The Washington Post article says the poster was created in 1978. Which explains why it reads like a 1950s vision of white culture. Because some of those things are so very much NOT the culture me or any of my white friends adhere to (man is the head of the house, majority Christian (let me count my Christian friends - no, haven’t run out of fingers yet), no tolerance for multiple gods (let me count my Pagan friends, I’ll need a minute to remove my shoes), your job is who you are, women’s beauty standards, win/loser dichotomy…all those values are not held by anyone I spend time with regularly. And don’t discuss your personal life - definitely written before Facebook!) I’m sure that is white culture somewhere still, and probably huge swaths of the country.
I have been of the opinion that the modernist notion of there is one objective truth than we can rationally come up with has caused a whole lot of harm. It seems to end up resulting in people who come up with some other form of the truth (due to different perspectives) are deemed as simply too emotional or not being rational. I’ll echo what @eschrodinger has noted that when people of color have disagreed with logical conclusion come up by the dominant white society there are accusations of over-emotionalism or, and I’ve seen this a lot lately, bias (as if the dominant narrative does not have bias). And sometimes tends to those individuals seeing a different telling of the facts as “FAKE NEWS” while they tell themselves that they are in possession of the rational objective truth.
From my perspective, labelling something as “fake news” is itself the product of the “my truth is just as good as yours even if it is unsupported by the facts” mindset. Even moreso than the internal disagreements between liberal groups who agree on the facts but not on their interpretation. I don’t think that disagreeing, even strenuously, about whether or not to tag something with a label is appropriate given the same underlying conditions is as harmful a notion as the denying of any sort of facts.
In speaking to folks who will yell out “fake news”, they aren’t saying anything of the sort. What they are saying is that the fake news media outlets are simply issuing lies to further their own agendas and to bring down people who are speaking truth because they don’t like them.
So they aren’t making a statement that my truth is as good as yours - but rather my truth is truth and your truth are lies to further an agenda. (which is highly ironic, I know)
But if you ask them to prove it, they will say that everyone has an agenda (i.e. “both sides do it”) and so there’s no reason to trust you and your facts.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen quite a bit of cherry picked numbers or facts (and an angry opposition if you bring in any additional facts) as opposed to both sides do it.
But truth is usually an objective and re-producible thing. Find a desired outcome and there will likely be one truth about how you got there.
Success, whether it is with mating, or business will have certain truths that are objective (punctual, logical, whatever aspect) all designed to maximize the potential for success
People muddy the water by talking about subjective things and the truth associated with them.
To tie this back to the thread, aspects of white culture have been attributed as such because they are successful attributes here in America. And because “white” people founded America, they made the model.
One would think that so many years after Rashoman (70 years already?!), we would know better. All of us have asymmetrical information and therefore are unable to accurately recall an objective truth. We can only recall our subjective notion of what happened. And sometimes those subjective notions are wildly different than other subjective notions. A great example of this is couple’s counseling - where one partner may have seen an action that occurred dramatically different than the other partner. Even though some of the facts are the same in both stories, there are a number of facts that are different which create completely different truths.
This is so false. “Truth” is an interpretation of facts, and the truth that a person relies on may take into account favored facts and disregard unfavorable or unperceived facts.
For example, many people attribute their success to their own hard work. The either don’t perceive or reject all the unearned advantages and blind luck that influences almost any success or failure. Which is directly relevant about how majoritarian culture perceives failure to succeed on the part of minorities.
For example, the majority culture may ascribe success to virtues such as punctuality. “I was successful because I took care to be punctual.” And faced with a minority person experiencing failure may say “See, all these occasions in which you were unpunctual; thus, your failure is attributable to your lack of character.”
This disregards the fact that punctuality is not just a personal virtue and that being punctual indicates a “deserving” or “good” character and failure to be punctual indicates an “undeserving” or “bad” character. There are factual circumstances in a person’s life—unearned circumstances—that facilitates or interferes with punctuality. Do you have access to reliable transportation is one of them.
It is an interpretation of facts and no one thing will result in something as vague as success.
But if you limit “success” to only be a certain part of “success”, say making money, there will attributes that significantly effect that ability to make money, which are true and re-producible.
Like punctuality
So do you believe that punctuality is necessary component of making money? So how do wildly successful (in terms of making money) companies in societies that aren’t as punctual make their money? They don’t seem to buck society norms (I have a cousin in Dubai who is a banker and they have incredibly lax start times - and if the banks are not concerned with punctuality, I doubt other businesses are either).
So, I don’t see how punctuality is an attribute that significantly effects the ability to make money.
Says who?
It is possible sometimes to be pretty certain about some kinds of measurable information. Is the door open or closed. Is that a cat or a dog. What element is that made of.
But most things require some degree of interpretation of observations, and can yield more than one result. And there’s pretty much no such thing as “objective.”
One of my favorite examples is the well-known “fact” that the fastest or strongest sperm is the one that succeeds in swimming the fastest and then penetrating the egg to successfully fertilize it. But that whole narrative is totally skewed (and just plain wrong), and became a scientific mythology that impedes the progress of scientific understanding.
“To the team’s great surprise, the sperm turned out to be feeble swimmers; their heads thrashed from side to side ten times more vigorously than their bodies pushed forward. It makes sense, says Martin. The last thing you’d want a sperm to be is a highly effective burrower, because it would end up burrowing into the first obstacle it encountered. You want a sperm that’s good at getting away from things. The team went on to determine that the sperm tries to pull its getaway act even on the egg itself, but is held down against its struggles by molecules on the surface of the egg that hook together with counterparts on the sperm’s surface, fastening the sperm until the egg can absorb it. Yet even after having revealed the sperm to be an escape artist and the egg to be a chemically active sperm catcher, even after discussing the egg’s role in tethering the sperm, the research team continued for another three years to describe the sperm’s role as actively penetrating the egg.” How the Aggressive Egg Attracts Sperm Now we know that the egg actually selects the sperm based on genes. But only after someone challenged the “objective facts” that everyone knew about reproduction.
I don’t agree with this. Facts that are true are the truth. The human brain is not capable of knowing or remember or organizing them and so therefore will always have an imperfect glimpse of which facts are true.
When the human brain tries to imperfectly corral facts into a narrative or structure is another place this process can go even wronger, because, almost by necessity, labels are oversimplifications. People often try to reify these constructions as the truth rather than recognize that the truth is the underlying facts, which there are not multiple versions of, despite what quantum philosophers might opine.
And of course when people try to communicate these to others, others might not agree with the labels they want to shoehorn the facts into, but that does not mean there are multiple versions of the truth. People disagreeing with what the facts are also does not mean that there are multiple versions of the truth, it most often means that one of the parties is wrong. Of course, sometimes both of the parties can be wrong or right if the facts agree with or deviate from both of their pet generalizations.
Here’s the Wayback Machine snapshot for June 3rd.
…then you are incurring a type of reductionist association that is part of what the chart was calling attention to.
Which goes a heap of a way to explaining why a lot of it matches more what would be white conservative values of the pre-2010 era.
Perhaps, in a certain context, in a certain society, under certain conditions. One of those conditions being that the majority culture has chosen to grant this value “success” status. It’s all the result of context and choices. It’s not an inevitable truth.
Punctuality helps you achieve success (“success” being defined by cultural choices, i.e., biases) because the people with power have chosen to grant favor to people who conform to the value of punctuality.
That is also unequivocally true (in this society) , success as a measure is a defined thing (because we have defined them) with reproducible results.
Punctuality, as seen by this society, is a factor of success, because we created that to be true.
The fact that these things are true doesn’t change the way this society works. It could be different, it IS different in different parts of the world.
I just don’t see how stating these things have any effect whatsoever, so what exactly is the whiteness chart supposed to be proving or disproving, or bringing to the fore?
So conversation could be had or so change could be made?
If you want to be successful in this society, there are a lot of things that you can do that increase your chances of that (for anyone) but it is almost like we have lots of people in this thread fighting against that objective truth (for what reason?)
EXACTLY. And it is the African American HISTORY museum after all. This chart is as valid as manacles, its a part of history.
Understanding that its 50 years old, its actually sort of nice to see that white culture has moved forward, integrating some non-white values. We don’t expect children to be quiet. We don’t use the King’s English (we never did - but anyone who has read an email from a recently graduated college student knows our communication standards have relaxed). We share personal information more readily. We tolerate non-Christians much better. Not, of course, universally.