I used to believe racism in the United States was overstated.

Sure, it existed. But it's not something widespread. Common. The claim americans are racists is ridiculous.

Well...I was wrong.

"Zohran Mamdani is a terrorist"

"Mamdani supports ISIS and HAMAS"

"New York City faces sharia law"

"Mamdani wants to MURDER jews"

The amount of shit published about this guy is absolutely insane.

He recently attended the 9/11 memorial ceremony.

At some point, he greeted congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and smiled for 5 seconds.

Immediatly, politicians went wild

Senator Ted Cruz:

Congresswoman Mary Miller :

Speaker Mike Johnson:

Here is the video. You can clearly see that he was stoic. He hugged her. Then he immediatly went back to being stoic.

Dude smiled 5 SECONDS in a 5 hour ceremony and they accuse him of celebrating 9/11

At the same ceremony, JD Vance and Howard Lutnick laughed and joked.

No one cares. They are white.

The US is more racist than I ever imagined.

You must live in New York. Most of the United States is still extremely racially segregated. As in, most people live in neighborhoods that are almost entirely people of their own race.

always has been meme

This is the world view you get when you consume your current events via ragebait extremism algorithms. I've never met a single person that has shared these views.

White culture in the US is very sensitive to overt racism. they really detest it. but if you let them, with a nice little cloth to hide behind, they will be the most grossly racist people you've ever interacted with. every news story about ICE harming brown children warms their hearts, as long as they don't have to see it or do it, or be told about it in a public place, that would be embarrassing.

Edit: dear white culture enthusiasts, feel free to keep telling on yourself, I'm here for it.

Ted Cruz would have taken a vacation if 9-11 had happened to Texas, he is a sniveling coward of a man.

Wait until you visit countries where overt racism is the norm.

And? Water is wet. Where ya been?

This is so true. I grew up in the deep south and everyone in my family was racist save for one uncle. All the rest, except for my dad believed they weren't racist. My dad was the most honest of the bunch. He was deeply racist and he would talk openly about it with us. We argued for years, but it never got loud.

But the weird thing is my dad could also recognize that racism was used by the Republicans to get people to vote against their own financial interests. And one really weird thing is when my dad died, he had several black and Latino friends who were devastated by his passing. They never knew he was racist. He didn't have a problem being friends with other races he just genuinely bought into white supremacy, but without all the hate. He was a weird guy.

My other family members, however, will insist they aren't racist while simultaneously saying that most Muslims are terrorists, Hispanics are lazy and Blacks are dumb. They vote against "socialist" programs they like because "those minorities and illegals will just use it all up and make us go bankrupt."

I live as close to Canada as I can and wish I realized when I was younger that I should emigrate. Now I'm too old.

Occasionally I will go south for business or to visit and it breaks my heart every time. The racism is so deeply ingrained that most people down there don't see it, but once you do see it, you can't unsee it.

I refuse to believe that they are capable of shame

I don't think Americans are more racist than anyone else, everyone has their blindspots. Europe, ask about gypsies, Russia is Russia, China has that genocide they're working on too. Israel too.

Since we're the financiers, making the conditions for which it happens - we are culpable beyond a doubt. We'll get our just deserts after this election (2028) probably.

I'd say the politicians play racism because people are ignorant and mostly play team sports. Most in America just ignore what is happening, they're struggling more than anyone overhere can remember since pre WW2 times. So you have people who would genuinely fight for what they believe in, but their own politicians are just playing them for chumps because money controls politics, not people.

Posts like these are just strawmen, and I know nobody here is going to agree, but it's lazy and performative and who cares. Go protest, vote, and get more active than, oh look I found racism in America.

That's also been my experience. Most racists that I am aware of think that being a racist means that you are a "bad person" and since they are not "bad people" they can't possibly be racist.

I would argue that there are many, many people who are racist to their very core, but they're not evil or bad people. You don't have to hate to be a racist. You don't have to murder people or burn crosses on their front yard or hang out with rednecks in white bed sheets to be a racist.

You can have friends of other colors and invite them over for dinner and go to games with them and treat them exactly like you treat every single other person around you and still be racist. You can sleep with people of other colors, spawn children with them, and raise those children in a happy family, and still be racist.

Racism is not an action. It is a belief.

If you believe that people of other colors are different from you in anything other than melanin content and possibly a handful of relatively minor bone structures, then you have at least some racism in you.

But explaining that to your family over Thanksgiving dinner is incredibly difficult and at best unproductive.

You never know if someone is just coming to awareness of these issues or not. I'd rather assume they're young and learning and feel stirred to share what they've just realized.

You are very lucky, then.

Fair point. It's difficult to wake up in America, I'll say. So many people just want you to take their objective viewport that makes sense and makes everyone else wrong. We don't want to be right, we just want to feel right. The other comments to OP is just a circle jerk, which is still antithetical to how we should be. Just seems like low level bait, not someone coming to a great personal discovery.

I mean obama was not very left and they went ape shit over him. 100% because a black man was elected president. that was just something beyond the pale for them. its why they think its fine to go facist because its went to far to them. Now who im talking about is republicans. republicans have sacrificed every aspect of conservative philosophy in the name of racism and its why olgiarchs are able to take it over so easy. they know even after they have violated the country and its laws. after they fuck over such a large swatch of the populace that it effects many of their memebers. often more on their members. they know they can still ead them by the nose with racist bulltrump.

America isn't the way it is because of Trump.
Trump is the way he is because of America.

so i would have said that the degree of racism was exaggerated like 10 years ago, but as it turns out, there was more shame involved with being racist but when trump declared he’s bringing open racism back, they all fell out of the wood work like they could finally breath after decades, and they are going to fucking tell you about it.

redlining

Racism is not an action. It is a belief.

I'd say it's a spectrum of belief and behavior or actions. For example, people can do racist things without realizing it.

It has been my experience that the people who are less honest about their racism tend to be the worst.

Being in the south already fucks with your head. I'm convinced that a lot of the hyper religiosity in the white south is overcompensation for the sin of slavery. You can see it in a lot of the laws they make trying to downplay slavery because it hurts the feelings of white kids (and makes white parents uncomfortable). They know it was fucked up but rather than fix the systemic inequities that exist as a holdover of those days, they'd rather keep the inequities, tell themselves racism is long gone(except for those democrats) and pat themselves on the back.

It's more like "Trump didn't shit on the floor, he just raised the carpet the turds were already there." IMO

Social media is a caricature. It doesn’t represent reality, don’t buy any of it.

But the racism is real, deep, and more subtle but scary. It’s shit said behind closed doors in my family, and that has left terrible imprints on generations.

Don't use social media as a gauge of racism in America. That's just shallow attention grabbing shit.

The entire government has been structured in racist ways, leading to racism in not just education, and goverment, but medical research, employment, Healthcare in general, housing, property, insurance, and the list goes on.

They intend to make the target of their racism look bad in any light, hypocrisy be damned (and they don't actually understand hypocrisy. If they do bad and don't get punished, its because they are good people. If the Other does bad they must be punished, because they are bad people).

Ted Cruz is the Senator for the State of Texas. This isn't a fringe county clerk in Mississippi.

He is one of the 120 most powerful people in the US. Senators have more power than representatives. The only people more powerful than a Senator are the President, Senate Majority Leader and Supreme Court.

What he says absolutely matters.

Look up the history of municipal swimming pools, thr actual history of healthcare coverage jn America, and any statement about welfare in the US since Reagan's been in office.

America will cut off it's own legs mid-femu if it means keeping black people from having anything in this country. I was so late to the party in realizing this too but we literally have nothing in place for commhnities or broad social programs in this country because racism has always been leveraged to keep it out. Any time something good was proposed someone said 'what if a black person benefits' and then we never heard about it again. It's not the government that's racist either they're just using the same trick that's been working since reconstruction.

Been hoping more recent events have been showing that at least a good majority of the racism will die with the boomers. Gen X still doesn't realize what they've been hypnotized with their entire lives but it's not too late for them to come around. Otherwise we gotta wait for them too to make it meaningful.

There are 100 senators.

And what's even more wild... a lot of that came from his own party, because defending the billionaires is more important than winning elections.

“I like Ted Cruz more than most of my other colleagues like Ted Cruz. And I hate Ted Cruz.”

• Al Franken

I agree. Like, I'm Native American. Brown skin, black hair, the whole works.

I myself realized that I was being racist to black people. I would start talking in AAVE when I met them, because I had the preconceived notion that that was a way for me to ingratiate myself into the in-crowd.

I never used the N-word, I do want to be clear about that, but I did not act like myself around the black people that I was familiar with.

The funny thing is, when I realized I was doing that, I stopped doing it, and then, I actually developed real friendships with black people instead of just acting friendly with them.

People can tell when you're being authentic. My fundamental core is not racist (at least as far as I am aware), but I practiced racism out of self-ignorance.

I'm sure there are other areas where I carry racism, and I'm working on it when it presents itself.

White people in America aren’t a monolith. Reneé Goode and Alex Pretti were white

At the risk of being inadvertently racist myself, I'd like to share some thoughts about Native Americans. Please forgive me if I cross the line or come off as offensive. I'm just trying to understand. I'll probably fuck this up.

There's still a hell of a lot of dysfunction among native peoples, most of which stems from historic oppression, genocide, etc. However it seems to me that tribal leadership has not helped your people out nearly as much as it could and often seems predatory itself. Humans being what we are it seems to me that cashing in on casinos has helped a few at the top rather than everyone else. I am I off base here?

Another thought, and this doesn't apply to Native Americans only, is that there is a great focus on "traditional" knowledge, rituals, stories etc... Now I'm an atheist and tend to be pretty skeptical about all religion(and to a lesser degree culture) so from my vantage point(and coming from a place of ignorance about Native American life) a lot of this focus seems to work to hold your people back. I get the sense that if instead of focusing on the past, which could very well be a flawed and inaccurate understanding of the past, you focused on education and made that the pride of your people, you'd be able to stand taller and take less shit from the dominant culture. I'm thinking of something like, "Oh yeah most Natives are doctors", or "Native Americans are very serious about science".

One culture I am familiar with is black culture in America and I feel similarly about the assumption that all black people go to church and are religious. I understand that embracing Jesus was necessary during slavery but at some point don't people realize they had adopted a slave religion designed to keep them from agitating about their circumstance?

I suppose most people don't really think about these things much and just live their lives unexamined, which is sad because it just helps those who prey on us without us realizing it.

It matters, but it doesn’t matter if it’s crazy because it’s Twitter.

Cruz is looking to insert himself into drama, which will get him attention, which is the only thing that matters on Twitter. This is a strategic tweet; I wouldn’t be surprised if one of his campaigners formulated and posted it on purpose. TBH, I’d do something like that if I worked for him.

In other words… It’s a fake. It’s all fake.

I hear other countries have competitive racism going on, while the US is basically minor league racism.

But that's no excuse and racism is racism, so John Brown on that noise.

However it seems to me that tribal leadership has not helped your people out nearly as much as it could and often seems predatory itself.

This is actually common across post colonial societies. The book Why Nations Fail by Nobel Laureate Daron Acemoglu explains it well. Colonial powers left behind extractive institutions in non white polities whereas inclusive institutions were built wherever they stayed. It is very difficult to counter institutional momentum so the new elites often perpetuate the cycle of extraction started by settler-colonialism. Such extractive institutions promote corruption. That's not even taking into account neocolonial activities by prior beneficiaries of colonialism.

An example of an extractive insitutional practice on indigineous reserves is federal land trusteeship and the lack of full property rights. This means that residents cannot use their real estate as collateral to secure commercial bank loans or mortgages. Economists refer to this landlocked wealth as "dead capital" because it cannot be leveraged to start businesses, build credit, or generate local economic growth.

I question a causal relationship between religion and prosperity or that religion is a hindrance to agitation. MLK Jr and Gandhi were deeply religious and are amongst some of the most notable agitators of the 20th century. Ultimately what it comes down to is oppurtunity and we continue to live in a world where being born brown or black means you almost certainly, on average, have less.

As far as Native American politics go, I feel like applying Western ideology to Native Americans is very much the literal definition of trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

All of the other things I've said about race aside, there very much is a strong cultural portion of each individual person's makeup, and Western society has never understood the Native American.

As a whole, taken over the full course of time, Western society has always either infantilized, bastardized, or romanticized the Native American existence, the psyche, the soul.

And so when you see Native American societies failing to thrive in Western society, it is almost always a consequence of that failure rather than some sort of flaw with Native society.

Capitalism is not a cure-all. It does not fit everyone.

And when it encounters a people it does not fit with, it forces itself to either destroy them or conform them.

As a counter, I’ve never seen anywhere more racist in my life than Spain. And from what I’ve heard of the rest of Europe, they’re pretty damn racist as well.

Huh, you must not have traveled very much then

Baby account with this post which is almost as old as the account itself?

I wish all bots/Russian trolls/bad actors were this obvious. It’d make them easier to identify and block.

Bro, if you really believe Europe isn’t insanely racist, I’ve got some property in the desert that is a sure fire gold mine.

LOTS of race baiting going on everywhere.

Conservatism is a bigotry-based ideology. All conservatives believe in a made-up social hierarchy in which they are at the top, with only conservative billionaires above them. This is the mechanism by which all conservatives are bigots.

Conservatives are unable to see any problem with this imaginary hierarchy because conservatives are biologically unable to experience empathy for others. This is why overt racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry come so easily to them.

Conservatism is the very definition of evil. A conservative cannot become normal. They cannot change and become non-evil. Once you understand how truly, deeply evil conservatives are, it becomes immoral to keep any relationship with a conservative. Disown them.

It might be a new account, but I agree with the example it provided for our bigotry problem. We are completely infested with conservatives, which is why we have such a wide-spread problem with racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and other bigotry.

If we delete conservatism, we also delete the bigotry that comes with it.

They do have a lot of conservatives, unfortunately. Wherever conservatism is permitted to fester, bigotry will also fester.

that's why he's the best person to represent Texas in the Senate, It's why they keep voting for him

Italy, UK, Germany, Sweden, Denmark etal

I’ll bet you did. Anything you can spin to advocate for violence against those you disagree with, right?

Guess I’m 2/2 today.

Just another tool to create division and keeps people focused on what drives them apart.

Can’t have the plebs realizing we’re all under the heel of the ultra wealthy and coming together under that uniting factor.

Fucking finally. Yes!

I mean, I agree there were turds in the carpet already, but Trump absolutely did shit on the floor, whether figuratively or otherwise....

it was always racist, just hidden under the guise being "accepting" other cultures, but in reality they want conformity in a melting pot, they got scared when the civil rights movement happened so they had been fighting it ever since. US is also the MOST RIGHT WING western country, aka conservative, so naturally they have always have been racist, especially with never actually ending slavery of AA only on paper though. why do you think white people have to be constnatly reminded on POC that they are better, and some poc fall for it.