Thanks for that. Being stuck in a “need to be physically present in x location for 12 hours a day in case something happens, but most of the time nothing happens” job, having this site to read is one of the things that helps keep me sane. I cringe at my post count, but it beats staring at a wall.
Is that really what you got from that?
The article is more an observation on the current state of politics and minority relations, with the hope that both improve. If you managed to get out of it that the parent was forbidding their children from being friends with white people, then you are not on the side of wishing to improve things, but to push people away and tear things down.
I don’t really agree with the author that relations are as strained as he describes, but I’m a white guy, so it is not really my place to give a thumbs up on how we are doing, but it is my place to at least accept that there is criticism of the system, even if I don’t agree with it.
“As against our gauzy national hopes, I will teach my boys to have profound doubts that friendship with white people is possible.”
Meh, close enough for me.
Did it trigger you? Are your snowflake sensibilities damaged by the advice this guy gave to his children in order to navigate the realities that are put into place by the majority?
Much better, an article in a major newspaper. A very stupid one.
It is impossible to convey the mixture of heartbreak and fear I feel for him. Donald Trump’s election has made it clear that I will teach my boys the lesson generations old, one that I for the most part nearly escaped. I will teach them to be cautious, I will teach them suspicion, and I will teach them distrust. Much sooner than I thought I would, I will have to discuss with my boys whether they can truly be friends with white people.
Meaningful friendship is not just a feeling. It is not simply being able to share a beer. Real friendship is impossible without the ability to trust others, without knowing that your well-being is important to them. The desire to create, maintain or wield power over others destroys the possibility of friendship. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous dream of black and white children holding hands was a dream precisely because he realized that in Alabama, conditions of dominance made real friendship between white and black people impossible.
History has provided little reason for people of color to trust white people in this way, and these recent months have put in the starkest relief the contempt with which the country measures the value of racial minorities. America is transfixed on the opioid epidemic among white Americans (who often get hooked after being overprescribed painkillers — while studies show that doctors underprescribe pain medication for African-Americans). But when black lives were struck by addiction, we cordoned off minority communities with the police and threw away an entire generation of black and Hispanic men.
Fun fact: black community leaders also were in favor of harsher penalties for crack. What’s happened is not simply a matter of “now it’s white people” (or are methheads not typically pretty white?); there has been a huge shift in how we view drug abuse in general. This is a bit of a minor quibble, but it ought to be said.
Seriously though, holy shit this is racist. “As against our gauzy national hopes, I will teach my boys to have profound doubts that friendship with white people is possible.” Yeah, all white people are the same in terms of how racist they are. Sure, that makes sense. Yeah, you can never trust a white guy to not be racist, and friendship between whites and blacks is a fool’s game. Reverse the races and you could put this on Richard Spencer’s blog. Instead, it’s published in the New York Times. What even the fuck?
Acting like a retarded right-winger isn’t cute, it just makes you look like a retard. It’s really bad advice, individually and collectively. It’s also phenomenally racist.
The advice was “Don’t trust white people”. That’s racist. Are you a racist? Or do you just get a kick out of sticking up for them?
Me? I’ll stick to not being a racist. If that makes me a snowflake, fine.
So, your preference is this sort of disingenuous summaries?
And how is it racist to make fun of someone for getting all bent outta shape for advice that someone gave his kids?
I must have missed that quote. In fact, I skimmed over it, again, and still didn’t see it. I did a ctrl-f search for that quote, and still didn’t show up.
Could you please show me in the article you got your quote of “Don’t trust white people”?
“Against our gauzy national hopes, I will teach my boys to have profound doubts that friendship with white people is possible.”
You may now commence spinning.
Me spin? He says that, against his own hopes and desires, given the atmosphere of the country and our politics, that it is unlikely that his children will be accepted as a close friend of white people. That they should recognize that, and not be too put out that forming such a friendship is unlikely.
You turn that into “Don’t trust white people”. That’s a disingenuous summary of a nuanced and heartfelt sentiment, and your attitude and attempts at gotchas is one of the reasons why that sentiment persists. You care more about trying to score gotcha points then to actually address the problems.
No-one gives a good fuck about his ‘hopes and desires’. He explicitly says “I will teach them to be cautious, I will teach them suspicion, and I WILL TEACH THEM DISTRUST”
Your hand waving bullshit aside, it’s perfectly fair to summarise his racist “advice” the way I did.
Ooh, this might qualify:
On one hand, yes, I suppose it is an indignity to be faced with a shopkeeper so distrustful of the average customer that they would want to put up a plexiglass window between them and you to prevent armed robbery. On the other hand, we’re talking about crime prevention in what are often very high-crime areas, in shops that are good targets for armed robbery. Honestly, this seems like the kind of thing the free market could easily sort out. If it truly is such an indignity to customers, shops that don’t do it should do better. Unless there’s some really important reason why they don’t. Like they’re worried about being robbed.
Also, by this logic, shouldn’t we also ban security cameras and armed guards, the proposed (and expensive) replacement solutions? Isn’t it an indignity to be constantly watched due to fear of being a criminal?
The logic does not extend per se since the plexiglass is much, much, much more intrusive since cameras & guards tend to not be between the customer and the shopowner.
I get where this is coming from. Plexiglass barriers in stores & take out places just **scream ** “Bad neighborhood”. So much so that about 20 years ago many banks, even ones on the edge of bad neighborhoods, removed their plexiglass barriers to not give the wrong impression. But small stores and such don’t have FDIC backing and such.
This is contraversial in Philly right now, and my own opinion is that it really isn’t the call of the city council.
If someone has the balls to open a store in a high crime area, they should be allowed any legal form of protection they want.
I’m concerned that they are more worried about the existence of the plexiglass than the reason it exists in the first place. It’s a symptom of a broader problem - namely that some neighborhoods are so scarred by violence that this is a standard practice in some areas. That is terrible. It is not merely an indignity to the shopkeeper but to the people who live there, that they have to live in such a violent culture and nobody actually seems to give a shit beyond removing the plexiglass.
I used to work in a very rough area of Philadelphia (Kensington) and it blew my mind what people were expected to accept as normal. One study at Penn estimated the rate of PTSD among people in that neighborhood to be upwards of 60%.
Entertainment.
That’s my motive, anyway.
Every so often someone wanders in here to say ‘What’s the big deal?’ and really, there is no big deal in a vast majority of cases. I like these mundane examples because they serve as a useful, low-stakes thought experiment for me. As a leftist, every case usually has some kernel of ideology that I can identify and usually agree with, but the approach may be wrong. And there are some cases that are clearly misrepresented or misunderstood and it’s interesting to talk about that, too.
Some of the shit hits close to home. The YA Twitter thing is a good example. The idea that someone can launch a social campaign to impugn your values as an author based on a complete misunderstanding of how social change works is pretty frightening. (The gist is: someone wrote a fantasy YA series featuring a racist protagonist who gradually became enlightened and created an anti-racist movement. The book series was excoriated as being racist because it made some readers feel uncomfortable.) This is really upsetting to me. I write a lot about sexual assault in my novel, and the idea that someone could use instances of misogyny that are purposely there to draw attention to the issue of sexual assault to publicly smear me as a misogynist rape-apologist is mind-bogglingly awful. Consider how close to the author’s heart that racism must be in order for her to write three fucking books about it. I have nothing but empathy for that person whether the controversy ‘‘helped’’ her career or not.
However pure their motives, some people, even young people, do fucking terrible, thoughtless things, and deserve to be called out.
About the plexiglass, I remember gas stations (back when there were stations that sold only gas) where the attendant’s booth was surrounded by plexiglass and you passed cash to them through a “scooped out” area of the counter. And there was nothing particularly bad about the neighborhood.
I once lived in an old industrial city which is best described as an unremarkable, racist shithole. The only place we had plexiglass was in the black neighborhood. I had never seen it before until I dated a guy who lived in that neighborhood. The idea that this represented an actual crime risk rather than a perceived crime risk is a bit hard for me to swallow. My impression was always that racism, rather than reality, shaped perception of that area. But the guy I dated, who was black, also perceived the area as crime-ridden, as did his friends and family. Like I never went anywhere on my own without receiving a list of safety instructions. So, I dunno what to think about every instance of plexiglass everywhere.
But if we’re talking Philadelphia? There are some genuinely scary places in Philadelphia. All the random shootings aside, one of our youth leaders was murdered and left in the dumpster behind the building where I worked. I don’t doubt the plexiglass is there for a reason. What gets me is why the city council is talking about fucking plexiglass instead of, I dunno, economic equality and other drivers of violent culture. And what about the patrons of the store, on the other side of the glass, who don’t have any protection? I had a professor who described to me how he had to teach every single one of his kids the best way to take a bullet, and how the instruction saved his son’s life. I miss Philly a lot sometimes but there are some deep issues there.
This shit really gets to me. Like it’s such stark obvious horrible inequality and the general national response is a tepid, disinterested, yawn. These aren’t unsolvable problems. They require time, effort, money and other resources, but they aren’t unsolveable. It’s emergency-level bad and nobody cares. Nobody would tolerate it in their own community but as long as it’s happening somewhere else we can ignore it. It’s something I never thought about until I experienced it directly, and I quickly learned just how much I took for granted about my own shitty upbringing. I no longer live in that area, but it’s the kind of experience that stays with you always.
In my neighborhood – the suburbs, 20~30 miles from the two big cities, we have a gas station at Fred’s (a major grocery+stuff retailer) that has a doghouse where the cashier handles money. You put your cash in a drawer, rather like a bank or pharmacy drive-thru set-up, and get your change back through it. In a very non-minority area, this. But I suspect that these days most customers swipe at the pump and never even really notice the doghouse.