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Before you accept the feel good adage of ‘ppl can do whatever they want it’s not hurting anybody’ consider the possibility that perhaps just because you don’t see who it hurts, that doesn’t mean they don’t exist
I’ve seen ppl say that about a lot of things that minorities actually got the shit end of
It weirds me out that there are people who will rightously talk over you because they think they know what's best for you. It's even weirder to me that even when you call them out, the still think they are some benevolent angel and you're just being ungrateful. See cispeople talking over transpeople, white feminists telling women of color what's good, men 'splaining away to women, monosexuals monopolizing the lgbt tag, and round and round it goes. If you feel the need to dominate a conversation that's not about you, you're probably not an ally.
His Ta-Nehisi Coates column today breaks awful new ground as the "paper of record" goes full troll, once again
Brooks’ point, which no one disputes and which is obvious in any event, is that America isn’t all bad; that injustice is inherent in America, but doesn’t come “close to the totality of America.” Fair enough. But Coates’ argument seems to be much more complex than that. At least in his other writings, particularly his essay on reparations, Coates argues that much of what makes America great was born of everything that made it unjust; and that awareness of this truth depends, more often than not, on which side of the line you fall.
Brooks doesn’t really want to hear that, though. He doesn’t want to hear that our distant sins aren’t really distant at all; that the legacy of racism stretches into the present; that Ferguson, Baltimore and Charleston are part of a living history from which we can’t divorce ourselves. Brooks, for instance, says he finds “the causation between the legacy of lynching and some guy’s decision to commit a crime inadequate to the complexity of most individual choices.” He finds it inadequate, in part, because he sees events like Baltimore in a vacuum, ignoring all the antecedent causes that led to it. This is precisely the error people like Coates are exposing. Brooks’ privileged perch affords him the luxury of not understanding how these things are connected; they enter his life only as abstractions, not concrete truths. I imagine it’s far less abstract for a black man from Baltimore, or for his teenage son, or for anyone else encumbered by the past.
How easy it must be for Brooks to focus on tomorrow, to write in earnest that we can “abandon old wrongs and transcend old sins for the sake of better tomorrow.” Those untouched by the pangs of history find it easier to dismiss, I suppose. But Coates is talking about the present as much as he is the past. Brooks, despite making the appropriate gestures, is blind to this part of Coates’ argument. He does not — and apparently cannot — see how our past defines our present and constrains our future.
White male nerds need to recognise that other people had traumatic upbringings, too - and that's different from structural oppression.
Laura Penny (penny-red) wrote a great article on why a lonely nerd teenagerhood doesn't replace or override privilege.
To put it in RPG terms, clique-based social trauma and structural oppression are different kinds of debuffs; they stack.
"stereotypes exist for a reason"
you're right-- it's called confirmation bias
I swear I'm fun at parties.
Yesterday, at an office bbq, my friend and I tried to explain to our boss the concept of patriarchy and male privilege. It was like trying to break a brick wall by throwing kittens at it. He's convinced that a) women control everything b) if they don't it's their own fault. I.e. patriarchy - i.e. whatever power structure exists is constructed and maintained by women. Apparently women's magazines were his go-to evidence of this. Every time either of us made a point he couldn't refute he said: "Aren't over-simplifying this?" The urge to impale myself on a fork had never been as high.
For 20 years I had immersed myself in the writings of early United States women's rights activists -- Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898), Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), Lucretia Mott (1793-1880) -- yet I could not fathom how they dared to dream their revolutionary dream. Living under the ideological hegemony of nineteenth-century United States, they had no say in government, religion, economics, or social life ("the four-fold oppression" of their lives, Gage and Stanton called it.) Whatever made them think that human harmony -- based on the perfect equality of all people, with women absolute sovereigns of their lives -- was an achievable goal?
...
Then I realized I had been skimming over the source of their inspiration without noticing it. My own unconscious white supremacy had kept me from recognizing what these prototypical feminists kept insisting in their writings: They caught a glimpse of the possibility of freedom because they knew women who lived liberated lives, women who had always possessed rights beyond their wildest imagination -- Iroquois women.
...
As a feminist historian, I did not at first pay attention to such references to American Indian life because I believed what I had been taught: that Native American women were poor, downtrodden "beasts of burden" (as they were often called in the nineteenth century). I did not know what I was looking for, so of course I could not see it.
TIL one more way in which my white experience has blinded me to so much.
