62 Years After Brown v. BOE, Court Orders Schools to Desegregate

ecofarm said:

Hahaha

You claim the word racism is meaningless and then seek to exclude the social aspects of a social construct. You want to equate racial bigotry (an individual act) with racism (a social construct) in order to ignore the very real social impacts of racial bigotry by the majority power - real, socially impactful, racism.

It is you, the ignorant regarding sociology, that reduce the term to near meaningless by equating an individual action with a social construct. That's ironic.

So, tell us... is racism merely individual racial bigotry or is there more to it?

Lastly... if you're looking for real racism... look for someone claiming the term has no meaning. That's a common defense of racists.

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It is overuse of the word that obscures its meaning.
And it is the users of ad hominem attacks that have no argument.

Racism can be individual, institutional, or both.

Dittohead not! said:

Agreed, it is one of the most over used words in English. There are others, of course, that have lost their meaning as well.

How about defining racism as hating a group of people because of skin color or shape of the eyes, or other physical characteristics that we use to define the also overused word, "race"? That would go beyond simply having a "preference" to actually prejudging people (the real meaning of "prejudice") and condemning them based on their physical characteristics.

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That makes sense to me. However, I don't honestly believe that very much of that kind of racism still exists in the United States in 2016. At least not the kind that you would like to talk about here.

More importantly, what are the consequences of that kind of racism? Who is being adversely affected by it? Who is being targeted for violence, for example, because of that person's skin color?

At one time in the US, you could say that blacks were targeted for violence due to their skin color. Today, I would say that whites make up the majority of people targeted for crime due to skin color. And I completely disagree with the idea that white people today deserve physical harm because of racism that occurred 100-200 years ago against blacks.

Some people drone on today about " white women clutching their purses when they see a young black male ". I'm really not concerned with that. There are still instances of racial violence and rape occurring, and the media doesn't cover it from the standpoint of a racial issue, even though it is.