Bill Maher weighs in:
ISWYDT. “Christian” does not belong with the others. You can choose not to be Christian, even if you are born into a very religious family–my wife did just that.
I’ll expend a little bit of effort, hoping against hope one last time for a human-to-human interaction, rather than a points-scoring, Shodan-always-wins-the-snark-game interaction.
Here’s how I see it – some people who go to jail are decent fathers, or at least better fathers than having no father. Not all, maybe not most, but some non-zero amount, because they just made one bad decision, or were decent-but-desperate people, or they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, etc. I think it’s reasonable to believe that this is more than a minuscule fraction, having known some ex-cons – a good portion of them were flawed but decent humans who genuinely loved their families. You haven’t questioned or challenged the fact that black men get longer sentences for the same crimes than white men. With those two assertions, that means that some decent fathers (or at least better-than-nothing fathers) get longer sentences due to racism/bias in the system. That means that some kids get longer periods without decent fathers (or without better-than-nothing fathers) due to racist/biased systems. So some of the time kids spend without having a father in the picture is due to racism/bias.
Do you agree that this is a reasonable supposition? If not, which point do you disagree with?
I’m just trying human-to-human, compassion about kids, etc. If you just want more snark, then you win. Trying human interactions can be tiring when the other side isn’t playing.
Correct, but white men - boys in particular - are not getting as helped as much as other groups. This is particularly noted in UK education where only 10% progress to further education. Cite. As the Sutton Trust reports
Here’s another one: men in the UK in part-time work (10-30 hours per week) earn less than women, but that’s nihilipilificated by the BBC because men overall earn more.
And while female victims of rape are treated with sympathy, this is not the case for male victims and rape helplines are for women.
And the Dope does its share of discrimination against men. Check out this thread.
The issue is, of course wider, and it goes to the elites treating the proles with contempt (e.g. by conflating concerns over immigration with racism). Hence Brexit and Trump. Trump and Farage courted those groups, listened to them, and duly got their votes.
I have no idea why you compare the U.K. and the U.S. on this matter. The UK is not in any way like the U.S. wrt race issues. You might as well look at South African statistics.
What? No. I’m not implying anything - I’m asking a pretty straightforward question: do you think that the way your parents raised you had any influence on your ability to make good choices as an adult?
Okay, so, your parents had absolutely no responsibility in helping you become the person you are today? If your parents had been abusive drug addicts, you’d have turned out exactly the same?
You keep saying stuff like this like its relevant to the conversation.
The point of discussions of privilege is not to excuse the actions of any particular individual. The point is to figure out why certain demographics have significantly higher problems with crime, with poverty, and with drug abuse than other demographics. “They make bad choices!” isn’t a useful observation, here. We know they make bad choices. The question is why do these choices seem like good ideas to people in these situations? The question is how do we get people to make better choices?
Yeah, grim as it sounds, waiting for previous generations to die out is going to be part of it. You keep saying “fifty years ago” like it’s some unimaginable gulf of time, but it’s incredibly recent history. Within living memory, white mobs roamed parts of this country and murdered black people with impunity. It was so socially accepted, they sold postcards of lynchings at gas stations. You can Google one right now, take a long look at the faces, and remind yourself, “Some of the people in this picture are still alive today.”
The idea that we can go from that society, to “Institutional racism is a solved problem,” in less than a century is incredibly naive.
That’s… fantastic, believe me. No one’s happier about it than me.
What the fuck does it have to do with this conversation?
So much for you being responsible for your own choices, I guess.
Wait…wait…don’t tell me…you’re one of the ones those evil liberals drove into the arms of the GOP.
Sure. I don’t call that “white privilege” though. But that’s just the good choices. I’ve fucked up in my life. I have never blamed my fuck ups on other people. I think that’s totally counterproductive. For anyone.
Ya know, my portal to the multiverse is broken so can’t check. Damn. Thankfully, however, I HAVE seen Back to the Future, so I am somewhat educated on wild hypotheticals. I suspect a complete change of circumstance would probably change a lot of things. Still not white privilege though. There’s plenty of white kids being born to drug addicts that are probably not the best humans. I think they’re calling it a something-something epidemic.
Oh, wait, my multiverse self with parents hooked on brown sugar just called. He says he doesn’t blame his problems on his parents or… oh my… um “black people”, either. Excuse him, his parents are on smack. It’s totally not his fault.
And I’m saying it’s ultimately NOT going to be white people that get black people to make better choices. That is COMPLETELY relevant. If I had the power to make black people not make bad choices, I’d completely, 100% concede I had “white privilege.” I mean, that’s like a superpower. A really weird superpower, but a superpower nonetheless. We can theorize all day about why people make bad decisions, but we’re not going to be the ones that make correct decisions for them. I can point some very basic steps to follow, but you can lead a horse to water, you can’t make it drink.
Do I think it’s a “solved problem?” No. Do I think it’s about time to start tipping the scales back a little from “it’s those damn whites with their damn white privilege!” and a little towards taking more personal responsibility in their own house? Yes. But I can’t say that as a white man, and even if I was a black man I’d probably take a helluva lot of flak for that. It’s happened.
It will significantly cut down on the crisis of non violent blacks in prison, will it not?
If various policies and practices are driving at least some of these inequalities and disparate outcomes, then we can work to change those policies and practices for the better. If you don’t believe this is the case, then at least we’ve found the source of the disagreement.
See, this right here is the disconnect I’m feeling in your argument. Your parents raised you well, and this helped you be the successful person you are today. Right?
So, if good parents get some of the credit for good kids, why don’t bad parents get some of the blame for bad kids? If your good parents made you a good person, why are you digging your heels in so hard at the idea that bad parents can produce a bad person?
Again, “white privilege” doesn’t mean, “bad things never happen to white people.”
But one thing it can mean is that when white people fuck up, they face lesser consequences than when non-white people fuck up. I believe I linked to a cite about sentencing disparities earlier, but here it is again.
That’s not white privilege either. Honestly, we’re how many posts into this thread, and you’re still throwing up straw man definitions? C’mon, man, at least try to meet me halfway, here.
Sorry, but aren’t you a white man who’s spent the last couple days saying exactly that?
Where’s the terrible fallout that’s supposed to come as a result?
Like I said pages ago, some people are never ever ever going to accept white privilege as a thing because a lack of hassle just doesn’t feel like privilege. Why is that so hard to understand?
That is a spectacular misrepresentation of that thread. A few posters indicated that they were fine with a women-only production team but “the Dope” overall was having an intelligent conversation over the legal, moral and societal ramifications of this particular hiring practice.
This argument again. You don’t get to cite Trump and Farage and then blame “the elites” (which strangely doesn’t include the wealthy, privately-educated Trump and Farage) for being the ones conflating racism and immigration.
Honestly? Because I think it’s totally wrong. I think it’s a matter of communicating the concept better, not just throwing up our hands and giving up whenever someone doesn’t get it or doesn’t want to get it. I mean, we don’t react like this when antivaxxers refuse to listen to reason, do we?
Personal responsibility and public responsibility aren’t mutually exclusive concepts. It’s possible for both of those things to coexist.
It’s occurred to me though, that even if 80% of the problems of the African-American community are due to systemic white supremacy, and 20% the result of poor individual choices, it would make a lot of sense from the standpoint of an individual black person to focus on the 20% that one can control. Life is too short to wait for white america to come to its senses and make proper amends.
Right. Telling you that you haven’t proven your point is snark. Telling me I think black ex-cons are scum who can never be rehabilitated, because I think an extra year in the pen is unimportant compared to the option of not going to prison at all is what - human-to-human interaction? If you want to dish it out and then complain when you get it back, get used to disappointment.
The number of decent fathers who are in prison, and the amount of time lost to their children, is insignificant, IMO. This is for a number of reasons -
[ol][li]Most black children are already growing up without their fathers anyway. [/li][li]I suspect, although I have no figures and don’t intend to Google, that the percentage of black children growing up without their fathers is even larger for the children of convicts. So it is even less significant.[/li][li]Which is the more effective approach to the problem of black fathers being lost to their children because they are in prison? Fighting to get them released earlier, or fighting to get them to obey the law so they don’t get sent to prison in the first place? The first gets an extra year. How much does the second gain you?[/ol][/li]
Gosh, aren’t you noble.
Regards,
Shodan
That’s kind of where I fall. If I snapped my fingers tomorrow, and everything was was equal, would “white privilege” be a thing? I think most people here would say no?
Everybody being equal is the baseline default of the way it should be. I simply do not believe that examples of crappy things happening to blacks means lack of crappy things is a privilege. Most of the time, white people are treated the way people should be treated, and sometimes black people are not.
For many years, that was simply labeled as discrimination. And if a black person claims to be discriminated against, I very likely won’t dispute that at face value. But I really don’t consider me going to work and not getting pulled over by a cop for no reason as a privilege. That’s just the way it’s supposed to be.
The privilege is that you can expect to be treated professionally if you are pulled over. Now, you may not be, that’s true. But you certainly have less to worry about. That’s a privilege. Of course it’s the way it’s supposed to me for everyone.
Well the jargon is pretty entrenched so I would suggest instead of arguing against it, just mentally substitute “white privelege” with “anti-minority bias”.
I agree with all of this. Furthermore, if I snapped my fingers and there was no mistreatment of random drivers by cops, would that hurt my life? No. So I am deriving no advantage from the situation. There are even times when it hurts me by causing others to judge me based on my race when I did nothing to deserve it, in which cases I’d be better off with no discrimination.
There are probably also times when it may or may not have helped me, such as education, housing, and employment, but exactly as you say, this can be subsumed under the more powerful and accurate discrimination. I say “may or may not” because it is difficult to say whether any one situation is due to some other third party being discriminated against, and if we treated everyone equally, we’d have a more efficient economy, so I may have had some missed opportunities in the other direction as well (for instance, a naturally bright PoC with a substandard education may have invented a huge tech breakthrough which I may have benefited from but did not due to discrimination.)
So was “illegal immigrants”. Now I mostly hear the equally stupid terms “undocumented” and “illegals.”