Great post.
That is another level of nuance to the joke that’s gotten lost in the wash - in both cases Khan and Rogan are intellectually curious at least. Rogan just can’t tell an actual scientist from a charlatan, and doesn’t appreciate the difference. Maybe the Khans were better at identifying the frauds.
This below is mainly the post of yours I was responding to:
That’s what I meant by “asking to be a little racist as a treat”. I phrased it that way as a joke but I mean condone/etc.
I’m saying that people fundamentally disagree with your premise, that it is any of that. They could be totally incorrect! But that’s the crux of the debate. I personally said this, emphasis added:
But the point isn’t whether or not we “condone things like this that dabble around the edges of racism” it’s whether or not things that appear that way actually are. They’re all watered down versions of the “niggardly” debacle from awhile back and it’s not an accident that Smrk4 used the term “childproof”.
To be clear, I don’t think they are, and I feel like I’m trolling because I’m more interested how this isn’t readily apparent as the crux of the debate, much less that the specific outcome of that specific person’s lame joke. Just because somebody fundamentally disagrees with you doesn’t mean they’re automatically correct and you’re not!
Oh lol, that’s not what I meant by HAM but I think it answers the questions you didn’t directly answer.
I meant, like, petitioning the forum and having a vote to ban the phrases, threatening to stop posting if they weren’t, etc, etc. That’d be fucking crazy, right?
Oh no, I physically bristle any time I see those phrases here or anywhere. But you think this part is also part of the thought experiment, that I’m not actually viscerally offended, because… that’d be fucking crazy, right?
Lol in lieu of editing this post I’ll just say that it’s not meant to be antagonistic and combative, it’s meant to be funny; usually it’s bullshit when people say the correct tone can’t be conveyed via text, and it is, but it sometimes requires an edit or two.
But I’m serious, this is one source of my empathy whenever I see something seemingly as ridiculous as saying all the words in the raps. “Healthy/unhealthy food” gets a lot of leeway but I absolutely feel like literally screaming when I see “junk food”.
JT and 6ix.
I also don’t look down on people who speak broken English. In fact I instantly know they are smarter than me because they likely speak one or more other languages I don’t understand at all.
But this comes from real life experience not cartoons so maybe I am wrong.
Honestly I seek out the person who speaks broken English because that is the person I learn the most from. My history of friends from an extremely young age would bear this out. If there is a room of ten people and one speaks broken English I know who I am going to try and befriend.
Lol yeah this too. I mean, some, most, people are trying to be racist as shit but the whole intent debate goes both ways. I’m in here thinking, “Wow, those Khans already learned English that quickly, even if it is kinda bad and broken? That’s pretty impressive.”
Great post! 100% agree with all of this.
Is it? I mean, like you said, I think I’m also having trouble keeping the subplotlines of these convos together lol.
But, by that one I mean that if somebody says, “Uh… Yeah, there’s only one “g” there, um, that’s not how you pronounce “Nigeria” holy shit guy,” but you kept on doing it, you’d either be a terribly slow learner or trying to be offensive, whereas most of this seems to be about unintentional offense and the debates around that. It’s almost the opposite, because while there are a couple different ways to pronounce “Nigeria” depending on one’s phonetic school of thought, none of them are that way. There’s nothing abstract about it.
I want to believe people stopped using “ghetto” as a pejorative in that sense for the big reason, not because it nebulously made its way on to the no-no-word list, but if that were the case I probably wouldn’t be a misanthrope so hey.
Can you share any specific examples?
When I was teaching about race, my students were mostly white and very left leaning, as is common in anthropology. It was still amazing how often some would argue with one of the few POC about what wasn’t really racist. These were people with literally years of expert training on cultural sensitivities and they still had so much trouble seeing or acknowledging racism, especially if they were somehow partly involved.
We all need to get to a place where we can differentiate overt from implicit bias and recognize that we surely are responsible for the latter far more than we would like to admit.
?
WWII?
That people actually think that stigmatizing neighborhoods is bad rather than changing out of obedience and/or fear?
other?
The first two. Maybe I should’ve said “the big reasons” plural lol but they’re kinda tied together. Like, “lol poor people” much less “lol victims of attempted genocide” shouldn’t be a thing you need to be taught to not think.
It’s correct to say every single person who posts here is racist, because everyone is racist. The only question is how and to what degree.
We have mountains of psychological and social science demonstrating this fact.
Yeah tbf, speaking as a white(1) person who has, I’ve realized more and more the older I’ve got, some very unique views on things owing to some very unique life experiences and general lived experience, and is losing the desire to post here from realizing that most of you are full of shit about actually hearing about lived experience… I gotta say she might be on to something!
I mean, what if we played the “tell us about the first time you were framed and jailed for a felony and had a black activist tell you, no, you must’ve did something wrong because you’re white” game, how would that go? Would I be the only participant not just on this forum but safe-money the only you encountered in your entire life?
Or, not even that extreme, what about just being the poorest person in a poor black ghetto neighborhood and, I mean, shit you’d think was dramatized for artistic effect, it just has to be, like, putting cardboard in my shoes until one of the GDs (gangster disciples) in the neighborhood bought me some new ones, or getting jumped and your nose broken and coat stolen and having a different friend give you the coat off his back, no, like, literally, walking with his cousin up to him on the corner and having him literally wearing two coats, one of them unzipped, because he thought it’d be colder, lol, this isn’t ancient history but there were no smartphones with snazzy weather forecast apps, and he gives you the fresh Starter™ jacket off his back, because while half the neighborhood wanted to fuck me up but the other half wanted to keep their special white boy safe (or maybe just thought there was an outside chance I’d be in the NBA and wanted to be in my future entourage I always secret suspected; too bad I was six feet tall in eighth grade and reached an adult height of… six feet tall) and would have me get one of them to accompany me if I needed to walk somewhere after hours and were super strict about letting me get caught up in any gang and drug shit, but, oops, some of them went to jail or died and I did get caught up in that just a little, until yet another friend said we were going to have to get me a gun if I kept doing that and I thought, fuck, I need to move somewhere else and get some white friends and luckily my dad kicked me out when I turned 18 so the stars were aligned… Do you think that affords me some special insights into the fluidity of privilege and race relations and what not, that you wouldn’t find from the average white or black person? Not as a woe-is-me or anti-woe-is-me, but just vaguely unique?
Or do you all really not want to hear about shit like that, because you want a sanitized, romanticized version of everything?
When Chads noped me I thought about the dunk, saying something like if I was one of his POC superstars he wouldn’t be as ridiculously dismissive, but I thought that’d be shitty and unfair, and then Gregorio just came out and, like, said it, man.
This is a weird post man. The people ggoreo mentioned are globally recognized experts on race and racism. They should be listened to partly because they are POC but more so because they are experts.
Also, when it comes to racism, barring extenuating circumstances, a POC’s voice should always trump a white person. That’s anti-racism.
Don’t anybody get worked up, I’m not mad or anything. It’s just that it dawned on me, an epiphany of sorts, that we’re not behaving this way because we’re online (like, yeah, we use avatars but we’re not avatars for groups of thoughts and ideas, we’re actual people), it’s just that the social atomization is masked because we’re online. But not fully, because this particular forum is small and intimate. It’s not twitter with a character limit, we’re way closer to In Real Life friends than we are to twitter strangers, but it’s this uncanny valley aspect that made me notice it.
I was thinking last night before I went to sleep: did youtube comments get better, or did everything else get noticeably worse?
I don’t know that name sorry.
Meh. She doesn’t seem to recognize that “actually some black people are racist too” is, while true, also a standard misdirection used by white racists to deflect criticism of their white racism.
Her video also ignores the very important fact that even if white people and black people were equally racist, society is structurally racist in favor of whites. Whites have more power so their racism actually does matter more. That’s important if you want to actually create a better world and not just win Internet Points.
And I’m a dumb pos with nothing to offer, gotcha.
Wait.
Coates the one-hit reparations wonder? Is that a joke?
Ok, Davis is untouchable in my eyes but that would also just be my bias, whereas with the other two we could pull up loads of criticism from other Black Leftist Scholar Experts. If your entire view is “LiStEn To BlAcK PpL” what happens when two of them disagree? And like you say below, this isn’t extenuating circumstances, a critic of Coates is goddamn Cornel West. So where are we then, back to square one, just agreeing with the one we’re inclined to believe.
I agree with Davis because everything she says is the fucking truth, not because she has a wicked afro, like wat.
What about objective reality? The scientist, you, is putting that one in the corner? Strange days.