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

[Ed Norton]

I can tell you I'd do the x-wind there too but this tablet sucks

 

[Ed Norton]

oh man--need the other device--more on bubbers too---and that experimental aircraft re crosswinds---Im gonna delete these posts later but typing is ridiculous now

 

[EveHarrington]

I realize if I were a decent human being and respectful and not a thug criminal then my trauma would h...

Huh?

Hoodies are a sign of thug-dom? Where are you from? Here in Hooterville hoodies are worn by all. They're pretty much as American as apple pie. (Ahem. Green Acres 'Hooterville', K?)

Said in jest. (Gotta say that lest my humor be skewered and leave me hung out to dry!) God help us all if we are profiled for wearing hoodies.

 

[EveHarrington]

Well, I read the thread. Every page. Eyes glazed over at points. It was interesting to see many sides.

The "I won't believe in white privilege without irrefutable scientific statistical proof" side.

The "non" side of playing the powerless child who wants a feuding mommy and daddy to get along.

The "throwing your hands up in the air" stance because we're all racist on some level.

The voices of reason who tried to break down the concept into basic terms.

Those who were unable to see beyond the initial defensive reaction.

And so on.

Yes, it IS hard to talk to white people about racism.


As an aside, I feel the black panthers are wholly misunderstood (in this thread; the few places mentioned). They are not the black counterpart of the KKK. I recently saw a NOVA (?) documentary on the black panthers. They were a reactionary movement to oppression. (A faaaaaar cry from the KKK!) I encourage people to learn more about the black panthers. I'm not endorsing every single action they've ever done (can't do that for any one or any group, to be fair) but I do understand why they formed and know they did MANY positive things in their communities.

 

[Ed Norton]

I suppose that the Whites don their sack cloth and ashes and self flagellate so that vicious racists can continue to destroy people and no changes will be made so that they will have and endless supply of real and imagined victims to whine about. Eureka!

I have more since there is some truth in all of the viewpoints but still mostly lies.
NonWhite vs NonWhite racism is harmless and never affects anyone in a lethal or devastating manner so that's nothing that should be discussed. Many groups of Nonwhites once they attain a certain socioeconomic status do little to help other Nonwhites, of the same class that's not germane either. I asked what is White privelege as I still do not understand but it seems to be more socioeconomic as once a certain level is attained then indeed there is an associated privelege. Lastly, if the topic were simply 'racism' then perhaps a solution could be found or at least the problems brought to light. I can give tons of real life examples of White racism just based on me and my dark-skinned brother's experiences-I can give an equal number of examples to the contrary. The way this thread presents the issue(s) is just way too simplistic. It will solve nothing nor elucidate anything.

 

[Anarchy]

They were a reactionary movement to oppression.

yes yes yes, In the initial iteration of the movement, they were pretty much a system for interposing between cops and the black people the cops were picking on.
In that respect they were very much a more northern and urban successor to the "Deacons for Defence" movement
and something of a pre cursor to the present day libertarian Cop Block movement.

One of the insights amongst libertarians and also amongst the libertarian leaning militia guys* from the 1990s and beyond, was that police abuses began on easily targetted marginalised groups (eg blacks and small religious communities) and expanded into targetting less marginalised groups, the motivating example of that for many of the militia guys was targetting of people who are interested in guns.

I haven't got Churchill's book beside me to quote the names of some of the black guys who were prominent in the militia movement of the 90s. Certainly amongst the constitutional militias there was a feeling of common cause with minorities, especially blacks (I'll cite Mike Vanderboegh, as an easily visible example of that view - not sure if he's still alive, he'd been ill with cancer for a long time).

Not all of the groups lumped together as "militias" in the mainstream accounts were constitutional or libertarian - and I'll cite the book "The Turner Diaries" as an example of the dark end of the racist and national socialist dark side. Timmy McVeigh? I have difficulty believing that he wasn't either a patsy or the subject of a sting operation that went to completion.

(A faaaaaar cry from the KKK!)

I'll strongly agree about the present day klan. still in broad agreement but less strongly for the late 19th century.

Historically, there are at least three different and possibly independent periods of klan activity
within any of those periods, all it took to appear to be a kluxer was having sufficient pals to avoid getting strung up, and enough white bed sheets to go around those pals. So we're inevitably looking at a diverse phenomena, rather than a single organisation or movement.

There are hints that there's a lot that isn't being told in the mainstream histories about that first period of the klan, following the conquest of the confederacy.
The recollections of surviving former slaves that were recorded in the Fe'ral writer's project in the 1930s # give some indications that the first klan's targets tended to be white yanky carpetbaggers, their cronies and criminals of any colour, rather than ordinary blacks.

In the middle of the Mississippi volume of recollections, a gentleman called "Prince" recalled that he often rode out with them [the klan], that it was the only way to keep order during re-construction. A black man riding with the klan is a detail that certainly doesn't gel with the mainstream perceptions.

Even with the third Klan which I don't think anyone can deny was and is overtly racist, despite eugenisist aspirations (eg Margaret Sanger addressing them - Sanger's counterpart in Britain, Marie Stopes used to send romantic poetry to Hitler! ~~), there appear to have been separatist strains within it, and there are photos of black separatists attending a meeting with klan guys all dressed up in klan regalia in the late 1960s or early 1970s.

In the separatist form, the policy was arguably more liberal than the position espoused by dishonest Abe Lincoln, who even as 'resident, argued for emigration of American blacks to Africa.

_________________________________
* one of the sources for the militia info: http://www.bookdepository.com/Shake...obert-H-Churchill/9780472034659?ref=grid-view
# you can find .pdf scans of the interviews with former slaves on the library of congress website
~~ I'm not arguing against choice or contraception - just pointing out the eugenisist side of the klan,\and the dodgy company kept by some proponents of eugenics.

 

[Anarchy]

NonWhite vs NonWhite racism is harmless and never affects anyone in a lethal or devastating manner so that's nothing that should be discussed. Many groups of Nonwhites once they attain a certain socioeconomic status do little to help other Nonwhites, of the same class that's not germane either. I asked what is White privelege as I still do not understand but it seems to be more socioeconomic as once a certain level is attained then indeed there is an associated privelege.

Yeah, the cultural marxist position seems to be that without socio economic "privilege" it can't be racism
which comes back to the impossibility of ever pinning a marxist down on what any word they use actually means. As soon as you think you've worked it out, they'll respond that, no, that's not what they mean...

you'll see an example of that from economic marxists, in the intro to the English translation of economist, Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk's "Karl Marx and the close of his system",
where the editor takes the side of (can't remember the guy's name) who argues that what Marx wrote wasn't actually what Marx meant, so Boehm-Barwerk didn't actually refute him.

Alexander Grey sums it up beautifully on pages 321 and 322 of his witty book "The Socialist Tradition, from Moses to Lenin*":

To witness Böhm-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 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." 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.…

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 Jeremiah or 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.

You get the same level of mind f*ckery from the cultural marxist feminists as well.

The strategy is outlined by the Frankfurt school sociologists and in Kozak's "and not a shot is fired".
It's to have everyone at each other's throats or so busy self flagellating that control can be seized and everyone will welcome the new certainty (or they can go into a mass grave if they complain).


____________________________________
* free downloads of Gray in .pdf and e-pub formats
https://mises.org/library/socialist-tradition-moses-lenin
Gray even cover's French utopian socialist Charles Fourier, who wrote that under socialism, the moon would die, the salt water of the sea would turn to lemonade, and new, more useful animals would emerge including the anti-lion and the anti-whale. Fourier was nuts.

 

[EveHarrington]

Ahh well I don't know much about the origins of the klan, but yes, I was referring more to modern day stances---well, more of the climate of the time when the black panthers were active.

 

[Anarchy]

more of the climate of the time when the black panthers were active.

oh hell yes!

the only American city to suffer aerial bombing during the cold war?
Philli
dropped on a house full of black people from a police helicopter. the resulting fire took out several blocks of South Philli.

 

[Bill Dickerson]

the only American city to suffer aerial bombing during the cold war?
Philli
dropped on a house full of black people from a police helicopter. the resulting fire took out several blocks of South Philli.

I hope your not implying the tragedy when the police were trying evict MOVE was intentional or racist.

 

[LuckyDuck]

Times like this I feel like educating people on global racism. Your neck of the woods is just your neck of the woods. That's it. It isn't hard just to talk about racism to white people, it's hard to talk about racism to anybody.

Knowing that broadens your understanding of the world.

LD

 

[Anarchy]

Hi Bill,
Dropping an incendiary bomb (gasoline plus explosives) from a helicopter was certainly intentional.

The subsequent wider fire that took out additional blocks of South Philly, was probably not part of the initial plan, but it was definitely a foreseeable consequence. Or would have been foreseeable to anyone with even a small amount of imagination.

Was it racist?
I think the pertinant question is, whether at that time the pigs in Philly would have done the same in a white neighbourhood?
and whether they would have got away with it quite so easily if it was a white neighbourhood they'd burned out.

Notice the qualifier "at that time"
clearly the fibbies have subsequently burned a bunch of white people in a church
and likewise were making preparations to burn a white family out of a cabin

one of the insights that became more widely appreciated during the 1990s, is that the abuses first begin against marginalised groups which engender little sympathy from the mainstream community, but over time and after getting away with abuses against marginalised groups, the cops/agencies gradually gain confidence and expand those abuses to more mainstream groups.

The constitutional militias of the 90's were in a large part a counter to that (as the Deacons for Defense had been in the post WWii south and the Panthers had been in the northern cities in the sixties and seventies), and arguably a very effective counter.

Here's Mike Vanderbeogh, writing from a militia point of view

I think the FBI realized our [the constitutional militia movement's] power before we really understood it's full implications. For one thing, we had them surrounded. At its zenith, the militia movement had perhaps as many as 300,000 active participants, but we were backed up, you see, by the undeniable fact of those millions of rifles. Of the 85 million gun owners at the time, how many would join the militias if another Waco happened? That was the question. Both sides eventually came to the realization that in any case, it was enough. As Clausewitz observed, "In military affairs, quantity has a quality all its own."

And the first thing we noticed was that the FBI became very much more solicitous of our sensibilities and sought at every turn to avoid a flashpoint. During each little potential Waco-- the Republic of Texas, the Montana Freemen, etc-- the FBI would seek out local militia leaders and ask their advice, seeking their opinions with what sounded like real concern.

The best answer that I recall to one of these FBI queries came from Bob Wright, commander of the 1st Brigade, New Mexico Militia. When asked if he and his friends would actually go to the scene of a future Waco in another state to assist the potential victims, Bob replied, "Why would I want to do that? There's plenty of you federal SOBs around here." This was a perspective the Fibbie had not considered before, and it showed on his face.

source http://waronguns.blogspot.co.uk/2007/05/guest-editorial-resistance-is-futile.html
Incidentally, it was Mike Vanderboegh and David Codrea who brought the BATFE's gun walking program on the Mexican border "Fast and Furious" to the attention of US Senators and the wider public.