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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall

Yeah. Of course it didn't. Color me shocked.

Pun intended?

Look, it is almost impossible to talk to white people about racism.

I hear you. Thanks for taking up the challenge here.

I sit on 3 different diversity organizations. Every single time white people are in the room, a conversation about racism, the effects of racism, steps to fix it, devolves into a conversation about white people's good intentions, feelings about being in the vicinity of racism, their meager upbringing, whatever. It makes it completely impossible to discuss the actual effects of their racism. People who are trying to address racism spend most of their time helping white people with their feelings and ensuring them that they aren't bad people. White people (on the whole) cannot have a conversation about racism.

I don't disagree at all.

Like I said, I have been struggling with this phenomenon for quite some time, as have many prominent people in the diversity field. Focusing on unconscious bias, confirmation bias, etc. is strategic because the message is, "Hey, shhhhh, it's not really your fault. But let's see how we can get past this." And it's because when you say to a white person, "Black people at this firm aren't being given the same opportunities. We need to do this that and the other." All they hear is "You're a racist," and that's that. Conversation effectively over.

Ditto.

And liberals and progressives benefit from racism and actively fight changing societal dynamics that grant them those benefits. As long as they can tell themselves that they aren't part of the problem or would never use a racial slur, they let themselves off the hook. Once again, when they are faced with how they benefit, they completely disconnect from the conversation. I've gone into the examples a million times on this board.

OK.

But enough of this. Your post is annoying in that you point out a bunch of stuff you disagree with but never actually say anything. So, if you want to have a conversation, I suggest you do more than sit there and shit on the article without offering even a little bit of insight into why what you are quoting is incorrect or what you think is or isn't "helpful."

Hey, I tried to say that there were things about the article that I liked and things I disagreed with. I'm not arguing about the message -- I'm just surprised that you would say it's the best thing you've read on racism since college, because that sounds like a pretty high bar. So here were my criticisms, with some more explanation:

"how society is set up"

No one "set up" society. Racism is the product of a whole bunch of individuals actions and choices. While it is helpful to get people to realize that racism is systematic and pervasive, talking at this level of generality can become a substitute for illustrating the subject in a concrete way. (Maybe this is just the reviewer's gloss on a book that does the letter.) I want to hear more specifics about how and why people do and think what they do and think. Hearing that society is set up to be racist is about as helpful as Sebby explaining that we are all responsible for the rise of Trump.

"white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color"

I don't think it's true. As I was saying to GGG, I think white progressives can be maddening, because one expects more help and less resistance, but I think Trump voters do more daily damage. For example, Trump voters and the officials they elected are splitting up refugee families. Obama was far from perfect, but he was better on that score.

white racism as "a pathogen that seeks to replicate itself"

From a history of ideas perspective, I'm interested in the way that beliefs evolve. But. If the central problem addressed by the book and the review is that white liberals are in denial about their racism, then talking about racism as a sort of independent agent that goes around infecting people is just another way of letting them off the hooks for their choices, actions and beliefs. To my mind, I prefer the approach of Gordon Allport's Prejudice, which talks about prejudice (or racism, if you will) as thoughts and beliefs that the result of the way everyone thinks.

I wrote my college thesis about racism and the way that it did and did not affect government policy in a particular case, so I guess I am repeating ideas that I have worked over a lot in the last many years.