Meanwhile that has to be one of the more stupid images I have seen posted
White Fragility
- Thread starter Brainster
- Start date
Distracted1
Philosopher
Seems a good allegory to me.
What the ability to see over the fence represents is, of course, open to interpretation.
The adult didn't need a box to prop him up.
The middle one just needed a chilly bin to stand on with some cold beers in it.
The little kid could have just sat on his dad's shoulders.
Or they could have just paid to get in, like the rest of the crowd in the background in the area with seats and no massive fences blocking people sneaking into the ground for a free ride.
It was probably on TV if they were that desperate
The middle one just needed a chilly bin to stand on with some cold beers in it.
The little kid could have just sat on his dad's shoulders.
Or they could have just paid to get in, like the rest of the crowd in the background in the area with seats and no massive fences blocking people sneaking into the ground for a free ride.
It was probably on TV if they were that desperate
BobTheCoward
Banned
- Joined
- Nov 12, 2010
- Messages
- 22,789
It seems that a society dominated by green culture would have structured itself so differently that what is valued and how resources are distributed would not look the same. Your question demonstrates your parochial attitude to this.
Craig4
Penultimate Amazing
I've read the book and was not impressed. For one thing, she writes herself a get out of criticism free card by saying if you disagree with her methodology you're being a racist. That said, her methodology is fundamentally flawed. She appeals to her own authority and expertise and relies heavily on anecdotes of incidents that happened during her workshops to make points. There is plenty of solid, scientific data out there on the impacts of systemic racism but you won't find it in her book. The "Feedback" methods she suggests are at best impractical and at worst condescending to the people of color she is trying to champion.
Pterodactyl
Graduate Poster
- Joined
- Dec 2, 2013
- Messages
- 1,280
"Green culture" is the kind of hypothetical term you have to make up when discussing any topic involving race or culture because grown adults start calling each other names if you get specific.
autumn1971
Illuminator
Last edited:
We've already had the Smithsonian pushing it. This book is at the top of the NYT best seller list and has been since 2018. That at least makes it look somewhat popular? Plenty of people seem to approve of it.
Here's Jimmy Fallon chatting away to her:
Here she is chatting to the man who occupies most of the other top positions on the NYT list:
on CBS. I think we can assume they are familiar with each others work. Unless you agree with them that the reason for all inequity in outcome is injustice, then you are racist. What they mean by inequity is that if asians are more likely to come from families that encourage hard work, then the scales should be tilted so that they get no advantage from it.
It also looks like it is being taught these ideas:
https://www.city-journal.org/seattle-interrupting-whiteness-training
to local government workers in Seattle (obviously it was only aimed at workers whose skin tone matched a particular hue).
The picture I posted of the people standing on boxes earlier comes up pretty regularly on Twitter. It's difficult though because, while in their long form pieces and in the Smithsonian thing, and in Seattle it is clear what they mean... typically one can't be sure whether a random tweet means "discriminate based on skin colour" or "give some additional help to people who are struggling".
Beyond saying the sales figures and media push of those books and if it has made it to the Smithsonian and local government training then that maybe implies quite a bit of traction, I doubt it is really possible to put a number on how widespread this is. It's always going to be an example here, an example there.
Last edited:
Not entirely finished, I skipped the chapter "White Women's Tears". I'll be honest, I had a tough time getting past this opening anecdote:
Are you ready for why?
Wow. That is very cringeworthy.
I saw this woman here recently:
Yeah, didn't convince me.
She is obsessed with race and asks people to behave differently depending on the color of the skin. Seriously, I don't know where she thinks this leads to.
Identity politics at its worst.
I recently discovered that color blindness is seen as anathema in these circles. Oooo... kay. I'm from Spain, and I'm feeling like Uncle Traveling Matt from Fraggle Rock trying to make sense of it.
I was wondering where Islam is supposed to fit into this definition of whiteness.
Checkmite
Skepticifimisticalationist
No.
The answer to any variation of "SO [a selected item from this very long list] CONSTITUTES WHITNESS?" is "no".
I'd just like to reformulate my question, because I desperately want to hear what I'm missing.
If there are cultutal discrepancies between races on atttitudes that would be expected to impact life outcomes, why should we expect life outcomes to be similar?
Paul2
Philosopher
- Joined
- Nov 6, 2004
- Messages
- 8,553
I think I'm beginning to understand (which does not necessarily = agreement).
If you favor equity, not equality (from the pic about standing on boxes at the fence), then a culture or individual that does not favor hard work to get ahead - or individuality, or anything else on the whiteness poster from the Smithsonian - is represented by one of the shorter people, and to give the shorter people big enough boxes to see over the fence is the same as accepting that culture for what it is, totally, instead of seeing it as insufficient, which is a negative evaluation of it (= racist).
This is also congruent with equality of outcomes, not opportunities. Criticizing equality of outcomes necessarily means criticizing the culture that led to the unequal outcomes, and condemning the culture - or an individual exhibiting the culture's values - is racist.
Is that what the graphic tries to say (as charitably as possible)? Is that as much sense as it can make?
If you favor equity, not equality (from the pic about standing on boxes at the fence), then a culture or individual that does not favor hard work to get ahead - or individuality, or anything else on the whiteness poster from the Smithsonian - is represented by one of the shorter people, and to give the shorter people big enough boxes to see over the fence is the same as accepting that culture for what it is, totally, instead of seeing it as insufficient, which is a negative evaluation of it (= racist).
This is also congruent with equality of outcomes, not opportunities. Criticizing equality of outcomes necessarily means criticizing the culture that led to the unequal outcomes, and condemning the culture - or an individual exhibiting the culture's values - is racist.
Is that what the graphic tries to say (as charitably as possible)? Is that as much sense as it can make?
I am not a proponent of the Smithsonian image, but I doubt that the actually supporters would own that position. The "boxes" comic appears to be put forth by someone who is not aligned with the side represented by the Smithsonian image, so I wouldn't jump to use that to interpret the Smitsonian image supporter's position.
I've asked about the image elsewhere and I haven't gotten any thorough explanations. The most common thing I hear is that the attributes are not said to be "exclusive" to white culture, so that the image isn't any actually asserting that there are meaningful cultural differences.
But then it seems like we should all agree that the list is poorly written through it's use of general attributes to illustrate a concept (i.e., if you describe a couch with attributes like "an object with a mass greater than 1 gram", you are poorly communicating the concept of "couch"). However the people who engage usually suggest that there is some point to using such an attribute to illustrate "whiteness", but I've yet to
So seriously. If there's a social juatice progressive in the house, please stand up.
Last edited:
They're white in that sense.
That's what happens when one tries to lazily sound scholarly by just avoiding being specific (i.e. ""no tolerance for deviation from Judeo-Christian religion"), which is what the author was thinking of.
By the way, directly linking culture to race seems backwards and anti-progressive to me. Culture is flexible, malleable, not something rigid and inexorable until the end of times.
Linking culture to race is one of the rules that the social justice folks like to play their game by eg It's a Culture, not a costume, or, white people wearing dreads.
I'll bet this infographic was initially written to define what it means to be American and then, before publication in 1990, changed to whiteness without much thought being put into what that change would signal.
Not sure about that. If that is the case, it would be very short sighted in terms of incentives and the weight they have in decision making regardless of culture, and it would be very condescending towards "non white culture" in contrast to "white culture".
Of course, if people ignore these other premises and don't even acknowledge that others argue from them and reject theirs (the whole "white culture" thing, I mean), they can arrive at that conclusion all they want.