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Comment by Jaruzel | Hacker News Reader

North America's attitude towards people of colour, absolutely disgusts me. I simply do not understand why that a country that was founded on on the principles of freedom continues to act this way. The fourth amendment clearly states that all citizens should be treated equally if suspected of a crime, yet this simply does not happen.

Yeah, the UK (my homeland) has it's problems, but in the main, racial in-equality is not one of it's major ones. Every country does have 'ghetto' type areas, where things aren't as black and white as they should be (no pun intended) but, come on America, you need to do better than this.

On the article itself:- A well written piece, and an real joy to read despite it's content. Things I had to look up, though:

Clark's Desert Boots: https://www.clarksusa.com/desert-boots/c/o203

Half Pint's 'Greetings': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2UdEasSWP0

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> North America's attitude towards people of colour, absolutely disgusts me. I simply do not understand why that a country that was founded on on the principles of freedom continues to act this way.

North america isn't a country. And the US wasn't founded on principles of freedom. Slavery existed back then ( slavery brought to the colonies by the british ).

> Yeah, the UK (my homeland) has it's problems, but in the main, racial in-equality is not one of it's major ones

Where minority soccer players get bananas thrown at them. Where masses of white children are raped and police do nothing because of fears of racism. Where a half black woman is paraded around by the british press as some lapdog of your "prince".

No country is perfect so lets stop with the finger wagging. Has the UK ever elected a black leader? Go read about or watch black people's/minorities' recent experiences in europe. They've been spat at, had racial epithets thrown their way, been discriminated against, etc.

So much this. There is a certain kind of European that loves to sneer down their nose at Americans, but show me the European country that has elected a black leader.

You don't know who is London's city mayor, isn't it ? Well I grant you he's not black.

Racism is certainly an issue in Europe, but at least our cops do not gunshot black people for any reason.

The US had a black president for 8 years so I guess America solved racism. /s

I think the point was not that America has solved racism, but that it is a common refrain of some Europeans to point to America's race problems as somehow indicative of the backwardness of Americans, while they smugly pat themselves on the back for being the progressive ideal of tolerance. But European countries have never had the kind of racial divisions that the US has. Until roughly 50 years ago, there was basically no significant non-white population in Europe. The US has had a significant black population for 400 years. And we now have a huge brown population as well. And now that Europe has acquired a significant non-white population, lo and behold, you see a lot of the same racial issues that the US faces.

You should visit Latin America. Everyone is judged by their skin tone. The darker you are, the more you are regarded as "the help." Parents are excited when their children are born with light skin. My in-laws are all Mexican and I can say that they are far more racist than any US citizen I've met.

I'm not even sure it's really "racism." But I do know that it's considered completely normal to think of others this way.

It's completely racism, dark skin color is an indication of non-European (priamrily either African or American indigenous) ancestry, and what you describe is a outgrowth of racism in which Europeans are favorered and the other two groups disfavored.

One of the most interesting conversations I’ve ever been involved with was when I went on a tour of guatemala with a group of med students from California. The kids were almost entirely children of immigrants from Latin America and Asia. They talked about differences in religion, in folklore, in parenting, in language — but one thing they absolutely agreed on was that people with light skin were lucky — and they talked about how to make their skin look lighter, etc.

It was really an eye opening conversation to me — how deep the impact of colonialism has been on those countries and how it even spreads through generations and across boundaries.

This is also true in China, and to varying extents everywhere else in Asia. Dark skin is an indication of low birth, pale creamy skin is considered desirable.

e.g. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/latest-trend-sweeping-china-lig...

The term you are looking for is “colorism”

You mean like football fans in the UK and across europe throwing bananas at black players?

http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/opinion/richard-evans-thr...

Did you even read the first sentence of the article you quote?

  HURLING a banana at a black soccer player was commonplace in England
  in the 1980s but has, thankfully, long been eradicated from its
  national game.

Did you even read the second sentence of the article you opened?

While it might not be happening in the UK so often now, the blatantly racist act — synonymous with treating players as apes or monkeys — endures elsewhere in European stadiums from Spain to Russia.

The comparison was about North America compared to the UK.

we actually do have this problem in the UK - for example, with the police targeting black teenagers/young adults for stop-and-searches in London. It seems a lot less pervasive/severe than in the US though.

I remember watching the Metropolitan Police (bringing you Institutional Racism since the 1950s) checkpoints at the 'ring of steel' in the City of London during my smoke breaks - I can't recall any time they stopped anyone white, it was always blacks. The stated purpose of the checkpoints was to prevent IRA terrorism, and young black men have never really been known to be active Irish Republicans and Catholics...

> a country that was founded on on the principles of freedom

The USA, my country, was not founded on the principles of freedom. It was founded on the principles of white supremacy.

Its quite easy to come to this conclusion if we simply look at the US Constitution, which has a clause stating that the Black slaves brought to this country for a single purpose, that of chattel slavery, were to be counted as 3/5ths of a person in order to determine the makeup of congress. That is directly against any "principles of freedom" I can come up with.

I'm confused about the down votes here. What isn't true about this?

Because the Constitution doesn't mention race. It merely states that a non-free individual was counted as 3/5 of a free individual for purposes of the population census, which was used to determine proportionate representation in Congress. Native Americans were excluded from the census entirely if they weren't tax paying residents of a state.

What was written vs what was implemented... in the context of that time, who else would have been a non-free person besides non-whites?

> country that was founded on on the principles of freedom

> The fourth amendment clearly states that all citizens should be treated equally

If something was added later can it be considered part of original foundation?

Wasn't one of those original principles of freedom, an (unspoken?) freedom to own black slaves?

This country was also founded on the principles of race-based slavery. Attempts to suppress the deep-seated racism of the US have not been completely successful.

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