Glenn Beck gets to ask dumb white-guy questions to a room full of black conservatives

[Swede]

Yoicks!

It is hard to explain to white people like Glenn Beck why their "innocent" questions about race actually just reveal their ignorance and their false assumptions about people of other races and the nature of race relations.

But Beck is so blitheringly un-self-aware that he decided to give it a go anyway yesterday on his Fox News show. As you might expect, it was a serial embarrassment.

Beck, you see, was careful to hand-select his audience, people "the media claim don't think exist" -- black conservatives! Not that he ever actually explains this to the viewing audience -- you have to figure that out for yourselves as the show goes along, like the moment when he asks the audience if they think we're headed toward socialism (they all raise their hands) or are accused of being not "black enough" if they are conservative (again, a unanimous show of hands).

http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/glenn-beck-gets-ask-dumb-white-guy-q

[Orrex]

1. Did he ask them about that extra bone in their foot that helps them run faster?

Not because he's racist, of course; he's just asking a simple question.


(Incidentally, after I'd lost a big race, my high school track coach told me not to worry, because that extra bone gives them an advantage.)
:puke:

[imdjh]

5. Hold on there, there might be something similar.

The extra bone is a new one on me, but I was reading an article which I thought I had bookmarked but can't find, which explores why we look at several major sports and see nearly entire teams of black faces in a country that is only about 10% black. Something about little nerve dohiggies in the muscles that have to do with reaction and sudden bursts of energy, which they avoid suggesting might be some sort of coping skill left over from the wilds. They also point out that it's not a universally superior (for sports purposes anyway) trait, that it's something that more black people have more of, but that some white people have more than some black people.

[Orrex]

9. I haven't heard that, but it's interesting--and tricky.

The racist father of my college roommate used to sum it up by saying "hell, we bred 'em like cattle for 300 years," implying that "they" would naturally be stronger and tougher--and dumber. And Mr. Racist was no laureate either, if you can believe it.

I can see two main risks in researching a physiological adaptation like this, assuming that it exists:

1. If it's taken as a natural predisposition to the sport, then someone who has the trait might be disparaged for having an advantage over someone without it. Traditionally, this has provided a way to discredit black athletes by implying that they don't have to work as hard.

2. It can be misrepresented as a hardwired distinction between races which would enable a form of segregation based on "real" differences between black and white.

I know that you yourself aren't implying either of these by any stretch, nor does either possibility mean that the physiological structure shouldn't be investigated. I just worry that this is another piece of science that can be too easily perverted to serve a bigoted agenda.

[imdjh]

15. I think it's assumed that there is something going on, so I don't see how knowledge would hurt here.

Part of the article was a black scientist who was saying something to the effect of "Come on now. Look at the teams and tell me it's all because the black guys just want it more."

I can see a downside. Though, in a nation supposedly so blatantly racist we have stands full of white racists cheering on black football players, letting their kids idolize black football players, and standing in line for autographs. Then again, this is the same country where guys who dislike black people intensely, drive by with nasty (as in you have to know about it because it's not on the radio) rap music blaring from their car stereos, dressed in black driven fashions, and talking black driven hip talk.

The real downside would be if they could test for the receptors and thus eliminate the guys who really do earn it simply because they want it bad enough to work extra hard for it.

[jmm]

6. When I was in high school it was an extra muscle in the legs

When I overheard a girl say she didn't make it on the track team because of this I asked what happened to the muscle in bi-racial people :shrug:? Instead of answering she ranted about how she couldn't be racist :eyes:.

[imdjh]

10. Does that mean that there is nothing physical? That the phenomenon...

.... of black athletes dominating certain sports is just like flipping a coin and getting heads 100 times in a row?

[Orrex]

14. I'm sure that there isn't just one answer

Sociological and financial pressures have a significant effect, as well.

[jmm]

18. Why are there so many Dominican baseball players?

Haiti shares and island with the Dominican Republic yet one half of the island supplies more major league players than any other nation out of the US and there are currently none born on the other half?

The girl who blamed her failure to make the team was simply bitter even though there were plenty of people lighter than her that did and darker than her that didn't. Instead of practicing so she'd be better the next year she used a race based myth which has never been proven as an excuse not to work harder.

Numerous factors could play into why certain sports are dominated by people from particular backgrounds but there's still no definitive physical evidence.


edited for grammar

[imdjh]

19. Do they play baseball in Haiti?

[jmm]

23. Yes

Not to the same extent that it's played in the Dominican Republic but that just goes to show that on an island about 400 by 150 miles there are non-genetically based reasons for difference in performance that play a far greater role than genetics.

Even if we compare them to players from other places where baseball is more popular than in Haiti there are still is a disproportionate number of Dominican players. Is the phenomenon of Dominican players in baseball just like flipping a coin and getting heads 100 times in a row?

[KamaAina]

31. Oddly enough, the baseballs themselves were made in Haiti for years

:shrug:

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

29. Are you claiming black people have some unfair physical advantage?

Because Hitler was upset about the same thing when Jesse Owens won those Olympic medals.

[imdjh]

34. See post #20. A universal advantage? No. But look at the results.

A universal advantage? No. From what I have read, this muscle switch thing isn't exclusive to black people, it's concentrated in certain black genetic stocks, but also exists in other races. So while blacks don't have a universal advantage, they have a statistical likelihood of having this muscle thing. And as stated in another post, one simply has to look at the composition of the football teams to know that something is up. There are only so many possibilities.

[Orrex]

16. LOL! That's great!

In my freshman year I was in a dorm with about a dozen people watching Eddie Murphy's Raw. A woman commented that he was "pretty good-looking, for a black guy."

I asked her if he's ugly "for a white guy," and she became enraged that I would suggest that she was racist.

[JonQ]

20. Extra muscles, no

but there is some evidence that ethnicity controls for the proportion of fast/slow twitch muscle fibers.

This ratio is mostly set at birth and with intensive training you can alter it slightly, but it has a genetic basis so finding correlations with ethnicity is unsurprising.

Oddly enough there is a mutation (R577X) found almost exclusively in causasian and asian populations (rarely in african) that directly affects long distance performance.

It is an interesting area of study, but one must be careful before making too broad of assertions because economics and environment come in to play as well as genetics.

[jmm]

22. That mutation made me think of this-

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/sports/03runner.html

To Some, Winner Is Not American Enough

As soon as Mebrahtom Keflezighi, better known as Meb, won the New York City Marathon on Sunday, an uncommon sports dispute erupted online, fraught with racial and nationalistic components: Should Keflezighi’s triumph count as an American victory?

He was widely celebrated as the first American to win the New York race since 1982. Having immigrated to the United States at age 12, he is an American citizen and a product of American distance running programs at the youth, college and professional levels.

But, some said, because he was born in Eritrea, he is not really an American runner.

The debate reveals what some academics say are common assumptions and stereotypes about race and sports and athletic achievement in the United States. Its dimensions, they add, go beyond the particulars of Keflezighi and bear on undercurrents of nationalism and racism that are not often voiced.

“Race is still extremely important when you think about athletics,” said David Wiggins, a professor at George Mason University who studies African-Americans and sports. “There is this notion about innate physiological gifts that certain races presumably possess. Quite frankly, I think it feeds into deep-seated stereotypes. The more blatant forms of racial discrimination and illegal forms have been eliminated, but more subtle forms of discrimination still exist.”

.....
The success of distance runners from Kenya and Ethiopia fostered a lore of East Africans as genetically gifted, unbeatable, dominant because of their biology. Scientists have looked for — but not found — genes specific to East Africans that could account for their distance ability, said John Hoberman, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies race and sports.

But, he said, “there is a difference between saying we don’t have a scientifically respectable conclusion and the very broad and perhaps mistaken claim that there is no physiological phenomenon here whatsoever.”

Regarding the question of whether East Africans have a genetic advantage, Hoberman said, “We don’t know.”

“The more relevant question is, who gets to represent the country?” he said, adding, “Only racists will insist that ‘our’ athletes meet specific racial criteria.”

Consternation over the race of elite American athletes is not new. A century ago, the notion of a “great white hope” emerged — a white boxer who whites hoped could beat the black heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson.

In running, as African-American athletes excelled in sprints, they were said to lack the endurance or the fortitude to prevail in longer distances, Wiggins said. Then, when East Africans started to thrive, the argument changed to one claiming there are special East African genes.

“From my perspective, it is racist thinking at its utmost,” Wiggins said.
.....

[imdjh]

2. Seems like water might seek its own level.

"Will Brown of the New York Republican Community Coalition points out, adroitly, that "African American" is an "evolution" from the "N word" -- and certainly is preferable. Moreover, it wasn't black people who invented the "N word" or the segregation from enjoying the full fruits of American citizenship it represented -- it was white people. "African American" represents the recognition of their dignity and their rights as Americans."

African-American is not an evolution from the n-word.

[Orrex]

4. African-American isn't an evolution from the n-word, but...

Artificial and pseudo-polite constructions, like "the black gentleman took my parking spot" are IMO synonyms of the n-word.

[imdjh]

7. Interesting.

For a while I have wondered why police officers almost universally use "gentlemen" or "the gentleman" to refer to a person who clearly would not be mistaken for a gentleman and was told that it was a fictional level of respect to avoid the appearance of referring to some people (like actual gentlemen) as gentlemen while referring to others in less respectful ways, presumably like the tradition of referring to white women of middle class or higher as "lady" while referring to lower class whites and all black women as "woman". But I have never actually thought of "gentleman" as a euphemism for nword. Canadian yes, gentleman no.

[Orrex]

13. My former supervisor used "Canadian" in that way. I thought it was just something that she'd made up

I had no idea that it was in wider use. Weird.


When I've heard the "gentleman" euphemism used in that way, it's always been with the racial designator. Never simply "so I asked the gentleman to remove his hat." It's always "so I asked the black gentleman to remove his hat."

In practice, I'm sure that it's not always a direct euphemism for the n-word, but it typically pops up when there's no good reason to indicate the person's race in the first place. "The black gentleman left a loaf of bread on his car roof," for instance.

[imdjh]

17. Well, in fairness Canadian isn't usually used in lieu of nword, it often simply means black.

I've never actually heard anyone use it that way, but I knew a guy from Orlando who said that over there it's a way of designating race when speaking in public without everyone's ears perking up. Then I read an article a while back, saying that a Texas prosecutor got busted for referring to black jurors as Canadians in an email. In both cases, it wasn't used in place of nword, it was simply used to designate the subjects as black.

If one were to say, "Well, I went by there, but there were a bunch of Canadians in the parking lot, so I didn't stop." it could be argued that he's using "canadian" to mean nword, because presumably had they all been upstanding black people in their church clothes, he wouldn't have been deterred from stopping. But it's also true that he might not have used the nword, even if he were guaranteed privacy because he really wasn't designating the crowd to be nwords, merely that he didn't want to be outnumbered or that the presence of such a crowd indicated an unfamiliar situation.

[Orrex]

21. Yeah, I guess that's how she used it

Still, it seems weird to me that she'd need to use a euphemism at all. I mean, if there's a legitimate reason to designate race, then go ahead and designate. But if there's no such need, then why bother?

Curious.

[imdjh]

25. That's what happens when you have speech police.

Whether you think it's a legitimate reason or not, the race of a person or group of people being described in a story is often functional in the story, and people use euphemisms or tells to get the message across without those listening in getting involved, offering correction, or going on the warpath.

In the case of the Texas prosecutor, as I recall, his point was that he was surprised that the other prosecutor had gotten a conviction with black people on the jury. Now, is that an unreasonable thing to speculate about? Probably not, but to say it outright, in a world where "niggardly" can get you fired because people are too stupid to know what a word means, too lazy to look it up, and too childish to apologize when they have made fools of themselves then perhaps euphemisms are a survival tool.

[Orrex]

30. Nine times out of ten the person's race is wholly irrelevant to the story

"I was at the store, and this black woman bought the last pack of tube socks."

or

"I was locked out of my car, and this black guy let me use his phone."

We can substitute "Canadian" if necessary, but the underlying point is that neither anecdote has anything to do with race, so one wonders why the storyteller would even mention it. That same speaker, I submit, wouldn't say "This white guy let me use his phone."

I wouldn't say that it necessarily implies any actual racism on the part of the speaker, nor any sort of implied "speech police." It's just something that some people seem to feel the need to comment on, even when it's not germane to the conversation.

[imdjh]

32. But as you said, it is something that people do, and not just white people.

It's just that we're the only ones people look at funny when we do it. If a black woman is telling a story, and says, "I slipped in the hall and these two white girls helped me up." No one's ears perk up. No one says, "What, you're surprised two white girls would help you?" IN short, no one goes out of his way to be a politically correct asshole over something that is simply a regular feature of speech and culture.

You're right, often the race of someone makes no difference to the story, but sometimes it does. Either way, if the intent isn't to be mean, then that's really all that matters, and people being overly sensitive or abusive via sensitive reaction or passive aggressive ... well a jackass is a jackass. If I got upset every time someone might have said something that might be offensives I'd be out of time.

[Raineyb]

28. My guess because she wanted to use the n word. Otherwise why not use the word black?

People who want to talk about people of other races generally switch to code when they don't want others to know they're talking race and that only happens when they're afraid to be accused of being racist. Which to my ear means they were saying something racist and didn't want to be called out on it.

[RKP5637]

3. Beck is a fool and acts like a clown out of costume IMO! He also prances

around flapping his arms like a bird in mating season. And that's before he even starts talking his sheer nonsense.

[Canuckistanian]

8. There are enough black conservatives to fill a room?

It must be a small room.

[imdjh]

11. You use lazy Susans and quick change artists.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

12. Whatever happened to Julius Caesar Watts?

Ya know, the OU football player who was a Congresscritter for a while?

[maglatinavi]

24. n words, etc

Now I have heard everything!!!
!!! A Latina of Puerto Rico and Roberto Clemente where baseball and politics are the favorite people's sports, I am awe stricken with the contents of these comments. Having said that, I must say that the words "negro/a (black) negrito/negrita (little black)are popular terms of endearment in P.R. although I never heard it said by my father, at my father's mother's and sibling's lips. However, my boss at the housing Agency, member of the Governor's Kitchen Cabinet was called "Negro" or "el negro Matos" by all his contemporary engineers, architects and friends...and even the Governor himself!!!
About the genetic elements in black players, well it really seems odd, to say the least...
Strange world indeed!!!
:evilgrin: :eyes: :evilgrin: :eyes: :evilgrin: :eyes: :evilgrin: :eyes:

[LatteLibertine]

26. Staged

with mostly plants and pointless. African-Americans will never support the Republican party in meaningful numbers.

[11 Bravo]

27. Who better?

[DU GrovelBot]

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