RE: Assholes in the news
February 24, 2021 at 1:10 pm
(This post was last modified: February 24, 2021 at 1:24 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
(February 24, 2021 at 12:17 pm)Rev. Rye Wrote: If someone like Contrapoints can manage to talk people down from going all 14/88, there has to be a better way of convincing the average person to check their privilege than telling them how to be less white, even if it’s just saying “yeah, I can see why you’d think that, but the thing is, here’s why it’s wrong and why you should act differently.”
Not if her thesis is correct. The demand for a Better Way™ is yet another example of complicity to systemic racism. Insisting that it be dealt with in some way that privileges it. She makes a big point of step one being to define what whiteness is to you.
We know what whiteness is to IA (and so we know what subwhiteness or unwhiteness is, as well).
Successful/unsuccessful
Responsible/irresponsible
Confident/doubtful
Innovative/incapable
In the same way that nothing about whiteness has anything to do with having white skin as IA explains it, nothing about whiteness has anything to do with white skin as the course instructs, and...ofc....it doesn't even ask him to be less white as he sees whiteness. His whiteness, instead, reads as a direct lift of the self fulfilling prophecy of white supremacy.
He has no objection, only the white defensiveness she refers to in explaining how we got here. He's fragile, and that's why he's bought into so much white supremacist shit. Indulging his fragility won't lead to him consuming fewer racist products. At some point, someone needs to sit him down and just tell him to stop, full stop. Maybe he can do more, but he doesn't have to do more than just stop. White supremacy isn't a perpetual motion machine. If he can go one further, great....
Stop and think about what we say - whether it makes us complicit to systemic racism. Stop and think about what we do - whether it makes us complicit to systemic racism. It's not something that just happens, like gravity. If it solely depended on the efforts of the racist golems (like our boy tim) it would be impossible to explain it's hold on our culture, a hold that crosses political aisles with ease. It's the complicity of the seething masses of decent people which prop it up, in reality, like every other good or bad thing that's ever been brought into existence by human beings. That's one of those uncomfortable truths that racial fragility applies itself too. That it's not really the bad guys fucking this one up. It's grandma, applie pie, and the fourth of july. The nicest person you know. Very fine people, on both sides, iow.
No, surely not. Not me, not us, not my granny, not my pie, not my fourth. I'm just trying to be successful, responsible, confident, and innovative. Throw beautiful for good measure, why the hell not. In for a penny, in for a pound. You reckon mollycoddling this asshole will help him?
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