#and it's impossible to see things like racism without observing the intersections of that - take a look at anti-blackness and slavery

[antoine-roquentin]

Consider Ms. Cooper’s threat against the person who told her to leash her dog: She was going to call the cops and “tell them there’s an African American man threatening” her life.  It seems taken as a given  that the police are racially biased — that they will act with overwhelming force, and without regard to the actual facts of the case, to defend a white person who appears to be in danger from a black man. Even though she was the one breaking rules, she assumed the police would target him, precisely on the grounds that he was an “African American man.”

This is not a set of assumptions that most conservatives would likely hold. They are generally skeptical of claims of racial bias in policing. While some acknowledge a few “bad apples,” they assert that law enforcement officers typically discharge their duties in a restrained and fair manner, with their responses to situations dictated by the pertinent facts of the case.

In other words, Ms. Cooper’s assumption that the cops would respond in a forceful manner against a black man without asking too many questions, strictly in virtue of his race as compared to hers — this is the kind of belief that liberals tend to hold about cops.

Indeed, based on her demographic characteristics — urban, white, female, highly-educated, of an upper-socio-economic status — it is statistically highly probable that Ms. Cooper voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election.

The peculiar intersection of race, class, and ideology that Ms. Cooper embodies is hardly unusual for cases like these. Consider: in areas of concentrated poverty that are being gentrified or that lie adjacent to wealthier areas (as is often the case in urban settings), policing tends to be much more frequent and aggressive — even for small crimes. Those calling the cops on people of color for things like taking shelter from the rain, failing to wave at a white passerby while leaving their AirBnB, sitting in their car waiting for yoga class to start, accidentally brushing up against a white person in a store, etcetera — the people regularly seeking out law enforcement for things like loud music, loitering, “suspected” criminal activity, or domestic disturbances  — these are often relatively well-off, highly-educated, liberal, white denizens eager to “clean up” or “protect” the neighborhoods they choose to live in.

Moreover, it is liberals who go out of their way to embed themselves in communities of color — especially young and highly-educated professionals or artists. Granted, rents tend to be cheaper in these areas. However, many are also drawn to such neighborhoods, quite explicitly, because they are “historic,” “cultured” and “diverse.” In so doing, they put themselves in situations where they more frequently come into contact with minorities. If misunderstandings or conflicts arise (as they inevitably will in multi-cultural and gentrifying urban neighborhoods), many reflexively look to local authorities to resolve these disputes on their behalf. Like Ms. Cooper, this is often done in confidence that the police will align themselves with the white person making the call. In practice, then, they are attempting to use police to punish people of color who are insufficiently deferent to their own demands or preferences. However, it is extremely difficult for most white liberals to understand their actions in this way due to a phenomenon social scientists call “moral credentialing.”

Research in the cognitive and behavioral sciences suggests that when whites explicitly denounce racism or affirm their commitment to racial equality, they often — paradoxically — grow more likely to act in ways that favor other whites; simultaneously, they grow more confident that their actions were not racially-motivated.

A similar effect holds when they observe others from their “in-group” making gestures towards antiracism: it convinces them not only that their peers are egalitarians but that their own actions and interactions are non-biased as well. Conversely, blaming or criticizing “others” for a particular moral failing reduces one’s own sense of guilt for that same moral failing.

Consequently, for whites who inhabit social circles where people go around denouncing racism to one another constantly — painting themselves as staunch advocates for social justice — it would become almost impossible for these people to see the role that they play in perpetuating systemic inequality.

Under the sway of moral credentialing, people can take actions that they would recognize in others as “racist” without understanding themselves to be racist when performing those same actions. These dynamics are quite clear in Ms. Cooper’s apology: She acknowledged how someone might perceive her actions to be racist but she insisted nonetheless that her behaviors were not racially motivated and that she never meant to harm anyone.

Put another way, it is not merely the case that liberals and leftists are capable of being dangerously entitled around people of color, they are probably more likely to engage in these sorts of behaviors than non-leftists. Precisely because they view themselves as “allies” to members of historically marginalized and disadvantaged groups, they often feel justified in taking liberties they would deny to other whites — confident that their actions are not racist, that they are merely giving an appropriate response to the situation at hand.

bunch of people have been talking about the “great awokening”, the public opinion shift in the last decade where a higher percentage of white liberals now repeat phrases associated with anti-racist thought in polls at a higher rate than black people. they assert that this is a new style of thought-terminating cliche, a new religion in fact, foisted on americans by democratic elites and/or the professional managerial class. notwithstanding the more obvious evidence against that, that many of those people also believe the sexual revolution was an elite-led affair when it most assuredly wasn’t, there’s the clear evidence that the actions of those who give these answers to pollsters don’t line up with their words. most ironic of all, the religious metaphor is clearly misapplied here, because what’s going on is that white liberals are using public support for anti-racist protests as a way of absolving their sins of racism.

[questionabledreamer]

#1 Ideology

Ideology is the most dangerous forms that ideas can take because they necessitate following a pattern over following a natural conclusion. This means that you lose sight of what really matters. What is the point of life? Is it a good idea to buy clothes made from kids in factories? If not, why do we still do it? Why do black people get arrested more often for minor drug offences and serve significantly longer sentences? If you read these questions and had an answer, you’ve probably derived or got that answer from somewhere. Hopefully, that place is scientific research, but what we do know is that the simple truth is these answers are varied. The only really to know the true answers is to do primary research, to actually gather evidence and do inquiries, but even when you do that the answers produced could be unsatisfactory because of the people doing the searching and the biases they bring.

If you heard without context, someone was shot by another person, it’s always clear that they are bad. If you heard that someone shot another person while detaining their vehicle, it’s also pretty obvious that’s worse, a murderer should not have the ability to stop a person. It’s only once you introduce the word ‘cop’ to the equation that certain people’s natural conclusion, because now the concept is related to an ideology, namely an ideology that thinks of criminals as violent terrorists and police officers as guardians of peace. A person is dead but according to the ideological framework, that’s a good thing, even if outside of the framework, it’s objectively wrong. The idea that criminals don't deserve human rights is dehumanizing, inherently, but since the ideology that produces that conclusion is so widespread you have people arguing about how severe the crime was instead of talking about the life that was extinguished. It causes people to lose sight of what matters, because the system they use to find or create meaning in the world creates meaning that favors certain people. 

Some people might say, ‘well, feminism is an ideology, and that’s good.’ but feminism isn’t an ideology, if you look at the concept of feminism. There are Trans-exclusionary feminists, and radical feminists, and intersectional feminists and more, and ever version of feminism, ever school of thought, takes a different perspective. Take sexualization as a concept, sex positive feminists might think of sexualization as something that the observer does to a subject, meaning they think that sexualization occurs when someone (most likely a cis-man) views a woman as a sexual object. While sex negative feminists see the opposite, they see sexualization as a thing a subject does to themselves, such as through revealing clothing. Both of these ideas are feminist in nature, they both attempt to answer the question ‘how do we prevent the sexualization of women that leads to gender based discrimination?” Feminism, Black Lives Matter, or any ‘woke’ group, which is in quotes because I’m sleepy as fuck and I can understand their point of view, are not ideologies, because they don’t attempt to tell people how things are. Frankly speaking they are just groups trying to solve clearly observable problems, and this is the second, other dangerous aspect of ideology. It implies that everyone is ideological, that all ideas are produced by ideology and so objectivity is impossible/ Ideologies discredit ‘outsider’ thinking, and they do this effectively because they fit a narrative better. Feminism isn’t selling you a narrative, it doesn’t attempt to tell you how the world is, it just attempts to sell you solutions to a problem that exists in the world that is entirely measurable (oppression). Same with BLM, even if you disagree with defunding the police, you HAVE to agree that black people face systemic racism in the criminal justice system as well as in most aspects of their lives in the United States, because that’s an observable problem. To use an example of a burning building that has often be used, trying to question anti-black racism is like a firefighter showing up to a burning building, looking at it and saying ‘well, it could just be really advanced special effects, we better wait for experts to come and weigh in on what we should do’ and then proceed to never call an expert and watch the building burn down. Because it makes no attempt to sell you on the premise, reality, it’s less effective on selling that premise, where as ideologies built on the capitalist idea that ‘small government is better’ is ONLY trying to sell you that premise. Alt-right morons say this all the time, ‘social science isn’t self corrective’, but that conception isn’t built on an understanding of social science (if social science wasn’t self-corrective, we would still only be doing research on white men) but instead built on ideologies that social science doesn’t fit in, because it actually produces evidence of how society really functions, instead of fantasies like trickle-down economics or white genocide, neither of which are real things, and we know that because of social science. Both fit inside an ideology that seeks to spread itself and sell the idea that white people are experiencing some kind of genocide despite there being evidence to the opposite point, that white men in the US are carrying out, and have been for centuries, a systematic genocide of racialized people and women. ideology is dangerous, because it is never based fully on reality, because ideologies are designed to be simple and the universe, if it was designed, was designed in a way that is mind-blowingly complex. Oversimplifying creates bias, because you inevitably lose details, and which details you keep and the ones that you lose are going to be based on bias on some level. All of our decisions are impacted by bias. The idea ‘women are inferior to men’ is simple, but that statement fails to live up to reality (women do many, many things better than men) and also seeks to hurt other people. 

[qqueenofhades]

So I just read an op-ed in the NYT entitled “Repeal the Second Amendment”, and it begins with the sentence, I have never understood the conservative fetish for the Second Amendment.

The article takes a classically liberal tack of arguing with statistics (the numbers of people guns have killed in America, as if anyone doesn’t know) and admits it would be difficult to accomplish. It presents a problem that anyone with eyes and a drop of common sense can see, but doesn’t do anything to address or understand the actual cause at the root of the belief in unlimited gun ownership. Which is, pure and simple, racism, white privilege and White Threat, in response to the changing socio-political environment of America and calls for multiculturalism. The same people who fetishize the Founding Fathers and “Don’t Tread on Me” and right-wing libertarianism and the Second Amendment are attached to their guns because they represent the hypothetical (and often actual) possibility of “defending” themselves against the person-of-color Other. It is their ability to remove this non-white entity from the body politic without recourse to the deeply mistrusted or conspiracy-theory version of the government they believe exists (and yet somehow manages to encompass staunch support for unpunished cop killings and the like). It is personal license to commit (racist) violence at will, whether theoretical or actual, or to feel “safe” from imagined (black/POC) threat.

This is not saying that every single gun owner is racist. This is not saying that every gun owner identifies as right-wing conservative. This is, however, saying that American gun culture and American racism and white privilege intersect toxically and are impossible to extricate from one another, and that the two systems support and perpetuate the other. The Charlottesville Nazis were the ones marching with automatic weapons for a reason, and right-wing boasts that “their side has all the guns” aren’t coincidental. Nobody needs a fully automatic assault rifle to defend their house. A handgun, maybe, sure, if you live in a bad neighborhood and know how to use it. But the ongoing legality of military-grade weapons that have no conceivable self-defense or hunting purpose is not an aberration or an accident. It is tied directly to racism, and American racism in particular.

We’ve all already observed the white privilege that led to Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas killer, immediately being called a “lone wolf” rather than a terrorist, and that his massive purchases of arms and ammunition didn’t raise any red flags, whereas it was merely accepted that a white male had a legitimate “right” to possess these weapons and “nobody could have envisioned” him actually using them. If he had been a Muslim or a black man, good lord, that alone would have served as “justification” for his actions and all kinds of new racist legislation would be enjoying present public support. But because he was a white man, there is a search for “another motive” or something else beyond his identity explaining it, when statistically, white male domestic terrorists are the most deadly and do the most damage (as well as overwhelmingly being responsible for mass shootings.) We claim to be simply helpless to prevent anything like this from happening again, and instead somehow accept that any public space, any time, can become the scene of mass carnage and destruction, rather than unseat the paradigm on which this mindset is, at its heart, based.

It’s also the case that it was called the “worst mass shooting” in American history, when -- as has also been pointed out -- any of the Native American massacres in the nineteenth century were far, far worse, such as Wounded Knee, where 300 Indians (200 of whom were women and children) were shot in December 1890. The United States has always had a gun problem, and it has always had a racism problem. These two things go together.

This is the real reason America cannot enact meaningful gun reform, despite an overwhelming majority of voters in both parties supporting common-sense restrictions. It’s not theoretical vast amounts of NRA cash (as the op-ed does correctly point out, it’s not that much in the grand scheme of things). It’s not a lack of desire for public change, and it’s certainly not not enough tragedies and indiscriminate killings to justify the need. It’s because attempting to dismantle American gun culture would require directly attempting to dismantle American racism and the sense of white America that it “needs its guns” to defend against the ongoing multi-cultural threat. The country is about to celebrate Christopher Columbus Day, aka the man responsible for wholesale genocide of the West Indies and more deaths (at least seven million) than of Jews (six million) during the Holocaust, as well as the ongoing centuries of colonization and extermination of native populations by the Western world. Politicians struggle with the simple and basic (and one would think, self-evident) premise of repudiating Nazism. The sitting president calls them “very fine people.”

This is not an accident, and these things do not exist independent of each other. We cannot have gun reform because white privilege will react to prevent it, just as white privilege and gun culture interact to support and reinforce each other. Until we get anywhere in addressing that (sidenote: I’ve been working my way through Stamped from the Beginning, Dr. Ibram Kendi’s book, the last few nights, and.... yeah), nothing is going to change. 

#hilary for ts #politics for ts #history of racism #white privilege #gun culture