Rob's Thoughts and Stuff

Completely non sensical ramblings and other stuff from Rob Douglas, a US Army Paratrooper.

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Location: Fayetteville, NC

Saturday, June 30, 2007

Ending Racism in America

There have been several events lately that have put the spot light on race based policies in the US. There was the beatings during the Juneteenth celebrations in San Antonio and Milwaukee. The beating in Austin led to the death of Hispanic man. Juneteenth is the celebration of the freedom of slaves in Texas. The other event was the courts striking down the policy in some areas to assign students to different high schools based on race. I firmly believe the best way to end racism is to eliminate all policies that have preferences or are race based in any way.
We have hate crime laws that increase the penalties and allow the federal government to take over the case if it was a crime committed on racial prejudice. The new hate crime legislation will make anything deemed homophobic a hate crime. We have already seen this in Oakland. The city of Oakland fired several women for hate crimes because they used the city email system to support a group who believe that a family composed of man and woman is healthier for kids. The city fired them and deemed the speech homophobic and hateful. At the same time, gay and lesbian organizations are allowed to use the city's email and bulletin systems to support their programs. By making racism and sexism a vague law that can suspend one type of speech in favor of another, they will try to legislate what ideas are acceptable in the public discourse. I bring up the case of the Juneteenth celebration because of the racial nature of the incident. It was an african-american celebration where a white man was beaten severely in Milwaukee and a Hispanic man was beaten to death in Austin. No one has sought to use the hate crime legislation to find the guilty parties. By nature, raced based legislation is not equitable.
In the name of diversity, some school districts have been busing students across town to ensure that schools are spilt more evenly by race. The concept the school system uses to end racism is to recognize there is a difference between races and assign students to school based on the students race. Students are students and they must learn the same material. We must recognize that all students are equally capable and assign them to schools on where they live. If we give a minority student an advantage in college admission by race, then we tell that minority group we do not believe they can succeed without government interference. Their may be some equity to the program if all minorities were covered. Affirmative action does not apply to Asians ending the illusion of supporting minorities.
Nothing in any of these legislation are equitable and only serve to create more racial tension in the country. If we are going to free ourselves from racism, then we must exclude race from legislation. There are still plenty of discrimination laws on the books. They can cover racist preferences in schools and the work place. Adding hate crime legislation to make a despicable murder more despicable is redundant and only serves to divide. Violent crimes are already hateful crimes. We do not have to legislate redundancy.

1 Comments:

Blogger KDoug said...

I felt bad because you didn't have any comments. So I wanted to leave one for you. I love you and can't wait for Peyton to FINALLY make her arrival. AGH!!!!!!

12:05 PM  

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