Meh, at this point may as well start a climate that shames people who live in the developed world…
…94% of black women who voted chose to vote for Hillary Clinton. Don’t you think they have a right to have a say?
What is “our cause?” How do people make social change “behind the scenes?” How do you “level the playing field” without talking about the playing field?
This argument that minorities and women should just shut up to pander to white voters is one of the most ridiculous things that came out of the last election. Stop throwing the people who overwhelmingly support you under the bus. Stop telling the people who will unquestionably go out and do their job and vote for the Democrats that they aren’t as important as the white voters.
If you get another 4 years of Trump it won’t be the fault of the people who “talk too much” about “white privilege”. It will be the fault of the people who, despite everything that has happened over the last year, have decided that Trump is a better bet. These people are not going to change. They will be complaining about “political correctness” forever and a day no matter how much the Democrats force their constituents to “shut the hell up.” So why bother trying?
We live in a society where anyone can hop on twitter and have their voice amplified to be able to be heard around the world. What you are suggesting is not only unhelpful, its literally impossible to do. People are going to say what they say.
More than what, more than white? More than proportional to their ratios in general society? Or merely more than a few years ago? Do you count Ted Cruz as white or as Hispanic? Do you count Joe Biden as White or as Jewish? I’m a white, Hispanic foreigner and I have seen that I do get treated differently than my darker-skinned, shorter distant cousins from south of the River.
Do non-whites have equal chances of being given a loan as whites? My own business didn’t need one, but most do.
It still exists, overwhelmingly. Having learned just a bit about it, I can’t stop noticing it now.
Not all commercial, political and personal decisions are made on a notion of white supremacy. But a terrible portion of them are, taking into account both conscious and unconscious, both individually driven and system driven things. The more critical question is whether any are, not necessarily all. None should be.
I think it’s pretty common among white people to see the humanity of black people differently. There are many ways of defining this, but I think there’s a disparity, yes.
No hope? Well, it isn’t “no hope”. But absolutely it is less hope, and that shouldn’t be.
-white, male, 60, $100k+
I have to disagree with that. Affirmative action should not exist, period. It’s simply reverse racism and if we want to eliminate racism, we need to eliminate it in all forms.
And just what form do you think that that “action behind the scenes” takes? People can change their own policies to try to eliminate white privilege, but the people who talk about it are already doing that. And they can try to persuade other people to change their policies… which means talking about it, precisely the thing you say they shouldn’t do.
Which is, itself, just one more example of white privilege. You, a white man, are capable of being unaware of the existence of white privilege. A black person is not capable of being unaware, because it’s staring them in the face every day.
“White privilege” is easier to say than “white lack of certain disadvantages”.
And I have seen it. I have seen it when observing black co-workers in Chicago try to hail a cab without success, only to have three pull up immediately when I, a white woman, raised my hand to hail them. I have seen it in dozens of other ways because I was willing to look, and if a white woman such as myself can see it then for those who suffer it, it must be that much more apparent.
I disagree with you.
I do think it is important to establish that all affirmative action is ameliorative and therefore temporary in nature. If it were to continue indefinitely, it would indeed be reverse (racism, sexism, ableism, whatever) discrimination. That’s assuming, of course, that the original problem does indeed get fixed and its symptoms ameliorated. If we’re not assuming that, we’re doing this whole thing wrong.
But a corrective maneuver is appropriate. If you’ve gone off the path by erring to the east for several miles, you don’t merely restore course to your original compass point, you deliberately veer more to the west as a temporary corrective; once you’ve gotten back on the path, yes, you use the original appropriate setting.
This has got to be complete rubbish. For instance, there was a famous series of commercials starring the Cadbury’s Milk Tray Man, a spoof on James Bond, from 1969 through the 70s and 80s, which would not have worked if what your speaker said were true.
Jeebus.
That’s just evil.
This is a whoosh, right? I find it difficult to imagine you wrote all that with a straight face.
White priviledge doesn’t mean that if you’re white your life is all sunshine and roses. It simply means that there are certain problems you’ll never have to deal with that a minority might. Your life could suck donkey balls, while the black guy next door has it made. BUT you’ll never have to be pulled over for driving while white, for example.
While men do get raped, women are far more at risk, and have to worry about that.
See what I mean? It doesn’t mean things are better for you, just that at least, you don’t have those additional issues to worry about.
Biden isn’t Jewish.
Did I just miss the transcript, or any proof? Have we gotten any assurance that any of these things were actually said?
(…at a poetry reading that the OP was “forced” to attend for $80 a seat?)
Wait, are you saying your wife can’t go anywhere without you and needs you to sit beside her and suffer? And waste money? And that you are powerless to opt out of an anti-white, anti-male poetry reading? Heck, you could walk her to the door and then go get a beer on the corner…
I just think on a board dedicated to fighting ignorance, we need some proof that the events in this thread happened.
Those two sentences do not agree with each other. White privilege is that whites are less likely to suffer from poverty, police brutality, and other problems.
Since I think disparate impact is a bit nonsensical with regards to social policy I’d disagree that so-called wealth based affirmative action is racist. I don’t like to see it in the form of college or business led remedies because I think that’s far too late to start helping mitigate some of the huge disadvantages that poverty creates.
I wouldn’t mind seeing additional help for the lower socioeconomic classes but with the stipulation that systemic cultural deficiencies are also addressed.
What are those “systemic cultural deficiencies” that need addressed? Might they be caused by socioeconomic issues and long-standing segregation?
I can guarantee you this claim is garbage. White men go GOP about 2-1, which means if you have 30 white men, you have about 10 democrats and 20 republicans. Lots of posters here are left leaning white men who make 6 figures.
Statements like this which are easily falsified just make your other points seem less valid.
As a white man, I guess a few things really stick out to me about race.
- W Bush, Obama & Trump. Both W Bush and Trump are deeply incompetent people who were unqualified for their jobs, who got where they are due to family connections, wealth and racial resentment against non whites (the GOP has been running on white racial resentment since the 1960s.).
Obama was a self made black man raised by a single mother who was far more eloquent, civilized, informed, educated and competent than either. But he was trashed endlessly by the same people who support both Bush and Trump. To me that really hit home how black people have to work harder and be treated worse. Seeing Bush and Trump get endless excuses made for them while Obama was treated like dirt.
If Obama was a remorseless sex criminal who had 5 kids by 3 women you’d never hear the end of it. When Trump does it people are just ok with it. For all the talk about ‘affirmative action’ and people getting special treatment, Bush and Trump embody this. Totally unqualified people getting into jobs they have no right to possess.
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Drug sentencing, blacks and whites use drugs at the same rates but arrests for blacks are 5x higher due to more police scrutiny.
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Trump winning. Trump winning was the first time I truly felt, as a white man, that this country is full of stupid people who don’t respect democracy, morality or human rights. But I get the impression that for a lot of people, they’ve always felt this way because that is how America treats them. I remember talking to a black guy who said what makes it worse is that only now, only now that white men like myself are seeing this ugly side of America, is it a topic of national discussion. When people like him were seeing it everyone was happy to ignore it. To me that embodies white privilege. It is only a problem when it starts to affect us. Same with juvenile violence. When it was black teenagers killing each other people didn’t care, just so long as it didn’t spread to the good neighborhoods. Then white kids started shooting up schools and it became a national issue.
Having said that, things seem to be getting better. I would hope/assume there is a general upward trajectory. I think right now we are in a downward slump because 8 years of racial rage under Obama are now coming to the surface, but along with that you are seeing a lot of people stand up and call these people out on their bullshit.
I’m of two minds about that. Part of me feels like the fact that this country elected Obama twice, means that there is an upward trajectory and that we are getting collectively less racist. But then the hatchet-job that the GOP proceeded to lay on him over the 8 years he was in office was sufficient to inflame racial resentment to the point that Trump was able to win. If the country had truly advanced to the point that I optimistically had hoped, then Trump’s BLATANT racial dog-whistling wouldn’t have worked on so many voters.
There are so many other factors that go into the equation, though, that it’s really hard for me to judge how much of it was related to racism and how much of it was related to Trump simply running a better campaign (he was out there campaigning his ass off in the Rust Belt and speaking at multiple rallies each week) and Hillary simply being a really unappealing candidate. I just don’t know.
The one thing I do know is that I am fucking sick of Donald Trump and desperate to see him replaced by a Democrat. He’s been president for a year and it feels like he’s been in office for 20 years. The prospect of three more years of having to fucking hear his voice and see his tweets and witness what he is doing to this country, is miserable enough. The prospect of seven more years of it…
I just hope the Democratic leadership is strategizing its ass off and that they can come up with the right ideas that will ensure a Democratic victory in 2020. If this means pandering to working class whites in the Rust Belt, they need to fucking do it. They need to do whatever it takes to win. I don’t know if that’s the ultimate key to victory, but Trump winning Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania tells me it’s part of it. If using the words “white privilege” a lot is going to alienate potential voters, they need to not use those words. It doesn’t mean they need to not do anything to address the issues. But if white people who have shitty lives are getting the idea that the Democrats care less about them than they do about black people who have even shittier lives, well, that’s a perception that should be addressed somehow. How, I don’t fucking know. I am so dissolusioned with American politics…some days I feel optimistic, some days I just feel it’s hopeless.
If it was based on wealth, not race, it wouldn’t be racism at all. If one group got more advantage from it, that just means they were further behind.
Don’t you think the poor white family in West Virginia needs more help than the family of the rich black doctor in the suburbs? Or do you think that no one deserves extra help. Or that minorities will always be poorer than the majority because that’s the way they are?
When I was in college in Boston in the early '70s I had long hair and drove a big (and crappy) car. I got pulled over all the time. Now, when the Boston cops saw that I was white and clearly a college student, and didn’t have grass on the front seat, they treated me with more respect than they would have if I were black. I guess they thought my dad might be rich and would give them shit.
So I’m not complaining. But I can imagine what it would feel like to be pulled over without my advantages.
Voyager, I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make. I’m not agreeing or disagreeing with it, I am just not sure the intention of what you’re asking him?
This is a good point. There are varying levels of privilege and they are highly dependent on the cultural circumstances. (I.e. “white privilege” might mean nothing in Japan, might mean something in Mexico, and might mean something very different in America. As could the definition of “white” itself.)