I feel pretty strongly that PoC need to be able to talk about their feeling and experiences without coddling white feelings, and much of the criticism of Huey Freeman has been from people who want him to frame all his observations with #notallwhitepeople disclaimers. That’s bullshit.
This though, this is not bullshit. It’s bigoted and ignorant. And personal attacks about the relationship between a parent and their children are foul.
I haven’t read the thread in question, so perhaps there is some miraculous context that changes things, but those clips as presented are awful.
Where this goes awry is that identifying oversensitivity and fragility gets over-diagnosed and lumped in with legitimate concerns others have.
Viewpoints are expressed as though they are harmless and I don’t believe that’s always the case.
In this thread, multiple people express the viewpoint of older white men having too much say. I don’t believe this to be harmless. Certainly, some are too shaken to even listen when they hear words like that, and folks like that can stand to grow a thicker skin, be a better listener who is more selfless. If that is true, those don’t need to be coddled.
It is harmful because of the disregard for older white men who may be a disadvantaged minority for a different trait, who may have had perspectives like theirs woefully underrepresented. It suggests one of two things to me. 1) Bigotry. Or 2) A conviction that a few traits act like a magic shield, insulating the individual from having to feel any structural oppression relatable to those in the groups being advocated for. The latter is akin to religious dogma and cannot be reasoned with. At best, it is a shortcut - one that is seen all too often in insensitive language used by activists toward others, again, not to be confused with language that may be acerbic that doesn’t do this. Situations get reduced to a 2-dimensional battleground.
Maybe this forum could use more leftist in-fighting if the main thing is to band together like this is all okay until (a POS) hits the fan.
I have always sensed what Huey is trying to do ever since he started here, and the remarks are not shocking, they are the logical conclusion of the excesses of our infallibility.
Or a white sociology student writing a paper entitled “Trolling Liberals Who Are Guilt-Wracked Over Racial Inequality: How Long Until They Realize They’re Being Played?”
This is actually what I meant by not being able to figure out Covfefe. There’s no legitimate grievance there. There is nothing at all wrong with the idea that old white men, as a demographic, are overrepresented at the table of ideas, and that, when you are asking about women’s issues in the workplace, it should be women who predominate. They have the experience.
However, this is exactly what Huey Freedman’s bullshit does. Because he is legitimately racist towards white people, it gives credance to the white persecution fantasy. While Dacien in that thread is wrong about casual white racism being common now, it sure looks that way when people go out of their way to give a racist asshole such a wide berth.
It makes it hard to explain why the comments in that thread are not racist towards white people when people will also try to explain away Huey’s direct racism. He does not just air grievances. He blames all the ills of society on white people. Autism just seems to be the one that gets people’s attention.
He will even attack people by calling them white, because, for him, it is a snarl word. All this shit is racist as fuck, and it disheartens me that so many want to coddle him.
I don’t know if he’s a troll, a genuinely racist balck guy, or both, but, if he won’t shape up, I believe he is a net negative to this board. And to the liberal cause of showing white people they aren’t persecuted.
(I do hope this thread won’t become about whether Dacien and UltraVires were right.)
I find his views over the top and the way he presents them tedious and distasteful. Some of his statements can easily be called racist. The “imported” kids comment was deserving of a mod note in my opinion. But with all that said, we should be especially careful with extreme and unpopular viewpoints, and frankly give them much leeway. We need to find all possible reasons not to silence those, or drive them away. Or risk becoming the message board equivalent of lukewarm oatmeal without raisins.
It’s no more than an impression, but I get the feeling he is an older black guy who has forgotten how to interact with white society on any level other than racism. He said elsewhere that he mistrusts millennials more than Baby Boomers. That might be because Baby Boomers retain some memory of the civil rights struggles of the 60s and 70s. Millenials don’t, so they don’t fall for his schtick.
Hence his increasingly over-the-top efforts to get somebody on this messageboard, which skews older, to react to him in a more clearly racist way - call him a racist name, something like that. He would know how to respond to that.
Or maybe he is autistic, and projecting. Or maybe just a troll.
FWIW, as the subject of the comment, I don’t know about this. I thought the rule of thumb was that if you reveal something about yourself on the SDMB, it becomes fair game. And it is the Pit, after all.
Of course, my POV is skewed by the liberating power of not giving much of a fuck. I don’t value Huey’s opinion more than a equivalent amount of pocket lint, and I am unworthy enough to giggle condescendingly as I watch his descent from oddball thru self-parody and on into performance art.
I completely agree with you. His toxic divisive bullshit also undermines the fact that those of us who have lived with privilege should spend more time listening to the experience of others - even if it makes us uncomfortable. But his interpretation of that seems to be that he he’s entitled to be a patronizing ranting abusive racist asshole all day every day, and if anyone doesn’t like it that’s just their “white fragility”.
He’s so tiresome that I gave up on participating in the few thread’s he’s in, or just ignoring his posts completely. He’s fairly easy to avoid, and I think that’s why he’s still here. If he were spewing his toxic bullshit around the board more generally, I think he would have been banned long ago.
I gave up on trying to engage with him, and stay out of threads on race in which he is a major participant, once it became clear that despite the fact that on a fundemental level I agree with a large majority of his views, the fact that I was white made me the enemy and there was nothing I could say that would change that.
More free speech is better than more censorship. The problem is that some offensive speech is implicitly encouraged and some offensive speech is forbidden strictly based on politics and mod bias.
What’s wrong is that you’re hyper goddamn sensitive and can’t cope.
You’re desperate to find ‘racism’ and any kind of ‘ism’ defects among black people to legitimize or reconcile the fucked-upness that is the white race.
And I speak as a white man. And before you morons call me a troll, get this: I am white, and I am proud of who I am as an individual. But it has nothing to do with my whiteness, or my being a man, or my being American, or my being middle-age. I can accept that white males are responsible for a lot of messed up shit in this society. That doesn’t mean that I own that as an individual; it just means that I, being a non-volunteering member of that ‘tribe’, share characteristics with the group that oppresses others. But I don’t take offense to what Huey Freeman says. You all do, which means you all are some hyper-sensitive punks who need to learn what reality is.
Oh go fuck yourself, and fuck the OP because all you do with your “both sides” shit is give faux concern to those who are concerned about the radical left, which doesn’t even exist in this society.
(Trump, people, Trump)