Althouse: "I'm not going to tolerate you making racist comments about my people."

March 17, 2013

"I'm not going to tolerate you making racist comments about my people."

(Thanks to Mitchell the Bat for pointing me there.)

37 comments:

pm317 said...: I do not like where all this PC thing (read racist for some people) is going. Everybody has an opinion about what they think is the collective behavior of groups. So be it if some people choose to say it out loud. Isn't not it enough as long as there is no discrimination that is legally acceptable against different groups of people for who they might be perceived as? Rule of law.
We were invited to a potluck yesterday -- the host was showing slides of his trekking in the foothills of Himalayas, for which they have to go through India. He showed slides of poverty, somebody made a comment about gazillions of people there, there were some untrue facts said but that is what they knew. One guy who had hiked in a different part of the mountains was showing pictures of school children, 5-7 years old and said how they didn't know to speak English! There were some laughs, ahs, oohs and BTW, most of them were silly liberal Obots. I don't think the second guy (not our host) enjoyed the trip which made me wonder why he would spend all that money to put himself through that. But it is a check mark for some of these liberals to go gawk at things in the third world and come back here to show how tolerant they have been. At the potluck, my husband and I, both Indians were careful to not take offense at any of that and let them be. I mean what else would you do. Watch for how bad it gets and draw a line and leave if it crosses it. But don't go around muzzling everyone.; 3/17/13, 9:21 AM
Shouting Thomas said...: That was pretty funny.

Yes, the pompous declarations of racism really have become that preposterous.; 3/17/13, 9:24 AM
Andy said...: Is this a thread for all the white people to complain about the racism that they face?; 3/17/13, 9:29 AM
Bob Ellison said...: Slides? Real film slides? With the carousel and all that?; 3/17/13, 9:29 AM
pm317 said...: Slides? Real film slides?
-------

Haha, you got me.; 3/17/13, 9:32 AM
Shouting Thomas said...: Is this a thread for all the white people to complain about the racism that they face?

Funny how Andy R exempts himself from inclusion within the white race, isn't it?; 3/17/13, 9:34 AM
Anonymous said...: Must be one of those 'black Irish' :); 3/17/13, 9:39 AM
TML said...: Interesting and true story: When I worked at Nike in 1997 and 98, they had a culture day. I wore my clan kilt (Murray tartan, ceremonial) to work. It was a big day there and a lot of people dressed up and there were events and ethnic food in the JBS (Joan Benoit Samuleson Center where we ate). Someone made a crack about my "skirt" and I could tell it was just a joke. But I knew about the hyper PC nature of Nike HR so I said I was offended and that I was going to file a complaint because my heritage had been made fun of. The look on that guy's face was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. Terror. Confusion. Incipient subservience. You could see it all. I told him I was joking. Primarily because I was afraid he'd have a grabber right there. But the point was clear: If I'd been black and had been wearing clothing from a specific black culture, it would've been bad for anyone who made a crack. No doubt. But pasty white Scots? We're clean targets.; 3/17/13, 9:43 AM
Andy said...: But pasty white Scots? We're clean targets.

And right on time...; 3/17/13, 9:49 AM
Shouting Thomas said...: Andy R is just like a black guy suffering under Jim Crow.

How courageous and noble he is!

A beacon for us all!

If only it were 1963, he'd get out there and show you racists a thing or two.

Andy, you're a jackass!; 3/17/13, 9:51 AM
Unknown said...: The first time I read the last sentence in pm's comment I read it as "go around nuzzling people." It put a much different spin on the whole thing.; 3/17/13, 9:56 AM
TML said...: Andy R., I didn't mean to imply that I care, cuz I don't and didn't. It was more that some people would never imagine that making fun of a kilt was "wrong" like making fun an afro or some other sartorial trope of various black cultures would be.

The whole thing is rather amusing. This was Nike!! Rebellious Nike, infused with the "fuck you" spirit of McEnroe, Salazar, Barkley, etc. But the culture was very rigidly controlled. I still loved it there. Amazingly talented people.; 3/17/13, 9:56 AM
Bob Ellison said...: I used to think I was black Irish, but now I'm turning short Swedish.; 3/17/13, 9:58 AM
TML said...: Oops, that should be "sartorial or tonsorial"; 3/17/13, 9:58 AM
Paco Wové said...: Subcontinental Indians are 'white' now? How does that work?; 3/17/13, 10:11 AM
William said...: The people with the most pride in their Irish heritage are the ones who know the least about it.; 3/17/13, 10:18 AM
Anonymous said...: Paco Wové said...
Subcontinental Indians are 'white' now? How does that work?
The genome makes them very tan caucasians. At least the late arriving Indians. There are some groups down south India who were the original indians, before the Aryans came South.

Never fear, your Federal Government has awarded South Asians, a people with a 5,000 year history of advanced mathematics, culture and an English education system as 'disadvantaged minorities' in need of affirmative action in contracts and jobs. So in that regard, they aren't 'white'; 3/17/13, 10:31 AM
RazorSharpSundries said...: Thanks for letting me know that Andy Richter Controls The Universe is on Youtube. For St. Paddy's Day I'm watching this and drinking scotch. whisky.; 3/17/13, 10:47 AM
tiger said...: What a great show.
'ARCTU' was excellent and so was the other one he had.

Too bad he's been relegated to that POS that is The Conan O'Brien Show'.; 3/17/13, 10:58 AM
SGT Ted said...: It was more that some people would never imagine that making fun of a kilt was "wrong" like making fun an afro or some other sartorial trope of various black cultures would be.

Bingo. This also shows us the silliness and hypocricy of those that cry "racist! bigot! homophobe!" every time somebody points out an uncomfortable truth about, or makes fun of, a leftwing politically protected ethnicity and/or sexuality group.

Some of the best black jokes I ever heard were from blacks I served with in the Army. Same with other ethnic jokes.

Why do Scotsmen wear kilts?

Because sheep can hear a zipper a mile away.

HEYOOOOO! :); 3/17/13, 11:23 AM
TML said...: SGT Ted, OK, now I'm offended!

That's a great joke.; 3/17/13, 11:30 AM
kentuckyliz said...: I watched a very interesting show on Netflix about human migration and the genetic markers and evolution that happened.

They tested a bunch of New Yorkers (being an incredibly diverse and intermingled population) and got them together and grouped them according to the genetic marker group they belonged to.

There were a lot of surprised looking African Americans standing with the northern European group.

Brown sugar! How come you dance so good? Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Woo!; 3/17/13, 11:42 AM
YoungHegelian said...: @kentuckyliz,

Do you remember the name of the show you got from Netflix?

Searching Netflix by category is a painful and time-wasting experience.

Thank you!; 3/17/13, 11:54 AM
YoungHegelian said...: @TML,

What's the difference between a Scotsman & a coconut?

You can get a drink out of a coconut.; 3/17/13, 11:56 AM
Jim Bullock said...: Oh, that's funny. (The video.)

I never saw a caste system, personally until I got to Seattle. The tech caste there is pretty blended but not with all the ingredients. Working late I noticed, eventually, that all the folks who vacuumed & emptied the trash were either native (indigenous) or Hispanic. Likewise Hispanic and indigenous were absent from the buttoned shirt and khaki crowd of e-wranglers. (The various tech tribes were just as crisply divided, but identifiable by dress, hobbies, recreation preferences and work habits.)

Seeing the support jobs completely aligned with "race" was weird. I'd never noticed such a thing before. Back in the hills the people who did such jobs looked like me. Occasionally they were me. For the higher-skill stuff, nobody cared what you looked like, or your accent. There was some social "discrimination" based on whether you were new to the area or not, but that didn't stick out in a much more "mind your own business" culture. As a new arrival you were a stranger, not a color.

The first time I mentioned this caste thing off in Correctopia, the chill and silence surprised me. I thought we were supposed to talk about such things. Now I play it for laughs, just to mess with people.

Of course I eventually noticed in Correctopia that it's OK to rail at distant things, big concept things, stuff "over there." Here and now and what are we going to do about this in the reach of our arm, not so much.

The upper-caste Indian grad student back in college was a different kind of hoot, though. It was funny watching him formally comply with the culture - treat the women the same as the men, for example - in his official role. He'd revert when "off the clock." He'd interact with me until "the interview" about home, parents, professions, schools. Seriously, I was wondering, "What, do you think I'm gonna propose to your daughter?" From a long line of professionals & scholars-guy got obviously less interested in informal interactions with me once he figured out I was poor white trash from the PA hills.

Shouldn't we just treat people as individuals, laugh at these category-uber-alles people because it is silly, then go use the resources they won't? (That strategy hugely accelerated US atomic sciences, and possibly lost Germany the war.)

(Whew. Glad I sobered up in time for this deep discussion.); 3/17/13, 12:04 PM
mariner said...: The people with the most pride in their Irish heritage are the ones who know the least about it.

The people with the most pride in their Black heritage are the ones who know the least about it, too.; 3/17/13, 12:21 PM
ALP said...: kentuckyliz:

I watched a very interesting show on Netflix about human migration and the genetic markers and evolution that happened.
**************
I have read (in passing) a few times that the shape of one's ear was a better indicator of which gene pool you are a member of than skin color.

I hope I am dead before the tryanny of the 'tiny eared' begins. Or maybe the large eared will reign supreme - who knows?; 3/17/13, 12:30 PM
ALP said...: The first time I mentioned this caste thing off in Correctopia, the chill and silence surprised me. I thought we were supposed to talk about such things. Now I play it for laughs, just to mess with people.
**********
Lived in SEA for many years. Know exactly what you are describing. I had never known such neighborhood prejudice until I moved to SEA. Very puzzling...you are expected to be oh so tolerant of cultural "exotics", but god forbid a white resident of Captiol Hill treat a white resident of Bellevue, (from an identical background), with any kind of common decency or respect.; 3/17/13, 12:39 PM
Drago said...: "Noooooobodyyyyyyyy knooooooows de troubles AndyR's seeeeeeeeen, nooooobodyyyyy knoooooows his sorrooooooooooooooow...."

Wait, that's not technically true. AndyR is never reluctant to share the astonishingly cruel trials and tribulations he has faced at the hands of this uniquely horrendous paternalistic, homophobic, sexist, mysoginistic society knows as Amerikkka.; 3/17/13, 1:57 PM
Synova said...: "But it is a check mark for some of these liberals to go gawk at things in the third world and come back here to show how tolerant they have been."

I met a lady in Fargo who'd taken school groups to Africa (where in Africa, I don't know) which I'm sure was a great experience for them, but she was showing me some crap she bought, "they hunt with bows and arrows like this." It was a painted up stick with a string tied on it. Now, maybe some people there do still bow-hunt (and maybe they're not allowed to have guns to hunt with) because there are people in the US who bow-hunt too. And people in my part of the country ride their horses to the store. Walmart actually built in a hitching post and the local school has rules for child pick up with horses. That doesn't mean we're not modern people, that we're not civilized. I knew people in the Philippines that lived in Nipa Huts, you know, the classic grass house. They were all modern people. They were paying for their kids to go to college and trade schools.

In any case, I just smiled and was polite as I admired the examples of the primitive tools that she got when she was off on her quaint primitive people tour. I didn't tell her she was an idiot or that the people she met knew that the Americans expected to see quaint primitive brown people and so they sold them quaint primitive brown people.; 3/17/13, 2:03 PM
Rick67 said...: pm317 - I am shocked they would show these pictures and make such comments right in front of you and your husband, knowing (one presumes) that you are Indians. The lack of self-awareness amazes me.

Didn't anyone think "oh cr*p, I wonder if our two friends are offended or think we have no clue what we are talking about"?; 3/17/13, 2:20 PM
Valentine Smith said...: Hey, what's so funny? He's from Burnt Cork.; 3/17/13, 3:40 PM
pm317 said...: Rick67 said...
-----------

It was not that bad but there were glimmers of some people thinking 'what a godawful place' or trying to joke about it. We can take some of it -- yeah, it is awful on the surface and in many respects but you have not seen everything that we know of that place. The balance we were trying to achieve as being guests there was not to stifle them altogether from their self-expression. We didn't want them to feel self-conscious and overly aware of our presence.

They were all Obots as I said before. Our host showed pictures of a big religious festival that was going on in Calcutta when they were there. It was for goddess Kali (or Durga) and I pointed out that they were celebrating a female goddess and added cheerfully 'if anybody cared about gender politics' and what I really wanted to say was, 'if anybody cared for lady-parts'. :); 3/17/13, 3:59 PM
Jim Bullock said...: Hey Alp,

Nice to find another ex-pat in Seattle. What an amazing culture study out there, is it not? Sadly, on-demand research shows that the brilliant "Ask an Uptight Seattlite" *which nailed it* seems to have stopped in 2010. I am mildly horrified that so many non-American tech-nomad & business partners must think the whole US is like Seattle.

On point - but I was never off it - I think we'd do ourselves more good talking about caste than race, mostly determined by when & how you got started and your trajectory thereafter. Race feeds into caste via the skew to starts, experiences and trajectory.

For example, it's uncommon these days to get told to get your mick behind out of somewhere, or see a sign "No Irish Need Apply." Whatever cultural drags persist on we of Irish descent have more to do with the caste we mainly ended up in. We should probably - I propose - identify with caste for expectations and perhaps social policy. Let's leave claiming a particular racial or national descent for parties, and mainly to determine who hosts. (Brazil day / week / party / whatever it is in NYC is *awesome.*)

In Seattle ex-pats have a different origin and trajectory than the natives, or the tech-larva transplanted there for their first job at one of the name-brand places. You are *known* and of a *tribe* with a bunch of connection experiences because of the road taken. Enter a different way, from a different path, you may do the same job, but you are a different caste.

That's lightweight. Yet I wonder - the horror of black slavery goes with the slave caste part, not being black or descended from folks from Africa. Segregation & similar created a separate caste, in which blacks were enrolled by birth. Somehow, Hispanics and Native descendents in Seattle get tagged to a different caste. Yet, even their race doesn't completely determine. People with Asian background from the International District form their own subculture, tribe, and I'll argue caste. BUT people with Asian background who enter the tech-caste are of that caste.

I wish we had any good field anthropologists left to really look at this kind of stuff. They're all "cultural" these days, telling a story in which the heroes and villains are predetermined. More's the pity. I think there's stuff to be learned.

I gotta slag on Seattle one more time...

I finally figured out how to explain the Seattle "culture." Say a bag of groceries you're carrying breaks, dumping your supplies all over the sidewalk. The New Yorker, even in NYC, busts your chops while helping you pick up your stuff. The Seattlite steps over you avoiding eye contact, then says something catty about you to their friend.; 3/17/13, 4:28 PM
David-2 said...: Jim Bullock @ 4:28:

I think "Ask an Uptight Seattleite" stopped when the Seattle Weakly realized it had to hire a couple of extra interns to handle the mail-in questions from Seattleites who didn't get that it was a joke.

I finally figured out how to explain the Seattle "culture." Say a bag of groceries you're carrying breaks, dumping your supplies all over the sidewalk. The New Yorker, even in NYC, busts your chops while helping you pick up your stuff. The Seattlite steps over you avoiding eye contact, then says something catty about you to their friend.

Say ... that sounds like you're being judgemental!; 3/17/13, 6:14 PM
Nini said...: Everyone has prejudice.

What annoys me sometimes are Asians in the west (and I'm Asian) talking about their culture as if it's superior over others' culture. And I was thinking why bother moving to the west then. Surely, the west must have something going for it.

Asian countries do have real problems and romanticizing Asia is being out of touch with reality.; 3/17/13, 10:38 PM
Eric the Fruit Bat said...: And then there's the story of the young buck all proud and boastful about his ethnic heritage until his kindly father advised him: "Son, there's a reason why we left the Old Country."; 3/18/13, 6:32 AM