What makes white people inherently privileged?
They aren't.
It's an inherently naive concept that combines racism, an ignorance of basic history, and a pseudo-intellectual re-imagining of "Sins of the Father" by people who never realized that "The White Man's Burden" was a scathing satire.
"White People" is not a group, and "White" is a color, not a culture. The term has a distressingly popular tendency to have people then assert that if you are white, you therefore have no culture, which is of course a ridiculous sentiment. One's culture in the US is American culture. It is nationally based and regionally based; i.e., culture is geographically defined, though there is of course the familial element as well.
Example: I'm originally from New York. I'm a New Yorker. My culture is different from, say, Chainz's, in many ways, or someone from California, or Arizona, while still similar due to being from the same nation (This being the shared concept of Life, Liberty, Freedom, as our environment is all inherently a partial product of our Bill of Rights.). I can be proud of my country, I can be proud of my state. I can even be proud of my state sports team, but, well…, again, I’m from New York, and specifically the Mets rooting part. There is a marked difference between being proud of something and claiming responsibility of the achievement; surely parents are allowed to be proud of their children, as an example? Surely I can be proud of a friend when they regale me with something that they found some sort of achievement or even simply happiness in?
The second problem with this is that it literally demands that there’s “White” and there’s “Black”. Apparently we’re unified blocks (say's who?), and other groups like, say, the entire Asian world, doesn’t exist. It comes across more as typical American self-importance in the rest of the world than anything else.
The war on drugs was basically a ploy to appeal to white people with "LAW AND ORDER", consequences be damned.
That’s…not even remotely true. The biggest advocates were Black communities being destroyed by drugs and addiction. They spearheaded the entire War on Drugs,
demanding that drug abuse and addiction be declared a major national crisis that required all existing resources to bring to end.
For years letting up on the War on Drugs at all, let alone recommending legalizing weed, was taken as a direct attempt to destroy their communities by black community leaders and politicians.
Nazis still exist. We live in the year 2017 and literal Nazis are allowed to parade in the streets.
We also live in a year were this has been the (comedic) response to such things for over thirty years, to massive applause.
God, do I love that movie.
I heard Breitbart was a credible news source.
It’s a fringe rag. You might as well be using Buzzfeed and Gawker-wait, no that last one was brought to court for being that bad and isn’t around anymore.
That’s the tier Breitbart is in.
If I may quote Morgan Freeman, "If we really treated each other as equals, there would be no black history month".
There's a second part to that quote. "Black history
is American history." Which is, of course, true. You can't segregate history, nor intertwined cultures.
That has, tangentially, been the basis of quite a few wars and rebellions of regions throughout history; regions with ancestral, cultural, and linguistic similarities more aligned to a neighboring country than the one they're actually in.
Let's look at Connecticut, 81.6% white.
Here's what their government took the time to compile.
There…is something seriously off with those numbers.
I only looked for a few moments so maybe I missed something, but according to your source, more black people live in the cities Hartford, Bridgeport, and New Haven CT…than in the entire state of CT. And when I do some mental math to add up the numbers for arrestees in 2014, I get around a ~2:1 ratio, not 11. And the idea idea that ****ing Connecticut somehow has a significantly worse ratio than…the entire south, doesn’t lead me to trust this.
Likewise, a list of poorly represented graphs and tables with basically no supplementary information all from the same source cause “We didn’t want to do research so here’s just a bunch of things this one non-profit group from DC did. What’s fact checking?” doesn’t help it.
Consider, for instance, the size of CT. It’s 5,542 square miles, home of 3.5 million people. This space is then divided among 8 counties, 92 separate police departments, and who knows how many courts. Applying these numbers to the entire state does not really convey useful information.
Illinois, as an example, was the 4th deadliest state in the country in 2014, with 685 murders. To put the state in context, the murder # in the single Illinois city of Chicago in 2016 was
762. And that can be scaled down even further to how most of those murders happen within the same pockets of a few blocks, like with this handy graphic from the
Chicago Tribune.
Therefore, I think we can all agree, that if you wish to look at crime, you must have significant information of cities vs the rest of the state. This is also significant because most black populations in the US are in those same cities, dealing solely with those police districts, and those courts.
To this end, *this* is what a Crime Report should look like. Specifically, this was done for the state of New York in 2015, and details (with absolute numbers, not percentages!) crime, both violent and petty, across all 62 counties and compares them solely to NYC.
For comparison, NY is an order of magnitude larger than CT (54,555 mi^2), is comprised of 62 counties, 514 law enforcement departments, and has population around ~19.5 - 20 million.
2/3rds of all Violent Crime in New York state occurs in NYC (in 2015, this was 50,088 vs 24,723), with the amount of petty crime between the city and the rest of the state being very close (208,783 vs 179,948).
So what if we want to know more about what’s going on in NYC, in order to judge the same sort of claim you made with that Connecticut paper?
We go deeper, obviously.
These are the type of sources to be looking at, the type that break the numbers down into their basic components (or at least as far as we can get) so actual patterns and foolproof evidence can be presented.
Or, to put it another way, reasoning is far more important than an agreeable conclusion.
There was plenty of "good" and "moral" people who sat quietly and did nothing to try to stop the genocidal slaughter of the native americans, slavery,
That is not really true, Chainz.
The trail of tears was massively unpopular, called out on by a great many in a position to do so, and was notably unconstitutional (In that SCOTUS literally declared it so,
before it happened.), with the US descending into Civil War a mere 15 years later. A War that, you’ll recall, more Americans died in than in WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam combined.
If you got in a time machine and wet to a white neighborhood 1950's, you'd find plenty of people who thought there was no "race problem" in America, and that Martin Luther King Jr. and his followers are just race agitators
Again, not entirely true.
This is what MLKJr had to say on the subject:
"First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season."
Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."
Specifically, from Birmingham Jail.
I don’t know what the article guideline is for quoting on this site (on another forum I go to, it’s pretty strigent), but
here’s a link from where I grabbed the above.
It was not possible to say "Racism doesn't exist" back then; it was literally written into the legal code in the South via Jim Crow laws. His complaints were specifically against the people who'd basically say "Don't rock the boat too much".
the same way people call Black Lives Matter protesters race agitators today.
I never said the form of oppression hasn't changed. I said the way people act in the face wrong doings don't change. Slavery being gone and having a blakc president doesn't mean race relations are honkey dorey. Every single time we tear down an institution that oppresses black people, something else takes it place. That's something we have not seen change.
I’m not really responding to these points directly per-say, but the general gist.
Part of the response is because the "clearly there" has been dealt with. Decades ago, one could not vote based off gender. One was legally treated differently under the law based off race. Until recently, homosexual couples could not marry and therefore be treated to the legal ramifications of that status.
In each of these cases, government response was changed in the direction of equality, and specifically with the goal of equality in the eyes of the government and the law; i.e., the blanket distribution of
civil rights as citizens and the constitutionally backed protection that such rights may not be infringed upon.
The problem with many modern day US movements is that many of the things argued for, or implemented, or demanded, does not assert nor attempt to legitimize itself via this concept of equality. Demanding racial based laws, racial employment quotas, segregated housing, etc, is precisely what the Civil Rights movement aimed to get rid of, and seeing groups claiming to champion minorities demanding the return of such things is something that is always going to end up opposed. It’s why many people believe wholeheartedly in Need Based aid, not racially based aid.
It’s not a matter of not wishing or agreeing for equality. It’s a matter of viewing an organization as deliberately disingenuous, and in the case of BLM far more concerned with being anti-cop than anything else, like
denouncing Police BBQs with black youth, and
demanding that a Toronto (as in, in Canada) Pride Parade not allow a Gay Police float "in the name of diversity". And those are just the ones I know on the top of my head about a group I don't go out of my way to pay attention to.
Another problem is that the tone-deafness with a lot particular rhetoric that really isn’t lost on other minorities, which results in Asian Americans, the Hispanic/Latino population, Jews, basically being shrodinger minorities for whenever the mood fits or by whoever wants to make their numbers look better (always fun when the only way the graphs make any sense is if a demographic is being treated as White in one graph and a minority in another graph in the same paper). You mention for instance how another institution always takes it's place; it's important, therefore, that one's activist group isn't in turn acting like such an institution to
another demographic. When the University of California switched to colorblind enrollment, Asian American representation shot up to 40% of their freshmen class; since then it’s been demonstrably shown (and brought to court) that AA disproportionately hurts Asian Americans more than anyone else, as an example. It's not the only way it hurts them, but it's the one that I can remember on the top of my head from reading up on it a few years ago.
For others, when
precisely in the past 100 years did the Irish, the Italians, the Germans, the Russians, the Jews, Hispanics, Asians, etc, become "White"? Just look a bit into the past; over 100,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to internment camps by FDR in response to Pearl Harbor. Basic technological advancement is the
sole reason this action did not make the trail of tears look like a mere drop in a lake. Who were some of the biggest advocates pushing for it? Chinese Americans, who then proceeded to buy up a great deal of their (now empty) property all along the West Coast. Reason so many Jewish refugees fleeing Europe were refused? In many places, resentment towards the non-assimilating German American community and their predatory business practices. And god help you be from any of the countries the Soviet Union ate up during the 50s. For decades the majority of Jewish professors in the US taught predominantly at black universities, jews were at many of those Civil Rights events because they lived in the exact same poor, urban communities. And then in recollections, movies, etc, or the era, we’re all “mysteriously” absent. Though to be fair, being thrown under the bus (or into an oven, or into the sea, or to Siberia...) because we're bad for the narrative is something we're rather used to by this point.
But the point I'm making is that time and again, all of this history, our history, equally legitimate American history, the nuances that made it happen and will continue to happen, the things done for and to others and done for and to us, none of that apparently matters because it just doesn't fit that white vs black narrative.
There were plenty of "good" and "moral" North Americans who slaughtered each other for thousands of years before explorers even came to North America. Natives were naturally violent in North America. Native Americans happened to have invented scalping. I'm not saying the slaughter of the natives wasn't bad, but it's not like they'd been slaughtering each other for ten thousand years before explorers came or anything... the point is, the natives were inherently violent before the explorers came.
Ganghis Khan and the Mongols would routinely decimate villages of civilians.
Viking Raiders turned ****, murder, and pillaging into a society-sustainable business.
The inspiration for Dracula, Vlad the Impaler, got his name given he would go through villages that displeased him and impale every last man, woman, and child to wooden pikes.
Over 1,400 people were executed via Guillotine during the 7 year long Reign of Terror in France following the revolution.
When Shaka Zulu’s mother died in 1827, over 7000 people were executed for being “insufficiently grief-stricken”. Cows were also slaughtered so young calves would “know what if feels like to lose a mother.”
And that's without mentioning anything for pre-1000 AD or any war related events or anything too recent (technology would have to be taken into account then, and then it would be about communism and ovens).
Humans are really, really good at slaughtering (typically enemies), regardless of time or place, and therefore your conclusion is ridiculous. If anything it just makes them come off as amateurs; sticks and stones vs centuries of science and and warfare advancements isn’t something even a fool would bet on.
90% of the native americans of the time were too dead to enjoy the "benefits" of being conquered.
This, however, is completely true. Before any war, any conquest, and America, there were merchant / explorer ships meeting the locals. They traded goods, stories, and most of all, germs. Small Pox, Chicken Pox, Black Plague, you name it.
That killed an estimated 90% of the native North American population; it was disease that decimated them before any real interaction with other Westerners. In comparison, the Black Plague, which is typically considered one of the most deadly events in Europe before WWI, is estimated to have killed 30%-50% of all of Europe.
This isn't even about college campuses and their admission board. This is where I'm talking about gaps in wealth between black and white people. I'm talking about how black kids statistically have higher odds of belonging to single parent households, poor households, to be in poorer neighborhoods, to be enrolled in worse schools, and have teachers with lower expectations of them than white peers.
And many of these things you state here is why I always end up going back to cities. A lot of the problems facing black communities are better thought as problems facing urban communities, of which the African American demographic is a disproportionate demographic of. The black migration to cities inherently tied their futures to the continued health of said cities, which didn’t last.
In fact, I went over a lot of what I'd say here in a previous post I quoted you in a few months ago, so I might as well just link back to those two posts.
I just proved they invented scalping.
You didn't do that at all. You
claimed they invented scalping,
in which case the Scythians would like to have a word with you.
And even then,
which native americans? There are currently 562 recognized native American tribes in North America, in 2017. Three hundred years ago, even further back before they got decimated by disease? There must have been tens of thousands independent tribes. Which ones invented scalping, which you're using as the end-all-be-all of a society's savagery?
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