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Globalist Encounters: Paris Diaries (“White men”)
I know that what I am writing is not original, but I have to get our Friday night dinner conversation with the parents of one of our kids‘ friends off my chest.
My family and I were invited to share pizza with the family of some friends of my daughter. Over pizza, we discussed the second home they are buying, the renovations they want to do, and other decorating ideas, and it was very interesting, especially between the wives.
This other family has a lot of family money, very good jobs, very international and affluent; true globalist pedigree.
One of the things I have noticed about these kinds of people in my time living abroad is firstly the perfect English with no accent and the Correct Politics. One couple my husband and I found ourselves cornered by at a birthday party for a 4-year-old were typical: a German woman with an American husband newly arrived in Paris and working for an international thing. Bland beyond description, the woman is German by nationality, grew up partially in Brazil, several languages, perfect colloquial unaccented English, and no soul whatsoever. Nothing German about her at all. About as interesting as a white wall in some modern glass tour institution, like where she diligently spends her days. I don’t know what he does. They have one kid that she had when she was about 47 years old. (I joke, but only sort of.) When we were finally able to liberate ourselves from an interminable discussion about IKEA and the Horrors of French Administration (individual countries have these LAWS, you know? And they’re different from the rules in other places! The world is not some giant IKEA that you can access with a MasterCard! Crazy, i know…) and escape, I said to my husband: “you realize that she runs the world, right? You realize that THAT’s the future They want for us plebes. One kid at 47, right-on politics. Nothing vernacular or local or particular. No accent or hometown or belief system besides Theirs?” They only meet each other, never local people, in neutral settings like airports and hotels and IKEAs and so naturally Germans and Pakistanis and Americans are all the same…
But I digress. The pizza conversation moves onto the lockdown, which that family spent in the countryside holed up in an Airbnb, since the mother couldn’t imagine being locked down in a city apartment, even a large and comfortable one as theirs is. It’s very expensive to rent an Airbnb for two months, even in some little village (where housing prices are very, very low – you can get some massive grange for 100k). So the mother wrote to her landlord asking for a rent reduction because of the lockdown. The landlord wrote back to tell her that her spacious apartment in the center of Paris was ample for a family of four during a lockdown.
She was furious and told us: “Such a typical white man response.”
My heart sank when she said this. I know that the chances my husband and I will share a pizza with someone who doesn’t hate Donald Trump are next to nothing, partly because we are in Paris, but then again my mom’s Midwest Bible studies class wants to talk about social justice and white privilege so there is no escape. I encounter the “white man” thing a lot at work, from non-French. But it never loses its demoralizing effect on me, especially coming from the parents of a nice kid that my kid likes.
And while they are Latin (I will put it that way), there was my husband, whose father is a retired plumber, a white man, a kind man. A fair man. A good tipper. The best husband. Who puts up with me. A quiet person whom people tend to like.
It was the woman who was entitled to ask for a reduction in rent so she could comfortably rent a country house for two months!
I did a deflection and gentle riposte technique, offering up my reminiscences of the female HR head landlord we once had, who wrote us weekly emails and made me scrub calcaire build-up off the faucets of our tiny 1 bedroom under her stern gaze when I was 7 months pregnant, and then withheld our security deposit. “It’s not a white man thing,” I said with false innocence.
It reminded me of a meeting I had at work with four people (I was the secretary), three older white men from various countries, and one white middle-aged or older American woman who ranted about white men in the course of the day. She has a great career, great diplomas, widespread respect, except from me, after that meeting. What a whiner, I thought. The white overlords have been kind to her. The men all kept their heads down.
We listened to Trump’s 4th of July speech yesterday and I explained to my 7-year-old that we judge people by their character, not the color of their skin or their appearance. We are proud of our history and heritage. France too has soldiers toiling around the world, thousands of people take refuge here from all over the world. Let us cease to self-flagellate. Let us be proud and patriotic, and appreciate the sacrifices our forefathers made so that we could enjoy prosperous lives in free Western Democracies.
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Thanks for sharing.
Logic is now illegal. It’s a white man thing.
I agree. All our toils and troubles are simply part of brutal path humanity must traverse.
IIRC, there is a set of 10 rules that provide clear guidance on how to navigate our journey in the least brutal way.
We can chose to navigate life without brutalizing each other.
We may have to schedule a Paris Mini-Meetup for non-Trump-haters the next time I’m in Paris. (Probably next May–this year’s trip for my wife’s family reunion was canceled by Covid.)
My sister-in-law and her family are in Ivry-sur-Seine, for your reference.
It is sad that your daughter’s friends are racists. That was clearly and unarguably a racist comment.
That would be very interesting and fun! Message me! 🙂
Racism is en vogue these days. We had a breakfast table conversation about white men this morning.
Too much of a good thing.
Quislings.
Yes, but I think it helps to label it as it is. Otherwise, they will never figure it out for themselves. C’est necessaire.
Apparently she said “no offense” to my husband but I missed it. This “white man” has become a reflexive way of virtue signaling and speaking.
Interestingly it’s my husband, the white man, who had a tough time, and who is the first person in his family to have a high school diploma. Not her, born into major global bucks and, I guess, strictly technically speaking, “not white”.
Reminds me of what Douglas Murray says about identity politics: it helps people who don’t need helping.
I lived in China for awhile. The stereotype of landlords being notoriously greedy and unhelpful know no restrictions to sex or race.
On a personal note, I had three landladies in three apartments. Two were nothing but fair and kind. The other one… had a penchant for charging me when something broke even though it wasn’t my fault. To be fair to her, things break so often in China that she might not have been able to make ends meet if she didn’t charge for such things. It still felt unfair though.
I wonder if your dinner partner was aware of the old English slur that “The WOGS begin at Calais.”
I see these middle class suburban white women who think they will be safe after the police are disbanded. Two of them were standing in the I-5 freeway in Seattle protesting with a BLM group when a black man driving a Jaguar hit them. One is now dead. Jaywalking, even for an allegedly good cause, is dangerous. I wonder if she died knowing that a black man had been the driver ?
I did notice an artisanal embroidered pillow that read MIGRANTS on it. I wonder if she knows how all those young men Merkel let into Europe in 2015 feel about feminism.
It’s all par for the course. If we can get away with only discussing her kitchen tiles, and my kid can continue her friendship that’s all I can expect. Of course, they are going to a private school next year 😏
Why would that matter? If she was jaywalking, the driver wasn’t at fault nor, presumably, did he intend to hit them.
On the other hand he didn’t seem to slow down much: the proper response when seeing vehicles stopped on the freeway is to slow down a lot and proceed around the blockage only with great caution. On the other other hand, coming to a complete stop might be dangerous since BLM “protesters” have a tendency to attack drivers, sometimes with firearms. On the other other other hand, I have read that the police had closed all freeway entrance ramps to accommodate the freeway-blocking protesters, so how did the driver get onto the freeway in the first place? Did he use an exit ramp?
Thomas Sowell has written about the seemingly universal hatred of “middlemen” businesses and people. It’s very common for people who do not understand economics to hate landlords, shopkeepers, etc.
My brother, a civil engineer, talks about the Kevin Costner Rule of Roadbuilding, which is, “If you build it, they will come.” They have had multiple instances where new roads were not finished being built, and people somehow started using them. At one dedication ceremony, they had a problem because people were (illegally) getting on the new highway and trying to get past the platform for the dedication ceremony.
He’s been arrested. Being innocent, even if black, is no excuse in the Woke World of Seattle.