The Official Racism Thread Social • Page 10

I'm not white...I don't want white people to say things for me instead of, you know, getting me involved in the discussion.

 

An industry has arisen in which people, many of whom are white, speak about biases endemic in culture, philosophy, music, etc. It is often treated as revelatory, but people of color, women, the trans community, et al, have been saying this for quite some time. In fact, volumes upon volumes have been written by people deeply affected by these systemic biases. No one listened. It wasn't until we shifted the conversations and enough people died that white writers began to hop on an intellectual tradition that had been around for over a century. Du Bois spoke about the psychological wages whites received from white supremacy; Edward Said in "Orientalism" spoke about how the west created a discourse that painted eastern countries as backward and so on and so on.

 

Like, how many times have white people asked me to check out Ta-Nehisi Coates, you know?

 

The Souls of Black Folk and DuBois' concept of "double conciousness" and "The Veil" really helped shape my understanding on racism way back when.

 

Yes, that I understand. What I don't understand is the utility in discouraging white persons from bringing up the issues or social commentators from commentating on them once they have been forced into mainstream dialogue, especially regarding phenomena such as this where it has an academic component that is upsetting to academia and disciplinary knowledge regardless of whether it affects one personally on an ethnic basis. It would seem counterproductive to allow for all the presumed groundwork from persons such as yourself in bringing attention to the issue and forcing it onto the desk of a major media outlet only to say "you can only RT rhetoric on his matter from persons who are really affected by it or who said it first." Plus, I fail to see how, when regarding the hyper-academic concern for the lack of Eastern philosophy, objections to the status quo should be reserved to Eastern-ethnic American citizens instead of two men who specialize and have immersed themselves in Eastern culture and are experts on the neglected subject.

Also, to the end of reserving non-Western critiques to non-Western-European persons, are you sure the author does not fit that bill?





By that logic your contention that you "don't need" such social commentators voicing the issue to their followers is the epitome of saying you don't want the issue's resolution expedited because you feel that you have a philosophical monopoly on the subject and the raising of it.

 

Are you arguing for white saviors? Is that what is happening here? The broader point is, in many cases, academics in this groups have been either silenced or ignored precisely because their identities are bound up in the fields they chose to study or, alternatively, due to systemic inequalities, have been shut out of academia. This is the point. It begins from the ground up. Obviously, white people should be involved in dismantling systemic racism, but they are also implicated in it, unconsciously or not, and their need to speak can crowd out those whose insights have the resonance of experience. The other point is that it can often reproduce the conditions in which topics only have legitimacy when white people speak of them. Again, that is not to say white people cannot speak, but that they also need to listen, regardless of their resume, and cede the room for other people to speak as well.

 

Yes. I'm glad my thesis was able to shine through.

 

K. Just checking.

 

@Trotsky I'll give you a pass since you may be unaware but this thread doubles as a place to discuss race but also a safe space for PoC to discuss things without scrutiny. Please try not to antagonize us when we suggest that people of color should be running important discussions.

Also, re-read my original response to you...I want white people to factor us into the discussion instead of taking the reigns for us. Excluding white people entirely would likely hurt progress. Just because a guy met prominent Buddhists doesn't mean he understands the plight the East Asian Buddhist philosophers face. Furthermore, these two scholars clearly know a lot of non-white scholars...why couldn't they be included as an author?

As @Dominick mentioned, if we are to move forward and recognize the legitimacy of the opinions PoC have, they must be an active part of the discussion. In my view, they must be the leaders of said discussion. Remember, the role of white people should really be allies and advocates without crowding us out.

 

Is writing an Op-Ed for NYT really crowding anyone out? I don't understand how their bringing an issue to light crowds anyone else's attempts to do so out.

 

I hate both of these people.

 

They're not bringing anything to light. Once again, people of color have been saying the same thing for decades.

 

Yes

 

More disgusting than the act of selling the gun alone are the causes Zimmerman says he's going to fund based off the sale.

 

Deep Roots for Lack of Minorities in American Medical Schools

 

This is not an article from theonion

Judge orders Mississippi school district to desegregate, 62 years after Brown v. Board of Education

As the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi put it, Cleveland — a town of 12,000 — has been running an illegal dual system for its black and white children, failing year after year to reach the “greatest degree of desegregation possible.”

Now Cleveland must consolidate its schools, integrating all its students into one middle school and one high school.

 

From what I've seen, Shkreli is a rich troll who does this shit to piss people off. As well as an attempt to be relevant.

 

Is it possible to change the mind of someone who is so far gone they don't even realize it? It's like I can't even talk to this person once a slur comes out. I know I've said this all before but I tend to lose my patience quickly when it comes up. It's not that they don't want to switch channels, it's that they believe theirs is the only one that exists. Anyone have an MIB neuralizer?

 

In my life I don't think I've ever seen someone successfully sit and learn and understand why slurs of any kind are bad and stop using them.

 

That's what I thought, and that's what I've been told by others. It's family, too, not some friend I can cut ties with.

 

@Dominick

This is a continuation on the super predators question, and I hope I'm not bothering you at all, I'm genuinely trying to understand.

When somebody says the word 'redneck', there is a very specific image that comes to mind. We can all picture it, and there is a large amount of people that fit that particular stereotype. That subset of white people does exist. But when someone calls another person a redneck, we don't take those words and apply it to the entire race. No one thinks you're calling all white people rednecks.
When someone says the word 'thug', there is a specific image and stereotype that comes to mind. And though it's a very small contingent of the entire racial population, there are people that fit that stereotype. That subset of people does exist. So why take a word meant for and referring to a small isolated group, and apply it to an entire race? If someone fitting that stereotype is called a thug, that isn't calling you a thug.

 

I didn't take the word and do anything, first of all. It is the totalizing ideology of white supremacist capitalism that created a society in which these terms are deployed to purposefully subject specific groups to economic, political and cultural oppression.

 

rednecks = a punchline in a joke
thug = a reason to kill a person

That's the system we live in, black folks need to take this language seriously and apply it generally because it's a matter of self-defense.

 

http://kotaku.com/blizzard-vows-to-improve-twitch-chat-after-pro-hearthst-1777192405

Gaming fans are racist fucks. This line hit me:

“I knew it would be bad, but I didn’t think it would be that bad,” Miller told Polygon at the time. “I was getting texts from my parents saying, ‘Oh, we saw you on your interview, really good job.’ And I was just hoping they saw it in full screen and didn’t see the chat.”

 

Hey guys, I know it's kind of a "canned response" at this point, but what's a good thing to say to the idiots who say things like "where's BLM now?!" when a black kid is shot by another black kid? I've seen a couple of good responses that are really short and to the point here and I'm struggling to come up with one as succinct.