There is a concept of proximate cause. At some point there has to be a direct enough connection between cause and effect for us to say one causes the other. So is there something that you think is causing so many out of wedlock births, absentee fathers and devaluation of education?
I could very well say that the reason for WWII and the holocaust is because of the Pelopennesian War and find some tenuous chain of events that connects the two, but at some point you have to put some of the responsibility at Hitler’s feet.
Type whiteness into Google. You’ll see the top two definitions. The first has to do with the color, but the second is “the fact or state of belonging to a human group having light-colored skin.” That definition is inherent in the concept of taking the word “white” and adding the suffix that means “the property of being ___.” No matter how you try and redefine the term, it will inherently carry that other definition.
I can see why sociologist might also use the term for “what has historically counted as white.” That fits with the “the property of being white” i.e. white±ness. It is also a neutral term, not negative. So I have no problem with statements such as “Whiteness has changed over time to include people of various ethnic backgrounds.” This article about whiteness is entirely unoffensive to me.
What I do have a problem with is the definition that seems to mean something akin to “the racism of racial classification.” Or having it be a substitute for “white privilege,” “white bias,” “white normality,” or other negative aspects. The second you take a term that refers to people who identify as white and use it to mean only something negative, it becomes a racially charged term. When someone says “whiteness is the problem,” it comes off as saying that “Fitting into the sociological classification of white people means you are the problem.” It is entirely unhelpful, leading credence to the idea that we think being white is wrong.
And I do think it leads to the exact problems that have come up here. iiandyiiii’s acceptance of “whiteness is the problem” has led to those who argue against him to use that concept against him. They can use the racial substitution argument: “If you can say whiteness is the problem, then I can say blackness is the problem!” It’s better to stay away from anything that can work like that.
And, yes, I actually just find “whiteness is the problem” to be offensive. I am white, so you could talk about my whiteness. That property is not the problem. I have white privilege that I need to be careful of. I need to pay attention to white bias. I have to avoid assuming people are white (white normativity). I have to acknowledge that, in the past, my Irish ancestry means I may not have been called “white.” But I reject the idea that it is my “belonging to a human group having light-colored skin” that is the problem.
Oh, and I disagree with pretty much everything else Damuri is saying, if that isn’t obvious. It’s just this one thing I want to clear up. My name was brought up, after all.
In fact, now that I think about it for a second, I have a simple reply to the topic:
The fact that (some) Asian people were able to fight hard and rise up above the racism that was used against them doesn’t mean that the black people who didn’t do so are themselves at fault.
To use a more obvious scenario as an analogy: The fact that a woman was able to fight off a rapist doesn’t mean that the woman who froze up was wrong.
To explain a little more: Black people shouldn’t have to do anything special to be equal to white people. We don’t get to blame black people for their disparity against white people when racism against them is still a problem to this day. We can’t look at the one example of people who faced racism who have risen above it (Asian people) and use that to disparage the other minorities.
(For those on the progressive side that note the problems in what I said, please note that I am intentionally simplifying and taking my opponent’s facts as given for the sake of argument.)
I did say “regularly”, but this is going well beyond the significant disagreement in our viewpoints. I’d be happy to go into my views on reparations in one of the multiple reparations threads (or start a new one). That’s really separate from my understanding of the history of race and immigration (and whiteness/blackness) in America. Whiteness or whiteness/blackness could also be called whiteness/blackness/redness/yellowness/brownness/etc. – I’ve been emphasizing the horrible impact it’s had on black people, but it’s certainly harmed other groups as well. But every group has a different history and has been treated differently, with different ramifications today.
I started a pair of threads recently that got into the weeds on some of the particular insidious elements of whiteness or whiteness/blackness or whatever you want to call this system, and the wide and surprising net it can cast:
The first thread didn’t get nearly as much attention and interest as I hoped, and I think it’s particularly informative for this discussion. In short, some researchers found that income inequality between blacks and whites is driven entirely by what is happening among black boys and men. Though black girls and women face deep inequality on many measures, black and white girls from families with comparable earnings attain similar individual incomes as adults.
So black girls who grow up with families of income X have the same adult outcome as white girls who grow up with families of income X. With black boys, it’s considerably different. Further, these relationships hold whether or not the families are single or 2 parent families – family income is all that matters; whether that income comes from 1 or 2 parents is irrelevant (though obviously 2 parent families tend to earn more, on average). I thought this was remarkable – and IMO it blows out of the water any hypothesis that there is something intrinsic to black people as a group, since whatever is going on aside from income inequality is holding back black boys, but not black girls, and whatever it is is unrelated to single parenting.
The second thread is about language, and how the failure to recognize and respect the dialect of African American Vernacular English as a real dialect, instead dismissing it as “improper English”, may be holding back many black children from participating in class and thus reaching their potential.
It is both a cause, and a consequence, of the toxic black culture.
It doesn’t work to blame it on slavery or institutional racism, because it has become worse after slavery ended and institutional racism was revoked. The black illegitimacy rate when Moynihan wrote The Negro Family: A Case for National Action was less than 25%. Now it’s over 70%.
It takes me an hour to run a mile because I have a 45 lb. weight on my back. Remove the weight, and it takes me two hours. It is a little hard to argue the reason I fall behind everyone else is because of the weight.
Really? Well, the statistics below are for ALL adult Americans.
Part of our ever changing society is the devaluation of marriage as a necessary adult institution. The trend has been constant over decades. As more and more Americans forsake traditional religion based concepts, the need for marriage decreases accordingly.
Don’t you get sick of making all these caveats to keep the SJWs from jumping down your throat?
So I am a little confused can you explain how is racism causing all this out of wedlock birth in the black community? How is racism causing all these father to abandon their children? How is racism causing such high rates of truancy and educational failure? How is racism causing such high levels of violence?
I’m not even saying that these things are the fault of the black community. But I don’t think we are doing anyone any favors by pretending that these things aren’t there and that they (rather than racism) are the cause of much of the black communities woes.
And I don’t think rape is a very good analogy for the level of racism we have today.
I wasn’t asking YOU the question, so why does it matter whether you are wikipedia or not? If you want to interject yourself into a discussion, that’s fine. If you want to interject yourself and then criticize me because I didn’t address the question at YOU, that is expecting a lot of people.
That politician is obviously a racist trying to blame the black community for its own problems. Its like blaming a rape victim for not fighting off her attacker.
So you are saying those are first principles (the state of Black families) that don’t have precedent causes that have meaning for human study? Is anything “proximate” enough to this problem to justify study?
Alternately, if there are members of the groups that do things that are not viewed favorably by mainstream society, it would not bode well for members that do not do those things. In which case, the problem would still be intrinsic to the group that racialists have created arbitrarily. Therefore it follows that you should embrace individualism instead of racialism.
These fantasy “racialists” sound like bad people, and I join you in rejecting such evil fantasy people, and in support of individualism, which IMO doesn’t conflict with anything I’ve said.
I don’t know what you are trying to get at. Tell me what you are trying to get me to say and i will tell you if I agree.
If you can define any current racism or laws that are causing black women to get pregnant as teenagers, causing black women to have children out of wedlock, black men to abandon their families, black students to drop out of school, black men to commit more violent crimes, please tell me. We will fight it together to stamp it out.
If you are saying that the segregation of 3 generations ago and the slavery of 15 generations ago is somehow caused the rate of these things to actually rise after the civil rights movement, you are going to have to connect those dots for me.
If not then wtf are you trying to say exactly? Or are you just trying to get me to say something in particular. If the latter just tell me what you think I am thinking and I will tell you if you are correct.