The patronizing, condescending attitude toward a particular race is racist. Not in any way respectful or considerate.
How is that condescending or patronizing? I hold no such emotions towards Native Americans so I really don't know how you've managed to ascribe them to me. I have the utmost respect for native peoples and their culture.
Seriously, what the hell is the matter with you people? It's honestly getting to the point where I have to accept the only racists and bigots left in the world are the ones so busy trying to protect those poor, disadvantaged, inferior people out there from racists and bigots. How blind you are to your own assumed superiority!
You are really lost here. You're having trouble distinguishing the facts on the ground from people's inherent abilities.
The facts are the poverty rate is far higher in Native American communities
25% as compared to 15% nationally at the height of our recent economic slowdown. Now you can ascribe that to inherent inferiority (the definition of racism) or to past history.
The recent Republican talking point with respect to poverty has been that the poor are simply lazy and that's why they are poor. If you combine that kind of thinking with the facts on the ground that certain groups of people have higher rates of poverty than others, that leads to racist thinking.
I think your issues may be from believing the talking points so that when the facts are brought to your attention, you call the person bringing them, racist.
Then you make the even wilder leap and ascribe someone's desire to help people that are (by the numbers) disadvantaged as "racist". This makes no sense whatsoever. Not every Native American is disadvantaged, not every white person is advantaged, anyone that understands statistics at all knows this. But, by the numbers, there is a pattern. The whites in the worst situations are generally better off than the average person of color.
I do NOT believe any of this is reflective of an inherent inferiority or superiority, but that history has an incredibly long lag time and difficult to escape. Whites get advantages other races do not simply by virtue of history. Simple things like better credit rating, home equity, having your parents give/help buy a car for you near adulthood. White children don't earn any of these things but they benefit from them because their parents have them and their parents benefited from the same advantages and it takes only a few generations to go back where it was public policy to oppress people of color. During that same time most whites were building family assets.
Time will help in ameliorating inequality from history, but there's no reason to throw up our hands and pretend we shouldn't try to address these kinds of problems with public policy since it was public policy that created them in the first place. The respect comes in when these decisions are made in collaboration with the groups that are meant to be helped which is, I believe, the current trend in policy making of this type.
