So they are burning and looting in Baltimore tonight

Discussion in 'Ethics, Morality, & Justice' started by cosmictraveler, Apr 28, 2015.

  1. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    Every year thousands of black on black murders are committed and the media and those who are always at the head of the line never give much time to those people I've always wondered why not. It would seem to me that the killing of a black person by the police is a very wrong thin g to do if it was done out of malice but what about all those blacks who have been murdered by other blacks? Why doesn't Mr. Sharpton and his friends talk about that to try and stop the violence amongst blacks themselves?

    Instead the media and Mr. Sharpton talk about the one time killing of a black man by a white police officer , I just do not understand. Is it that the media doesn't care about the other thousands of black on black murders for it seems to me the media doesn't pay much time about that I guess because the media only wants to have sensationalizing where it is needed but instead picks out things that will create hate and spark unrest.
     
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  3. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    Well, the media does have a tendency towards sensationalism. That’s how they sell the news. It’s the freedom of the press thingy. But police misbehavior is particularly egregious because we give policemen tremendous power and authority. Imagine you were Mr. Gray. Imagine you had a legitimate critical medial need it your cries were not heeded? What if you were beaten by policemen to the point of death? How would you feel? What if that happened to a member of your family? If it could happen to Mr. Gray, it could also happen to you or a member of your family too. Who do you call when those who are supposed to be looking out for you don’t? Do you have to die to get the attention you need? That is just wrong and more than that it is scary. It should concern everyone and there should be ZERO tolerance for this kind of police misconduct or negligence.

    Additionally, I don’t know where you live. But where I live, and I live in large city, anytime someone is murdered regardless of race, it is reported by the local news outlets. But local murders rarely make the national news, because there is a lot of news on the national scale and news outlets only have so much space and so much time. And black on black violence and white on white violence have been discussed on the national scale.

    Yes, Sharpton is unfortunately a race baiter and race ambulance chaser. So what? That is Sharpton’s claim to fame. That’s how he made his name. There have always been people like him and there will always be people like him. Who cares? Sometimes Sharpton has a case; sometimes he doesn’t (e.g. Tawala Brawley). But that doesn’t mean he should be summarily dismissed. We should take the charge of racism seriously. Unfortunately, the charge of racism is abused, but sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes racism is real and the effects of racism can be devastating. I’ve seen it tear families apart and ruin lives. Nothing good comes from racism. The problem here isn’t Sharpton. Some of our policing agencies have some very serious issues that need to be addressed immediately (e.g. Baltimore, Cleveland, Ferguson, etc.). And this is something you don’t just fix and it stays fixed. This is something that requires continued vigilance.
     
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  5. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    Well, it wasn’t even borderline; you made a very definitive statement that you couldn’t back up with definitive source material. I doubt the data you need even exists.
    Where has it been reported several times in this forum and in this thread? I have searched this thread and found no such reference. It’s probably with the 4 times you provided your source, it doesn’t exist. But even if Mr. Gray grew up in a home with lead paint, that doesn’t prove racism as you have asserted. I am white and as I previously mentioned, I grew up in a home with lead paint too. I remember playing with paint chips and breathing leaded gasoline fumes. And everyone in my neighborhood was white. So using your logic, am I also the victim of racism just because I was exposed to lead paint in my youth? Lead poisoning isn’t a demonstration of racism. At one point it was the norm for everyone, at most it is a symptomatic of issues related to social class rather than race. Poor whites live in older homes too. As you should know leaded paint has been banned for use in all residences in this country since 1977. Leaded gasoline was banned in the US in the late 1980’s. If Mr. Gray’s mother lived in public housing unit or Section 7 Housing, the US government requires all building be up to code. As I have repeatedly said, not every ill is tied to racism or the result of racism. Lead poisoning affects white kids too and lead poisoning has been found in products other than house paint (e.g. toys and children’s products from China). The children of poor families are 8 times for likely to suffer from lead poisoning. Black children are 5 times more likely to suffer from lead poisoning. Lead poisoning isn’t a racist conspiracy. You have no evidence racial bigotry causes lead poisoning. It’s a social class issue, not a race issue, and according to the CDC, lead poisoning is on the decline. Being poor with few housing options, is in part, why some kids continue to be exposed to lead, not race. So while black kids are more likely to suffer from lead poisoning than white kids, being poor is even more likely to expose kids to lead poisoning. You need evidence Ice, and you just don’t have any. Lead poisoning isn’t evidence of racism or bigotry, it’s just evidence of being poor and forced by social economic circumstance to live in substandard urban housing.

    We are getting sidetracked here; let’s go back to the real issue here.

    I said, “ There is no evidence racism played a role in Mr. Gray’s demise at the hand of police.” To which you responded, “Yes, there is. Quite a bit, ranging from Gray's history of lead poisoning to the manner in which the police handled his detainment.” How does lead poisoning and the lack of housing choices relate to how Mr. Gray was treated by the Baltimore Police Department? I don’t understand what the Baltimore Police have to do with where Mr. Gray’s parents lived or the alleged lead poisoning.


    http://www.usccb.org/issues-and-act...y/environment/at-risk-from-lead-poisoning.cfm
     
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  7. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    So let thousands of black on black murders happen without saying anything by anyone but one white on black problem and the entire world hears about it. That is biased journalism and those who always do that are hate mongers wanting only to sensationalize things and never ever represent the truth for they never tell the entire story but one that evokes hate and fear just as the Nazis did with the Jews. So here we are again doing the same thing as before not telling the entire story but making it up as the media wants. Despicable , underhanded to be doing that kind of thing but that's how low scum work.

    There aren't any black leaders trying to halt black on black crimes on the world news because they are not paid to do that just as the Nazis were told to make up stories about Jews. This kind of "news" isn't news at all but only sensationalism and stirring the flames of fear into everyone not trying to calm things down in any community but to only build a raging fire under the guise of news.
     
  8. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    Where is your evidence black leaders haven't spoken out against black of black violence?

    http://www.theatlantic.com/national...eople-protest-black-on-black-violence/255329/

    http://www.knoxnews.com/news/watchf...uce-violent-crime-in-black-community_76691988

    I cannot think of a time in which black leaders have not been concerned about crime and violence in black neighborhoods. For decades now black leaders have been attempting to reduce violence in their communities (e.g. gun buyback programs). So it's fiction to believe black leaders haven't been concerned with violence in their communities. And I'll ask you again, what if you or a member of your family were a victim of unwarranted police violence and abuse? If the shoe were on the other foot, I'm sure you would have a different opinion.

    Police abuse is something which shouldn't be taken lightly when it is found. What happened in Baltimore was obviously a case of severe police abuse or gross negligence. As I said before, iit appears to be more than just a simple matter of gross negligence. I just don't see how negligence could cause that much damage. What happened in Cleveland appears to be a case of police mismanagement and overreaction. Unfortunately, with these kinds of events, people fly off the handle into la la land (e.g. the shooting of Brown) and facts become irrelevant to some people. But given the low esteem in which residents of Ferguson held their police department, because of legitimate abuses, it is certainly understandable why Ferguson residents would be skeptical. But that doesn't justify the wackiness, the violence, looting and burning or the attempt to punish an innocent man (e.g. Officer Wilson) and the refusal to acknowledge evidence we saw in Ferguson. And I am still a little perplexed as to why Ferguson residents didn't oust their government at the ballot box if they were so dissatisfied with their police department. I think we need to understand why Ferguson residents didn't vote their frustration. Unfortunately for folks who have a penchant for demagoguery, facts do and should matter. When everything becomes evidence of police abuse, no matter how unrelated like lead poisoning, well, rational discourse has left the building.
     
    Last edited: May 28, 2015
  9. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    How many times do you ever see anything on the world news report about black on black murders? Then think of how many times you see about a white police officer shooting a black man? I think you know that there were very few black on black murders reported last year or this year so far by any national news media. However as soon as a single white police officer shoots or kills a black person we hear about that right away without even knowing what really happened.

    The news reports things not as facts but as sensationalism because the public only is told what the news wants them to hear not what really happened because those facts would be found out about after an investigation which can take weeks as everyone knows. So without any facts, other than the news wants to make up, the public is shown shit about whatever happened and not the facts. So we will never be able to determine what actually happened until long after it happened but the media only wants to make up stories of how things happened. That is piss poor journalism and not fit to print.
     
  10. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    I've never encountered any form of abuse nor have any of my family members in our entire lifetime. I guess when I'm told to do something by an officer I do it and do not ask questions or give rude remarks to upset them. In almost all of the incidents that have been reported recently we see that if only the offender would do as they were told nothing would have happened but as you know we have watched a simple thing go wrong due to the violators not conforming to demands no matter if they were in the wrong or not. So if I were anyone who did not want to create any problems I would do as I am told and take up if I were in the right or not in a court room during a trial.
     
  11. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    Well good for you, neither have I and I too am compliant when confronted by a police officer. It makes little sense to take on the police force mano a mano. There are better ways to solve differences with police officers. But you are nor I are not all people. People are different, people react differently. Some people panic easily, others not so much. Police officers deal with people everyday who are unlike you and I. Just because people react differently in police encounters, it doesn't justify what we saw in Cleveland or in Baltimore. Police deal with people everyday who do things that don't make sense. That's why we have police officers. Police are suppose to be professionals, they need to act like professionals. People act like assholes in emergency rooms too, would that also justify mistreatment? There are a host of medical reasons why people act violently or erratically or to become noncompliant too. So just because today you would be compliant in an encounter with a police officer, that might be the case tomorrow.

    Here is the bottom line, there is no justification for what happened to Mr. Gray. Mr. Gray ran, he was captured and arrested. He appeared to be in good shape when he was placed in the paddy wagon. He was dead or near dead shortly thereafter.
     
    Last edited: May 28, 2015
  12. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    Try PBS. If the news reports everything, which most do, I don't have a problem with the press. The press has always sensationalized some aspects of the news. It's the price we pay for a free press.
     
  13. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    But when lies, deceit and flim flam are reported as facts it isn't news any longer it is bullshit and everyone knows this. So we will never see any unbiased reporting again anywhere. I'm giving up trying to bring light to this subject for I'm only beating my head against a wall. This isn't freedom of the press this is make up shit as you want it to be published.
     
  14. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    Other than Fox News or Republican entertainment when have you witnessed lies, deceit and flimflam reported as fact? Please be specific. The problem is the press reports the news as it develops and people prematurely jump to conclusions (e.g. the Brown shooting). I'd say that is more a problem with people than it is the news as initial reports are often incomplete and can be misleading.
     
    Last edited: May 28, 2015
  15. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    Now that's where the media jumps to its own conclusions. He could have had a heart attack but because that takes time to do an autopsy we don't get that factual report but only what the lying media wants us to know. That's why I'm not commenting on any more of these so called police brutality reports for we can't ever get the truth out of the assholes running the media empire.
     
  16. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    Mr. Gray never had a autopsy done until days after the event but the day it happened the media said that mr grey was not having any problems when he was put into the van but died on the way to the police department. How the fuck did the media know what happened and what condition he was in, are they medical examiners? There's one thing that was immediately brought to the attention of everyone before anyone knew what mr grey died from.
     
  17. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    I was the source. That's as "definitive" as it gets.
    I found it perfectly adequate, for the purposes of the rough estimate I was making. I had the homicide rate, the black population estimated, a control on racial disparity in murder rates via incarceration percentages, the total lynchings and yearly breakdowns, from the linked sites. I pulled the percentage of KKK lynchings that were black men from memory (as well as one of the links), likewise a rough guess at the percentage of lynchings that were KKK, and included the error range from all of this in the discussion. I even cherrypicked the most challenging timeframe available - the year 1892, the peak lynching year also featuring one of the lowest homicide rates in a low population. What do you find lacking? Please be specific.

    And if you have a minute, try addressing the actual point being made: that comparing police killing to ordinary homicide by simple head count is all but meaningless. Like KKK lynchings, police killings have completely different, and much greater, significance.

    My condolences. If you are actually curious, type the words "lead gray baltimore" into the search bar of your browser. That way you can avoid retyping your stupid, bs "questions" over and over and over, trying to make other people chase your sticks, and instead choose your own source from the dozens.

    That, along with your repetition of the fact that some of the police involved were black, is why your claim to have seen no evidence of racism is not serious.

    Again: It's evidence of systematic, institutional, racism behind the lifelong abuse of Gray and everyone else who lives in that part of Baltimore; by the police, by the housing inspectors, by the courts, by the landlords, by the banks, by every agency of government and power center in society for as long as black people have predominately populated that part of town.

    The media I follow reported all that stuff as quotes and opinions from eyewitnesses and official spokesmen - as competent journalists do.

    You apparently need to find different media for yourself. That's been recommended to you before, and this is yet another example.
     
    Last edited: May 28, 2015
  18. joepistole Deacon Blues Valued Senior Member

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    Yeah, you just made it up, which is what you. And it took you more than a week to make that admission. You referenced statistics for which you have no source. You have not done any primary research, so how can you be the source unless you just made-up those statistics? You have not referenced any resource which validates your assertions. After more than a week you cited some references and told me to do the calculations. And I pointed out your “source” data was inadequate because your “sources” don’t contain the data you need to support your assertions. Now you are back to” you are your source” (i.e. you made it up). You just made it up. You have no source. That is the bottom line here.

    First, you refused to provide a source, then you provided 3 pseudo sources, and now you admit you have no source or primary research to support your assertions.
    Well when you estimate, you tell people you are estimating. You make a very definitive assertion for which you had and still have absolutely no evidence. For example, none of the sources you referenced contained data on the race of the murder or the social affiliations of the murder. What you did was the equivalent of an octopus ink spray.
    How is that even relevant? Who but you even mentioned comparing police killing to ordinary homicide rates? It wasn’t and hasn’t been an issue in this thread. This is yet another of your distractions.
    Well, actually, this discussion was about your assertion that Mr. Gray’s alleged lead poisoning was evidence of police racism and Mr. Gray’s lead poisoning had been discussed in this thread when in fact it had not been discussed – another one of those “dem” damn facts.
    Well, that is part of it. The Baltimore police officer charged with Mr. Gray’s murder is black. But you should know now, there is much more to my argument. Like, a white member of Sciforums testified to how Baltimore police officers physically mistreated him during a medial crisis. So Baltimore police abuse and mistreatment of residents goes beyond just race. Black officers have been accused of abuse and whites as well as blacks have been abused by Baltimore police officers.

    So you appear to have a very selective or a severely defective memory, because all of this has been repeated over and over for your edification.
    So the employment of black police officers is evidence of systematic institutional racism? And what did the Baltimore Police Department have to do with the housing choices made by Mr. Gray’s mother or with housing inspectors or banks? This is yet another attempt to obfuscate.

    Being poor isn’t racist. There are many more poor whites than there are poor blacks, as has been endlessly pointed out to you. Issues like lead poisoning affect older people, like me, because we were exposed to lead paints and leaded gasoline fumes right up until the late 1980’s when lead was phased out of those products. Mr. Gray hadn’t even been born then. And the CDC has been lowering the lead tolerance levels. Lead levels that would have been considered safe are now considered unsafe because the CDC has changed the lead standards.

    The issues you mentioned transcend race. While calling people names as you have repeatedly done, might make you feel better, it will not solve the problems the poor face.

    If we are to get serious about this problem it is not enough to blame people and call people names. When the National Transportation Safety Board investigates accidents, they don’t stop with blaming people. They look at the reasons why people make the mistakes they make. There is a whole science behind it; it’s called human factors engineering. We need to understand why Baltimore Police made the decisions which lead to Mr. Gray’s demise. And I have mentioned a few of those factors. Only when we understand those factors can we begin to fix the problems which led to Mr. Gray’s death.

    You were asked, how is Mr. Gray’s alleged lead poisoning evidence of police racism? You still haven’t answered that question. Grandiose demagoguery isn’t reason or a solution. It’s just grandiose demagoguery and an excuse. As much as you may not like it, everyone has some culpability here. Everyone has some accountability here. The Baltimore Police Department as I said from my very first post is culpable for Mr. Gray’s death. But you shouldn’t go off the deep end as you have done with all this nonsense.
     
  19. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Indeed. This topic has been raised here in the Washington-Baltimore corridor where there are large black-majority communities and many of them are quite prosperous. (Nearby Prince George's County is the most affluent majority-black region in the country.) Your question has been raised in both the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun: Why is it that when six young black men are killed by white cops, the city arises in anger, but when hundreds of young black men are killed by black thugs every year, their names aren't even published?
    The roots of black-on-black violence are complicated. Mr. Sharpton and his friends know that as well as us white residents of the Washington-Baltimore region.

    One of the major vectors is the racist way the U.S. drug laws are enforced. It's been noted many times that black Americans and white Americans use illegal drugs at virtually the same rate (in fact we white folks smoke MORE pot than black folks), yet a black drug user is somewhere between four and eight times as likely to be imprisoned for it as his white counterpart. This is a huge segment of the black male population. When they eventually return to civilian life with a prison record, the women they left behind can't let them back into their homes because the presence of a convicted felon would automatically cut off their welfare benefits.

    So we've got an enormous population of young black men who grew up without fathers. No role models.
    The Washington and Baltimore media actually cover this issue. I don't read the other big city papers so I can't tell you how, or if, they cover it too.

    But one of the most shocking things I've ever encountered that bears on this issue was in the Washington Post about ten years ago. A reporter was interviewing a number of single black mothers and asking them why they were single. The answer they all gave was, "There aren't enough nice, stable black men available."

    Imagine the same situation with the colors reversed. Imagine a community of white women who said that they weren't married because there weren't enough white men in the area! They would have been raked over the coals for refusing to consider men of another race as potential mates!

    But of course this wouldn't happen, for the very good reason that white American women don't have any taboos about marrying black men. Around here, a black man with his white wife or girlfriend is a common sight on the sidewalk or in a store, a bar or a theater. But it's very rare to see a black woman with a white man--it happens, but not often.

    On "Oprah" many years ago, she was interviewing a black man who had taken a white wife. The black ladies in the audience were booing him, actually calling him a traitor!
     
  20. Photizo Ambassador/Envoy Valued Senior Member

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  21. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    Very Common, even when just dating. In the Baltimore's Civic Interest Group, there were about 10 of each sex black regulars and typically 20 white girls from Goucher College and their cars which with my precise timing approach to hit up to 25 restaurants with less than a minute tolerance from T zero is what made for success.

    We all were very dedicated to "the cause" - open the restaurant to all races; but at times some quite harsh words were said by black female to a black male who was trying "to make some time" with one of the females from Goucher College. I dated a few of those Goucher girls and once one of the black females added to her quite racial, angry tirade directed at an intelligent black male member of our group, something like: "Stick to your own kind. You're infringing on Billy T's territory!"
     
    Last edited by a moderator: May 30, 2015
  22. Schmelzer Valued Senior Member

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    I would like to add a point about the race/criminality problem in the US which I have observed purely accidentally, and which I have never seen discussed.

    The accident was a documentary about the police and how they work in Alaska. What one knows from US is that the prison population in US is usually black, with the police being usually white. What I have seen in this documentation was another picture. Ok, the police was, as expected, white. Essentially, in this documentation, white only.

    But the prison population was not black. But also not white. It almost completely consisted of the aborigines. A completely different race, with completely different history - but the result seems similar.

    For me, this was only an accidental observation in a documentary which was not considering this question at all, but quite shoking because surprising - seeing almost 100% white policemen with almost 100% asian-looking prisoners. With 100% black prisoners it would have been less surprising, because I see some of the discussion about such racial problems - but almost all of them about problems with blacks.

    Any comments?
     
  23. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    The Australians still call their native people "Aborigines," but in the USA we have never used that word--in fact many people consider it derogatory. Down here in the South 48 (the contiguous 48 states), the native people have historically been called "Indians," but over the past few decades that name has been supplanted by "Native Americans."

    Up in Alaska there are two distinct populations of native peoples. In the southern part of the state the natives have the same ancestry as the native people in the rest of the Western Hemisphere, the descendants of migrants from Asia who came across Beringia more than 12,000 years ago. But in the northern part of Alaska, the native people are more recent arrivals, more like five or six thousand years ago, and they are closely related to the Arctic people in eastern Siberia. They are called Eskimos or Inuit (names from their own languages), but today we tend to call them Native Americans too.

    But anywhere in the USA where there are large populations of Native Americans, the same scenario is played out: the jailers are white, but the people in the jails are not. There are many places in the South 48 with populations of both Afro-Americans and Native Americans, and many of the incarcerated people belong to those demographics. There aren't very many Afro-Americans in Alaska, so there aren't many of them in the jails there.

    Of course everywhere in the USA there are lots of white people in the jails too. If you haven't seen that, you've probably seen scenes that were deliberately taken in places like Washington or Baltimore that have a majority-black population. There really aren't many other places like that, so it would be a little disingenuous for a filmmaker to make it seem like there are.
    The Native population is so large in Alaska that it may indeed look that way. In the South 48 white people vastly outnumber Native Americans so there are plenty of white people in the jails.
    One of the things that reduces the proportion of Native Americans in our jails is the fact that many of the Native tribes have treaties with the U.S. government that grant them more-or-less sovereign regions ("reservations") in which they maintain their own more-or-less traditional communities. They have their own police and their own jails, so if a Native commits a crime on the reservation, he goes to jail there, rather than to the county jail administered by white people ten miles away.
    I'd have to write an article six pages long to give you the slightest understanding of the race problem in the USA. I'm sure you know that Africans were first brought here as slaves, and it was 250 years before they were allowed the full rights of citizenship. But they were still treated poorly and had few opportunities for education and prosperity, so it was another 100 years before the "civil rights" movement began to take hold and they began to be treated as equals. But this is a slow process and the majority of Afro-Americans are still not very prosperous, they still tend to congregate in majority-black neighborhoods, and crime in those areas is rampant.

    Native Americans are not faring much better, although there are several exceptions. The Cherokee happened to be settled on land that turned out to be full of petroleum, so they are rather wealthy. The Navajo have the largest reservation in the country and have maintained a solid community.

    I haven't mentioned Hawaii, which has a large population of people descended from the original Polynesian inhabitants. They intermarried with the Chinese and Filipino people who came over to work on the plantations in the 19th century, so today they are "mixed race" and there isn't much friction between the white people and the Hawaiian people--whom our government categorizes as "Native Americans" just like the Apaches and the Eskimos.

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