> I'm getting really tired of these kinds of racial and ethnic generalizations. If you substitute "asian" or "jew" in and you find it's racist, it's still racist if it says "white."
No. If you attended a civil rights march in 1962 and remarked at how white the counter-protesters were (and how the hoses never seem to get aimed at them), you would be making an accurate observation about race and power dynamics, not smearing white people. Observing that some (many?) of those same dynamics persist in our present enlightened age is not racism.
Even if I accepted the modern re-branding of the word "racist" to mean the new "power + privilege", which I don't accept, but I understand many people use that definition, the author's statement is still loaded with racial prejudice. He literally said that bad behavior X is "no surprise" because the person behaving badly is white and a man.
You trying to justify this language as not only tolerable but acceptable is part of the problem society has wrt treating people as individuals. And the fact that you're using historical injustices against people to tell me why I need to accept negative language around two immutable physical characteristics that I possess is really over the line. We're supposed to be moving away from that kind of society.
> You trying to justify this language as not only tolerable but acceptable is part of the problem society has wrt treating people as individuals. And the fact that you're using historical injustices against people to tell me why I need to accept negative language around two immutable physical characteristics that I possess is really over the line. We're supposed to be moving away from that kind of society.
I'm confused here. You want society to treat you as an individual (a reasonable ask), but you also feel like some other white person's bad behavior somehow reflects upon you?
Let's be clear: the negative language in this article is about the negative actions, not racial characteristics, of the person in question. The racial characteristics are only a reminder that these things don't happen in a vacuum, a truism that most people don't have an issue with (including you, insofar as you recognize that historical injustices really do exist). Talking frankly about how bad behavior connects directly to privilege does not a racist attack make.
>I'm confused here. You want society to treat you as an individual (a reasonable ask), but you also feel like some other white person's bad behavior somehow reflects upon you?
I don't feel like some other white person's bad behavior somehow reflects upon me. I feel like it has become acceptable to judge me based on my non-individual characteristics, based on the language in the article, and your defense of that language. There is no contradiction here.
>Let's be clear: the negative language in this article is about the negative actions, not racial characteristics, of the person in question.
Yes, let's be clear: the negative language is "no surprise," which is being directly applied to those immutable physical characteristics of being white and a man (and one mutable characteristic of being an Ivy League alumnus). Please don't tell me what the author really meant, when their language is quite clear.
> you would be making an accurate observation about race and power dynamics
Accurate observations don't get a pass, unless you're generally smearing the white race. Today, you cannot have a conversation about racial differences in crime rates, IQ, etc. You also cannot make any negative generalized statements towards non-white or non-cisgender groups. However, you can hysterically smear white men as much as you want, without significant repercussions, if any at all [1][2][3][4]
I think the parent post acknowledges this. When I said "if X is racist with race Y, then it's also racist with race Z," they replied with "No." They sound like the explicitly support a double standard, depending on what identity is being smeared.
No. If you attended a civil rights march in 1962 and remarked at how white the counter-protesters were (and how the hoses never seem to get aimed at them), you would be making an accurate observation about race and power dynamics, not smearing white people. Observing that some (many?) of those same dynamics persist in our present enlightened age is not racism.