So you would not believe the Black man you initially asked, without further consultation, is what you’re saying? You think you know better, or can find better input elsewhere, because you didn’t like his answer?
Sounds a wee bit patronizing. Almost … patriarchal.
Well, i think we might possibly be getting things mixed up here. I never meant to imply that i didnt or wouldnt believe anything he said “as a black man”. I simply meant that until I understood what was said to me, i could not honestly say “you’re right bro”. I wrote sloppily before, i should have said to say “you’re right bro”, I would have been dishonest in that i said something i did not yet understand to be true. I forgot that vital yet in the quoted post.
I don’t think adding a “yet” changes anything. You asked, he answered, you didn’t accept. That’s all true, yes?
Do you accept something as being right or true if you dont understand what is being asked of you to accept? The “yet” is important because it implies that i open to accepting his answer but more information was needed.
Here’s what it appears like to me based on your description – folks were venting on FB; you took this venting to be a desire for discussion and asked questions about it; folks were annoyed by this interruption to their venting session, and may have used hyperbolic put downs to express this frustration.
In short, you made a faux pas and were rhetorically smacked for it. Not a huge deal unless you make it one.
If you “need to understand”, you are not doing what he told you to do, no? You’re doing that instead. So, “ignoring his answer until…”
is still “ignoring his answer”
The idea is that you don’t need to understand “it” - you need to accept “it” unquestioningly. Because you will never understand “it” - you’re not black.
You are supposed to just shut up, then say “You’re right, bro”, and do what he told you to, without question or complaint.
Regards,
Shodan
See? Shodan gets it.
An approach which never fails to bring about increased understanding and harmony wherever it is practiced…Ha!
Regardless of the subject if you stop challenging and stop questioning you’ve already stopped thinking.
I think people are probably on the right track with FB being a vent, but there’s also the imbalance of time. Look at what happens when a troll comes here to the SDMB and JAQs off about something that we’ve already had a thousand threads about. People spend collective hours writing up well-meaning, informative, and educational replies, and only one of two things ever happens – the troll disappears, or the troll is unfazed. Not to say you’re an IRL troll, but in the context of FB I can understand why someone would be dismissive of the potential for any meaningful education to occur.
Frankly, I think there’s more too it than that – I don’t think the answers are out there on Google. My wife has become very involved in D&I efforts over the last couple of years, and I love her for it, but I’ve also not taken her up on any offers to get involved myself. Why? Because while I think “raising awareness” and “having a conversation” are all good things, that’s not really my thing, and none of these D&I groups have come up with any “next steps.” What can I, as a part of the white male patriarchy, actually do about the racial problem in America? It’s a valid question, and if black people don’t have a responsibility to tell me (they don’t), then where can I find this information?
The one thing I’ve found evidence for, the one thing that I think I could do that might actually help, would be to take my white privileged family and move us over to the black side of town. Enroll my kids in a black school and actually work to re-integrate our city my own self. Bring my middle class income and my generational stability and my connections into a community that could desperately use all of those things. But there are problems with this. One, I’m not sure if I’m a good enough person to actually uproot my comfortable life to do this, to remove privileged access from my kids’ lives in order to do this. Two, I realistically would have had to have been a good person a decade ago, before my kids got involved in activities and friendships, because now I’d have to be an extra good person in order to upend our lives like that. And three, even this thing that I think might actually make a difference in America, that there’s actual peer reviewed evidence in support of, even this is just more white patriarchy bullshit. Like, I’m gonna ride my white ass into a black neighborhood and save the day like some kind of colonist? Should I bring bibles and medicine too? It’s all very fucked up, and I don’t know if I’m charismatic enough to get black people not to resent me for doing it.
So it very may well be that he doesn’t know what you can do, because there are no easy answers, and there’s not even a whole lot of hard ones, nearest I can tell. It could be that raising awareness and/or fostering a dialog are where he sees his strengths are. Or it could be that he’s skeptical of whether or not you’re worth the time.
I guess this is true. I honestly didnt regard it as “ignoring” anything he said, rather i saw it as trying to listening to what he said and not understanding the answer and attempting to gain more understanding. I didnt ignore anything he said, he said try google, i have and will do more as i go on. I also didnt keep pressing him when he said he wasnt doing my homework for me or that he had nothing for me. I simply expressed my confusion as to why he would respond that way to me asking for his thoughts on the things talked about in the posts he had just shared.
Once he said he had nothing for me, i didnt ignore him and continue to ask and prod him for his opinions. I listened and expressed my confusion as to why he’d respond that way to what i intended to be a very friendly, supportive question. When he said he wasnt doing my homework for me, i listened to him, then responded by saying i didnt understand why he thought i was attempting to have him do any of my work for me.
A lot of times minorities don’t even fully understand the extent of their own oppression and may not trust themselves to communicate the contours of that oppression to others. It’s not like the old days when the racism and oppression was pretty clear and obvious and the problem was that white people were simply OK with terrorizing black people and treating them like second class citizens. There were legislative solutions to many of those problems.
These days the racism is not nearly as bad as it used to be but it is still creates barriers and trauma. E.g. after you discount the direct effects of poverty (which can be directly traced to past racism in many communities), you still have the effects of a society where poverty is color coded. People assume black people are poor and that affects how people treat black people. Perhaps we should all start treating poor people better while we are at it.
When you pass white man on the street in a T-shirt and shorts, he is going to the gym. A black man in a t shirt and shorts might try to sell you drugs or maybe rob you.
There is a lot of literature out there now that at least addresses the black perspective on these issues.
I don’t know them all but I thought “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nahisi Coates was pretty enlightening. I don’t necessarily agree with everything in the book and it is very anecdotal but I found it useful.
It is a little unreasonable to expect everyone to have a ethnic studies degree but that is where we are. Understanding these issues is starting to become an element of good citizenship.
“how to be an anti-racist” by Ibram C Kendi does a good job of identifying the problem in a way that is easily digestable. I don’t agree with his solution but by looking at his proposed solutions, you get a pretty good idea of what the problems might be.
For some people, there is a hierarchy of oppression and you are on the wrong end of that spectrum by virtue of the color of your skin. For some people, your problems don’t matter until their problems are addressed.
Really?
Where the fuck do you hang out on the internet? AOC’s twitter page?
Seems an odd belief structure for those who also believe that the very people who will never understand it are the same people who are tasked with fixing this patriarchy. And he told me to find my answers elsewhere, because this was not his problem, it was a white man’s problem.
So this patriarchy, that we all agree needs to be eradicated, is only ever truly able to be understood thru the Black Experience. Also, the white man will never be able to understand this, so he needs to just flatly accept what the black community tells them and just do what they say. Also, this is only a white man’s problem, so dont expect the black community to do your work for you and tell you what to do.
Tell me again what my HS mate was telling me to accept?
And not just Facebook.
There are lots of people (for a wide variety of subjects from all portions of the political and identities spectrum), we see them here too frequently, who are completely disinterested in discussion let alone actually working towards any positive change. And maybe not even venting. Sometimes it is people looking for what would basically be an online support group: vent and get some unquestioning “that sucks” and "me too"s that ask nothing of you. But more often it’s about posturing and getting affirmation from a target audience. Rarely are people looking for anything other than those things.
If only it was only Facebook.
Putting the burden to “fix” the problem onto the oppressed population is a classic passive aggressive technique to appear like you are being fair and reasonable, and then then shift the blame for everything to the oppressed population. Oppressor says “What’s the solution? Tell me what I can do?” and then nit-picks, dismantles, rejects, or vomits out minutia about everything that is proposed–it’s not possible, it’s not fair. The oppressor takes the suggestions personally, reinterprets the conversation as being about the oppressor and the exact outlines of his culpability and responsibility, not about reality of the oppressed. The oppressed’s solutions are turned into strawmen, held up as examples of unreasonableness and evidence that the oppressed, as a group, are unmanagable and defective. Then, when nothing changes, the oppressed is blamed because they “didn’t come up with a solution” even though they were “given a chance”.
After centuries of that cycle, is it any surprise that people react poorly to being invited to play another round?
I don’t think it could be any clearer - he is telling you to accept unquestioning submission.
And “unquestioning” means literally that - you don’t get to ask any questions. That you don’t understand what they want you to do is a feature, not a bug. They never want you to think you’ve done enough, because they always want you to do more.
Besides, once you start letting people ask questions there’s no end to it. “What do you want from me” is a question. Don’t ask questions.
Regards,
Shodan
And that baring of wounds has resulted in many changes like the civil rights act.
This country is still 75% white. You’re not going anywhere without them.
The problems that remain are not things that can easily be legislated away. It is significantly harder to identify and prove and mostly exists within the hearts and minds
What Manda Jo said, as usual :).
It’s a little concerning that your takeaway from the conversation isn’t a commitment to dismantling racism, but is rather a long and rather plaintive screed about how unfairly you were treated by your black friend. Stipulate that he was a rude asshole to you: is that really the Great Debates material you need to write about?
Coincidentally, The Root published a piece today called, How to be a Better White Person in 2020. It’s a great read, and while it doesn’t explain or justify your friend’s response to you, I don’t much care about that and don’t think you should either. Instead, it gets right to the heart of what you as a white person can do to help dismantle racism.
And yet there are a lot of people who think there should be a “dialog” about these issues. And a dialog has to have some back and forth or it isn’t a dialog. And who better to have a dialog with than someone you know already who is complaining about these issues? If you try to have this same type of interaction with people in the media or vocal people in cyberspace, they’ll say you’re sealioning, and if you go to people you know who are not bringing up this issue, they’ll correctly accuse you of being their go-to person on these issues with all that that entails, rather than incorrectly in this case.