It’s not reading comprehension at all. You’re explicitly adding something in that the poster did not say or imply. You’re doing exactly what Shodan did to your post. Exaclty.
I’m sure there are. What about F-P’s post (or mine) that leads you to believe that he or I never accept any story of racism at face value?
What people are you talking about?
I think Crystal Mangum and Tawana Bradley were lying about their stories of racism. That hardly means I am denying that racism exists. Maybe Obama and his wife are being 100% truthful about their experiences, and maybe it was 100% fueled by racism. Maybe they are being 100% truthful, and so are other white people who have had the same experiences. Does this mean racism doesn’t exist? I don’t think it does mean that.
Regards,
Shodan
He makes the accusation that the Obamas might just have encountered someone asking for help. Of course someone thinks it’s normal to ask the First Lady of the United States for help getting something off a shelf. Do you really think Barbara Bush would have been asked for help? Hillary Clinton? It’s not like she’s some unknown face.
Maybe someone with a different history could get the benefit of the doubt. But F-P is nearly always the voice of contrariness in race discussions. It’s not just this one post. I am fairly certain that his initial reaction to any claim of racism is to disbelieve it.
And you commonly defend that way of thinking, implying you think it is reasonable. It’s not.
No, the implication is inherently there, especially along with the claim about Mrs. Obama’s experience. That’s how English works. If you say one thing might be accurate while discussing whether the rest of it is accurate, the implication is that you think the rest of it is inaccurate.
If you say you went to the store, saw a penguin walking around, and took it back to the zoo, and I say “I’m sure you went to the zoo,” the implication is that I think you didn’t go to the store and see a penguin. If I also throw in something about penguins not usually running around in stores, it’s pretty obvious what I mean.
Also, here’s an edit for clarity of the last line of my previous post:
And you commonly defend people when they do this, implying you think such thinking is reasonable. It’s not.
First of all, racism is an idea, not an event. It doesn’t “happen.”
Second, I don’t know anyone who thinks racism doesn’t exist. The question is degrees.
Some of us don’t think racism permeates everything in our society. We tire of people who dedicate every waking moment to the quest of finding racism everywhere.
This isn’t 1960.
“All experiences are equal, but some are more equal then others.”
I agree that some people don’t think racism permeates everything in our society. In a bizarre coincidence, almost all of them happen to be white. Golly!
I’m sorry; I shouldn’t be so glib. It really is a sad state of affairs when people who actually experience racism think that their knowledge and experience means they know a lot about racism… They may even think they might know more than [del]their betters[/del] those people mentioned above.
Skin tone does not dictate one’s knowledge of racism. I mean, if we’re going to play that game, then I would like to discount the opinion of every White person in this thread who thinks that (rampant) racism is an obstacle facing Blacks in the US, on the basis that I’m Black and happen to disagree.
Or does it not with that way?
No. He accuses Michelle Obama, not Barack Obama. And she deliberately disguised herself on that shopping trip. If you deliberately disguise yourself, you don’t get to complain that people don’t recognize you.
I don’t know enough about either of you to make that judgment. Just speaking to the broader issue that the problem isn’t really about dismissing one person’s experience in one case, it’s about dismissing all experiences in all cases, and it’s true a thread like FP’s is likely to attract such people.
[QUOTE=Omg a Black Conservative]
Skin tone does not dictate one’s knowledge of racism. I mean, if we’re going to play that game, then I would like to discount the opinion of every White person in this thread who thinks that (rampant) racism is an obstacle facing Blacks in the US, on the basis that I’m Black and happen to disagree.
Or does it not with that way?
[/QUOTE]
It stands to reason that a black person would have greater insight into what it’s like to be a black person than a white person would. That said, your personal experience does not negate any other black person’s experience. I think ultimately that’s what this is about - some people coming forward to say, ‘‘I had this experience, and it sucked,’’ and others saying, ‘‘I never had that experience so your experience is invalid.’’ Or, in the case of white people, ‘‘I had an experience like that once therefore your perception of your own experience is invalid.’’
I am just rather bemused at how quickly we dismiss others’ experiences while taking our own at face value.
I have a friend who does that every time the conversation turns to white fear of minorities. He’s a big guy, see, and people lock their doors whenever they see him coming, but he’s white, therefore black people are probably just imagining things. He’s not even looking at ‘‘collective experience of white guys’’ vs. ‘‘collective experience of black guys.’’ He’s looking at ‘‘personal individual experience’’ vs ‘‘collective experience of black guys.’’
(By ‘‘collective’’ I don’t mean every single black man in existence, I just mean a significant number.)
I have to question the logic behind FP’s post. He seems to be arguing that as a white person he’s never experienced racism. Therefore he questions whether black people experience racism.
The gap in the logic should be pretty obvious when I point it out like that.
Personally, I happen to have born on the top of every divide out society has. I’m white, I’m male, I’m straight, and I’m Christian (or at least I was). So I’ve never personally experienced any of the bigotry members of any minority group experience.
But I’m not an idiot. I understand that just because I don’t experience these things doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
I don’t see that this is an issue. No one dismissed all experiences of racism, so no one like that was attracted to F-P’s thread.
The point is that being mistaken for the help is not a uniquely black experience. So when Michelle Obama presents her experience of being asked for help in a store by an older lady, she is mistaken to claim that it gives insight into being black that no white person could have. Because if being asked to get something off a high shelf for an older lady gives you insight into what the black experience is like, then many whites have that insight.
No, you mean every single black man in existence. And nothing you say can change that. That’s how accusations of racism work. When you do it right.
Regards,
Shodan
I think one of the issues that it brings up is that because racism is still so prevalent in the US it will probably be inferred even in instances where it didn’t occur, and that result should be totally unsurprising.
So, you have instances where a person mistakes another person for working at a store when they don’t (it’s happenned to me and I’m pretty damn white). Obviosuly, when it happenned to me, it wasn’t because of racism. If that same person, in that same store, made the same accidental assumption about a black person, then we’d have to ask the question “was it because of racism?” And the answer would be “maybe.” There is almost certainly a greater likelihood of it occuring to a black perosn than to a white, but the general statistics say absolutely nothing about a given insatnce. In fact, the increased likelihood of it occuring with regards to black people provides reasoning to assume a given instance was, or could have been, racially related. But this very line of reasoning guarantees that some instances will occur where a racial implication was assumed but not present. That is problematic for everybody.
I’m not sure I’m interested in an extended back-and-forth about this, but perhaps one post would be appropriate.
As I see it, there are two distinct though related issues. 1) what I think about the underlying issue of blacks being stereotyped as “the help”, and 2) what point I was making in that particular thread. These are as follows:
As to stereotyping as “the help”
[ol]
[li]I think it’s very likely that this more commonly occurs to blacks than to whites. I’ve not seen any studies of this, and I don’t know if such exist, but it makes sense that this is so. But based on that same rationale, it makes more sense if this disparity is more common in some situations and less common (if it exists at all) in others. Specifically, in a situation where there’s a big difference between the percentage of blacks in the customer/guest role and the percentage in the service role, e.g. in the valet situation, or the waiter vs guest at high end dinners, then it’s likely that this stereotype will be more prevalent with blacks. (Even in such situations, it can happen in reverse, but it’s probably more common to blacks.) In other situations, where there is not a noticeable difference in the percentage of blacks in the service role versus the customer role – e.g. at a Target store – it’s unlikely that a black is any more likely to be mistaken for help than a white person.[/li][li]It’s likely that being mistaken for the help is more insulting to a black person than to a white person. This is because a white guy being mistaken for the help would generally amount to just an innocent mistake, while a black person being mistaken for the help can carry the connotation – whether or not this was actually the basis for the assumption – that “a person like you couldn’t be more successful than a service person”. And this is especially so since, per the above, the biggest disparity between whites and blacks being mistaken for service people would be in situations where the difference in social standing between the guests/patrons and the service people is the greatest.[/li][li]A person knows their own experiences, but a person only knows with certainty that which they’ve directly observed. Any time someone starts making judgments about what someone else is doing and thinking, they are outside the realm of their own direct experience and into the realm of judgments, which can be wrong. So that a black person who is asked to get something off a high shelf at Target knows that they were asked to get something off the shelf, but this is the extent of their own direct experience, and what they actually know. But did the other person think they were a Target employee, or did they just think they were tall enough to reach the shelf? And even if they thought they were a Target employee, did they make this assumption because of some random error or because they had some stereotype of black people as people who don’t shop at Target and only work there? These are judgment calls, and the fact that a person knows they received the request doesn’t give them total insight into what the other person is thinking, and their conclusions are open to question by others.[/li][li]As a result of all of the above, i.e. the difficulty in determining the thoughts of others, the fact that these situations are more commonly encountered by blacks, and that these are probably more of a sensitive issue for blacks, it’s likely that black people are more likely to mistakenly infer a racial aspect where none actually existed. So that even though the actual prevalence is in fact higher among blacks, the disparity is probably perceived by blacks to be even higher yet. And one illustration of this is in the comments from the Obamas. While BO’s comments seemed to be about situations that are likely correlated to race stereotypes, ISTM that MO was jumping to conclusions that were not warranted, unless there’s more detail that she omitted from here story. (To be sure, her assumption was not as idiotic as that of one nitwit in this thread who seemed to be assuming that the person who spoke to MO knew she was the First Lady and still assumed that she was probably assumed working at Target anyway, but still a very shaky and unwarranted assumption.)[/li][/ol]
All the above relates to my thinking about the subject in general, and the Obamas’ comments in particular, but they were not my motivations in starting that thread, which was not intended to make a point about racial stereotyping. However, the above relates to my premise in starting that thread.
What got me to thinking about the whole subject of being mistaken for the help was the Obama comments, which is why I mentioned them. My reason for mentioning skepticism about their perceived experiences was because they seemed to contain the implied premise that being assumed to be “the help” is some uniquely black phenomenon, such that any incident could routinely be attributed to racial stereotyping as they seemed to be doing (particularly in the case of MO). If that apparent premise was correct, then one would expect that a thread asking Dopers for their experiences along these lines would not attract much response, and particularly not from a broad spectrum of Dopers. However, my counter-premise was that this was incorrect, as above, and I therefore suspected that there could be a lot of Dopers who had had such experiences, as turned out to be the case.
In sum, my positions outlined above are related to my thinking in starting the thread, but were not a point I was specifically trying to make in starting it.
As I said at the outset, these are distinct but related issues, and I can’t commit that I’m interested in hashing either one out. Of the two, I’m a lot more interested in the first than the second, but I’m loath to discuss even the first in this thread, as it’s intermingled with the other issue and I don’t feel much like being on the defensive, especially over something as silly as this. And even more especially since if past patterns hold to form, various birdbrained bozos will pick on isolated sentences of this post and take them out of context and I’m certainly not interested in dealing with that at this time. So if this is racism, then make the most of it.
That cite just made my day.
My specialty.
Regards,
Shodan
No, he doesn’t question that.
Maybe not. Probably not. But it can certainly come across that way.
Yeah, this guy is a fucking tool of the first order.
“Poster Orwell, we grant thee with the rank of Dishonorable Tool of the First Order, subject to all the rights and responsibilities associated with that rank.” taps each shoulder with a rusty slingblade
Your first, second, and third points seem valid. Your fourth one is tricky, and it’s a problem that gets run into all the time when dealing with disproportionate phenomena caused by a general trend. Back in the eighties, tobacco companies defended against lawsuits from emphysema sufferers by correctly pointing out that the sufferers couldn’t 100% prove their particular case of emphysema was caused by smoking: who can prove that a particular instance is caused by a general cause?
In the same way, if black people are disproportionately subjected to this sort of error, either we have to discuss it with zero examples, or we have to use examples where we can’t prove that this particular example is caused by a racist tendency. Either choice will be criticized. And yet it’s a good thing to discuss, I think.
Putting it gently, you might also be well-served to not pick isolated sentences (or words!) out of other people’s posts and pick on them for extended periods; it can lead to more productive conversation to focus on the meat of what people say :). I hope I’ve done this in my post above, possibly discounting this sentence.