If those circumstances are influenced by whiteness/blackness, and those negative circumstances are more frequently encountered by certain groups, then the effects of those circumstances are to some degree 2nd order effects of whiteness/blackness.
In many cases it is, in many it is not, and it’s often a combination. These are very complex concepts and circumstances and it’s almost impossible to speak of them accurately as simply as you’re trying to do so here, IMO.
Whiteness/blackness strongly influences American culture, and most or all sub-cultures within American culture (and vice versa). There are extremely complex interactions between all of these complex concepts and phenomena.
I think they take away your "means’ if you have too much but after they take your stuff you don’t have “means” anymore.
Here is the full quote. I think its useful to note that buying the immigration right required buying the half American child, something that you seem to think happened frequently enough to have changed the overall characteristics of the refugees from Vietnam.
I’m not going to call you a racist, but I wonder if I could get away with saying that some other group sold their children in large enough numbers to make a difference in the overall character of that group.
I am looking for the cite that Wikipedia is using for that statement. I could not find one. It seems like the language is lifted from this website:
I don’t see where they are getting this info from.
OK let me try saying it this way because you seem to think that culture is the result of some flaw in character of black people as individuals (or you think that is what I am saying).
I think that the history surrounding black literacy in the antebellum south created a baseline of hostility or aversion to education that may have trickled down to some of the attitudes we have today. This is particularly prevalent among black males. I think this aversion to education is a toxic element of black culture.
I think the drug policies and generational poverty leads to gangs becoming institutions. I think gangs are a toxic part of the culture in many poor black neighborhoods.
I am not sure what the root cause of the breakdown of the black family but it is real and it is epidemic. I think this has become a toxic part of black culture.
It doesn’t matter that these are not problems of their own making, these are things that keep the black community from reaching its potential. These are things that the black community has to address on its own and it can’t wait for racism to drop below some acceptable level before they start working on it. Of all the problems, I think the disintegration of the black family is the most important to address. I think everything else become easier to handle once they can reverse the disintegration of the black family.
I would agree that it is bad form to use such terms in an open public speech or something where the recipients may not understand the word, just as I would expect that if I were to use the term “pentadactyl” to describe my listener, the listener being ignorant of the meaning of that word could effect communication, even though it would (probably) be accurate, they may perceive it as an insult. But to use a word in its academic context in conversation to explain a phenomenon that has no other ready term shouldn’t be condemned.
You are correct that bigots objected to terms that people used when they tried to highlight the effects of bigotry. How much consternation has been thrown over the prefix “cis”, for instance.
It is bad enough that the bigots demand control over the language, and while I agree that it is not a great way to get bigots on your side to use a descriptive term like “whiteness”, the bigots aren’t going to be on your side no matter what word you use to describe the cultural and economic effects of generational bigotry.
If talking about the effects of generational racism bother people, then lets get rid of the effects of generational racism, not police the language so that it can be more easily ignored.
For those who do not understand that racism didn’t just stop when slavery was ended, or when jim crow was repealed, that hundreds of years of slavery and oppression could not possibly have any effect on modern socioeconomic problems of people of color, anything that could possibly remind them that their prosperity was built on the backs of generations of the oppressed is an anathema, and so their objection to any words that would remind them of that makes sense.
For those who do understand these things, turning on others in an attempt to make the bigots more comfortable is doing their work for them.
So yeah, it would be unwise to go out and make public speeches blaming “whiteness” for the world’s ills. But on a little corner of a message board supposedly devoted to fighting ignorance, while talking specifically about racial relationships and how they effect the socioeconomic status of various demographic groups, I cannot condone censoring useful language to make bigots more comfortable.
Taking away their means sounds like persecution to me.
I also said the following, based on common sense: wealthy people (relatively speaking) have a better chance of successfully transporting themselves to the escape boats; wealthy people have a better chance of bribing officials as necessary; wealthy people have a better chance of bribing those coming to kill them; etc.
Do you disagree with these logical suppositions? Do you think a poor person and a rich person targeted by the oppressive government have exactly the same chance of avoiding or bribing corrupt/malevolent officials/death squads, making it to the coast, onto a boat, bribing officials, getting enough food on the journey, etc. – all the things that might be necessary to make it to America? It seems trivially obvious to me that someone with wealth would have a greater chance of success in this endeavor than someone with nothing, all else being equal.
I think (as someone said upthread) you’re getting cause and effect wrong. If there are circumstances caused by discrimination/oppression/“whiteness/blackness”/etc. that are leading to these disparities, then it’s not the culture that’s causing them, but the circumstances. If black people are facing these circumstances more often than others, and are just behaving as humans tend to on average in these circumstances, than focusing on culture will do nothing. And this includes every one of these disparities – there are circumstances in which humans are more promiscuous, on average, or are more criminal, or violent, or whatever, on average. If black people are facing these circumstances that result in humans behaving in these ways more frequently, due to whiteness/blackness/racism/institutional-bigotry/discrimination/etc., then the disparitiy is not the fault of black culture, but rather the fault of these harmful phenomena.
And we should focus on those circumstances (and the larger cause of those circumstances) since they’re the only thing outsiders (and broader society) can affect anyway.
How do those non-existent means help them get to America?
You mean the wealthy people that are being targeted and persecuted by the government? If wealthier people could escape communism, the entire professional class in communist countries would have left. I have not seen any evidence that refugees generally are wealthier than the general population of the country they were fleeing. I thought it was commonly understood that refugees are fairly representative of their country of origin.
I think a Vietnamese fisherman has a better chance at becoming a refugee than a Vietnamese lawyer.
So what circumstances cause the things I mention?
Most of the “circumstances” seem to be (directly or indirectly) vestiges of the past.
A wealthy Vietnamese person understands that his family is a likely target of the communists. Maybe he’s not sure at first, but a wealthy friend is targeted, so then he realizes he better get his family out of Vietnam before it’s too late.
In my understanding, that’s a very common feature and result of communist revolutions. And it seems quite logical that these folks might be more successful in getting out, just as a wealthy fisherman with a high quality boat will have a better chance of escaping than a poor fisherman with a broken boat.
There could be a million different possibilities. In my understanding, kids who have lost a parent or sibling are more likely to engage in risky and dangerous behavior. Kids with less hope for the future are more likely to engage in desperate behavior, or throw caution to the wind. Kids without a safe place to be during the day are more likely to go to dangerous places, with dangerous people.
Once you assume these are just humans being human, all the rest falls into place pretty logically, IMO. It doesn’t absolve any individual for bad behavior. But it explains why groups may include greater or fewer numbers of people engaging in these behaviors, just because they’re humans in more difficult circumstances, when those circumstances are different, on average.
Are we really having an argument about whether the word “whiteness” is an appropriate term for “the concept or ideology of there existing a socio-ethnic or racial group of people identified by light skin color and connected to human settlements originating in northwestern Eurasia, a group given privileged positions in society and being ascribed generally as being more virtuous than people who are not white”?
Not really, we are having a discussion about whether people who are acting in the interests of social justice should censor themselves in order to appease the bigots who don’t want to discuss the concepts behind that term, and claim offense to the word in order to change the conversation to one about not hurting the feelings of bigots.
Institutional and pervasive racism perpetuated by those who benefit from it, maybe?
Okay, if that’s the case I am surprised at some of the specific board members who are joining that parade.
I’m not sure that covers it, though. The term needed is specifically one directly referencing the creation of the concept or meme of whiteness, which is a specific cultural and historical thing, and is responsible directly for all conceptions of non-whiteness.
I’m using it as the academics/journalists who focus on the issue do (at least, in my understanding). I also offered “whiteness/blackness” as a potential alternative.
But why engage when you can quip, right? Quip away!
You are, indeed, doing the Lord’s work (with the added patience of a thousand epochs). But let me show you a trick I learned from Kakashi-Sensei.
Kuchiyose no Jutsu
Go ahead, Robin. Take it from here.
(emphasis mine)
See? You need not expend* so *much effort posting. Remember, you will not sway hearts and minds. This is worth repeating. You will not sway hearts and minds here, so conserve you reserves and rely on Robin DiAngelo. This woman is the first white woman in history to be able read white folk better than black folks. Here, read the Jutsufrom this scroll.
At this point, it’s a pretty standard definition. The worst you can say about it is that it’s a specialized definition, and it’s pretty clear, in the context of this conversation, that it is the definition that is appropriately understood.
It’s about the very existence of the concept of being white. “Whiteness” is a pretty reasonable term to use for that concept.
The reason we have a race problem is that at some point some people invented the idea of considering themselves white. There was nothing necessary or inevitable about that. It was a deliberate decision.
Blackness exists because of whiteness. So whiteness is the problem under the discussion. As I asked before, what better term is there?
I know at least one poster, maybe two, on the Dope, who were swayed towards supporting reparations as a policy by the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates. Plus, I enjoy these sorts of discussions. And perhaps the Overton window is shifting, millimeter by millimeter, on these issues, just as more people hear perspectives they have never considered before.
You may well be right that no one cares. I don’t know if I’ve earned any credibility here or not , but from the responses I’ve seen to your many posts, you’re certainly not qualified to make that call.
Then you disagree with iiandyiiii. As he states, “whiteness” is not about being white.
I tend to agree with much of the ideas and concepts being raised, though perhaps not as much on the solutions which haven’t really been presented in this thread. But the messaging here is simply terrible and I reject the term because it’s silly. Redefining words to have non standard definitions is bad for communication.
As far as I can tell, Ascenray and I are on the same page. It’s awfully hard to talk about this topic using simplistic language. And I have trouble understanding how using the terms that are used by academics is “redefining” anything.
The “concept of whiteness” is not bad. It emphasizes that the conception of racial categorizations is being discussed and not those who are placed in such categories without their consent or knowledge.
