Not to be ungrateful or anything, but you have to weigh those 74,000 dead against the rather larger number of British dead, and reflect that while the war was going on there were some opportunists looking to get the British out of India ahead of time. see Fighting in India and Hindu-German Conspiracy. That doesn’t exactly encourage greater latitude from the British. In the main India was loyal, though, and we were glad of it.
Hey, I’m Jewish and Irish. Forty-sixty years ago, neither side of my family was considered all that white either.
I still get this kind of stuff all the time. Not from the coworker who calls me the Antichrist. (She’s mostly stopped), but from random people in the office, at lunchtime. Working in a substance abuse program, I get a lot of people around who feel passionately and whose heads are completely full of every damn conspiracy theory known to man.
It’s why I stopped eating in the lunch room. Got sick of the random and loud discussions of how the white man is doing this or that. (Or Jews, of course. Less popular than the white man, but there. )
It’s not constant, but every week or so? At least once. And you feel kind of filthy afterwards, because while most of it isn’t true, some of it is.
Really depressing.
And you have no one but yourself to blame. We all told you this shit was going to happen when you started that IMHO thread about whether you should take the job as Farrakhan’s personal assistant.
How’s your book coming? When last we heard the working title was still The White Devil Wears Prada (and by Prada I mean 'Pretentious Raiments Aquired through Demeaning and reducing to Abject poverty people of color the world over for hundreds of years), which always seemed a bit of a mouthful for a children’s pop-up book, but I trust the publisher.
Because the assignment was to share A CUSTOM that we practice here, today, NOW that reflects our heritage. It was supposed to be A PART OF OUR DAILY LIFE.
Not about rigid people in funny hats giving disease infected blankets to natives. Not about creating schisms inside faiths. Not about fighting against the British in the French and Indian War or the Revolution–7 ancestors and counting.
Again, for** fetus**, the reading impaired: He was supposed to share a family custom that reflects our heritage.
Why, thank you for sharing with the group, fetus. And now we’re going to refocus on the group discussion for today. Please sit down and wait to be called on.
We now live in a world where we are afraid to point someone out in a crowd and clarify who we mean by saying “the black guy”. Hell we don’t even know for sure if the person in question should be called Black or African American or something else. BTW: It is almost never a “black guy” that takes offense, but some overly sensitive white guy or gal.
We must not take the chance on letting a woman in a workplace know their new hairstyle looks good as that would be sexual harassment. No really, I have been through the generic corporate sensitivity training.
We have to be careful never to drop a curse in the wrong crowd as one of our salesmen accidentally talked like a normal human and got written up as some gutless customer service rep did not talk to him about being offended by the word but instead ran to HR. Weirdest thing is this was a salesman that I thought everyone really liked. He was good at his job, made things easy for people and no one ever had a bad word for him. We finally found out who the “bitch” was that ran to HR as the poor guy died of a heart attack helping someone push their car to a gas station. She felt so guilty for what she did that she fessed up to doing it. One of the other customer service reps advised her that if she has a problem with anyone’s language to please let them know and not run to HR anonymously. Things like this can be handled by adults in an adult manner.
If you use standard words like retard, someone will give you a hard time about it. This includes my own sister who works with the developmentally disabled. She is hyper-sensitive to the word retarded.
Condemn Sharia law and see how many idiots pop up to compare you to Hitler. Og forbid if you mention most terrorist today are Extremist Islamic. Oops, I just proved I am a racist.
Hell defending Israel seems to get you called a racist on this board. Ask FinnAgain.
I am sorry that so many found no humor in the Op, but the first five posters seemed to get it was a joke. I guess they like me are insensitive closet racists.
Jim {They won’t even let us make fun of the French any more}
Really? How big a problem is this, anywhere other than paranoid fantasy land?
I spend most of my life in college and university settings, as a grad student and as a teacher. That is, i spend lots of time in the very environment most often criticized as being excessively “PC.” I’m a lefty, and just about all of my good friends consider themselves liberal, left-liberal, progressive, leftist, or some other similar thing.
I literally do not know a single person who would take offense at someone using a phrase like “the black guy” to identify a person in a crowd (although, in a majority black city like Baltimore, you’d probably have to be more specific), or who exhibits any sort of confusion and angst over descriptive terms like “black” and “African American.”
I realize that my own experience is not universal, but if you believe all the dittoheads on the right, it’s precisely the universities where this sort of “PC hysteria” is most likely to be found, and i really don’t see it.
Well, of course not! You are blinded by your ideolgical constraints. It’s really quite simple. Or simplistic, if you prefer.
But these “gaffs” are things all of us get accused of doing, not just white men.
It’s funny, I’ve been accused of being racist more times I can count on this board. But whenever a white guy gets accused racist around here, even if that’s the most apt description, watch the dreamteam jump out of the woodworks to defend him. There are Dopers here who sympathize with the Don Imus’s, Michael Richards’s, and Dog the Bounty Hunters of the world, but have nothing but mouth-froathing vitriol for the Jesse Jackson’s and Al Sharptons. Yeah, white guys have it real hard around here.
When I reported a white male coworker for harrassment, it wasn’t because he was a white male. It was because he was harrassing me and making my life unpleasant. I don’t doubt that there are people who are unfairly complained about, but making it out to be some White Man Against the World thing is plain stupid. It’s as stupid as a black guy blaming all of his problems on racism, or a Hillary Clinton blaming all her political problems on the Right-Wing conspiracy. It’s hard for me to worry so much about White Man when almost all of my coworkers and supervisors are–and have always been–white men. I turn on the TV and who do I find being powerful and smart and good-looking? White men. Who’s on my money? White men. I might worry for them individually, but not as a group.
Perhaps it’s hard reading modern history and not wincing a little, if you are a white guy. But at least you’re in the history books. Try being invisible. That sucks worse.
This has been my experience too, and I’m in the same type of environment you’re in.
Well I think Rush and Imus are morons. I have defended Sharpton on this board. It is a very long thread, so please do yourself a favor and take my word for it. I actually respect Jesse and have mentioned so. Hell, I am proud as all hell to be part of the same race (human) as Rosa Parks.
But there is an over-sensitivity in America and on this board. Someone recently got slammed for pitting a drunken derelict for pissing on his shrubbery as he made the horrible gaff of mentioning the drunken pisser was hunchbacked.
You see shit like this and it makes it easy to make fun of the offenderatti. However, nothing I say is going to change anyone’s mind about the Op. I get the feeling several posters have the same preconceived ideas about him that I have about a poster like Clothahump. So I guess I will give up.
Jim
- Dog the Bounty Hunter, can’t defend or condemn, I don’t know him. I think he made a cameo on my name is Earl recently. Why is he famous?
Well, as someone who has been critical of the OP, i’d just say this:
Your term “preconceived ideas” implies that the OP got piled on simply because people carried into this thread baggage from previous interactions with smiling bandit. That is completely incorrect, at least in my case.
As you suggest, there are some posters about whom i have some preconceived ideas, based on multiple past encounters, but the OP of this thread is not one of them. While i recognize the name, and know that i’ve interacted with him on occasions in the past, he was not on my radar as someone whom i especially liked or disliked, and if you had asked me anything specific about his politics i could not have told you. Also, i still hold no long-term grudge against him as a result of this thread.
But i thought his OP was stupid, and his subsequent posts caused that view to harden in my mind, despite your protestations that it was all in fun. Your implication that people are responding to the personality, rather than the argument, is not supported by any of the arguments made in this thread, as far as i can see.
Okay, not you, but how about **Luci ** & SkipMagic? Their posts are the ones that made me think of preconceived notions.
You were right about post #12 though, that did no favors for my defense of the Op. Somehow I missed that. But damn it, I found the Op funny and at least the first few responders must of too.
Seeing post 12, I have to revise my 85%/15% tongue-in-cheek to at best 50/50.
Jim
So you’re saying that people are coming down hard on smiling bandit because they’re oversensitive?
I didn’t hear anyone say that were offended by the OP. Only that it really wasn’t that funny. And it really isn’t that funny, IMHO. I mean, maybe the joke was funny the 100th time, but we’ve kind of heard it before. Both here and elsewhere.
I’m still not sure what smiling bandit is lampooning. Is he mocking the “woe is me” white guys? Or is he geniunely tired of people condemning white guys? I think that’s why it’s not really funny. But maybe that’s just me, and I’m just being a ball-busting, white-men-hatin’ negress.
Oh, yeah? And that preconceived notion would be what, exactly?
Perhaps if you continually get called racist you should just stop denying it. As a white guy, I’ve received this advice more times than I can count.
You mean Skipmagic moving the thread to the pit where the OP would get his rightful and inevitable mauling?
Yeah, there’s a real conspiracy going on around here.
I think I’m getting a handle on how you perceive reality. You wanted 100% condemnation and ridicule of the OP, but didn’t get it. So, in your mind, there’s a “dreamteam” leaping to the OP’s defense. What a bizarro world you live in.
I just recently went back to school. Out of at least a dozen people I’ve had to deal with, not one of them was a white male. Not one. They’ve all been women or black or Indian men. The majority were women and minority. I’ve never spoken with a white woman either.
I guess we just view the world from different perspectives. I look around me and see mostly women and minorities. I look up and see again, mostly women and minorities.
You look waaaay up with your binoculars and see white men. Again. Oh, the injustice of it all.
A preconceived dislike for the Op and his politics is what I was reading. Which surprised me, as I did not think **Smiling Bandit ** was part of that crowd. Somehow I have barely noticed him at all.
I tend to have preconceived notions about what a few posters on either side of the spectrum are likely to post. I provided one as an example.
So, I was wrong?
monstro, I guess I don’t listen to enough* Rush or something. I haven’t heard this type of thing a hundred times. Where do you hear this type of thing?
To answer your question, yes, it appears to me that many people were being overly sensitive. Though as I just posted to mhendo, I missed the smoking gun of post 12 and I feel a little foolish for expending the time defending this and getting myself in hot (or at least warm) water.
Jim
- As in any
Yep. The decision to move the thread was not based on smiling bandit’s personality or politics (I knew, and cared little–with no personal offense meant toward smiling bandit–about either), it was moved because it was a rant hiding under exaggeration. It didn’t belong in MPSIMS and wasn’t suited for any forum other than the Pit.
Well damn, I hope I was right about **elucidator ** at least.
I certainly had preconceived ideas about the OP, but I think they essentially allowed me to correctly interpret the OP, whereas you seem to have misunderstood it (although you seem to have revised downward your estimate of the likelihood that it was all in fun). Its just another rant about “woe is the white man” because he can’t say and do with impunity all the things that he once could.
If you can find anything on this board that proves I’m racist, by all means, post it.
Otherwise, shut the hell up.
You just went back to school? Higher education or high school? Are you saying none of your professors were white guys? None of the deans are white guys? The president of your school, the board of trustees–none of them are white guys? I can’t even think of a historically black college/university that has no white faculty.
I had a coworker like you. A white guy constantly surrounded by the guys he supervised, mostly Cubans (white guys, but they speak Spanish and therefore don’t count). He was constantly talking about how he felt like the minority all the time–how he didn’t really fit in with them. How no one liked him, because he was the lone white guy. He would tell me this, forgetting that I was the “lone black girl” and yet I still managed to fit in. But still, I felt sorry for him. But then I thought about it and realized he was wallowing. All the graduate students were white guys. Our boss was a white guy. Pretty much all the faculty in our department were white guys. Now, it’s true that in his day-to-day interactions, he was the lone white guy. But I couldn’t help but feel that his complaints were more based on a superiority I’m-too-good-to-be-here-with-these-spics complex than it was simple alienation.
Way up with my binoculars? Would you like to schedule a visit to my workplace? I assure you, you won’t need a pair of binoculars to see my office’s composition. Not that I’m complaining. I love white guys. But they ain’t in any danger of being extinct.
It’s not an injustice being a minority. It is not always the most preferred position to be in, but it’s not a horror upon horrors. If you want us to grieve for the white man because he’s no longer dominating the workplace or the classroom numerically, you won’t see any tears from me. I think it’s a good thing, you see. It means that people are doing what they’re supposed to do, not what someone thinks they’re supposed to do.
I hear it in bits and pieces. Whenever the conversation turns to Affirmative Action. Whenever we talk about reparations, slavery, or Indian extermination. Whenever there rants against political correctness and “minority hypersensitivity”. Whenever we talk about racism or sexism, inevitably we hear the refrain in some shape or form. Sometimes it’s as subtle as “White guys are the last group who are allowed to be discriminated against/ridiculed/stereotyped etc.” Let some tell it, white guys have it harder than anyone else. They are saints for putting up with the rest of us.
But I have no idea if this is where the OP is coming from. He probably isn’t. I wish he would elaborate on the OP and give his intentions.