Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Call one of them a racist and they'll dig in and fight. Even I will still dig in and fight if you call me racist. Why? Because it's a lazy way to say a more complex thing.
|
This is your major problem. If you can't hear someone when they say something you've done is racist and all you hear is someone calling you a racist and thus, a bad person,
you have taken a word that has a complex meaning and rendered it useless. If (for one example), when it comes to black women, you think only like light-skinned black women with European features are attractive, that is objectively racist. I should be able to say that to you without you shutting down and telling me how you can't control who you're attracted to or that you have black friends or that race never entered into your head or that you can't be racist because you had a black girlfriend. The fact that you have been conditioned to prefer a European beauty ideal doesn't make you Steve King. But it is indeed racist.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
And the silly argument that to bristle at it is to prove white fragility insults my intellect. I'm happy to engage insult and hyperbole all day long. I actually enjoy it. But it had better be really well crafted, and not the sort of thing a sophomoric sort could wield as a cudgel.
|
Again, this paragraph shows that you. do. not. listen.
The concept of White Fragility isn't meant to be a fucking insult. It means when it comes to this specific topic, because applying the term "racism" to any of your actions carries with it the idea that you are a bad person, you no longer listen to why whatever action at issue is wrong or hurtful (even if it is what I referred to in the previous email as Low Level Racism). Your sole focus is proving that you are not a bad person. And since we all have to deal with that, we never get back to why that initial action is wrong and how you can correct it.
I would like to explain to people I've come across who have said, "She's cute for a black girl," why that is racist. It's clearly not the same as saying, "Niggers disgust me." But if I can't even talk to them about the former they are fucking fragile--meaning, their feelings take over a conversation in which they can be educated. That's not meant to be an insult.
TM
