Where did I assume any motivations? I haven’t assumed any motivations at all. My feelings are about actions, not motivations.
Sounds fine to me. And if someone says or does something that I (or others) think is inappropriate, I (and they) may say something. If someone flies a Confederate flag in a neighborhood in which black people might see it, I may something. If they wear a swastika on their shirt, I may say something. If they wear a t-shirt with sexualized and objectifying imagery of women, I may say something. We might have a conversation. I might criticize someone or someone’s actions. Not the end of the world.
I have never seen anyone display a Swastika. I have seen plenty of people displaying battle flags even here in New England and some black people in the South. To some people, it is just a sign of casual rebellion against nothing in particular. I don’t ever assume that anyone is displaying it for any specific reason. One of my black friends that lives outside of Seattle now had one because The Dukes of Hazzard was his favorite TV show growing up and he was mad that he had to take it off his motorcycle when the white intelligentsia in the area decided those were no longer allowed because of historical oppression (his prized motorcycle got vandalized multiple times when it was parked in public places). That is irony if there ever was any.
My main point it is always better to find out what people really believe and talk to them rather than just assume based on arbitrary assumptions and symbols. You may be very surprised. There are a few bad people out there but most aren’t and they have somewhat nuanced views that they developed for a reason. Someone will never know that if they just plug their ears and started screaming whenever anyone with differing views starts to speak.
I don’t assume motives either. I just know that that symbol is very offensive to many people for very good reasons – that it was resurrected to prominence as a symbol of opposition to Civil Rights. I don’t think everyone who flies it necessarily believes black people are inferior, but I think everyone who flies it either doesn’t know that it is legitimately seen this way by millions of decent Americans or doesn’t care. I think that’s highly obnoxious and unkind to one’s neighbors and fellow Americans.
I’m not making any assumptions at all, and I’m happy to have these sorts of conversations about these topics. I don’t think most of these people are bad people either, and I’d love to talk to them about these things. But I’m not going to hold back my feelings and criticism because I think they are decent people. Decent people screw up all the time. When I screw up, I want people to call me on it. At worst we’ll have a good conversation and maybe I’ll learn something.
The first time I ever saw the term SJW it was being used by a socialist to refer to people who get outraged by relatively insignificant stuff on the internet but never get up off their asses and try to do anything about real injustices that seriously hurt people. I can get behind that attitude, but lately I’ve seen it used more against anyone who expresses a liberal view, to the point where I think it’s lost all meaning and should be retired.
I can’t fathom putting that shirt, a swastika armband and the Confederate battle flag on the same level of offensiveness.
If someone thinks that shirt is as bad as a swastika shirt, they’ve got problems. Not saying you think that, but I can imagine some people reacting as if they’re on the same level of badness.
I’ll give you an example of a cause I’m familiar with.
An activist who wastes no opportunity to portray herself as a champion for justice, human rights and puppies… at the same time expressing happiness to have group that’s been classified as a terrorist organization and is notorious for inciting and taking part in acts of ethnic cleansing being on her side because they kill people they don’t like so maybe they can start doing the same against the people she doesn’t like…
Of course that little band of justice warriors think they are the good guys and anyone that dares to say that their shit does, indeed, stink is an agent of evil that needs to be dealt with by any means, up to and including attempting to frame people for extremely serious crimes just to shut them up.
Shrug. I did some Googling and found other sources that say the opposite. Competing search results.
It wasn’t always illegal. It wasn’t until fairly recently that a federal law was passed (against strong Republican opposition.) It’s also hard to prove.
That’s how ugly racism, sexism, religious discrimination, homophobia, and other forms of bigotry are. Some people would shoot themselves in the foot than to hire a woman. Bigots use excuses, claiming that women don’t work as hard, or as well, but the fact is that it’s bigotry, and ugly as sin.
Do you truly, genuinely, honestly think that? Most of us have worked for large corporations and we all know they’re ultimately only interested in the bottom line. If it were 20% cheaper to hire women instead of men, that’s exactly what a lot of them would do, IMHO.
Even accounting for outliers like a particularly sexist regional manager or something, if it was, across the board, waaaay cheaper to hire women, the pressure would be coming down on people at that level to make sure as many women as possible got hired to keep costs down.
I can understand that. I’m sure if I had to try and explain out my observations over a lifetime it’d be… well, where do I start?
Maybe it’d be better to take a different line. You talked originally about modern liberalism, of which your Co-Op group are a part. How do you know that this scorn for labor, working-class, and especially working-class white men is a wide-ranging thing enough to speak of it in those terms?
If anyone wants an example of rape culture, watch the recent Trump video with Billy Bush. A great example – a man brags about groping/sexual assault and Bush’s laughter and egging him on constitutes implicit acceptance and support. In rape culture, groping and sexual assault just aren’t that big a deal to many men (especially powerful men), and considered as part of the perks of being successful and powerful.
Sundown towns declined but still existed even after civil rights. Vidor, TX, between some of the blackest parts of Louisiana and Texas, is one such town, and is still less than 0.1% black.
You tell me if it’s possible that a town could be that white when the surrounding areas are so black if town culture and informal policies didn’t have something to do with it.
“Vidor was known as a “sundown town,” where African Americans were not allowed after sunset; it has also long been a haven for the Ku Klux Klan. In 1993, after the U.S. federal government attempted to bring African Americans into Vidor’s public housing, the Klan held a march in the community, prompting African American families to move out within a matter of months.”
Places like this still exist in America. Is it wrong to say that white supremacism is still strong in places like that?
And you’re still avoiding my earlier point, namely that there’s no way a modern business would pass up the chance to save 20% on its wages, if only they could get away with hiring women because they can legally pay them less.
I don’t think that works. A sexist wages policy would be the result of company decision makers believing that women were worth that smaller wage. If CEO Bob thinks that women should be paid less than men, because he thinks that women work less well or otherwise provide less value to the company, then he’s not going to require lots of women be hired.
In a perfect world, perhaps. This is a bit different than my point. But in the real world some businesses have in the past and probably still do make decisions this way.