News Why It's So Hard To Talk To White People About Racism

[Nighthawk]

@Pencil Being South African I have kept my distance from this thread

 

[Bill Dickerson]

I'm having trouble understanding the complaints and actions of the ball players with the Missouri boycott. The paper said some racial epitaphs had been thrown earlier and somebody smeared a swastika on a wall in poop. Has there been other incidents? What did or didn't the university president do to cause this upset?

I heard one of the protesters talking to the media and they related something about it being a slave state previously. I think that kind of stuff just shuts down a large percentage of the population. I approve of the non violent approach. I'm missing the connection.

 

[Anarchy]

I'm not sure if this one is going to be too obtuse. I'll attempt to explore some of the history of thought behind the idea of dealing with people as aggregated classes, rather than as unique individuals.

The British classical economists, people like Adam Smith, David Ricardo etc, tried to think and work in aggregated "wholes"

so for example, they didn't think in terms of a glass of water, or an ounce of gold, they would refer to "water" and "Gold" in the aggregate, meaning all of the water and all of the gold in the world. Prices were not the price of milk today in the corner shop on such and such a corner, it was "The Price Level", People weren't thought of as individuals, they were thought of in terms of "nations" or "labour" or "landlords". Their methodology completely abstracted from the individual.

There are a couple of routes from those guys and their methodology, straight into the present day.

the less contentious, is via Marshall, prof of economics at Cambridge at the beginning of the 20th century, and his best known but perhaps most misleading student, John Maynard Keynes (his dad was also called John, hence use of middle name).

The more contentious, even than Keynes! is Karl Marx, whose three volumes of "Kapital", were pretty much devoted to expounding an economic theory (labour theory of value) and its implications (including exploitation). The basis which he built on, was arguably a fairly faithful, if muddled, regurgitation of David Ricardo.

Marx' other great forebear, was arguably Hegel. Hegel's "internal relation" concept, held that all things in the universe are related as a whole, and a change in one area or aspect of the universe, changed all other areas of the universe too. One implication of this is that it appears that Hegel denied the possibility of seperate sciences.

Hegel was also very influential on the thinking of the German Historical School economists, and Historicism was in turn the basis of the "Institutionalists" who dominated early 20th century American economic thought.

Both Marx and i think Hegel too, also drew on a much older idea dating at least from Joachim of Fiora (communism has a much longer history than Marx and his "Scientific socialism") This held that an aggregated borg like collective "humans" had been "alienated" from their connection with the universe by the creation.

I suspect that these "collective" influences are part of the explanation of the presentation of people as aggregated groups, such as "blacks are" or "whites are".

There is a lovely refutation of this line of thinking in Bohm-Barwerke's "Karl Marx and the close of his system" (a better translation of the title would be "Karl Marx and the completion of his system" as Bohm-Barwerke published in 1898, after the posthumous publication of the third and final volume of Kapital).

Bohm-Barwereke was criticizing Marx assertion that differences in rates of profit cancel each other out either side of the mean, hence the mean price can be used. The same refutation / reductio ad absurdum applies to all of the aggregations.

We might just as well try in this way to prove the proposition that animals of all kinds, elephants and May flies included, have the same length of life; for while it is true that elephants live on an average one hundred years [not sure about that! @] and May flies only a single day, yet between these two quantities we can strike an average of fifty years. By as much time as the elephants live longer than the flies,
the flies live shorter than the elephants. The deviations from this average "mutually cancel each other," and consequently on the whole and on the average the law that all kinds of animals have the same length of life is established!
Bohm-Barwerke page38

However, Marx is not so easily refuted; Alexander Grey explains why

To witness Bohm-Bawerk or Mr. [H.W.B.] Joseph carving up Marx is but a
pedestrian pleasure; for these are but pedestrian writers, who are so pedestrian as
to clutch at the plain meaning of words, not realising that what Marx really meant
[Cole] has no necessary connection with what Marx undeniably said. To witness
Marx surrounded by his friends is, however, a joy of an entirely different order.
For 'it is fairly clear that none of them really knows what Marx really meant; they
are even in considerable doubt as to what he was talking about; there are hints that
Marx himself did not know what he was doing. In particular, there is no one to tell
us what Marx thought he meant by 'value'. And indeed, what all these conjectures
reveal is somewhat astounding, and, one would like to think unique. Capital is, in
one sense, a three-volume treatise, expounding a theory of value and its manifold
applications. Yet Marx never condescends to say what he means by 'value', which
accordingly is what anyone cares to make it as he follows the unfolding scroll
from 1867 to 1894. Nor does anyone know to what world all this applies. Is it to
the world in which Marx wrote? Or to an abstract, 'pure' capitalist world existing
ideally in the imagination, and nowhere else? [Croce] Or (odd as the suggestion
may appear) was Marx (probably unconsciously) thinking in terms of medieval
conditions? [Wilbrandt] No one knows. Are we concerned with Wissenschaft,
slogans, myths, or incantations? Marx, it has been said, was a prophet - and
perhaps this suggestion provides the best approach. One does not apply to Jer-
emiah and Ezekiel the tests to which less inspired men are subjected. Perhaps the
mistake the world and most of the critics have made is just that they have not
sufficiently regarded Marx as a prophet - a man above logic, uttering cryptic and
incomprehensible words, which every man may interpret as he chooses.

Alexander Grey; "the socialist tradition from Moses to Lenin"

For methodological individualism, we need to go to Aristotle and via the Scholastics, directly to Locke and Jefferson (Jefferson had read Juan de Mariana's "history of Spain" and possibly other works too).
A seperate route was via Franz Brentano (arguably a modern Scholastic, he was also Freud's philosophy teacher and a pioneer in his own right in psychology) and into the Austrian School of economics, Of which Eugen von Bohm-Barwerke was one of the early thinkers.

To sum this comment up in one line;

I suspect that the people who are thinking individuals and people who are thinking aggregated wholes are talking past each other, in different paradigms.

 

[Rumors]

@Pencil
Just glad you are here.... I have missed you contributions to the forum. You always kept me thinking and on my toes. I hope you are safe and doing well.

 

[deleted]

I am white and I see the effects of my privilege all the time-and it sickens me.
Race should be a beautiful thing. But monsters have turned it into a bad connotation. It should be celebrated! Plus, there is no way to look at someone and tell what race they are. Each person is a beautiful blend of colors and in the end we are all made if the same goo. We all have the same organs, are born the same way and die the same way. your body doesnt have a soul, your soul has a body. I care far more about someone's soul than their body (aka skin color)

Separate laundry by color. Not people

 

[Bill Dickerson]

Can you describe how or what you see that convinces you of this white privilege?

 

[Ed Norton]

So that I won't personally be accused of playing my 'race card' let's just consider two simple pie charts

https://www.google.com/imgres?imgur...=421&h=351&hl=en-US&ei=CtHuVoXTGsTl-AH_l5eoDQ


https://www.google.com/imgres?imgur...M&hl=en-US&ei=NNHuVoCKO8b9-AGbwK2gDQ&tbm=isch

Don't hate on me; hate the math
:whistling:

 

[Ed Norton]

Also, this is an unscientific hunch based on 'knowing' NYC but I'd be willing to bet that most of the Whites who were stopped were economically disadvantaged and appeared so and probably something like 75% male...I bet the overall majority regardless of race were male, just a guess

BTW: That's why a lot of 'us' despise cops--- if the shoe fits put your flat feet in and wear it! Ok?

 

[Stickler]

Intersectionality.

Society discriminates on color AND on class...of course that means that very economically well-off non-whites have to deal with racist cops? But I would guess not nearly as much as poor black people.
I imagine I have had to get to deal with getting pulled over in my cars more than more well-off white people. Why? Raggedy old cars are going to be less likely to be street legal, so the cops are going to pull me over to get their monthly quota out of the way.
Cities are finding black and poor people make good cash piñatas:
http://qz.com/257042/these-seven-ch...wring-revenue-from-black-people-and-the-poor/

 

[Ed Norton]

It looks like this thread may end with some sense, afterall @Stickler
Spot on..My Brother 'The Judge' has been harrassed and he's dark skinned 'Black' in the appearance sense. He is very professional looking- FFS he's a 'Federal Judge':p ;)

I wrote this thread off as a total loss, long ago

 

[ms spock]

@Ed Norton I was pretty upset with the way this thread went as well. Especially when people turned up and said well if X is so then you should be able to provide Y proof - and that had been provided right at the beginning.

The thread became a living example of why it is so hard to talk about race to white people.

 

[Ed Norton]

At least you proved your point (obliquely) @Ms Spock. Honestly, I wasn't sure how to address this myself so I left. Looks to be on a higher note now.

One great example that I could think of is the history of the South Bronx which was burned, in somewhat recent history, It is an involved explanation as to what really went down. I don't know if I have the energy to frame it and the official story while partly true and still an example of systematic racism is not complete. I touched upon it, briefly, in the Trump (Dump) thread. >90% of the Black and Puerto Rican South Bronx was destroyed by racism, really, on all levels. I wasn't born during the active conflagrations but I saw the aftermath during the early 80s and 90s.I hated visiting my family members in the South Bronx as a child, as even at 5-6 I saw what happened was done with human thought and by human hands and the pure evil was terrifying. I am half Afro-American and Half Puerto Rican so there was no way I could run from the fear as, I saw that, for some ungodly reason, that I was expendable along with my entire family for no good reason except for what I was. I have researched 'The. Bronx Burning' quite extensively and if you dig it's quite ugly.

I think that a few images really speak more than words but this is why it is hard:

https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://traditionstraining.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/01aaa-bronx.jpg&imgrefurl=http://traditionstraining.com/category/fires/&docid=mpL2a_5xaEf7zM&tbnid=wHJyywsxCQOxiM:&w=500&h=324&hl=en-US&ei=acnvVtDMM4ms-AGiiZGYCQ

https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us/wp-content/uploads/imagessouth-bronx-1975-small.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x9172531&docid=wR6AFLlUUk2rEM&tbnid=UkQc-IfiDTvFZM:&w=639&h=425&hl=en-US&ei=lsnvVsHKLcrW-QHn2aSgCA


https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/83/47/81/834781e92b2f9a85855ba59a6c254782.jpg&imgrefurl=https://www.pinterest.com/pin/574771971170539413/&docid=5R-nQCp7yU-gaM&tbnid=F8XBETtAH6DzNM:&w=736&h=483&hl=en-US&ei=68nvVpWzJ4a4-AHG4aCoCA

Those photos barely do justice to the scale of destruction that I saw in panoramic perspective with my own eyes. It was engineered. It was a holocaust, in lower case, letters so as not to imply the historical Holocaust of the Nazi era but just what the actual word 'holocaust' means 'A whole burning'.