Oh, okay.
Do you understand what it means when we say something is systemic, like systemic racial injustice?
White people, in general, benefited from a system that favored them over other people. Most of those people didn’t do anything wrong or bad. Most of them are good people doing nothing more than living the life they were born into. We had generations of ancestors that had the freedom to accrue property and wealth, build churches and communities, purse avocations and education and careers, migrate in search of opportunities. These translated into advantages that were passed from generation to generation.
There is nothing wrong with this. These were all good things done by good people.
But black people in America do not have this foundational legacy. Literally all of built lives from nothing, no more than four or five or six generations ago. I’m not going to try to imagine black experience, but it’s got to more difficult to build wealth and family and career and community without those advantages.
The past can’t be changed, but you have to understand that the aftershocks of the original injustice still reverberate through the system, causing harm. And the people that are damaged by it don’t want to forget it and move forward because it’s not fixed and probably can’t ever be fixed. But it can be mitigated and the first step is awareness.
It’s not about you. It’s not about people calling you a bad person and trying to make feel guilty. It’s about putting yourself and your feelings aside and honestly analyzing the broader picture of the world you live in and your place in it relative to others.
Right! A discussion of privilege isn’t intended to be a psychological examination of the privileged. We know some folks are always going to be rosy-eyed optimists who don’t care about what happened in the past. A discussion of privilege helps us to understand why everyone doesn’t have this mindset. Some people simply don’t have the luxury of giving everyone the benefit of the doubt by assuming today is somehow magically different than yesterday. Some people are still cleaning the wounds they got yesterday. So it’s not the “past” for them. It’s their present. And since the pain will be with them tomorrow, so it’s their future too.
Maybe so. But I guess I just wish someone had chosen a different phrase than “privilege”, that’s all. Like maybe “advantage”, or something. I don’t know.
Ugh, I assume you are talking to me? Difficult to know without quotes. Yes, I understand that. All of it. Now, I ask, with all due respect, were you insinuating that I’m comparable to a deadbeat/bully/hit-and-run driver/abuser? Because I said something that sounded kind of like what bad people in your life have said? It’s hard to say that it is not about me when it is directly under my post and sounds a whole like like a response to what I said.
Sorry, maybe next time we’ll make sure to check with you first Missus.
Everything I said in both my posts was about systemic racism in this country and not directed at any particular person. I think you are probably a good person living the life you were born into.
I do think that, IF YOU HAVE HURT SOMEONE, expecting them to forgive and forget, then staking out the moral high ground if they refuse - is abusive.
But you didn’t do that. You didn’t hurt anyone and you didn’t stake out the moral high ground. But on a broader scale, I don’t think that “forgive and forget“ is viable solution to the race issues in this country and expecting black people to settle for platitudes about unity is oppressive. On a societal level, not a personal one.
I am, and have been, very explicitly, discussing these issues on systemic societal level.
Many of the people in this conversation seem pretty sensitive to nuance, sensitive enough to be wounded by the minor negative connotation of the word “privilege”. Can you use that same sensitivity to try and understand why seeing statues celebrating the people that raped and enslaved your ancestors and fought a war to continue doing so as the centerpiece of your town square might be hurtful?
I dont think they are bad questions to ask, especially from someone who claims to be so unracist as she is.
Look, she had this whole spiel about asking the white people what THEY are doing about racism. Why cant we ask her what she has done?
You aren’t asking her what she has done. You are asking if she as done some very specific things that you seem sure she hasn’t done, just so you can say she doesn’t have any standing when it comes to this subject.
Ok, fine, I would like to ask her how many black students she had, about co teachers and such.
I dont think its a bad thing to ask.
Moving further away from the OP -
It’s not you; it’s not Wells Fargo. It’s systemic across the industry.
Remember 10 or so years ago, when bad mortgage practices were found across the banking industry? Some banks were worse, some were better, but the same shady practices were found in a large number of banks?
The same thing is here - monstro linked to an example that named Wells Fargo - but a quick search will show that in the past 5 years, Chase has settled a similar lawsuit, as has Bank of America, and citigroup. (Those are the top 3 banks in the country.) It would be naive to think it wasn’t happening elsewhere.
It would be similarly naive to think that Rocket Mortgage is the only company with a flawed algorithm. It’s endemic across the industry (they all use similar algorithms, using the similar data, to come up with similar outcomes.)
The real question for you is not whether or not you should boycott those specific companies - the bigger question is what’s going on in your sphere of influence (your job/industry, clubs & activities, etc.) where there are norms and practices that may be perpetuating and exacerbating racial inequities. Chances are it is not a bunch of people thinking “let’s keep people of color down.” It’s more likely to be a flawed algorithm.
Nobody is stopping you from asking her, and I am sure we would be interested in her response.
BTW, the original quote, from a 1996 documentary, asking “every white person in this room who would be happy to be treated as this society in general treats our black citizens to please stand up” -Do you stand, or do you stay seated?
I honestly dont know. I’d be afraid to stand up because I have seen her videos of her doing seminars and seen how she tears people down. Rarely do people talk back to her. But then, if I was in a confrontational mood, I might just so I could ask her some questions.
Honestly, I hate white liberal hypocrites. I hate when they get up on their soapboxes and say how racist others are and how perfect they are and then when confronted with a question like “how many black kids are in your kids school?” they tend to run away.
I do know some very unracist white people who are very liberal who work everyday around minorities and do a damn good job. The difference between them and people like Elliott is they dont brag about it and wear it on their sleeves like some medal of honor.
Oh, and they arent making money off it like Elliott is.
Way to ignore the premise of the question. I’m sorry I asked.
I’m going to slip into work mode and voice this in work language that doesn’t even mention race or people so no one takes offense.
Let’s say someone designs a system, an incredibly large and complex one. A network. Integrated circuit boards and IC chips, wires and connectors. Processors and sub processors. Lots of code and programming. Lots of peripherals and interfaces and remote devices. Hardware and software and firmware.
But this network has has a flaw in it from day one. It doesn’t distribute resources properly across all devices. Sometimes it causes the devices on one port to malfunction and lockup.
The network has done this from the beginning and no one could get a handle on it. Most of the users of my hypothetical system weren’t impacted at all because they never used devices connected to the bad port and the people that did generally got used to having less reliable devices. And over time, this system expanded and grew and grew. New versions of software, more and more peripherals.
And the original design problem still persists. It has confounded technicians for years. The wiring has been checked, the software debugged and all the devices are good. There’s just the persistent problem that causes problems on one subset of devices, even though the devices are all good. It’s a baked-in problem.
So eventually you get to a point where you just don’t know what to do, and the easiest answer, by far, is continue to ignore the problem which only affect a subset of users. Or respond to the complaints by saying - We don’t see a problem. Just show me which part is bad and we’ll replace it. Which they can’t, because no individual part is bad.
Now this hypothetical system is a critical system that can’t be shutdown or rebuilt. The fact is the problems are so baked in they aren’t going to be fixed.
But the problem can be mitigated. The design of the devices can be modified to make them more resistant to the resource distribution problem, although this entails a more expensive design. You can try to divert more resources to those devices. You do this enough, eventually you might make all those problems APPEAR to go away.
But it’s not like you repaired the system and fixed the problem. The underlying issue is still there and as long as you want to keep this system running smoothly you have to continue mitigation. While improved designs of the other components may mask the problem, you have to bear the cost of the improved designs for the life of the product. It’s nobody’s fault and everyone’s problem. It’s the cost of doing business.
I get that analogy, but at this point it isn’t the designers of the network that are bearing the responsibility, the people using that same system are now being told that the designers of the system fucked up so boom, you guys are going to pay.
All the while a lot of the users of the system never even knew it was broken.
So now that we all agree that there are issues, what is to be done about it? I have asked for specifics before but all I have gotten in the past have been generalities or things that are a non starter from the get go but what needs to be done to “mitigate”, what would satisfy those who remain unsatisfied?
I personally feel that, maybe due to the past, cultures have taken hold to such an effect that if a balancing act was performed and no other changes made, we’d go right back to here in no time.
That’s a pretty good analogy, except I would extend it: some of the problem is the individual components that can work with a redesigned system, but both the components and the system need to be improved in order to have a well-working system. If you replace the system without replacing the individual components then you can mask the problems but not fix it permanently.
But you can only replace these individual components slowly, as technology improves over the years (i.e. people die or slowly change their point of view.)
Yes indeed. This is even true in the more general sense of “algorithm”.
See environmental (in)justice. De facto redlining back in the day kept black folks in depreciating neighborhoods where they couldn’t build as much equity as white people. Because these places were viewed as worthless ghettos by city planners, they tended to be disproportionately zoned for industrial activities. The city needs a new landfill? Put it in the ghetto. The power company wants to build a new transformer station? We’ve got a perfect site next to the wastewater treatment plant, which is right next to the landfill, which is right across the street from “ghetto” school People don’t vote in the ghetto since they’ve been kept them from voting! So they don’t matter!
So shit like this happened throughout much of the 20 century. In the 1990s, the environment justice movement started really pushing back, pointing at how black folks and poor folks (but especially black folks…since this kind of shit transcends class for black folks) were being disproportionately impacted by environmental hazards. It’s still pushing back, but what is being realized is that it doesn’t matter that redlining is no longer a part of federal housing policy. The algorithm of redlining is still promoting unjust decision-making, since historically redlined areas have a legacy that makes them attractive for certain kinds of development. If you have a choice between building a loud-ass pipeline compression station in an area with low development (one where the residents really care about maintaining that low development and have million dollar homes to prove how much they care) or the area that already has the transformer station, the landfill, the wastewater plant, and all the access roads the developer needs, then you’ll likely go with the second. Even when people protest outside the board of supervisors’ public meetings. Your “algorithm” tells you it just makes sense to build in area that’s already been built on. But that algorithm doesn’t care that the people in that area have suffered enough and that it’s time to make some other community suffer.
You mean other than traveling around the country teaching, lecturing and giving seminars and speeches about race relations in the US since long before the 2020 push to improve things?
This ENTIRE thread is about the things she has done and are currently doing about racism!
I did. I said I honestly dont know. I’m guessing not because I’m very intimidated when I’m in an audience.