Stereotypes: American Immaturity
By Daniel Miessler on August 19th, 2006: Tagged as America | Culture | Politics | Race
So this guy running for congressman in Louisianna is getting rocked for saying that many black people in Alabama don’t know how to swim. It’s a big deal with people saying it’s a stereotype, it’s not true, etc.
In other news, from a while back, the swimming requirement was dropped for cops in north Miami because it was seen as discriminatory against black people. Here’s what the black police chief had to say on the matter:
“Our swimming requirement may give the false perception that we are not serious in our efforts to hire Haitian police applicants,” police Chief Gwendolyn Boyd-Savage, who is black, wrote in a memo. “They have been intimidated because they don’t swim; very few of them swim,” said Mayor Joe Celestin, who is Haitian-American. “They have the ability to learn how to swim, but many of them are not that great of a swimmer. … We want to bring them in and give them a chance to learn.”
Hmm, so the black police chief has to remove a swimming requirement so that black people can be cops, because, in his own words, “they don’t swim; very few of them swim.” But this guy in Louisiana says the same thing and gets called a racist.
This country needs to learn how to acknowledge differences without equating doing so to racism. Especially when the difference is clearly cultural and not racial.
This country needs to learn how to talk to itself like an adult. If we continue handling social tension like 4-year-olds we’re going to be facing major social upheaval in less than a decade.