The latter.
It’s in the constant promotion of and focus on the tremendous obstacles that blacks have in trying to make it in a white-dominated society. This does not encourage people to try it.
You said that “People consistently judge things as being more likely to be successful if they also happen to support them”. In this case, white people judged MLK Jr’s tactics as unlikely to be successful (incorrectly), and black people correctly judged his tactics as likely to be successful. You’re saying that because white people were less likely to support MLK Jr, they were less likely to think his tactics would be successful.
That sounds like a pretty clear case of white people deluding themselves into thinking something false, when it was true.
I think this is very close minded of you, and indicates that your mind is made up on this.
I think you’re missing something – as a minority, black people necessarily function and act in “white” society far more often than white people function and act in “black” society, on average. Black people often worked in homes and businesses owned by white people, while the reverse was much less common. Isn’t it possible that this gave black people more insight into the advantages and disadvantages of being white than white people had about the advantages and disadvantages of being black?
Actually my biggest gripe with my local school district is with their “neighborhood school” policy, which more or less amplifies whatever de-facto segregation there is in the area. There’s no reason on Earth that one school should have like 20-30% underprivileged students with the other 70-80% being upper-middle class white kids, and a school literally a mile away as the crow flies should have 88% underprivileged apartment kids. And the academic scores of the schools reflects this, with the more underprivileged schools significantly underperforming the others.
Despite all the problems that come with busing, I think in this case, they probably ought to seek to even out the schools as much as they can; even White Rock Elementary (the subject of the article I linked) shouldn’t have a disproportionately low number of underprivileged kids when several other schools have a disproportionately high number. At least this way it’s fair- you’re neither screwing the poor kids, nor helping the wealthy kids overly much.
Everyone is self-deluded in that sense, blacks, whites, Red Sox fans, everyone. It’s human nature. In any given situation where two groups of people are differently influenced by their different calculations, one of them will turn out to be more right than the other. That doesn’t mean that group was less “self-deluded” than the other, it just means that they happened to be right in that instance.
[To use a Red Sox fans example, suppose you have a close play or rules interpretation in a crucial game, and naturally all the Red Sox fans think the facts are in accordance with their side and all the Yankees fans think it’s in accordance with their side, neither side is necessarily any more “self-deluded” than the other. And if you later come up with a super-duper-luper replay which proves one side or the other to be correct, you can’t use that to prove that this team’s fans is less prone to self-delusion than the other team and give more weight to claims by this team’s fans going forward. Which is effectively what you’re doing here.]
OK.
It’s a valid point. It’s perhaps a marginal advantage. But it’s far outweighed by the natural tendency of people of all sorts to feel they’ve gotten a raw deal compared to other people (for reasons including but not limited to racial discrimination).
Is it Racially Insensitive for Whites to Discuss Problems in the Black Communities?
I would answer Yes.
Implicit in any discussion is a choice of what is to be discussed (the weather, sports, favorite restaurants, black-on-black crime), and once it is chosen, a framework of how it is to be discussed (the standing and perspective of those doing the discussing). On both counts a white person choosing to discuss “problems in the black community” tips their hand that they first perceive that the subject is more worthy of their discussing than other available subjects, and that they have a standing and perspective that makes their opinions worthy of expressing.
White privilege, or “white-splaining” in a nutshell.
But I don’t believe this raw deal belief was the same. I’m on my phone right now, so I can’t cite, but I believe that in the 60s and before, most black people believed that black people were not treated equally or fairly by society. I don’t believe that most white people believed that white people were not treated equally or fairly by society. So already there’s a big difference, and the natural tendency you suggest isn’t reflected here.
My feeling as to the OP is that to the extent that the black community is saying they want white people to mix out of their issues and they’ll deal with it on their own, then there’s some justification for saying whites should do that. (Even there, it’s shaky.) But to the extent that blacks want the broader society to help them solve the problem, then everyone gets a say in what those issues are and what caused them and how they should best be addressed.
Naturally there are more and less sensitive ways to discuss things.
I just want to link to a thread I started 6 years ago which deals with a lot of the problems affecting the AA community and how (as people from outside this community) we could discuss/approach them.
‘Blacks need to get their act together’ vs ‘AA social troubles are an American problem’
Natural tendency doesn’t mean everyone will think the exact same thing. Emphasis here is on the word “tendency”.
Most people tend to think they’ve been treated unfairly, meaning they’re a lot more likely to think this is the case than an unbiased observer might think. The likelihood of them actually thinking so in a given instance would vary based on the possibilities that present themselves (among other things) and the supposed basis for the unfair treatment would similarly vary. If a readily apparent possibility is that this is due to race, then they’ll seize on that. If not, then they’ll seize on some other reason, if one happens to be available.
Guy goes for a job interview and doesn’t get the job. That guy, no matter what race creed or color he is, is more likely to think he should have gotten the job but didn’t because of some unfair reason than would an outside observer. If he’s a black guy, then it’s easy to grasp onto racial bias as an obvious possibility. If he’s not, then he may seize onto something else.
Ditto for a guy who gets treated rudely by a store clerk or cop etc.
Your point that whites in the 60s didn’t think that society was treating white people (collectively) unfairly is a completely specious one, as above.
But why isn’t it possible that the biggest reason black people felt they were treated unfairly was that it was true? And the biggest reason, or at least a significant reason, that most white people opposed civil rights was that they didn’t understand the reality of how black people were treated?
I think you’re too wedded to philosophy on this issue at the expense of the actual circumstances people experienced. Sometimes people feel a certain way about their treatment because it’s true, and their feelings are sometimes the most accurate information about how they are actually treated.
Both of these things are undoubtedly true. But that’s not the point. The point is whether black people have some unique insight to how they’re treated relative to other people (your claim) or whether it happens to be true that they suffered from severe discrimination in the 60s (my claim). And the difference between the two claims is whether all subsequent perceptions of black people are to be accepted at face value or not.
Yes, you’ve made this claim already. I’m closed-minded. I got it.
My claim is that black people have unique insight into how black people are treated relative to majority culture – and that this has been demonstrated over and over again. I don’t think it’s even a particularly unusual claim – I think Native Americans have unique insight into how NA are treated relative to majority culture; I think women have unique insight into how women are treated relative to men; I think that gay people have unique insight into how gay people are treated relative to the straight majority; etc.
OK, and I think all those other claims are equally untrue. So there we are.
[ETA: Might be some truth in the case of gays who’ve lived in and out of the closet.]
I think there’s an equivalent to that closet for every one of those groups – black people working and functioning in white culture every day (when the reverse isn’t true); NA people doing the same as well as sometimes “passing” as some other ethnicity; etc.
It doesn’t look like you’ve understood the issue.
LOL. Ditto.
The problem is possibly your reasoning. People have not been using the work on Black on Black violence as a passionate request for the the health of the black community.
This is actually a deflective response to when Black Lives Matter started protesting innocent and unarmed black people getting killed and then not having any repercussions or police and Zimmerman not going to jail.
They are two completely different matters and even if we fixed all the black on black violence, it still wouldn’t fix the issues of police brutality and in Florida plain old getting away with murder.
Another thing is, and we know the same whites who use this tactic, has never actually researched this, but it means all the things that people are doing and have been doing for decades to try and stop the violence in their community is and has just been ignored. They act as if there aren’t community programs and watchgroups that haven’t been working against these issues since drugs were bought into our communities by the government so they could wage that fake War on Drugs. All you have to do is google “black community rally against violence” and it brings up over 1.7 million results. So when white people say that “blacks” should worry about black on black violence it’s really meaningless because there are and always have been both black and white people worrying about all violence.
Another thing is, unlike cops who kill unarmed black men and get celebrated with paid vacation, blacks who kill other blacks end up going to prison. So the police are already working on black on black violence. Who’s working on police on black violence? Trump talking about he can help us with the black on black violence by bringing up that Dwyane Wade’s cousin in Chicago getting killed must have not read that the Chicago police had her murders in custody 2 days later.
I don’t know why Whites even feel the need, if not to assist with Black Lives Matter, to worry about the Black community when the White privileged community is almost just as bad with their white on white violence going on. While 90% of black victims are black, a good 83% of white victims are white. Turns out a lot of killers don’t like to travel to do their violence. But somehow the news and media never focus on white crime unless the story is going nationwide like shooting up a theatre, shooting up a church or shooting up a school.
If you followed the news, you would never know that there are plenty everyday regular white criminals breaking laws, killing people and being arrested and maintaining that majority lead in prison population. You would never know that there are more white gang members in the national prison population then the combined population of black and latino gang members in prison. But if you got cable and watch Locked Up or Lockup or a whole bunch of shows on Investigative Discovery you’ll see their are some bad white people you need to worry about and a lot of times they’re in your family.
Then you’re acting like the Black on black violence came before lynching as opposed to not only living in a country that enslaved their ancestors, hung our elders, in my father’s lifetime just decided that people with brown skin should finally have some civil rights and still going on, police are killing non illegal black men and getting away with it. You all have a 345 year head start on opportunity if you want to say we started getting some opportunity right when The Civil Rights Act was passed.
The way you make a claim for blacks to not be violent, I have to ask why do whites even commit crimes at all the way they have been coddled in the United States of America? What’s their excuse?
Something tells me your White privilege is the reason you don’t already have the information above that retorts everything you say again easily accessible on google, but it does show you have a warped view on life in the United States of America if you say the things you say.
Especially those chopstick Asians. They are Super Racist.
It’s more, if they say, “It’s bad.”, and you say, “It’s not that bad.” for both historical and logical reasons, I am more inclined to believe the former.
To expand, when a group explains why they feel they are discriminated against, and why they feel that they are not seriously treated as part of society, and they are ignored because YOU don’t see it, it makes the problem worse.
I do not think that black communities want to have violent elements in them. I don’t think that black communities (or any community for that matter), has the ability to unilaterally remove the violent elements from their midst.
We need to work together, as a society, instead of divided into “communities” that are labeled as such by accident of skin color, to solve all of our problems.
“Black on black” crime is still human on human crime, no matter how you put it, and we, as fellow humans, have the responsibility to help to solve that problem. And we should do that without making it an “us” vs “them” issue, as that defeats the whole point.
Not racist so much as classist - which is another form of bigotry. How long have you believed that poor children are inherently detrimental to a school and therefore do not deserve quality education as much as your own children?