facial hair or wear glasses, whether they are naturally or deliberately bald, how they carry themselves, how they execute a handshake, and any number of other things.

Do you really give an automatic free pass to people who are involved with or support any idiology as long as it's in the cause of self-liberation? One of the other flaws of humans is that they are easily swayed by charasmatic leaders promising freedom from oppression. This often ends up badly for the supporters themselves when their leader turns out to be a tyrant, or for the people the leader set up to be the scapegoats.

White people can and do experience racial prejudice in America, but we do not experience institutional racism, which is the working definition of "racism" for the author of the comment you replied to.

> There isn't any institionalized discrimination in the USA any longer. There's a perception of it, but that's largely self reinforced.

Institutional racism is alive and well here; I'm surprised to be the first one to respond to your remarks stating otherwise. There are many, many studies that show a marked disparity between arrest rates, conviction rates, and incarceration rates for whites and blacks in America. This disparity exists virtually across the board and for crimes which we know are committed in equal amounts by both groups of people such as marijuana use (in fact, whites smoke more weed but are still arrested less frequently for it). Regarding employment, there are also plenty of studies which show that job applications with "black-sounding" names get far fewer callbacks than those with "white-sounding" names, regardless of what else is written on the application.

The difference between people judging someone based on race versus all of those other things that you mention is that in the other cases, society has not been shaped so that "haters of feature set X" are pretty exclusively the people in power, so e.g. bald people are not consistently discriminated against at every turn. This is at least in part what is meant by institutional racism: the random person on the street has little effect on anybody[1], but when people with the same attitude have the power to arrest you, to deny you a loan, to make your life difficult in any number of ways, the result is a hostile environment that is supported and maintained by the institutions that house such people and support their discriminatory behavior by tolerating its emergence in their official capacities.

Institutional racism can be difficult for members of the dominant group to acknowledge or even see. I have only started to become attuned to it myself over the past few years, and I still don't have a very sharp or complete picture of it. It is usually far more subtle than calling someone a name or making a disparaging remark: you will be treated with a veneer of politeness as your concerns are summarily dismissed. It's easy for someone from the dominant group to come up with excuses as to why a particular act is not an example of institutional racism instead of giving credence to the collected experiences of those who are on the receiving end[2]. If you are genuinely interested in investigating and understanding the phenomenon, I'd recommend looking at the statistics before talking to people about it for precisely this reason: what seems innocuous in isolation looks more sinister when you begin to understand the scale at which it is happening.

This comment is not going to change anybody's mind, and that's okay. I just didn't want to let that statement stand uncontested any longer than it already has.

[1] Though, really, when the random person on the street becomes many or most random people on the street, the effect can be pretty devastating as well. [2] Some are of the opinion that this tendency is itself an expression of racism, effectively assuming that the victims are mistaken or lying while the perpetrators are assumed to be innocent. I am not sure if it is a subtle racism or if it is simply hard to put faith in such a vastly different outcome that developed from a familiar situation. Having exhibited this behavior myself on more than one occasion, I'm sort of invested in believing that it is the latter.