White supremacy is a minority view in the US and seems to have gained huge amounts of traction in spite of these believed effects. White supremacists have lost jobs for being caught out attending rallies; it doesn't seem to stop the rallies.
I remember reading a story about a Black man attending KKK rallies to understand their argument and successfully convince some of them to leave the group. I think it was Daryl Davis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis
Nowadays this would be very difficult because the mere fact of being around "bad" people ("bad" depends on the context and might be something relatively innocent) would also brand you as "bad" regardless of any good intentions you might have.
What ends up happening is that "bad" people are stuck in their own echo-chamber surrounded by like-minded people and anyone outside of the group wouldn't dare to engage with them (and provide counter-arguments) because of consequences for their own career & social circle (as their own friends would distance themselves from him for the same reasons).
Daryl Davis is a really interesting guy. His episode on the JRE is really good and his stories keep you engaged. Even if you don't like Joe Rogan, you should still be able to enjoy his episode because Davis does the majority of the talking.
A commenter below helpfully provided links to pages talking about increases in hate group counts. As you suggest, this could mean either more hate groups, a more effective SPLC (that's better at finding them), or a broader definition. The last one might be written in the original reports somewhere. I have no idea how to distinguish the first two.
It seems like the definition is "broadened" but no actual definition is provided. All we can look at is who gets labeled as "white supremacist" and draw our own inferences. Notably, a lot of garden-variety egalitarians--people who are against any kind of racial ideology including critical race theory, "anti-racism", and other left-wing racial ideologies--are frequently labeled "white supremacist" (including an awful lot of people of color, jewish people, homosexuals, etc).
We should be very wary of rhetoric that depends on changing definitions of terms without providing precise definitions (see also "racism"). Put differently, everyone's ideas should be criticized on their own terms, but you oughtn't be taken seriously if you don't even define your own terms (and defining them in terms of other poorly defined terms--e.g., "'anti-racism' opposing racism"--doesn't count).
The status quo is not explicitly racist, and a lot of people are comfortable with it. The push by the left is to suggest that just because a system does not have discriminatory laws, that doesn't mean it's not oppressive. Take the prevalence of indentured servitude after the Civil War as an example. I'd recommend "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" for a lucid account of the racial issues in current America.
If you can be convinced that the status quo is oppressive to racial minorities, then it serves to perpetuate white supremacy.
I don't follow your first point, since it seems clear to me that people of color, jewish people, and homosexuals are able to hold white supremacist viewpoints.
> If you can be convinced that the status quo is oppressive to racial minorities, then it serves to perpetuate white supremacy.
This is assuming white privilege is the same as white supremacy, when the term white supremacy has been used for KKK and neo-nazis groups, not mainstream white society since after the civil rights era.
It also assumes that most whites and only whites benefit from white privilege, otherwise it's not so white, and may be more a combination of class, culture and/or historical consequences. Also the fact that white people are still a majority in countries like the US, where a majority in any country likely has similar privileges just by being the majority. One last assumption (in America) is that white culture is a certain way, when in reality the US is primarily an English dominated culture historically, whereas Europe has a lot of cultural variation.
A related issue is that white supremacy is sometimes extended to considering an entire economic system as racist, just because history went a certain way. But there's nothing about an economic system that says any one particular group need benefit more than another.
Fair point. White supremacy is an attitude, whereas white privilege a state of being. I would quibble that white supremacist ideas are quite widespread - see, e.g., references to "thugs" during the BLM protests.
I also agree that white privilege interacts with class, culture and historical consequences, this was well put.
If, hypothetically, an economic system admits little class mobility, and if classes are racially biased, then the effect of that economic system is to maintain a racial caste system. What are your thoughts on this? I'd also point that the justice system works similarly. There are few explicit racial biases, but what is the effect of this system? It actively maintains a racial hierarchy. Does that make it racist?
Sure, I’d say the West is less so over time as laws and attitudes shift towed being more inclusive. But as for capitalism in general, it’s just an economic system that any society can make use of. I’m of the opinion that it does a better job of growing the economy and producing more opportunities than other systems, raising the standard of living in general. It does also produce more wealth inequality. It also has a tendency to produce powerful corporations. So those two tendencies along with a few others need to be kept in check.
> there's nothing about an economic system that says anyone one particular group need benefit more than another.
Crony capitalism creates positive feedback loops where the friends of rich people benefit more than strangers to rich people.
I doesn't take a lot of analysis to see how that can re-enforce the dominance of one race in a society if there's any small amount of inequality to start(1) and people of a given race are mostly associating with others of the same race, since the positive feedback loops in capitalism are significant.
(1) And "small amount of inequality" isn't a fair assumption for the US, where one race started out owning people of the other race.
I should have said racial or ethnic group, since there's no reason other than historical happenstance why any racial/ethnic grouping can't benefit. As for friends of the rich, has there been any economic system where that wasn't true? If not rich, then at least the powerful and well connected have always benefitted in every society. The challenging part is how to mitigate that somewhat.
> I doesn't take a lot of analysis to see how that can re-enforce the dominance of one race in a society if there's any small amount of inequality to start(1) and people of a given race are mostly associating with others of the same race, since the positive feedback loops in capitalism are significant.
This isn't racial discrimination or racism or white supremacy, and yielding equal outcomes among racial groups isn't innately desirable. If we assume that all races would be equal today were it not for historical discrimination (quite an assumption given that significant disparities predated first contact between different racial groups and thus racism between them), and we want to correct for that historical discrimination then we can talk about it, but that's fundamentally different than "racism is rampant today" or "we've made little progress since abolition" or "we live in a white supremacist ethnostate" or any of the other left-wing claims.
> This isn't racial discrimination or racism or white supremacy
Definitionally, "a system that gives white people a structural advantage based on what color they were born" is a system of white supremacy, even if the system could be tilted to be a black supremacy or hispanic supremacy system if the initial conditions were different.
There's what the system could do (in another historical timeline) vs. what it is doing.
> Definitionally, "a system that gives white people a structural advantage based on what color they were born" is a system of white supremacy
Yes, but that's not our system. Our system doesn't give structural advantages based on race (at least we can hardly measure the extent of any such advantages). It does give structural advantages based on class (and many other variables) which correlates with race; however, correlation and causation are famously different. We don't have a white supremacist system or any kind of racist system, although some are advocating for a racist system so that we can eliminate disparities.
> There's what the system could do (in another historical timeline) vs. what it is doing.
No one is suggesting an alternate historical timeline; I'm arguing that our system today isn't racist, but that it's very nearly colorblind; however, disparities can result in a perfectly colorblind system because the initial racial distributions were not uniform.
EDIT: Downvoters, do you believe correlation and causation are the same thing in general or only when applied to racial disparities?
> Crony capitalism creates positive feedback loops where the friends of rich people benefit more than strangers to rich people.
That's about class, not race, ethnicity or whatever other grouping you prefer. White billionaires hang out with black billionaires, not with white hobos.
You're reinforcing the parent's point that there's not race discrimination but class discrimination. Our hypothetical white billionaire is presumably discriminating utterly on a class basis (hanging out with zero poor people of any race) and not discriminating at all on a racial basis (hanging out with members of his class in proportion to their race / without racial bias).
> The push by the left is to suggest that just because a system does not have discriminatory laws, that doesn't mean it's not oppressive. ... If you can be convinced that the status quo is oppressive to racial minorities, then it serves to perpetuate white supremacy.
There are a couple of dynamics at play here:
* The distinction between de jure and de facto discrimination. No one disputes that a country can be racially oppressive via de facto discrimination as our country has been in the past.
* Whether any kind of discrimination is a necessary condition for a system to be called "oppressive". Of course a system is oppressive if it discriminates at all, even if the discrimination is only de facto. This is a completely uncontroversial opinion--virtually everyone believes this, so I don't think this is the position that the left is espousing (especially given that prominent left-wing voices like Kendi are pretty explicit that this isn't what they're talking about). Moreover, if leftists are taking the uncontroversial interpretation, then it doesn't make sense to call anyone else a "white supremacist" because at worst they are opposed to discrimination to the extent that they are aware that it exists (and no, pointing to disparities does not constitute compelling evidence of discrimination).
So presumably leftists believe we live under "white supremacy" because there are disparities at all, irrespective of whether those disparities are attributable to racial discrimination. More likely, it seems to me that leftists are conflating "there was a lot of historical discrimination that created different wealth, crime, marriage/family, etc distributions that the present system acts upon" with "the system today is racist and we've made little progress since the legalization of slavery".
If the latter were true then we would indeed be under a 'white supremacist' system, but thankfully it's obviously fallacious. There are certainly still some vestiges of racism that we should continue to work to remove, but we've progressed tremendously--our system is mostly colorblind, everyone of consequence everywhere is in favor of making the system more colorblind (save apparently progressives and a handful of thoroughly marginalized actual white supremacists); however, a perfectly egalitarian (i.e., non-racist) system isn't going to yield equal outcomes.
That said, if we want to address historical racism, then let's talk about it as such and not give the impression that we're solving for extant racism (or that extant racism is a primary driver in various disparities). This is unnecessarily dishonest and divisive. Let's talk about reparations instead of advocating for a racialized society and system (in contrast to a colorblind society and system). Let's dispense with viewpoints of racial primacy and essentialism. Let's dispense with DiAngelo's "whites are inherently racist" (not paraphrasing) and Kendi's "anti-racism requires eternal discrimination" (paraphrasing). All of this is nonsense and a distraction if our goal is to address historical discrimination or decrease injustice or even close racial gaps (defunding police or antagonizing whites are not likely to improve yields for minorities).
> I don't follow your first point, since it seems clear to me that people of color, jewish people, and homosexuals are able to hold white supremacist viewpoints.
My point didn't depend on the ability or inability of people with those identities to hold white supremacist viewpoints; it was literally parenthetical. I only brought it up because there's a lot of overlap between the people who make broad claims of white supremacy and the people who advocate that whites "shut up and listen" to people with these identities such that, you know, they might shut up and listen before writing these people off as white supremacists.
The justice system (1) does discriminate against people of color to some extent, and (2) it also discriminates against the poor. The arguments for these points are laid out in detail in the book I referred to, so I'm not going to waste your time repeating them. If you do agree with either of these points, then we would agree that the justice system is oppressive.
You raise the point that leftists don't differentiate between a system that discriminates based on race and a system that discriminates on factors correlated with race. I would argue that the effects of those two systems are quite similar. Would you agree that, regardless of the intention, both of these systems have the effect of racial oppression?
I can't defend DiAngelo or Kendi because I'm ignorant of what they have to say.
> The justice system (1) does discriminate against people of color to some extent, and (2) it also discriminates against the poor
No doubt, and everyone agrees that this should be fixed to the extent that there is discrimination. It's unclear exactly how to fix this discrimination except to continue to promote a color-blind society (which has been the winning strategy thus far and while it hasn't completely resolved the problem, it's significantly curbed it in a relatively short amount of time).
> If you do agree with either of these points, then we would agree that the justice system is oppressive.
Yes. But no one is arguing that we shouldn't change the justice system; there's disagreement about the extent to which it's oppressive with the left arguing that it's "literally slavery" and moderates arguing that it's a problem that needs to be addressed but not a significant driver of the disparities that the left cites and the right arguing that it's an insignificant problem relative to black-on-black crime.
> ou raise the point that leftists don't differentiate between a system that discriminates based on race and a system that discriminates on factors correlated with race. I would argue that the effects of those two systems are quite similar. Would you agree that, regardless of the intention, both of these systems have the effect of racial oppression?
Yes, by definition, something that correlates with some underlying cause else has similar effects.
A good analogy would be the disparate outcomes of the criminal justice system with respect to men and women. As with blacks, the criminal justice system discriminates against men to some extent. However, it more significantly discriminates against violent behavior, which correlates with male gender to the effect that men are disproportionately likely to go to prison, their sentences are disproportionately harsh, etc.
A moderate would say that we should address the discrimination problem, but not try to discriminate against women in order to address the remainder of the gap which is attributable to the correlate: violent behavior.
An ideologically consistent leftist would argue that correlates should be treated as causes in the name of erasing disparities; however, (mysteriously) there are no nation-wide progressive efforts to close this gap. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine why progressives are comfortable discriminating against some groups but not others.
EDIT: Even though they have similar results, as with all correlations, the danger of treating correlations as a causation is that you end up treating the symptom and not the problem, and often this just exacerbates the symptom. Eliminating standardized testing in the college admissions process is very likely to result in more discrimination against blacks, but addressing our growing wealth inequality problem will benefit people of all races (and given that blacks are more likely to be poor than whites, it will benefit them disproportionately). Further, this allows us to dispense with the deliberately confusing, divisive "white supremacy", "white fragility", "racism" rhetoric that is in all likelihood only creating more racists.
EDIT2: While we may not disagree, I feel like this conversation is a lot more productive than most race conversations. Thanks for being a good faith participant, sincerely.
On the contrary, I've been traveling across the US quite a bit over the last several months, from New England, the PNW, and the South. While I've seen plenty of signs and a few rallies supporting BLM and other progressive causes, I've yet to see, in person, a single sign or rally or any supportive material for white supremacy. I hear about it a lot on the internet but from my travels anyway I haven't seen it yet.
Edit: I did see some confederate flags being flown in middle of nowhere Mississippi, but I honestly believe they're not flown as a symbol of hatred (at least not always) as some people had banners next to their flags saying things like "Pride not hate", or the rainbow flag, or other phrases trying to distance themselves from the negative connotations of the flag.
I had one almost happen in my town (in NJ). We had to counter rally to chase them out. There are fewer physical rallies because the ones they try to do are often successfully suppressed. Recall Boston in 2017. Unite the Right (not suppressed and resulted in a murder). etc.
If you go to certain left wing rallies, they WILL show up. I have seen real live nazis screaming at my friends at an anti-ICE rally.
The problem with these guys is they do have a narrative that is appealing to a certain set of people about nationalism and certain ethnic enemies that care creating the problems. The idea is to prevent their growth and flourishing because if you see them get very common, we are in deep trouble... though given the debate tonight with the president signaling "Stand Back. Stand By." to the Proud Boys, I sense a creeping darkness.
Unfortunately for them, one doesn't really get to choose how other people interpret the symbols one uses, as anyone who's ever tried to do something weird in a protocol and then hope a code comment will stop developers of the future from screwing up the code around the weirdness can attest.
Sure, you can interpret the flag however you choose. That has nothing to do with the perceived rise in white supremacy though. Confederate flags have long been flown in the south, and if anything, flying the lgbt flag next to it is new.
The Confederate battle flag meant "The Confederacy" for five years, and meant "Mississippi" for 126.
I'm not from around there, and it isn't my business to defend nor condemn it. I do think taking it as ipso facto evidence of white supremacy is a Yankee mistake.
I didn't say it was a good solution or one I would ever offer myself, but I think a lot of the young-white-male-to-alt-right pipeline falls in to this when nobody else seems willing to hear them out except to tell them which ethnic group to blame.
In the way it might be casted upon supporters of the President, the distinction between white supremacy and white power is largely semantics.
As far as I understand it, "white supremacy" for those that desire it is the idealized end result of "white power." Much of the rhetoric from President Trump is to rally support for white power. [1]
Given the most common disagreement in the US is between those who advocate for or oppose President Trump, it makes sense that his followers would be deemed "white supremacists"
I believe the broad awakening among many white people in the US currently is the ambient benefits of invisible white power.
It is exactly because of social cooling that you heard so little about white supremacy for so many years. The tacit endorsement of one famous person (see if you can guess who!) helped to somewhat raise the ambient temperature for it.
I'm not sure there is causation here. Far-right ultra-nationalistic movements are gaining speed in many places in the world. I think there are many factors at play, one being that we get further and further away from WW2 and people forget how bad it can get (especially here in Europe). Only the military and very old people in the west now know what a real war feels like. On top of that there's general social unrest and increased inequalities (the infamous 1%), software eating the world etc...
I do think that white supremacy, fascism and nazism was really a lot more fringe even only 10 years ago, it wasn't just under-reported.
Yeah, if you pay attention to the world (and I'm not implying grandparent does not - please don't draw that conclusion), you will see a lot of "symptoms" before 2016 happened.
I believe the person grandparent is referring to's rise to power was one more symptom in what's been happening, and not a cause in any way. Of course, these things tend to enter a sort of feedback loop. If you'll allow me a parallel with the rise of antisemitism in Europe in the early half of the last century: It was not Nazism that emboldened and bolstered antisemitic feelings across Europe. Nazism was a symptom of the established and pretty mainstream antisemitic current in western society at the time. Even the US was not immune to hating on the Jew.
This rise in far-right political strength is most likely associated with a backlash against the (mostly? totally?) left-wing push for inclusivity and rapid social progressivism. In a way, among those that wouldn't identify themselves as far-right but do manifest ideals associated with the far-right of today, I can identify a certain undercurrent of "we're going too far, we're making too many changes, we need to slow down". Of course, things like "cancel culture", Spotify's staff wanting complete creative control over a 'controversial' podcast, etc., as well as the social bubbles we isolate ourselves in on our chosen social media platforms do not help at all with empathy or viewing others' viewpoints, which greatly exacerbates the issue.
My point is more that people seem to no longer consider war even a possible scenario. As such the weakening on the EU is not seen as a huge problem by many, because as we all know Europe is not at all historically prone to spontaneously bursting into flames.
In a way your comment which, if I read it correctly, implies "surely you don't think that the rise of nationalism could lead to wars" kind of proves my point. It totally could, and I'd add fairly easily. The peace we have is not as solid as it may seem, especially with dwindling resources and the rise of new superpowers in the East.
Your point is only made because you choose to reinterpret my words. Sure, nationalusm could lead to wars, so could many other things. How is nationalism any more certain to do so?
Many people were accused of being xenophobic, mostly by self-important brats, of course they loose their reluctance towards it. It is much stronger than 10 years ago.
>Far-right ultra-nationalistic movements are gaining speed in many places in the world.
That may be true, but far-left movements are certainly gaining speed as well. And I'm talking about real actual 'cease the means of production'-communists. Politics is certainly getting more polarised.
I believe the phrase is "seize the means of production."
Ceasing it is merely a consequence of botching the seizing (and the understanding of where that means fit in a post-Industrial-Revolution ecosystem of interlocked systems). ;)
And full agreement; this is a language cobbled together by a chunk of land getting conquered and re-conquered so many times that the locals gave up trying to speak the language of the New King and made up their own from their favorite words in the aggressor cultures and the language they spoke amongst themselves.
There has been many wars in Europe since WW2, from Cyprus to Yugoslavia and Georgia. You don't need to be 80 years old to have experienced war. Or maybe you need to explain what a "real war" is.
If true, that raises two interesting questions relative to the socialcooling.com content:
1) It begs the question of whether social cooling should be considered a universal ill. After all, white supremacy is bad, and consequences for publicly embracing it are useful.
2) It begs the question of whether the impact of digitally-originated social cooling is particularly relevant if one thought-leader can upend it.
This depends on how your aggregation function is weighted.
If your measure is "how many people in the US are white supremacists?" then, yes, it's definitely a minority view (though still more widely held than it should be!).
But if you scale it by each person's power/wealth, you get a very different view. If your question is "what is the total power held by white supremacists?" you'll end up with a larger number.
And if you really want to get an accurate measure where you treat each person's white supremacy value as a number that ranges smoothly from positive (actual white supremacist) to zero (not interested in putting effort into race relations one way or another) to negative (anti-white supremacist), your function may produce a number that explains a hell of a lot of US history.
> If your question is "what is the total power held by white supremacists?" you'll end up with a larger number.
I very much doubt so. The richest people in the US are whites (e.g. Besos, Gates, Buffet), but not suprematists. If you have data which proves otherwise, please share.
> The richest people in the US are whites (e.g. Besos, Gates, Buffet), but not suprematists.
And what of the Kochs and Waltons?
Either way, you're only thinking about the 0.01%. But consider the many many more people in the 1%. Big fish in small pond types that are part of the Old Boy's Club in your local area. People that wouldn't call themselves white supremacists or even racist, but also wouldn't really want Black folks joining their country club.
If you don't think deep-seated racism is profoundly prevalent across large areas of the US, you are probably just in the position of having enough privilege to be oblivious to it. I grew up in the South, and it is everywhere. You just have to scratch the surface a bit to see it.
Maybe it's true, maybe it's false, but the burden of proof on those who make statements about white supremacists, and I did not see any evidence supporting these statements.
> but the burden of proof on those who make statements about white supremacists
In a nation where it was legal to own black people for most of its existence and less than 40 years since the last lynching, you think the burden of proof is on me to show that white supremacy is a problem?
I don't know. Maybe you watched a movie about white supremacists when you were a child and it stick to your mind. People tend to have biases and see what they want to see. Some people see white supremacists everywhere. Otheres constantly see examples of inter-racial love and friendship.
> In a nation where it was legal to own black people for most of its existence and less than 40 years since the last lynching, you think the burden of proof is on me to show that white supremacy is a problem?
Maybe it is a problem, maybe it is not a problem.
The original statement was not about that. Quoting:
> But if you scale it by each person's power/wealth, you get a very different view. If your question is "what is the total power held by white supremacists?" you'll end up with a larger number.
This is the statement I'm contensting. Because it is unsubstantiated.
> Maybe you watched a movie about white supremacists when you were a child and it stick to your mind.
Well, I:
* Lived near a sundown town.
* Watched one of my closest friends get recruited by an associate of David Duke and slowly get indoctrinated into white supremacy.
* Had a white kid in high school proudly tell me about the time they "beat the shit out of that nigger" just because they didn't like the way he looked at them.
* Watched half a schoolbus full of elementary school kids joke about "porch monkeys".
* Grew up in a city named after one plantation in a neighborhood named after another one.
But, sure, yeah, I must be imagining it all.
> Because it is unsubstantiated.
I provided a link to lots of articles about white supremacy in the US. It is you who have provided no counter-evidence.
No, I'm not saying you are imagining. I suspect (not state) that you are biased, and describe the issue larger than what it is.
> I provided a link to lots of articles about white supremacy in the US. It is you who have provided no counter-evidence.
And I can give you a link to Google, when you can find anything.
You just provided a link with the list of white supremacist organisations. Nobody denies these organisation exists.
But there is no proof that "white supremacists" have significant power. They look like small marginal groups with no money and no real power. Like religious sects.
They did succeed in boosting the current President into the office, which is more than no power. How significant the power is of being a voting bloc the President can't seem to say no to is a question reasonable people can debate.
The US was largely founded on white supremacy and it has been part of the state institutions for two hundred years. It didn't disappear at the end of the civil war, or in the 1960s, or in 2008.
I'm afraid I don't know the definition of state you're operating under, so I don't think I can evaluate claims such as "white supremacy is endorsed by the state in the US."
Federal immigration control almost exclusively focuses their attention on deporting and denying asylum to Latino refugees and asylum seekers.
Last week it was uncovered that mass hysterectomies had taken place at an ICE facility in Georgia without the informed consent of patients - this falls under the UN's definition of genocide.
This policy shift towards targeting exclusively Latinos came under the Trump administration calling Mexican immigrants "rapists" who bring crime and drugs. Melania Trump is a white immigrant who was granted the exclusive EB-1 green card for "extraordinary abilities".
I find it nearly impossible in these circumstances to come to the conclusion that the state is not explicitly catering to white supremacist ideology...and immigration policy is only the tip of the iceberg.
No it is not. I literally never heard that "white supremacy is endorsed by the state in the US". I heard the highly exaggregated unsubstantiated claims though. (Eg by calling all people wearing MAGA hats white supremacists.)
The global context is more complicated, but (as my international friends are fond of reminding me) the US has outsized cultural influence on what other countries consider best practices.
By that logic Hillary Clinton is a sexist for remaining married to a sexual harraser, and a vast proportion of the left are who-knows-what-label for uncritically parroting the Covington teen narrative.
This seems broken, especially with 'MAGA' thrown in there, are you saying only whites voted for that candidate? Because I got news for you... MAGA wasn't even original to Trump.
According to this list since I believe people can bootstrap themselves I must be a white supremacist. Except I highly doubt the KKK are fond of mestizo people, I even doubt they even like "white" Hispanics at all. I know people who have been homeless and now make more money than I do, living on cars or purely on the streets, minorities included.
As a minority I am astounded at all the bikeshedding people are doing to fight racism, worse yet finding racism where there is none like git branches.
Edit: Also, just because someone supported Trump and is white and voted for him doesn't automatically make that person a racist. This kind of prejudice rising up today is very worrisome and way too topical in a discussion about social cooling.
That's the point, it is broken. It's how "white supremacy" has gained so much traction in the US. Of course it will have gained traction if you expand the definiton to include almost 50% of the population.
The pedigree of that image is that it started as a list created in a facilitated focus group on race and race relations. It assigns no positive or negative connotations to those items; they're things people said off the top of their head when they were asked "What does 'white culture' mean to you?"
Later, it was shared with the inaccurate description of being a list of negative aspects of white culture.
It's kind of funny really; the pedigree of that list being considered a list of negative things is white people making assumptions about the intent of a list assembled of things white people self-attributed to white culture.
Regarding the previous "iceberg" image---that's a lot of words to go looking through to try and pick out the items you're describing as 'perfectly normal and valuable things.' Can you highlight which ones you were referring to? Assuming good intent, I assume you didn't mean "Racial profiling" or "Fearing people of color."
> It assigns no positive or negative connotations to those items; they're things people said off the top of their head when they were asked "What does 'white culture' mean to you?"
The result is the same, the subconscious associations between "white" and "whiteness" and those traits has been strengthened. The meaning of words comes from what people think about when they hear it. By increasing the amount of things people associate with the word "white" the definition is expanded.
No negative connotations have been assigned by the document. But "white" and especially "whiteness" has very negative connotations. I've never come across any text or material suggesting "whiteness" is a good thing. Its always stuff like this: https://news.csusm.edu/ask-the-expert-the-problem-with-white... (That alone is already pretty fucked up when you think about it for more than a second) Furthermore, the meaning of words comes from what people think about when they hear it. But "white supremacy" has extremely negative connotations, and so all those normal things get tarred by association with imagery of the Nazis and the KKK.
>Regarding the previous "iceberg" image---that's a lot of words to go looking through to try and pick out the items you're describing as 'perfectly normal and valuable things.' Can you highlight which ones you were referring to? Assuming good intent, I assume you didn't mean "Racial profiling" or "Fearing people of color."
Of course not, those are the actually bad things that are used to tar the "perfectly normal and valuable things". If the iceberg picture only contained good things, it would associate positive valence with the term "white supremacy" rather than associating negative valence with the normal things as the picture was designed to do.
To take specific examples, "Calling the police on black people". This is a perfectly normal thing to do if your being robbed or harassed and the perpetrator happens to be black. Doing so does not mean your promoting white supremacy. Now if you're doing it because they're black, thats a bad thing, but the image makes no destination, so the normal thing is tarred by the bad thing. There are also some supper egregious ones, things like "White parents" and "there's only one human race/We're all one big human family". These are actually anti-racist perspectives that are now being associated with one of the most racist and destructive ideologies in history. Another one is "All Lives Matter", this is an explicitly egalitarian message that is now viewed as racist by association.
I can keep going through the list but then my arguments would turn into a gish-gallop.
This kind of rhetorical tarring has been going on for so long that certain kinds of explicit institutional racism is now viewed as not racist (affirmative action), and explicitly anti-racist and unifying statements "All lives matter/there's only one human race" are viewed as racist.
All lives matter, in particular, is perceived as racist because it's only trotted out as a response to black lives matter (a phrase it is not at all incompatible with, so people tossing "all lives matter" out as a response to "black lives matter" are immediately casting it in a racist connotation).
As for the reason it isn't really a retort to "black lives matter", that's been explained better by Chris Straub than I ever could.
It's more that they're saying people just believe black houses are likelier to catch fire innately and that's acceptable, when they're not and it's not.
You could replace, "black" in that sentence with a whole bunch of other things. There's nothing special about race, and their shouldn't be. Again, multiple factors of variation. If someone is focused on "poverty" it's not that they find black people being disproportionately affected acceptable, it's that they have exercised their judgement and don't see it as a priority. And (IMO) rightly so.
Now you can make the argument that 99% of people don't give a shit, and only care about themselves. But that leads you more down the path of effective alturism than BLM, again because the former doesn't ignore the other factors of variation.
For those who genuinely care about the state of the world, and have identified issues that in their judgement that are more pressing, or those who do care but are currently busy keeping their own heads above the water for whatever reason, the accusations that they believe the current situation is acceptable are at best tone deaf and at worst downright insulting.
Political reform? How many people protesting actually voted in their municipal and state elections?
Even if that were the case, it would be a pretty solid argument to focus on more tractable problems rather than whatever the past few months have been.
Saying "Other options have been tried and failed." Is BS post-hoc justification. This round of BLM started because of 1 egregious viral video in a country of 300,000,000 when a whole bunch of young people had nothing better to do. When your dealing with complex systems like police-community interactions, you will never be able to completely eliminate egregious incidents, even if you can reduce the incident rate by 90%. Any kind of legitimate attempt to improve the situation will necessarily involve something resembling multiple A/B tests carried out over multiple areas and multiple years to understand the relationship between policy, environment, culture, and policing outcomes. This will necessarily take time, it will be extremely expensive, and the gains will be marginal. That's just how things work when your dealing with massive complex systems and rare events.
It wasn't just one video, it wasn't one just one incident, It's not a small amount of people who are upset, and it's not okay.
Quite a few of the protesters have documented why they're out in the street. If anyone is having difficulty understanding the situation, I recommend reading what they've said.
For me personally, it was very educational to bear witness to people protesting police brutality being met with more police brutality---not justified force escalation, but attempts to bait protesters into breaking laws to justify arrests, antagonize nonviolent protests hoping for violent ones, and straight up lying about the situation on the ground. The last part I find insulting, because it's not like the video cameras aren't there. They know the video cameras are there. They believe the system will protect them from violating their own protocols and the law, and so far, it does.
> White supremacists have lost jobs for being caught out attending rallies; it doesn't seem to stop the rallies.
Yesterday, there was a documentary movie on German's private TV station Pro7 about Nazis. An actual Nazi confirmed live on camera: yes, deplatforming Nazis (and that includes them losing jobs, family, friends) works and is a huge source of pain for the movement because many people don't hold up to that pressure and leave.
Just imagine how big the rallies would be if there was no social pressure on not being Nazi would no longer be there... at the moment many attendees either don't give a f..k about how they are perceived, or they relish on that being accepted in their social circles.
Correlation does not imply causation. Every authoritarian and totalitarian regime also agrees citizens should pay their taxes. As do most liberal democracies.
First they deplatformed the Nazis, and I did not speak out -- for I was not a Nazi.
>The problem is when governments go against legitimate opposition and abuse social pressure.
Legitimate according to who? Isn't any opposition to a government illegitimate opposition? Or exclusively legitimate, depending on how you feel about the concept of government itself.
I've been self-censoring for more than a decade now. I really like how the information is presented in this SocialCooling site.
As you have pointed out, the effects are good if they lower the voices you disagree with, and raise the ones that represent your views. My advice to everyone reading HN is to pick the winning side, and conform to it. Fortunately for us, picking the winners isn't hard.
Funny; I thought it was "First they deplatformed Nazis, and I did not speak out because Nazis can get fucked." ;)
> I've been self-censoring for more than a decade now
Good! I recommend it. It's a basic skill that is useful when living in a society with other human beings whose situation (social power, emotional state, world view) we must account for. We have entire empathic neurological systems to support that behavior.
> My advice to everyone reading HN is to pick the winning side, and conform to it.
> Funny; I thought it was "First they deplatformed Nazis, and I did not speak out because Nazis can get fucked."
The original quote which you're abusing begins "first they came for the Communists".
These were Communists in the era of Josef Stalin, to be clear. Mass-murdering totalitarians, exactly the sort of people you wouldn't want taking over your country.
It appears you missed both the lesson of Herr Niemoller, and a key part of the history of the rise of Nazism in Weimar Germany.
Someone missed a lesson from history. Might be me; might not.
In modern Germany, it's still illegal to explicitly disseminate means of propaganda of unconstitutional organizations. Is this wrong? I think I'll defer to the modern Germans on that question.
There's also difference of degree. Deplatforming Nazis (which is how parent post bastardized the quote initially) is not the same as incarcerating them. I was playing off the bastardization.
If you want to continue to defend platforming Nazis, be my guest, but I don't have to discuss it with you.
Many a barn door is closed after the horses escape.
I, too, have negative interest in continuing to speak to an unpleasant person who makes unsupported assumptions about my views on a topic I never addressed.
German communists most likely weren't aware of what was really happening in the USSR at the time.
(Whether an hypothetical communist revolution in Germany would have resulted in Stalinist-like horrors is an interesting question.)
French communists have had a disproportionate part in French resistance, and a disproportionate part in French after-war policies for a long time.
It's because this page is using "minority views" as a code word for "ruling class threatening views." Which has always been the case. A minority view that doesn't threaten business interests will face little suppression (see: white supremacy)
I don't think we can assume white supremacy doesn't threaten business interests. Particularly not in the US, where approximately 2 out of 5 Americans aren't white. How many companies are willing to put on the table as their business model "We'll be actively hostile to 40% of our potential customers?"
People in America dont live in random places. You have parts where everyone is white and parts where everyone is black. Then you have parts where one group is severely dominant. For many if not most businesses, their customer base does not have same racial ration as whole America.
One business' potential customer is another's potential employee and a third's potential competitor.
How many websites have multiple translations available and put effort into accessibility proportional to the amount of the population that could be helped by it? It's not anywhere near 100%.
