"White privilege"
Just read about actress Rosanna Arquette stating that she was "sorry and ashamed of being white and privileged"
So, would she have preferred to have been born non white and underprivileged? If she grew up healthy would she be ashamed that she was not a sick child?
For myself, I am proud that I had loving parents, grandparents and grew up in a stable home with both a mom and dad present. My parents paid for a good education for my brother and me. Is this shameful? Should I have left school carrying a huge debt from student loans?
So now in 2019 I'm supposed to be ashamed and disgusted of my upbringing and education?
I think not!
So, would she have preferred to have been born non white and underprivileged? If she grew up healthy would she be ashamed that she was not a sick child?
For myself, I am proud that I had loving parents, grandparents and grew up in a stable home with both a mom and dad present. My parents paid for a good education for my brother and me. Is this shameful? Should I have left school carrying a huge debt from student loans?
So now in 2019 I'm supposed to be ashamed and disgusted of my upbringing and education?
I think not!
Comments (317)
What exactly are you proud of? Choosing your parents wisely?
I imagine she would prefer that there was not an over-privileged and an underprivileged group, but that all were born equal in privilege and benefit.
One of the saddest things about privilege is that the privileged usually come to believe they deserve it, and so take pride in their privilege, instead of acknowledging it as a debt they owe to the underprivileged.
True, it's a shame that inherent advantages exist, it wouldn't be that way in an ideal world. We don't live in that world, obviously. The concept of privilege, we've seen it create feelings of guilt, shame, resentment and anger. Privilege is separated across racial lines, thus dividing people across racial lines and increasing tribalistic sentiments. We could focus on being charitable, trying to reduce poverty for all, improving education and basic things like that but some people choose to instead focus on race instead.
You want people to see their race as a debt and as an entitlement? That kind of attitude only creates new problems - as if there aren't enough already.
This Rosanna Arquette has the worst approach possible and OP has it half right. We shouldn't feel pride but gratitude for our own blessings - whether meagre or better than average. We should feel disappointed that other people (not other races) are struggling and act on their behalf where possible and without going overboard. If we analyse the pros and cons of our actions, there is no justification for discussing privilege in racial terms.
I agree with your sentiments mostly, but there is one caveat: It is important to realize the specific experience of minorities or the ongoing effects of past injustice.
If we only go by improving general conditions, we'd never build things like ramps for wheelchairs. It takes focus on a specific minorities to deal with these kinds of problems.
Likewise, if you only focus on the current political situation of black people in the US, you miss the long term economic consequences of being first enslaved and then marginalized, like having had way less opportunities to amass wealth.
Not really, it's only important if you focus on racial differences. If a person is just a person and not a white person or a black person then you can only address the problems of people. If a person experiences poverty, the why is only significant if it's a problem to be fixed. Past injustices cannot be fixed and it's not pragmatic to focus on them.
You can list all the problems you think black people are disproportionately affected by but in some sense, all that means is that fixing those problems will disproportionately advantage black people. It exacerbates racial tensions but helps no greater number of people. There are idealistic advantages to your way of thinking, satisfying some moral imperative that some people, maybe including yourself, believe exist.
I am a practical person, I can only see that your approach is less practical than mine and I'm swayed by little else. You seem to think I'm wrong by giving the example with the wheelchairs. Truthfully though, racism and tribalism still exist, with no thanks to attitudes like that of "white privilege" and not only would it de-escalate racial tensions to re-prioritise to fixing problems rather than counteracting past injustices but you'd have a better chance at convincing those who are unhappy with helping minorities for whatever reason. If you would simply rebrand the help you're trying to give to something everyone could get behind.
This is not true. It's pretty unimportant if I focus on racial differences or if I don't, because I'm white; it becomes important if racial differences have a cultural significance for people whether they are focussing or not. That is to say, if your skin is black and you don't know that that fact is significant in affecting how readily a cop will shoot you, you are in mortal danger. Not focussing on racial differences is a privilege of whiteness.
Perhaps, but that's not what she said. She said she was ashamed to have been born white and privileged. That is nothing to be ashamed of. Creating or perpetuating discrimination is a shameful act, but I can't offer any blame to the young white child being born today to wealthy parents. If all she meant to say is the innocuous comment you've presented, she might have chosen a better way to say it because an alternate and more more literal reading is that being white is something to be ashamed of.
Well I have heard folks say they are proud to be American, or Irish or whatever, and perhaps they might have chosen a better way to say it, or perhaps that is the way identification works, that one can be proud to support the Aussies at cricket, and likewise ashamed when they are caught cheating. It seems to me that folks can feel proud or ashamed of their ancestry as a matter of fact, whether you think it justified or not. One is not praiseworthy or blameworthy in such matters, according to some (our) moralities, but one feels as one feels. Let's not shame her for her shame.
The penultimate work on “white privilege” is Peggy McIntosh’s White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack
As @Judaka said, I don't feel ashamed of my advantages, I feel grateful. That doesn't mean I think I somehow deserve what I've been given more than others or that I don't recognize that how I have been treated is fair to a lot of other people. I am middle class. It was expected I would go to college. Same is true of my children. There is an automatic path, I think of it as a rail, that takes us in the direction we are expected to go - to education, affluence, and security. It takes effort to get off that rail. For many people, it's the other way around, it takes heavy effort to get on the rail. Sure people do it, but that doesn't mean our system is fair.
We have a responsibility to do what we can to make our society fairer. It would be more becoming for you to recognize that instead of complaining about the mean people who criticize people like me and you.
I've started to think that the focus you suggest on advantage and disadvantage, class I guess, rather than race is the right one, although it still makes me ...uncomfortable. I've said this before - white people in general don't like black people in general. I have middle class, professional black friends who are routinely treated with suspicion and mistrust by white people everywhere they go. It is my understanding that's a common experience. I think that puts an extra burden on black people as opposed to even working class white people.
Downloaded it. I'll take a look. Thanks.
Yes, rich people think they deserve everything they have and everything they can get.
Quite an absurd response, black people need to be aware that cops will be more likely to shoot them and if they're not aware they are in mortal danger? I do hope you're not serious.
Whether you focus on racial differences - as you clearly do - or don't is a choice for anyone regardless of their skin colour. It is not possible to be ignorant of racial differences, our society makes sure of that but it is possible to choose not to focus on them. That you are white doesn't lessen the importance of how you focus on racial differences. It is the same.
I despise racism, I seek to reduce it.
Concepts like white privilege may seem correct in how they vindicate the oppressed and condemn the oppressors, it feels justified and right to put a spotlight on it. Unfairness is unavoidable but a focus on the unfairness leads to bitterness and resentment.
We have spoken about this in the past but I do not really see the way that people emphasise racial inequality as being productive, I think it exacerbates the problem and creates new problems. The actress mentioned in OP has offered nothing of value to anyone. White people become angry, coloured people become angry and we're encouraged to continue saying white people this and black people that. How does this help your black friends who want to be seen for who they are and not for their skin colour?
People can pity themselves and decry their race, pity others and decry past and current injustices. It doesn't help anyone. Anyway, glad to hear that you're open to change.
To say that one is proud to be Irish compliments the Irish. To say one is ashamed to be Irish insults them. It therefore makes sense to be insulted by the latter and not the former if one were Irish. I understand they are logically similar statements in that both relate to how one feels about being a part of a group, but if one doesn't wish to insult people for matters entirely out their control, they should probably not stereotype them and condemn them. You don't get a pass to offer an insult just because the insult applies to your group as well. I don't get to recite all the failings of southern, straight, Jewish, white, middle class, males just because I am one any more than my polar opposite (whatever that might look like) could.
Of course I feel badly about others that may not have had the opportunities that I was given. Certainly I would prefer that all people had equal opportunities in life, but the reality is that in our world real equality does not exist, yet.
Yes, I feel fortunate to have had the support given to me, but having guilt and shame about it, never.
As I said in my post, I'm starting to come around to that way of seeing things, but it makes me uncomfortable for the reasons I gave.
Yeah, I wish I wasn't too. But hey, life's to short to argue with wilful ignorance. I'll leave you guys to your moral high ground.
rather to undercut that sense of deserving. That people understand that they were in a different situation and this afffected their success and when they compare themselves with others and judge others that this is a large factor.
Yeah, I'm just waiting when smart and intelligent people will start acknowledging their debt to the stupid and apologize. I mean, without stupid people around they wouldn't be so smart and so privileged, right?
It's not clear to me. Are you saying black people are stupid or working class people are stupid?
Oh God. :roll:
Now where did you get the thought that I was referring to 'black' or 'working' people here?
(Oh right, the TITLE!!!!)
Yes, I'm bit sleepy. It's late here.
The epistemological one:
(1) How people form perspectives is sensitive to under what conditions they grow up.
(2) Regularities in those conditions often lead to regularities in perspectives.
For the same structural reason that a homeless person rarely has to worry about their holiday expenditures, a white person rarely has to worry about the presence of police. At that point, you might say that whiteness-blackness, gender etc... are more superficial influences on perspective than something like homelessness. But that objection already accepts the framing device which is doing all the work; that social conditions can strongly influence perspective formation - perspectives are socially fungible. What matters now is how to answer the question of in what ways and if race alters perspective formation.
You can see that in attitudes towards police, differences in religious practice, attitudes towards education and communication styles. But all these differences in perspective; of how people form opinions and what opinions they form; make more sense upon the background of social context.
The sociological one:
(1) Members of social identity groups in the aggregate face different social pressures, economic conditions and are afforded opportunities differentially based on that identity group membership.
(2) Social identity is not something arbitrary, it comes from an interaction of statistical tendencies of individuals within identity groups.
Let's go to (2) first, someone is not gay just because they choose to identify as such, they are gay based off their sexual preferences. They might be treated as gay if they signal in a way correlated with the social expectations of the identity group, or if they really are gay and it's found out. Or schoolyard conspiracies, whatever.
In a similar way, someone is not 'black' just because of the colour of their skin, having black skin is a signifier highly correlated with social roles and expectations of being black. Black identity is a branding that comes with the skin; social expectations and expected norms of conduct and personality traits. Social processes read off a skin colour as if that procedure had any legitimacy, but it still happens. It's precisely that dynamic that makes it not arbitrary; the branding as a social process. Like the value 'branded' on currency ultimately through common use thereof.
And (1) is just a simple empirical question, though actually answering it requires looking at the data. The short answer is; yes it does happen, a lot, and in every way you'd expect and some you wouldn't. The long answer is: racial identity, even though it's a social construct, is so highly correlated with other performance effecting metrics like education level and home and environment that it's difficult to establish any direct causal link between racial identity and performance. But the strength of the correlation between racial identity and these performance metrics is still reason enough to believe that there is differential treatment.
Isn't this just a declaration of moral high ground itself?
If someone is ashamed of being so-called privileged, then he or she is a selfish bigot that refuses to use his or her wealth or status to improve situations for oppressed people. They rightly should feel ashamed, but not of being privileged; instead, they should feel ashamed of their self-centered character and refusal to act. Moaning and groaning about it seems more like a passive-aggressive insult to those in a different class, almost like bragging about how much better off the one whining about it is than those who don't have wealth or status.
Being "ashamed" of one's race is just another form of racism and should be condemned as much as any other form. In a society that proclaims itself to promote tolerance and equality, then why are we insulting "whiteness"? Shouldn't we tolerate white people as much as any other race? People struggle no matter what genetics inside them, no race is better off than any other.
I don't think white privilege is a term used to describe the differences in perspective or character between whites and coloured people. The term even has "privilege" in it and while what you have said, for the most part, is more or less true, I don't know how you figure that white privilege is a term that describes any of the things you've mentioned.
Only "sociological variant (1)" is on track, when we're talking about white privilege, we're talking about how white people are disproportionately enjoying a variety of social and economic benefits compared to other races in majority-white countries.
I think some people try to use the term as a statement of fact while others feel the term describes and represents a sick injustice.
Willful ignorance? Moral high ground? After saying what you said? You sure are bratty.
Read about standpoint theory for the epistemological dimension.
I'm gunna change my tune here, I suppose you can call white privilege whatever you want. Feminist rhetoric about each and every white advantage, I feel like it has been too complicated to have entered the mainstream yet.
This is lazy. Standpoint theory originated in intersectional approaches to feminism. Specifically, black women face different stuff to white ones. As an epistemology approach it applies whenever identity group differences influences perspective formation. If you'd read even the entire wiki article I'd linked you would see that. It explicitly has race examples.
If you want to see some of the links between the two here might help. The keyword is 'epistemic privilege'.
If Rosanna Arquette were really worried about being privileged, she would liquidate her assets and send a large check to the NAACP. Just guessing, but I bet she doesn't do that.
People generally gain privilege by material means. They accumulate wealth, property, land, etc. and in possessing these assets can exercise power over others. The people who founded this country were privileged people, like privileged people everywhere, because they possessed substantial -- material -- wealth.
Wealth is inheritable, and through provident planning the CLASS of privileged people maintain the concentration of wealth among their small portion of the population. (Like, children of rich people are married to the children of other rich people.)
Race has certainly been a factor in the opportunity to accumulate wealth, property, land, and so on. The "white middle class" was selectively favored in the post-WWiI boom by having rich governmentally sponsored benefits designated for them, pretty much exclusively. Those benefits were the GI Education Bill, Veterans Housing Administration, and the much larger Federal Housing Administration programs which paid for education and subsidized the costs of building or acquiring homes. These benefits were generally denied to other other racial groups.
So, 2 or 3 generations later, there is a substantial portion of the population (maybe 20%) who are substantially better off today because of these programs. Many working class whites received NO benefit from these programs because they lived outside of metropolitan areas, did not have incomes high enough to qualify, did not enroll in college, or lived/worked on farms.
So, SOME whites are privileged because of their race, but most whites do not posses enough assets of the kind required to exercise any sort of privilege.
Only if we get down to the details of household goods, cars, clothes, and the like can we make a scale of "poor white privilege". For the most part, poor whites and poor blacks share a lack of privilege.
Upper or Middle Class Whites and Upper or Middle class people of other races have solid privilege based on wealth. Working class whites and people of other races share the same lack of privileged perqs. Yes, there definitely are many more people with out privilege, white or black, than there are people with privilege.
START TALKING ABOUT CLASS AND STOP TALKING ABOUT RACE. CLASS IS WHERE THE MONEY IS.
Yeah, honestly, instead of going down the rabbit hole of debating pernicious feminist intersectionality theories, I'm going to climb back out before it's too late. White privilege is about the dominance of the white perspective? Sure, go for it.
Not what I said. Ignores the socio-economic dimensions. I responded in a way that highlighted the epistemological angle to take on privilege because that's what you asked about in my post. I even stressed that the two are related in my post, too. No idea where you're getting this from.
Yes. It's like this:
I wasn't trying to say that you had only talked about your epistemological angle, anyway.
8. Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community - however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things - whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.
But then again, the Papacy conveniently fails to mention how it is the Church itself that had been instrumental in dismantling the extended families in Europe:
Cousin marriage was once the norm throughout the world, but it became taboo in Europe after a long campaign by the Roman Catholic Church. Theologians like St. Augustine and St. Thomas argued that the practice promoted family loyalties at the expense of universal love and social harmony. Eliminating it was seen as a way to reduce clan warfare and promote loyalty to larger social institutions -- like the church.
It is not the Church that ultimately turned out to be the big winner in the millennium-long policy of dismantling the clans and the tribes in Europe. It is the State, along with an irrational and unsustainable notion of race, that became the winners.
Therefore, the year 1937 was a bit late in the game for the Church to decry the consequences of their "own goal", i.e. the inevitable mental illness that the Papacy so aptly describes as: "Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State".
I grew up in a small (white) rural county; my family was poor, but not desperately. Seven children. Three of the seven who went to college did so on scholarships (this was in the 1950s, 60s) or worked and studied at the same time. These were educational boom times. There was more money available for college student aid back then, and tuition was low.
Even though I attended a run-of-the-mill state college, the degree (and the experience of college) granted enduring advantages. There were enough blacks in Minnesota in the '50s and '60s to produce a fair representation in MN college enrollment, had it been possible for more blacks to find a way to attend. (About 15% of white men attended / completed college in the 1960s; black men attended and completed college at around 7% (these are national figures). There weren't many (less than 7%) blacks -- or any minorities -- at the state college. This situation has changed since the 1960s. More minority students of all backgrounds are attending colleges now, but probably still at a lower rate than whites.
The opportunity to obtain the advantages of completing college degrees links back at least to one generation, maybe back to two or three. My parents admired and respected learning, even though they had not attended college.
Opportunity compounds, and because of the degree, I was able to obtain professional employment. Being professionally employed (good experiences, interesting work, references, etc.) lays the groundwork for the next professional job, or graduate school. And graduate school opens up more opportunities.
"White Privilege" is a recently coined and is an empty concept if applied to ordinary -- most -- white people. Wealth Privilege strikes me as much more convincing. Money talks. "White trash" are trash because they are poor, and have been poor for a few generations, and have had as few opportunities as poor blacks. Whiteness doesn't help them at all.
like the wikipedia opening...I thought common usage at least was focusing on the advantages of being white. Of course it is an advantage to trust certain institutions - if that trust is rational - but that hasn't seemed like the focus, at all, of people's use of the term.
I also agree with much of what you describe in the sociological argument,and this is part of what I think is used to create shame when the term is used. Often it is not used this way. It is used simply to point out the advantages, often not thought about, of being white. But often it seems to be used as a shaming, a j'accuse on the individual level.
Think this is more to do with a wounded reaction to the term's use rather than anything to do with the systemic properties of privilege. Though, the wounded reaction's prevalence is something worthy of analysis in itself.
I don't think that's true. A lot of the current political ideas on the Left now, I worked with back in the 80s in one of the subcultures where these were the norm. This included gay and lesbian rights, transperson's rights and existence, ideas like white priviledge, heteorsexual priviledge, male priviledge, etc. It was my job, as in responsibility as part of a salaried position, to look into situations where problems arose around these issues and also to develop communication around the issues from the institution. The policies were focused on practical consequences and then also what constitutes racism or sexism or heterosexism in interactions. I was in regular meetings, where specific instances were brought up, discussions of policy took place and more exploratory, what to we all think type discussions also. The idea of priviledge was often used as an accusation and as a self-accusation. IOW people not in the advantaged category and people in the advantaged category would both, often, use the idea of priviledge as an accusation or aspersion. The latter group against themselves. Now those who used it against themselves were obviously on the lefty, progressive side of things. IOW if white, they realized a lot of the things you said in your penultimate post. But they definitely were adding in a kind of original sin aspect. And a lot of the aimed uses of 'priviledge' by disadvantaged category people were meant as damning - to varying degrees - accusations.
Not surprising of course and I know from my own categories how I can react to others who have advantages over me. Human stuff. But there nonetheless and problematic. You can't expect people to be perfect with concepts, especially if they've had a shit time. On the other hand it still pays to point out the problem. Can this pointing out become it's own problem? absolutely. One could really see this aspect when people with different kinds of priviledge got into it, though this was a small phenomenon. And the shaming and countershaming would start flying. The white lesbian and the straight black man each trying to see who is on higher ground. who gets to be less ashamed.
I am not in the front lines any more, so I readily admit my impressions are hardly scientific. but it seems to me 'white priviledge' is still used, often, and with regularity, to include a shaming. And not jsut a shaming about, say, the ignorance of a white person about the advantages they have had, but a shaming for being white. Or someone else for being a man, per se.
I've heard that similar things happen in communities with a safe space policy. Sometimes it is easier to have a simplified narrative; for therapeutic or rhetorical purposes, but I think the accusations really should be evaluated based on the context and validity. If someone is rebuking someone else (performatively) with an accusation/branding of privilege, it might be rooted a well grounded belief (though not necessarily true) based on past experience even if it's wrong.
Well, the fact "Whiteness doesn't help them at all" is probably what they experience as being "unfair". I guess that we already know what they really want:
The National Party's election platform stressed that apartheid would preserve a market for white employment in which nonwhites could not compete.
As soon as people identify strongly with race, then race politics can never be far away. Still, the concept of "race" has always been nebulous, because it is not just about skin colour.
The European Jews were also white, but that did not make a difference in the 40ies, in German race politics. Polish and Russians are technically also white, but somehow still deserved the label of "Untermensch", i.e. subhumans, while the Japanese didn't. They were considered honorary white.
So, there clearly were nonwhite whites and white nonwhites. Of course, all of that did not make racial politics any more rational ...
People like me are the best, and unfortunately that means people like you are a bit crap. My pride insults you - get used to it.
Although, as I said elsewhere in this thread, I do think that money does probably make the biggest difference, it bothers me to ignore race. Black people face unique discrimination in our society. Not having to face that is a privilege.
In many ways, you and I are very similar. I often start out to write something only to find you have already done so. On the other hand, I envy you your historical, social, and political awareness.
Maybe, but I don't think that applies to black people, Hispanics, and other unpopular minorities. White American society defined black people as black starting 400 years ago. During most of that period, they were slaves and their humanity was considered worthless. I think questioning their co-option of that identity as a weapon and sign of strength misses the point.
To some extent, in the US it's the other way around. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Republican Party started an effective and self-aware program to use race to move southern white people away from the Democratic Party. That program continues today and continues to warp our politics. One major effect is the climate of distrust and resentment that sometimes seems to be the defining characteristic of American politics.
African-Americans were not in the driver's seat in that respect. They did not choose to identify according to race. That decision was clearly made for them.
Concerning other minorities, it really depends whom we are talking about.
For example, Jews may have other things to identify to than race. The very term "Jew" does not denote any particular race. In fact, you probably have Jews in every race on the planet. To what extent, race is a defining characteristic for them, is not clear. If your mother is Jewish, then you are too; especially, if you also subscribe to Judaism. Race does not seem to be the major factor there.
Africans are also different from African-Americans in that respect.
For example, someone will be considered a member of a Somali clan, regardless of his race, simply, because his father is part of that clan. Someone could have a very different skin colour from the typical Somali, because of his mother, but I somehow suspect that it doesn't matter much to the clan, or to the person himself. I am sure that you have relatively light-skin Somalis who still totally identify with the same clan, just as their parents do.
I think the same is true for other minorities in America - Irish, Hispanic, Italian, Jewish. It seems to me the difference is that those other minorities will fairly quickly join the mainstream. Maybe that will happen eventually for black people, but it hasn't happened in 400 years and there is still a long way to go.
I doubt that African-Americans want "assimilation". Well, not sure. Maybe they do. Maybe they don't.
The Jews certainly don't want it. They must like their own clan and their own Rabbinical take on Second-Temple Judaism, because otherwise they would have dropped these things a long time ago already. The fact that they are still around after almost 2000 years, points to the idea that they probably do not even want to assimilate, even when offered the opportunity, which wasn't always the case either.
Concerning African-Americans, they would only be preserving a skin colour, which is a flimsy concept anyway. So, that would be a long-term losing proposition anyway. If you want to preserve your difference to the mainstream, you will need something more "conceptual" too. They don't have their own religion. So, I don't believe that they can do it.
Quoting alcontali
It's not a matter of what they want or don't want. Many ethnic groups maintain cultural and traditional attachments to their ethnic heritage, but still fit in. In my limited experience, although Italians, Irish, and Jews maintain a sense of national identify, it is just one among others. Most consider themselves Americans and citizens of their cities and towns. They consider ethnic and religious loyalties lower down the list. In my middle class Massachusetts town, many of positions of community leadership are taken by people of Italian extraction. It's not that they have forgotten that, but they are members of our community first.
Assimilation is not a homogenation process. Germans can celebrate Oktoberfest and still be fully American.
I would acknowledge that some groups do fight assimilation entirely and remain largely insular, like perhaps some ultra-orthodox Jews and the Amish.
Italians and Irish may want to preserve their attachment to Catholic religion, but marrying any Catholic spouse would do, who would not even need to be Italian or Irish. Furthermore, attachment to Catholic religion is generally not even that strong any more nowadays. So, they will trivially consider any Christian, non-Catholic spouse for that matter, if they even bother with that, because I can see them picking a spouse amongst other religions and even amongst atheists. So, I can see them assimilating and their unique differences disappearing altogether. That won't be the case for the Jews, which is actually not a national identity, but a tribal+religious one. Otherwise, it would already have happened, and it clearly didn't. Nationalities are flimsy. They don't last, and therefore, they do not mean much. On the long run, it is a waste of time to identify with that.
In my experience that isn't true. It's certainly true that many Jews maintain a close relationship with their traditions, probably to a greater extent than many other ethnic groups. But for most I've met, although they may still go to Temple, many marry outside their religion; live, work, go to school, and have close friends among non-Jews; and consider themselves Americans and local community members.
It is neither nonsensical nor racist. It's what it is. White people, in general, on average, have more money than black people, in general, on average.
Who are you to tell @Teller what he feels or should feel or what is suitable for him to feel.
Also, as you can see below, he acknowledged his gratitude.
Quoting Teller
Quoting T Clark
PRIVILEGE is derived from ECONOMIC ADVANTAGE. IF blacks had not been so thoroughly and systematically economically disadvantaged since 1865, their present economic situation would be similar to whites, and we would not be fretting about "white privilege".
White people are not privileged by dint of a light skin color, per se, and black people are not dis-privileged by dint of a dark skin color, per se, any more than Asians or Jews are privileged to do well in school. People obtain advantages through historical processes. We know how wealth was accumulated among a very small proportion of Europeans, Indians, South Americans, and Asians. (I won't review the history here.). We know that there was a class system imported into North America from England which advantaged a small number of English upper class people and disadvantage a much larger number of English "waste" and "trash" who were poor. The upper class view of poor whites was one of disgust.
Black slaves were dehumanized, and once freed by the E. P. and the end of the Civill War, were systematically prevented from accumulating wealth. A substantial chunk of the white population were advantaged by various government programs, starting with the laws applying to the Northwest Territories (think Ohio or Indiana) which made land grants available. In various ways land grants were continued well into the 19th century across the plains to the Pacific. Many settlers obtained some wealth and some security, but thanks to the vicissitudes of agriculture, a lot of them went broke. Workers in urban areas were systematically screwed by capitalists.
The last very large effort to benefit whites was housing development begun in the Great Depression and running up to the 1970s. During these 40 to 50 years, the suburbs were hugely expanded with new, quality homes which were pretty much limited to white, middle class people. The long term appreciation of these houses, properties, and communities--complete with cultural amenities--formed the basis of economic advantage for several million people, and given inheritance and further capital accumulation, to quite a few million people.
Blacks were not allowed into the suburban housing game. Considerable expense was applied to new housing for blacks--communal, large-scale, rental housing. The initial intent and execution of the various housing projects was positive; but as everybody knows, renters do not accumulate equity, and the initial enthusiasm and support for public housing (by urban administrations) withered. Before long large scale deterioration set in, and in a surprisingly short period of time what had been good turned bad.
Three to five generations of people living in public housing, very cheap low quality privately owned rental housing, or section 8 has resulted in continued wide-spread poverty among blacks. Housing policy affects education attainment and health status, and this adds to the burdens of the poor black population. (Never mind the effects of drugs, alcohol, and the war on drugs.).
ADVANTAGE NOT PRIVILEGE.
I've changed my mind about paying reparations. I used to think it was inadvisable, impractical, unfair, and so forth. But now I think we should do it.
There are several ways that blacks can, over the long run, be compensated for the systematic discrimination practiced against them.
One way would be to fund a selective federal housing program for black people. The goal of this program would be black-owned, private, and quality-constructed homes. Grants could be made to assist with substantial down-payments, along with requirements for banks to extend loans based on non-discriminatory federal guidelines.
Another way would be to fund high-quality achievement-oriented K-12 schools and follow that with substantial-to-complete subsidies for college (linked to reasonably good academic performance). Since there is a limited need and aptitude for academic work, non-academic training should be covered by subsidies, but not operate preferentially (that is, don't arbitrarily steer black students into trades).
There are too many blacks in prison for non-violent drug offenses. They have quite broad rehabilitation needs, and programs for housing, education, mental and physical health care, and employment need to be ready and in place when they are discharged from prison.
Some level of cash grant to blacks who are too old, or not otherwise in a position to benefit from education or new housing programs, and are not in prison. Perhaps it could work like a lottery: taking the grant in payments over time would result in a larger payout than a single up-front payment.
This will, of course, cost quite a bit of money and take time. Scores of billions of dollars, I should think, paid out over time--50 years, maybe. We might have to reduce defense spending, raise taxes on the rich, or (preferably) both.
If black people deserve reparations, American Indians are even more in need. Cash, yes; benefit programs for education, economic development, health, housing, and so forth. But for American Indians I would recommend returning substantial portions of land -- territory. And let us not return land that is good for nothing--ruined, contaminated, never much good to begin with. Rather, return land that is still good. Where? scattered across the United States. Small, medium, and large tracts. large tracts of the Great Plains are already being gradually and voluntarily depopulated. Let's speed it up, and hand over some big tracts--fences, buildings, and infrastructure removed. Let the buffalo roam...
We owe Mexico a big chunk of the United States, but thanks to illegal immigration, they are gradually repopulating lost territory anyway.
But male white privileged conservatives hate handouts, even to other white people, and they are the ones who run this country for the most part. I agree with you, though. The rich are the most entitled of all.
Yes, they certainly exist. That is the kind that will assimilate, i.e. disappear in the night of history. They will not be around as a separate identity in 2000 years from now. Probably not even in 100 years from now.
African-Americans and other racial minorities were artificially kept separate through laws that forbade interracial marriage which were abrogated only in 1967. Distinct racial groups nowadays barely exist in countries like Brazil or Mexico. It got all mixed up over probably less than 200 years.
Jews also participate in interracial marriage, but they still manage to keep their separate identity afloat, even for 2000 years, because race is rather irrelevant in it. There is always a proportion of the Jewish community that assimilates and drops their separate identity, but the remainder carries on. African-Americans won't do that, because the only distinguishing feature in their community is some flimsy notion of race, which is no longer legally enforced either.
And papers like the Peggy McIntosh paper cited above are loaded with a bunch of subjective evaluative terms like "earned/unearned," "fair/unfair," etc. Those claims are not falsifiable because there are no facts regarding whether anything is earned or not, fair or not, and so on.
Granted we've got the okay to do some economic redistribution, If you or I listed the pros and cons of reparations and listed the same for economic redistribution without the racial element, you think the list for reparations would end up making it sound like the more practical and fair choice? Is there some other element?
You said you changed your mind, why is that?
If the claim isn't falsifiable, there's no way to say that it's not merely a matter of the narrative that folks want to create, and nothing could possibly sway them from that narrative, even if it has no relation to reality.
Sounds like someone’s defensive. Privileged much?
Someone's just skeptical, especially of non-falsifiable claims.
Americans have about $98 trillion in wealth. A substantial portion of that is controlled by the richest 1%, then the richest 2%, 3%, and 4%. 90% of the population controls a very small portion of the wealth, and in fact, has most of all the debt. Let's say we took $50 trillion from the rich and distributed it evenly to 350,000,000 Americans citizens. Each person would receive $142,857, regardless of race, sex, or age.
There would be HUGE financial and economic problems resulting from such a sudden transfer of wealth, which is OK because it is merely hypothetical. It is inordinately unlikely to ever happen. BUT, nevertheless, $142,857 per person would accomplish reparation and would equalize wealth, for a period of time, anyway.
A Revolution would have to have happened in order to take $50 trillion from the uber rich. I am assuming that business would not proceed as usual after the revolution. A revolution will probably be required to merely raise their taxes up to where they were, not so very long ago, at 90%.
Quoting Judaka
I became increasingly obvious to me that the black population has been subjected to several rounds of disadvantageous policy, long after slavery ended, after the Jim Crow era ended. Disadvantaging blacks is in progress right now, through the usual means: housing policy, education policy, spending priorities, and so on. And in identifying blacks as being disadvantaged, I am not denying that whites, hispanics, American Indians, and asians are also being disadvantaged by the same methods.
For an unlikely but terrific sociology read, try EVICTED: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond?. (available used, digital, libraries, or new) The book is about a black landlord in the slums of Milwaukee and a white owner of a run down house trailer park (also in Milwaukee). The renters in the slums are mostly black, and the renters in the trailer park are mostly white. Both landlords are making a lot of money off their poor tenants. The black landlord has something like 200 properties (all low quality) and the white landlord has something like 90? trailers, most falling apart. The formula is simple:
Charge as much as possible
Fix nothing (unless it is absolutely unavoidable, and maybe not even then)
Evict any tenant who misses payments and/or becomes too annoying
Renting to the poor in the slums happens to be quite profitable for the landlord. For the tenant, the chaos of their lives -- and the ruthlessness of the eviction policies, means repeated loss of money in furnishings, clothing, food, etc. Plus, the tenants are paying very high rents to live in what are, frequently, shit holes.
What goes in Milwaukee goes pretty much everywhere. There is limited public housing (which in many cities has largely been eliminated by blowing the buildings up), there are Section 8 vouchers (which do NOT provide luxurious apartments IF one can wait long enough to get a voucher, and there are a few grades of slum dwelling -- some of which might be OK, but most of which most people would refuse to live in if they had any choice in the matter. Outside of these alternatives for the poor, there is homelessness.
If your opinion changes when we have capital to redistribute then I don't get it, reparations will require capital to redistribute as well.
Your story is interesting but I still don't see any argument for why we should prioritise help/redistribution based on race. Reparations aren't even prioritising but selecting people for help based on their race. The only counterargument to this comes back to past injustices - which can't be undone and aren't a real factor now. People say they are a real factor only because they separate people based on race - if you don't do that, then what you've got is a lot of poor people - though for different reasons - dividing them by something practical like "where is help most urgently needed?" for instance is better than "this guy is black and that guy isn't, I mean come on.
We can talk all day about how economic redistribution might work and why it's necessary but it doesn't really explain the question of how you came to favour reparations over giving help based on need, ability to help and looking at how important the help being given is etc.
@Bitter Crank has said explicitly elsewhere that he considers class (i.e. money) more important than race. It is not true that "past injustices ... aren't a real factor now." I think I feel that race is a more important factor than BC does.
BC - sorry if I've put words in your mouth.
Whether we call it "reparations" or "redistribution" is not a critical question and neither are likely to happen.
The reason that I changed my mind about reparations based on race is that significant racial discrimination is clearly in force now, and has been in force for the last 50 years. (It has been in force much longer, of course, but let us concern ourselves with current discrimination.). We are concerned about institutional discrimination, not individual feelings.
Housing policy, education policy, social service policy, crime policy, illicit drug policy, prison policy, etc. have all been selectively disadvantageous to the black community. The disadvantages of the last 50 years have been built on the much longer term disadvantages of the black population.
Individual actions with respect to race play a relatively small part here. It is policy, not personal actions which are the big problem. The force of policy (like neglecting the maintenance of the large scale public housing buildings, which were a large capital investment, and which were assigned by policy to the black population, until the buildings were not fit to live in) was selectively disadvantageous to the black population. Eliminating "welfare as we know it" was selectively disadvantageous to the black population. It was of course disadvantageous to the white population too, but white people, in general, have fewer deliberate policies aimed at their suppression, at least based on race. The selective enforcement of laws prohibiting drug possession, use, and selling is disadvantageous to the black population, particularly the male population. Long prison terms for repeat offenders is an even worse policy burden.
The policies which are selectively disadvantageous could and should be changed, but even if they were changed today that would do nothing for the millions of wrecked lives which are the result of very bad policy.
Reparations are a way to aid individuals in repairing the damage. Repairing the damage done takes cash and much better policy.
I have said, and I still say CLASS IS MUCH MORE IMPORTANT THAN RACE. People who have been selectively disadvantaged and have ended up at the bottom of the class structure aren't going to get out of that location by their own efforts. This applies to whites, blacks, American Indians, asians, and anyone else who has been shafted down to the bottom.
So, again, whether we call it redistribution or reparations is unimportant. The CLASS STRUCTURE, and all the economic, social, and political policies which enforce it, are the problem. Just in case anyone forgot about it, the distribution of wealth and the power of classes has been severely skewed in the last 50, 60, 70, 80... years to favor a very small portion of the population at the disadvantage of a very large portion of the population (the 1% vs. 99%, or if you like, the 10% vs. the 90%).
It will take a literal revolution, an overthrow of the oligarchy, to enact either reparations or redistribution of wealth and a rewriting of the rules and regulations of American society. Do I expect this to happen? No, of course not. The oligarchy is riveted, bolted, and welded in place.
I can't explain myself any clearer.
Economic advantage and white privilege are different concepts. Any individual, regardless of race, can have economic advantage over another.
If you grouped people by economic status you’d find individuals of a variety of races and ethnicities.
White privilege is not about wealth, but “an invisible knapsack” of privileges afforded to members of certain races. It’s invisible because, well, it doesn’t exist.
Of course, but I don't see how that changes anything I said.
Quoting NOS4A2
As I've said, I'm coming around to the position that focusing on money rather than race will be the most effective way of helping people. As for white privilege, well, yes, it does exist.
Institutional discrimination and economic redistribution are two different things, two separate things. You are right that it doesn't seem that likely for either to happen anytime soon though. If you don't think it matters whether it's called reparations or redistribution then alright, I think it matters so that was my issue.
As you say, ultimately it will require a government that has similar ideals in economic redistribution before anything happens. I just hope it is not in the form of reparations, there is no point looking backwards nor in exacerbating racial tensions.
There are many kinds of privilege which individuals, or collectivities, can do very little about, which is what makes privilege a-not-very-useful-concept. Like straight privilege. You are straight. You were born that way. You didn't do anything to earn or acquire it. It's there because most people in general, and most people with social, financial, and political power are straight, and such big majorities tend to arrange things in their favor. Why the hell wouldn't they?
There are age privileges--different ones for different ages. 3 year olds can get away with things that 30 year olds can't, like throwing tantrums. On the other hand, 3 year olds EDIT: [s]can[/s] CAN NOT buy alcohol (legally, anyway). There are height, weight, fitness, and symmetry advantages. Tall, slim, nicely muscled men with attractive symmetrical bodies and faces have a beauty and height privilege. Tall men tend to do better in society. Short, fat, ugly men -- not so much. As the Duchess of Windsor said, "You can never be too rich or too thin."
There are geographical privileges. People who live in hot, arid sandy parts of the world will be increasingly disadvantaged compared to people who live in temperate, well-watered, and fertile parts of the world. People living in mountainous areas are attitudinally privileged over people who are going to get flooded out as the oceans rise.
White privilege in the US is like Han privilege in China. Whites and Han aren't the only people living in their respective countries, but they have been and are the majority and arranged things to their liking. Why wouldn't they? In Rwanda, the Hutu-Tutsi strife stems from class warfare, with the Tutsis perceived to have greater wealth and social status (as well as favoring cattle ranching over what is seen as the lower-class farming of the Hutus). Tutsi privilege.
True enough. One of the points I have been trying to make (with not much success, apparently) is that [i]you don't have to look backwards.[/I] In the present moment disadvantage is a matter of policy. You can look backward to see where the present disadvantageous policies came from, but the contemporary facts are clear.
I think you meant "can't." If not, you'll be getting a lot of visitors in Minnesota soon.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Sure, but the position of blacks is different, at least in the US. The level of dislike and distrust felt for them is higher, and in most cases you can't hide that you're black. I can't speak for other countries and cultures.
What I mean is, wealth should not be conflated with white privilege for the very reason that non-whites can be wealthy. They are two different concepts.
Focusing on race is the problem to begin with, and will always arrive at racist conclusions.
Exactly.
So if you decide to give out reparations or redistribution in some form to people based on race, how do you then (or now) define who's black / native indian enough? Or is you idea of making it without simply saying that it's race you are after. Well, then people won't think of it at all as reparations.
These kind of things lead to extremely bureaucratic 'racial' hierarchies, you know. A blossoming of racial purity, in a totally perverse and weird way.
This is what I feel also, but I've given up on the whole debate around it being logical. And likely know that someone will attack my view.
I see what you're saying, honestly, I feel that you're just being slightly contradictory. You agree with NOS4A2 about focuses on race leading to racist outcomes but you're also in favour of reparations. We can't ignore instances of racism but the solution isn't to compensate an entire race of people. The problems that exist today like you mention and more are problems to be resolved for sure but seeing as many of those problems exist purely because of an overly racialised focus (in my view), I can't see a response that is racially focused as being the answer.
Just as the term white privilege is neither banal nor just a statement of fact but highlights a racialised perspective which makes matters worse. It's the same.
I think that it's kind of pointless to argue about this reparations thing when you seem to be more or less in agreement with the overall message of this post anyway so I'm going to leave it there.
True, "black" is not always a certain adjective. A woman who came from 100% Northern European stock got away with calling herself black, and even became head of her local NAACP. (This was a case of this out on the West Coast, somewhere.). She just decided that "being black" fit her personality better than being white. I guess. Conversely, there are blacks who can pass for whites. So... screw race.
Unfasifiable => narratively driven.
Test that.
What is 100% Northern European? A blue eyed blonde haired Sami person, who talks about being other than a white? There's a real Northern.
The whole bullshit starts with questionnaires having that line of race/ethnicity. Here we don't have them. There is a line typically if your mother tongue is Finnish or Swedish, which would in some way give away your ethnicity. Which itself is even a bigger stupidity when taking to the extreme.
Quoting Bitter Crank
It ought to be so, but nope. Intersectionality just pushes these silly things to a new level. Actually to deny the existence of race seems to be offensive nowdays. So I assume my thinking is very incorrect here.
My wife is Mexican. I always tease her, especially in summer, that my skin is darker than hers.
It also not even true. Privilege is falsifiable by the social conditions. There is a existing/empirical reason some people are identified as having privilege or not, based on the observed social conditions.
Accusations of unfasifablity are failing to engage on the level of a definition. Like if we were trying to discuss trees, only for someone to insist claims about trees were unfalsfiable because nothing we observed was a tree.
Terripan is missing we have to have an understand of states we observe before we can identify what claims are falsified ( states of social relations like privilege included).
It doesn't equal that. What I said was that there's no way to say that it isn't that in that case. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. How would we know?
Sure. So then we make falsifiable claims and see whether they hold water. How about we start doing that?
This is not aimed at you. I don't know who you are or where you came from. Saying that we shouldn't look at race is what people who don't remember that for 400 years, all we looked at was race say. It also doesn't take into account the burden of disrespect and discrimination that our society still places on black people. "Why can't we all just be friends" is easy for a white person to say.
Let's see, what changes have been made because the law takes race into account - black people can vote, black and white people can marry each other, black people cannot be excluded from public facilities, black people don't have to ride at the back of the bus, black people can, at least in theory, have equal schools, black people cannot be discriminated on in hiring...... The US Supreme Court ruled that States could not prohibit people of different races from getting married the year I graduated from high school. It was the most wonderfully named court case in history - Loving vs. the Commonwealth of Virginia.
I've been playing both sides of the net in this discussion. It angers me how facilely white people can shrug off 400 years of brutality. At the same time, as I've said, I don't really think race-based policy will work. It will never pass and, if it were to, the Supreme Court would kick it out. I also think it would increase resentment against black people.
People should probably deal with what's going on now. Folks from 100 years ago (and often much more recent) are not typically around any longer, regardless of what side anyone was on back then.
That doesn't mean that there's no connection to any current situation, but we need to deal with now.
This is not a scientific discussion. The rules of justification are not the same.
Quoting ssu
That wasn't really seen as a problem for the past 400 years. It's only been a problem since white people have started to be held accountable. Which doesn't mean I don't agree with you from a practical point of view.
That's very convenient. Let's be fair now that fairness helps the people in power. Same as it ever was. It also ignores the on-going treatment of black people.
People have been doing it from the start. That's how they identity any instance of privilege as opposed to not. From observation of society and culture, they note how people are treated, what is expected of them, how culture understands and related to them. It's how we conclude the poor man does not have wealth privilege. We observe he lacks the wealth and any opportunity or advantages that would bring.
By obsevation of the individual in social conditions, we falsify the poor man has wealth privilege.
So we're not talking about something that's really the case empirically? What the heck are we talking about then?
Quoting T Clark
How this makes any sense to you in the context of what I said is a complete mystery.
Can we talk about some of it? Maybe suggest a claim we could start with?
Quoting T Clark
Nobody chose to be born white or black but you choose to judge them based on whether they're white or black. There's a difference between a racist and what you are but honestly, you live in the same neighbourhood.
Quoting T Clark
Well, people can shrug off the violence they themselves performed yesterday, let alone violence that preceded their birth by 400, 300, 200, 100, and fewer years. This isn't white folk behavior, this is Homo sapiens behavior. People aren't that nice.
Beside that, these "white people" may not actually exist in significant numbers -- by which I mean "people whose white identity is tightly coupled with a sense of automatic superiority, deserving advantage over non-whites, approval of violence against non-whites, entitlement, and so forth". The image that some (usually) white, so-called leftists creates of "white people" is that of a Nazi race extremist--a la Third Reich.
I'm not sure that I've met a white person in the flesh who fits the model of "white people who facilely shrug off 400 years of brutality". I'm sure they exist; I don't think they exist in large numbers.
It takes time to civilize people. A century ago (22 months short) white people rioted in Tulsa, OK.
. Wikipedia
Bad, bad, very bad bad. Three generations later a repeat of this sort of event seems extremely unlikely. If it had been happening right along, then I think the characterization of white people as nazi race extremists would be more justified. But it has not been happening right along.
I don't judge people by whether they are black or white. I'm white and I don't feel guilty about it. I try not to judge people at all, with variable success. I do try to hold white people, especially affluent white people, accountable if they won't see racial conditions as they are in the US today.
I believe you just gave a lecture on how it's wrong not to view things racially or else we've forgotten about centuries of racism.
Quoting T Clark
"Let's be fair now" I mean who's "us" and what do you mean "now"? Also, who are the "people in power"?
I don’t know who you are or where you came from either.
But no, Marin Luther King also expressed colorblindness. It was easy for him to say it as well, not because of his race, but because it was rational and ethical.
Of course people were treated differently because of their skin color. They were classified into racial groups, and treated as all alike, so much so that they were considered and treated as sub-human. It’s pseudoscience. So why utilize their system of categorization? You can’t eliminate racism by evoking it.
Attributing “privilege” or any other stereotype to a race is essentialism and racism of the worst kind.
King said - I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
He expressed a dream of colorblindness, knowing, I assume, it wouldn't happen for a long time. It still hasn't happened and it won't until people recognize how things are.
Quoting NOS4A2
"People were treated differently." "They were classified in to racial groups. "They were considered and treated as sub-human."
"You can’t eliminate racism by evoking it." You can't create an equitable and honorable society without recognizing and acknowledging it.
You express your opinion, I give a lecture. Our society "views things racially." People in power "view things racially.
Quoting Judaka
People in power - Those who don't get arrested when they drive down the street. Those who aren't treated with suspicion wherever they go. Those who aren't sent to prison as a matter of routine. Those who are the beneficiaries of hundreds of years of preferential treatment. Those who don't remember having to ride in the back of the bus.
Ah yes, why don't I also start giving as the example of white people that colonized America, the Nazis. Very fitting to the times to link "white" with "nazis". Very woke from you, Bitter C. No need to mention that the countries were European colonies that similarly were populated by European immigration just like some former British colonies up north. And that the basic social problem is between these the native Indian population and those with European heritage.
One clear example of the still alive Anglo-American racist tendencies is the categorization of the "Latino" and the reference to the "Non-Hispanic White" which naturally creates a class of "Hispanic Whites" which is simply not mentioned. (Of course the whole insistence of race and the use of racial categorizations in the first place is a more clearer example.)
Somehow it is totally out of question that the most logical divide (if division of this kind can be logical at all) of people in the Americas would be a) Native Americans, b) European Settlers and c) Settlers from other continents, which include the slaves from Africa. Nope, totally impossible for people in the US. You see, the offspring of Italian/German/Finnish emigrants who came to the British colonies (or former colonies) are considered "white", but the offspring of Italian/German/Finnish emigrants to the ex-Spanish/Portuguese colonies are "latinos". Doesn't matter if they have not mixed at all with other groups.
And when the ludicrous logic is indeed noticed, like that actually many Argentinians are of European descent, the term "Latino" isn't used anymore, immediately a newer classification (yes, racists just love classifications!) has to be created with the "Non-Hispanic White". So now we have again a divide were one group of Americans with pure Italian/German/Finnish heritage are separated from another group of Americans with pure Italian/German/Finnish by the language they speak in the new World. Typically a division by the language spoken would be an ethnicity issue, not a racial issue, but as I said, racism is alive and strong in one country.
But this actually is totally in line with the illogical way racists define things. So called "White" people who are racist are naturally racist to others that at first would be thought to be "white". Racists in Europe do not at all use a term like "Caucasian" and only later have started to mimick the American racist rhetoric, which has this hilarious idea of universal "whiteness". Just start from thinking how many groups of now considered "white" people in the US were untermenschen in the eyes of the Third Reich. But of course, something built of xenophobia, fear and hatred of the other and the hubris of oneself doesn't have to be logical.
You are lecturing us on history and telling me that people's opinion is a result of their whiteness. As if you're the only person here who knows about slavery, segregation or the past extents of racism. You posit that the white race is in power in America, society may view things racially but society is flawed. Your way of thinking perpetuates racism, it is racist really, you can't have separate rules for people based on their race,
Racism existed and exists and that's clearly to the disadvantage of black people, no shit. How tragic it is that it exists, that people will group others and themselves by race and prejudice against people based on race - oh wait, that's you, right?
It's true, and also irrelevant, that race has no anatomical or genetic basis. That it's an artificial construct. Fact is, race in this context was invented by Europeans, white people, as a way to put other people in their place, to dehumanize them so they could be exploited. Now it's no longer convenient or useful to those in power to discuss race. To claim it doesn't exist would be funny except for the fact that it's not funny at all.
Oh, no... Judaka thinks I'm a racist. Boo hoo. And, of course you can have rules for people based on their race. We've had them ever since one group of people met another group. It's too bad that's true, I guess, but it is what it is. As I've said previously, thems that runs things no longer find it convenient or useful, so let's get rid of it.
And no, I don't think that applies to you. I think you sincerely believe what you've said in a principled way. And you're not really wrong in theory except that it ignores 400; maybe 10,000; years of history.
Are you sure this was invented by Europeans? By this I mean the dehumanization of other people. I would consider racism an universal phenomenon and easily you can have the phenomenon appearing in older cultures. As far as I remember ancient history, people were extremely xenophobic. And being afraid of the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Persians or the Romans would be a sound thing if you would be living next to them, actually.
Quoting T Clark
What I think is that we are starting lose the ability to talk about the issue openly.
That's why I wrote "in this context." I also wrote:
Quoting T Clark
I don't ignore history, I don't believe in racial histories. I despise racists and people who believe in racial histories. I do not want to overturn the past, I want a future with no racism. I am an individualist, I want people to be judged for their individual characteristics and NOT group identities, which I reject for the most part.
The counterargument to this is not to try to be more compassionate than me, giving examples of racism, poverty and corrupt legal systems and acting as if you care more than me. Also, it isn't to say that you're justified to be using racial histories and racial prejudice because it existed historically - something you should condemn not emulate?
Also, I don't aim to hurt your feelings, no point acting like I'm a fool for trying. I merely apply my beliefs to discussions and observe the results.
Then I guess you despise me.
Quoting Judaka
When push comes to shove, what matters is what works best to make things better. As I've acknowledged, I've come to believe that may be focusing on class rather than race. Of course, I guess class doesn't really exist either. Do you despise me for that too? Let's say "wealth" then.
I don't think I'm more compassionate than you, I just think you are mislead by your ideology.
So you are essentially conceding that my approach is more practical - in that you have said that a racially focused solution is not the way to go. What are the benefits to your "ideology"?
I've been saying that throughout this discussion.
Quoting Judaka
It's two separate issues - How things are. What we do about them. What are the benefits of knowing how things are? 1) Knowing the truth is good in and of itself. 2) Facing the unpleasant truth is good for the soul. 3) Understanding how things got the way they are may make it easier for people to change their attitudes 4) Knowing how things got the way they are has implications for who should be held primarily responsible for making things better.
Wait a minute, people aren't red and yellow black and white randomly. People inherit the characteristics of their racial group (or mixed racial group), such as skin coloration and a zillion genetic traits from their biological parents. To paraphrase a George Carlin skit:
Are you sure that no other large grouping of people, like those living in Asia, on their own didn't/don't parse differences among peoples in a similar way that Europeans did/do? Or People in Africa, the Western Hemisphere, etc.?
"Race" has both denotative and connotative meanings, some of the latter which are positive, some negative, and some neutral. In a 1912 hymn, "O master workman of the race" (Jesus), "race" means "human". It has also referenced what we call ethnicity--Irish, Catalonian, Ukrainian, etc. Race has been applied to the African, Asian, Caucasian, Amerindian, and Australian aboriginal peoples.
Then it has famously and notoriously been applied to the "Aryan race", a concoction of the National Socialist German Workers' Party, the leadership of which often fell very far short of the Aryan Ideal: tall, blond, blue-eyed, muscular, etc.
Race, referencing ethnicity, should be criticized for seeing consistency of traits, particularly in Europe. The peoples of Europe have been stirred and mixed about as much as possible, going back to the earliest waves of migration out of Africa, and subsequent east-west-north-south sloshing of population movement.
Race, referencing the largest groups of peoples, has more validity. The people of Africa, those who did not migrate, display the genetic great diversity of the "root stock" of the world's population. Africans do not have Neanderthal or Denisovans DNA, because those and other ancient humanoid groups arose from the earliest outward migrations from Africa. The Eurasian plains, the area north of the Middle East, was the mixing bowl out of which Aboriginal, Amerindian, Asian, and European people came.
The Great Error in the concept of race is that [I]some races are better than others[/i], rather than there are some differences among the races.
Racial histories and your prejudice against different races are not "truths", they are interpretations. Doesn't appear that many people on this forum understand the difference honestly and it's just an egotistical outlook to have, thinking your interpretations = the truth. Your "benefits" all are based on you being more knowledgable than me, which is just a convenient assumption, it cannot be anything but an assumption.
When we are talking about interpretations, the benefit cannot be "knowing more". This is a philosophy forum, I am not interested in trying to "win" arguments - there is no winning. So, there can only be the hope to expand my knowledge and develop my opinions. Your views have no practical application, there's a litany of downsides (literally) to them and now you're just hoping it's good enough to portray yourself as the one dealing with tough truths. Toxic interpretations aren't tough truths, they're dumb truths and they're subjective. Anyway, I think I'm done here.
Quoting Judaka
This ought to be obvious, but seldom is. Actually, that addition of "I reject for the most part" is crucial. Because to say differences between groups people don't exist at all, or are only the invention of the mind of some people, isn't right either.
Quoting Bitter Crank
And then there are differences inside one race. I think the taboo-stigma of the topic makes it quite difficult. Or the hypocrisy involved in it.
I wasn't trying to open up the question of whether or not race has a physical, genetic basis, although I recognize that the way I wrote it did just that. What I was trying to do was show that the social basis of race is what matters. White people defined black people as black and treated them differently because of that. That makes race real.
As I said, sorry that I confused things.
Makes sense to me.
I agree with that.
Is it? My identity is defined by my relation to the world. That includes other people. There's family, neighbourhood, city, state, the world. I "borrow" from it all. Then there's how I relate to human history; get from my parents, studied in a university over 400 years old, live in a house I didn't build. Or as the ancient celts said: I draw water from wells I didn't build. There's nothing "individual" about my identity at all. It's one of the more persistent illusions of our time that the individualism is something to aspire to while it really is a degradation of society.
That's not to say we should blindly accept the position and relations that we are thrown in. In the end freedom is about accepting the chains we want to bind ourselves with; family, friends, kids etc.
So getting that back to privilege, I think the main differences can be found there: it's mostly about opportunity to be able to choose. Money makes it easier to choose, so people with more are privileged. Sometimes that's even unfair, e.g. inheritance inequality or exorbitant salaries or taxation rules disproportionally benefitting RoI over wages.
And there's definitely a privilege to being part of the dominant sub-culture within a nation and that's still being male, white, straight, no tattoos etc. All else being equal, I'm more likely to land a job interview than the guy with the foreign sounding name on his resume. All else being equal, I'm less likely to be stopped by police. All else being equal, people are less likely to call the cops when I'm tresspassing. Here's a nice video demonstrating that in the Netherlands, where being white makes all the difference:
The experiment fails because they didn't have the subjects doing the same thing—it's conceivable that the hacksawing looked more suspicious in itself than the hammer-tapping, and even if it wasn't, changing the activity invalidates the whole thing. Which is a pity because I suspect the underlying point is true but the filmmakers wanted to make sure they got the "right" result and gerrymandered things.
Edit: The video description says this: "They all used the same utensils (hammer, saw, plyers) for the same amount of time." So, as it should be. Why they only showed the white guy using the hammer and the other two using the hacksaw is beyond me then.
I've never seen that word used that way. Not a complaint. Maybe I'll use it too. That's how language changes.
It's both a verb and a noun. Results here though https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/ do suggest you yanks predominantly use it as a noun.
Edit: Maybe you were just referring to my metaphorical use. In which case, yes, gotcha (literal use also predominant in the corpus).
Americans use it as both a noun and a verb, but I've never heard it used to refer to anything other than establishing inequitable voting districts. The word comes from here in Massachusetts. You seem to be using it to mean a kind of generic screwing around to misrepresent things.
I couldn't get access to the link you provided without registering.
Thought so. See my edit. And I'd forgotten I'd previously registered. But it's worth the two minutes to have that site at your disposal if you're a language buff.
I don't mind the metaphorical use, although Governor Gerry might.
Quoting Benkei
What's your reasoning for favouring collectivism over individualism?
Quoting T Clark
You do and you'll be sharing a small, damp, hot, mold and vermin-infested cell with Baden. He's being charged by the Anglo-Saxon Gestapo with felony misappropriation, unauthorized use of a term with a very solid and specific meaning***, and other high crimes and misdemeanors.
***early 19th century: from the name of Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts + salamander, from the supposed similarity between a salamander and the shape of a new voting district on a map drawn when he was in office (1812), the creation of which was felt to favor his party; the map (with claws, wings, and fangs added) was published in the Boston Weekly Messenger, with the title The Gerry-Mander.
More proof of how Massachusetts politics have been rotten from the beginning.
@Baden is an Irishman living in Southeast Asia. Not much chance of extradition. I, on the other hand, am duly chastened and beg forgiveness and mercy.
The Anglo Saxon Gestapo knows exactly where he lives. As for you, just make sure that you gerrymander nothing but congressional boundaries.
We don't even have to go that far. The individual exists within an environment which affects them. From the point of an individualist, one needs to consider what effects are happening in the enviroment or collective. Individuals and their successes never occurs without it.
Indeed, we are properly speaking about individualists here. Those who align themselves against society using people in terms of race, gender, economics etc., are deeply indvidualist in they want to deny society misuse or mistreatment of a person for it's goals. The core of these movements is well-being of an individual. (contrast to collectivist accounts which these sort of exploitation is fine if it creates a social order).
The indvidual is the goal of group identifaction. We use it to form an undstanding of who someone is and how they belong. It sets up who an indivdual is to us and our society.
So it is true social catergories like race, gender, sex, economic value, family, our names, are created. We add them, use them, for our specifcally social purposes.
But this doesn't mean they don't exist or mean something. People exist as different individuals. When people encounter each other or not, they take on signifcance or not. If a child, for example, is named, then it can be tlaked abour and related to. We can form ideas about who this person is, how society relates to them or not.
To know the differance of Willow, for example, means being able to identify I am one society needs to feed. Or being able to identify me as a threat who must starve, so a food store lasts longer.
To fail to know Willow puts me outside society's grasp
If people don't have e concept or category for me, then I cannot be related to. People cannot work together to benefit my individual ( "feed Willow" ) or specifically prevent it ( "never feed that monster Willow" ).
The problem with trying to ignore race it was specifcally formed to relate ro real existing people. In the same way a name is our connection to how an indviudal is part of our society, so is race. It became our way of relating to many different people. Our society named us with races organise us as the different people who exist.
Those diffrenecs don't go away just because we wake up one day and decide never to mention race. Not only to we have the problem of people still relating in racial terms without saying so, but there is the wider issue of our society. The way it has related to existing people is still presence. Dispossession or exclusion of these different people doesn' or go away just because we eliminate a category of race from our thoughts.
After all, those effects happened or are on the underlying person and how they exist within our society. Put another way, to speak about "racial injustices" is not to talk about our thoughts or intentions, but of material conditions of someone in society, conditions which are present whether we chooe to call them racism or not.
Very true. And when they have economic advantages over others, the advantages and privileges derived therefrom are about money--not race.
That said, I don't reject government interference at the detriment of some individual liberty outright as I do think it has a role to play in creating opportunity, eg. positive freedom. Stuff like universal healthcare is a no brainer to me, considering I've never once have had to worry about medical bills or those of my family or having to skimp on treatment due to money concerns.
The problem here is not identifying obvious physical attributes like race or gender, nor is it that people think they have significance. The issue is "interpretative relevance" or the meaning we take away from those characteristics. For instance, presuming that because someone is black, he is more likely to be dangerous.
There are a plethora of ways to "know Willow" and some of them make more sense than others. It isn't just that I may have an opinion about how people are based on their race and gender, it's that I could use my opinions about their race and gender and consider them sufficient to know how to think about someone and how to deal with someone. That defines whether "Willow" can be simply characterised by gender and race or whether other characteristics are important.
I've got no problem (and it would be silly if I did) with people having their identity based on the many groups they belong to. Though I don't necessarily agree with how liberally people call things groups when they could just as easily be called characteristics, gender is an example of that.
My goal is not to eliminate race as a concept - it's to reduce the interpretative relevance of race. To remove it as something that people use to judge others and prioritise as a way to form opinions about others.
Individuals should be responsible for their actions and not the actions of the groups they belong to, they shouldn't be disliked because of what others with their skin colour or gender did. Social justice is not an excuse, there is no excuse. Racists, those who believe in racial histories and the like aren't evil - they're just stupid.
Everyone has the ability to make a choice.
Well, yeah, but, like, what I mean is that the term "white privilege" didn't really appear until 1989. It just takes a while for things like that to be phased through the left-wing sloganeering that occurs in overly eager activist camps so that they can be rendered meaningful. Personally, I think that "white privilege" is a rather meek euphemism, and that a better term ought to be adopted.
Groups if people have always been targeted to feel guilty, useless and/or ill-treated; likely before our species came into being. It doesn’t take a genius to see such social behaviors in others parts of the animal kingdom.
It’s just words that make the phenomenon more apparent substantial, leading to its power is political discourse.
I think that the phenomenon of race is relatively new. Race is a social construct which only came into being during whatever you want to call the era of civilization.
As far as "white privilege" is concerned. It is the case that 'Western civilization' has resulted in a global situation to where being "white" offers you an unfair advantage. White people, or even people who, like myself, for all intensive purposes, pass as white (I'm a quarter Columbian, which, according to most racists, makes me "not white" (I think that the consensus is something like 12%.(You know that you're giving the other party too much credit when you ask whether they round up or down, but I think that it might be 12 so that you'd have to be four generations apart.))), should consider that in some regard. Perhaps the notion of "white privilege" doesn't need to stick around as it is means of getting a certain point accross that is only so effective, but the idea doesn't need to be wholeheartedly disbanded. You are, through the magic of chaosmosis, somehow partially responsbile for whatever situation it is that you find yourself in.
I mean, I'm just saying that in spite of that I don't technically have it, I do check my "white privilege" and that, if you are a white person, you should too.
The worst period of Jim Crow is now a century past. Those people are also dead.
The people to whom a debt could be considered payable are the children of the last generation and their parents. So 3 generations, back to the beginning of the Federal Housing Program post WWII. During the 1940s, 50s, 60, and into the 1970s, blacks were systematically excluded from a critical wealth-building program: the construction of huge suburban tracts around all of the major cities. They were excluded explicitly: Blacks were not to be approved for mortgages in suburban building projects. (You can read all about the policy in the recent book, The Color of Money.)
Whites who were given mortgages in the suburban projects were able to benefit from the appreciation of their high quality homes. Home value appreciation became the core cash asset of the white middle class.
For blacks? It was new, large-scale, high rise construction that was designated as rental property. The quality of the homes was good, but urban administrations were usually not willing to spend the money on maintaining the buildings so that they would remain good places to live. In any case, renters do not accumulate equity.
In cities where the large high-rise and dense public housing buildings were maintained, they remain in good shape. After all, cast concrete doesn't deteriorate very fast. Of course, it wasn't the concrete that failed in cities that neglected their public housing. It was the elevator systems, heating, ventilation, cleaning, routine maintenance, and security that failed, eventually turning the neglected buildings into cast concrete shit holes.
In addition to dealing the black population out of value-appreciating suburban housing, blacks tended to be concentrated (an active process) in specific "redlined" areas -- slums, in other words. Generally low levels of income caused by poor education, insufficient access to jobs or the transportation needed to get to outlying jobs, and harsh policing (which other groups of people were not subject to) resulted in the present underclass. You can add on to all that "the end of welfare as we know it" in the 1990s under William Jefferson Clinton, president of the US from Arkansas.
Just as suburban development benefitted whites from coast to coast, the pattern of denying blacks opportunity was also carried out coast to coast.
The blacks who would receive reparations, if reparations were to be handed out (don't worry, they won't be, ever) are blacks who are alive now and have suffered under current and recent policy.
Look, you didn't do it to blacks, and I didn't do it to blacks. My parents didn't participate in the suburban program because they lived in a small town, where the FHA was not building nice homes. I didn't benefit from black poverty, and neither did you. The idea of reparations doesn't depend on you or me benefitting or causing the problem. We are merely part of the country led by some people who went out of their way to fuck over black people once more time.
Again, I would agree that those needless injustices should be compensated for, except that it would be people like you and me indirectly paying for it, which would just cause more hardship for everyone.
I wasn't saying about physical identifying attributes. My point was that a person, in how they exist within a social context, a material state of the world. That's to say, they are present in certain relations in a given society. The material state(s?) in question here aren't a particular feature of a person we might cite as a cause of some circumstance or another, it's the fact of a person existing in a given society.
"Interpretative relevance" means nothing here. These aren't questions of merely taking the world a certain way or not, having some sort of whim about what people mean.The existing people and society from a objective relation.
Regardless of whether we think about or accept it, it is true that black communities have, for example, been subject to economic disadvantage. The underlying people we are talking about have been affected by many things, often by polices which systematically affect their communities, which form a material social relation. A relation which exists even if we want to take the step on longer using racial concepts or posing them as a reason for anything.
In other words, it's not a question of judging anyone in term of their race. The point of these descriptions is not to judge the character of anyone based on their race, it's to describe the material condition of society relation to people. White privilege is not to say any given white person is terrible. It's only a description of a material feature of society people find themselves in.
"White privilege" does often get deployed accusations of character of white people, but that's on account white people denying or ignoring issues of racism within the material condition of society. The privileged have a tendency to ignore of dismiss the concern of the oppressed-- e.g. the poor white person who insists there cannot be white privilege because of their one terrible circumstances and forms defence of white supremacist identity.
But to be born into an advantage of white (or any other kind) privilege isn't a judgement of character. People just get confused because of how privilege gets raised when they are trying to defend oppressive identities, traditions and social structures (which is why their character is judged to be poor).
Some reasons:
I am specifically talking about the United States. I'll let others speak for other countries.
The government, society has a responsibility to address the consequences of it's past and present actions. "Tough toenails" is not a very satisfactory response.
Quoting Waya
As a wise man once said "But that's life. Life isn't fair."
'White Privilege'
I will not deny the importance of focusing upon deep seated institutional racism. There is much knowledge capable of being gleaned about the justice system of the United States from/by looking at actual numbers/cases of police shootings and more movingly... the remarkable difference(s) between criminal sentences handed down along the lines of race to perpetrators of the same crime(s). There are patterns that cannot be permitted to continue. We need productive factual practical discourse regarding race relations.
I deny that the notion of 'white privilege' is the best way to get there.
On it's face, the notion itself smacks of exactly what it's purportedly against. Racism is what happens when one judges an entire group of people - on some personal *value* level. Based upon race alone some negative worth/value is attributed. It's - at best - the fallacy of gross overgeneralization, and it is at the heart of racist thought, belief, and/or statements thereof.
The only thing that all people of the same race have in common is they're people of a certain race.
The vestiges of full-blown racism is understandable given that cultural integration/acceptance is still new to many people. The overwhelming fear of others that comes is undoubtedly grounded upon the human penchant for war. The scarcity of resources combined with wanting what others have is a thread that binds human history. Brutal killers as rulers. There is a time when it is wise to fear certain people.
When talking about how to go about change, we can start by realizing that some people you just can't reach. Be very very careful who you place in such a group and how you further describe that group. Some people have hate filled thought/belief/minds/hearts. These people are not rational. They are angry. Walking volcanoes. The mark of rationality/reasonability is the ability to consider(at least temporarily) another viewpoint.
However, there are minds to be changed and/or otherwise helped. Some reachable people are white. Some of those whites have been taken advantage of - by the system - throughout their own history. Many if not most of those people look out into the world and do not feel privileged.
Some reachable white people have not been taken advantage of. Some have experienced much privilege. All of those non racist white people - regardless of socioeconomic circumstances - capable of being awakened to the deep seated racism still pervading many communities and governments ought be reached without appealing to fallacy.
It has never been the case that all whites have equal 'white privilege'.
There are many white people who could be swayed if they themselves felt better understood. There are many commonalities between the oppressed. Race is one. Not all white people have equal privilege. That's the way it is and the way it has always been.
However, unless these less fortunate white people had legitimate well-grounded fear of being physically harmed by the police even though they have done nothing illegal/wrong, unless they've felt all alone and in immediate physical danger in a room full of strangers - from the same race, unless they have served much of a life sentence for a crime that they did not commit, unless you could feel the unwarranted unwelcomed stares and comments about your race, unless these things(and much more) were a part of your daily thought/belief and life not by choice...
...then you have had the privilege of being a white citizen in the US.
And they have been paying Jews and the state of Israel - billions of Marks.
Unless, of course, you extracted it from those with the most resources -- the very small very rich segment of the population that controls most of the wealth in the country.
I see no universal benefit in shifting prejudices and enforcing them in political discourse - it will no doubt remain a concealed weapon used for good and bad in the near and coming future until another kind of prejudice takes centre stage.
Sadly extreme voices in the world today attract attention because people enjoy a little drama. If humanity as a whole isn’t completely stupid we’ll muddle through.
Guilt and jealousy are dangerous beasts. The vast majority of people on the planet take their advantages for granted - I guess guilt and greed at least do good in keeping greed in check to some degree.
The term “race” may be relatively new, but it is irrelevant given that humanity has lived with various internal and external prejudices and biases in all forms of societal interaction - both pre and post civilization. Different ‘religion’, ‘language’, ‘diet’, ‘geography’, etc., are all different iterations of the modern, and fashionable, slight ‘race’ used to undermine groups. It’s just ‘culture’. Culture is not ‘constructed’ by humans in any purposeful sense (other than being honed to serve tribalism - an exaggeration of the underlying nature of human nature put to political use).
The general conflicts that arise are mostly due to people either wanting to be part of something greater than how they perceive themselves or to be greater than they perceive themselves - both positions seem to be part and parcel of ‘being a human’ and both, upon logical consideration, also seem to be equally futile ... kinda funny really :)
The conflict of these two contrary perceptions of ‘being a human’ are what makes us both destroyers and creators of our own future, of our own dreams, and of our own hopes, wishes and fears.
My message is simple enough ... Point the finger if we wish, but remember that whomever we wish to blame, whatever we perceive as ‘holding us back/down’ will cease to be one day. All the people alive today will die - it doesn’t make sense to me to measure my life against what others have and don’t have, about what is ‘fair’ and ‘unfair’. I’m here and that is my singular ‘privilege’ and with such ‘privilege’ comes a substantially greater weight of responsibility to myself and others that makes petty squabbles of skin tones, languages spoken and culinary preferences so mind-bogglingly unimportant it almost makes me hysterical.
Note: I also find arguments based on individual cases to be pandering to the current sensationalism that perpetuates most media sources today - the age of ‘click-bait’. The generations coming through will hopefully grow up understanding such silly tactics and find themselves falling prey to a whole new set of silly political antics ... and thus the cycles continues :)
Enjoy fellow humans, remember next time you walk down the street look at people and say to yourself, “They’ll all be dead soon enough as will I. Such is the curious mystery of ‘being human’ so why should I care about singular differences when we’re a myriad of the same thing in extraordinarily differentiated situations and moods.”
Anyway, was fun writing that now I’m going to depart.
Yes, petty squabbles such as slavery, disenfranchisement, violence, police brutality, inequitable court systems, generalized suspicion and distrust, job and housing discrimination, etc.
There are a few who definitely won't be dead soon enough for my satisfaction. I won't begin naming names. Everyone, supply your own list.
Hey, I thought you liked me.
Ken Cheng: The other kids all called me “token” growing up. At least that’s what they put at the top of my Christmas cards. Sure, there was a space between the “to” and the “ken” but the point remains the same.
Ken Cheng: To All the Racists I’ve Blocked Before is at Bedlam theatre
Well, I was not talking about white privilege but identity.
For white privilege, it's a pernicious and toxic term.
The first important point is that "white privilege" is not a fact, it's an interpretation of facts. As far as the facts go, they are what they are. Just in the 1960s and 70s blacks were being subjected to very real and overt racism from the government with deprivation of their rights, persecution by police and so on. Opportunities are low, poverty is high, things were very bad only 50 years ago. No matter how good their situation is now, they couldn't possibly now equal the average in America - and the situation now isn't very good anyway.
Actually, if white privilege was said just like you and I have said it that's already most of the controversy gone. There's still the issue of ignoring all races besides white which are doing as well (or better) than whites.
Most of the advantages listed in "white privilege" even if they're BASED on facts are malicious in nature. If you're going to talk about the economic advantages of being born white, you've stopped dealing in facts and you've entered the realm of interpretation. White people can be born rich or poor, there's no innate economic advantage in the colour of your skin. There are many such examples of this.
People talking about white privilege are usually more than happy to throw in unfalsifiable, baseless claims about unconscious racism, hyperbolising the threat of police, including conspiracy theories etc.
Nobody should ever take "white privilege" as a reputable sociology term, it's rarely offered that way either. The implications are pessimistic and ugly, the term is obnoxious and it's the term is used with unfalsifiable claims and has either depressing or nasty interpretations. It's doing nobody any favours to be introduced to the term and it has literally no value of any kind.
People only offer sob stories for why the word is needed, when I hear a practical argument for why I should tolerate the term then I'll listen but mostly it's just people giving moral imperatives or being in denial about how the term is not simply describing the facts. I googled " list of white privileges" and took a look at every link on the first page. It's really not hard to find that "white privilege" goes beyond what's factual for many. It's not just white people refusing to accept the facts.
http://crc-global.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/white-privilege.pdf
https://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/10-examples-that-prove-white-privilege-exists-in-every-aspect-imaginable-20170724
So were you going to pony up and suggest a falsifiable claim to talk about, or?
I'm comfortable that others understood what I was saying, even if you didn't.
Okay, I found that interesting. Thanks for going on about it i like sushi.
I already did in my previous post. A social state of privilege or oppression is falsifiable. We make observation of whether it exists on society or not. You could pick any such instance or claim. It's a relation of existing society. We observe in society to test whether it is present.
Remember, we aren't talking giving some kind of reason as to why a specific causal event occurs, but rather describing the existence of particular social condition. As such, we aren't asking how, for example, one group came to be disadvatged is a certain way or not, but rather making the observation that they are in the given social context. (with respect to specific causes, there are many and varied, but none of them the specfic fact we are talking about here. Just as the cause of a tree growing or not is distinct from giving a description of whether a tree is present).
So "Privilege exists" say. What are we claiming that we are observing or would observe, exactly?
Quoting T Clark
Quoting I like sushi
I think maybe you missed something here Sushi? You referred to 'petty squabbles of skin tones'.
T Clark's response was along the lines of, 'you mean petty squabbles like slavery, etc?' which implied that he thought, that you were saying, that issues like slavery and disenfranchisement were 'petty squabbles'.
Is that what you meant? How did he reinforce your point?
Upon re-reading, maybe your point was 'life is tough and none of this crap will matter in a billion years, so EVERYTHING is just petty squabbles'...but that seems a meaningless point...?
Check out The Innocence Project...
No, of course not. Some of the black people's actions increased racism though. I have found that Booker T. Washington's approach to the issue would have been the most productive and in the long run, reduced racism the most.
I strongly disagree with you here. White people are not given any more privilege than any other human in most places currently. It is more that society has been playing with the minds of black people making them feel like some kind of victim. Sure, they have had some hard times in history, but let's point out the other hard times of other races. In African history, white people were enslaved and severely disadvantaged. Should Africans be assisting white people who live there for all the setbacks they had?
As a country, we must realize that the government is not the people. The actions the government made are now the past, and we must work to prevent it in the future. That is about all that we can or should do.
It will create more racism, and in fact, already has. We too should dream, as Martin Luther King did, of a day when we won't be considered for the color of our skin, but for who we are. Not all wrongs will be made right, but we can certainly work harder to prevent further wrongs from being made.
I'm 67 years old. I have friends who had to ride in the back of a bus. I graduated from high school in a town in southern Virginia in 1969, which is the year it became legal for black and white people to marry there.
I think @I like sushi knows what I was trying to say. I just have a really different perspective on it than he/she does. That ignorance of or indifference to history infuriates me.
Quoting Waya
I can't think of any response to this. I'm just shaking my head.
Quoting Waya
I'm sure you're a nice person, trying to do what you think is right, but it makes me sick to my stomach to see you quote that man who gave his life for us. You should be ashamed.
Willful ignorance.
You didn't misquote him, you misappropriated his beliefs. And no, I didn't "insult your person." I didn't say anything bad about you. I said something about what you wrote. I'm allowed to do that.
In my own personal recent history, I've witnessed a group of co-workers stand up as a united front - arm in arm - against exactly that kind of unwarranted negative value placement upon another.
Mine or someone else's?
Quoting T Clark
Willful ignorance?
If you're writing about the things I've said, I never called anyone racist. I never do. I don't find racism to be a useful concept. It also sets off a bunch of emotional and defensive responses that obscure the discussion. I try to accept the good will of people in these types of discussions to the extent I can.
Indeed. I agree. You did not.
I was writing about what you said. I was not offering a report of what you said.
Quoting T Clark
Sounds good as long as we talk about the devaluation of another based upon race alone.
Hard to get a good handle upon white privilege without discussing it's roots.
I'm not an expert on King and what he believed, but I'll take him at his word - equality was, and is, a dream. You know - "I have a dream." A dream for the future, not a reality for 1963 or 2019.
Indeed. Some renditions of King are empty of all meaningful content.
But it is such an important topic.
Let's leave it at that for now. I think we've painted ourselves into a corner. Next time we pick this up maybe we'll be able to carry it further.
I’m ignorant of history to some degree (who isn’t!). I’m not inclined to view the entirety of human pre/history as focused on one particular nation within one particular century. It was clear enough that I was talking in broad terms so it is not my fault that other’s take on a relatively skewed perspective alongside what I actually said and what I was referring to.
My point about everyone dying was playing off the psychological view I referred to earlier in that post - human’s being creatures that tend to view themselves as important and, contrarily, also as insignificant and wanting to work for something important. My reply was specifically to the person I replied to and in that light I was framing the broader human enigma of general prejudice as being part of our regard toward our sense of responsibility and our fear of facing up to our unknown influence on others and influences that steer us this way or that.
Differences in phenotypes are not significant other than being part and parcel of the human proclivity toward visual stimuli.
I won’t use the term in the OP. I can talk about it, but I refuse to use it because I find it inappropriate and distasteful; as I do various other terms. I generally try to remember to use parenthesis when talking about ‘race’ too in the hope other’s will do the same rather than confuse it with race (as defined by science).
‘Prejudices’ are carried by everyone - meaning some people have irrational dislikes due to personal experiences that they’ve never addressed in a rational manner (or skewed because of over-rationalization). It is just part of survival and it has helped us get to where we are. The puzzle is how to cope with such things in complex societies. In most cases people are generally not inclined to address all their flaws and instead focus on their positive attributes instead. How to safely address our innate flaws and work with them is the responsibility of everyone - and a responsibility we tend to avoid due to its self-destructive nature.
I understand perfectly well that there is a debate in the US, and in other countries too, about how certain demographics have been maltreated in the past and whose children’s children’s children have suffered as a repercussion.
It is a privilege to talk about these topics with people all over the globe at the tap of a few keys without fear of being censored/imprisoned. That is not to suggest for a second that there are not problems ... to imply I would say such is self-righteous brought on by emotional reactions, induced by political agenda or just plain old ‘being a human’ and muddling through the day-to-day problems of saying stuff and being perceived as saying something different.
To be clear, I’m quite happy to talk about how to attempt to right certain wrongs. I won’t use the term in the title of the OP though - I imagine, due to past form, most people will just be outraged than offer up any particularly reasonable course of action to deal with possible options. Drama is just more fun though and given that internet culture is flooded with ‘click bait’ journalistic pieces I’m only really inclined to listen for so long as there are numerous phrases that just get repeated over and over without the person uttering them offering up views in manner that isn’t openly biased and is decided closed of from any attempt by others who offer opposing positions simply to explore the subject.
To address teh OP directly. Feeling ashamed of anything is to be applauded. This means you’re facing up to something that makes you uncomfortable. On the other hand I find it, in equal measures, to be rotten to the core to insist that other people should be ashamed - that is only going to cause deep-seated hatreds to surface uncontrollably. Simply expressing views about things allows others to pay attention to what is being said and maybe come to question their own positions and possible feel shame/pride or whatever the issues that arise are.
I think all of the above is ‘common sense’ and I’m not suggesting, hinting or implying anyone in particular as ‘guilty’ of any misdemeanor anymore than I am myself ... well, in honesty that is not completely true. I have impressions that I cannot displace and I’m sure others have impressions of me that they cannot displace.
Motivation is a difficult thing. It’s so much easier to just blame circumstances - oddly enough, in my personal experience, I find those on the bottom rung of the societal ladder tend to complain about very little indeed.
Funny, I met a guy who’d just been to visit the US for the first time. He said he was “shocked by how many homeless people there were.” He had this mental impression that didn’t match reality as he was from a country that isn’t as “developed” (Vietnam).
I judge myself, and necessarily judge others by my own views/standards - what else can I do other than remain open to my own ignorance and understand my perspective is always small no matter how broadly I extend it.
Being rich and especially being educated makes people privileged compared to others in our present society. Of course, it ought not to be any surprise that societies that try to be meritocracies, the outcome can be (and usually still is) deeply divided between those who are privileged (rich, educated, that are professionals) and those who are not. Would you have your job without higher education? I wouldn't if had not finished the gymnasium. And obviously wouldn't have two academic jobs without a Masters degree.
Yet one should notice that there is a huge difference between being in Netherlands or Finland compared to the US here and it's the issue of race, of being 'white'. In the US 73% are considered white. If we would divide the population in similar terms, about 84-85% of Netherlands and 98-99% of Finland would be 'white'. That's because the largest ethnic minority in both European nations are other Europeans, which are considered in the US 'white'. Add to that the problematic history.
Yet I would argue that the racial debate in the media is copied likely in the Netherlands as it is done here in Finland from the US. This happens because the media is quite global. It becomes then a bit strange especially here in a country where 98% - 99% are white and the state has no colonial history whatsoever to hear arguments that are straight from the US discourse.
In my contributions to this thread, I've tried to make it clear that my opinions apply only to the US. I have made no judgments about anywhere else.
I can't see how one judges oneself Just when one is not actively, in word & deed, Anti-Injustice. (e.g. Rosanna Arquette?)
Any system that helps people in proportion to their disadvantages without regard to demographic grouping like race etc will automatically provide more support to demographic groups that are statistically more disadvantaged exactly in proportion to the degree that that group is thus overrepresented among the disadvantaged and only for such time as they continue to be thus overrepresented.
So if we institute a race-agnostic policy to help all poor people, and black people are disproportionately poor, such a policy will automatically provide disproportionate help to black people, but only until such time as they are no longer disproportionately poor. We don’t have to do “reverse discrimination” to make up for past discrimination, because just helping everyone in need will automatically work out to that in effect.
I assume you've heard the statement
or, at least, that you understand the sentiment. Many (will) feel "reverse discrimination" who have enjoyed the (legacy) privilege of discriminating with impunity against disadvantaged classes, or minorites of one kind or another, whenever "discrimination" is either explicitly prohibited or implicitly obviated (or threatened) by 'aggressively redistributive' policies (e.g. Rawls, Sen). The 'welfare state' & its attendant policies has always only been a reformist prophylactic (more quarter than) half-measure ... a political-economic 'gradualism' that's mostly only delayed a critical reckoning and exacerbated the metastases of Class Privilege (Piketty, Varoufakis, Wolff). If history, sociology, behavioral economics, etc braided together is an incisive guide, then (sooner rather than later) more radical measures (will) have to be taken than simply recycling more of the 'middle-class' same old same old e.g. "raise the minimum wage", "paid family leave", "free childcare", "free college", "free healthcare" ... "universal basic income", etc.
I don't know. It seems impossible for a person to choose his/her race or the circumstances s/he is born into. Shame involves some degree of responsibility which is impossible without choice.
That said I think one should be aware of how your parents got where they are. Did it involve immoral practices? Did it hurt anyone? These are possible questions that led Rosanna to make such a statement. I think it was noble of her to acknowledge that her ancestors may have been involved in some form of systematic exploitation of people.
Perhaps, but programs intended to equalize might actually be unfair and do nothing but exchange the people being oppressed, irrespective of whether some unfairly privileged people object to their being treated equally.
I won't commit to the belief that the privileged are incapable of knowing what is fair or not due to their fear of losing their privilege, which means I must accept their complaints of oppression as I would any other. To ignore those complaints would assume the privileged are intellectually or morally inferior and that they cannot judge actual oppression versus true equality.
While this is true, the specific problem that affects many minorities is that they, on average, lack inherited wealth. They had much less time, relative to the majority, to accumulate assets. This is difficult to equalise.
This also presumes that the success of most non-minorities (white people) is tied to inherited wealth. I just think that's false, especially among the middle and working class.
The argument that whites have inherited a system built to their advantage is a better one, only because it's more difficult to respond to because the claim is more nebulous. The real question isn't whether American society has a sordid history of racism (as it surely does), but it's to what extent is that history the real impediment to success today. I'd submit that race is not the critical limitation in today's society and that opportunity and success can and does fall to minorities without heroic efforts, although perhaps with some special effort. I don't discount the special efforts needed as irrelevant and not something that ought be eliminated, but they also shouldn't be exaggerated and suggested that all struggles or failures are owed to it.
What we'd need to do is look at specific cases of success or a lack of it and figure out what the exact assets or problems are. If we're going to claim that racism was a problem for specifics in the lack of success example, we'd need to be able to pinpoint just how something is racist, and not make claims that are broad/abstract platitudes.
In China there's Chinese privilege. In African counties there's black privilege. In Middle Eastern countries theres Arabic and Muslim privilege.
Whatever happened to the idea of not shaming people for something they have no control over where or how they were born as? Hypocrites.
The suicide rate of white males in the U.S. is higher than those of minorities, except Native Americans. What is white privilege and how is it a privilege if you aren't aware of it? Does this mean that everyone that has been making arguments for anti-realism has suddenly had a change of heart when it comes to politics? Anti-realists arent sure of the chair that you're sitting on exists but are positive that white privilege, even though you aren't aware of it, exists.
This what happens when you don't integrate all of your philosophical ideas into a consistent whole.
It seems to me that there is a "good parenting" privilege, where if you were raised by two loving, selfless parents you end up better off than those that don't when you're an adult.
Privilege doesn't have to do with ethics. Privilege has to do with advantages that someone has--the idea is that it makes it easier for them to get and keep a job, earn more money in that job, rent and buy real estate, deal with the police, etc.
"That this group has privileges that that group doesn't have is wrong" would be an ethical stance.
Hear, hear! And those who are fortunate enough to have good parenting seem to be more able to rise above less-than-ideal circumstances because they were brought up to believe that they could achieve anything. I teach quite a few students who come from the underclass (rural and inner city poverty) and it's pretty easy to tell what kind of parenting they've had.
Privileges are given, bestowed, passed from one person to another. We are not born with them. That's the main issue with “white privilege”: the act of bestowing “privilege” on another is a result of the bestower, not the one receiving the privileges. So not only do they leave out the privilege-giver, but blame the receiver for being given them.
“White privilege” is white supremacy repurposed for the modern day. It’s the assumption that whites are somehow better off because of their skin color.
Success is relative though. You can be successful, but still poor in absolute terms. Studies seem to point in the direction that having wealthy parents is a significant advantage, because apart from the assets themselves, education and social status are also "heritable" to a certain degree. It's also difficult to argue with the proposition that, in the west, the lineages of White people had a lot more time to accumulate wealth without any major upsets to their property.
Quoting Hanover
I don't disagree with that viewpoint in principle. But I do think too many people assume that equality of opportunity can somehow be established without ever looking at outcomes, past or present. People react with indignation to the idea that contemporary Americans should pay reparations for slavery. The reaction is understandable, but slavery does have a very real and direct effect on the wealth of the descendants of those slaves today.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I think privilege describes (aims to describe) a socio-economic state of affairs.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Whatever happened to the idea that ad-hominem is not an acceptable argument?
Quoting NOS4A2
That is obviously not the idea, but it's no surprise to see you rattle off more right-wing talking points.
Oh, is it obvious? Is this an acceptable argument?
When white people start telling me how better off they are by nature of their skin color I become immediately suspicious. So be my guest, argue how some people, by virtue of their skin color, are better off than others.
I don't need to argue that, because that's not the argument. The argument is that some people are better off by virtue of having been in power in the past.
Then the “white” in “white privilege” is superfluous.
As superflous as any descriptor. "White privilege" is "white" because, historically, white people were indeed better off because of their skin color.
In support of that: if outcome is the product of opportunity and ability, and ability has a normal (gaussian) distribution as most statistics about human characteristics seem to, then if opportunity had a uniform (equal) distribution, we would expect outcome to have a normal distribution as well. Seeing a non-normal distribution of outcomes (as we do, since success is heavily right-skewed) is therefore evidence of some inequality of opportunity or another.
How would we establish the distributions, exactly?
That seems like it would be almost impossible to establish. There are so many variables at play, and we'd be trying to connect current data with a situation that ended 150 years ago.
I thought it was power that made them privileged.
Are they maybe just utilizing scores on certain sorts of tests? We'd need, for one, to examine whether the tests are really well-designed to tell us something about abilities, especially in a broader sense. And then re opportunities, we wouldn't have something as straightforward as tests.
I'm skeptical about it epistemically.
That's not a contradiction.
Quoting Terrapin Station
The situation didn't end 150 years ago (if we are talking about the US). It ended perhaps 60 years ago, at best. Until that point, there was still plenty of open discrimination, especially in the southern states. In certain areas, like housing, it went on even longer.
But it would certainly be difficult to establish any specific numbers. It seems like a fairly reasonable assumption that there hasn't been enough time to catch up though.
There weren't slaves in the US 60 years ago.
The claim was that it's connected to slavery.
Privilege is bestowed, given. There certainly are people who would privilege others because of skin color, and they should be called out for doing so, but the receiver cannot be blamed for being a part of the privilege transaction unless he is aware of it and is in agreement with it. He is not a participant in white privilege, willingly or otherwise. Neither is he born with privilege.
You're taking the claim unreasonably literally.
In any event, it is connected to slavery. For one, racial segregation was an outgrowth of slavery, the next best thing when slavery was no longer possible. For another, to assess the impact of slavery on the current state of affairs, we still need to look at what happened after the emancipation. And it turns out the former slaves were not allowed an even footing even then.
Quoting NOS4A2
I didn't say white people are somehow universally to blame for there being white privilege.
In my view, when we're doing philosophy, we need to make literal claims, especially if it's something that's supposed to be important, supposed to have a lot of significance. So what would the literal claim be?
Quoting Echarmion
That sounds like you're talking about something historical primarily. If we're trying to connect something about slavery to something about conditions at present, I think it's going to be more or less impossible.
Would you say white people universally have white privilege?
That it's connected to slavery and the openly racist ideas and policies that preceded and followed it.
Quoting Terrapin Station
You think it's impossible to establish a causal connection between past and present?
Quoting NOS4A2
No, I wouldn't say that. It seems evident that there are white people that are not priviledged, at least not in any significant way.
Very fair. That’s at least a nuanced view of it.
Maybe i’m Understanding it wrong. I always thought white privilege was the unearned privilege afforded to white people in general.
If that's the literal claim then how was I taking it "unreasonably literally"?
Quoting Echarmion
When we're talking about something with so many variables and a 150+ year separation, yes.
By ignoring what happened after slavery ended, even though it was a continuation of racist policy.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Fair enough. I don't have sufficient evidence on hand to convince you otherwise.
Quoting NOS4A2
The qualifier "in general" can be used in a way that allows exceptions. But I am sure there are people who argue that all white people are privileged due to various deep-seated prejudices and similar factors. I think it's too difficult to assess the actual effect of such factors to make strong statements.
But I didn't say anything like that. I just said that we haven't had slavery in over 150 years. You said that the literal claim is that the present situation is connected to slavery.
Not just an assumption, but that was otherwise a good post.
It was an outgrowth of anxiety associated with the 1890's economic depression coupled with the failure of southern progressives, socialists, and communists to deliver support to the poverty stricken, leading to the rise of southern demagogues who resorted to race baiting, which led to a violent take-over by white supremacists who passed laws to reduce black votership from 50-70% to 3%.
If the rest if the US had given a fuck while the South descended into fascism, Jim Crow wouldnt have happened.
It wasnt a simple outgrowth from slavery.
Why do you hold a position that there's insufficient evidence of?
Nonsense.
Total nonsense.
This would be an interesting conversation. I could write out many paragraphs explaining all the reasons that what I said is true. You're not worth it.
Critical rationalists beg to differ, because the contrary entails that nobody should ever believe anything.
If you're lacking empirical support for an empirical claim, your claim has no basis to be held. If you say whites maintain privilege as the result of slavery without empirical support, your claim is no more supportable than my claim that the results of slavery no longer have impact on white privilege.
I don't believe there is insufficient evidence for it. I just don't have sufficient rigorous and presentable evidence. I am not a sociologist and have no easy access to the relevant literature.
There are loads of things I believe without any sort of rigourous evidence. All manner of basic knowledge about biology, chemistry and physics that's based either on things I heard in school, or things I saw in a documentary. My beliefs about the character and beliefs of my friends isn't based on much more than anecdotal evidence.
So, is there such a thing as a general epistemic "null hypothesis" according to you?
You do not understand the burden of proof sir.
I know what you are saying seems a reasonable standard but its not, it is burdened by a myriad of absurd and ridiculous claims/beliefs that get smuggled in with any good ones that pass the standard.
You DO need to have evidence for your own opinions/beliefs in order to be justified in them, even if its just evidence only you have access too. You should NOT hold opinions/beliefs without evidence, whether you can present it to others or not.
A pet peeve of mine, but "burden of proof" is a legal concept designed to solve situations of non liquet. It's not a general epistemological principle. Neither is the notion of a "null hypothesis".
Sure, I have the right to a baseless opinion, and I suppose I have the right to be irrational, purposefully wrong, and even openly contradictory and idiotic.
Why are we pointing this out? Does this prove your case somehow that slavery has caused white privilege?
Google.
The effort wouldn't be commensurate with my investment in the topic.
Your position is that slavery has caused modern day whites to be disproportionately privileged, yet you acknowledge you have no proof of that and can cite nothing in support of that. You then claim you're too busy to Google.
Next time just save us the time and tell us you have a baseless opinion that you're too busy to confirm or deny.
Except the things I wrote. You're welcome to point out any factual or other errors you happen to spot. I am not keeping you from using Google yourself, am I?
Quoting Hanover
A bit melodramatic, don't you think? I participating in a forum discussion, not running a political campaign.
So is it wrong to shame people, or for people to be ashamed, for being born a particular color or not? Would you agree that shaming one group to bring up another is wrong?
Quoting Echarmion
Quoting Terrapin Station
Quoting NOS4A2
Did none of you read the rest of my post?
First, what is privilege for one, which is to say what is good for one, may not be good for another. There are many people who don't see material pleasures as a privilege. They can be a crutch. It depends on how you look at life and how you're raised.
The problem you are complaining about is everywhere majorities and minorities exist, across the globe. How can you enforce people from choosing mostly whites for a job when mostly whites are available for the job? How can you force people to "choose" who they associate with?
I've been on the receiving end of an overly aggressive cop more than I can remember, and I think many of them need some anger-management training. This doesn't mean that they're racist. They do it to everyone because they're on a power trip.
What about the white male suicide rate? How easy it is to overlook stats that don't push your political agenda.
As to the socio-economics of it -what about the coinciding averages of socio-economic status and being raised by a single parent and doing well in school that I pointed out?
The fact that you have to point to averages, and not a case by case basis shows that there are instances where blacks make more and have more privileges than many white people. Being rich and famous gets you privileges and it seems more about who you know than what you know.
Quoting uncanni
Exactly. My wife has been teaching for over 20 years and teachers and their families know all to well how parenting has a huge impact on the social behaviors of their children.
I'm not making that case. I just saw an exchange that looked like someone else stating that opinion and admitting that they don't have sufficient evidence to convince you of it, and you telling them that they should therefore discard it themselves, and called foul on that.
Quoting DingoJones
If those absurd and ridiculous beliefs are so absurd and ridiculous it should be easy to provide evidence against them, beyond merely the lack of evidence for them. You're epistemically free to say "I don't see any evidence for that and it doesn't seem to be true to me", but they're equally free to rejoin "it just seems true to me, even though I can't prove it conclusively to you", and until one of you can show the other wrong then it's just a disagreement between each others' intuitive perception with no rational ground to say one is by default right and the other is by default wrong. If you said that some opinions were by default right, that would be tantamount to religious faith; and if you said that no opinions are right unless they can be conclusively proven from the ground up, then you'd end up in nihilism because it's impossible to establish anything from the ground up.
I just linked an essay of mine on the topic before because I didn't want to derail this thread into an off-topic conversation, I was just calling a quick point of order on Hanover.
Barely.
Your point of order remains absurd, despite your referring to yourself as authority.
Also, your face is absurd. :p
I wasn't endorsing the idea, by the way. I was just saying that it's not an ethical idea. As I said, "Privilege has to do with advantages that someone has--the idea is that it makes it easier for them to get and keep a job, earn more money in that job, rent and buy real estate, deal with the police, etc."
If someone doesn't want to get or keep a job, earn more money rather than less at a job, etc., that's fine. Nevertheless the idea of privilege is that it's easier to get and keep a job, earn more money at that job, etc. That's not an ethical idea.
Ok, so we agree that privileges exist. So what? How is that helpful? What do you want to do with this information that privileges exist? Should others ought to have privileges? Isn't that an ethical question?
I'm not even agreeing with that, really, especially not privileges that are at all due to "race." (I'm putting "race" in quotation marks because I believe it's a bogus concept to begin with.)
I'm just familiar with the concepts, and I thought it was odd that you were saying that the concept of privilege is an ethical concept. I was just providing info that conventionally, the concept of privilege is not itself an ethical concept.
Again, I'm not endorsing any sort of view in that clarification.
I think that most talk about these issues is very dubious, because it seems to be pretty uniformly executed with really bad epistemic methods behind it.
Well, if privileges don't exist for you then no wonder you don't see it as an ethical issue. It seems to me that you're admitting that privileges are subjective. Some admit they exist or not to some degree or another.
This topic is about systematic racism and fairness (privilege), and racism and fairness are ethical issues.
I don't think that whether they exist is subjective, and the concept of them isn't ethical (though most thinking about the implications of them and all thinking about what should be done about it, when one thinks something should be done about it, IS ethical).
The problem, on my view, is that conclusions about this stuff are made, at best, on statistical data--about things like demographic data re mortgages, unemployment claims, tax returns, etc.:
(a) without critically looking at the many data collection/reporting issues that can make the statistics unreliable, misrepresentative, or even make crucial data unobtainable,
(b) while making very dubious assumptions about connections between different statistics,
(c) while making very dubious assumptions about causes/motivations of anything behind the statistics.
Or like I said--the epistemic methods fueling these claims suck, but not many people care about that. One side likes the narrative they've created and the other side likes combating it on its own terms.
Quoting Terrapin Station
or (d) don't include the detriments of one class or ethnic group that may offset some privilege they may have (like the suicide rate of white males vs other minorities).
Quoting Echarmion
You concede too much Echarmion. Terrapin, aren't you from the U.S. (I am almost always wrong in my assumptions about people here)? It shouldn't seem that difficult to connect the Civil Rights Movement (60 years ago) to slavery?
Well since you will certainly have your reasons, here is a quick history (leaving out most of the egregious details):
Prior to the Civil War, most Americans were racist and made no effort to hide it. Many of those opposed to slavery (abolitionists), would be quick to admit that African people were inferior.
Following the Civil War, the 13, 14, and 15th amendments must be passed to correct racist errors in the constitution. Radical Republicans controlled congress and passed a severe, but entirely necessary, Reconstruction Act. Among other important features, this act authorized the U.S. military to basically act as police in the South, enforcing things like the right to vote for black people.
Unfortunately, the North felt uncomfortable "punishing" their white counterparts in the South for very long (racism). As we reach the 1880s, the South has been "punished" enough :roll:, and Reconstruction ends.
With the end of Reconstruction comes the return of the status quo in the South. The same people who were in power before/during the Civil War, are back in power. Now, they can't re-institute slavery without fear of another Reconstruction, but they can restore just about everything else. By 1893 (plessy v ferguson), Jim Crow laws are official, and black people are legally second class citizens (again).
Before I continue (I assume you are sick of this already, haha), can you see that slavery is connected to Jim Crow laws? If not, I have more work to do before I can show their connection to the Civil Right Movement (which was a direct response to the environment created fostered by Jim Crow laws). If you don't see a connection, can you maybe show where the gap is? It seems pretty air tight to me. Maybe we need to confirm we both mean the same thing with the word "connected'?
Seems obvious enough.
Quoting frank
I agree, but you are the one that added the word "simple".
Quoting frank
While all of the above occurred, that just adds to the complexity that exists in any historical situation. Surely, slavery and racism are more significant causes of racial segregation than anything you mentioned here. You state the above like racism didn't exist until the 1890s.
Quoting frank
This was due to the end of reconstruction. An army stationed in the South prevented those white supremacists from reducing black votership until this time.
Quoting frank
The southern fascism you refer to only hurt black people. Does that give a hint as to why the rest of the country did not care?
Prior to the 1890s, southern blacks were accumulating wealth and learning how to navigate the political system. In many areas blacks and whites worked side by side and gathered socially. Jim Crow was a violent movement intended to bring that progress to an end and reverse it. White supremacists believed that the association of whites with black would destroy white culture, so their racism was (is) about what they see as self-preservation.
Quoting ZhouBoTong
It's a myth that racism only exists in the southeast.
Quoting ZhouBoTong
How are we establishing that, exactly?
(I just quoted that because it was the first thing there's an issue with.)
Gobsmacked ... at your privileged incoherence. :meh:
Really? The FACT that they made no effort to hide it means we have a LOT of evidence.
And I am not talking new racism where you are racist if you are uncomfortable around another race. I mean old fashioned definitional racism, "they are inferior".
Are you comfortable admitting that Jefferson and Washington were racist? Surely, owning slaves (based on race) counts as evidence of their racism? I am not saying we should stop celebrating their achievements, but we need to acknowledge facts.
Also, I just said "most" Americans. That doesn't specify whether most is 51% or 99%. Is it really debatable that "prior to the Civil War" at least 51% of Americans were racist?
I guess we mostly only have evidence that historical figures were racist. We don't know what EVERY American thought. However, it is fairly (entirely?) consistent through history that the lower classes are more racist (and the racist representatives they voted for represent their racism).
I am willing to go through many specific examples of evidence, like say, the 3/5 compromise, if really necessary. I am actually a bit confused by your doubts. Why do you think most Americans were NOT racist prior to the Civil War?
Slavery was an attractive system of extracting involuntary low cost labor from a designated group of people (Africans, mostly). The English did not introduce slavery because they were racists. They bought sold, and transported slaves because it was profitable. Slavery is old school -- going back a very long ways.
The Greeks and Romans owned slaves without developing intense negative feelings about the ethnicity of people who were slaves. Racism isn't a requirement for developing a slave system. Necessity and convenience are required.
Our peculiar American problem was our high-minded ideas about freedom and representation. It was contradictory to talk about freedom and equality when the keystone of our economy was slavery. Slaves couldn't be equal and free and still be slaves. One solution was to classify the slaves as not fully human, The 3/5 compromise counted the slaves along with whites, just subtracting 40% of their numerical weight. The purpose was to reduce the represented population of the slave-holding states.
Thomas Jefferson, slave owner, probably did not count Sally Hemings as sub-human when he had sex with her.
Slave holders likely had intensely ambiguous feelings about their slaves -- valuing them on the one hand, intuiting that they were humans like him or her self, and yet treating them with scalding cruelty. The outcome of these intense feelings wasn't to free the slave; rather it was to keep and hate them.
Slavery was an integral part of our economy, north and south. Northerners also had to square their ideals with their realities. (Granted, there were many people, north and south, who were not responsible for slavery's existence. But it was still a vital part of the economy.
'White Privilege', as an extension of a dominate group identity, is, to paraphrase Charles Mills, as water to a fish. Invisible because it is natural to the dominate white polity that has not suffered the disadvantages, prejudices, and discrimination, codified, socialized or otherwise, that out-groups/minorities have been and are subjected to. Just as one isn't "intellectually inferior" because one isn't consciously aware that they are breathing, I don't necessarily find this form of white ignorance linked to "intellectual inferiority" unless, pace Mills, it is an ignorance that resists, an ignorance that fights, an ignorance that is militant and reifies itself, especially political. The challenge, as always, is to recognize it, understand how privilege is made manifest, and fight for those who are deprived of it.
Ok. I recognize it and realize when failures are the result of bad decisions versus a bad environment.
Yes, as long as whites were held in check at gunpoint (the union army), black people made progress.
Quoting frank
Indeed, but without Reconstruction and the Union Army, the progress NEVER would have occurred in the first place.
Quoting frank
I am not sure the point of this sentence...so, they are justified in their racism?
Quoting frank
That was exactly my point. No one got up in arms over Jim Crow BECAUSE most of the country was racist anyway.
Indeed. Which is why I am finding it a little strange that I am here being forced to defend "most were racist before the Civ War."
Quoting Bitter Crank
For sure. Racial slavery fostered racism. Slavery harms the owner as much as the slave (well not really, but certainly morally). The Frederick Douglas autobiography captures this (the degradation of the slave OWNER) very well.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Indeed it is not. But it certainly makes any slave system worse. Other slave systems typically did not have hereditary slavery either.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Quoting tim wood
There seems to be some confusion here. Yes, everything Bitter Crank said was correct. So why is it evidence that most of the country was racist? Because the ANTI-slavery side is the side saying that slaves should not count as a person (the COMPROMISE was to subtract 40%, the north did not want slaves to count at all). Obviously, counting them as a full person would have given more power to slave states, and that is no good. But saying they should not count as a person shows an inherent racism (otherwise they would notice the contradiction).
Quoting Bitter Crank
Well men have had sex with women throughout all of history, and still felt comfortable saying they should not be allowed to vote...so I am not sure how much respect is required. I would also think that Thomas Jefferson would be the type to talk how great the African people were, ALMOST as good as white people.
Also, viewing the perpetuation of slavery as worth it, because I (Thomas Jefferson) would be a poor ass pauper without the slaves, may not be NECESSARILY racist (seems likely though), it is certainly condemn-able, and very hypocritical considering his own writings.
Quoting tim wood
I did, but I may not have been clear. I said, not modern I am uncomfortable racism, but old fashioned DEFINITIONAL racism. One race is superior/inferior.
Yes. Yet Jim Crow only existed in the south. There is racism that leads to violent segregation and racism that doesn't.
Maybe because there are other factors. :roll:
I agree that there are. Hence why I said:
Surely, slavery and racism are more significant causes of racial segregation than anything you mentioned here.
— ZhouBoTong
Notice I did not dismiss your factors. Just pointed to more significant over-arching factors. I have not been convinced (you haven't really tried to be fair) that slavery and racism were less of a factor in segregation than anything you have mentioned.
Economic conditions in the South coupled with an establishment that fought vigorously to avoid reform left the white population psychologically vulnerable. And still, as white supremacists took over, a UNC professor wrote an article for the local newspaper quietly questioning whether it was true that blacks and whites can't live together. He subsequently became a target.
So I'm saying economic conditions were the underlying disease. As i mentioned, symptoms of that were in abundance as progressives, populists, socialists, and communists all struggled to break the establishment's strangle-hold on the South. They all failed. That set the stage for Jim Crow.
Why should we think of racism as the primary problem?
I typed for a while, but then changed my mind and deleted it
As long as everyone admits that racism was a major problem, and that segregation was certainly racist, I don't care what we call primary causes.
I was going to say something close to this, but thought I should defend my view for a change.
Plus the UNC professor and all the others like him. They deserve more than to be lost by history in an ocean of hatred.
I don't know, perhaps I'm being a bit close-minded or harsh, but...
How could you not see it if you had any close black friends and/or loved ones?
Do you think this was true in the Roman Empire or for other Mediterranean Basin slave-holding cultures going back 1 or 2 millennia BCE? The Roman economy was also very dependent on slavery; 1/3 of the population of the Italian peninsula was slave. (I'm not sure what the fraction of slave populations were in say... Gaul, Dalmatia, Cappadocia, Mauritania...
As far as I know, Roman slaves were the very model of diversity -- Greek, German, African, Middle Eastern, British... whoever could be hauled into slavery. Was the fatal flaw in Anglo-American slavery that the slaves were pretty much exclusively African?
Slavery in the Roman empire varied from employment of Greek slaves as tutors for one's children to extremely harsh labor regimes in mining. Anglo-American slaves performed a fairly narrow range of labor in fields, farmyard, and house, and the exploitation seems to have more intense and systematic than slavery under the Romans.
Bad luck anywhere in there?
Right. If it's really racism it is never truly definitional.
:roll:
Yeah, but you're saying that most Americans were racist.
Quoting ZhouBoTong
If I had enough info about things they said where I considered some of those things racist, sure. I don't know enough about either for that, really, though. (This is also not saying that they weren't racist. I'd need far more info about them than I have (or remember) to make a claim either way. I don't like making claims about stuff like that without a lot of info about it. I'm not a fan of being quick to judgment, pro or con, and I think that people being way too quick to judgment is a big problem in general. Many people rapidly make up their minds about stuff, in a highly judgmental way, based on very little info.)
Quoting ZhouBoTong
In my opinion that's too simplistic. Racism hinges on their beliefs, and the mere fact of owning slaves in that historical context I don't think is sufficient to tell us what their beliefs were regarding "race." After all, it's not as if slave ownership was primarily motivated by racist beliefs. It was primarily motivated by economic desires--slaves were a source of relatively cheap labor, and they made it possible for a lot of people to make far more money than they could have made without a source of such cheap labor--in many cases, people would not have been able to be in business for themselves period without that cheap labor source. It's much like folks who hire illegal aliens in the U.S. now. That's not motivated by racism. It's motivated by wanting to capitalize on a cheap labor force. That doesn't imply that no one who hires illegal aliens (or own slaves) is racist--surely some are. But I don't think that the mere fact of owning slaves would be sufficient to imply that someone is racist. I think it's more complicated than that.
Quoting ZhouBoTong
Definitely that's debatable in my opinion, yes. Even if you were to take slave ownership as evidence of racism--which I think is too simplistic, as I mention above, nowhere near 51% of Americans owned slaves. It wasn't even 51% of Americans in the South who owned slaves.
Quoting ZhouBoTong
Also, voting for someone isn't at all indicative of agreeing with all or even most of the policies they support. I always vote. Many people I know always vote. I doubt I've ever voted for someone where I agreed with most of their positions. I always have to vote for the "least crappy" viable candidate, and that's not at all an uncommon sentiment.
Sure, and good luck, which I'd think would be as likely to befall one race as the next.
Yes, I felt a little bad after I sent that, since I had asked for more of an argument...and you gave one. But as I was responding I was realizing that we(I) were really whining over some small stuff. As long as we are all aware that racism was a significant force, I don't need to argue over "most significant" - everyone will have a different perspective.
Yes, but not to the same extent.
Quoting Bitter Crank
For me where slavery goes from an inappropriate method of labor usage (I don't think you think you are suggesting that the Roman slave system was something we should emulate?), to an atrocity, is a nice simple line...once slavery is hereditary, it is now a nasty transformative force. As soon as a slave owner claims that baby as an asset, they are viewing that baby and its people as somehow "lesser". And yes I am happy to concede that most business owners and shareholders absolutely view their employees as "lesser", but it is obviously nowhere near as extreme.
Quoting Bitter Crank
I think the hereditary nature is more the "fatal flaw", but it being almost exclusively African is what makes it racist by definition (I am happy to concede that it "makes it APPEAR racist by definition" - I obviously don't know what these people are actually thinking; there are things that look like ducks, but are not ducks, but I am gonna call it a duck until I have information suggesting otherwise).
Quoting Bitter Crank
The tutors were likely treated way better by their owners. The worse the slaves were treated, the greater the degradation of the owners. But if their owners had just written monumental documents on the ideal that "all men are created equal", then, unless a crime was committed, even enslaving a tutor is a humongous hypocrisy that will require the owner to use all sorts of cognitive bias to justify (to themselves). Hell, just having to call someone "Dominus" all day divides people into classes of betters and lessers (not sure if that is a real thing or just pop culture, haha).
Quoting Bitter Crank
And I would argue that a little racism made it much more justified to be more "intense and systematic". While I am sure it existed at times, do you know of hereditary slavery ever being common in Greece or Rome? A quick google search hints at what I already thought, it wasn't common...but that doesn't help a ton.
Quoting Terrapin Station
I would say you have the higher burden of proof. But, of course, I can't prove I knew the thoughts of every American...but I would be willing to bet everything I owned on "most".
Can we admit that "most" "white" countries were racist at this time? Imperialism and the race for Africa were surely racist, right? (racist defined as one group viewing themselves superior to another based on the vaguely defined idea of race - I am worried you are thinking of racism as I like/don't like a certain group. That is more modern racism. The superiority is the real problem though. Humans like dogs, they are not viewed as equals - and I am fine if you want to say I am racist against dogs, haha).
Quoting Terrapin Station
Now I get you are the King of Subjectivity, but at some point we have to work with what we have. Based on your quote above (yes taken to extremes), there is not ONE SINGLE HUMAN that we can call racist. Additionally, there is NOT ONE SINGLE HUMAN that we could call christian, or atheist, or a fan of Liverpool FC...right? Even if they act christian, and call themselves christian, we don't know whether they are just taking a piss or not. what am I missing?
If I can provide a letter from FDR referring to "white supremacy", is that evidence of racism? And FDR was one of the most racially progressive presidents in history up to that point (he knew white people wouldn't vote for someone who cared about minoritites so he had his wife work to help them, while he appeased the white folk.)
Quoting Terrapin Station
Thomas Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal". He owned slaves that did nothing wrong other than being born black. What possible justification is MORE likely than racism?
Quoting Terrapin Station
Right. Which we can never know for sure. But we can make some pretty solid assumptions based on their words and deeds.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Right. But that is how we got trump, right? "sure he is a scumbag, but look at that stock market!"
Slavery held Rome's development back. There was no need to develop efficient technology when you had this steady supply of fresh slaves coming into the heart of the Empire from the expanding periphery. When the Romans felt the need, they could put together mechanized industrial operations. One of the large water powered grain mills in Spain, I think it was, ran multiple grinding wheels by a cascading water supply. One falling stream was able to power multiple grinders in close proximity to each other. The output of flour was quite high (by Roman standards).
There are some other examples of remarkable Roman technology, but for the most part, they didn't pursue technology. There was no need -- until late in the empire when expansion ceased and the periphery began to shrink. As the periphery shrank, and as provinces moved out of centralized Roman control, the economy began to shrivel up and "efficient technology" would not be a concern for a long time.
My objection to slavery is not that it was racist, but that it was extremely exploitative, extremely dehumanizing, and extremely cruel. Racism, to my way of thinking, does not make slavery worse. Racism, could not make slavery worse. Whether the slaves were one ethnicity or a dozen ethnicities doesn't matter. Being reduced to chattel property and treated as an object can't be topped.
You know, Karl Marx identified "wage slavery" as the curse of the working class. The employer doesn't exactly "own" the worker, but the worker is entirely dependent on the "wage-paying class" for their minimal sustenance. In one of his examples, he said a farmer could use a Negro slave to re-roof a barn. Or he could hire an Irishman to do it. Which worker was the better deal? The Irishman of course.
If the slave fell off the roof and died, the farmer faced the large loss of the slaves substantial value. If the Irishman fell off the roof and died, the farmer wasn't out anything -- unless he decided to give the widow the irishman's unpaid wages--a small sum.
Capitalism can use slaves, but it is cheaper to use more disposable employees. From the capitalist's point of view, the purpose of hiring a worker is to exploit his labor as much as possible and pay him no more than it takes to keep him on the job. Since the worker is dependent on labor, the amount that it takes to keep him coming back is not that much.
Note that I'm not making the claim that "most Americans were not racist." Rather I'm skeptical about the claim that most were.
Quoting ZhouBoTong
That's not what I'm getting at. (And I'm not sure why you'd read it that way. The quote that's a response to is me simply saying that I don't know/don't remember enough about what Jefferson or Washington said.)
All I'd require is statements that reflect beliefs re some common definitions of racism, such as:
"a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race"
(I'm not saying it strictly has to be that particular definition--that's just an example)
I wasn't saying anything about sincerity, by the way. I literally don't know, if I ever knew (and just don't recall), racist things that Jefferson, Washington etc. said--not because I'm denying they ever said anything. I'm claiming a lack of sufficient familiarity and/or memory with what they said.
Quoting ZhouBoTong
I had just explained the monetary motivations, for example. (The comments about cheap labor.)
Quoting ZhouBoTong
If he's claiming something like white supremacy, sure.
I wouldn't at all doubt that some presidents were racist, by the way.
Quoting ZhouBoTong
Yeah, I wasn't making a point about knowing that for sure. Things people say are good enough. But it would have to be something that we're not just interpreting as racist. For example, William Shockley, a Nobel laureate who was the co-inventor of semiconductors, supposedly said that whites have superior intelligence. That would be sufficient to count as racist (of course).
Ok, just to measure where we are at; are you equally skeptical of the claim, "prior to the Civil War, most Americans were NOT racist"...?
Quoting Terrapin Station
Fair enough, I think I was just having a hissy-fit anyway.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Social Darwinism and the White Man's Burden were popular at the time (both clearly and explicitly expressed "an inherent superiority of a particular race"). Doesn't a lack of backlash count as a type of tacit acceptance?
Quoting Terrapin Station
Yes, but they are VERY petty. How serious is the rest of the world supposed to take his words in the Declaration of Independence if a minor personal financial concern is enough for him to abandon the principles entirely? (notice if he is racist he does not have to abandon his principles - that is why I hold it up as a MORE LIKELY reason)
Quoting Terrapin Station
I may have to track that down. A quick search suggests I need a j-stor account. It was written in the 1920s (before he was president). Discussing Hawaii, he described the Japanese as a potential threat to white supremacy.
Quoting Terrapin Station
The trouble is I would want to show that MOST were (are), haha.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Imperialism was practiced for about a century and was based on one groups "superiority" over the others, right? As Europeans countries raced to claim Africa until only Liberia (American founded country for returning slaves) and Ethiopia (whooped the weak ass Italians in a tiny war) remained independent; were they treating the Africans as equals?
While that doesn't show most people were racist, it shows that most "white" countries were racist?
Some bad decisions are the result of bad environment. Do you recognize that too?
Sure, and some good decisions are made in bad environments.
Perfect freedom doesn't exist, but our choices matter.
Phew. I wasn't sure where you were going with the argument. I am more OK with this direction...but I may still argue a little, haha.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Surely, slavery for the child's tutor was "better" slavery in the salt mines? In the same way, racial slavery had the potential to be worse. Also, racial slavery in a country where "all men are created equal" is stating that they (slaves) are not men. This is dehumanizing for the slave, but it also affects the owner. If they are not men, maybe severe beatings are the only way they will learn. Non-racial slavery would understand that NO ONE WANTS to be a slave. Racial slavery assumes that they are happiest and most fulfilled as slaves.
So I am not going to say that racial slavery is worse than the worst forms of non-racial slavery. The point is, racial slavery almost guarantees that slavery is the worst form, savage and brutal.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Again, you would have to sell me on "all slavery is equally bad" before I could accept this. Your tutor vs mines example seems to show some forms are worse.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Sure it can. Being nicely treated as property is way better than being horrifically treated as property. I can admit all slavery is entirely wrong. But to say it as if it is some "infinite" that can't be topped seems to ignore reality. Kind of like saying "there is nothing worse than death"...well what about "torture then death"...sounds worse.
Quoting Bitter Crank
I obviously generally agree with Marx's analysis of capitalist society. However, if I combine this paragraph with your previous idea that all slavery is equally (maximally) bad, then aren't you suggesting that being stuck working 40 hour a week jobs we dislike until death is equally bad to the enslavement of Africans that occurred in America for a couple hundred years? I can agree it is bad, I might even agree with "wage slavery", but you are going to struggle to convince me that my life is nearly as bad as a slave in Alabama in the mid 1800s. And you would NEVER be able to convince me to CHOOSE 1800s american slavery over modern wage slavery.
Quoting Bitter Crank
You don't need to convince of me of your economic ideas. I was partially on-board when I started at this site, and you have convinced me enough that I would happily vote for you as Labor Tsar, should the opportunity arise. And I do believe that if ALL economic problems are solved, then racism would only be a minor annoyance. However, with all of the progress society has made, economic progress does not seem to be one that is going anywhere (it is too emotional, too personal, and too complicated). However, racial progress has been tackled legally. While there are setbacks, each legal step is progress (however slow).
Well I looked it up and you are right here. I am not sure if Greece was not hereditary or I just made that shit up. Either way, Rome had way more slaves so it would be the more important comparison. But after thinking, I don't think it changes any of the points I just made in my last response. Still important to know we are operating with the right facts.
The ancient Greeks traded in foreign slaves as it was deemed immoral to enslave a fellow Greek.
The Spartans were equal opportunity slavers though...
Bad luck for an entire race? Sure. Sickle cell. Bad luck for some people of that race? Sure. Walking black at night.
The latter is the problem.
Sure. Some people choose to drive black during the day.
I am guessing there are two, maybe three reasons:
The first is that it was convenient to obtain slaves from Africa. You remember the triangular trade map from American history? Ships left the American Colonies with rum (before cotton became a big crop) and unloaded the liquor in England. Then the ships traveled south to Africa where they picked up slaves. Then to the Caribbean colonies to unload the slaves who would be used on cane plantations. Molasses was loaded up and taken to New York and Boston. The molasses was made into rum which was shipped to England.
The second is that there were slave sellers on the African Coast. The English didn't have to hunt down slaves; Africans did that chore for them, in exchange for desired goods.
Why did the Africans sell their own kind into slavery? Well, for one -- they didn't see much of what happened to slaves. The trip west or east (Arab slave traders) was a one way trip. Two, people are willing enough to sell out strangers, and for the most part, the Africans who were sold into slavery were strangers to the sellers. Europeans were not the first people to obtain and trade in African slaves. Arab nations obtain slaves along the north and west coast of Africa. [Among the last states to abolish slavery were Saudi Arabia and Yemen, which abolished slavery in 1962 under pressure from Britain; Oman in 1970; and Mauritania in 1905, 1981, and again in August 2007.]
I don't know whether 17th and 18th century British society considered Africans sub-human or not. I get the impression the British of the time tended to consider everyone who wasn't upper-class British to be sub human. Snobs.
Quoting ZhouBoTong
We are debating degrees of suffering here, not whether there was suffering. Was being a Greek slave/tutor in Rome no worse than being sent to the mines? Granted: The mines were obviously worse. Slaves died at a high rates in (some) mines, or wished they were dead, maybe. But bear in mind that an educated Greek didn't start out life as a slave or as a tutor. He probably became a slave because he failed in business, was swindled, or was captured during a war. His family was enslaved as well. In the Empire, a person could be transposed from top of the heap to bottom of the heap in short order. The transition from a man of importance to slavery (even if in a post where one could use one's knowledge) involved a radical adjustment in status.
Granted again: What makes slavery bad is the kind of labor one is forced to perform. Gladiators might have had the worst labor--fighting to the death. Working in the mines was pretty bad. Agriculture? Long days, certainly -- but the agriculture of olive, grape, and grain growing (as well as garden farming) were not as horrible as cotton or cane farming. For one thing, vineyards require skill on the part of workers. The workers had to be happy enough to be careful about what they were doing.
Southern American and Caribbean slavery involved quite disagreeable working conditions. Romans had some very unpleasant work too--galley slaves, for instance, but nothing on the scale of the cotton industry. (At least, that is my impression.) Also, in the ancient world, no worker had a particularly easy life, because work was mostly manual. Slave or free, work was a lot of sweating labor.
Here's a clip from I Claudius, where Livia, Emperor Augustus's wife gives the gladiators a pep talk. She's very much against them using professional tricks to stay alive. In Robert Graves novel (based on Suetonius) Livia was chief conspirator (for whatever skullduggery was going to happen). She's a real nice person.
Yes. I'd be skeptical of any claim about what most of any group of millions of people thought over 100 years ago.(Or even today, since no one is polling enough people for claims like that in my opinion.)
Quoting ZhouBoTong
I'm skeptical that most people even think about stuff like that. A lot of people that I interact with don't bother with ideological stuff very much. We could pick any random ideological content that you think is popular now, and I'd bet that if I polled most of the people I encounter during the day--let's say the people at my gym, the people serving me my coffee at Dunkin Donuts, the people on whatever subway car I get on, the musicians I do a session with, etc., most aren't going to be familiar with whatever it is. Most people I know/have known aren't that concerned with stuff like that. They're focused on practical concerns and whatever popular culture stuff and/or hobbies they're into. That's not at all a knock against anyone. Different people have different interests. Most of my family--including my wife--and friends have very little interest in ideological stuff.
Quoting ZhouBoTong
You must think that people are far less motivated by monetary concerns than what seems to be the case to me.
Quoting Bitter Crank
I can add a couple of titbits to this. The trade on the African coast was slaves for iron, and to a lesser extent guns. The African iron industry was late developed and iron was scarce and of religious significance. So the coastal traders became rich in iron weapons and the prestige of the favour of the gods, and by trade and conquest mixed, the trade moved inland and sucked slaves from the interior.
There was also a religious justification for enslaving Africans ( and not Arabs or Chinese or Indians) in their largely, but not entirely mythical nakedness and lack of sexual shame, which put them amongst the beasts rather than the descendants of Adam and Eve. Thus elsewhere the exploitation of our inferiors took another form - indentures, forced migration, etc.
War. Victorious warlords in the interior took prisoners to cripple defeated tribes. Moors showed up looking for slaves (as their ancestors had been doing for centuries.)
We know the Moors weren't making much, so the Chieftains must have been giving up the prisoners for practically nothing.
After some brief research into “critical race theory”, it appears race skepticism and Colorblindness have fallen into repute in the hands of intellectuals as of late, marking it as a sign of “race privilege”.
Ok, ok. I apologize. I should have learned your nature by now. Everything you have said is fair in this context. Sorry, but I have been conditioned to the fact that, typically, when someone says "I am not convinced" it is a soft way of saying "I disagree". I understand, that on a philosophy site, people are more careful with their words and I should read them to mean exactly what they say...old habits, my bad.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Again, that seems fair. But for me, I would at least view it as condoning, or an acceptance, of racism, whether or not they were "racist", they were part of the problem (assuming we buy into the whole democracy thing - which I guess I don't entirely so maybe I should ease up a little).
Quoting Terrapin Station
I think I am with you on the motivation. Just that I would call that motivation (for money) a moral shortcoming (a petty concern is maybe being too nice, a major moral flaw is possibly more accurate). Beside the Ayn Rand crowd, most philosophies will consider that blind drive for money (at the expense of more significant moral concerns) to be immoral (right? I may be wrong with my limited knowledge of philosophy, but all MAJOR moral systems seem opposed). Now, morality is one area I agree with you that it is ALL subjective. But, subjectively, I can still make judgements based on the information I have available.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Quoting Bitter Crank
I agree so far. Even if the Spanish had heavily settled the west coast of the Americas, Asia and Australia are still too far for any convenient trade (that Blue Planet show emphasized how BIG the Pacific Ocean is).
Quoting Bitter Crank
Everything you said here seems accurate and this shit is crazy: Quoting Bitter Crank U.S. history always makes it seem like we are the last place on earth to free slaves...while I knew that was not true, I would not have expected such recent abolition (or attempted abolition in Mauritania) dates.
One other side theory I have related to this involves tribalism, civilization, and globalism (I will try to keep it short as it is probably stupid anyway). People are naturally tribal. We care for and protect "me and mine" and fear the "other". As people, then tribes, then cities, then civilizations grow, so to does the size of "me and mine". This suggests that the first groups to grow the size of their "me and mine" is going to have a big advantage over those who can only trust a smaller group. Europeans were the first to claim a whole race as "me and mine" and therefore had huge advantages over smaller societies (the Nazi's showed where the emphasis on "me and mine" gets taken too far). Before WW2, Japan tried this with its Asia for Asians policy. Too bad they treated the Chinese and Koreans horrifically. So, the Africans on the coast did not view it as selling their "own kind" into slavery. They were selling "others" to some even stranger "others". I may need to explain further, but don't view what I am saying as particularly significant...does this paragraph make enough sense? Am I saying anything more than what is obvious to everyone?
Quoting Bitter Crank
Yes, and I have the tendency to debate minutia. Overall, I see no problems with your position (I am sure whether I agreed or not was seriously stressing you out, haha). And of course I am happy to admit that all slavery is wrong unless it is entirely voluntary (which as far as I know has never existed - but I hesitate to accept absolutes so I have to leave a little wiggle room).
Quoting Bitter Crank
Agreed...except for the 1 out of a million Messi or Ronaldo of gladiating. For the humongous, super-athletic, combat genius, being a gladiator was a path to fame, freedom, and sex...but this changes nothing in our discussion, just added for a chuckle.
Quoting Bitter Crank
Dang, I am typically bored by older movies, but this is a pretty darned good speech. And while the Lady giving it is not necessarily racist, she has the same blindness that I was referring to. Are you seriously telling these men, with a straight face, that they need to stop all these dumb little tricks they use to NOT DIE? Why do they give a shit what you say? Hell if I am going to die anyway, maybe I should just kill this lady giving this stupid speech?
Thanks for the input. Since you have some knowledge on the subject, do you know what happened to the children of slaves in Greece? Were they automatically slaves? Or were they born free? Or did it vary? I can quickly find the answer to Roman slavery (typically, you were born a slave), but I am not finding a clear answer on Greece.
This is an interesting idea that certainly rings true. Their lack of civilization was used as evidence of their inferiority (made more clear and justified by religious comparisons). Good addition.
:chin:
This really isn't true. The Nazis limited their tribe to Aryans, specifically excluding the neighboring Slavs (who were very much white). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Slavic_sentiment
The idea of all whites being of the same tribe seems an American thing, where ancestral history has gotten lost with the generations and intermarriage among the groups. The same holds true for American blacks, who have no idea of their ancestral origins. But look to recent immigrants, white or black, people keep to their groups.
In Ireland, the Catholics can hate the Protestants. In Scotland , they can hold hostilities toward the English. In the US, these groups can't be distinguished. The melting pot boiled those subtle distinctions off, but race remains, no doubt due to the historical legal and imposed social distinctions of the races in the US.
Quoting Hanover
Well, it felt like some hypothetical BS. I gave it a shot, haha.
Quoting Hanover
wait, isn't this evidence in my favor (sort of)? by LIMITING their tribe they were weaker? Although it does point out some poor analysis in my original proposal :grimace: .
Quoting Hanover
I can agree that the white unity thing peaks in America, but imperialism suggests it was (is?) a world problem. Even when white countries were competing they were united against the other. White countries fought other white countries for glory, white countries fought non-white countries so they could profit. After WW2, things change. White people invent new divisions of "me and mine" - Communism vs Capitalism, but they still don't count people of color as participating in the same game (nonaligned countries, China could be on Team Communist only if they acknowledged that Russia is the leader).
Quoting Hanover
Wait, they absolutely can be distinguished (not to say that I necessarily disagree with where you are going). It is just that they and we (christians and non) have decided their similarities far outweigh the differences. Based on a picture, it might be easier to identify the difference between a white and a black person. However, based on a phone conversation (or internet forum discussion), it would be easier to identify the catholic vs protestant.
Well @180 Proof, what do you think? I am not too sensitive. If the idea is terrible, let me hear it. I guess @Hanover let me hear it, and I responded with some vague not quite agreeing or disagreeing (Sorry Hanover, that is all I got for now), so that may not inspire you to engage, haha.
I'm dubious of your move from "me and mine" anthropology to "Nazi" ideology which seems to suggest "whiteness" - racial essentialism - in your implicit critique of tribalist "white privilege" (supremacy). The historical elements are apt but how you hang them together - heat without much light - I find questionable. (What you say about mid-20c Japanese imperialism & role of Africans in the Atlantic slave trade is spot-on though.) Just my 2 bits.
I think you are on to something here, but I am too stupid. Each time I read it, I have a slightly different understanding. Can you dumb this down for me a bit?
If I drop the little example of Nazis (even for the point I was TRYING to make, it was a bad example) does it solve the problem or is something still lingering?
Quoting 180 Proof
That is about what I was thinking. As I thought about how I would take this theory further (if there seemed to be something to it), I couldn't think of how to make it more complete or rigorous. So that probably suggests it would never have much explanatory power.
Sometimes I just enjoy shouting out what happens to be on my mind and see what people think.
Quoting 180 Proof
Thanks for that :smile: