White Fragility

[TellyKNeasuss]

Personally I think systemic racism is not as prevalent as many people think.

It might depend on your definition of "racism". If you view "racism" as an attitude that directly leads to racial discrimination, you are probably correct. But on the other extreme if you view "racism" as any preference for the norms or companionship of certain groups over certain others, then it certainly would be widespread.

 

[ponderingturtle]

DWB stops might be racist, but are they "systemic"? Or largely the result of a group who are overtly racist? Given that there are a lot of DWB stops in Washington, DC even though the police force is majority POC and almost all of the senior operational commanders are Afro-American (and the mayor is Afro-American, as is the majority of the city council), that might add evidence that it is "systemic".

That is the thing with how unconscious biases effect people, the people pulling those people over for driving while black can be black and it can still be systemic racism. Being black does not totally insulate you from all the cultural messaging that goes into the feeling of "just don't look right, pull them over".

So you admit to the data that shows significant bias against blacks but then say it isn't actually racism? No that is the very definition of racism.

 

[TellyKNeasuss]

So you admit to the data that shows significant bias against blacks but then say it isn't actually racism? No that is the very definition of racism.

I'm not sure where you get this from my post.

 

[Emily's Cat]

It sounds insane but you can find all kinds of nonsense like this in academia, so I wouldn't be TOO surprised. Just takes one whacko from one of these fields or activism areas to have influence over the training, imo

You're probably familiar already but just in case, you can find some of this stuff discussed on the Real Peer Review twitter account.

https://twitter.com/RealPeerReview

That led me to something else... And there's some very weird guilt-laden behavior out there at the moment.

Apparently a young author's book got cancelled (or she pulled it as a result of pushback, your choice) because she was writing about a culture of which she wasn't a part.

https://www.geekgirlauthority.com/what-the-cancellation-of-alexandra-duncans-ember-days-can-teach-us-about-allyship/

The author's apology on the matter struck me as symptomatic of a social pressure that really doesn't make much sense to me:

Colleagues reached out to me to express concern that the premise of the book…was harmful. The Gullah Geechee culture has been systematically repressed and erased, and in my misguided attempt to write a book that was inclusive of the cultures of Charleston and the Lowcountry, where the book is set, I participated in this ongoing erasure. My own limited worldview as a white person led me to think I could responsibly depict a character from this culture.

Clearly, the fact that I did not see the signs of the problem with my book’s premise in my research or conversations about the book is evidence that I was not the right person to try to tell this story. I am deeply ashamed to have made a mistake of this magnitude and hope my actions will not negatively affect the cause of bringing greater diversity to children’s literature…I have tremendous respect for those authors and the Gullah Geechee community and feel sick to think I caused anyone harm with my work.

Her attempts at being inclusive... was actually her participation in the ongoing erasure of the thing she's trying to protect and respect?

Okay, I can give some leeway here for a young author who is likely trying to have a bit of CYA so her career doesn't get tanked from the gate. But the author of the site linked above had a few things to say that strike me as being really antithetical to the entire concept of equality and liberty.

Being a good ally is hard. It’s not something you can decide to do overnight. And it’s not something you’ll get right every time, even if you’ve been at it a while. The problem is that every day we get it wrong, people from marginalized communities suffer and die.

This view suggests that failure to be a good ally is the cause of people suffering and dying.

Overall, this is an odd case. There's a community that is marginalized, and here's an author writing about that community in an effort to keep it vital. But her work won't be read... not because she's been inaccurate and not because she's not respectful of that community... but because the author is white. It seems like this approach does more harm to the Gullah Geechee than good.

 

[Emily's Cat]

Personally I think systemic racism is not as prevalent as many people think. It certainly exists but finding specific examples that can be fixed is a harder than people think, and the result is that you end up with a lot of arm waving and very little meaningful action. This lack of meaningful action is then cited as then blamed on systematic racism and the circle of inaction continues.

Eg wrt policing, in most cases the primary systemic problem isn’t racism, it’s authoritarianism. This, in combination with occasional examples of individual examples of racism and generally lower socioeconomic status of African Americans IMO is sufficient to explain most of the issues involving African Americans and policing.

If you set out to fix systemic authoritarianism, you could get someplace but if you try and fix systemic racism you will IMO get ineffective measures like the one you discuss. Naturally fixing the authoritarianism issue won't solve everything on it's own but it will allow society to make headway to the next issue can be isolated and addressed.

I think there's some legitimate institutional racism (and sexism) in our judicial system, with respect to laws that are objectively out of whack. A lot of the drug laws, for example. Especially things like the differences in punishments for marijuana and crack related crimes compared to opioid and cocaine related crimes. There's also some reasonable support for the claim that some of those laws were designed to disproportionately punish black people.

But overall, I agree that there's not a humongous amount of systemic racism. There is, however, a lot of deeply ingrained and largely subconscious bias. That's a much harder nut to crack... and I don't think it can be cracked through legislation. My opinion is that the most effective way to change that bias is to portray more black people in everyday art, not as "black people", but just as people. Make a doctor in a TV show about a hospital drama be a black woman... but don't make it a TV show about a "black woman doctor". It's just a show about a hospital doctor, and the doctor happens to be a black woman, which is irrelevant to the story because it's not noteworthy for a doctor to be a black woman. As soon as we can create art that doesn't portray black characters as noteworthy in any way, the sooner we overcome bias based on assumed differences and limitations.

 

[Emily's Cat]

The problem is that systemic racism is systemic, it can be hard to identify specific cases of it. Take driving while black individual traffic stops are hard to show racism in, but statistically the bias is clear. Is that systemic racism or not?

DWB stops might be racist, but are they "systemic"? Or largely the result of a group who are overtly racist? Given that there are a lot of DWB stops in Washington, DC even though the police force is majority POC and almost all of the senior operational commanders are Afro-American (and the mayor is Afro-American, as is the majority of the city council), that might add evidence that it is "systemic".

It's something that I don't consider "racism", but do consider "racial bias". And bias tends to be more societal, and a lot less institutional. One of the key differences between racism and racial bias is that racism tends to be "us and them", where one group views the other group as bad or lesser or "other". Racial bias, on the other and, tends to be a set of assumptions and expectations that is shared by all races in that society.

i'll point people back to the "Baby Doll" test of some time ago. Little girls were given two dolls - a white doll and a black doll - to play with. They were then asked which doll was the "good baby" and which was the "bad baby". Although the results weren't perfectly equal, both the white girls and the black girls had large majorities that said the black doll was the "bad bay" and the white doll was the "good baby".

 

[Brainster]

The problem is that the old-fashioned racist--the ones who used the n word after uppity, the ones who burned crosses and lynched any black man who even dared to glance at a white woman--is a rapidly dying breed. And this is a problem? Well, it is to people whose vested interest is in keeping racial tensions stoked, like Al Sharpton and Robin DiAngelo.

Hence the newfound focus on structural racism. Now again the old-style structural racism (poll taxes, school segregation, etc.) is largely non-existent, so they find it in outcomes--black wages are lower on average than white wages, blacks are more likely to have covid19 than whites, etc. At this point in the lecture, the white liberals are all nodding along smugly, and DiAngelo gets them with the sucker punch. They have benefited from being white all their lives, so they have been complicit in a racist system. They are racists even if they don't think they are, because they are still caught up in the old definition of racism, which DiAngelo says is "people being mean to other people."

 

[Brainster]

dupe ignore

 

[Venom]

I have always held onto the plain old definition or at least conventional usage of racism; prejudice and discrimination against a particular ethnic or cultural group. We can talk about racism that is systemic and racism that isn't.

The redefinition or alternative definition of racism (I can't be racist in the U.S. because I'm not white) is grossly contrived and fatally flawed, imo.

 

[Ziggurat]

The redefinition or alternative definition of racism (I can't be racist in the U.S. because I'm not white) is grossly contrived and fatally flawed, imo.

Fatally flawed? Well, that rather depends on the purpose one wishes to use it for. As a means of wielding power, it's contrivance is a feature, not a bug.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

The author's apology on the matter struck me as symptomatic of a social pressure that really doesn't make much sense to me:

You say this, but she herself specifically says that it was her decision to withdraw the book, after having discussions with other authors.

Her attempts at being inclusive... was actually her participation in the ongoing erasure of the thing she's trying to protect and respect?

Details are scant, but it seems like the issue was that she was writing about that culture (including their magical mythology) from the perspective of someone within that culture, while not herself being from that culture, or having collaborated with someone from that culture. It also seems that, while the book was written from the perspective of someone from that culture, that the bulk of the book was that person passing themselves off as white, meaning that the for the most part they may as well be white and aren't actually an example of representation at all.

I can't say myself, but that's the gist that I've got from a little poking around.

 

[pharphis]

Fatally flawed? Well, that rather depends on the purpose one wishes to use it for. As a means of wielding power, it's contrivance is a feature, not a bug.

I can't help but call it out when I see it. The redefinition is used simply to make some cases of discrimination perceived as worse than others.

Standard example:
- A person points out some discriminatory act against whites (or men) and calls it sexist (or racist)
- Another person chimes in (sometimes the person guilty of discriminating) to say "it's not Racism (or sexism) because power structures/patriarchy/white supremacy" or something similar.


How is this NOT just to minimize the harm caused by something? I know people tend to just argue over definitions all the time any way but is there really *any* reason to change the definition (and insist on the newer, more controversial definition) than to minimize some forms of discrimination as less important/severe?

 

[Brainster]

I have always held onto the plain old definition or at least conventional usage of racism; prejudice and discrimination against a particular ethnic or cultural group. We can talk about racism that is systemic and racism that isn't.

Get set for the new, new definition of racism that is being pushed by the black author who is competing with DiAngelo for the top spot in the bestseller lists:

Here, the focus of the definition is less on attitudes than results: The societal disparities between white people and others are themselves referred to as racism, as a kind of shorthand for the attitudinal racism creating the disparities. This 3.0 definition of the word is now quite influential, such that the best-selling author and Atlantic contributor Ibram X. Kendi calls all race-based societal disparities racism that ought to be battled. It is a usage of racism that one often acquires in college classes in the social sciences, and that is fundamental to modern discussions of race and racism. For example, many people would say that the fact that, on average, black students do not perform as highly on standardized tests as white students means that the tests are racist, in that they disadvantage black students.

If you want to know why mathematics is racist, there it is in a nutshell. Asians do better at math than white people, ergo math is racist. We must battle against mathematics! Note that this also means that the NBA is racist (those white supremacists who jabbered about needing affirmative action for whites in basketball were right).

 

[Ziggurat]

How is this NOT just to minimize the harm caused by something?

It is. But that's just the proximal goal. Keep your eyes on the ultimate goal.

 

[Abooga]

I have always held onto the plain old definition or at least conventional usage of racism; prejudice and discrimination against a particular ethnic or cultural group. We can talk about racism that is systemic and racism that isn't.

The redefinition or alternative definition of racism (I can't be racist in the U.S. because I'm not white) is grossly contrived and fatally flawed, imo.

I only learned about this new definition recently and to me it sounds extremely American-centric and logically inconsistent. What happens for example if some poor white Ukranian travels to the USA and encounters blacks prejudiced against whites, is he not encountering racism? Imagine him, skinny and poor, having lived in misery all his life, finding some obese (a sign of opulence) black americans, living a life of luxury (by his Ukranian standard, where having running water is a luxury) treat him badly because of his skin color... Whatever systemic advantages there have been in that case, they were in favour of the black Americans, not the Ukranian... so wouldnt this be be pure unadulterated racism?

 

[Tippit]

You want to see white fragility, just say the words "white privilege" and dare to suggest that racism exists and has negative consequences and it is plenty easy to see.

Are those “negative consequences” the result of racism, or the outrage that typically results in humans when they’re falsely and perpetually accused?


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[Tippit]

White fragility: Cutting and running from facts, reason and reality in order to escape responsibility, avoid admiting guilt or facing consequences, or in extremis, shifting blame or guilt, real or imagined, onto others.

"All Lives Matter" as response following the agonizing death of yet another black man. There's White fragility for you.

Fearful of manning up to the text of the Articles of Secession (take your pick) and instead insistent on some sort of "Lost Cause"? There's White fragility for you.

Karens calling the cops because "alive while black"? There's White fragility for you.

Totally irrational response to factual mortal dangers? There's White fragility for you... and y'all complain of White genocide. Sad.

As for whatever is taught in Anglo "seats of higher learning" by the Right or Left... just gave you the clue to the problem. Mad? There's Anglo fragility for you.

(Google and YouTube are no longer your friends, either. Boo-hoo.)

Well. That was convincing.


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[Tippit]

Along with the assertion that they've become "normalized", it was a list of aspects of white culture like their traditions, attitudes and way of life (for example objective, rational, linear thinking).

I'd like to see them do a list of aspects of black culture. Like their traditions, attitudes and way of life. There should be one of those, no? Or do only white people have traditions, attitudes and a way of life?

If there was, it would reflect hip hop culture, a toxic yet predominate black subculture that has become predominate overall, affecting everyone, with values like hyper-materialism, misanthropy, misogyny, glorification of violence, etc...


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[BobTheCoward]

If there was, it would reflect hip hop culture, a toxic yet predominate black subculture that has become predominate overall, affecting everyone, with values like hyper-materialism, misanthropy, misogyny, glorification of violence, etc...


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Sounds like someone that doesnt listen to much hip hop.

 

[Mumbles]

Sounds like someone that doesnt listen to much hip hop.

Sounds like someone who has no idea how to compare different forms of media without raging at the one that's dominated by black people. Hyper-materialism, mysogeny, and glorification of violence? Gasp! Sounds like quite a few tv shows, movies, video games, popular music forms, sports leagues, and so forth.