It won’t matter; there are two separate views of what America is and the Republicans subscribe to the view that socioeconomic hierarchy is good, and that this is what America represents. They reject pluralism and the aim of equality. They will do whatever it takes to preserve their idea of what America should be. They are not bound by the same value that we are.
Thank you for being honest about your opinion of Donald Moss’s article. I disagree with it and therefore you. But I think we can recognise this as an instance of the left/right divide. And the existence of that divide, and the difficulties in getting people to move from one side of it to the other, is a key element of why the Republicans are able to maintain their base, and why the conservative right isn’t going away.
Who’s Donald Moss? Did ANY Democrat or liberal elect him to public office or to represent his or her interests or opinions?
I’ve got better things to do today than to mine the Internet for every horrid racist thing a random Republican that no one’s ever heard of wrote, but if did I could probably fill a book before 5PM.
And Moss didn’t even say anything that was that horrid if you understand the underlying concepts, but I don’t think his literary tactics did him any favors.
I have no problem with discussions of tactics. I’m not sure if this would change anything (as @crowmanyclouds points out), but if you agree with the concept, then that’s what’s most important to me on the issue.
So you’re just going to drive by the internet, quote an abstract, not read a single word of the article (you can’t unless you have a subscription to Sagepub), and claim some sort of high ground here or present this as evidence?
Call it a hunch, but I suspect you have blatantly misrepresented the author’s position.
Donald Moss is a psychologist who published a provocative article about Whiteness. DemonTree brought it up in post #277 as an example of left-wing racism.
It was also brought up in a Newsweek article.
We’re discussing whether the article was leftist anti-white racism, if the article is an example of leftist rhetoric that is offensive to the right, and also the concept Whiteness in general and its effect on the left/right divide. I’m not aware of any Democratic Party reaction to Donald Moss’s article, or indeed to the term “Whiteness.” I’d never seen the term used before today.
It was a rhetorical question.
You haven’t read the article, have you?
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00030651211008507
No, I too can’t because I don’t have a subscription.
Yes. Black poverty is a problem in America. So is Black crime and Black educational attainment being lower than the average in American society. We can discuss those problems individually, or possibly under some collective term. But if we choose “Blackness” as the collective term, then we’re creating a new definition that parallels the other two general definitions that already exist and have previously been explained in this thread. This board would explode if somebody tried that. But apparently, some people think it’s okay to parallel the state of being “White” with a system of embedded racism. It isn’t okay.
What word or phrase, that fits into a Fox News sound bite, would make you happy?
I seem to have a problem with leftist rhetoric. 
Off the top of my head, I’d go with “Legacy of White Pre-eminence.” Not very catchy, but at least it’s more accurate. Sorry, but I’m not in advertising.
I haven’t caught up with most of the thread since post 270 yet, but this stands out to me. I disagree with this strongly, but obviously don’t speak for all liberals. My response is it it’s not about who (general) you are prejudiced against, even if it’s someone whose in the majority like white Christian conservative cis-men. What’s important is WHY the prejudice is there. Here’s my straightforward thinking on the subject.
I hate you because you’re Black / White / LGBT / cis / atheist / male / female / Latino / an undocumented immigrant / disabled / etc. = bigoted asshole.
I hate you because you hate me = a normal human reaction.
It seems that there is an extremely fine distinction between “whiteness” as a system, and “being white” as a racial identity. Not at all surprising if people are failing to make that distinction.
Now that this thread has gone completely off the rails…see ya.
Neither have you.
Tip: an abstract isn’t an article. Know the difference.
You’ve identified differences in how bias can be evaluated and addressed. Okay, so I will go on record as acknowledging that there is a difference in how some people may regard ‘prejudice’ manifest by a member of a minority group toward a member of the dominant social group, and prejudice emanating from the dominant group toward members of a minority.
And the reason for that should be obvious: these two examples of prejudice, while they might appear to be congruent in the language that we use to express these biases, are quite different in terms of the force and impact that they ultimately carry.
That’s what you don’t seem to understand in this whole debate about bigotry and prejudice. If prejudice had no detrimental impact beyond the emotional distress sustained by the individual being bullied with an epithet, the issue of racism wouldn’t have nearly the gravity that it does. It’s the fact that prejudice by one group can literally subordinate, enslave, displace, or even eradicate members of another group that matters here.
If you observe differences in how we treat prejudice depending on who expresses it and who sustains it, that’s because differences in power inevitably make racism a potent weapon for members of an unrestrained ethnic majority, in ways that are not available to members of the out groups. That doesn’t make ‘reverse racism’ right or acceptable - there’s no license to be an a-hole. But before you go using abstracts as examples of unrestrained bias against white people, please first consider the reality of power differential, and for God’s sake, make an effort to read such articles in their entirety to get a more complete sense of what the authors are trying to say.
All true, of course. And plain, old-fashioned racism is a huge component of today’s conservatism (for want of a better word – today’s conservatism has little to do with what I grew up understanding “conservatism” to be).
But it’s not the only reason we’re in this boat. It’s not the only reason this horrible gap has grown so wide that we can’t even communicate by semaphore across it.
Let’s not let the existence of racism become our excuse, our reason to avoid confronting the flaws in our own thinking and our own history.
I mean, it makes sense, right? If someone is a conservative, consider what type of world they’re trying to conserve: one in which they had unchallenged superiority or status. There’s a great sense of entitlement that comes with being a conservative. You can see it playing out in real life whenever you see those ‘Karen’ videos on YouTube. There’s an implicit assumption that they are entitled to special treatment, that they have some sort of implicit level of authority, simply by virtue of who they are, which gives them the right to regulate who’s allowed to walk or ride a bike through ‘their’ neighborhood. I’m not going to say that black or Latino people never behave like Karens, but it does seem like a much lower frequency phenomenon, probably because they don’t make the same assumption.
And if they described it as something parasitical that created perverse appetites, they’d probably be banned for trolling.
Andy refused to answer the question, but I’m prepared to bet he believes pretty much every white person in America is ‘infected’ with this ‘parasite’. There’s very little distinction between whiteness = bad and incurable, and white people = bad and irredeemable. To put it fancifully, whiteness is the original sin of the social justice religion.