Texas State Newspaper writer fired for racist column

[Effie]

Never called you a Nazi. This is a sad, pathetic lie born from your personal issues. Contemptible.

I feel like I just got a reply from a Trump tweet.

You called me a genocide-fantasizer. Rogue called someone a "Blud und Boden" advocate. Which is more pivotal to calling, or not calling, someone a Nazi? Are Nazis primarily objectionable because of genocidal tendencies, or because of "Blud und Boden?"

Once again, you misread my posts and you demonstrate that you either know absolutely nothing about Nazism or that you have some elaborate revisionist take where Darré and blood-and-soil weren't genocidal people and ideologies. I'll assume the former.

Anyways, I am sorry that you are deeply traumatized by describing you posting about how if antiracists act in manner X they will trigger a racial genocide and utilitarian beliefs would urge you to take sides out of self-preservation as "fantasizing", that is, writing a fantasy. That doesn't justify you leaping to paranoid conclusions, though, or making posts like this.

EDIT: That is, I described you as performing an action, asked you why you were performing it, and your response has been to deny you are essentially a performer of that action. This has some rather disturbing implications as a worldview and for psychological health.

[Simon_Jester]

Once again, you misread my posts and you demonstrate that you either know absolutely nothing about Nazism or that you have some elaborate revisionist take where Darré and blood-and-soil weren't genocidal people and ideologies. I'll assume the former.

"Blud und Boden" enabled Nazi genocidal tendencies. Genocidal tendencies are genocidal tendencies. In any event, there isn't much in it either way; you're not going to have much luck splitting hairs finely enough to explain why pointing to a guy who says "the only logically consistent endpoint of Philosophy X would be genocide and that would be bad" can be accused of ghastly desires with impunity, while a guy who says "there exists an intergenerational linkage between people and land which cannot be transferred" can be.

Either accept accountability for saying nasty and unjustified things about people, or stop criticizing others for saying nasty and unjustified things about people. Pick one.

Anyways, I am sorry that you are deeply traumatized...

There is no trauma, there is only you, critting the same hippo over and over. And I am pointing this out, because it is repeated, and you repeatedly deny it. You have come into this thread with a recurring pattern of refusing to acknowledge counterpoints, trying to psychoanalyze people as an alternative to replying to them, and in general flinging accusations around like a chimpanzee flinging crap.

You are a profound discredit to any scholarly body or faction that would have you as a member.

[Effie]

Once again, you misread my posts and you demonstrate that you either know absolutely nothing about Nazism or that you have some elaborate revisionist take where Darré and blood-and-soil weren't genocidal people and ideologies. I'll assume the former.

"Blud und Boden" enabled Nazi genocidal tendencies. Genocidal tendencies are genocidal tendencies. In any event, there isn't much in it either way; you're not going to have much luck splitting hairs finely enough to explain why pointing to a guy who says "the only logically consistent endpoint of Philosophy X would be genocide and that would be bad" can be accused of ghastly desires with impunity, while a guy who says "there exists an intergenerational linkage between people and land which cannot be transferred" can be.

Either accept accountability for saying nasty and unjustified things about people, or stop criticizing others for saying nasty and unjustified things about people. Pick one.

Anyways, I am sorry that you are deeply traumatized...

There is no trauma, there is only you, critting the same hippo over and over. And I am pointing this out, because it is repeated, and you repeatedly deny it. You have come into this thread with a recurring pattern of refusing to acknowledge counterpoints, trying to psychoanalyze people as an alternative to replying to them, and in general flinging accusations around like a chimpanzee flinging crap.

You are a profound discredit to any scholarly body or faction that would have you as a member.

So you're just gonna ignore the part of my post where I said it's about your actions and not your desires, huh. Quite the credit to academia you must be.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Okay. Stick a fork in it, this is done.

[Alyrium Denryle]

OK. Because Thanas asked me to, I am unlocking this thread. However, Effie, you will cease being a toxic little shit. Immediately. If not, I start dumping your posts into the HOS and other action will be taken as appropriate. I am also going to remind everyone that the Dogpile Prohibition is in full effect and further violations of that prohibition will result in, at best, the permanent locking of this thread, and administrative action in consultation with other staff.

[Simon_Jester]

Alyrium?

I think I'm a bit confused about how the dogpile rules are to be applied in this thread.

In particular, I'd like to check how it applies to, e.g., me trying to respond to Rogue 9's critiques in an attempt to do devil's advocacy for Straha's position on birthright citizenship and its interaction with historical genocides.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Alyrium?

I think I'm a bit confused about how the dogpile rules are to be applied in this thread.

In particular, I'd like to check how it applies to, e.g., me trying to respond to Rogue 9's critiques in an attempt to do devil's advocacy for Straha's position on birthright citizenship and its interaction with historical genocides.

Honestly? I'm not sure. I'm really tempted to split that off if it becomes a Thing.

[Straha]

I'll say that I think the dog-piling ban is unnecessary at this point because that conversation is on hold. Simon and I have reached a temporary hiatus until after he's had time to read Custer Died For Your Sins. Meanwhile there are stalled conversations at the periphery, Dragon Angel's post is really quite good and deserves reflection and reply, Rogue and Simon are free to go at it, TRR seemed to be interested in continuing another conversation, and whatever annoyance you may take at Effie's post they are making arguments. Seems easier to let those discussions continue and then Simon and I can either post in the thread after he's done reading the book or we can spin that discussion off into a new thread.

[Alyrium Denryle]

I'll say that I think the dog-piling ban is unnecessary at this point because that conversation is on hold. Simon and I have reached a temporary hiatus until after he's had time to read Custer Died For Your Sins. Meanwhile there are stalled conversations at the periphery, Dragon Angel's post is really quite good and deserves reflection and reply, Rogue and Simon are free to go at it, TRR seemed to be interested in continuing another conversation, and whatever annoyance you may take at Effie's post they are making arguments. Seems easier to let those discussions continue and then Simon and I can either post in the thread after he's done reading the book or we can spin that discussion off into a new thread.

That works for me. That said. Effie WILL cease being a toxic cockwomble.

So, given that the Straha and Simon's argument is on hold, I will lift that the prohibition.

[Simon_Jester]

I'm on about Page 80 of 300 or so in Custer Died For Your Sins, specifically the 198? edition. The foreword was interesting reading from the point of view of a man with my approach to these issues.

From my own perspective so far, the book informs but doesn't exactly surprise; I didn't know the specifics of the termination policies of the '50s (and '60s?) but as a man who's become accustomed to expecting little better than Trump-level governance from politicians who don't care, I was not surprised to learn of them. It's the kind of thing that happens when you trust power over a group to a bunch of detached fuckers who don't care, especially when their pre-existing motivations are a big pile of racist crap.

Another factor of the non-surprise, I think... it's partly because I'm a child of the 1990s and later, by which point the "Cowboys and Indians, them savages weren't using the land anyway" set of memes had largely given way to something a bit more in line with reality, at least in the forums/spaces/places/media that formed my cultural reference pool growing up. I grew up on a reference pool that might not have been much more informed about the Native Americans, but was at least considerably more respectful than would have been the case for the typical adult alive in the 1960s when the book was written.

I didn't come to the table with any particular expectation that I could look at any point in the history of American race relations and expect to see the US government doing anything other than just about the worst thing politically possible in that moment. I was pleasantly surprised, even, by Deloria's mildly positive comments about New Deal era Indian policy, if only because it was less actively shitty than what came before or after.

...

I'll have more to say about that when I've finished the book.

---

This country has a broken history. It claims to be many things positive for the world, but as we all know, that has not been the case for a very long time. If, and I'll be honest, it ever was the case.

We have an extremely dark history that is not commonly taught in our schools. Shit, I did not even know about Indian Termination until I read this thread. That, and more, are actually still part of our country's collective living memory, especially in the living memories of the Native Americans. I used to be, for example, legitimately confused as to why Native Americans were so angry at the cultural appropriation of their beliefs; I respected them and still made an effort to research as to what our limits are, but deep in the back of my mind, I still had that confusion.

Now that I've learned just how recent our crimes against them have been ... it makes sense. It completely makes sense why they would be that enraged. Us, haphazardly appropriating their beliefs without consideration or proper respect, when in the recent past we tried to crush those same beliefs and identities from them? We should consider ourselves very lucky that their patience has been this high. They would have all the rights in this country to speak out with fury about this social horror they had to, and continue to in several ways, experience.

Anger like this also resides in communities of color, and especially recently have the reasons why they are angry been brought to light for this country's deserved embarrassment. Clueless white people who think racism is "over" because Martin Luther King made his mark are only the tip of the glacier. People of color have suffered in silence while the rest of this country was blissfully ignorant; after all, until only a short while before the Ferguson protests when this truly exploded, I only knew of the treatment of Rodney King. And that event occurred back when I was in grade school.

Because I grew up with a life of privilege as a white person, I had no clue that such things were continuing even into the new millennium. I was sufficiently distant enough from their suffering that I was blind to their anger. Had I not been educated by many people of color in the recent decade, I probably would still be that kind of a clueless white girl.

At the core of it, much of this strong and furious rhetoric comes from their anger. I can only speak as a trans woman since I'm not black, but I can empathize with people of color because even though my suffering is nowhere near as great as theirs, I know how an unforgiving a society filled with bigotry feels like. I know their anger, as I have felt that kind of anger at seemingly-perpetual bigotry as well, though not as much as that of people of color who have continually been shit on since slavery, since Jim Crow, until today with unchecked police abuse. For the Native Americans, their anger that previous settlements with us have been worth as much as toilet paper, given how little we talk about crimes like Indian Termination, and even in recent years with this government's direct actions regarding the Dakota Access Pipeline.

We should be so lucky that their anger has not exploded even further, because god damn, they deserve the right to have it. This article, as has been repeatedly pointed out by Straha, was shit in its execution, but it is a symptom of the continual injustice people of color, Native Americans, and other nonwhite groups face here. An injustice that has its roots from the time this country was founded.

This country is broken and rotten to its core. Although we have ostensibly progressed as a whole in terms of racial rights, we still managed to elect an obvious racist, fascist-wannabe as President and the rest of his party elsewhere, in spite of popular vote digits. Were people of color not given equal rights and equal treatment in the 20th century? Should they have expected that we would fall this far in so relatively short a time scale?

Of course there was progress, but that progress has been built on a substantially weak foundation. Police were supposed to have weeded out the many bad apples that supposedly "merely" soured the bunch decades ago, but nowadays we see that our improvements there have been very shallow. Our society still encourages systemic punishment of protesters rather than listening to them; one only needs to see Colin Kaepernick as a blatant example for people of color. For Native Americans, one only needs to see the DAPL barbarity.

I recognize that my "right" to live here has come from a legacy of genocide and ethnic cleansing. I am an American by name, but with that name comes a history of atrocities that I still to this day find impossible to fathom. I am white-skinned, but also White in that my privilege has come at the horrific expense of generations of abuses, crimes, and slavery.

I would as soon try and toss my White identity as I would an entire refrigerator's contents of moldy, infested, forgotten food, but to do that would make me forget the barbarism committed by white-skinned conquerors in the past. I cannot forget that. It would be immoral of me to forget that. I have no moral "right" to say this country is mine, because my ancestors stole this country, pillaged its inhabitants, and left them to rot on worthless land.

And this is why they say that "Whiteness" as a concept needs to perish. Note that again, this does not literally mean "all white people should march off a cliff and die". Whiteness, and the continuing abuse by people who claim Whiteness as a central, immutable trait, needs to cease to exist. I will not be so bullheaded as to think "that time has long passed us, we're better now and we'll always continue to be better". That is not guaranteed. It can change within an instant as long as Whiteness exists.

We as white people need to seriously consider something extremely uncomfortable, and something that has been considered time and again by people of color, by Native Americans, by many other marginalized groups:

Can this progress be rolled back into uselessness?

Can people of color really trust this society to make reforms to protect them? To make lasting reform, not something fragile enough to be stripped away during the next Republican Presidency, the next Republican Congress, or universe forbid, a Republican-dominated Supreme Court? Can Native Americans trust us?

We haven't given anyone much indication that we can be trusted. Just one turn of an election, one major sweep by a party of utter trash that edges closer and closer into white supremacy, and poof. Gone. All progress vanishes.

Trump has been chucklefucking his way through these and while he is limited by his own incompetence, by Democrats who are wishy-washy as to what their values are, and even by admittedly members of his own party at some times (while continuing to lick his boot for the majority of the time), he is still an extremely unsettling omen of a bad potential future. Literal Hitler-worshipping 14/88 Nazis and the just-as-evil Neoconfederates feel more emboldened to bring this country back by a century or more. 4-5 years ago, that was an unimaginable thought.

Can marginalized people trust that this society with all its incremental gains will not just roll over during the next 10, 20, 30 years? It seems evident that they cannot. This frustration at continual injustices, with only paper-thin promises that "it'll all be better", is why they can't. I cannot fault them for their anger or their words. We have done enough to solidify in generations proof that we are either irresponsible with our privilege, or we just simply do not care.

No matter what any of you, individually, do for the causes of progressivism, that is not enough in itself to prove to people of color or Native Americans that anything you do will either be of substance, or of permanence.

We have a long way to go until this anger can finally be put to rest. It will probably not happen within our lifetimes, unfortunately, but as much as we have to continue helping in the struggle for their rights, we have to also ensure to them that we will not collectively betray their trust. Continue your dialogues with them, but engrave the knowledge into your head that you will have to deal with this anger in as respectful a way as you can muster.

We can only overcome this if we can truly acknowledge their pain, on something beyond a superficial level.

My own view is that I don't disagree with the substance of what is said here.

Like you, the position and status and unfair advantages I reap by being descended from a race that conquered a continent by perfidiously reneging on several hundred treaties and buying up several million slaves to help work the land they'd seized? I never wanted it. I'm not disowning it by saying that, I'm not trying to somehow make it as though it didn't happen for purposes of living my own life. I'm just saying the literal words, "I never wanted it." At no point did I sit down and think "yes, I want these rewards, in exchange for these evils having happened in the past." Even if cause and effect worked that way, I would never have willed them to work that way.

And then I stare at my pale arctic-mutant hands and say to myself "Okay, so what the hell do we do now?"

Everything I actually believe related to matters of race relations is motivated by my desire to somehow answer that question with a best or at least least-bad solution. It's not about appropriating power or control or retaining it, at least not on any level for which the concept of a morally relevant "I" is meaningful, on which I have an identity that can be differentiated from the mass of blind forces that allegedly rage within my subconscious.

The thing is... There's a crack in everything, a hole in everything. Everything has flawed, it was never perfect, the surface is marred and scarred because the interior is marred and scarred because the core is marred and scarred. There is no Eden we can retreat back to, not even by regressing in time. There's a touch of existentialism or something like it in my mind as I say this, because the fundamental point is that we are here, it is now, we have to do something about it, in the maximally inclusive sense of the word "we."

That's my initial response to what you said.

[Dragon Angel]

My own view is that I don't disagree with the substance of what is said here.

Like you, the position and status and unfair advantages I reap by being descended from a race that conquered a continent by perfidiously reneging on several hundred treaties and buying up several million slaves to help work the land they'd seized? I never wanted it. I'm not disowning it by saying that, I'm not trying to somehow make it as though it didn't happen for purposes of living my own life. I'm just saying the literal words, "I never wanted it." At no point did I sit down and think "yes, I want these rewards, in exchange for these evils having happened in the past." Even if cause and effect worked that way, I would never have willed them to work that way.

And then I stare at my pale arctic-mutant hands and say to myself "Okay, so what the hell do we do now?"

Everything I actually believe related to matters of race relations is motivated by my desire to somehow answer that question with a best or at least least-bad solution. It's not about appropriating power or control or retaining it, at least not on any level for which the concept of a morally relevant "I" is meaningful, on which I have an identity that can be differentiated from the mass of blind forces that allegedly rage within my subconscious.

The thing is... There's a crack in everything, a hole in everything. Everything has flawed, it was never perfect, the surface is marred and scarred because the interior is marred and scarred because the core is marred and scarred. There is no Eden we can retreat back to, not even by regressing in time. There's a touch of existentialism or something like it in my mind as I say this, because the fundamental point is that we are here, it is now, we have to do something about it, in the maximally inclusive sense of the word "we."

That's my initial response to what you said.

Without going into too much detail since I don't want to overburden you alongside the rest of everything here:

You may have never thought "muahaha, those evils of our past were all good and justified, AMERICA!" I may have never thought that either, but as far as this society's institutional structure is concerned, there is still a sort of implicit apathy to our past actions. And no matter how much we profess otherwise, it continually seems there just has not been that much of a change. A definite change, yes, but not as much as we'd wanted to envision back then.

Individually, we don't subscribe to the notion of a Holy American Empire that Can Do No Wrong, but we are mere drops of water in a flooded barrel. If the rest of the water was infested with all sorts of pond scum and microfauna, and we were droplets that were mixed with some concentrated purifying solution, we would only be able to affect so much around us. We could never eliminate all the toxicity that surrounds us; only cleanse whatever we are close to, and hope other droplets around us can do their parts as well.

Hence why for a long, long time ahead of us, we will still be feeling their anger no matter what, for society is moving toward purification of this water barrel at too glacial a pace. Millions of people of color, Native Americans, et. al. live and die under conditions we purport to have solved, and their patience only wears thin as we collectively fail to adhere to our promises.

This isn't to say that any and/or all activism is pointless, far from it. But rather, that activism can often forget that this toxicity can and will reproduce. (see what is known as White Feminism for quite disappointing examples of it...) We have, from mainstream news outlets, to tweets and YouTube commenters, people who will recite random phrases out of say, Martin Luther King's canon, but then recite them in contexts they were completely not intended to be in...

Such as taking "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character" to mean a condemnation of any civil rights measure that equalizes social standing between whites and people of color, at all.

Which ... both manages to sorely miss the point of Dr. King's dream and twist it to become grossly offensive.

It's very easy for that to happen because modern American education, as can be expected from this society's still-deep corruption, is also afflicted by this apathy. Otherwise we would have much more an awareness of and much more humility about recent disasters like Indian Termination, rather than hoping that they stay hidden under the rug. And, American culture--for all its exaltations of individuality and liberty--puts infinite faith in organizations that impose order, like the police, while granting very little to those who desperately need it.

That our society seems to stick to rose colored views of our past while committing the same wrongs over and over, well, it's another wave of erosion on the riverside of their patience.

Part of what Straha meant with "we have to have a conversation" earlier in the thread, I think, is that neither he, nor me, nor you, nor most people probably here are qualified to speak entirely on the behalf of people of color or Native Americans. (correct me if I'm wrong!) We just don't have that requisite experience from their day to day struggles, and without that, we could end up engineering "solutions" that only, even if unintentionally without malice, circle back to where we started.

People of color and Native Americans have to be centered in those oncoming dialogues, in listening to them and their experiences, and engineering solutions around those experiences with a heavy weighting toward their final say. We have just, unfortunately, been too ignorant and within our ignorance, we end up centering ourselves moreso than the people we, without it necessarily being our direct fault in our individual cases, are complicit in oppressing. Such complicity being anything from ignoring subtle racism from our friends and family, to prejudging people of color from our subconscious bias, to saying that by the heavenly mandate of our birth here, this land is ours.

I don't know entirely either what I have to do ... I suspect, this is the same for many other humans who realize these conditions. But I know I have to do better for them.

.....Okay, that was a lot of detail. Feel free to take or respond to what you'd like, since it's perhaps impossible to keep any substantial writeup of these positions brief.

[Simon_Jester]

It's very easy for that to happen because modern American education, as can be expected from this society's still-deep corruption, is also afflicted by this apathy. Otherwise we would have much more an awareness of and much more humility about recent disasters like Indian Termination, rather than hoping that they stay hidden under the rug. And, American culture--for all its exaltations of individuality and liberty--puts infinite faith in organizations that impose order, like the police, while granting very little to those who desperately need it.

That our society seems to stick to rose colored views of our past while committing the same wrongs over and over, well, it's another wave of erosion on the riverside of their patience.

Part of what Straha meant with "we have to have a conversation" earlier in the thread, I think, is that neither he, nor me, nor you, nor most people probably here are qualified to speak entirely on the behalf of people of color or Native Americans. (correct me if I'm wrong!) We just don't have that requisite experience from their day to day struggles, and without that, we could end up engineering "solutions" that only, even if unintentionally without malice, circle back to where we started.

And again, I'm not disagreeing with this as a factual proposition; the only reason I even step into the conversation is because I want there to be a sustainable space in which the necessary conversation can take place. You can't have a conversation on this scale without some kind of a venue, and the existence of the venue is a high priority for the preservation of the conversation.

I don't want to preserve my arctic-mutant privileges. I want to preserve a forum in which it becomes possible to dismantle those privileges. Because the last three centuries have provided far, far more evidence that they won't dismantle themselves than could possibly be necessary. Therefore, if it is necessary that hey be gone, the machinery by which they can be removed must be created.

...

So far as I know, there are two ways in which you can dismantle a system of privileges.

One is to drag the privileged aristos to the guillotine, a strategy which has the advantage of being very effective, and the disadvantage that as the number of aristos in need of a guillotining increases, the act of doing so becomes not only a greater evil, but also less likely to actually work. 99% of the population can, with sufficient coordination, assuredly guillotine 1% of the population. Doing things the other way around is highly unlikely to succeed.

The other is to make it blindingly obvious to everyone involved, including most of the aristos, that the old privileges should not and do not apply. Eventually, their importance will diminish in one way or another; the European aristocracy of titled nobility is a good example of this process even in countries that didn't guillotine their aristocrats.

I know of no third way.

So stipulating that it is necessary to actually succeed in dismantling a system of privilege in which the corrupt aristos greatly outnumber the denigrated underclass... I honestly see no way to succeed but the second way, at which point it is necessary to actually ask the question "how then do we make it obvious that the privileges in question should not be and will not be respected any longer?"

And for the above reasons, on this specific point, I feel I am on firm ground to insist: To insist that we act to preserve the forums in which communication in good faith between the races is possible. And to not act in such a way that these forums are likely to be destroyed. I think it is imperative upon members of all races to act in this way, precisely because it is imperative that denigrated minorities have a say, and indeed take point, in the process of awakening and alerting those members of the majority who are willing to listen. If the forum is collapsed and the members of the majority are driven away, then the injustices of the past are more likely to perpetuate themselves, not less. Because you don't get someone to stop fucking up by cutting the phone lines you would otherwise use to communicate with them.

[Alyrium Denryle]

I have merged posts at Simon_Jester's request.

[Dragon Angel]

And again, I'm not disagreeing with this as a factual proposition; the only reason I even step into the conversation is because I want there to be a sustainable space in which the necessary conversation can take place. You can't have a conversation on this scale without some kind of a venue, and the existence of the venue is a high priority for the preservation of the conversation.

I don't want to preserve my arctic-mutant privileges. I want to preserve a forum in which it becomes possible to dismantle those privileges. Because the last three centuries have provided far, far more evidence that they won't dismantle themselves than could possibly be necessary. Therefore, if it is necessary that hey be gone, the machinery by which they can be removed must be created.

I want--I dream for this kind of a venue. I don't want to see social discourse fall, but at the same time ... I feel their pain. They've hoped for such a venue for decades, but we keep on failing to provide something lasting. Little ends up being sustainable, and that is a symptom of a bigger problem that I don't know how to finally correct, but I do know how to at least help them in some way endure it: with a whole lot of empathy.

We try to fix things, but we end up half-heartedly implementing them, much less enforcing those fixes that add some substance. It's like creating patchwork fixes for an underground steam pressure system. Those never last, and they can only end up exploding if never further attended to.

Alas, we have problems like what I'm going to elaborate on next...

So far as I know, there are two ways in which you can dismantle a system of privileges.

One is to drag the privileged aristos to the guillotine, a strategy which has the advantage of being very effective, and the disadvantage that as the number of aristos in need of a guillotining increases, the act of doing so becomes not only a greater evil, but also less likely to actually work. 99% of the population can, with sufficient coordination, assuredly guillotine 1% of the population. Doing things the other way around is highly unlikely to succeed.

The other is to make it blindingly obvious to everyone involved, including most of the aristos, that the old privileges should not and do not apply. Eventually, their importance will diminish in one way or another; the European aristocracy of titled nobility is a good example of this process even in countries that didn't guillotine their aristocrats.

I know of no third way.

So stipulating that it is necessary to actually succeed in dismantling a system of privilege in which the corrupt aristos greatly outnumber the denigrated underclass... I honestly see no way to succeed but the second way, at which point it is necessary to actually ask the question "how then do we make it obvious that the privileges in question should not be and will not be respected any longer?"

And for the above reasons, on this specific point, I feel I am on firm ground to insist: To insist that we act to preserve the forums in which communication in good faith between the races is possible. And to not act in such a way that these forums are likely to be destroyed. I think it is imperative upon members of all races to act in this way, precisely because it is imperative that denigrated minorities have a say, and indeed take point, in the process of awakening and alerting those members of the majority who are willing to listen. If the forum is collapsed and the members of the majority are driven away, then the injustices of the past are more likely to perpetuate themselves, not less. Because you don't get someone to stop fucking up by cutting the phone lines you would otherwise use to communicate with them.

Er, well, I never proposed guillotines. That kind of violent revolution can still be several decades away, or it may not be. If society reaches a point where it is clear that marginalized people find it utterly impossible to express themselves nonviolently, then we have even bigger and more apocalyptic problems to worry about...

(I realize I've supported the idea of violence as self-defense in the past, but that scale of violence and the proposed violence here are worlds apart.)

As far as the second option...

There needs to be a realization, I believe, that if we are to have any success with the second option, then we collectively have to do better in our advocacy and (metaphorically) beat all of this into the heads of everyone and the aristos. We also need to make sure that they cannot just filibuster this entire process into irrelevance.

Actually, a good example came up for me elsewhere in the last few hours:

See, there is a push in open source communities to put into place what are known as Codes of Conduct. As you would probably expect, a CoC is a document that states what in a specific community constitutes productive conversation and what is not--namely, asshole behavior, harassment, and various forms of bigotry. This push has happened for the last few years with moderate to decent success, but also ... Picard facepalm levels of backlash.

You would think, actually, that something like this would be like any other kind of moderation policy, correct? You would think that there should be no boogeyman present in codifying a list of community rules? In fact, this is almost similar to what you are proposing, yes?

Well it turns out that people positively flip their shit all the time whenever a CoC is proposed in the vast majority of FOSS communities. Suddenly, codifying rules and behavior norms is just completely unacceptable because apparently, being civil in a joint project ... is too much? Opponents' alternatives are either "fuck the CoC who needs it" or "the CoC should just be one line from Bill and Ted: Be excellent to each other". Which is crap, of course, for a forum that wants to keep itself behaved, but therein lies the obvious circular problem.

I just don't get this. He even says that if we don't want any problems, then we should just keep our identities hidden. Yeah, that's so great hearing you preach it Privileged Cis White Guy #6525106, I'm glad you can walk around without anyone giving you any issues. Why do you get to have all the fun though, while we have to stay out of sight?

In popular projects, this gets to be orders of magnitude worse. As in, it attracts the pond scum of the Internet, which then tumbles down on a proposal in an avalanche of bad faith. Now you could say "well, it's obvious they're not acting in good faith, they're possibly just there to troll, there are trolls everywhere, how is this a big problem?" To which I'd respond: It's a big problem because despite the bad faith present, they still work in derailing CoC proposals. We have both people like the person in that image and other project maintainers who, while not as outright shitty as him, are clueless enough to still fall for it.

So you see, you don't have to worry much about the marginalized cutting the phone lines. The privileged are already doing a fine enough job of that. Focusing on the marginalized here is like focusing on cooking your dinner while the entire house around you is burning down.

As long as there exists the clueless who let evil pass, and as long as the Bad Faith Brigade gets to chime in, there can't be real progress. If we are to have a forum, then we have to make an effort to restrict that forum so that the deplorable elements don't have any say. But yet, this society insists on giving them a say because hey, the free market of ideas! Exchange of beliefs! A "healthy debate"! ...Which is all well and good for one side. Meanwhile, the other side gets told to shut up and stay invisible, and if they don't, expect the consequences.

Being continually told these while having their side of the story constantly downplayed and suppressed ... it wears out their souls.

See, you imagine a forum that can be created where people, both the dominant majority and the oppressed minority, will one day be able to talk together to discuss a better future. That's great, and I want this to happen. Truth is, though, it just does not exist in the majority of spaces. We like to pretend that exists, sometimes we even throw them a bone now and then. But, it does not, at least, not one of substance. The majority of spaces still allow those bad elements to drown us out. Sure, you can find scattered circles where that kind of bullshit isn't tolerated, but in the greater scheme of society, they are also droplets in the barrel.

The second option can only work if there is a functional space that is grounded in the foundations of our norms. I don't know if that can be legislated or if it is even possible to spread the good word far enough such that it is even possible, but until then the marginalized will tend to see proposals of the second option as something nice to aspire to, but without any real weight and enforcement behind them ... ultimately pointless.

That's the real problem this generation and the next will need to come to terms with, if we want this to end: We need to hard forbid these regressives who dogpile any and all proposals for something better. No more soft "solutions" that are milquetoast and waving in their committal.

[Effie]

It's very easy for that to happen because modern American education, as can be expected from this society's still-deep corruption, is also afflicted by this apathy. Otherwise we would have much more an awareness of and much more humility about recent disasters like Indian Termination, rather than hoping that they stay hidden under the rug. And, American culture--for all its exaltations of individuality and liberty--puts infinite faith in organizations that impose order, like the police, while granting very little to those who desperately need it.

That our society seems to stick to rose colored views of our past while committing the same wrongs over and over, well, it's another wave of erosion on the riverside of their patience.

Part of what Straha meant with "we have to have a conversation" earlier in the thread, I think, is that neither he, nor me, nor you, nor most people probably here are qualified to speak entirely on the behalf of people of color or Native Americans. (correct me if I'm wrong!) We just don't have that requisite experience from their day to day struggles, and without that, we could end up engineering "solutions" that only, even if unintentionally without malice, circle back to where we started.

And again, I'm not disagreeing with this as a factual proposition; the only reason I even step into the conversation is because I want there to be a sustainable space in which the necessary conversation can take place. You can't have a conversation on this scale without some kind of a venue, and the existence of the venue is a high priority for the preservation of the conversation.

I don't want to preserve my arctic-mutant privileges. I want to preserve a forum in which it becomes possible to dismantle those privileges. Because the last three centuries have provided far, far more evidence that they won't dismantle themselves than could possibly be necessary. Therefore, if it is necessary that hey be gone, the machinery by which they can be removed must be created.

...

So far as I know, there are two ways in which you can dismantle a system of privileges.

One is to drag the privileged aristos to the guillotine, a strategy which has the advantage of being very effective, and the disadvantage that as the number of aristos in need of a guillotining increases, the act of doing so becomes not only a greater evil, but also less likely to actually work. 99% of the population can, with sufficient coordination, assuredly guillotine 1% of the population. Doing things the other way around is highly unlikely to succeed.

The other is to make it blindingly obvious to everyone involved, including most of the aristos, that the old privileges should not and do not apply. Eventually, their importance will diminish in one way or another; the European aristocracy of titled nobility is a good example of this process even in countries that didn't guillotine their aristocrats.

I know of no third way.

So stipulating that it is necessary to actually succeed in dismantling a system of privilege in which the corrupt aristos greatly outnumber the denigrated underclass... I honestly see no way to succeed but the second way, at which point it is necessary to actually ask the question "how then do we make it obvious that the privileges in question should not be and will not be respected any longer?"

And for the above reasons, on this specific point, I feel I am on firm ground to insist: To insist that we act to preserve the forums in which communication in good faith between the races is possible. And to not act in such a way that these forums are likely to be destroyed. I think it is imperative upon members of all races to act in this way, precisely because it is imperative that denigrated minorities have a say, and indeed take point, in the process of awakening and alerting those members of the majority who are willing to listen. If the forum is collapsed and the members of the majority are driven away, then the injustices of the past are more likely to perpetuate themselves, not less. Because you don't get someone to stop fucking up by cutting the phone lines you would otherwise use to communicate with them.

So there are a couple disconnects here.

First of all, there's no real connection between the dichotomy you lay out and the need for forums of discussion, because the dichotomy you lay out is one about whether social change comes entirely from terror or whether softer exertions of power can enforce it. There is, to put it bluntly, absolutely no reason as you have laid it out for discussion forums to exist in order to communicate that "the old privileges" no longer apply, because it is in any case not a matter up for debate as you have laid it out.

This dichotomy is fairly foreign to most discussions of the use of power in and of itself, but whatever.

Furthermore, there is an incoherency in your arguments about "forums in which communication in good faith between the races is possible." Even if we accept that they exist, which is a major assumption, then there is a tension between them existing as a means for minorities to be able to speak and existing as a means to uplift and improve the majority, or, to put it in concrete terms, between allowing people of color to express their experiences under white supremacy and allowing white people to exist without their feelings being hurt. The two are not reconcilable because the experiences of people of color under white supremacy are painful and horrifying ones which white people as a class have responsibility for, and unless the white people in question are completely unable to emotionally connect, they will in turn be hurt by hearing of those experiences and understanding their complicity.

There is also the assumption that people who cannot accept this pain would accept this responsibility if they did not feel it and take meaningful action. That is to say, greater understanding of what is at stake, what has been done, what is being done, makes them less likely to act righteously. Knowledge is a direct impediment to justice.

As this framing puts all the agency, the ability to accomplish actions, in white hands, we must ask how it can be credible that this ignorance will lead to exactly the proper actions to take. One option would be that the pain and suffering from people of color from white supremacy is not meaningful- that it is false knowledge that deludes people into taking the wrong action. Another option would be that white people are quite simply so intrinsically white supremacist that knowledge of white supremacy's full extent only encourages them, and they must be led by the nose into destroying it.

Both options are of course morally offensive and absurd, but it is difficult to conceive of how else to reconcile the two propositions. A third option might be to argue that emotional responses are inherently meaningless, and what matters is the presentation of technocratic, dispassionate solutions via these discussion forums.

In this formulation, then, white supremacy is not wrong for moral reasons, but is wrong for reasons of impaired efficiency and so on. Because morals, ethics, necessarily precede reasoning. They act as the axioms which form our ability to think in moral terms. And thus technocratic arguments against white supremacy largely fail to be convincing, because they presume a non-ideological character to it, that everyone is operating on the same axioms and merely needs to be enlightened as to their true self-interest.

So I can't see how there's any connection between the two areas, and I can't see how the two goals you lay out for these hypothetical forums can be reconciled without going into very silly territory.

[Simon_Jester]

I want--I dream for this kind of a venue. I don't want to see social discourse fall, but at the same time ... I feel their pain. They've hoped for such a venue for decades, but we keep on failing to provide something lasting. Little ends up being sustainable, and that is a symptom of a bigger problem that I don't know how to finally correct, but I do know how to at least help them in some way endure it: with a whole lot of empathy.

We try to fix things, but we end up half-heartedly implementing them, much less enforcing those fixes that add some substance. It's like creating patchwork fixes for an underground steam pressure system. Those never last, and they can only end up exploding if never further attended to.

I agree on this; at the same time no one can heal a broken system that everyone is collectively afraid or unwilling to even diagnose. Half-assed fixes may be little better than no fixes, but abolishing all fixes because half-assed fixes are bad is worse than bad.

If the answer to "the underground steam pressure system is falling apart" is "let it, steam has a right to vent and the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that it's more natural for the steam to vent anyway..." Well, there's going to be a series of steam explosions, suffering happens, the boilers shut off, no one has any heat. If it was ever really important to have heat in the first place, people need to go down inside the system and fix it, and part of that process is being willing to actually talk about what is and is not helpful when trying to repair steam pipes.

Alas, we have problems like what I'm going to elaborate on next...

So far as I know, there are two ways in which you can dismantle a system of privileges.

One is to drag the privileged aristos to the guillotine, a strategy which has the advantage of being very effective, and the disadvantage that as the number of aristos in need of a guillotining increases, the act of doing so becomes not only a greater evil, but also less likely to actually work. 99% of the population can, with sufficient coordination, assuredly guillotine 1% of the population. Doing things the other way around is highly unlikely to succeed.

The other is to make it blindingly obvious to everyone involved, including most of the aristos, that the old privileges should not and do not apply. Eventually, their importance will diminish in one way or another; the European aristocracy of titled nobility is a good example of this process even in countries that didn't guillotine their aristocrats.

I know of no third way.

So stipulating that it is necessary to actually succeed in dismantling a system of privilege in which the corrupt aristos greatly outnumber the denigrated underclass... I honestly see no way to succeed but the second way, at which point it is necessary to actually ask the question "how then do we make it obvious that the privileges in question should not be and will not be respected any longer?"

And for the above reasons, on this specific point, I feel I am on firm ground to insist: To insist that we act to preserve the forums in which communication in good faith between the races is possible. And to not act in such a way that these forums are likely to be destroyed. I think it is imperative upon members of all races to act in this way, precisely because it is imperative that denigrated minorities have a say, and indeed take point, in the process of awakening and alerting those members of the majority who are willing to listen. If the forum is collapsed and the members of the majority are driven away, then the injustices of the past are more likely to perpetuate themselves, not less. Because you don't get someone to stop fucking up by cutting the phone lines you would otherwise use to communicate with them.

Er, well, I never proposed guillotines. That kind of violent revolution can still be several decades away, or it may not be. If society reaches a point where it is clear that marginalized people find it utterly impossible to express themselves nonviolently, then we have even bigger and more apocalyptic problems to worry about...

But see, that's my point. If it is imperative to change people's minds, you will either change their minds peacefully or you will change them warfully, as it were, or you will fail to do either and not accomplish the goal.

This isn't about me accusing people of having guillotine fantasies, I leave that for others. The point is, if the guillotine is not the answer (and there are so many good reasons for it not to be, that it is obviously not the answer), then the answer has to be constructed in such a way that success is possible.

Actually, a good example came up for me elsewhere in the last few hours:

See, there is a push in open source communities to put into place what are known as Codes of Conduct. As you would probably expect, a CoC is a document that states what in a specific community constitutes productive conversation and what is not--namely, asshole behavior, harassment, and various forms of bigotry. This push has happened for the last few years with moderate to decent success, but also ... Picard facepalm levels of backlash.

You would think, actually, that something like this would be like any other kind of moderation policy, correct? You would think that there should be no boogeyman present in codifying a list of community rules? In fact, this is almost similar to what you are proposing, yes?

Well it turns out that people positively flip their shit all the time whenever a CoC is proposed in the vast majority of FOSS communities. Suddenly, codifying rules and behavior norms is just completely unacceptable because apparently, being civil in a joint project ... is too much? Opponents' alternatives are either "fuck the CoC who needs it" or "the CoC should just be one line from Bill and Ted: Be excellent to each other". Which is crap, of course, for a forum that wants to keep itself behaved, but therein lies the obvious circular problem...

In popular projects, this gets to be orders of magnitude worse. As in, it attracts the pond scum of the Internet, which then tumbles down on a proposal in an avalanche of bad faith. Now you could say "well, it's obvious they're not acting in good faith, they're possibly just there to troll, there are trolls everywhere, how is this a big problem?" To which I'd respond: It's a big problem because despite the bad faith present, they still work in derailing CoC proposals. We have both people like the person in that image and other project maintainers who, while not as outright shitty as him, are clueless enough to still fall for it.

And I agree that you clearly need troll-kickout powers, you clearly need to stop jackasses from acting to preserve the rules that enable them to be jackasses.

In the specific, object-level question that came before us in this thread, the question is: are there anti-jackass rules that do, or do not, need to be enforced against members of the marginalized group?

There are several ways you can answer that. One is "yes, there are, and let the privileged group write and enforce all of them at will." This is doomed to disaster for reasons you've discussed or alluded to.

Another is 'no, there must never be a limit for the marginalized group, they can be jackasses if they want, because it's a form of just compensation for how much they suffer elsewhere.' This works if the venue is meant as a form of primal scream therapy for minorities, but it will only serve that purpose, and will be useless for all others. Because no matter how much they deserve to be screamed at, only the most abject of masochists will stand still to be screamed at indefinitely. Fairness doesn't even come into it; it's a predictable stimulus-response effect, like an amoeba. If you prod something enough times with a sharp enough stick, it moves away.

Having the rules for what constitutes jackassery by the minority be written entirely by the privileged group is both unfair and unfit for the purpose of the venue. Having no rules and embracing unlimited minority jackassery rights is fair, but still makes the venue unfit for the purpose it's intended for. That leaves various possible compromise points in the middle, wherein the minority has some restraints on what constitutes jackassery, broad ones designed to prevent outright harassment and keep the venue accessible. While the majority group also has restraints and limits, preferably fairly strict ones designed to force them to think seriously about the issue rather than filibustering it to death.

It is possible to have rules that fulfill both purposes, if one tries.

So you see, you don't have to worry much about the marginalized cutting the phone lines. The privileged are already doing a fine enough job of that. Focusing on the marginalized here is like focusing on cooking your dinner while the entire house around you is burning down.

As long as there exists the clueless who let evil pass, and as long as the Bad Faith Brigade gets to chime in, there can't be real progress. If we are to have a forum, then we have to make an effort to restrict that forum so that the deplorable elements don't have any say. But yet, this society insists on giving them a say because hey, the free market of ideas! Exchange of beliefs! A "healthy debate"! ...Which is all well and good for one side. Meanwhile, the other side gets told to shut up and stay invisible, and if they don't, expect the consequences.

Okay, so what do we do now?

Have venues with no code of conduct for members of marginalized minorities? Well firstly, that results in debates over who gets to be how pushy because it turns 'privilege' into a one-dimensional game of hot potato in which everyone is accusing each other of having more privilege than they do. Who gets to be how mean in their editorials? Which disabilities and minority statuses confer that right, and how much of that right?

Secondly, it doesn't work as a vehicle for persuading members of the majority to be more enlightened about all this; either they come in enlightened enough (and/or masochistic enough) to be willing to shrug off the verbal abuse as "no more than I deserve," or they just leave and go somewhere else, to a place where they may or may not gain any enlightenment.

I mean, you spent whole paragraphs precisely on the issue of forums trying to adopt a code of conduct to make productive discussion possible. On the one hand, it's true that privileged trolls can disrupt that process, but on the other hand, there is also the core insight that you need a code of conduct to make the discussions possible.

That's the real problem this generation and the next will need to come to terms with, if we want this to end: We need to hard forbid these regressives who dogpile any and all proposals for something better. No more soft "solutions" that are milquetoast and waving in their committal.

Aaaand simultaneously, this needs to be done without defining 80% of the population as "regressive" and writing them off and then wondering why nothing ever changes. Because that would be too clueless for words.

[Dragon Angel]

Simon, I'm going to have to withdraw from my side of this discussion early since I don't have the time, physical energy, and health right now to continue this indefinitely, but I'd still like to condense my final(?) responses to each of your segments:

---

1. I don't believe that people unconditionally want to remove every potential for a fix, but if the only things that are proposed by the privileged are half-hearted fixes, there has to be some point where people of the privileged will acknowledge "This has lasted long enough. We need to stop bikeshedding and start putting some real fixes into this shit, because we can't have this kind of a broken society forever. I'm ready to listen and learn as much as I can from them."

The reasons for the privileged being afraid to enter a discussion and the reasons for the marginalized are very different. For the privileged, it's either or a combination of losing one's place in the social hierarchy ("when downtrodden people are given equal rights, it starts to feel like you're being oppressed"), having their feelings hurt in the process ("men are afraid of women because they fear rejection, women are afraid of men because they fear murder"), or as you describe, feeling the righteous anger of the marginalized. The first point is mostly present in those who are further hardline in their prejudices, but we all do feel the second and third points on occasion, in some way. It's just human to.

Overcoming those is not a matter of being masochistic. It's a matter of showing to the marginalized in no ambiguous way that you actually do acknowledge their emotions. This part has been incredibly absent from so much discourse from privileged people and if we want the marginalized to treat us nicely, we have to make sure we can respond in kind. Fail to live up to that, and you only further cement their fears that discussion is hopeless in the white person's castle. It's very much a two-way street.

---

2. I agree with that sentiment, but the part that I think we have issues with is how much of this onus is on the privileged, and how much on the marginalized. As like any other human being, marginalized people don't exactly want to die, there is already an instinctual want to solve these matters diplomatically. The trouble is, so much of the privileged have given the marginalized an impression that they are not willing to listen, that the marginalized feel immediate skepticism at offers of an olive branch. They usually try to take the olive branch, of course, but because of this learned reaction they don't exactly invest much emotion into its success.

And really, who can blame them? We have a history of taking as much as giving in the last century of civil rights progress. We also have a history of forgetting history. Coretta Scott King's letter to Congress to prevent Jeff Sessions from becoming involved in federal justice reached their ears in 1986, but in 2017 it failed. It's like we totally disregarded our lessons in the last three decades. What's to prevent other lessons from being forgotten in another three decades?

I'm going to be a broken record on this sentiment but I think it is absolutely crucial to remember it: We need to show to the marginalized that we don't have the societal memory of a goldfish. We need to show them we mean it, we are serious for improvement.

---

3. In that discussions should not just turn into mere shouting matches, the rules would end up applying equally to both parties, I would agree. With that said, in that discussions should not allow overly strong and angered rhetoric from either the privileged or the marginalized, this is where the marginalized needs much, much more room than the privileged.

To elaborate: Complaints from the marginalized, even the most muted of them, tend to be received by the privileged almost quadratically angrier in tone. In my case as I am trans, I can give examples of how discussions I'd been a part of had blown up on the sides of the receivers, even though I had done my best to explain as calmly and collectedly as I could. I'm serious, I went into those discussions while keeping an open mind about how little they'd known and giving them breathing room to learn. They still reacted like I was treating them harshly!

But as we're talking about people of color and Native Americans here, let me redirect. They have that effect happen to them much worse. It's a part of white people's subconscious bias regarding them; all too often, you see statements like whites describing black people as taller than they really are, and older than they really are. A black teenager can transform into a fully formed adult. I mean, damn, to use an extreme example Tamir Rice, a 12-year old, was read as an adult!

This extends to words said by them as well. You know of stereotypes like the Angry Black Man/Woman, right? That stereotype exists because white people tend to hear any complaints from them as highly charged, even sometimes enraged statements, and the most extremely bigoted would describe any of their words as, shall we say, "primal screeching".

(Yeah, as an aside ... do be careful with the context you use that phrase in. Not saying you're anywhere near the KKK types who abuse it regularly, please know, but it makes me cringe every time I see it here.)

So, a large part of why I say that the marginalized need much more room than the privileged in terms of strong rhetoric, is because thanks to subconscious bias against the marginalized, their speech can be read as much hotter than it really would be. Having more room to be listened to without judgement actually equalizes the playing field for them, not overly unbalances it toward their end.

---

4. Well, if I wanted venues with no code of conduct, I wouldn't have put forth that situation now would I?

But in all seriousness, the kind of "privilege Olympics" that you describe is addressed by the practice of intersectionality. This is in fact a solved, and oft discoursed, field. Beyond intersectionality though, I go back to point 3: Words of the marginalized can be read as angrier than they really are. I won't say that the article in the OP handled it well, but I can tell you with certainty and experience that more moderately-toned discussions also happen to run into these same brick walls. The only tone that can be 100% capable of not being read as (overly) angered is one so weak that it may as well be noise. Marginalized people have tried that in the past, and it never got them a damn thing.

Let there be a code of conduct, but one that allows much more room for the marginalized to punch up than the privileged to punch down.

---

5. I don't know where you're getting that I'm defining 80% of the population as regressive. What I am saying is that even if, generously, 5-10% of the population is regressive, their actions still end up derailing conversations intended to improve spaces for everyone. Clueless white people will be clueless white people and consider their words with equal weight to the marginalized's, as obviously, they are clueless. Combine that with subconscious bias and every struggle of the marginalized to sway their opinions becomes an uphill battle.

Remember that statement by MLK about the white moderate? That is the kind of obstacle clueless white people in this era represent. If you got the 80%-are-outright-regressive impression from my description of clueless white people, then I suggest you read closer into what King said there.

[Straha]

And for the above reasons, on this specific point, I feel I am on firm ground to insist: To insist that we act to preserve the forums in which communication in good faith between the races is possible. And to not act in such a way that these forums are likely to be destroyed. I think it is imperative upon members of all races to act in this way, precisely because it is imperative that denigrated minorities have a say, and indeed take point, in the process of awakening and alerting those members of the majority who are willing to listen. If the forum is collapsed and the members of the majority are driven away, then the injustices of the past are more likely to perpetuate themselves, not less. Because you don't get someone to stop fucking up by cutting the phone lines you would otherwise use to communicate with them.

The thing is that good faith isn’t up to the majority to determine. Let me offer two related propositions:

First, that the hatred being expressed that is so derailing is, at its core, legitimate. As I put it to Bob above, the Navajo nation (and the Lenape, and the Cherokee, and the… and the… and the…) have been corralled onto land selected specifically for its worthlessness and left there to die. They have had treaty after treaty with them broken, promises ignored, and poverty effectively enforced. How do you expect them to react but with hatred? Ditto Black students in Baltimore and Detroit who just months ago were sharing pictures of how their schools were too cold for habitability?
To feel this hatred is natural. To express it is natural. For people to reject because the tone is upsetting is unfair of the listener.
Tied to that, and second, is that the destruction of forums you’re describing is an ex-post facto justification for the protection of ego. The series of events you’re describing goes like this:

White person: “Let’s talk about working together towards a new future. First, what can we do to establish trust between us?”
POC: “This is tough because I hate you for the privileges that you have been able to accrue that are constitutive parts of my oppression.”
White person: “You have hurt my feelings so I’m leaving and you can go back to suffering.”

That response isn’t a move from white people to find a productive way forward, it’s a way to say they tried without having to actually try. It’s a way to force anything serious off of the table because it makes the only options to move forward painless.

It’s also a way to disavow both how the present only came about through atrocities and, as such, is maybe something we should be deeply suspect towards instead of trying to preserve and the unearned privileges of white people. I mean, we’ve also seen it in this thread with people like FaxModem trying to ex post facto make two ethnic cleansings stepping stones towards a great humanistic understanding (imagine saying that about the Shoah…) and Rogue straight up calling me a race purist rather than admit that his forbearers only earned the right to be in this country because they were white.

I don’t mean to be a broken record about this but the White Fragility article I posted earlier effectively lays out exactly how this works beat for beat.

[Straha]

There was a copy paste error. The "and the unearned privileges of white people" should be after "through atrocities".

[Simon_Jester]

[blinks]

[stares blearily]

Okay... you know, I'm trying to be introspective here but I just felt a massive surge of... something. Apathy, maybe?

I think I've hit my limit too. The breaking of the record has swamped my ability to care about abstractions, justice among them, and on some intellectual level I know that's wrong, but... On the same intellectual level, I know I'm human. Tell me enough times that I don't deserve an opinion, or a place, or anything else, and I just don't see the point in hanging around anymore.

And it's not a perception where the conversation has no role for people with my color in it that's doing this, either. It's the part where the conversation pretty clearly has no role for people with my habits of thought. The things I say to myself, the ways I motivate myself, the way I try to solve problems and hope for a better tomorrow, all seem as though they came from another planet compared to the stuff I'm hearing.

You can, and probably will, blame white or White or whatever fragility for all this. All I know is, I can't make myself care anymore. My identity as a person doesn't really revolve around my concept of 'the white race,' but the things it does revolve around are clearly anathema to having A Conversation About Race Relations, and so I will be endlessly lectured on why the kind of things I think or care about don't matter and I should stay the hell out.

Fine. I'm out.

I concede your point, but... I feel like instead of just wanting things to be better and believing that people can think and plan about how to make that happen, I'm being confidently assured that things can never be better and how I can never be welcome in the community of people who nominally claim to defend the victims of history.

And yet, somehow, the sensation that floods my mind when I think this way... It feels more like I've lost a level in Minority Issues Enlightenment in the process. Like I was doing better as the guy who cared and wanted things to be better, than as the guy who sees how it's all pointless because of an infinite interlocking socially constructed network, the sheer injustice of which fully justifies us in saying that it's worth destroying the tools we would otherwise use to dismantle the network. Because that's legitimate, whether it makes sense to me or not.

And I feel like by saying "okay, whatever" to that, I'm becoming more complicit in the network and the processes by which it enshrines its own oppressiveness, not less.

Maybe the numbness will pass and I'll either go back to normal or somehow change into some other state I cannot readily imagine. I don't know. Right now, I just... can't care anymore.

EDIT:

Okay, maybe there's more than sheer numbness, I feel like my next-to-last paragraph and the one before it... I feel like there's an idea here. But right now the numbness is telling me that if I bring it up it'll be treated as too trivial to matter or something, while I stare at it and go "no wait seriously this is important right here I can see it having its effect."

[K. A. Pital]

I can never be welcome in the community of people who nominally claim to defend the victims of history.

I'm sorry Simon, but it is really brash of you, this.

All this talk about phone lines etc. Normally injustices start being corrected once you throw the oppressors out. It's not a guarantee but it is usually the first step. It is a bit hard to do so when your nation is basically held and colonized by these people.

So we come to "coexistence". But it is inevitably a coexistence based on past injustices.

Nobody - unless he, dunno, fought in the decolonization wars or something - could be automatically welcome in the community of people who defend the victims of history.

Did you fight in the decolonization wars? Which nations did you help to decolonize? Whose rights did you help to protect?

You can be welcome, but to be welcome, you actually need to have some bond with the people who are in a struggle, and to get it you have to take part in it.

[Simon_Jester]

See, Stas... stipulating that you are right...

From where does one find the zeal to join an army that will wish one wasn't there, even after one has enlisted in its ranks? Where does one find the energy to fight for the army, even if one believes it is correct? They want you, personally, gone, they want your opinions gone, every conversation will predictably underline that fact. And again, it isn't simply a matter of racial identity, but of philosophical disposition. No amount of physical contribution could change this, you would have to be overwritten and rewritten in all ways, your values including the ones that are in favor of the army in question must be destroyed.

If you ask me to break myself down that far, I find that I lose the desire and interest to do it, or even to find ways to help the faction that so loathes everything I am.

...

A faction that calls me brash as an insult, for trying my best to think about what possible combination of forces could secure victory for that faction, is a faction that actively does not want me on its side. Which saps my will to even think about being on its side, even if I believe that it is right. Because under it all, I'm still human. And very few humans are capable of exertions on behalf of a group they know despises them, for any reason other than brutal necessity, even if they know intellectually that the group is unambiguously in the right. Even stipulating that.

And you can hold me in contempt for saying this, and all i can say is "well, you held me in contempt anyway, so this doesn't change anything."

[Thanas]

Look at the process between Germany and Israel, Simon.

[Simon_Jester]

At first glance, the differences are large enough to make the similarities unhelpful. At least, unhelpful as an analogy that addresses the core of the issue for me.

And I can't do more than first glances without a clearer idea of what you're talking about.

[Elheru Aran]

Reading this fustercluck of a thread... the main thing I'm wondering here is, if minorities don't WANT our help, should we leave them to it, with the predictable result that they probably won't get what they want? Is there any chance that more or less any help could be acceptable, with the understanding that the majority may not always know exactly what's going on with the minority, but with enough goodwill and cooperation, the playing field can be leveled eventually? If the minority's way of telling the majority what to do is to constantly give them a knee in the nards, eventually the majority is going to go 'okay fuck you guys I'm out' and it's back to square one.

Communication does NOT have to be completely comprehensive, understanding, and well defined for people to get along. I don't have to know the long, convoluted history of race relations in the US to give my POC coworkers a hand when they need one. I don't have to be familiar with the exact language of critical race theory or whatever it is to support equal rights for all people and work towards that end. I'm capable of acknowledging that I have a certain 'white privilege', 'male privilege', whatever, due to the way that society has evolved over the centuries, and that other people may not be as fortunate.

It does not take a reading of Cornel West to be aware that it may be tasteless to bring the new African-American neighbors a bucket of fried chicken as a house-warming dinner, and choose to bring a pie instead. It doesn't take a graduate degree in race theory and a screed against capital-W Whiteness to walk alongside them when protesting police brutality and voting rights.

All it takes is a bit of human decency. All it takes is acknowledging that injustices have been done throughout history, and trying to do your part as an individual. Do I understand all the fine nuances of the relationship between the white majority and the various minorities in the country? Hell no. But I don't have to understand it to try to do the right thing.

Would it be better if I -did- understand it? Sure. Would I be able to do more, necessarily, after understanding it? Depends on my circumstances and ability. The same goes for anybody else.

Am I wrong here?

Quick EDIT: I will probably not be able to respond to this till next week, as I'm not going to be on the computer much over the weekend.