What do you think that changes?
Again, I didn’t bring them up.
I’m not sure what you are trying to accomplish by massaging “our fathers” into “predecessors” and what contradiction you are trying to point out here.
Well, you should no longer get offended when people talk about them, and no longer get defensive in saying “What did my ancestors do?”
Again, yes you did. You asked what you r ancestors did, claiming tha they only got here recently, and therefore, not responsible for the conditions they found.
You are the one that said “Our collective duty is to set up a country that is fair and where everyone has an equal opportunity to thrive.”
But then you claim that it is not your responsibility to do any of that, because your personal ancestors were not involved.
I’m not offended except to the extent I get offended by people making asinine arguments.
Do you not see the post I quoted bringing up my ancestors?
Where exactly do you think I claimed the exact opposite of what you just quoted me saying?
No, actually I can, because for many whites it is their ancestors who caused this.
Are you trying to be clever or something?
Then you should have no offense at all. You seemed to take offense when you felt that the accusation was personally leveled at your personal ancestors.
You comments of “This may have been addressed earlier, but what damage do you think I’ve inflicted on black Americans?” and “Will you stop this? My ancestors had nothing to do with creating “blacks as an economic and political underclass”. They weren’t even in the country when all the stuff you mentioned happened.” certainly seemed to indicate that you took offense to the incorrect interpretation that you chose to make.
No, I do not. I saw a post talking about the ancestors of modern conservatives. I saw you talking about your personal ancestors in offended terms.
You will have to point to me to show me where anyone was talking specifically about your personal ancestors.
You said,
Those two statements contradict each other.
Either we have the responsibility to “set up a country that is fair and where everyone has an equal opportunity to thrive”, or we have no duty to fix the problems that were created by our “fathers”.
We do not have a country that is fair and everyone has and equal opportunity, and that is the fault of our predecessors, who you say we have no obligation to fix the problems that they left us.
Because “A discussion” about “problems” invariably involves someone getting blamed; so in this example the “Discussion” is pretty obviously going to be “Aggreived minorities want white people to apologise and admit they’re horrible, horrible people that everything bad is the fault of, and also to just withdraw from public life because ugh, white people are just the worst.”
The best we’re going to get with regards to fixing some of these issues is “Everyone alive now agrees that being a racist dickhead is bad and don’t do it” - and since nearly everyone agrees that’s fair and reasonable and civilised, there’s not much more that can be practically done without a dramatic change in society.
I think because that’s largely the default state of affairs is why we’ve got people inventing things like “privilege”, because Getting What They Wanted (and, to be fair, should have had the whole time in the case of overt racism) didn’t bring about the super immediate spectacular change they were hoping for.
Disagreeing with an argument by pointing out a fundamental error in logic is not taking offense.
What? That makes no sense.
Those clearly are not contradictory statements.
You can’t take “many” and logically extend it into “all”.
This whole idea relies on some kind of collective guilt based on skin color. I’m going to say I’m opposed to collective guilt based on skin color, or pretty much anything else.
If someone is doing something wrong, that person’s wrongs should be addressed appropriately. If someone is a member of a group where membership is not otherwise wrong, and someone from that group has done something wrong, trying to attribute responsibility to all members of the group is a terrible idea.
Setting aside the ‘ancestors’ question for a moment, the current existence of advantages for some demographic groups (white and male) over other demographic groups (non-white and female) has been well-documented. For example:
http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html
and
http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2014/why-does-john-get-stem-job-rather-jennifer
and
Despite Improving Job Market, Blacks Still Face Tougher Prospects : NPR
Each of these studies provide citations that lead to dozens more studies, all demonstrating the general principle that, well, privilege exists.
Arguments about ancestors need not be resolved in order to address the fact that privilege exists. As for what to do about it: building awareness of the objective facts (such as the fact that identical resumes receive differing responses based on the name at the top) is a good starting point.
Re-reading this I am struct by how eloquent and apt it is. Thank you, asahi.
It may be no coincidence that there is “in America” in the thread title. Based on a lot of anecdotes, I wonder if the compete/cooperate lever is more lopsided in America than in several other cultures. (And should ‘Americans’ be broadened to include, to a lesser extent, Anglophones more generally? I think we’ll need a new thread to debate that. :eek: )
Look, if you are white in America, then you are benefiting from a status created in the past by the bad behavior of white people. It is the fact of your status and the benefits you receive that make this society unjust.
Whether or not you believe it’s your fault or you are to blame is irrelevant. It is still your responsibility to fix it, because only white people can fix it.
If you don’t do it, it won’t get fixed. That’s what it comes down to. You can be as offended as you want from having this point d out, but that fact is unchangeable.
If you believe in a just society then you as a white person are responsible for taking action to make it just. So if you want to be one of the good guys, you’ll stop crying about being unfairly painted with a broad brush or whatever kind of pathetic nonsense. It’s your problem and you have to fix it. Or you just have to stop thinking of yourself as one of the good guys.
Great post!
In a way, yes, I can.
As I said in a post before the one you originally took exception to, I don’t believe that whites today, individually, are collectively guilty of anything other than what they say, do, and vote for while they’re alive today - I already covered that. I know that a lot of white conservatives make a point to argue that their ancestors had nothing to do with slavery. Maybe they fought for the North. Maybe their ancestors weren’t in the country. Maybe their ancestors aren’t white or black. None of that is really important to ascertain.
Again, we’re talking about how we fix wounds in America, and it’s pretty obvious to anyone who studies American history (beyond what they teach in American schools) that black Americans have sustained more wounds than just about every other ethnic group, save perhaps Native Americans. White governments of the past and whites in everyday society perpetrated these crimes and whites living today have economic and political advantages today over their black counterparts, regardless of whether your ancestors had anything to do with establishing this society - a totally irrelevant fact by the way.
This has nothing to do with assigning blame or making whites feel a sense of shared guilt over a society that they inherited. There were whites who inherited a society that was more regressive and institutionally racist than the one we’re living in today. Many whites marched in civil rights marches, not because they felt like they were responsible for racism that they didn’t believe in, but because they realized that saying “It’s not my fault - I never owned a slave and I don’t feel the way my neighbor or father does” doesn’t - change - shit. You could argue that white Americans aren’t collectively at fault but they have a collective responsibility. You can’t just say “It’s not my fault” or “It’s not my father’s fault” or “It’s not my grandfather’s fault”. If you are truly interested in trying to change the present situation, then you have to understand that you have the power to see that as far as our society has come, it still has a hell of a lot of racism, and this racism doesn’t exist because Barack Obama told the world that if he had a son, he’d look like Trayvon Martin.
I guess what I’m saying is, I really don’t give a toss if your ancestors were racist or not. I’m not talking about them; I’m talking about you and me and everyone on this board. We all have the power to try to learn more about racism and its impact on people. We all have the power to try to understand what symbols like confederate statues mean not only to great grandchildren of white confederate militia men but also the descendants of slaves. We can all Google and find out the real history behind these symbols, when they were erected, and why. We all have the power to try and understand what it’s like to be a black graduate of an Ivy League school and yet get profiled by suspicious neighbors or police officers. All we have to do is have a little curiosity to go past our own experience with people who look like us.
If you think that, why are you saying things like this:
If none of that is important you ought to stop bringing it up.
Setting aside quibbles with the way these name studies are done, the result they get back isn’t significant. Sure, it’s statistically significant, in that the difference is not likely due to random chance. But it is not significant because the gap isn’t large enough to be noticeable in everyday life. For example, in the study they are talking about in the NPR interview, they found white names got positive responses to 18% of the applications while black names got 15%. That gap is essentially meaningless. You have to apply to around 40 jobs before you get to an actual whole number difference (6 v 7).
If you flip the numbers around and look at it a different way, the actual impact gets even smaller. For a black person applying to a job, the chances of the different outcomes are 15% for a positive response, 82% for a rejection for non-racial reasons, and 3% rejection for racial reasons. Ultimately, both a black applicant and a white applicant will have essentially the same experience.
As for the gender study, it appears at first blush to be more of an impact. However, there’s actually no statistical difference in starting pay for STEM (minus engineering) graduates. See the chart on page 14 of this pdf:
There’s a ton of logical explanations for this. Most likely is that women don’t accept jobs at places that discriminate against them in pay. They will be over represented at the places that treat them fairly and under represented at places that don’t.
Crap post.
I believe in a just society. In a just society I am responsible for myself, not for you.
I am responsible for making sure that you are not treated unjustly, because I don’t want to be treated that way. I will fight a war, embrace a movement, and alter the structure of my government to make sure that you are not treated unjustly.
But the rest is up to you. I’m sorry if your parents and your teachers didn’t tell you this fact. They really should have.
I suspect they did.
Universal health care would be a good place to start.
There’s nothing at all contradictory about what was posted.
Are you trying to be clever?
And, as long as it is insisted that someone needs to be blamed, rather than we all needing to take responsibility, nothing will be accomplished.
If we want to point fingers and blame people, we could. We could point at people like Jefferson Davis, or Robbie Lee, or ‘Jim Crow’, and point to them and blame them. We could point to organizations of white supremacists like the KKK or the Nazis, and we could blame them too. The lame game can be fun, we could keep it up all day.
That is a different subject entirely, though, from the question of how do we fix these problems. Deflecting and claiming that the problems are not your fault is not going to solve them.
It’s not about assigning blame, it’s about taking responsibility.
Claiming a error in logic is not the same as pointing one out. You will have to justify your claim, as it does not follow.
You are incorrect in your assessment.
No, it does not make sense that you are deflecting blame from your personal ancestors, when no blame is being put at your personal ancestors, and who gets the blame is utterly irrelevant to who has the responsibility today.
In one statement, you say that we have no responsibility to fix the unfair and unequitable society that our predecessors left us.
In the other, you say we have the duty to create a fair and equitable society.
How is that not contradictory?