From: Randall Randall (randall@randallsquared.com)
Date: Tue Jun 04 2002 - 00:55:29 MDT
Gecko/20020507
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To: extropians@extropy.org
Subject: Re: Longevity and Ayn Anti-Venom
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Olga Bourlin wrote:
> From: "Randall Randall" <wolfkin@freedomspace.net>
>>Telling, that some people here assumed that you must be talking about
>>poverty, since they normally don't see any real difference in skin color?
>
> I'm assuming you're joking. (I don't know you well enough - you are
> joking, aren't you?)
In the sense that I understand you weren't seeing this angle, yes, I was
joking. However, I had hoped to make you see it from this side, too.
> The example I mentioned was about how white kids could
> swim in a pool, and black kids could not (and one can't ignore the
reference
> to skin color - it's a "built-in" to the whole point).
But it seems like an irrelevant detail to some.
> This is not just a story, but has personal repercussions. This actually
> happened to someone very close to me, when he was a child.
For those of us whose useful memories begin in the eighties, and whose
personal experiences don't include the overtly institutionalized racism
that your question implies exists, poverty is one of the first explanations
that jumps to mind. For myself and most of my close friends, this sort
of thing (no admittance to the pool; stay in the back of the bus, etc) is
part of history in the same way that slavery and the invention of computers
is: it happened before we were born.
So while it may be axiomatic for you and those of your generation that if
bad things happen to people who are black, it must be *because* they are
black, people of my generation (and background) look for a different reason,
because skin color doesn't seem to be a sufficient reason.
-- Randall Randall <randall@randallsquared.com> Crypto key: randall.freedomspace.net/crypto.text ...what a strange, strange freedom: only free to choose my chains... -- Johnny Clegg
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