Why? Because you are trying to categorize people by the color of their skin or by their gender. You are trying to turn them into voting blocs by appealing to fear, resentment, and anger.
I remember someone who had a dream that people would one day be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. Do you think shouting people down because of ‘white privilege’ or shutting someone up for ‘mansplaining’ is helping to achieve that goal?
Pointing out racism in others is not racist.
Yet we do keep seeing that claim made by those who would prefer not to recognize or address the problem, don’t we?
I’m sorry, this still doesn’t make sense to me. I honestly don’t see why it’s the people who are pointing out the mistreatment who are being “divisive,” instead of the people doing the mistreatment in the first place.
“Um, why are you killing and imprisoning a certain demographic of people more than the dominant one?”
“Shut up, you’re being divisive.”
So the people who were being the NC bathroom law were just innocents, and the people who protested it are the ones being divisive? Donald Trump is innocent, and the people who don’t like his ban are the ones being divisive by pointing out it’s wrong?
Somehow, I don’t think people who feel they’ve been giving the wrong end of the stick would react very kindly to the implication that they should just shut up because THEY are the ones being divisive by pointing out that they’re being treated unfairly because of their race or gender or whatever.
Pete Wilson (Republican) did that in California. He won the governorship with that. Eventually it became a disaster for the Republicans.
Minorities then did find that Republicans were serious and minorities did find out that they did not have friends in the Republican party.
In less than generation the Republican party has found what happens when a party appeals to fear, resentment and anger. They become almost an afterthought.
Don’t know much about that, I do know that a very significant number of democrats did not vote, some for not liking the candidate, some for being confident, and some because they did took Trump seriously at last and took seriously that his goons were going to intimidate voters. I also do think that now more minorities, woman and indifferent Democrats are and will see how they are being affected by the changes Trump and henchmen are doing.
That is the key: they will notice the harmful changes. A lot of the changes until now were mostly of the pandering kind. Not anymore, but a lot of Americans had to see it for themselves.
It will like the minorities in California that thought that the Republican were not going to follow on bigoted or misogynist promises. What they will (and are) seeing now is that most Republicans are going to bed with the flea masters. And they are not minding the fleas they got from the dog. I see Trump as the one that will convince more Americans that the Republicans can not be trusted, just as the Californians learned.
I see this sort of claim, a lot. yet, when I look around at society I see the opposite.
Driving While Black was used as a “legitimate” traffic stop for years before people named it and called attention to it.
Several studies have noted that black school kids are “disciplined” more harshly than white kids for the same offenses–a practice that had been going on for a long time before it was called out.
Similarly, penal sentences and opportunities to avoid harsher punishment are disproportionately handed out according to the person’s race.
We still find examples of discrimination in housing, hiring, and job promotions.
Refusing to identify those phenomena or refusing to address them does not seem to have made them go away. Yet any effort to address them is labeled “identity politics” and it is claimed that those efforts are what are causing the problems. That makes no sense.
Well, that’s the soft bigotry of low expectations.
If that was the sum total of it, I would agree with you completely.
If.
All across society one can find brilliant and idiotic people espousing different positions, with most people, neither brilliant nor idiotic, holding positions that resonate with their own experience. There certainly are really bad proponents of identity politics wandering around–from Bannon to Farrakhan. The problem that arises in most of these discussions is that they tend to attack the extremes, treating the labels as though they were the totality of the phenomena, discounting the validity (on both sides), of more nuanced voices.