And how can one do that? It's obvious: by expressing sexism/racism against men and whites only. If they'd been born long ago, they might have vented against women or blacks instead. That's why when I hear people expressing shamelessly anti-man or anti-white views, it doesn't strike me as a dramatic improvement over the expression of anti-woman or anti-black view....
October 24, 2014
"A lot of people have an impulse to be prejudiced. But at the same time, they're like almost everyone..."
"... in that they want to avoid being socially unacceptable. So they want to vent sexism and racism somehow — but only in ways that are considered socially acceptable."
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Still holding outfor my "historical advantages." Anyone, anyone?
Oh, and those slips of the tongue: e.g."white nigger", "he is clean and articulate", "he doesn't speak negro", and those Indians working at gas stations...
Seems the more tolerant a progressive is the more slippery is his tongue.
Fuckin'-A right, Bubba
Well, they can still libel Sarah Palin.
At a certain point feminism changed stride. Basically it became, "Now that we have gotten you to admit that we women are your equals, we're here to tell you that, actually, we're better than you."
Something similar now exists vis-a-vis the gay rights movement. Now that society has granted virtually every concession that gay rights advocates have demanded, it seems that they are not satisfied with having equal rights. Gay rights must supersede straight rights.
Want to preach a sermon criticizing same-sex marriage? Better lawyer up, because your sermon is being subpoenaed. Don't want to make cakes for gay weddings? You're better off shutting down your bakery. Want to reserve your chapel for hetero weddings? Prepare to go to jail.
Freedom for me, none for thee. It's the liberal activist way.
There used to be a thing where they made all the Hollywood villains WASPs. They did this not because WASPs were particularly evil but because they were not and didn't object to being personified as villains. Since most of the heroes were WASPs, there was a kind of fairness to this. As time has passed, the heroes have become more diverse, but the villains remain WASPs. They're usually corporate executives in the energy field, and you can tell just by looking at them they vote Republican. But just to make sure there's usually a picture of them shaking hands with Bush in their office while they discuss how to download toxic sludge into the town's drinking water.
"I think it has gotten to the point where some white men feel like that have to tip toe around some topics and issues in fear of being accused of being something awful."
Ha. That point was passed some time back in the 90's. What is now approaching is the point where white men and the women who marry them stop playing by the old rules. I suspect the Asians will be joining us shortly. It was a nice country while it lasted.
Or maybe against the South, no?
White males are actively and openly discriminated against. It's okay, so long as it's not motivated by hatred of white males.
That's one of the lessons I had to learn at an early age when I began to think about SATs and college.
I try to take my cue from Edward R. Murrow:
"No one can eliminate prejudices; just recognize them."
If you are a white guy from poor background, what do you have to score on the SAT to get the same chance of acceptance to an ivy league school as an Hispanic man or a Black man from a wealthy family?
An extra 50 points? An extra 100 points?
Or anti Christian. While at same time being against hate speech directed at religion
Tyrone wrote:
Something similar now exists vis-a-vis the gay rights movement. Now that society has granted virtually every concession that gay rights advocates have demanded, it seems that they are not satisfied with having equal rights. Gay rights must supersede straight rights.
exactly. You can't say that whites are scourge of the world in so many words, but if you even point out thst transgender who want to remove their penis are suffering from a mental disorder its hate speech.
The left picks targets that are super special, and they apply one standard to that. You must accept or you are a bigot.they frame the debate. And therefore the things they are for are the positions you mustn't disagree with. But the targets that are permissible to attack they can be merciless about and even go so far as to accuse of blood libel.
And as far as saying transgendered are suffering a mental disorder I'm not even saying you should discriminate. I'm simply suggesting that when you suffer from dysphoria its in fact a mental disorder. So you should be able to label it that way. Its not as if they are happy with their situation. Its so dire they need to chop off their dicks! That's not normal.
People seem to be missing the precise point. He's not stressing that discrimination against white males is considered acceptable but that the people who are doing this are displaying a primal urge to discriminate that comes from the same place as the hostility that they don't show, that they successfully suppress because it's not acceptable.
The whole notion of prejudice is subjective and dependent on the person saying you're prejudiced. Usually it amounts to you're prejudiced if you believe something I don't but I'm rational to oppose the things I do. That's not prejudiced.
Take in point polygamy. Basically if you are for banning polygsmy then you are not bigoted because after all there are perfectly valid reasons to ban polygamy. But if you are for allowing polygamy then those who oppose it are bigots who are not open minded enough.
You can see this a little on the right I suppose. But if you want to see ideologues on full display all u have to do is listen to liberals argue.
Althouse wrote:
"People seem to be missing the precise point. He's not stressing that discrimination against white males is considered acceptable but that the people who are doing this are displaying a primal urge to discriminate that comes from the same place as the hostility that they don't show, that they successfully suppress because it's not acceptable."
I get the point and totally agree with it. Except to say, it comes from the same urge that they suppress because it's NOT ACCEPTABLE, so then when they express it , it would be acceptable. Otherwise they'd have suppressed it.
So self-styled progressives are just as prejudiced/susceptible to tribalism and/or affiliation bias as the people they call sexists/racists? Is that honestly news to anyone? I mean, isn't a big part of small c conservatism believing that much of our fundamental human nature is immutable, and couldn't the phenomenon described in that post just be an aspect of that nature (however much we try to overcome it)? If so it seems like this isn't really news to a pretty big chunk of the population.
It is of a piece. The need for a scapegoat. The desire to bully.
There is a strange asymmetry to the theater, however. The easiest person to scapegoat is the person far away. The president, for example. Or, the idiot scraped from the internet to generate your outrage. Maybe the idiot is a right-to-life white guy from some state far south of yours running for state rep. Maybe the idiot is a gay lawyer suing a wedding cake baker in a state you visited once. They are comforting, these scapegoats. They give you a fact or two to hang your anger on.
Yet it's always "they." Never "me."
He's not stressing that discrimination against white males is considered acceptable but that the people who are doing this are displaying a primal urge to discriminate that comes from the same place as the hostility that they don't show, that they successfully suppress because it's not acceptable.
Isn't that so obvious it doesn't need to be stated?
I thought nobody was born racist. That's one of the bumper sticker philosophies going around. I have my doubts about that, but it's not something susceptible of proof by clear data.
Henry mused...
Yet it's always 'they.' Never 'me.'
It's never even 2nd person, let alone 1st person.
Always 3rd person plural -- as distant and generic as the language allows.
"There used to be a thing where they made all the Hollywood villains WASPs. They did this not because WASPs were particularly evil but because they were not and didn't object to being personified as villains. Since most of the heroes were WASPs, there was a kind of fairness to this. As time has passed, the heroes have become more diverse, but the villains remain WASPs."
Oh please. Ever since the crack wars of the '90's the truly scary villains have been disproportionately black males with a generous smattering of gangland Hispanics. This seems to be one area where Hollywood is resistant to political correctness.
Everyone's racist. Everyone's brain sorts who's part of my tribe, and who's not. It ever was, and ever will be.
Ann Althouse said...
"People seem to be missing the precise point. He's not stressing that discrimination against white males is considered acceptable but that the people who are doing this are displaying a primal urge to discriminate that comes from the same place as the hostility that they don't show, that they successfully suppress because it's not acceptable."
But you are missing a precise point also. It was democrats/progressives that were sexist/racist then and it is democrats/progressives that are sexist/racist now.
And the smart money is on you figuring out some cruelly neutral way to vote for Hillary. On a mostly sexist basis.
I thought it came from a simple kindergarten mindset. "Since Jamal black guy was discriminated, shouldn't Billy white guy take a turn at being discriminated? It's only fair!"
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Really-Need-Know-Learned-Kindergarten/dp/034546639X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1414227785&sr=1-1&keywords=everything+i+needed+to+know+i+learned+in+kindergarten>I don't think I'm far off here.</a>
How come you can't post links anymore?
This is what I said at your offspring's blog:
My theory is that this is mostly political. The Dem party and its operatives are trying to turn out the vote in the upcoming election, and two of the big constituencies that they need to turn out are unmarried women and Blacks. So, they cast these groups as victims and themselves as their saviors. The complacent media dutifully pushes their party line.
I am just struck by how hard they are pushing these things this election cycle. We have discussed before how Mark Udahl got the name"Mark Uterus" in Colorado. Absent any real ideas, and having voted consistently as he was told to by Harry Reid on legislation over the last six years, his entire campaign seems to revolve around scaring single women that Cory Gardner is trying to steal their lady parts.
Oh please. Ever since the crack wars of the '90's the truly scary villains have been disproportionately black males with a generous smattering of gangland Hispanics. This seems to be one area where Hollywood is resistant to political correctness.
Maybe, just maybe, because young Black males are probably, by far, the most violent and dangerous segment of our population. Of course, inner city late adolescent and young adult Black males prey primarily on their own communities, with Blacks being their principle victims. Despite the disparity in populations, Blacks are more likely to kill non-Blacks in this country than the other way around.
And, Crack, I am not suggesting that this is the fault of Blacks themselves, except to the extent that they, and esp their leadership, have made their bargain with the devil, in this case, by supporting so completely the racist party, the party of slavery, the KKK, Jim Crow, and more recently the War on Poverty, which effectively destroyed the Black family, ultimately resulting in fatherless boys running as juvenile packs through the Black inner city communities, until they end up dead or in prison, while their sisters, also fatherless, bear the next generation of kids out of wedlock.
"People seem to be missing the precise point."
You will have to forgive the targets of this for venting. We can't all be Spock clones like Obama.
I think this premise is obvious, and of a piece. Many liberals are insufficiently self aware and tend to deny their own human nature, For a more thorough exposition, I can't recommend Jonathan Haidt's books highly enough.
I also think it's more useful though, to look at a different aspect of "reverse discrimination": the tendency to feel that it is necessary to disadvantage those who were historically advantaged, in order to rebalance power. This is not, of course, really necessary, but I think we often feel that it is. That is what makes it seem "acceptable" to feel and express prejudice against the group that was the dominant one, which is in the process of becoming non-dominant.
We should guard against this tendency because instead of speeding up the rebalancing, it actually slows down the pace- because naturally the group that is losing status pushes back. The idea here is not unlike the philosophy of nonviolent protest for achieving social justice- except in this case the "violence" is rhetoric and social and economic policy.
Move Men
Hillary understands it.
Frankenstein, Dracula and the Wolfman were all white men.
"A lot of people have an impulse to be prejudiced."
I don't know that that's true.
A lot of us conservative white men who live among liberals keep our politics private for a reason.
I know if I posted the stuff on facebook that I do on twitter, I would be massively unfriended. Probably disinvited to lots of social events as well.
There is another conservative I talk to in town who looks around before talking to me in public about politics, because he says his main business clientele are liberal, and even though his place is first rate, they would stop going there if it came out.
Original Mike is pretty sure that millions of years of human evolution never happened.
The Vagina as Fascist State understands that full inclusiveness results in a corresponding loss of power: there is always the need for the scapegoat to divert attention from self-created failures. As such racism and sexism is not simply an outlet for hate but rather a form of psychological self-protection for the failed and the flailing. As a collective of the failed and the flailing the Vagina as Fascist State projects hate at its opposite: the successful white male who does not kowtow to their Society.
After all, certain white men are deemed acceptable due to their feasance to the Vagina as Fascist State: they bow and scrape in this Society much like the dhimmi of the Muslim world. To be a part of the Vagina as Fascist State is to know one's place, and any resulted shame is projected outward through condemnation of their denied self.
With this being the case, is it any wonder that the secure white male outside of the Vagina as Fascist State may choose to confidently accept all creeds and colors through the melting pot of lesbian and interracial porn? A yellow polyurethane penis knows no hate.
Original Mike and other Blank Slaters are right up there with young earth creationists in their ability to ignore scientific theories that they don't want to be true.
The prof's son, to his credit, appears to be a man who's intuited that there's something ugly and dangerous going on, and is trying to figure it out with his current intellectual toolkit. He needs new tools for thinking about the nature of prejudice, and until he gets them, he'll be floundering around with the very inadequate set he has now. But, as he says, "just a theory", and playing around trying to come up with explanations is often a good start in that direction. I immediately saw a contrast with the still adamantine naïveté displayed by the Prof in the Coeur d'Alene thread.
I've been thinking along lines like this for quite a while. I don't think the need that some people seem to have for another group to hate and look down on is necessarily limited to race or gender -- there's ideology, too. The liberal hatred for conservatives is not solely focused on race or gender -- think of the viciousness meted out to Sarah Palin or Condoleezza Rice or Thomas Sowell. I once heard a "nice" middle-aged liberal Democrat woman insisting over and over -- with no provocation other than some newspaper headline -- that she wished somebody would assassinate Ted Cruz. "They should shoot him!" she fumed. "I'm nonviolent but God I wish somebody would kill him!" I wondered at the time, if she could have seen herself in the mirror, whether she would have recognized how hate was distorting her face.
We all have that tribal impulse -- at base it's just a need to belong somewhere that doesn't have to turn hateful. But some people seem to have a real need to feed that need to belong to a tribe with hatred for those in other tribes. These days, a LOT of those people are liberals.
"I thought nobody was born racist. That's one of the bumper sticker philosophies going around."
"Everyone's racist. Everyone's brain sorts who's part of my tribe, and who's not. It ever was, and ever will be."
Those statements can actually be "harmonized." When the brain sorts "who's part of my tribe," it doesn't have to be on a racial basis. It can be political or ideological or social or religious. Or, of world historical importance, nation. Before World War I, socialists assumed that German workers would not fight English workers; the real enemy was the capitalists. Boy, were they wrong. During the World Cup, every Brazilian soccer fan, from the whitest white to the darkest dark, is a member of one tribe--and every Brazilian is a soccer fan.
During most of human history, people only encountered other people who looked like them. We are hard-wired to see "us" and "them" but we are not hard-wired to do it on the basis of appearance. When Serbs and Croats were killing each other in the former Yugoslavia, it was striking that they looked exactly the same and even spoke the same language, Serbo-Croatian.
"A lot of people have an impulse to be prejudiced..."
I have to give JAC credit here. I'm assuming that by virtue of his education and upbringing, he was carefully insulated from exposure to the tribalism that is inherent in all human... hell, all primate... societies. Now that he's out in the real world, he has realized that the behavior of his fellow primates does not make sense with regards to the blank-slatist ideas he was carefully inculcated with, and, as an intelligent person, he is crafting and trying out new hypotheses to explain the behaviors he sees around him. This new hypothesis of his is a better approximation of reality; it reminds me of the sort of thing I thought when I was about his age.
"Still holding outfor my "historical advantages." Anyone, anyone?"
Me, I got my White Privilege Starter Kit a few years back, and man, it's pretty sweet! But here's a tip – make sure you hold out for the White Male and Protestant options – easily doubles your oppressive power!
"People seem to be missing the precise point. He's not stressing that discrimination against white males is considered acceptable but that the people who are doing this are displaying a primal urge to discriminate that comes from the same place as the hostility that they don't show, that they successfully suppress because it's not acceptable."
And what is that "place"? Could it be the instinctive urge to differentiate yourself from others? So that you can survive and thrive? To me that implies that all this social shaming will not work. People will ALWAYS find a way to differentiate. And maybe one day our superior rulers will understand that people are allowed to differentiate but GOVERMENTS ARE NOT!
Original Mike: "A lot of people have an impulse to be prejudiced."
I don't know that that's true.
Bob R: Original Mike and other Blank Slaters are right up there with young earth creationists in their ability to ignore scientific theories that they don't want to be true.
Whether O-Mike is a Blank Slater, I don't know, nor could I infer it from that brief comment. But I certainly am not, and I wasn't quite happy with that formulation about prejudice, either.
All (not "a lot") of us are born with the tendency to form in-group/out-group categories. And Althouse Cohen is correct that "prejudice" can be socially conditioned, aka fashionable - e.g. whites hating on Whitey with religious zeal. But prejudice isn't merely some amorphous impulse looking for an object, subject only to irrational fashion - that view in itself is stuck within the bounds of "blank slate" thinking, with just a slight nod to nature, and A-Coh seems to want to stay within them, for now.
mishu said...
How come you can't post links anymore?
You need to close your quote around the URL.
Terry said...
An extra 50 points? An extra 100 points?
Although your guess is pretty close**, the racial discrimination practiced by universities is mainly against Asians:
++
"The study, described in an article published in the June issue of Social Science Quarterly, also found that eliminating affirmative action would significantly raise the number of Asian-American students, while having little effect on white students.
If affirmative action were eliminated, the acceptance rates for black applicants would fall to 12.2 percent from 33.7 percent, while the acceptance rates for Hispanic applicants would drop to 12.9 percent from 26.8 percent, according to the study. Asian-American students would fill nearly 80 percent of the spaces not taken by black and Hispanic students, the researchers found, while the acceptance rate for white students would increase by less than 1 percent."
++
**Hsu has some other articles with those numbers, poke around at his informative site to find them...
Its part of our sin nature.
"And who is my brother?"
re: Tribalism
Racism is for lazy tribalists who only want to look skin deep.
Hutus and Tutsis
and
Serbs and Croats
They have perfected tribalism.
PS Blog commenters are pretty good at it too. They can detect "the other" via a simple turn of the phrase.
People...a lot of people...so many people that we can't name one
All (not "a lot") of us are born with the tendency to form in-group/out-group categories.
But that tendency is not uniform across the species. There are only "a lot" of people who come out of the womb itching for a fight. Visit a preschool. You can pick em out.
Bob R: But that tendency is not uniform across the species. There are only "a lot" of people who come out of the womb itching for a fight. Visit a preschool.
Or a blog comment section.
If he was happy to omit the "reverse" then why didn't he? It's his blog.
Also, an "urge to be prejudiced" is so far off the mark the Ann re-jiggered it to "urge to discriminate". If we just talk about it as preferring one's in-group to various out-groups then it's just a common place observation, though.
This is tied in to the way people throw around the word "racism". Different speakers mean vastly different things when they use the word, but for some, recognizing the differences would rob the word of its stigmatizing power.
In the same way, when "rape" is defined to mean having sex with someone just a little bit drunker than you are, then just about anyone can imagine a situation in which they could be a rapist. Getting to that stage totally undermines the otherwise useful idea that rape is about power, control, and violence, rather than sexual desire.
Bias, yes, but not prejudice. Neither originating nor reciprocating prejudice.
Bruce,
You're confusing me with my Brothah-of-a-Different-Colah, Crack. While I agree with what you wrote in your second paragraph, the fact remains that white folks of all ideological stripes are all too comfortable with portrayals of Black males as sub-human.
Bruce Hayden wrote:
And, Crack, I am not suggesting that this is the fault of Blacks themselves, except to the extent that they, and esp their leadership, have made their bargain with the devil, in this case, by supporting so completely the racist party, the party of slavery, the KKK, Jim Crow, and more recently the War on Poverty, which effectively destroyed the Black family,"
But this is the fault of blacks themselves, insofar as they are the ones committing the crimes that make up the statistics showing the high crime rate. The blacks who are committing the crimes that is.
Fernandinande said...
You need to close your quote around the URL.
Thanks
The other reason you still have WASP movie Villains is you have a lot very good actors who are English or WASP - and since only a few can become diversity heroes - they are available to play villains.
Cracker Emcee wrote:
While I agree with what you wrote in your second paragraph, the fact remains that white folks of all ideological stripes are all too comfortable with portrayals of Black males as sub-human.
But I woudn't assume that people who commit crimes are subhuman since people have been committing crimes since we've had laws. Humans commit crimes.
Whatever race a murderer is he's still a human.
As for the analysis, I agree. Some people need to hate and since they can't mutter about Nigras or make jokes about Women they mutter about Rednecks and dumb white guys.
rcocean wrote:
The other reason you still have WASP movie Villains is you have a lot very good actors who are English or WASP - and since only a few can become diversity heroes - they are available to play villains.
That is true. And brits have a pompousness to them when they talk that you could mistake for villainy.
Some brits. Jeremy Irons definitely. The chimney sweep from mar poppins not so much (technically played by American but the accent was supposed to be cockney)
Wonder how upset Crack is with CNN's Carol Costello avoiding punishment when two of the network's few on-air black personalities lost their contracts because of offensive statements?
I notice Don Lemon's been pretty quiet about it...
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