Rolling 2017 Thread on Race

It's great. There were more of those about the same subject.

Just last Saturday the 'kick out Black Pete' demonstration - they tried to rally before but pro Pete's blocked the highway and police let them, no kidding - went along. I was on my to Amsterdam when I drove under an overway and saw a crowd gathered there, with flags and stuff: it could only have been pro Pete's waiting for the buses of anti-Pete's to pass and throw stuff or kick a stirr. Several of my friends were at the anti Black Pete demo. I apped them and police got rid of the troublemakers.

Reading my own words, I'm aware of how insane it may sound to anyone outside this fucked up country. Everyone's completely entrenched, digging further down their own "opinion" (yes: were no further here really than if you say Black Pete is racism people will say: that's your opinion, and also it's wrong, it's a kids party etc.) Trying to explain why it's racist is turned into a "*you* people want to change our traditions, if you don't like it gtfo", which is racist and xenophobe.

But our prime minister is on record, blatantly, smilingly saying Black Pete is "just part" of the tradition, he "has black friends who celebrate it with him" etc. Long, looooooooooong way to go... :-/

btw someone on that thread said "that Zwarte Piet is a actually a black man underneath all that so clearly it's not racist"

I kind of want to throw the entire history of minstrel shows at her but I'm respecting the original poster's wishes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjosGL5YwPw

^^ (you can turn on English subs, they seem ok). This is basically where we're at. This clip from the only Late Night show got a lot of traction, and he tried to explain why BP is absurd. But obv it got traction because it's a white man who is saying what black people here have been saying for aaaages. Which is causing a rift in the anti BP movement: should white people be "allowed" to spread the message when black people have done this for ages and aren't credited for it, versus: well yeah but at least white people are reached now because of this and it makes them think etc.

It's, quite frankly, a mess.

Reading my own words, I'm aware of how insane it may sound to anyone outside this fucked up country. Everyone's completely entrenched, digging further down their own "opinion" (yes: were no further here really than if you say Black Pete is racism people will say: that's your opinion, and also it's wrong, it's a kids party etc.) Trying to explain why it's racist is turned into a "*you* people want to change our traditions, if you don't like it gtfo", which is racist and xenophobe.

Dunno if it helps any but all this sounds pretty familiar from debates I've experienced in Portugal, the UK and the US. Especially when it comes to anything that's categorized as children's entertainment - ppl get apeshit defensive because, I think, subconciously if they admit that a beloved thing from their childhood is actually racist (or sexist or etc.) they see it as a judgement on their entire childhood.

campaigning to keep the original words to "Eeny, meeny, miney, mo"

I rewatched Kind Hearts and Coronets recently and that rhyme comes up a few times...

Especially when it comes to anything that's categorized as children's entertainment - ppl get apeshit defensive because, I think, subconciously if they admit that a beloved thing from their childhood is actually racist (or sexist or etc.) they see it as a judgement on their entire childhood.

there's been a pretty strong reaction to that "The Trouble with Apu" thing and I think this is exactly why

Because a lot of people would rather be racist than change anything they like?

I think part of it is that a lot ppl think of racism primarily in terms of being a personal moral failing rather than a structural issue? so when it's suggested that a beloved childhood thing is racist they react like they're being retroactively denounced as a terrible bigoted person for things they did/thought/felt as a child and get defensive.

hopefully it's possible to have treasured childhood memories of Christmas involving Zwarte Piet and also acknowledge that Zwarte Piet is bad and racist and shouldn't continue as a tradition? probably everyone's most precious memories are inextricably wrapped up with stuff that's problematic to some extent?

I keep thinking back to an essay I wrote in high school about racism and received wisdom and how pervasive and infectious it is; one particular point I made was that even as a black kid I wasn't immune to getting caught up in this type of thing as well, using the example of the willing ridicule I participated in with some of my friends after a presentation by a local Native American outreach group over some of the claims they made about the contributions of Native Americans to global society, which included writing and arithmetic. I realized halfway through my mocking that my haughty invocations of cuneiform and Babylon were looking at things from precisely the wrong context that there was literally no reason why analogous concepts couldn't have been co-discovered by a contemporaneous society that Americans spent a good portion of their history attempting to wipe off of the face of the Earth; my mistake was thinking that if I could have this epiphany as a 16-year-old, that meant most adults already realized this.

There's a commitment wired into a specious definition of truth and facts that plagues the academic-minded maybe, or factual literalists for sure

/Reading my own words, I'm aware of how insane it may sound to anyone outside this fucked up country. Everyone's completely entrenched, digging further down their own "opinion" (yes: were no further here really than if you say Black Pete is racism people will say: that's your opinion, and also it's wrong, it's a kids party etc.) Trying to explain why it's racist is turned into a "*you* people want to change our traditions, if you don't like it gtfo", which is racist and xenophobe./

Dunno if it helps any but all this sounds pretty familiar from debates I've experienced in Portugal, the UK and the US. Especially when it comes to anything that's categorized as children's entertainment - ppl get apeshit defensive because, I think, subconciously if they admit that a beloved thing from their childhood is actually racist (or sexist or etc.) they see it as a judgement on their entire childhood.

+ the lie of "all childhoods are happy and innocent"

I was a very happy kid growing up but the experience of being the one black kid in a sea of racism pretty much put the kibosh on romantacizing childhood.

I was thinking about yeah, even with a happy supportive family your experience of childhood is likely to be utterly different to oblivious white kids like most of us in the west

we need to kill the idealization of childhood in general, imo

Which is like talking about Americans or dutch or British as if we're one unified mass of experience and background xp

Also yes nhex, childhood is one.of the constructedest ideas there is

It's not surprising that people have a knee-jerk, egocentric reaction to accusations of racism, viewing it in terms of how they're personally inconvenienced by the accusation rather than in terms of their complicity in something harmful. The effort one is willing to put into shifting their perspective from point a to point b (or the extent to which they in fact double down on the personal butthurt) is a pretty straightforward metric for determining how much of a dickhole racist that person is, I find.

it's usually no more than "you're making me feel bad. I don't like people who made me feel bad"

is there any reason to think conservatives are not disposed to worry about complicity arguments

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/12/iat-behavior-problem.html

singal doing his i-just-have-some-questions schtick

Thought this was a good interview: http://www.newblackmaninexile.net/2017/11/racial-justice-doesnt-trickle-down.html

I will listen to that but the "class only" strawman from the description really bugs me. Who's seriously advancing that?

I think there are some problems w this but the overall gist gets at some aspects of the conversation that has confused old people

https://t.co/CHXmHsmLQG?amp=1

x-post: Lol, sorry, but that's perfect for the 'Posts perfectly in character' thread.

fair

Something I'm struggling with in the discourse advanced/described in the Tablet piece (and that I've seen replicated on social media in slightly more extreme forms on the strongly identitarian wings of the left) is, what takes the place of whiteness-as-identity? If whiteness is inherently supremacist, and therefore an identity and oppressive superstructure to be scrapped in history's dustbin (an argument I am totally fine with in and of itself), I would think that risks once again reverting to white people not "seeing" race when they look at themselves, reverting to the nullity that white supremacy encourages, a sort of "otherness" beyond race. Yet I also see people frequently dismissing the idea of "reforming" or "redefining" white identity. So I guess what I'm wondering is, and what I can't seem to piece together from the existing discourse, is what is the non-oppressive way for white people to conceive of themselves?

history's greatest monsters

If whiteness is inherently supremacist, and therefore an identity and oppressive superstructure to be scrapped in history's dustbin (an argument I am totally fine with in and of itself)

lol you are the phoniest motherfucker on this board

I'd assume that if whiteness as an identity is to be abolished, so is race as an identity altogether? Non-white identities having been thrust on ppl by white supremacy.

I say this a lot in these kinds of threads but it feels cart-before-the-horses.

lol you are the phoniest motherfucker on this board

tell me how you really feel sb

Handy how sleepingbag's screen name abbreviates to suggest ban.

is there any reason to think conservatives are not disposed to worry about complicity arguments

I mean that’s just a long smarty pants way of saying what DJP, Nhex, NV, OL and Neanderthal all expressed or alluded to above, really

But you know what’s really long winded and smarty pants is that Tablet piece. Jesus Christ:

This intricate system of racial casuistry, worthy of Jesuits, is a beguiling compound of insight, partial truths, circular reasoning, and dogmatism operating within a self-enclosed system of reference immunized against critique and optimized for virality.

You can tell that that piece is different from all the optimized casuistry because it's so badly written

It starts out okay and then gets worse as it goes on. “I had an outline and a deadline and it was one or the other”

after i posted that, it occurred to me that the right-wing attitude toward federal tax dollars for abortions is worried about complicity. so they understand the principle!

That’s really not at all the emotion behind that though. It’s about control over other people’s options.

A story my wife told on Facebook yesterday:

Overheard in my doctor’s waiting room:
Scene: Two older folks (a man and a woman), obviously related, are sharing pics from a recent family event that the man missed due to illness.

W: Oh, and here’s my nephew’s girlfriend. Well, fiancée, now, since he proposed that day.
M: She’s black?!
W (really agitated, all of a sudden): She’s not black!
M (giggling a bit): Of course she’s black. Do you not have eyes?
W (still agitated): Well, no one said she was black.
M: What?
W (now growling): If she was black, someone would have said so. And, pipe down, people are going to think you’re prejudiced.
M: Not me. I’m just noting that she’s black. She’s gorgeous. You’re the one who’s upset about it.
W: *silence*
M: Ha! Welcome to the family, gorgeous!
W: *leaves the waiting room*
#guesswhoscomingtodinneryall

UPDATE: They just left the office (I was hella early for this appointment). The guy walked right over to me, patted me on the knee (boundaries much?), and said “You are the most gorgeous thing in this whole place!” I think I love him. She huffed and sped up to leave the office.

My wife was the only black person in the room when this conversation happened and everyone else studiously avoided eye contact with her in its aftermath, like they had something to be embarrassed about or something.

"if she was black, someone would have said so" is I don't even know what

Competing Beyonce/Fu-Schnickens "Ring The Alarm" signals going up in that household

ATTN ATTN THE FIANCEE IS A NEGRESS, I REPEAT THE FIANCEE IS A NEGRESS

This intricate system of racial casuistry, worthy of Jesuits, is a beguiling compound of insight, partial truths, circular reasoning, and dogmatism operating within a self-enclosed system of reference immunized against critique and optimized for virality.
― El Tomboto, Thursday, December 7, 2017 7:18 AM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah this is he main quote where it loses me
For most of it though I thought it was a pretty good summation from a distance of what happened within the left over the past few years and explains why so many ostensibly liberal ppl I went to school with are suddenly so concerned with political correctness gone mad

Competing Beyonce/Fu-Schnickens "Ring The Alarm" signals going up in that household

ATTN ATTN THE FIANCEE IS A NEGRESS, I REPEAT THE FIANCEE IS A NEGRESS

― Embalming is a flirty business (DJP), Thursday, December 7, 2017 11:01 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

*extremely nasal white person voice* Actually, it's a Tenor Saw sample

lol

the SC cop who murdered Walter Scott just got 20 years. bracing for inevitable Trump tweet on this news that brings up Katie Steinle.

i am picturing the man and woman in mrs djp's story as the queen and prince philip

Definitely works, I can imagine Phil's eyes lighting up whenever Meghan walks in the room.

well that's some imagery