Maybe the poster should have said “the following things are stereotypically (although not universally or exclusively) associated with the self-image of white people”.
Maybe the poster should have said “the following things are ideals white people (and more specifically, white people in the United States) place value on and strive to uphold”.
Maybe the the poster should have said “the following things are qualities many American white people have claimed are exclusively ‘white’ traits that people of other ‘racial’ or ethnic backgrounds lack or are deficient in, which claim is an example of the pervasive racism of American culture”.
But the poster didn’t say any of those things. What it did say was
And if the poster had confined itself to, I don’t know, men wearing suits and ties (instead of dashikis); or people eating three meals a day instead of eating a very light breakfast, then snacking over the course of the day, and eating one large meal at either midday or in the evening; or even “practicing Christianity”, this might be a lot less contentious thread. But instead the poster claimed “objective, rational linear thinking” and “cause and effect relationships” are among the “traditions, attitudes and ways of life” of “[American] white people” that have been “internalized” by non-white Americans.
This is either a shockingly racist thing to say–the sort of thing you’d expect to find from the Stormfront crowd–or at best is something that would only be said by a Postmodernist who thinks all that stuff about “rational thinking” and “cause and effect relationships” is just a “Western” thing, and that saying science and rational thought and understanding cause and effect relationships are “objectively” valid ways of understanding the world is just an arrogant Western attempt at “colonizing the minds of people of color” or some such. Which in turn may not be “racist” in the sense that people who think like that really mean “Non-white people are inferior!” but has the deeply unfortunate effect of telling non-white people that trying to think rationally and understand cause and effect relationships is a “white thing”, which in practical terms is a kind of institutional or systemic racism.
Or even: "why should a person’s ability to comfortably house and feed themselves and their family depend upon this idea of a “career” in the first place?
I can’t tell if you are being serious or not. If you are, ask yourself what would happen if everyone decided they didn’t need careers? Like, for example, the people who built the comfortable house and grew the food? Should they also be allowed to not have careers?
The idea that people shouldn’t have to work for a living denies the fact that everything we have is the result of other people working their asses off. If you need such people to survive (and you do), it’s morally repugnant to suggest that some people can just opt out of that, while receiving all the benefits.
It’s perfectly reasonable to ask the question that I did. And it’s morally repugnant to suggest otherwise! It’s also morally repugnant to claim I said something I did not say.
Oh, I see. ‘Jobs’ are for black people, ‘careers’ are for white people. Is that it?
I doubt you really mean that, but you do seem to be arguing that ‘whiteness’ values building careers, while other people can just do ‘jobs’.
It’s very true that you can spend your life doing odd jobs or gig work. So long as you are paying your way through life, you have the freedom to work any way you want.
But tying the difference between ‘jobs’ and ‘careers’ to any sort of racial status is… racist.
Please don’t make up positions that I haven’t taken and then ask me to defend them. To be clear, I disagree vehemently with both of the things you made up for me to defend.
When people don’t engage in honest and open discussion, and put arguments into other people’s mouths that are made up from whole cloth, and that they never made . . . well, I find that morally repugnant!
The argument is whether building a career exhibits ‘whiteness’, as opposed to just having a job. I assumed that’s the context you were responding in - to point out that there is a difference between ‘a job’ and ‘a career’.
So you don’t agree that building a career is an aspect of whiteness? Or were you just trying to make a nitpicky side pount that had nothing to do with the idea that career focus is a ‘whiteness’ trait?
I’d go so far as to posit that, far from whatever may be clear in terms of what the poster referenced in the OP or what follow on posters meant or have meant, this discussion has almost become a sort of proxy for something else. As if there may be a certain subset of people who aren’t fully on board with the idea that, whether they recognize it or not, unconscious bias and institutionalized racism are things that exist, not just boogeymen conjured up to vilify opposition.
That is how you are choosing to interpret it, but it’s not correct. If it was iust about white perception of themselves, then no one would be talking about grading minorities easier so they can compete in a ‘white’ world. No one would be claiming that ‘science is violence’, or that we need a new ‘woke’ math to replace the patriarchal ‘white’ math. No one would be claiming that the only way racism can end is to bring down the entire ‘white’ culture and replace it with a different one,
If you honestly believe that hard work, respect for authority, use of the scientific method and other traits on this list are properties of individuals and not races (and you should), the entire focus of anti-racism would be doung things like fixing inner city schools and making sure that minority kids can compete with white kids. They’d be doung things like trying to solve the problem that 70% of black children are in broken homes.
You have two choices: Either everyone is equal and there are no intrinsic differences between races that overwhelm individual differences, or you believe that we live in a society that has ‘structural racism’ because whites have organized it around the things they are good at and other races or cultures aren’t. That’s what critical race theory says - that black people have no chance to compete in a ‘white’ world because we have rigged the game by focusing on science, math, individualism, hard work, repect for authority, etc. and that’s not what they are good at or even want to be good at.
In the first case, we might be able to agree on the things we can do to help - such as reforming the inner city schools, getting rid of the violence and lawlessness of the inner cities to create an environment where people can study, work and invest. If black kids aren’t prepared for college because they came from damaged backgrounds shitty schools and bad neighborhoods, we could add extra funding for pre-university programs that get them up to speed.
If instead you think that it’s impssible for blacks to get ahead in this system because it’s rigged, and things like kmowledge of science don’t matter because it is just one of many valuable ways of thinking, then you might just demand that black kids get preferential grading to make up for the bias of whiteness they can’t change or compete against. Then you might believe that the system has to be brought down and completely rebuilt around a new paradigm of racial marxism, which is what Black Lives Matter believes. At least, the pasty white college kids who claim to represent black lives believe that.
Shut up, he explained,
You need to learn the difference between an opinion and an explanation.
You know, one of the things I learned during the Trump era is that I had been guilty of thinking that other people on ‘my’ side were mostly like me. I thought the nativist, racist wing of the conservative side of the aisle was maybe 5-10% of them.
Then I saw them come out of the woodwork after Trump was elected, and I saw even the ‘reasonable’ ones abandon all sorts of principles for the sake of power, and I realized I had been fooling myself.
I think this thread is an example of well-meaning, reasonably moderate Democrats doing the same thing. You WANT to believe that this chart isn’t what it clearly is, because you personally don’t believe these things so you assume that the other side is blowing this up out of proportion.
Time for you to wake up, A significant portion of young graduates of various critical studies programs are NOT Democrats like you, They are radicals looking not for some extra money for social programs or affirmative action, but to blow up the system and rebuild it, general along Marxist lines. BLM calls itself a Marxist movement. They aren’t just looking for reform - they are looking to smash capitalism itself, as they think that capitalism is a fundamentally racist system.
If you’re down with that, great. You can help the U.S. become a shithole like Venezuela or Zimbabwe. If you are, however, a well-meaning Democrat who just wants to stop racism, you might want to look a little harder into what exactly you are supporting,
I wasn’t making a “nitpicky side point”. I was replying directly in agreement with Acsenray, who said:
That’s the context. It’s not complicated; all it takes is literally reading the post I was responding to and quoted in my own post.
And, to be clear, it is not “nitpicky” to point out the difference between the significant and commonly understood meanings of “job” and “career” when your failure to grasp the difference leads you to accuse me of taking a position that “people shouldn’t have to work for a living”.
You’ll also note that my having to dive into basic language comprehension only started when you called me “morally repugnant” for holding a position that I never claimed to hold.
Someone help me understand how taking a break in the middle of your career and then coming back, 1, or 6 years later and expecting to be on par with the co-workers who didn’t take that break is even remotely rational thinking?
And while you are at it, explain to me how 2 incomes is not better than 1?
Sorry to anyone who thought I was attacking them personally. There are a lot of confusing claims in this thread, and I may have responded to the wrong people.
Rest assured, when I say something is ‘morally reprehensible’, I’m talking about specific actions and beliefs, and not specific users. If you don’t believe in the things I’m criticising, then the criticism is not applicable to you.
I maintain that anyone who believes that the characterists for success in modern society are ‘white’ characteristics is making a racist claim. Usually you hear such claims coming from Klan members, but now you can also get it from ‘anti-racists’ and critical theory classes.
Or as Michael Gerson called it, “The soft bigotry of low expectations.”
Eh I saw that poster and what they described was primarily WASP culture. The concept is not well executed due to various European cultures overlapping with Anglo culture and they in turn not being taken into consideration or how they influenced White culture in the US, plenty of Italians Irish were given stereotypes which don’t fit that mold of what the Smithonian was trying to portray.
I also didn’t like the snarky “Bland is best” Garbage, that’s up their with “White people don’t season their food” Stupidity.
I also think that the punctuality and scientific method are bad examples of “Whiteness” Due to it ignoring the influence of industrialisation, go back before that time and you’ll see plenty of White societies disregarding punctuality.
In response to MandaJo, whilst shes’ correct in the obligation South Asians have in respect to their parents, they also don’t really express their love verbally or with physical emotion for example saying I love you to their parents is considered unusual and I wouldn’t be so quick to write off the method of parenting in the Western world so quickly, I find that on some levels it helps for people to be more mature in relationship building and compromise as they have an understanding that they cannot always rely on the safety net of their parents.
What is remotely rational about permanent financial punishment for parents who take additional time off to make sure their kids get a good start in life? More parent-child bonding has been linked to reduced child mortality and improved cognitive outcomes for the child, among other benefits; are those important to society, or no?
“Better” in what sense? It’s almost always more financially advantageous, sure. We are right back at what we discussed earlier: once you have a minimum acceptable standard of living, is having more money what you value most, or are other things more important? For example, raising your kids yourself instead of shuffling them off to day care, or keep older/disabled family at home instead of sticking them in an institution purely for custodial care, may be more in line with what a particular family considers to be important. If you have to make a choice between home-schooling your child and working a low-wage and personally unfulfilling job, is the job always the right choice for every family and situation?
No one has said permanent, but 6 years of absence comes with some kind of cost, do you agree? It is a stalling of the career, maybe it happens in a big year when everyone that participated got 15% increases, but the next few years were mediocre, and then when they decide to come back to work, they are now at what they were making (if they are still qualified) which is quite less than the individuals that did not take a break. Choosing to limit a conversation about money and then linking it to the bogeyman of well being and throwing in some societal benefits (that may or may not be true) is disingenuous don’tcha think?
Also this one, we were talking about equality in careers and jobs yes, Of COURSE 2 incomes is going to be better than 1. See Point 1 discussion.
