My white grandparents had a house in the middle of the black part of town. And when I say "black" I mean except for my grandparents and my family, we never saw another white person anywhere close to their house, when we visited. We'd make the trip from the suburbs to their house every Sunday to take them food and hang out on the porch, in good weather, or the living room in bad weather. They were in their 80's and had lived in that house for 50+ years, and they saw no reason to leave. They and their neighbors were dirt poor.
As a kid, the difference between were I lived and this place I visited once a week was striking. It shaped how I felt about poor people and race relations, in general. The weird thing is that when I went there, that neighborhood felt more comfortable and friendly to me than mine in the burbs.
I remember when Ali refused to be drafted. There was a lot of anger in our home town. It help me form my feelings toward war and service. I don't think that internal dialog would have happened had he not done what he did.
This is an important thing to acknowledge about “heroes” and “role models.” People are complicated. Their relationship with the society that shaped them is complicated, their relationship with society fifty, one hundred, or centuries later is even more complicated.
I do not excuse Muhammad Ali’s views on certain subjects because he was amazing in other respects. I don’t give an overall score. I admire and respect certain things he said and did, I politely disagree with other things he said and did, and I reject outright certain things he said and did.
I still feel he is “The Greatest,” but I do not pretend he was perfect, and if you conjured him up today in full possession of his speech and mental faculties, I would not hesitate to argue with him about issues like homosexuality.
I’d do the same thing with MLK. I’d harangue George Washington about owning slaves. I empathize with how they might have formed their views. I understand how the forces of their times and experienced helped shape their perspective. But empathizing with them does not mean agreeing with them.
It’s essential to see the whole person and avoid falling into a simple black/white/good/bad/progressive/conservative trap. And it’s essential to disentangle empathy from agreement or endorsement.
he actually quoted the Bible and said "Jews and gentiles are devils", according to the context of the interview in which he said it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJu8sVWQ-wk
Not quite, but you're right; he was far from perfect. He cheated on his wife numerous times as well, and many of his views changed as he grew older.
I think we can look up to what he did right and still acknowledge that he was flawed like the rest of us. I hope no one judges me solely by the things I did when I was in my twenties.
Ali: Turning my back on Malcolm was one of the mistakes that I regret most in my life. I wish I’d been able to tell Malcolm I was sorry, that he was right about so many things. But he was killed before I got the chance. He was a visionary ahead of us all.
…I might never have become a Muslim if it hadn’t been for Malcolm. If I could go back and do it over again, I would never have turned my back on him.
Simply assuming that he was treated badly and therefore justified in his blanket discrimination towards others is academically lazy and ethically unacceptable.
I'm not assuming anything; has life has been documented time and time again. We information from him personally, those who knew him, and we know exactly what Louisville Kentucky was like during his lifetime. Are you saying that unless I was there personally I know "absolutely nothing" about his life? Get real and get over yourself.
Ali was my favorite sports figure as a child and remains so. I have consumed everything I can find about the guy. I'm willing to bet I know more than you on the matter, but if I don't, why don't you share some of your insights with us as well as the rest of the world?
>academically lazy and ethically unacceptable
Yeesh. I'm not sure what 'academic and ethical' standards you believe people on a forum should be held to, but again; get over yourself. I'm sure you think you're being extremely clever and deep with your comments here, but in reality you're adding absolutely nothing to the conversation with your overly pedantic comments which show nothing but your ignorance of history.
I also find it pretty hilarious that you seem to have created a throwaway account purely to comment in this thread.
This rebuttal only has merit if you're being pedantically literal.
Surely, you're aware of the prevailing racial conditions in the U.S. and Louisville in particular during Ali's upbringing and beyond. He was, by definition, treated badly by an entire system that was not set up by black people, yet overtly oppressed black people.
Surely, you're aware of how the conditions of the time would have impacted Ali himself, his family, and those in his community. Surely, you can see how members of such a community might feel some anger and resentment.
What's lazy here is your pedantic use of demagoguery to make enlightened-sounding, but vapid statements that berate others for some supposed discrimination that exists only in a willfully myopic bubble of your own creation.
"People saying this is racist are misunderstanding that the problem with racism is not just some words, it's the power balance dynamic that backs them. A black man saying white people are the devil, has no power to actually do much damage, even in 2016. A white man saying that black man is the devil, has during our history been able to: imprison the person on trumped up charges, have their family bought and sold, beaten often to death, hung them, tar and feather, run them out of town, and refuse them housing. To pretend that there is an equality between two statements from people of different skin colors in current and past american society is to be willfully blind to the difference between them."
Those words are sourced from the concepts of Elijah Muhammed, Louis Farrakhan, Malcolm X and others.
Its fine to repeat Ali's words here...but lets not misconstrue them as original ideas or Ali as anything other than a follower and a mouthpiece fueled by his own anger issues.
- Ad hominem attacks
- Disclosing hypocrisy (as a logical fallacy)
- Celebrity posters distracting from the subject
- Appeals to authority
Consistent identity is a no-brainer within the context of a single post; beyond that, there are downsides.
In any case, HN doesn't feel like it has an individual-driven community, at least compared to Reddit. I'm hard pressed to name any users on this site. That might be more a reflection on me - I come here to read about interesting topics, and I have more interest in the message than the speaker.
Incidentally, how many HN users can you name? (I'm genuinely curious)
Re names: No idea, but more than it would be worth taking the time to try listing. I'm the wrong person to ask, though, since it's my job to monitor HN.
Maybe, just maybe, binary thinking is the exact opposite of being a Hacker. Maybe it’s a crutch, an excuse for not seeing the world as it really is, or a rhetorical device for steering discussions away from truth and towards an end someone is trying to socially engineer.
Would that were true, but I fear that all those 0s and 1s pattern our brains in even more intensely binary a way.