My post could have been clearer. I meant that they aren’t discussed in the context of “privilege” very often. You’re certainly correct that the importance of education and a stable home life get attention generally. But while Googling “white privilege” or “male privilege” will return a whole slew of opinion pieces, articles, studies, etc, if I were to do the same for some of these less-frequently-discussed-but-arguably-more-important aspects of privilege, I notice a relative dearth of attention being paid to them.
SlackerInc,
Is discussing systemic racism, white privilege, and implicit bias part of the sneering and having to apologize for being white that you reference, and reactions to that similar to what we have seen in this thread part of the being driven away?
F-cking millennials, that’s who! They ruined everything!
(That’s a joke folks)
Well firstly, past discrimination has impacts that felt by current generations. Communities that are systematically segregated and debased according to their racial characteristics don’t just recover the moment racist laws are removed from the books. You do accept that private citizens and governments can continue to discriminate irrespective of what the law says, do you not?
But since we’re discussing the law and the power of the law, let’s first go beyond the law and consider how laws are applied and enforced, which is no less important than the text of the law itself.
As an example, if you have police officers swarming black neighborhoods, on the lookout for black men behaving suspiciously, on the lookout for black suspects, then they’re probably more likely to be arrested than white men who exhibit those same behaviors in neighborhoods that are perceived as less dangerous. They’re more likely to have a criminal history earlier in life. And their families and neighbors are less likely to be in a position to help cushion the blows sustained by the system. I don’t have data handy to back that up at the moment, but that just seems relatively logical and straightforward.
Since you asked for a citation, what I can cite is data that shows that black convicts receive longer sentences for the same criminal behavior, even when controlling for criminal history.
But irrespective of my Google-fu, I don’t think citations really make my argument. I think some arguments are better made with citations, whereas others are not. Some issues lend themselves to a more qualitative investigation than a quantitative one. Some arguments are better understood by observing and experiencing, rather than with data and a high profile case study. Consider the fact that African Americans have long complained about police brutality, excessive force, harassment, and many of these complaints fell on deaf ears until YouTube gave ordinary Americans a chance to view what happens to unarmed black men on a regular basis.
Are you black? No.
Hello? Give up your life as you know it, move to a country where you’re a visible minority with a history of discrimination, and get back to us.
I’m back!
Before getting to responses to specific points, a couple general points.
Here’s a question for the scoffers: what do you or other progressives do when some alt-right provocateur throws out an “It’s ok to be white” in an online space? Do you calmly respond “Sure it’s ok, as long as you respect everyone else’s equal rights—what’s your point?” Or do you fire back something more along the lines of “STFU, you Nazi piece of shit”? I generally see the latter. Now how do you think that looks to a 14 year old white boy in the ‘burbs who is observing the exchange as part of his introduction to politics? Who do you think he is more likely to see as being fair and reasonable?
For any “olds” reading this who think podcasts are a tiny niche thing:
Sam Harris gained prominence from bestselling books like The End of Faith. But he has become more of a podcaster than author, noting several times that any one of the several podcast episodes he releases in a given month is listened to by far more people than have read any of his books (anecdotally, that’s true for me personally: I have listened to scores of his podcasts but haven’t read any of his books).
Okay, now back into the fray:
Aye right, the True Scotsman is flyin’ fast an’ furious in here! Michael Moore, who made the top-grossing documentary of all time and has another in the top ten? Michael Moore, who was named by TIME Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world? Who still regularly appears on the Emmy-nominated HBO show “Real Time”, and probably on cable news (which I don’t watch)? That Michael Moore is just some rando we don’t need to pay attention to? :dubious:
I already said it upthread, last Thursday or Friday: take a visible stand against this shit. Be seen by impressionable young white boys asserting unequivocally that liberalism welcomes them, and appreciates them. That’s it. If you don’t see people dissing straight white men in general, then you don’t have to do anything at all.
Look, the kind of people I fear may jump to the other side in reaction to this kind of PC talk are not going to be your favorite people. They are low information, and/or may have some questionable priorities. But their votes count as much as yours. (If they live in a swing state, maybe more.)
But I mean, what’s your theory of the case? That there are no persuadable voters? Or that you just need to get everyone to read the party platforms and the good people will vote Democratic while the bad people are never going to come to our side no matter what?
If that’s true, you have a lot more work ahead of you than just disputing my assertions. You need to persuade the party to start recruiting candidates based solely on intelligence, diligence, probity, and ideology rather than considering speaking ability and general charisma; and to stop running ads, except those which describe the parties’ platforms or which direct people to a website that contains them.
Good luck.
Really? Like Bill Maher, who gave a million dollars to Obama? Or Jon Chait, who regularly takes on political correctness but has also written multiple books praising the Obama legacy? Or how about me? I went to my county DFL meeting on Saturday. I can show you a pic of the minutes if you don’t believe me. We exist, like or not!
You seem more literate than one would expect of a person who clearly doesn’t know the meaning of the word “paternalistic”. Odd.
IMO what a lot of responses of this sort are missing, is that it’s not about whether these kinds of anti-white or anti-cis-het-male comments are going to invade someone’s life and make them unhappy. It’s absolutely true that if you don’t give a shit what progressives think, and you are a college educated white guy, none of this is going to keep you from being “just fine” as the snark usually frames it. The point is if you are a young person who is interested in joining a political club or tribe, and surveying the landscape, are you going to necessarily join one where an aspect of your existence that you were born with and can’t change is regularly held up for scorn or ridicule?
For some people, the answer is going to be no, especially with the other side whispering in their ears in ways that magnify—and yes, distort—the problem. And that is an unforced error if we let that happen. True, we cannot stop extremist idiots from spouting iff, and we can’t stop the right from propagandizing. But we can control whether we actively counter this stuff, both by denouncing any negative messages that are based on inborn attributes, and by providing “social proof” that most of us Democrats have the warm and fuzzies for straight white guys who want to be part of our coalition. It’s simple, and the right thing to do regardless of the polls: just put out the welcome mat for straight white dudes. And if they join the club, make them feel like an appreciated and valuable part of the team. That’s it.
If OTOH it makes you vaguely nauseous to contemplate doing this, because you feel an impulse to think something like “FFS, straight white cismen have been coddled long enough”, consider whether the problem is more deeply rooted than you might have thought.
ISWYDT. You can’t just slip “conservatives” in there with the others. Being straight, white, or male is not under our control: it’s the way we’re born. But being conservative is a choice, an ideological position. There is absolutely nothing wrong with progressives trashing conservatives. I will happily join them in doing so!
I love how a simple exhortation to oppose and condemn tropes of straight-white-cis-maleness being inherenty problematic equates to advocating that the Democratic Party return to being “white-male-supremacist”. :rolleyes: How about just being welcoming to straight white men, AND Asian transwomen, AND black lesbians, and every other type of person who was born a certain way, as long as they support our party’s goals more than they support the GOP’s?
FFS. Srsly? Those “examples” are so obviously not what I’m talking about. Not even close. Jesus.
WTF are you on about? Is that really the point you think I was trying to
make? Jesus.
How many times do I have to explain that I’m not trying to “discredit liberals”.? Liberals like Bill Maher, or Jonathan Chait, or Sam Harris, those are my heroes. All I’m doing here is saying that Bill Maher is right, and all Democrats should try to be more like him, instead of getting bogged down in this PC identity politics morass.
Not for being white? Say what? Did you even watch the video clip?
And the fact that you would characterize Maher that way just underlines the problem. He’s fighting harder against Trump than anyone, and he regularly brings progressive journalists and politicians on the show. He’s one of the good guys. But he’s “problematic”, so… :smack:
Ehhh…that’s your entire post. Is this performance art? 
In any event, it appears you belatedly realized you hadn’t really paid attention to the video clip the first time?
You still need to watch it another time or two, it would appear. It wasn’t just one review referencing her race. The L.A. Times (possibly the biggest outlet of them all when it comes to movie reviews) is the one that questioned why they couldn’t have cast a woman of color. But Maher also put quotes on the screen from the NY Post (complaining that she is a “straight, white, able-bodied blonde”), the Independent (griping that she is “still blonde, able-bodied, and well-dressed, with all the trappings of Western beauty standards”, which doesn’t technically use the word “white” but c’mon), and the Sophie Hagen tweet—which Maher only quoted part of, but which pausing shows also once again complained about Schumer being “able-bodied” (is this the new PC horse to flog?) and, yes, “blonde” and “white”. Hagen (someone I hadn’t heard of) has a relatively modest 36,000 followers, but she still got six thousand likes for that post, and nearly a thousand retweets. And I’m sure this doesn’t represent the entirety of the pressure put on Schumer from progressives, or she wouldn’t have felt the need to (oy) apologize for being white on “The View”! (I wish she would have resisted doing so, regardless.)
The analogy doesn’t hold. I’m genuinely pro-Democrat and anti-Republican, so I can’t be a concern troll. Even if you don’t believe that I vote and donate and volunteer Democratic, there are countless posts on this very board that don’t make a lick of sense if I’m trying to carry water for the Republicans.
I would argue that the much more defensible ground is to point out that centuries of slavery and Jim Crow robbed black families of tangible wealth they could have passed down to their descendants but which has mostly been passed through wealthy white families; and that those centuries of oppression also disrupted and distorted African American social structure in a way that made their parenting more likely to be dysfunctional in the present day. These points in themselves are enough to justify reparations for slavery and robust social programs to help black families, even if we leave aside basic compassion (which is also enough in itself IMO).
One of the main reasons that it’s a much better position to take is that if you are an African American person, especially a woman, in 2018 who has high SAT or ACT scores and good grades, you are totally set in a way that a white guy with the same resume is not. You can decide what high status occupation you want to pursue and you are all set. Want to be a lawyer or college professor? There’s a glut of both of those to such a degree that even star students who are young white men may struggle to find a good job in those areas and have job security. But if you’re from a “protected class”, you will not likely be let go when there is downsizing; and if you get a Ph.D., you will have your pick of places to locate and settle into a tenure track position with lifelong job security. This was of course not true at all in living memory, but pretending it’s not true now plays right into the hands of the alt-right.
This is a fair point, as it’s definitely a huge problem. It’s an arguable question whether you’re better off being a white man with a Ph.D. who has to work as an adjunct or even as a manager at Denny’s because of the glut of Ph.D.'s relative to tenture track positions, but who won’t have much to fear from the justice system…or a black man with a Ph.D. who is totally set careerwise but might run into Skip Gates-type problems or worse. However, I think it’s pretty safe to say that if you’re a black woman with a Ph.D., you’re better off than the white guy. Sure, there are educated black women who run into problems, like Sandra Bland; but can we name another example? Stay out of the former Confederacy and you’re likely fine.
A “Sister Souljah” moment? I would be for it, although only after clearing the primary field. There would be a shitfit thrown on Twitter etc., but I think it would be worth it. Great idea!
If I got to keep my brain and consciousness exactly as is, still had my health, and my family, I would pay you TO flick it.
It may not be as simple as that, but it doesn’t mean they got equal or fair treatment.
However, all the people who are pointing to this as proof of the general shittiness of society are failing to acknowledge that Starbucks is closing all its stores and doing a training about this. If the same shit happens the next year or the year after, then you can say you told me so and it was just PR with no real effect. But I’d be willing to bet that it’s not going to happen in the future and that in fact, black people will be given if anything more leeway to loiter in Starbucks than white people will.
That’s a very broad question. Check out my responses to individual posts and then get back to me if there’s something I’m leaving out.
In all seriousness, though, I think it’s very likely that the reason a ginormous gender gap has opened up among millennials is both because millennial men (esp. white men) are getting turned off by the political correctness stuff I’ve talked about in this thread, and because millennial women (many of whom are also POC) are getting super turned off by the hijinks of Trump, the alt-right, and other Republicans who support them. My feeling is that we can keep all those who are turned off by the right without committing an unforced error in the other direction.
Ok, so when you extolled us that when we see something then say something, you want us to argue against more diverse casting in movies? People complaining about Hollywood casting are driving Millennials to the GOP? I knew that “It’s time for a black James Bond” thread was pretty stupid but I never thought that maybe it swung the election for Trump.
Yes I watched it. Not sure what you saw. And no we certainly should not be like that anti-vaxxer quack science loving ignorant POS. His donating money to a good cause does buy him anything. His is most often the shit of “my side” I feel the need to stand up to.
Nope. It is a very narrow question and one easy to answer.
Here I’ll rephrase it as a simple hypothetical: I, DSeid, am “sneering” that the impacts of institutional racism and implicit bias are real and important and that those who refuse to comprehend that are being willfully ignorant. If I was on a blog saying that would that be the sort of sneering you mean, and would a hypothetical reaction telling me to suck his cock by a white male be the pushing the demographic into the R column that you claim?
From the POV of right and wrong advocating for redressing those impacts is simply right. Now I’ve argued strongly in this thread that doing such can be done with explicit recognition that there are real and serious problems that various specific white demographics face that should be given attention as well, but, no, denying the issues that underlay what gets labelled as “identity politics” because doing so may offend some white men who are getting “turned off by the political correctness stuff”, is not the right thing to do.
It would also be stupid from a partisan perspective.
I agree with DSeid, I think the day of accommodating the delicate male ego has passed by. It had it’s time when it was ever a consideration, in all things. It’s time for it to go the way of the dinosaur now though I think.
No, I’m not wanting anyone to argue against diverse casting in movies.
Yes, the complaints about movies that have already been made are unhelpful. We need more diversity, especially behind the camera; but this is not the fault of any single movie with a white star. Non-Hispanic whites are still the majority of this country, so there’s nothing wrong with their starring in the majority of movies. Yet the complainers I’m pointing to give the impression (even if this isn’t really what they mean) that they want a radical form of affirmative action, ideally discontinuing all movies and TV shows that star white actors until, I guess, enough time has elapsed to make up for all the years when it was so disproportionately the other way? I hope reasonable people can see how ridiculous a plan that would be even if there is some brute logic to it.
I haven’t made any argument about the election being swung to Trump (although it was so narrow in the key states, it can be overdetermined by a wide variety of factors).
No, and no. What you are describing is not my favorite, but it’s not as bad as outright dissing white men qua white men.
BTW, I ran across another example of such this weekend while listening to the Appointment Television podcast, hosted by a trio of millennials. It’s episode 140, at the 2:34 mark.
This is the most common type of example of this trope. And sure: it is relatively mild, but I still think it qualifies as a microaggression, and it certainly doesn’t roll out the welcome mat for white guys to join the progressive club.
ETA:
Why? Men still have lots of votes! What is this on your part if not stubborn ego? Even if you have to sort of secretly roll your eyes deep down inside, why not just “accommodate the delicate male ego” for the sake of votes? We’re not talking about policy concessions here, just language. So to refuse is really a blatant case of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Except black people get treated worse than white people who make the same life choices. I’m a white man, but I know for a fact that I’ve had it easier than black men with my same upbringing.
The irony here is impressive.
Dude, really?
I am beginning to get it. You want a PC police … against any possible microaggressions that might hurt the delicate sensitivities of white men. And of course the biggest microaggression against them is being sensitive to the perceptions of others who are not them.
You want to play political calculus? These young white men are not reliable voters and pander all you want, even if you win them you may not get them to vote. OTOH good turnout of Black voters, women voters, highly educated voters, Hispanic voters, of the overwhelming numbers of millennial voters who support the issues that you deride as identity politics, all who lean often heavily D, is what matters more to winning nationally. IF my proposed market outreach of compassion for the issues of various white demographics with ladders of opportunity as well had any realistic chance of coming off in a way that decreased that turnout, then from that political calculus perspective it would be a bad choice. Still the right thing to do though.
I suppose its something to do with the fact that, “People who are educated have more opportunities than people who are not educated,” is not a particularly controversial stance, either as an observation of reality, or as a statement of values.
Also, a major way to improve the stability of home lives for black men is to stop incarcerating black men for victimless crimes like drug use at far higher rates than white men. Conservatives who think a stable home life is important never seem to go for that one, though.
It would cause the breakdown of civilization! Mass hysteria! Dogs and cats sleeping together! Real wrath of God stuff!
So is your question how does the Democrat Party not alienate white children below the legal voting age who frequent white supremacy web sites?:rolleyes:
Let’s also be clear here that there is not an equivalency between “equal rights” and “the right to be a racist and not be shunned by decent society”. White supremacist (let’s dispense with the “alt-right” euphemism) provocateurs love to try to espouse racist ideas in a format that appears legitimate and reasonable. That way, once they have sparked the outrage they intended to create, they can sit back and point to the “unreasonableness” of their opponents trying to “take away their rights”.
Sounds a little “snowflakey” to me.
What I suspect is that your average white man is indifferent to much of the social policies of liberalism. Don’t get me wrong. I’m supportive of women, minorities, the LGBTXYZ community and so on. But as a white man, I don’t really feel a personal stake in their issues.
The reason for this is that **Ashtura ** firmly believes his station in life is a direct product of all the good decisions made by him and his parents. Since there is no longer formal institutional racism, people who get arrested or are stuck in poverty must have done something to cause it. Demonstrating that racism still exists creates severe anxiety that perhaps they are the unwitting beneficiary of racist policies and practices.
How incredibly shortsighted do you have to be, to dismiss the formative influences on someone who has at most one presidential election before they are eligible to vote?
And how sheltered do you have to be, to believe alt-righters sit patiently on their own sites, waiting for impressionable young minds to seek them out?
P.S. It’s the Democratic Party, not the “Democrat Party”.
Somebody struck down affirmative action while I wasn’t looking?
Who said that? The “niche thing” is far left podcasts that disparage all white people.
Right–given that oddness, you could figure that I do know the word, and it’s only hyperdefensiveness that leads you to a tortured theory under which I don’t. Or you could go with the tortured theory, and feel good about it. Up to you!