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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
Why the gaps exist.
Sure. I guess the point is that the answer one comes up with, or finds convincing, would inform the response (assuming we don’t want gaps).
So if you think the reason is “individual bad habits” then the answer is get some individual good habits.
Or if you think “the cummulative impact of racial inequality in society” then the answer is to make society more equal and undo that impact. (But then you’d need to define equality and inequality and agree on how they’re expressed in a society.)
Since the left is who is saying that society is unequal, I think it’s your job to define what you think is equality. Once you do that. we can decide whether we want it or not.
From the Cambridge Dictionary:
Which seems good to me.
“Fairly” is a weasel-word.
What would you prefer in its place?
Maybe “justly.”
Good question. What about “with justice”? From the time I was a kid on the playground I saw that “fair” pretty much meant whatever I wanted it to mean at the time.
Fair enough.
No. You have to be more specific. Use examples.
These are from the OED. Equality is the word most strictly applied to persons. Equity to behavior.
Iniquity 1: quality of being unrighteous, (more often) unrighteous action or conduct; 2: want or violation of equity; injustice, unfairness.
Equity 1: The quality of being equal or fair; fairness, impartiality; even-handed dealing.
Equal 1: to make equal, equalise; to bring to the same level; 2: to consider or represent as equal; to liken, compare (etc.); 3: to be or become equal to, to come up to, match rival; 4: to produce or achieve something equal to, to match; also To compete on equal terms with.
Equality 1: The condition of being equal in quantity, amount, value, intensity, etc.; 2: the condition of having equal dignity, rank, or privileges with others; the fact of being on equal footing; In persons: fairness, impartiality, equity.
Those are not examples or proposals for specific problems.
Let’s say education.
Every child in the US (and Australia) has access to public school for their 1-12 education.
The quality of public education differs from one part of a city to another, with richer suburbs having better public schools.
(The reasons for this are many, it is not just about money.)
So there’s inequality of opportunity for children (whatever ethnicity) who attend public schools in the poorer suburbs.
(This is the most effective point of intervention, imho.)
Are some ethnicities more likely to live in poor suburbs than other ethnicities?
What are the reasons for that?
Does their ethnicity come into it?
Is there some kind of cycle that involves poor schooling?
Are there other things at play?
These are the kinds of questions I think should be asked. And I don’t think that anybody can give a pat, ideological solution.
jmho
I suppose you’re right. I can delete it if its inappropriate.
Me too, although things can get tricky if we say “same opportunities,” at least from what I’ve seen over the years. (Below I’m just sorta spitballing to touch on a few things that’ve come up since my last comment.)
In America this has been over-compensated for, at least in the academic/corporate sphere, which is what the hyper-ambitious are preoccupied with. I can live with that because I don’t really want anything to do with either, but irreparable damage has been done – at least for the past few generations. It ought to be a scandal, but I’m not counting on any of the culprits getting their comeuppance.
This is the tricky part, racism in America isn’t where most have been looking. I’m using the term inclusively, because I’ve never found it to be an exclusively white people phenomenon, though there are a lot of sophisticated whites in these ranks. But the searchers have a problem. This is why they associate “the struggle” with thieves and drug dealers as opposed to black men and women who take steady, productive jobs in order to support their families. The former undermines a system they despise without costing them a thing, the latter contributes to it without explicitly benefiting them much.
For instance my city, New Orleans, has a much larger “minority” population, but it’s festooned with fewer BLM posters than Portland did when I visited last October. (New Orleans is practically the charter school capital, and the city as a whole knows how much of a disaster it’d be if we lost the police.) Portland likes “honoring” people they’d rather not live near, and to be fair, they’d rather not live near rural whites either. But they don’t get to claim some special appreciation for equality. That ain’t what they’re looking for.
You are asking good questions. For complicated issues like this there are usually multiple factors at play. The problem is that CRT is not interested in those questions. It merely asserts that any differences are due solely to race and are kept in place to maintain white and Jewish supremacy (and, when it comes to education, Asian adjacency to white supremacy – one thing that is happening in several school districts is that Asian Americans are leading the fight against this because the CRT answer is to lower standards for everyone rather than figure out how to improve).
Okay, you’ve defined a problem Then you bailed out on the conversation by not being willing to say in even a general way how it might be solved. Or even an approach to finding a solution.
I don’t know the answers to the questions. Those might be helpful?
I think you know pretty much what you want for all these issues and are just unwilling to write it down in public.
People who walk around with a sign proclaiming their lives matter suffer from deep feelings of inferiority. I am certain that self-respecting people of their race cringe whenever they see or hear expressions which announce that the lives of those with their skin color matter.
Why? It’s just an online forum, who cares?
Do you know the answers to all the questions? What are they?