Like a corporation telling you these things, you are correct, you should be mad that the corporation is telling you that you personally are responsible for racism and global climate annihilation
Ascribing these things to intellectual arguments or to a person talking on twitter about digital blackface, that’s you being reactionary. That’s you doing what you all hate that MAGA does
And the “it’s hardly ever a Black person telling me this anyway, it’s a fellow honky!” is really missing the forest for the trees. Black people are saying it, but you’re surrounded by white people, so who are you going to hear it from?
Your Black friend down the pub probably isn’t interested in starting a whole thing and listening to you whine during the football. But today we literally get to select who we read and listen to online.
Fair points, and really it is obvious that we should all try to improve individually. But it still feels kind of defeatist and a bit disingenuous that individualised personal growth is the only vector of equality that seems to get any traction in “the discourse”.
I dislike people seeking to dominate others. If I show you Victorian demands for “manners” and “courtesy” and scornfulness of the lower classes for their lack of these things, you have no difficulty seeing this as a class hierarchy perpetuating itself. But give it the thinnest coat of social-justice paint imaginable and you’re like “you know, maybe you are being ill-mannered and discourteous? Worth considering. Reactionary not to think about it, really”. This is about creating a hierarchy of people who are “educated” in the sense that they are caught up on the latest in sociocultural analysis, versus the insufficiently intellectual who should be disdained.
Of course this is in tension with the idea that there frequently is actually bigoted behaviour which is widely considered OK by societies until they progress to the point of seeing it as unenlightened. But I acknowledge this is a thing, whereas it’s not clear that Rugby or AQ acknowledge that what I am talking about is a thing.
The difference here is the call to action, which is “let’s not do blackface anymore, at all, ever, it’s bad”. That’s an actual global change in behaviour being proposed.
Yes. I understand the article has a bunch of caveats in it. There’s a disconnect here that I don’t know how to address. The point is what @geewhysee posted, which is that this sort of individualist navel-gazing constantly leads left-wing politics down dead ends. You don’t seem to see political energy as a finite resource, and you don’t seem to see that a movement constantly critical of its own members is alienating. There is no collective solution being demanded here, therefore it isn’t a left-wing political project, it’s just a debate about personal morality. That would be fine if stuff like this didn’t constantly consume valuable left-wing political energy.
It’s likely that more tangible good has been done for the Black community by Gretchen Fucking Whitmer and the Michigan Fucking Legislature than by a shit ton of marginal additions to wokeness.
Can’t chew gum and walk at the same time, but can continue to ignore context and use woke as a slur, insisting a group of people are doing something to you
Consider yourselves lucky that you will never know what it feels like to watch a self-proclaimed ally who has way more power than you say “sweetie it’s not a good look to attack your allies,
you’re doing more harm than good for yourself” in response to you merely describing and criticizing a concept adjacent to something they sometimes do
I didn’t find much in that CNN column that was even controversial. “Digital blackface” is obviously going to get people going but the content seemed pretty accurate to me.
Right. Like imagine you’re someone who has noticed that this is a potential issue. Are you supposed to conclude, “well, people still don’t have healthcare, so I guess I shouldn’t say anything about this”?
I don’t think even the author would say that this is the most important issue around or that they expect everyone to drop what they’re doing and delete all black person gifs from their phone. It’s just something good to be aware of and hopefully it impacts some behavior.
The court turned away an appeal by Steven Donziger, who has argued that his prosecution violated his rights under the U.S. Constitution because private lawyers appointed by a federal judge handled the case against him after the U.S. Justice Department declined to do so.
This is the entire debate to me. Maybe there’s something to the ideas in the article, maybe it’s interesting to discuss. But what “digital blackface” means, very clearly, is “people are doing bad things online, analogous to wearing blackface, for which they bear personal moral responsibility”. If you don’t mean that, don’t say it.
Gorsuch is an interesting guy. Crops up with some dissents in places you wouldn’t expect to see him. Regardless of ideological convictions, actually does seem to be a genuine believer in the idea of the rule of law.
There certainly feels like a difference in degree between this and IRL blackface, but “digital blackface” feels like a pretty apt description of what the author is trying to convey.