Hmm, you may have a point here.
As i pointed out- Humans in general have been pretty nasty to other humans ever since Og. White people are no different- no better and no worse either.
I think liberals sometimes feel guilty. But as someone who was raised in a predominantly white, incredibly racist community, I feel confident in saying that racists don’t feel guilty about being racist. The idea that racist conservatives are wrestling with some kind of liberal guilt trip doesn’t ring true to me. They don’t care, and are often angry that someone wants them to care. The only thing that really happened is that racists started paying real social consequences for their racism and rather than owning up to and correcting their shitty views, they doubled down and started punishing people for pointing it out. I don’t think racists are necessarily wholly and completely bad people, but racism is bad, decent people feel bad about it, and if you don’t feel bad about it… Well.
I think progressives can get carried away sometimes but it’s not like all these people would be less racist if progressives hadn’t talked about racism. Racism is and always has been fundamental to their worldview.
A data point.
I have a membership on Match.com. My profile there is presently inactive as I currently have a GF I found the old fashioned way. But I can see and edit my profile & recall what I saw of other’s profiles when I was active.
One of the parameters Match offers is “Ethnicity” with a collection of checkboxes. You’re able to define your own as one or more of the checkboxes, and you can express which ethnicities you’re interested in by one or more checkboxes. Lastly, there’s a textbox where you can drop in a couple sentences about you & your desires.
The choices are Asian, Black / African descent, East Indian, Latino / Hispanic, Middle Eastern, Native American, Pacific Islander, White / Caucasian, and Other.
There are similar parameters for “Faith”, “Languages spoken”, and “Education level”. Those four seem to pretty well constitute what this thread would label as the “culture” subsection of one’s total profile.
That’s not what I’m suggesting, I’m suggesting that they resent what they see as liberals trying to get everyone to feel guilty. It’s an overstatement/misstatement to say “liberals are trying to make everyone feel guilty” or “they’re trying to make us apologize for being white”, but liberal messaging very much does involve privilege awareness and taking some responsibility. Racists don’t want to hear that, so they twist it into something more dramatic-sounding than it really is.
Nobody ever suggested otherwise, so this observation is irrelevant and banal.
Just to add to the OP…
Not only were the sites hacked and their data collected, but three of these sites were deleted…in real time.
From Yahoo:
A hacktivist remotely wiped three white supremacist websites live onstage during their talk at a hacker conference last week, with the sites yet to return online.
The pseudonymous hacker, who goes by Martha Root — dressed as Pink Ranger from the Power Rangers — deleted the servers of WhiteDate, WhiteChild, and WhiteDeal in real time at the end of a talk at the annual Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany.
I seriously hesitate to ask, but… any idea what horribleness these sites were for?
From the piece linked in the OP,
WhiteDate (archive link) was a whites-only dating website, WhiteChild (archive link) hosted content encouraging white people to have only white children, donate their sperm to other white families, or adopt a white child. Meanwhile, WhiteDeal (archive link) was a whites-only freelancing site offering white-only staff.
Thanks. It was… exactly what I thought it would be. 
I agree. There is a relevant part of the dialogue of the past whatever number of years that has included and encouraged some pretty severe (as in, no room for shades of gray) approaches to language, and whether you are welcome to be part of the solution or part of the problem.
Just moments ago, in my social media feed, I saw the following two posts, shared by a white friend of mine about how it’s racist to say “Say her name” for Renee Good, both of which garnered plenty of likes and comments of support by a predominantly white audience:
(Paraphrased, but I’m happy to quote precisely and provide receipts if folks find that useful)
Post 1: You know to not do the “Say her name” thing for Renee Good, right? That is for Black women only. Edit: I am horrified at the comments on this post by folks who think I’m wrong. I’ll be blocking you all.
Post 2: You black people who are calling out white people for using “Say her name” also need to stop using "it for black men. It is for women only. If you disagree with this objective fact, you’re just as fragile as white people and I will block you.
Sure it’s just words on a social media post, but it feels like a common part of “the discourse”- people demanding a consensus on language usage and moral correctness on micro issues, and refusing to accept divergence.
I absolutely understand how being fed this sort of thing daily for decades, often by people you know, could lead one to feeling like they are not welcome.
I would not have that person as a Facebook friend but it is a prime example of why I left social media. I sort of agree with the idea that it’s icky to co-opt Black activist language but I can handle someone disagreeing with that and not get the vapors. That said, conservatives can be just as fragile so it’s not really a unique characteristic of liberals to be intolerant of other views. I just hate when they do it because it makes me look bad by association.
I left Facebook because of intolerant fellow liberals and my distaste for my own political behavior so I won’t deny those dynamics exist. It’s exhausting.
As I recall from my match days well over a decade ago, no one sees the checkboxes of choice. Those are just your private search parameters to use when browsing profiles. A person from one of your unselected boxes can see you and message you.
That is totally legit, however I find these to be 2 separate issues.
In the case I was talking about, people are legitimately talking about white responsibility to be conscious of their privilege and act accordingly, and others are interpreting it as a demand to submit. People who are upset about this were upset it about it on day 1 of hearing it. They were never going to be open to change or growth. White people do not like the suggestion that they’re advantaged in any way, and they double dislike the suggestion that they ought to consider changing their behavior.
The other case is a whole other messed-up can of worms where some excessively-online people have designated themselves the language police and are inventing things to get upset about. In your example it’s hypervigilance about cultural appropriation (one culture taking another culture’s stuff for their own use). That’s a whole other mess, and you can see Black people even sniping each other over it. This is something that wears you down over time.
Speaking of my own experience with it, I first approached these conversations open-mindedly with a willingness to learn and change. But over time it started to feel like people were constantly throwing out new rules and standards of speech and behavior not to perfect the way we address each other, but simply from the satisfaction of bullying others who are a few days behind on the acceptable-language treadmill. At a point it becomes apparent that your best is never going to be good enough, so you can cut yourself a little slack. And when you see these conversations about “this is for Black women only”, you run the opposite direction immediately, because no useful discussion will follow.
Anyway, both are real & important things to discuss and be aware of, but I see them as different phenomena.
As opposed to…?
Good bet they were / are more focused on making lots of white babies. Not so much on making especially white babies. That latter was sorta assumed given their white supremacist target market.
But also good bet there is/was plenty of discouragement of less than fully white babies.
Which raises the question of who they thought was white enough. A Spaniard? An Italian?
Finding someone with darker skin and procreating with them.
And they figure someone willing to do that is susceptible to their messaging? Oh… right. Racists are fucking stupid.
Racism appeals to people who desire and perhaps need things to be simple. “If something is unfamiliar to me, it is bad.” Racism is a mindset that reinforces that viewpoint. “I just keep to myself and ‘my kind’, I can be comfortable, I understand the world. I don’t need someone who looks different than I do, who eats food I might not like, who listens to music that sounds different from mine, who speaks a language I can’t understand.”
There is a reason why racism frequently goes hand-in-hand with intellectually incurious people.
Also this afternoon I’m seeing (and this is all from real human people I am in real human relationships with) people express concern that no one is talking about the fact that Renee Good is queer, which is writing her queerness out of the narrative.
In what feels like an exact 180 of the above reasoning, I’m also seeing commentary on the fact that the media reported that she was white which indicates that the media thinks that her whiteness is why we should care, and if you, dear reader, care more about her than some darker-skinned non-citizen, then you are both a victim of the establishment media, and sharing your dismay at this particular event proves you are racist.
I agree, ish, but I also think it’s reasonable for someone to not have any idea that “say her name” is co-opting anything as opposed to using a convenient turn of phrase- that’s how things change and evolve and spread. It’s a giant game of telephone, and it is unreasonable to expect to control the message 50 people down the line, or to make moral judgements about those people because there’s a piece of initial intent or meaning that has gotten dropped.
Yes. I guess my point in bringing up these anecdotes is that I do think these are connected. You don’t have to dip your toe very deep into the cesspool of our current public square to find someone eager to tell you that you’re not good enough. Absolutely there are a lot of people (most people?) who, when faced with even small challenges to their worldview or sense of self, get defensive and interpret it as a personal attack. At the same time, I think there are folks who are overwhelmed with news, information, and change who want to do good, but feel like the goalposts are constantly being moved by people who claim to have a better perspective than them.
I can understand how, being presented with constant and often contradictory-seeming “if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem, gtfo” opinions, one could come to the convenient and admittedly self-serving conclusion that all this talk of compassion and justice and equality is maybe just a bunch of folks trying to re-define in- and out- groups, and they’ve told me I’m out.
It’s all complex and like many I am trying to manage a constant state of despair about our present and our future. I do not blame anyone on the left (whatever that means. Non-MAGA?) for creating intolerant people by not being nice enough. But I do think that we’ve adopted an approach to social and political positions that assumes a single clear moral answer to every question, and that people who cannot accept that answer and adjust their behavior accordingly are not welcome to participate until they come around. And if they’re not welcome to participate repeatedly over time, I’m not surprised if they develop bad feelings (shame, guilt, confusion, othered-ness) and are inclined to become hostile toward “the left”.
Anyway, sorry for going on a bit of a tangent here… all this is to say that I disagree with the ideas that white guilt is a lie, and that the only people who might feel guilt or anger about any interactions with left/progressive thought are people who are fundamentally racist or not decent people. And hanging on to those ideas causes more harm than good.
You left out ignorant = ill-educated.
Racism is what happens sorta naturally if you don’t know any better. Just like shitting in your pants.
Education is all that separates humans from monkeys.