Because to do so would be nothing more than an empty attempt in vain to make white people more comfortable, which is stupid and doesn’t accomplish shit. If white men need to feel comforted by hearing more black or latino political leaders denounce every single comment that raises eyebrows then the problem isn’t minority fragility; it’s white snowflakery. People who have an incessant need to feel comforted by black condemnations of some random left wing troll on twitter and more likely than not going to be the same people who feel even more comforted by seeing black men locked up in jail and removed from society altogether. At the heart of the perceptions you allude to is fear, the perception that black people and people of color represent some kind of existential threat.
This point is evidenced to some degree in a subsequent post in this thread in which you allude to a white “minority” by 2045. In reality, however, “white minority” is misleading because even then, whites will still represent a very strong plurality of voters. What I sense among a lot of white conservatives - and even some “moderates” - is a fear of what will become of their America when it loses its identity as a white majority nation and culture.
Race-baiting politics works because it capitalizes on these fears. People don’t want to lose status and power, and it’s surprisingly easy for the leaders of any ethnic majority group to exploit our inherent tribal tendencies.
Imagine wandering into a thread about economics or gerrymandering and complaining that the people who write about those complex topics use specialized words and concepts that take some work to be fluent in. And then, instead of asking to be directed to a primer or some background reading, you instead conclude that the people writing about the topics should just do the work of clueing in uninformed readers every single time they write something.
That pretty much never happens. But when the topic is race, it happens every single thread.
Why do you think that is? I think it is because discussing racism makes white people defensive. It is a totally understandable reaction. But it is not the fault of people like Coates.
Imagine the people who say ‘Fuck your feelings’ and mock you as ‘Snowflakes’ being the ones who consistently whine about mean old liberals sneering at them and driving them off message boards or into the hands of extremists.
I would add the caveat “in the USA”. There are places and times in which a white minority was terrorized and lynched. Those places were never the USA. I don’t think, in this context (white privilege in the USA), that things like the Mau Mau Uprising are relevant.
I don’t think this is a very fair comparison. The problem is not that someone reads Coates’s work and sees the words “snurvleglog” and “resnootability” and is frustrated because they don’t know what those words mean. The problem is because they see words like “white” and “whiteness” and make the not-unreasonable assumption that those words can be read in the obvious, normal fashion. (The fact that that reading fits into their pre-conceived expectations of what Coates might be saying obviously makes it easier.)
It’s more than that. They are also telling the people in that thread that they shouldn’t use terms like “absolute advantage” or “cracking” as they have chosen to identify those terms as personally insulting to themselves.
I don’t read Coates very often. He makes me think too much, and I don’t really have time for that.
He is provocative that way, I will fully admit and agree. But, the alternative to being provocative is to be suppressive. To not talk about the issues that are facing us and our society. I am sure that there are many who would appreciate that.
I “joke” that I don’t have time to fully digest a Coates article, so I don’t usually seek him out on my own, and only read him when someone like iiandyiiii points out something particulary noteworthy, or when someone from the other side points out something that they have chosen to take personal offense to.
And yeah, he does make you a bit uncomfortable, and that’s not a bad thing. Living inside your comfort zone means you will never grow, never improve, never change. He makes you think, and some people appreciate that, and others resent it. That some choose to be resentful over things that make them think in a way that may make them uncomfortable doesn’t mean that he should be categorically condemned.
I think it’s because folks who push the white privilege narrative are trying to redefine common words to fit an agenda whereas discussions about economics use easily defined terms.
The way white privilege is used is opposite of the understood definition of those words. It’s like when a black person in the US wants to be called African American, that’s perfectly normal and understandable. If the same person who was native to Africa and lived in Africa their whole life said that, that would be strange. When folks wanted to shift from the term illegal immigrant to undocumented, etc. that made sense based on the underlying fact pattern of some folks not breaking the law.
Like I said, I’m on board with the concept, but I think the messaging is terrible and my expectation is it will not catch on outside of those who already buy in, and will be counter productive for those who haven’t already.
I always think of “illegal immigrant” as someone who is here illegally. If you’re here legally, then you’re not an “illegal immigrant”. “Undocumented” makes it sound like a clerical error-- they’re just missing a few documents, and all that’s needed is to clear that up! If the vast majority of people here illegally were only breaking the law due to a clerical error, then I could see where “undocumented” would be a better descriptor.
Having said that, I can see where the term shouldn’t apply to people brought here as children, since most of them had no idea they were breaking any laws.
I don’t think that “white privilege” means something that is at odds with the initial reading of those words. There are subtleties in the way it is used, but it’s hardly 180 degrees off.
If someone wrote a piece with a flood of very specific random bad shit that individual black people have done under the label of “blackness”, would you say they “chose” to find it offensive? Would you find the discomfort it caused them somehow virtuous?
That has nothing to do with anything Coates has written. Based on your descriptions and comparisons, you have very little idea of the content of Coates’ writing.
Liberals need to find a way to communicate with white Americans. Stupid as it may seem, many of them really do feel that the Democrats are in league with minorities to take their country away from them.
Has anyone linked to the recent Wshington Post article interviewing Trump voters ? It focused on the upper Mississippi area where many counties that hadn’t had a majority-GOP vote since the Reagan landslide flipped to Trump.
A union member who didn’t like Obama but did like Obamacare is a GOP county chairman who says people voted for Trump “to make America great again.”
Another GOP county chairman explains Trump supporters:
Lots of examples of some folks on the Left sneering at folks not in lockstep with them, (pretty much the way that some folks on the Right sneer at folks that are not in lockstep with them).
So far, no actual evidence that the “sneering” is causing anyone to shift their position to the Right. (There are often cases of folks in the SDMB complaining about how the “other side” is sneering, but the ones claiming to have shifted their position due to sneering generally can be found to have held the same positions for years.)
The question I have is why are all these white people—who we’ve been told are most assuredly not racist, not prejudiced, not xenophobic in the slightest—aren’t bothered enough by the racism, prejudice, and xenophobia coming from the GOP to stay away from it?
Why are we talking about progressives like Coates, when he isn’t even an elected official? Has anyone in this thread identified any anti-white policies that can be attributed to Democrats? It doesn’t take much work to come up with decidedly anti-black and anti-immigrant policies from Republicans. Policies that should bother anyone who considers themselves non-racist.
When you have a guy like Arpaio trying to get into the Senate—an undisputed infringer of Latino civil liberties who nevertheless was proudly pardoned by the President—you can not seriously be trying tell me that the real problem in this country are Dems (who are majority white…go ahead and count em) being too mean to white people. You can’t be seriously trying to get me to feel sympathy for all those white folks whose feelings are hurt because progressives don’t talk “right” or whatever, when GOP officials are apologists for racial profiling, the Confederacy, and Nazis.
With all due respect, if you go back and read the OP, I think you’ll see that each of the points you bring up is a straw man.
There has been a lot of research lately into why people hold onto their political beliefs, and it’s pretty clear that if you attack them on an emotional level, most people will react by entrenching themselves even more deeply into those beliefs, even if there are logical reasons why they should embrace other political positions.
I honestly don’t know if the issue being raised by the OP is a significant one in terms of changing electoral results. However, I’m generally sympathetic to the idea that you don’t win people over by demonizing them. It might make you feel good, but it rarely does any actual good. There are exceptions, of course, and we all have to find our own line of when a person’s position is so antithetical to the democratic process that we are morally compelled to point out the evil in their position. And the OP does address this by noting that the goal is not to pull in every conservative voter regardless of how heinous his beliefs might be, but that there is a spectrum of conservative voters out there and given how close our elections tend to be for president, it doesn’t take too much of a voter shift to change the outcome.
