Rampant Racism in America

beancounter said:
So in essence what you're saying is that negative stereotypes of whites is just "being teased" and "just a simple observation", but negative stereotypes of blacks racism.

Sounds like a double standard to me.
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Where did I use a double standard? Are you going to play ignorant and never heard of the "angry black woman", "fashionable gay man", "butch lesbian"? I'm pretty sure we all have, yet that doesn't mean we should lable all black woman, gay men, or lesbians as such.
What both amuses and angers me is how anyone could be insulted by a generalization that truly has so little negative impact on their life. How many white women get denied jobs out of the stereotype of being sheltered and fearful? Or taken in for questioning after being stopped for not using their turn signal? Or have the canine unit called to destroy their car for drugs?

I may have been teased, but being white has never caused me adversity. And you know what? I also know angry black females, and fashion concious gay men who fit their stereotypes far more than I- and they know it, and we all know the difference between aware of them and profiling people for them.
This whole conversation reminds me of when Hilary called out trump for tax avoidance and he came back with "hey, I've only taken advantage of the laws. That makes me smart". How many here agreed?
 
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Andy_T said:
Nope, but it might make sense to "round them up" if they would now vote again to establish such a regime anew. (about 10-15 % Germany-wide, possibly 25 % in the so-called "New countries", the former Eastern German Democratic Republic)

That would be something they are guilty of and should be made responsible for - same as Dump voters.
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While I agree with that sentiment in general, what you are suggesting is coming dangerously close to the advocacy of "thought police". Once that cat is out of the bag, getting it back in won't be easy. And whose to say that the cat won't eventual view your thoughts as aberrant...
 
Regardless of whether or not the label/stereotype results in adversity, stereotypes should not be used. To stereotype one group, and not another, is by definition a double standard.

silva said:
Where did I use a double standard? Are you going to play ignorant and never heard of the "angry black woman", "fashionable gay man", "butch lesbian"? I'm pretty sure we all have, yet that doesn't mean we should lable all black woman, gay men, or lesbians as such.
What both amuses and angers me is how anyone could be insulted by a generalization that truly has so little negative impact on their life. How many white women get denied jobs out of the stereotype of being sheltered and fearful? Or taken in for questioning after being stopped for not using their turn signal? Or have the canine unit called to destroy their car for drugs?

I may have been teased, but being white has never caused me adversity. And you know what? I also know angry angy black females, and fashion concious gay men who fit their stereotypes far more than I- and they know it, and we all know the difference between aware of them and profiling people for them.
This whole conversation reminds me of when Hilary called out trump for tax avoidance and he came back with "hey, I've only taken advantage of the laws. That makes me smart". How many here agreed?
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FortyTwo said:
...

This probably seems harsh but now is not the time to coddle each other. As white people we have a responsibility to be better, now more than ever.
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Agreed. Sometimes it takes being figuratively beaten over the head with something to get it to sink in. I will forward that farmer's post to some of the members of my family who might actually be receptive to his point of view. I had some difficult conversations with some of them last weekend about racism and the monuments issues. I nearly lost it a few times when I heard the orange menace's nonsense about the "evil/fake media," "loss of cultural history," etc., spew from some of their lips (I'm on an island politically in my family, and it's beyond demoralizing sometimes). It's so difficult to be calm and rational when I hear this stuff come out of people's mouths, especially from people I love. They don't understand how easy they have it as white people, and they don't understand the institutional racism in their own minds. What white people have to stop doing is trying to compare any perceived injustice to that of people of color. White people don't have to worry about being shot at if they're wearing a hoodie. I think white people do need to shut up and listen -- stop blurting out "but, but, but" as a defense mechanism every time a person of color tries to explain what he or she deals with on a daily basis, even if you disagree with the premises or the executions of the explanations. Process what they are trying to tell you and see past the anger to try to understand. People of color are tired of waiting for attitudes to change, and I don't blame them for becoming frustrated over protests and demonstrations they find pointless if said protests don't result in real change.
 
Discord chats may be crucial to lawsuits over neo-Nazi violence

DATA RELEASE: White Supremacist Fundraising & Planning for Charlottesville - UNICORN RIOT]

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Video Shows Man Shooting At Crowd During Charlottesville Rally, With No Police Response

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Amazing: Police Chief in Oklahoma Busted and Ousted as Owner of Racist Website and White Supremacist Record Label
 
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PTree15 said:
Agreed. Sometimes it takes being figuratively beaten over the head with something to get it to sink in. I will forward that farmer's post to some of the members of my family who might actually be receptive to his point of view. I had some difficult conversations with some of them last weekend about racism and the monuments issues. I nearly lost it a few times when I heard the orange menace's nonsense about the "evil/fake media," "loss of cultural history," etc., spew from some of their lips (I'm on an island politically in my family, and it's beyond demoralizing sometimes). It's so difficult to be calm and rational when I hear this stuff come out of people's mouths, especially from people I love. They don't understand how easy they have it as white people, and they don't understand the institutional racism in their own minds. What white people have to stop doing is trying to compare any perceived injustice to that of people of color. White people don't have to worry about being shot at if they're wearing a hoodie. I think white people do need to shut up and listen -- stop blurting out "but, but, but" as a defense mechanism every time a person of color tries to explain what he or she deals with on a daily basis, even if you disagree with the premises or the executions of the explanations. Process what they are trying to tell you and see past the anger to try to understand. People of color are tired of waiting for attitudes to change, and I don't blame them for becoming frustrated over protests and demonstrations they find pointless if said protests don't result in real change.
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VERY well said. This is why I don't agree with beancounter's and others' insistence on a "double standard" narrative. We don't have it bad in the same way, and pretending that we do is just dishonest, plain and simple.
 
My two cents' worth:

The point that black farmer was making is that the less visibly overt racism of so many white people directly affects more people of color negatively than some white supremacists marching with torches. White women who react in fear to a black man being somewhere "he shouldn't be" and making a call to the police (as he has experienced, simply working a field on a tractor) are not simply creating an affront to that black man - they are endangering his life and the lives of other people of color by perpetuating and reinforcing that stereotype of "the dangerous black man" that leads to so many getting shot and their killers getting off because "he shot that man because he was in fear of his life."

A white woman getting her feelings hurt because she's being "stereotyped" is just not in the same league. Hurt feelings are one thing; being in literal danger of one's life because of the assumptions someone makes about you based on the color of your skin is quite another.

Which leads me to why such false equivalencies are in themselves so demeaning. As a German born person growing up in the U.S., I grew up with non-stop messaging about evil Germans, in everything from popular entertainment to mention as a prime example of evil in the pastor's weekly sermons.

Let's say I countered a discussion of the Holocaust with "but what about the stereotyping of Germans I had to grow up with!" I think most of you would understand that the discomfort of having the evil of one's nation's actions pointed out to one, even continuously, is in no way comparable to having one's entire family murdered at Bergen-Belsen, and that even trying to equate the two is wrong and demeaning on a very fundamental level.
 
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Very interesting article:

I used to lead tours at a plantation. You won’t believe the questions I got about slavery.

Margaret Biser said:
One important branch of this phenomenon was guests huffily bringing up every disadvantaged group of white people under the sun — the Irish, the Polish, the Jews, indentured servants, regular servants, poor people, white women, Baptists, Catholics, modern-day wage workers, whomever — and say something like, "Well, you know they had it almost as bad as/just as bad as/much worse than slaves did."
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Margaret Biser said:
Other visitors seemed to find part of their identity in a sense of class victimhood, and they were unwilling to share the sympathy and attention of victimhood with black Americans. As Frank Guan pointed out in the New Republic, explicitness of racism tends to be inversely proportional to social class. Guests who expressed racism most openly to me often appeared to have had recent ancestors who were poor, who were prevented by convention and economics from rising in social status, and who were exploited by the powerful — but who were protected by their whiteness from the extreme oppression visited on African Americans. Regardless of their current wealth level or social status, they still felt that the deck had been stacked against them for generations. Their sense of ancestral victimhood was so personal that the suggestion that any group of people had it worse than their ancestors did was a threat to their sense of self.
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Another very interesting article (already 2 years old), mentioned in this one:
Why Are White Racists Always Called “White Trash"?
 
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Mischief said:
Let's say I countered a discussion of the Holocaust with "but what about the stereotyping of Germans I had to grow up with!", I think most of you would understand that the discomfort of having the evil of one's nation's actions pointed out to one, even continuously, is in no way comparable to having one's entire family murdered at Bergen-Belsen, and that even trying to equate the two is wrong and demeaning on a very fundamental level.
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Thank you for making a great post and providing a very valid analogy!!!
 
beancounter said:
Treating people the same is a narrative you disagree with?
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My house is fine, the neighbor's is on fire. If a firetruck comes in and unloads a bunch of firefighters, I'm going to hope they don't treat our houses the same.

On top of that, if they promptly go to my house and gently spritz it with little spray bottles of water, assuring me the house will not catch on fire after all and that the neighbor's fire isn't my fault while simultaneously doing nothing to actually put out the neighbors' house, then there is clearly a problem.
 
By the way, and I knew I was getting that analogy from somewhere, the above example is from this wonderful comic:

20141204-patreon.png


Which encompasses the whole "smug insistence on ignoring context" that comes with "all lives matter" arguments and such.
 

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