I’m just intrigued that someone would accept a tiny increase in the possibility of a scholarship for their child in return for a massive increase in the probability that that same child will be harassed, discriminated against, beaten up, arrested and/or murdered merely for being a young black man. Doesn’t seem like a good tradeoff to me.
Next up: An educator solves poverty by asking people if they would like to be poor.
The first step in solving any problem is to get people to acknowledge that there is one.
Gotta love the cognitive dissonance here. “What do you mean, racism? How does her example prove racism? All it proves is that being black in our society is a huge disadvantage – like being disabled or blind or poor. How on earth is that RACISM?”
I’m pretty sure if she had said “put your hand up if you think racism against black people exists”, most people would have put up their hands. I don’t really see how that is moving forward the conversation.
Acknowledging the academic existence of a thing is not the same as acknowledging the harm that thing does.
“Does partial differential calculus exist?” is a different question than, “Do you struggle with partial differential calculus?” You only want her to ask the first question. The second to me, is much more interesting and productive.
If she had said, “Put your hand up if you think that the racism against black people causes harm that you would not wish to experience.” then most people would have put up their hands too, that would have been a similar question to which she asked, just turned around the other way. Would that have been better for you?
It sounds like your primary concern here is that white people are not made to feel uncomfortable. Don’t worry about the audience, anyone who was made to feel uncomfortable in that crowd paid for the privilege of being made to feel uncomfortable, they knew who she was, what her talk was about. Somehow, this makes you feel uncomfortable, even though you weren’t even there.
So tell me, who are you getting offended on behalf of? Is it the people who wanted to be there, and learned something from the experience? Or is it on behalf of someone who wasn’t there, and had even never heard of her before? Is it on your own behalf, if so, what harm has been done to you for which to take offense?
Exactly, Dangerosa. Urbanredneck, those scholarships don’t exist instead of scholarships available to your son. They exist in addition to those available to your son. Stop thinking that rights and privileges that exist to help out others who are different from you somehow detract from your own rights and privileges. They do not.
There is a scholarship for left handed people.
Assuming that your son is right handed, would you be willing to force him to use his left hand for everything to get that scholarship?
Some parents tried to force their left handed kids to be right handed, so that they would better conform. Are you saying that they have it backwards, they should be forcing their kids to be left handed in order to get scholarships?
Or, is your problem that scholarships exist for left handed people that right handed people are not eligible for?
In this thread someone is arguing that the existence of private scholarships for black people outweighs the disadvantages of being black.
No. Unless… the only reason you don’t want to be disabled is the prejudice able-bodied people direct towards them. At that point, you can ask yourself why you let your fellow able-bodied people be such jerks.
I don’t think I’m offended. But it’s possible I’m unfairly categorizing what she’s saying as about as deep as a puddle. E.g. “I’ll do the hard part of pointing out that racism is bad, and then you guys can do the easy part of making racism not exist.” Reading the description, I had flashbacks of the Solar Freakin’ Roadways guy (again, possibly unfair).
About a year back, there was a thread where a poster had asked an online black friend what he should do about racism. That poster seemed frustrated about not getting a good enough answer.
What I came to the conclusion was that the best answer that person could have given is, “Why is it my responsibility to teach white people how to stop being racist?”
We white people do need to have a talk with eachother about race, because we are the ones who perpetuate it, and we are the ones who are able to do something about it. Black people need to be involved mostly to tell us if our efforts are working, and to remind us that they are not, but they should not be given the burden of having to tell us how to stop being racist. They didn’t come up with it, and they have no answers to solve it.
It does take empathy. I see posters cynically saying things like “I don’t fall on me knees in outrage over seeing a statue to a man who killed my ancestors” and think that that is actually a reasonable argument.
Lets try an empathy exercise, just to see where we all stand here. Lets say one of your co-workers went through some bad stuff. They were kidnapped and tortured over a period of years. They don’t really bring it up, it doesn’t affect them noticeably, but you have heard this.
Now, one day, you notice that they give you a bit of the cold shoulder. You don’t know why. You try to ask them, but they just say everything’s fine, and brush you off. You talk to another of your co-workers, and they tell you that you are wearing the same exact shirt that this person’s torturer wore everyday while they were being tortured.
Now, is your reaction to immediately change shirts at the first opportunity, or is it to become defensive about your fashion choices? Do you confront them because they hurt you with their reaction to your shirt, even though you meant no harm by it, or do you apologize to them, acknowledge that you understand how you hurt them without meaning it, and promise to not wear it anymore?
If your reaction is to get defensive about your shirt, you do not have the empathy required to participate usefully in a discussion about race.
I don’t really know Jane Elliott, but what I can dig up real quick tells me that she’s not very shallow and lazy. That she isn’t doing the easy part and leaving the hard part to others. This little snippet barely in context is not the summation of her decades of work on diversity and racism in the US and around the world.
This is more like them giving you the cold shoulder because someone else wore the similar shirt, and by not automatically stopping them you are part of the problem. You definitely wouldn’t wear the shirt in the future and you would try, perhaps not as hard as you should, to bring it up to people that you know closely if they are wearing it, but you definitely aren’t going to patrol the hallways looking for people with the shirt to stop them, even if they would be slightly more likely to listen to you than to other people.
This would be more like when someone says “It would help me greatly if you’d spread the word about how wearing that shirt effects me” and people immediately get defensive about how it’s not their job, why should they have to do it, they aren’t the ones that caused the problem. Then, any time it’s brought up that the original victim had a traumatizing experience in the past, they immediately redirect the conversation around to the fact that they didn’t cause it, it’s not their fault, and why does everyone have to be such a buzzkill to keep talking about that?
Like I said, this was an exercise in empathy, not an analogy.
If one has to make it about themself before they can acknowledge someone else’s harm, then they need to work on their empathy before they can understand the problems of racism and work towards alleviating them.
As to the second half of your last sentence, since you analogized it back to the statement, that is exactly what anti-racism is. It is when you see someone wearing that shirt, and you tell them why and how it is problematic. It also and especially means that when you know someone is wearing that shirt specifically because they know that it hurts your co-worker, that you give them some shit over it.
hogarth is missing the distinction between explicit racism and implicit racism. Asking people if racism exists just shows that everyone knows explicit racism exists - and I suspect the people in the audience don’t do that, and will thus be satisfied.
But when researchers send out duplicate resumes, half with white sounding names and half with black sounding names, the white names get more interviews. This isn’t due to explicit racism.
Dealing with that problem is a lot harder than preventing explicit discrimination - especially because most of us white people deny the problem exists.
That thing with resumes, it never made sense. Most places I’ve worked are anxious to have more black employees. Some of them even go out of their way to hire them.
The White Man’s Plight is a terrible burden to bear.
And we see why anecdotes and confirmation bias are not a good substitute for data.
Since you have been in an environment that you perceived as being biased towards blacks, I can understand why you think that employers in general would be as well. Now that you have seen the data that what you have perceived is not the general experience of a black person seeking employment, does that change your opinion on the matter at all?
How do they go out of their way to hire them? Do they recruit in mostly black schools? Do they advertise in media with large black audiences?
And also, who do they hire? Do they fill lower level jobs with black workers, and consider their job done while management is mostly white?
A lot of places say they will go out of their way to hire black candidates who come in the door, and they sometimes do that. But that doesn’t solve the problem when history tells black candidates to not even bother coming in the door.
It’s exactly what she was getting at. Just not explicitly discriminating isn’t good enough.
My old department hired 100% of the black candidates who interviewed. One. Not good enough.