One month later.
Hey! I’m a member of the Gronp!
Small world.
Really? I assume gender based microaggressions exist, but I’m always far more anxious about offending someone else than about anything people might say to me.
A lot of this stuff isn’t even racist, though. That particular example was, but some of the other examples in that thread only have a tenuous relationship to actual racism. At some point the speech policing creates more discomfort than the supposedly offensive terms themselves.
The reasons that people do anything are varied and complex. A single individual contains legions. They may be perfectly sincere, or want social approval, or both, all at different times and in different contexts. Announcing that you are cis-het could mean different things in different contexts. You can’t really have a conversation about heterosexism without naming what it is to be straight and cisgendered.
Some of these people are exhausting, and I do not dispute that, but what I find exhausting largely depends upon my mood.
Gronp is one of my favorite places on the internet.
How can I explain this better? There are rules on the left that say eg ‘you must listen to minorities on X subject because they have a very different experience to you’. And in this context people remind each other that just because something doesn’t bother you, that doesn’t mean it is okay or other people are being unreasonable in objecting to it. But outside that narrow context they revert straight back to ‘these people (who are different and have different experiences) are stupid/misinformed/evil’ and ‘it’s not a problem for me, therefore anyone who objects is being unreasonable’. So the most plausible conclusion is that they are following these rules, rather than that they are acting out of empathy for others.
The most plausible explanation is that people have more empathy for some people than others. This is always true no matter who you are. I’ve yet to meet a single person who didn’t budget their fucks to give in some way or another. Why do we donate to some causes but not others? We can’t donate to all the causes.
A lot of political conflict stems from disagreement about who we should care about enough to allocate our time, resources and dollars. I care more about people in poverty than fetuses. I care more about African Americans than racist white people. Unless that racist white person is like, my grandma. I love my grandma. But I still tell her she’s being racist when she’s being racist. She’s a grown woman, she can handle it.
I care about everyone in poverty with respect to the issues they deal with as a result of poverty. I don’t care so much about how a racist feels when someone points out their racism. In my experience with racists - and my experience is extensive - they are not well - meaning ignorant lambs, they delight in the “naughtiness” of being un-PC and use their racism to reinforce social bonds with other racists. They don’t need to have their hands held, they need to receive the message that certain words and behaviors are flat-out unacceptable.
Everyone deserves to be treated with basic human decency but I guess if there’s a common thread among the things I care about, it’s injustice. When people are not treated fairly it really gets my goat. When they are subject to an active campaign of oppression, I am incensed. Having grown up in a culture of white supremacy I’ve felt responsible to shift the cosmic balance somehow. I hate that I came from that, and even though I wasn’t the one being racist, it’s like an infectious disease I will be scrubbing off the rest of my life.
“It is not your fault that the world is the way it is, it would only be your fault if it stays that way”
-Die Ärtzte - deine Schuld
(german punk band)
The racists are not delighting in being un-PC. They view political correctness as an unprovoked and unjustifiable attack on them, personally, individually. They’re not saying bigoted things for giggles; they’re saying those things because they actually believe them.
Yep, that’s right. Because you have consistently failed to give a good example.
The best one you gave was an elderly person who is so out-of-touch that they do not realize that a word that has been verboten for decades is unacceptable, and as I said, people are quite accommodating of the elderly anyway. (I would ignore the word “colored” though if they repeatedly referred to people that way I might politely point out that this word is considered offensive).
So, a “nothing burger”.
And again, the real harm is in misinformation – witness Trump, Brexit, the storming of the capitol, and a surge in white supremacist terrorists. Any discussion on “PC culture gone mad” needs to begin by addressing the elephant in the room – that it’s almost entirely myths, weaponized by the right.
I don’t necessarily take it seriously. If a group says that a word is offensive and asks that it no longer be used, that’s not some onerous request, so I just do it.
If later I learn that the term is OK after all, then I can just switch back to using it. It’s not that I was “tricked” into believing something, as I was never necessarily on-board, I was just doing all I could to be polite and civil and continue to do so.
I would have thought that literally any of the examples of someone losing their job for having an un-PC opinion would count as proof of the harm of PC culture.
I’m not talking about actual Ethnic Supremacists who genuinely buy into the Master Race stuff, but people who have questioned any one of a number popular tenets like “Women in first world countries are horribly oppressed” or had the temerity to suggest “We shouldn’t be bending over backwards to accommodate a tiny percentage of the population that has appeared more or less out of nowhere in recent years and demands everyone agree to their demands or else”.
Do you watch South Park? PC Principal and the PC Babies have been regularly skewering (via satire) the harm of PC culture for a couple of series now.
The only example I can recall from that thread was the sports commentator. It was initially reported as just being one slip-up but that (surprise, surprise) turned out to not be true. It was actually a long pattern of behaviour and one would assume he was given warnings.
Remember: this is in the context of a world in which a genuine example of a person being fired for PC culture reasons would absolutely be jumped on by The Daily Mail et al. So it’s a situation where “absence of evidence” is significant.
Sure, I watch and enjoy South Park fully aware that it is a right-wing skewed series. For example, they mocked the idea of climate change and only in the last year or so made an episode repudiating that position. Again, I am not criticizing them for being right-wing; we all have some bias and it’s good there’s a TV series coming from that direction (of course in most of the world climate change is not a political issue, but it is in the US).
On the subject of PC culture specifically, what I said in that other thread, in just about every one of my posts, is that I understand it’s a big issue for many people. I know it’s a vote-winner. I’m not surprised South Park cover it a lot. I’m simply saying it’s built on a foundation of pure bullshit.
The fact that some people can be upset to the point of tears that “You can’t say Merry Christmas any more!” doesn’t mean that what they are saying is true.
Most of the examples of people losing their jobs or otherwise suffering career related harm are for expressing an unPC opinion rather than simply misusing a word. If that’s what you want then I can find plenty of examples.
I suppose I should start compiling a list everytime it happens so that I have them ready.
Let’s start with your best one.
Of course they believe bigoted things. I never said otherwise. I said (or meant to say) they aren’t innocent. Most people aren’t racist because they just need their racism to be gently explained to them, they are racist because they are willfully ignorant. Now that I think about it, there are a lot of ways to be racist, from the prim and disapproving racism of my grandmother to the full - throated hatred and actual lynching allegedly committed by my grandfather. But they both share wilful ignorance in common.
To explain what I was trying to say another way, saying racist things is a way of “virtue signaling” and fostering tribal cohesion. The racist beliefs are sincere, but they serve an additional function tied to social identity, which is why they are so pernicious.
My grandma is racist because she’s intellectually lazy. This is evident in all her politics, not just her racism. Classicism certainly is a factor. She (and I) are both from a town that is segregated by race and socioeconomics, and where racism is socially rewarded. She doesn’t like to be uncomfortable. Black people make her uncomfortable, thus the problem must be them.
There may be some confusion here. CRT is not the root cause of anything, it’s a theoretical framework for examining systemic oppression, particularly in the criminal justice system. The root cause of racism is white supremacy.
Perhaps this is why we think about the issue differently. In my experience actual racists - meaning people who are consciously prejudiced against other races - are rather rare. Commonly people may be unconsciously prejudiced due to upbringing, media etc, and everyone, especially in the past, often said racist things unknowingly or unthinkingly. This was the case with the ‘Jewed them down’ example - the guy thought it was ‘chewed them down’.
So PC is not about correcting racists, but telling ordinary people that something they have been saying for years is now unacceptable in polite society and they need to change their vocabulary. And it’s largely educated members of the professional class telling working class people what they may or may not say, based on sometimes-tenuous reasoning. I don’t see why it is hard to have empathy for this group - maybe because they are all being tarred as racists? And yet many of the people doing the tarring were equally unaware of any problem with the words until quite recently.
How do you even know so many racist people?
I think this is an accurate description of this individual from my own personal experience. He was a blue collar guy who worked in a correctional facility for young offenders teaching them a trade so they could re-enter society with a skill. In the many years I knew him personally, he was nothing but kind to me in every way and I did not know him to be a racist. He was simply a very small town guy living a small rural life with limited exposure to cultures other than that of his surroundings - a product of poor parents in a bad environment which he escaped as early as he could by joining the military. I was familiar with all his friends and neighbors and they were all exactly the same, and all very kind to me.
Because racism is integral to the culture where I grew up in rural Michigan. I had not one, but two family members in the KKK (step-grandparents), one of which was Sherriff of the small town he lived in (that town made the national news a few years back for an overtly racist incident at the school.) I had a friend threatened with lynching as late as 1998. When I was ten or eleven and met my grandmother’s new husband, the first words he ever said to me were, “You ain’t datin’ no n*****s are ya?” He’s the one who is rumored to have lynched someone. And one of my stepfathers was apparently a virulent racist the entire time but he hid it from me and my mother. He occasionally expressed prejudicial views, which I argued with him about, but I’ve since learned of things he said that were appallingly racist. But racism wasn’t even the worst thing about him.
You’re from the UK, yes? Most people not raised in this culture cannot even begin to wrap their heads around it. When I lived in New Jersey one of the things that struck me as the most unusual was the relative absence of racial hatred. Not saying there were no racists in New Jersey, but it was a different culture where diversity is kind of the default.
Is it your contention that we ought to let racist remarks go without comment in order to spare the feelings of ordinary white people?
I think the point that @DemonTree is making is that liberals/progressives tend not to distinguish well between virulent/overt/hard core racists and people who - like in my example - aren’t racists but just don’t know or think about other cultures much, if at all. I have certainly found myself guilty of not making that distinction either and treating them all the same. It’s easy to do. And with 75M voting for Trump, it somehow becomes easier the larger the population/group.