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Woke, CRT, and BLM Types: Straight, White Guy Has Questions
I have questions. I’m a straight, white guy, so please bear with me as I couch these questions the only way I know: like a straight, white guy. I know. But you’ve lived in my white guy world for years, so just act like the way you were until three or four months ago.
First question: A request really. Give me one or two concrete examples of “Systemic Racism.” White culture talking here but maybe throw in a place, name, date, or other details such that I can follow you. I’m hoping for facts and logic here — again white culture stuff — but it’s who I am. The media doesn’t explain anything anymore, and I need information to process all this woke cum racist-anti-racist stuff. I’m White!
Second question: What do you expect all of us straight, white guys to do? Let’s say I saw the “I am a racist” light, and now I want to lead the rest of my life as a good, honest, non-racist guy. What would that look like? How would it manifest itself? Maybe a leopard can change its spots. And again, sorry, my whiteness is showing, but can you explain this in plain, clear words from a dictionary printed before last year?
Last question: When are you going to stop using cars, airplanes, phones, and other inventions created by white guys? I have some spare Covid relief funds and I want to pick up stuff cheap. Because I’m a capitalist too.
Ricochet, please ask your questions in the comments.
Published in Culture
Hey, you’re white aren’t you? Just stand there silently and endure your richly deserved abuse for your degradation of non-blacks for the last 350 years.
Forget about those inventions; they’re part of a history that’s no longer relevant.
As for those spare Covid relief funds, send them promptly to your local chapter of BLM as the first of many payments for reparations. If you bring them in person, don’t forget to bend a knee while offering payment.
Now, go to the back of the bus, and be quiet.
Yes’em.
Examples move us toward empirical evidence. That is not allowed. Systemic racism is “Post-Proof.”
Shut up and let everyone else plunder your accomplishments and production until everyone is reduced under the heel of a totalitarian jackboot, and the equity of universal misery is achieved.
When they begin to fail, and local tribes become the rule, kinda like everything that Western Civilization worked hard to get of out of. But that’s okay. Climate Change, y’know.
The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture published a brochure in 2020 that provides many answers to your First Question. @tigerlily helpfully included the brochure in a post about the brochure. (Interestingly when I did a DuckDuckGo search for “smithsonian african american museum white culture brochure” the Ricochet post was the fourth result in the images results.)
To summarize, systemic racism includes measuring individual results, being married and rearing independent children, valuing rational linear thinking, valuing hard work, valuing financial rewards and property rights, valuing being on-time and completing work on a schedule, planning for the future, the entire American legal system (based on English common law), being competitive and seeking to solve problems, politeness, and others. Basically everything about your life is “whiteness” that is apparently inaccessible to blacks and therefore systemic racism.
They expect us to die, Mr. Jim.
That’s what is carefully being taught in higher education, which of course also means K-12. Noel Ignatiev, a Communist and a Harvard educated historian, on his retirement from teaching at Massachusetts College of the Arts:
Or psychiatrist Aruna Khilanani speaking at “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” an event given at the Yale School of Medicine’s Child Study Center:
But you make it sound like Cuba or Venezuela. That can’t be right?
One of the joys of being white is we don’t think of having a “white culture”. Harking back to the Smithsonian’s chart, most of those things listed are what’s called “How people can succeed in life.”
Proven paradises! Ask Sean Penn.
Unless this goes directly to the main feed, and lots of us share it – well, you came to the wrong place to ask!
But I will give a shot on your first question , bearing in mind that I don’t understand so well myself. I’ve never heard a good example of systemic (as opposed to systematic) racism, and you are to be commending for grasping the difference. But systemic racism means that racism is inherent in the very structure of an organization and so it isn’t necessary for any of its adherents or members or associates to themselves be racist. So the courts are racist, the police are racist, all schools are racist, the welfare system is racist, electric utilities are racist, the US Constitution is racist. And, by the way, you can’t possibly understand because you are white (actually you are probably not white-skinned but some other color, what the racist Crayola corporation long ago called “flesh” – and that may itself be a prime example.)
Oh, well, maybe I ought to give a straight up answer to your second: Being “white” you can’t possibly live the rest of your life non-racist, even if you were to change your skin color, so the best thing you can do is just die. Which somebody ontheleftcoast already said.
Geez, I had never heard of Ignatiev. From his picture, he looks exactly like someone whose portrait is hanging somewhere in the Kremlin. Gotta love his idea that, “…treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity…”.
Thankfully, he’s now worm chow. Still, it’s a reminder to all of us that there’s money to be made peddling white self-hatred.
Typing error. Good catch. I fixed it. Thanks. But either works in this case. The Left accuses us of both I’m sure.
Then I un-fixed it.
According to his Wiki bio, Ignatiev believed that race was not a scientific reality. I’ve wondered how JimGoneWild can be such a racist when race doesn’t even exist.
Yeah, and so I’m not a guilty white guy, right?
It’s one of those great philosophical conundrums. Sort of like, “If Helen Keller falls in the forest, does she make a noise?”
What Crabree said.
If he’d had the courage of his convictions, he would have offed himself.
You are conflating “white culture” with “American culture”. That is Leftist thinking. Fight Leftist thinking, don’t perpetuate it.
Racism is an unusual sort of problem. Here’s why.
Most problems are pretty complicated, and cannot be effectively addressed with simple solutions. In fact, most big problems involve complex trade-offs and therefore cannot really be solved at all. They can only be reduced by substituting smaller problems for bigger problems.
For example, the problem of carbon emissions cannot be effectively addressed by banning carbon fuels, because the disadvantages would outweigh the benefits. But the problem can be reduced by using natural gas and other relatively clean fuels.
Racism is different, because it is a subset of the problem of unkindness. Unkindness is not a government problem. It is a problem of personal behavior. Of course, the government should be neutral on all matters related to race, but that will not solve most problems of personal behavior.
The only solution, which can be implemented only on the individual level, is to be kind. If you treat people kindly, then you cannot – by definition – simultaneously impose racist oppression or any other kind of oppression upon them.
This solution cannot be legislated. Nor can it be taught in employer-sponsored workshops or seminars. The most effective instruction in this principle that I received came from my parents, and from the nuns who taught me in grade school.
Here’s a quote from Aldous Huxley, the author and philosopher: “It is a bit embarrassing to have been concerned with the human problem all one’s life and find at the end that one has no more to offer by way of advice than ‘try to be a little kinder.'”
I agree with you, but some racism, the kind I’ve most encountered, is the bigotry of low expectations: killing them with kindness, as it were.
That’s a valid point. I agree that kindness can often make demands on the recipient as well as the giver.
Some of the kindest things that were ever done for my son came from his drill instructor at Marine boot camp. He was not exactly a rainbows-and-sunshine sort of fellow. But my son is grateful to him, and I am too.
And that’s why I feel so bad for young men going into today’s military. When I saw Rep. Jim Banks questioning the CNO I wanted to heave.
What is called charity in the KJV, what I might call true kindness, is doing whats best for the other person. Sometime it requires what has been called “tough love”. The DI may not have known it, and I’m guessing your son didn’t appreciate it at the time, but that DI was practicing it.
To answer your first question; in CRT terms the proof of systemic racism is seen in the outcomes in our society. If blacks are incarcerated more frequently, have lower average income and wealth, score lower on SATs, are under represented in various professions or organizations etc, that, in and of itself, proves systemic racism exists. If your response is, “well, what can we do to close those gaps?” you are racist, because in the CRT view the very structures that create systemic racism need to be dismantled. Asking, for instance, “how do we raise black SAT scores?” is the wrong question. If blacks score lower on SATs then SATs need to be dismantled because they are structural tools of white supremacy. In fact, CRT would argue that SATs are used precisely because they maintain white supremacy.
From the CRT perspective this was the great failure of the civil rights movement and Dr King – they only worked within the given structure of white supremacy rather than insisting on dismantling that structure, they appealed to everyone’s common humanity rather than bringing a race based analysis to the problem. It’s also why merely ensuring blacks are represented in every aspect of society at their numerical percentage in the population is not enough; the very structures of society must be overturned and the oppressed put in control.
You (and I) and the CRT people are talking past each other because we speak different languages.
Jim, Jim, Jim, Jim, Jim…
As a millennial, it’s my job to tell you that it’s not my job to educate you. C’mon, man!
Here’s the best I can do:
You left out the “Boomer!”
I want black people to stop culturally appropriating slavery from us Slavic people.
I am of Slavic descent. The word Slave comes from Slav. The Arabs were stealing millions of slavs every year and putting us into slavery for centuries before 1619 ever happened.
We are the people of slavery. Stop appropriating our struggle. When some Germans come and kill tens of millions of your people. Then you can talk.
How could I have been so stupid. Thanks
Hear, hear!
The right
squestions are:Why is this so?
Has the (historic and current) impact of race on individuals in our society anything to do with this?
Which part? Are you asking why the gaps exist, or why CR theorists deem current structures untenable?
I’ve a few thoughts on this, but I suppose it’s best to wait, otherwise I might head in a completely different direction than one that responds to your questions.