I’m reminded of a cartoon I saw back when I was in grade school (1960s). The scene depicted two suburbanite men at a bus stop, discussing the newspaper article whose headline appeared on the paper one of the men was holding. The gist of the headline was a suggestion that problems in the black community could be traced to attitudes within the white community (particularly the suburbs). The caption read (paraphrased from memory): “How can it be my attitude that causes the problem? I never give the Negro a second thought.”
That’s probably more numbers than anything; there are twice as many white men (or women) out there than there are TOTAL black people. And more than four times the number of white people out there.
It’s more pragmatic in a democracy to worry about the larger group- even if they only sway 30% of the white vote, they’ve already swayed more people than if they swayed 100% of the black vote.
Beyond that, when you’re 15% of the population more or less, and geographically distributed, you’re by necessity going to get less than 15% of the total representatives.
Maybe this analogy will be clearer. There are some people who look back with fondness about plantation culture. Southern gentlemen, southern belles, huge mansions. People who do this never say they love it because slavery was a good thing. Yet you can only truly love plantation culture if you push slavery from your mind - or think it was good.
When we lived in Louisiana in the late '70s we stayed in a plantation house one weekend. Slavery was barely acknowledged. A tour about five years ago of another made the experience of the slaves a big part of the narrative.
Loving the '50s the way the nostalgia buffs do is only possible if you ignore the oppression - which does not imply that someone is explicitly supporting it.
I don’t disagree with either of these statements, but that is never what is claimed. The claim is that people have nostalgia for the 50s because it was a time when they could beat their wives or keep blacks in their place. It is never said that they were simply indifferent or didn’t really give it full thought.
The accusation is that white people expressly and unequivocally long for those days of racial oppression and that any other thing they look back on in purely a dog whistle to cover up their true reason for liking the 50s.
And that is not unusual. Most people don’t look at a larger picture. If they have a good job, a good home, and take a vacation every once in a while, they are happy. Most people are happy precisely because they are able to ignore a lot of bad shit in the world. When the bad stuff bothers you, that’s when the depression and anxiety sets it because you cannot change the world.
Many people can’t conceive of themselves as being ‘privileged’. You have to first be sensitive to prejudice and differential treatment, either because you are not white, or because you are a member of a different marginalized group or groups.
On the other hand, being part of a marginalized group does not guarantee that you will be sensitive to the situations of others. What I mean is that there are racists and anti-semites and islamophobes and so on among various marginalized groups (which only goes to show you that some people are just plain clueless).
I’ve experienced both the privilege of being white, as well as the stigma of being born Jewish, of being an atheist, of having a mental illness, of having both asian and mixed race relatives, of having islamic and LGBTQ and hispanic and asian and black and native american friends etc. I’ve been lucky in that my upbringing and environment was extremely diverse starting from a very young age (plus I had very liberal parents, including my dad who had tried to stop a race riot happening outside our house, and was honored by a church in Harlem in the 1950s or 1960 for his work on their behalf). So yeah, I see what’s going on all the time that even liberal friends of mine seem to be blind to.
Interestingly, I found an old children’s book in our collection that was written in 1953. It’s basically about what dads do all day in their jobs. Every single character in the book is white. Even the dads who work in what we consider to be more …multicultural jobs like food service or taxi drivers. And why wouldn’t it? 89.3% of the population was white in 1950. Even growing up in the 70s and 80s, I knew like 3 black kids in my class of 250. My college had something like 8% minorities.
“Racism” was never really something I observed much of simply because there wasn’t really many people of other races around.
I agree. I graduated from an all-white high school in the early 90s!
However, in our community we still had many of the same issues. Bitching about people on welfare for example. That wasn’t directed at blacks, it was white people in my community. Yet, some on this board say that is a mere dog whistle for racism.
“Those” people in town that your mother told you to stay away from. All white people. We didn’t have a lot of drugs back then, but the people selling it? White people.
So growing up, I never had any animus towards blacks because I didn’t know any. And when I went to college, I still had no animus towards them. In the last 25 years, I have gotten to know many people of different cultures and still have no animus.
That is why it is frustrating in these debates that the accusation of racism because of positions that I have held which have nothing at all to do with race are raised against people like me. Sure, I would accept an argument that because of the situation I grew up in I don’t have as much understanding, say, of someone who grew up in a diverse community. But the accusation of racism is outrageous when the people making it have no frame of reference.
Perhaps not in so many words. The *implication * is pretty clear to anyone not willfully blind and deaf to it.
Okay, I’m gonna ask for a cite on that (demonstrably mainstream sources preferred, please. We have enough to to just demonstrating YOUR side’s wrongness; we don’t need to be saddled with the extra burden of fending off axe-grinding loonies who want to be on our side).
:rolleyes: Thanks for that textbook example of exactly the sort of false dichotomy I was talking about in the very post you replied to.
Once again: The choice does not have to be between (1) a culturally conditioned expectation of white male dominance and (2) a culturally conditioned expectation of nonwhite male dominance. Letting go of the historical legacy of automatically expecting white males to be the default/dominant individuals in American culture will not automatically turn America into Iran or Saudi Arabia.
But as you can see from this exchange, some people really are convinced that it will. Even if they don’t consciously advocate overtly racist or sexist views, the idea of an America where white males don’t have that automatic boost in perceived and actual status relative to the rest of the population feels to them like the collapse of civilization.
Uh-huh, very nice, but the issue here is that some people in a historically and persistently racist/sexist society have an easier time than others getting those demands listened to. That’s the problem.
The thing is, though, that in a historically and (to a lesser extent) persistently racist society like the US, we all get a background-radiation dose of cultural animus toward black people just through living in our shared culture. Racial bias and inequality filters through our media, our neighborhoods, all our assumptions about what’s culturally “normal”.
Sure, it’s possible for people to consciously reject and push back against those baseline-level amounts of racial bias in our culture. But it’s delusional for any of us (white OR nonwhite) to assume that we’re somehow magically immune to it just because we never had to think about it when we were growing up.
Nope. We all absorb some kind of awareness of the news articles that disproportionately emphasize black crime, for example. We all hear the everyday language in which words like “animal” and “thug” and “welfare queen” are implicitly coded more “black” than “white”, even though they’re superficially race-neutral. We all see the disproportionate number of white faces on people like TV news announcers, leading authorities, Congresspeople, models, CEOs. That’s the sort of background-radiation-type effect that I mean: the way our historical legacy of racism still subtly influences so much of what seems culturally “normal” to us.
(And a post consisting solely of an unsupported negation of another poster’s statements isn’t so much an argument or debate but rather mere contradiction.)
I couldnt disagree more. The news- except FOX is pretty well balanced, and the newest crop of Dem frosh congressmemberslooks pretty damn balanced.
I havent heard the term “welfare queen” on mainstream media is a couple decades. When i hear "animal’ it is about…animals. Four footed kind. “Thug” is applied to black gangs- because thats what they call themselves.
Maybe you watch Fox too much.
You are starting to sound like Fredric Wertham, except with you it’s racism.
I like your naive optimism, but unfortunately it doesn’t accurately reflect the facts. In the first place, the fact that you have to restrict your counterclaim about Congress to the specific subset of freshman Democrats in order to make it look anything like racially balanced illustrates how feeble that argument is. Congress as a whole is still only about 22% nonwhite, compared to 39% of the US population overall.
This isn’t about conspiracy theories or accusing the vast majority of Americans of openly endorsing nefarious racial hatred. This is just a rational recognition of how our society as a whole is still non-negligibly influenced by our traditional cultural assumption of white male dominance and racism against black people.
I’m not saying we should go around accusing everybody of being motivated by conscious racism all the time: that would be silly. But it’s equally silly to take refuge in the chirpy Pollyannaism (generally covering a lot of white-fragility anxiety) that needs to pretend that the influence of persistent societal racism only ever affects overt racists.
But them being at heart nostalgic doesn’t mean they come out and say it.
You’re surely aware that lots of people are racist and sexist (and not just white males) without consciously seeming themselves as racist and sexist.
And I’d say that few of the nostalgia types change their tune when the problems are pointed out to them.
Yeah, but when you take out the white racist GOP faction, Congress is very well balanced.
Proportion of Democrats who are white men will drop from 41% to 38% while Republican figure will climb from 86% to 90%.
“Pollyannaism”.:rolleyes: “white-fragility anxiety”:dubious::rolleyes: