Comments | paranoyd: Controversy ahead ...

paranoyd

Controversy ahead ...

Jan 21, 2009 01:21

Ah, racism. Is there anything it can't do?

***

Over in debunkingwhite, there is a link to an article in which a white woman waxes poetic about black men. Boy, do they get upset. It makes me feel like I'm missing something. Why should I care about/judge a woman who likes black guys? Change the words "Black guy" with "Tall guy" or "Bald Guy" or "Short guy" or ( Read more... )

Comments 11

denelian January 21 2009, 22:26:53 UTC

i am not angry ( ... )

paranoyd January 21 2009, 23:31:23 UTC

Thank you for a good and well reasoned comment. And I think you will be surprised to find that I almost completely agree with you ( ... )

denelian January 22 2009, 02:36:09 UTC

heh, i like the "SPOC" pun myself ( ... )

paranoyd January 22 2009, 03:32:49 UTC

I think you make plenty sense, and all of it good. (Wow. Fractured English much? lol ( ... )

Thread 6

karmenghia February 2 2009, 02:33:12 UTC

I have a few huge problems with the current state of race relations. One position which gets me some heat is my rejection of white privilege. I think that is simply an outward expression of white guilt, which POC think we should all have, and which I do not. I make no apologies for being born who I am, and I reject the idea that I get something special because of the color of my skin. I also understand that, by way of the circular logic applied to pretty much any conversation of racism that means I have white privilege and am using to deny having it. Its no win.

Exactly. This is why I run, very fast, in the other direction whenever the racist meme surfaces.

paranoyd February 2 2009, 04:30:27 UTC

I understand what you mean. But I also feel it is necessary to be able to discuss racism and the remedies to it.

I just don't think a LiveJournal argument or a "humorous" Bingo card or even a plethora of racial (not racist) bloggers are doing much to help the situation.

vee_ecks March 10 2009, 10:30:20 UTC

paranoyd March 10 2009, 19:06:53 UTC

I don't have any problem with the concept of privilege. I mean, it's pretty simple: being white in this culture, in and of itself, gives me certain advantages. There are very few neighborhoods in the country where my mere presence in broad daylight might bring a cop car around, for instance. I know that's not true for some of my friends.

I don't disagree. The problem for me is not admitting that there are times in which I am privileged by being white or marrying a woman, but in that I am ALWAYS privileged even if I'm not doing anything specifically because I am white in every situation period. This is demonstrably not true, and poisons the discussion right from the beginning.

Abuse of the concept occurs when it's applied equally to *every* social dynamic involving majority and minority members of one set (race, sex, gender, whatever) or another. To take things to an absurd degree for illustration purposes, you end up with a bunch of gay black women beating the shit out of some white straight guy and yelling "Expression of privilege ( ... )

vee_ecks March 10 2009, 19:27:34 UTC

I said this in my LJ, but it's witch hunting. Definitively. One of the key marks of a witch hunt is that if anyone criticizes the hunters for any reason, they are proclaimed a witch. And this just happens, in Salem, in the USSR under Stalin, in the US during the Red Scare, during the eighties Satanic panic: in each of these cases, and every one like them, any critics are pronounced witches or counter-revolutionary or communists or Satanists, themselves. And...the LJ anti-racist You Don't Get a Cookie Brigade makes a practice of accusing any critics of racism.

I've pointed this out twice, now, to fairly reasonable people caught up in this crap, and both times I've gotten the same response: "WITCH HUNT? BWAHHAHAHAHHAAAA. How could it be a witch hunt? We don't have any *power.*"

Everybody's got the power to kill and destroy instead of building, the more so the more they collect themselves around a banner. This is always a danger, even when the cause is just. And...I ain't joining any witch hunts.