Whiteness harms Jews too (and your Godwinizing here is total bullshit).
Let me know when you are actually interested in my responses to your questions. You asked me a question, and I answered, in some detail. And you totally ignored that answer for whatever this nonsense is.
Not every post should be about trying to score points. Sometimes actual discussion - asking questions, but then also really reading and considering and then responding to answers to those questions - can be a good thing!
Okay, I’ll spell it out for you. The passage is racist, something you can easily see by substituting literally any other race in there. Yet it was published in an academic journal, and here you are endorsing it. Ergo, prejudice against whites is acceptable in our societies.
It likely won’t do as much harm as prejudice against other races, but it’s not harmless and it shouldn’t be acceptable.
It’s not racist in the least. It’s not anti white in the least. It advocates helping white people by trying to excise the brutal and immoral system of whiteness (or my suggested term “whiteness/blackness”), which has done and continues to do great harm to many white people. What part of that do you disagree with?
The part where it accuses a whole race of having ‘voracious, insatiable, and perverse’ appetites, for a start.
The whole thing is offensive nonsense. The truth is that all humans have a tendency to divide people into in-groups and out-groups, and to favour their in-group; race is a common basis for these. That this generally harms minorities much more than the majority is simple mathematics.
It doesn’t do this. Once again, whiteness is a manufactured system that harms non white people but also white people. Whiteness is not a race.
Read it again. Or refer to the multiple threads we’ve had on whiteness. Or both.
“And some, I assume, are good people.”
Long ago we agreed that saying a stereotype does not apply to all X is not a get out of prejudice free card.
No idea what this is responding to. Whiteness is not a stereotype - it’s a system that was deliberately put into place to manipulate people for the benefit of the wealthy and powerful.
Pointing that out, and criticizing the system, is not racist in the least.
I’ll ask again - what do you disagree with? Do you disagree that whiteness is a system, or that it harms many white people, or that it’s bad and should be dismantled? Or something else?
Wow! I haven’t read up on “Whiteness” but I presume, well hope, that’s it’s use as portrayed in the quoted abstract is synonymic with white racism. Which seems counter-intuitive. “ness” is generally just a suffix to turn an adjective into a noun, and usually indicates a state of being. So happiness is the state of being happy. (Trivial question: is there a term for that? I had a quick look in Google, but I couldn’t find a word for the process of turning a noun into an adjective by adding a suffix.) When it’s used with a noun for a racial or ethnic groups, it has an additional meaning of cultural identity, such as Blackness, or Jewishness. Is it really a thing to equate white identity with white racism, as Donald Moss, the author of the abstract is doing, saying that it’s “a malignant, parasitic-like condition” that “renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse”? Or is that author being particularly provocative about white privilege?
iianyiiii, do you agree with the author that Whiteness is “a malignant, parasitic-like condition”? If so, do you believe that a substantial number of your fellow liberals also agree with the author?
A lot has been said in this thread about making mountains out of molehills, and I don’t want to do so. My reaction to that abstract is that the author is trying to be provocative in order to get attention, either so he can try to get his 15 seconds of fame, or because he has books to sell. But in terms of the left-right divide, can’t everyone see how divisive that abstract is? Has there been any reaction from the US left to the actual article, whether to support it or condemn it?
Well, so much for,
Whiteness is indeed a terrible system and should be dismantled, to benefit non white and white people alike.
Yes, I can see how this would be seen by many as divisive, because so many misunderstand how the concept of whiteness is being used here. That doesn’t mean it’s not accurate as intended (even if it’s commonly misunderstood). Whiteness is the system that was deliberately put into place by wealthy and powerful white men in the past to manipulate people and create divisions based on superficial characteristics in order to benefit the wealthy and powerful.
Whiteness is not a race. In short, wealthy whites in colonial America in and around the 16-1700s were terrified that poor whites and poor blacks would join together to oppose their interests, so they created laws, customs, practices, etc., that evolved into the American system of slavery (and then Jim Crow and segregation and their descendants) to prevent that from happening. The Smithsonian Museum of African-American History has some incredible historical exhibits about this phenomenon (though I don’t recall if they use the term whiteness in it, but they do explain the concept along with the historical data that supports it).
They (these wealthy white men of the past who created the system of whiteness) were very successful, and modern whiteness is what remains of their successful societal engineering.
It’s there verbatim in the third sentence of the article’s extract. Unless you’re saying that whiteness doesn’t relate to the white race, which would be absurd. Or are you using DemonTree’s use of the word “whole” to dispute what is otherwise obviously stated?
Whiteness is not the white race, it’s a system (which I just described).
This is what the right wing propaganda does, besides minimizing already what Trump did say, researchers that do examine racism (or denounce it) are themselves called racists by the right in an Orwellian effort to keep things as they are.
Is ‘whiteness’ a system, or is it ‘a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility’?
What percentage of white people would you say are infected by this ineradicable parasite that renders their appetites ‘voracious, insatiable, and perverse’? Are you infected?
I’ve sincerely tried to answer your questions already, but you’ve avoided answering some of mine. If you go back and answer my questions, I’ll answer your new ones.
You need to at least answer the first question, because currently it appears you have substituted your own, far less controversial, definition for the one used by the article author, in order to avoid acknowledging the implications.
I don’t need to do anything, not when your posts don’t appear to be expressing interest in an actual exchange of ideas here.
Very well. Your dodging the question is noted.
So the general use of “ness” is as a suffix that turns an adjective into a noun indicating a state of being. Under that condition, whiteness is the state of being white. There’s a further less general use when the adjective is for a racial or ethnic group, which means cultural association with that group. Under that condition, Whiteness means culturally associated with the White race. But there’s a new third definition:
that’s pejorative, sounds a lot like racism, and can only be applied to the White race. Don’t you see what’s wrong there? A word that on the face of it means the state of being White is deemed to have a parallel definition of racist. At the very least, come up with a better word, and “Blackness/Whiteness” is not a better word (or term). Also, try explaining to some working-class white person how, because of his race, he’s part of a system of “the wealthy and powerful”. And then try to recruit him into the Democratic Party.
…says the question dodger. Why not an actual discussion? Isn’t that more interesting than this sort of points scoring, or whatever this is?