“This is the God’s honest truth,” Dumas said on the air. “You can look at the statistics—Indians are lazy.”
The on-air exchange began when a white intern at the station—Chelsea Pryor, who has attended the University of North Carolina at Pembroke—told Dumas and his co-hosts that she was marrying a Lumbee.
“Hey, white girl. After you get married, are you going to have a teepee-warming party?” someone quipped. “I could give you a pelt or something.”
Morgan Brittany Hunt, a Lumbee who works with the tribe by talking with teens about the consequences of smoking, called the comments racist.
“We have doctors, we have lawyers, we have businessmen,” she said. “We may have people who don’t have their four-year degree, but who get up and work hard to provide for their family. I was really upset.”
Hunt said the show is a hot topic in Pembroke.
“Everybody’s in an uproar,” she said. “It’s slander and racism. (Don) Imus was fired for a lot less than what aired” on G105.
Re "You can look at the statistics—Indians are lazy":
Which statistics are those, moron? I've looked at plenty of statistics and I haven't seen any on Indians' laziness. Feel free to enlighten us.
If you're talking about unemployment rates, those don't prove Indians are lazy. The only thing they prove is that Indians are unemployed. The main reason for that is the lack of jobs on reservations.
Comments like these are the product of centuries of racism and stereotyping among Euro-Americans. For instance, check out the following quotes from Good-for-Nothing Indians:
Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes, 16th centuryBy nature Indians are very lazy and sworn enemies of work. They prefer to suffer hunger than to fatigue themselves with agriculture. Therefore, they must be forced to do this by their superiors. With six industrious Europeans one can do more in one day than fifty Indians.
Joseph Och, Missionary in Sonora: Travel Reports of Joseph Och, S.J., 1755-1767
For the last right-wing shock jock who demonstrated America's racism against Indians, see Minn. Shock Jocks: Indian Youth Suicide Is Caused by Incest.
8 comments:
Stunning.
Writerfella here --
Natives are 'inbred?' Consider that all Natives now alive in the continental United States were SURVIVORS. The rules that governed their original breeding constants STILL were intact after their survival of genocide. But still, that left them with no genetic diversity, which the breeding rules were intended to preserve and maintain. That any of us still are alive today means that the rules worked, BUT -- one disease could wipe out Natives very shortly, because there is NO genetic diversity to protect them. The proof of this is that, after 1918, almost every Native alive contracted Tuberculosis. writerfella's own father suffered TB at age 18. He survived but the walled-off infections meant that it became lung cancer when he turned 70. writerfella's own friend, Nikolaj Sucik, went to Africa last August and became exposed to the HIV-induced, antibiotic-resistant form of TB. Nick has doomed himself NEVER to come back among Native Americans because he could kill them all. 'Lazy and inbred?' And just WHO caused the racial genocide that led to such a claim? The dude saying any or all of that info does not know his own people's history...
All Best
Russ Bates
'writerfella'
The "inbred" charge also came up in the previous example of shock-jock racism.
Dumas may think he has evidence of laziness, but he doesn't have evidence of inbreeding. All he knows is that some Indians live on reservations, are unemployed, and have health problems. From this he can't conclude much of anything about Indians in general.
It's clear to me what's going on here. Conservative racists (if that isn't redundant) use a handful of facts to justify their inbreeding claim. This makes it sound as if it's semi-objective and scientific. Then they can say, "I never claimed Indians were genetically inferior as a race. My position is that they must be breeding among themselves. How else do you explain their lack of achievements and social malaise?"
In short, they're trying to tell us Indians are less than human while pretending they're not. That's the epitome of racism.
"Conservative racists (if that isn't redundant) use a handful of facts to justify their inbreeding claim"
There are plenty of liberal/leftist racists. From the hatred of Israelis that is too often thinly-cloaked old-fashioned antisemitism (but now also justified by Marxist class struggle) to the liberal politicians who won't lift a finger to even complain about Chief Wahoo (here they join with conservatives, but aren't any less racist), to anyone who backs the skin-color preference, hiring goals, and quota parts of affirmative action. Oops. almost forgot about Rev. Wright.
About 99.9% of the liberal protests against Israel are because it's acting like an imperialist superpower--i.e., like the US. And not because it's Jewish.
In particular, Israel is guilty of occupying foreign territory in violation of international law. Whether a colonizing force is Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, we'll condemn it every time.
If you disagree, let's see the evidence for your position. Good luck with your answer...you'll need it.
It seems you've swallowed the conservative/racist definition of "affirmative action." Here's the actual definition for you:
http://www.answers.com/topic/affirmative-action?cat=biz-fin
Affirmative Action
Steps taken to correct conditions resulting from past discrimination or from violations of a law, particularly with respect to employment.
What exactly did Jeremiah Wright say that was anti-white? I thought most of his inflammatory remarks were directed against America, not against white people. Needless to say, those aren't the same thing.
Yes, liberals can be racist sometimes. Witness Dennis Kucinich wearing his Chief Wahoo cap, for instance. Or Russell Bates inveighing against the dark-skinned Pequots, Lumbees, and Chickahominies.
But there are many more racists among conservatives than among liberals. Sorry if it hurts, DMarks, but that's the truth.
Here's a hint of the evidence for my claim:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/29/AR2006012900642.html
Another study presented at the conference, which was in Palm Springs, Calif., explored relationships between racial bias and political affiliation by analyzing self-reported beliefs, voting patterns and the results of psychological tests that measure implicit attitudes--subtle stereotypes people hold about various groups.
That study found that supporters of President Bush and other conservatives had stronger self-admitted and implicit biases against blacks than liberals did.
Not only lazy, but pathetic. Stop wearing your feelings on your sleeve and grow up. Sticks and stones! Man up, grow a pair, and shut your mouth!
Shut my mouth? Make me.
You use a schoolyard taunt to show how mature you are? Hilarious.
In case you didn't realize it, I'm not an Indian, so Dumas wasn't talking about me. Oops.
When you have anything resembling an intelligent argument to offer, go ahead and do so. Repeating Dumas's racist comments doesn't qualify.
Until then, stop spewing your ignorance and learn how repeated insults affect people, especially children. From The Harm of Native Stereotyping: Facts and Evidence:
Stereotype Threat
Besides acknowledging the fact that television media often offers negative stereotypical portrayals of individuals belonging to certain racial and/or ethnic groups such as African-Americans and homosexuals, social psychology goes further by examining the direct implications of these mostly negative images. One of these implications is the notion of stereotype threat, the risk of confirming a negative stereotype about one's group as self characteristic. As an individual is constantly exposed to negative images of his/her racial or ethnic group, this person begins to internalize the same social and personal characteristics of these images.
Numerous psychological studies have examined effects of stereotype threat in areas such as standardized tests, and athletic performance. For example, the commonly held assumption that women are less skilled in mathematics than men has been shown to affect the performance of women on standardized math tests. When female participants were primed beforehand of this negative stereotype, scores were significantly lower than if the women were led to believe the tests did not reflect these stereotypes (Spencer & Steele, 1997).
How Racism Hurts the Body
Research into the physical effects of racism on its victims could help explain a disparity in health across races and reframe racism as a health issue. Health experts have long blamed racial disparities on social forces, linking higher rates of disease and death among African-Americans to joblessness, unsafe housing, and other inequities. This round of research, which scientists stress is preliminary, seeks to establish if racism itself plays a role in the disparity. In more than 100 studies on the subject, most of them published since 2000, some patterns have been established, reports Madeline Drexler for the Boston Globe.
Discrimination seems to act as a source of chronic stress the same way that marital conflict or strains at work do, increasing the stress hormone cortisol, raising blood pressure, and suppressing the immune system. High stress also has been linked to unhealthy behaviors such as overeating or smoking. When African-Americans are shown a racially provocative scene on television—a white store clerk racially insulting a black customer, for example—their blood pressure and heart rates rise. It also takes a longer time for those indicators to return to normal than usual. A yet-to-be-published study by Elizabeth Brondolo, a psychologist at St. John's University in New York found that racism experienced in the day led to elevated blood pressure at night, suggesting the body can't turn off its stress response.
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