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Ego Tripping on the Backs of Minorities
It’s wealthy white people who tend to be the most “woke.” They see themselves as the “white savior” — as Atticus Finch. But as someone once said, if you’re going to be St. George, you first need a dragon.
To be Atticus Finch, you need a racist society that routinely lynches blacks. So, in their self-narratives, America must become that society. Atticus Finch also needs a Tom Robinson – noble, oppressed, and helpless in the face of an evil society. So, in the woke progressive’s self-narrative, minorities must be without agency, requiring white saviors to act on their behalf.
All this would be no more than a bit of harmless self-delusion if white progressives kept their self-narratives to themselves. But, to become heroes in their own eyes, they must be heroes in the eyes of the world. So, they must tell minorities that they are helpless. That the system is rigged against them and that they cannot make their lives better by their own actions. To the extent that white progressives are believed, lives are destroyed. White progressives are exploiting minorities for their own ego trips.
Published in General
Another desperate debater technique: “You shouldn’t complain about problem X without first dealing with problems Y and Z.” That’s not an argument; it’s just a clever way of saying “shut up” – something that people on the left have become very good at.
Here’s the bottom line: No one will make his life better by believing that the world is stacked against him and that there’s nothing to do but sit in a corner and sulk until all white/black/brown/elite/Jewish people perfect themselves. I’ve got shocking news: No white/black/brown/elite/Jewish person has ever perfected himself and none ever will. So, the only way life is going to get better is to get up, get out of the corner, and get to work. Anyone who says different is not a friend.
When problem X depends on problem Y for its existence (and the not the other way round) that does not follow. Or at least focusing on X and refusing to consider it in the context of Y doesn’t seem constructive – actually I would say a lot of ‘culture war’ arguments are like that.
But I didn’t say that it would and there isn’t. (What was that you just said about straw manning?)
Robin D’Angelo wrote a book about how the majority responds to this kind of conversation in the US called “White Fragility“. I think the title is misleading, because it invites the conclusion that it is about being White, per se, rather than being a majority with the majority’s assumptions. I can say with certitude that the exact same sort of responses arise from Hindus when India discusses its minorities’ disadvantages, and I am pretty confident that you’d get a similar Sinhala response to discussions of Tamil disadvantage in Sri Lanka, Muslim responses to discussions of Christian disadvantage in Pakistan (or Egypt), etc. It isn’t about being white or black, it’s about being human and how we instinctively respond to being in the majority (or rather: how being in the majority empowers certain human impulses).
Please don’t confuse achievement with notoriety.
The disadvantages suffered by minorities (and disadvantaged non-minorities) in this country are almost entirely due to government — government schools, government housing, government “welfare” — and, most of all, government induced fatherlessness.
If minorities are held back by racism, it is the stealth racism of progressives in government who believe caring for people means shielding them from the natural consequences of their behaviors.
We are a nation founded on individual sovereignty. With it comes widespread freedom, but also its burdens. That is, personal responsibility. We’ve substituted that for the false compassion of the Left. Minorities hurt worst.
It goes deeper than that. They actually hate minorities. Their lip service about caring for them disguises their contempt. The best example of this is abortion, which is much higher, proportionally, among blacks and Hispanics than among whites.
It is just like PETA. The vast majority of animals under their care are euthanized.
In surveys of charitable giving, conservatives are found to be far more generous than liberals.
Hypocrisy is a requirement for being a liberal/progressive/leftist.
I have an anecdote. Recently Robert “Beto” O’Rourke was criticized for have a DUI when younger and not being punished at the time. Rather than say, “My dad the judge, got me a pass.” He choose to blame his “white privilege”. No Beto. That was “O’Rourke privilege”. Stop turning your elitism into a virtue signaling opportunity.
“white privilege” “majority privilege”
Which whites are the majority? In my memory, different groups of “whites” were at each others’ throats much of the time. Catholics vs Protestant, Mainline Protestant vs Evangelical vs Mormon. Irish vs German vs Italian vs Polish vs etc, etc, etc.
The notion of “white” as a meaningful race/ethnic group is entirely a construct of the Left to create a common enemy that will allow a coalition otherwise disparate interests to cooperate for political (power) gain. Heck, ‘Republican’ isn’t even a functional group anymore.
But black, muslim and other minority peoples want to come to America. Christians and Sikhs flee Pakistan. Kind of a big difference.
Studies seem to back this up
Check out Thomas Sowell’s book, Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study. India was the first country to implement a form of affirmative action – in their case, to advantage the “Untouchable” caste. It worked as badly there as it has worked everywhere else, including Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and the United States.
Some of the problems encountered were:
e.g. Ricochet circa 2016-Present.
When people are used as tools they are slaves, when they are used as projects they are a variety of pet.
My understanding is that black people resent this on an an individual level quite a bit, but on the political level it’s been part of the structure for a long time – black leaders can’t really ‘lead’ without it.
The system truly is somewhat rigged. Not in a sinister way, and certainly not to the extent that your average Bernie Bro imagines. Because people don’t know how the world actually works, they are free to imagine the hand of the elite in any situation in which people don’t succeed. To me that is the real poison; people have convinced themselves that they are disenfranchised. Pathologies follow.
That poison is branded and very much in demand.
Some French dude once wrote that ‘women only fall in love once – the first time – all other times they are really in love with being in love’.
It may be the most gassily Gaulic thing ever written, and likely un- or rarely true.
But the underlying idea seems useful for virtue-signalling; they care about caring. If you can care enough, you are a good person even if there is no practical effect (or real effort).
At risk of being gassy myself, I suggest that you cannot help someone without serving them, you cannot serve them without understanding them, and you cannot understand them if you don’t know them.
Just talking about them is the least interesting form of gossip.
This reminds me of something my wife told me about a Facebook acquaintance of hers. Apparently this middle-aged woman demonstrated her wokeness to some poor fellow on a trans-continental flight. She is white, you see, and he black, so she of course undertook to explain blackness to him. Apparently he endured it with some measure of restraint, as she did not report that he argued with her or evinced any irritation at her. Though given her self-delusion, she would’ve interpreted anything other than outright hostility at her to be confirmation of her target’s gratitude at her blinding insight, and any hostility toward her as a result of her brave puncturing of his false consciousness.
That poor man. I really wish, though, that I could’ve been a fly on the wall as he first told his friends about his encounter with her.
I was drinking at a bar with a gay bartender this one time. He mentioned that though he was gay he doesn’t identify as being gay and he didn’t think of himself as a victim even though sometimes people were unfair to him because he was gay. The woke white couple rushed in to explain that his sexual orientation defined him and that he was a victim. I was there but I wish I had video of that encounter.
“Hey, there, benighted ethnic/religion member! Just checking in to let you know that even though other people think you’re less than they are, I‘m not like them; because I am special that way.”
I am glad to be white and straight since I don’t have to worry about identifying as white and straight. Yet I wonder sometimes whether this ‘identifying’ thing is active or passive, and how much time it takes away from doing other things.
Perhaps it only comes up in relation to other people – when you notice you are either among similar or different and that most people wake up as humans, only becoming sexes, colors, and whatnot over the course of planning for the day.