Forums

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by ThurgreedMarshall

You are being particularly confusing about this. You talk about how you weren't that impressed with the article and ask why I was. I tell you and I get, "Ok. I said there was some stuff I liked." I don't understand what's going on in your head. If what impresses me you agree with, but doesn't impress you, fine. But don't ask me the question and act so dismissive. Maybe this is one of those instances that would go differently if we were standing across from each other, because, at the very least, you would temper your comments based on the look on my face.

You gave the article very high praise. I don't get it. I agree with a lot of it. I have seen white people talk and act in the way described and I think it's a real and important thing. What did I say that is "dismissive"? I suspect you are right that if we were talking in person we wouldn't be talking past each other.

I'm not sure why you're surprised. I'm pretty sure I explained it very clearly. And given the fact that I have been working in diversity for 20 years and watched how D&I efforts have had to contort itself and struggle to make any headway at all by making white people comfortable enough in their own feelings to even consider addressing the underlying problems (that lay squarely at their own feet), it was nice to see the issue so eloquently set forth in this piece. Your continual explanation of how unimpressed you are is meaningless to me.

To be clear, I completely get what you are saying about D&I efforts and white people. I have been involved in those efforts too, though not to the extent you have. I have heard white people say those things. Some of my friends are black. (That was a joke.) I'm in a somewhat different position vis-a-vis my current employer than you are, but this topic is something I'm working on. I am with you on everything you say in this paragraph except that while I found the piece good and right, I didn't think it was so eloquently set forth. And I say that not in the spirit of trying to crap on good work -- yours, the reviewer's, the author's. I agree that most white people want to think of racism as something that other, bad people do, not as something in which they are complicit and from which they benefit. I think that's absolutely a thing. But that idea is not new to me, and I can't believe it was new to you.

This is one of you dumbest comments ever.

First, society is most definitely set up. White people set it up over the course of hundreds of years and they set it up and maintain it to benefit themselves. Period. Pointing that fact out does absolutely no damage whatsoever.

No damage at all, but nor does it add anything.

And I'm so glad you told me what you want to hear. What a disingenuous, bullshit thing to say. You pull one sentence out and say it's too big a generalization while simultaneously ignoring the specifics about how and why white people shut off when it comes to any discussion of racism. I'm starting to wonder whether your entire response is a more complicated example of exactly what the author is talking about.

What specifics? I would like to see more specifics. That would be interesting.

I addressed this in my response to Ferrets.

And I in my response to GGG.

The way you are characterizing the point in this piece is reductive and insulting. You have taken an analogy out of context and assigned it a meaning completely detached from the point of the article.

Racism isn't an independent agent that goes around infecting people.

And yet that's what the author said, comparing it to a pathogen. I'm not saying I reject the whole article, I just said that it was an idea in the piece that I didn't like.

The fact that you can read what I read and reach a conclusion that it somehow lets people off the hook is fucking ridiculous. The problem with racism, whether whites benefit from intentionally or simply as a byproduct of being white, is that there is very little incentive to fight those benefits if you are white. If you are born white, you automatically achieve a certain status in this country. Stating that doesn't let people off the hook. Stating that white people continue to enjoy the benefits of that status and will not act to endanger that status does the exact opposite.

Agree. White people have agency, and make choices, and are responsible for their choices, such as avoiding dealing with uncomfortable truths and doing nothing.

The problem I have with the "racism as pathogen" idea -- not with the larger piece -- is that it diminishes that agency. You seem to think I'm saying white people should be let off the hook. I'm saying the opposite.

?

Allport describes prejudice as a product of the way ordinary people think, not as something external and anomalous (a "pathogen"). If you want people to accept how pervasive prejudice, it seems to me a better path is to explain how it is integral to everyone's psychology.

Seems like you're trying to force everything into the conclusion box of your college thesis and if it doesn't fit, you toss it aside.

My thesis was about the post-war occupation of Japan, so that would be a good trick. Come to SF for a beer and I will tell you about it.