To condemn Adrian Peterson without considering racial context ...

[tularetom]

95. First of all I am not minimizing your personal experience

and I can understand your perspective. I believe it was as traumatic as what you have described and I feel bad that you had to endure it. And I don't doubt that others had similar experience.

What I am questioning is whether you can extrapolate that personal experience to every black family living in that time and place. And particularly whether you can use your personal experience to justify (or even explain) Adrian Peterson's actions. Mr Peterson was not attempting to keep his son from being "uppity" (BTW I despise that fucking word), he texted that he was proud of how tough the little guy was for just taking everything without crying. And by the way Adrian Peterson is nothing if not privileged. He hasn't lost his job, he hasn't even been arrested for child abuse, he'll walk away from this with a slap on the wrist and in a year the whole thing will be forgotten. Money is far more a determinant of privilege than race.

I still maintain that most of these incidents are caused by anger and frustration.

And finally, you've never met me. You don't know whether I'm black, white, something in between or something totally different. As it happens, my paternal grandmother was the daughter of a black father and a Cherokee Indian mother. My dad was left on the steps of a church as an infant by his mother who could not care for him and raised in an orphanage. I can assure you he never once felt privileged and he did a good job of raising three kids even if he did lose his cool once in awhile when he'd had a bad day and paddle our asses. So I guess I'm 75% white.

I'm running on. I respect your opinion and I understand the basis for it. I'm not belittling it, but I just don't agree.