The fish doesn’t see the ocean.
Think about the swimmer who got an extremely minor sentence for rape.
Think about that Uber driver who killed four people and was taken alive.
Why do you think this conversation is about you?
I’m considered white, even though I don’t really consider myself so.
I posit the sample size on ‘racial make-up of murderers taken alive’ is too small to be meaningful. And anecdotally, it appears to me that race isn’t a factor. Seems to me that a great deal of effort is made to take all confirmed murderers alive. I’m not aware of any policy of, “Wait…he’s black??? Fuck that guy, bring out the cannons.”
They tried to capture the Orlando killer, they did capture the DC serial snipers. They tried to capture the dallas ambush attacker.
The “ohhhhh they captured that white terrorist!!” narrative is one wear the boats need to rise.
What do you consider yourself then? I’m just curious.
Yeah, and those are wrong. I’d argue in the former case it had more to do with the guy’s wealth/family’s wealth than the color of his skin, though.
See, when these conversations come up, I always ask one question, and I always get some bullshit answer: What am I supposed to do about it? I know this may seem unbelievable, but I don’t have all the power in the world. I don’t have connections, nor do I have wealth. What the fuck should I do about it? What *can *I do about it? There’s injustice in this country, and I’m not going to pretend it doesn’t exist or deny reality, but I didn’t cause it, and frankly, outside of voting, there’s nothing I can do about it. This isn’t some fantasy world where I can don a mask and cape and fight injustice, or else I would. I’m pretty much poor.
What legislator is going to listen to me? I can feel sympathy, and empathy, and vote for more just leaders, but I’m not going to hate myself for having white skin, and I’m not going to feel guilty because we live in a fucked up society, because I didn’t make it that way. I’m trying to survive in it in my own way.
The fact is, the poor are poor, the rich are rich, everyone gets fucked over if they don’t have money or power. And due to history and due to sheer numbers, minorities (generally) have less of both than other groups. But it’s all relative, because every life is unique.
For some reason, no one has any problem accepting the existence of class privilege.
And I’ve never heard anyone deny that there is such a thing as “lookism”. We seem to intuitively understand that people who are more conventionally attractive tend to have it easier in many respects relative to people who are far removed from conventionally attractive. Otherwise, people wouldn’t see the point in spending billions of dollars for cosmetic surgery, weight loss fads, and grooming products. In general, we care about how we look because most of us know that how we look can affect the quality of our social interactions.
But when the conversation turns to race, suddenly there are no such things as advantages and disadvantages. Suddenly everyone is on equal footing. We’re supposed to think it’s crazy to believe that individuals of one group can be favored over others simply because there are more individuals of that group in the population. Cuz that would be impossible. Lookism isn’t impossible, but magically racism and racial bias somehow are.
We see money and lack thereof. We see fat. We see shortness. We see disability. And we think certain things in response to these things and act accordingly. We also see race. We think certain things when it comes to race, and these thoughts can then manifest in racially biased outcomes. To deny something as basic as this is to deny all of history and human psychology.
Your post is part of the problem.
Nobody is attacking white people. Nobody is suggesting white people should be attacked.
What people want is for non-white people to not be attacked. We don’t want the police to start shooting white people. We want the police to stop shooting black people.
But some people hear us saying “Don’t attack black people” and they somehow think the message is “Attack white people”. No, that’s not true. The problem of white people being attacked only exists in the imagination of some nervous white people. And it gets put there by posts like yours.
Italian-American, Irish-American, Catholic, New Yorker, Democrat, and American - in that order. And you can say “But those are white”, but I’d disagree. Within my own family’s living memory, my grandfather, when stationed down in Alabama in the US army in the 1950s, was not allowed into “White” establishments because of the shade of his skin, and it led to brawls. He’s alive and if you saw a young photo of him, you’d think you were looking at a picture of Lou Diamond Phillips. Only just a century ago, Italians were not considered to be “Anglo Saxon” aka White but instead the Iberian Race. The Irish were considered to be Keltic. As my lovely bigoted Irish great grandfather put it, “Italians are just inside-out niggers.” He refused to pay for my grandmother’s wedding because she married an Italian man, and told her “If this was the old neighborhood, you’d be beaten to death.” My other grandfather, also Italian, was derisively called “The Black Phantom” because of his skin tone. My father can pass for Middle-Eastern or Hispanic and I have seen him called both. He got his ass beat for being a “Fuckin’ Hippie Spic” by a cop who didn’t like his tone of voice as a young man. My family’s history, language, and traditions got washed away in the name of Patriotism. Lose that Italian language, or you’re not really an American. My family has no recipes, traditions, or tales from the other side, because my grandparents disowned that in the hope of being accepted as “real Americans.”
I myself have known economic and social hardship a good chunk of my life, and I’ve never gotten a job because of family ties (I don’t even have one now) or connections.
So yeah. I consider white people to be WASPS. The country club people who come from normal, functional families, who go to Church every Sunday, who have non-addict paunchy pasty fathers who crack corny Dad jokes, and can trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower (metaphorically). Protestants. People who have known nothing all their lives but comfort economically, and who have never known no consequence for their behavior (like Trump). Tim Kaine, for me, was the perfect example of a white man as opposed to an ethnic person. The pasty inoffensive stepdad.
Most of my friends are Hispanic/Latino, especially Mexican-Americans, and I find as a matter of culture, traditions, and background, I can relate to them a lot more than I can white people.
[quote=“Little_Nemo, post:48, topic:789783”]
Your post is part of the problem.
.
Not true.
VERY not true as of the last couple of weeks.
Duh. Almost all people want that.
Cite.I never said that was ‘the message’. And by ‘don’t attack white people’ I mean verbally. Though I could certainly give you several youtube videos of whites attacked for the color of their skin
.
Strawman
Impossible to prove
Of course not. Everyone is different. And yet, being black carries with it racism. What do you think Brock Turner’s sentence would have been if he looked like this guy? Make everything else the same, change that one variable, and he’s looking at a decade behind bars. Me and my folks are generally quite cavalier about drug use. One of my neighbors back in Maine got busted for growing pot and got off with a warning. If he was black, that almost certainly would not have happened. Philando Castile probably would not have been shot if he had not been black. All of these people are very different. They all have their own privileges and disadvantages. And yet, the consequences of being black, or the privilege of being white, are there, working within the framework of everything else.
This is a bizarre meaning of white privilege that I rarely if ever see applied as such. Might wanna scale back the paranoia there. Nobody here is telling you to sink. Nobody wants the black supremacy. Chill out man.
Nobody is asking you to hate yourself.
And to go back to your earlier point, it’s hard to deny that class privilege and “looks” privilege also gives beneficiaries unfair advantages…i.e. it’s not just a matter of poor and ugly people being treated worse than the standard enjoyed by others. Without privilege, the truth is a lot of more rich and pretty people would be pushing brooms rather than playing golf. Their faults would much more likely hold them back rather than be ignored or perceived as strengths. Law breakers among them would more often see jail; assholish ones would more often earn well-deserved punches to the face.
When we talk about race privilege, it is hard for many to accept that the same principle is at work. But it most definitely is. Everything I’ve said above about rich and pretty people applies to folks who belong to the demographic group that historically has been the least oppressed in the U.S and is also the least stigmatized today.
A lot of people want the impossible, whether they realize it or not. They want minorities to receive fair treatment, but they also want white people to remain at the top of the hierarchy. Like, they don’t want black people to be disproportionately targeted by traffic cops. But they don’t want to see more white people being pulled over either. Or they are fine with poor people having improved access to better educational activities. But they still want their schools to maintain level funding–they don’t want to give up the advantages their schools have just so that all schools in the district can be just as good. They also want to abolish redlining and other housing discrimination practices. But don’t tell them that equalizing housing means they will have a harder time securing a bank loan or getting approved for a rental. They might get just a little salty if they hear that.
Women have come up in the world over the past 50 years and as a result, men have to work harder than they used to to get jobs. Is this a tragedy or is it the logical consequence of a playing field that’s evening out?
The unavoidable truth is we don’t have an infinite number of resources. There’s a limited amount of classroom space, jobs, police, bank loans, and housing. If barriers are removed from minorities, then competition becomes fiercer for these resources for everyone. Individuals whose success was previously the result of those barriers will suddenly have to compete in ways they never had to before. And some of these people will suffer harm that they would have been spared from in the past (like going to jail instead of getting a slap on the wrist). But people have a hard time seeing how it is fair that they can be “punished” like this. I don’t know what to tell these people other than instituting more fairness in the world doesn’t mean everyone winds up happy. Someone is always going to get the fuzzy end of the lollipop since bad luck doesn’t discriminate. But we have the power to decide that race shouldn’t determine who ends up with crappy outcomes.
If the new rolling eyes emoticon weren’t so terrible, I’d use it here.
This sentence shows you’re thinking about it wrong. White people aren’t being attacked. A system that benefits them is.
If his parents were as rich and connected as Brock Turner’s, I doubt he’d be spending a decade in jail, either.
As i said earlier. White people are certainly being attacked verbally.
I can find acerbic links if you’d like.
Do you imagine we can’t find more links attacking blacks, women, or gays? Far, far more, and far worse.
So what? Are you now against Free Speech when it is minorities saying things about white people?
Strawman. Ain’t got shit to do with what I said. Not even close to the subject.
Another strawman. Stay on topic people. The assertion was made that ‘white people arn’t being attacked.’
I stated I meant ‘verbally’ and provided proof that there are occasions where white people were literally being verbally assaulted in the name of white privilege. (And not the “system of oppresion”)
And like i said, I can provide more acerbic occasions, spittle flying, fingers snapping if that one link isn’t enough,