White Liberals Present Themselves as Less Competent in Interactions with African-Americans

[Jimmy Higgins]

When talking to clients, I always try to simplify things, though not to the point of idiocy.

I'm guessing your work involves issuing food stamps?

Engineering but whatever floats your boat

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Nice job of missing the point. I'm saying that's the leftist position, not mine.

Rational people reading understood what you meant. Dog had to go out of his way to feign misunderstanding in order to attack you. Higgins is still doing it. Can't just ask you to clarify. Have to presume you meant something you didn't write, even in the face of you saying otherwise.

LP had an opportunity to clarify... he really hasn't. Maybe you could enlighten us as to what it means. Because within the context of the OP link, LP is saying liberals are doing the exact opposite of the OP link claim.

JP had no problem understanding what I actually said.

I'm saying the implication of many leftist approaches to racism amount to a hidden assumption that the minorities are inferior and we should pretend that isn't the case, that what they are seeing is evidence of widespread discrimination. (What it actually is is a cultural problem, not a racial problem.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Check this out:

Why we need to call out casual racism
https://ideas.ted.com/why-we-need-to-call-out-casual-racism/

"There comes a time in every upwardly mobile Black person’s life when they encounter someone who tells them how “well-spoken” and “articulate” they are. It is usually a white person who is earnest and honest in their admiration of your verbal abilities, and in that moment, you swing between being appreciative and being totally offended."

You know the sort of thing. 'Isn't Obama so civilised (for a black man)."

And yet (controversy alert) I read that while on average 62% of all American high-school leavers go to college, the figure for blacks is only 20%. Are American blacks actually, on average, less well-educated and articulate than whites? This would not, of course, justify dumbing down when speaking to them.

Something comes to mind here--how good were the controls on accent?

The thing is, many people treat different speech as evidence of a lack of intelligence. People are stupid for not speaking perfect English (even if they immigrated here as an adult), people are stupid for not using the same accent as the listener. Watch Americans in a foreign country and you'll see plenty of this at work.

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This is only an issue because people get fixated on group identities. Step one is to stop encouraging people to fixate on group identities. If we get more people to see each other as individuals and not as representatives of group members, and presuming certain traits are universal to all in each group, we are well on our way out of this. Let's not be especially mean or nice to you, presume you especially smart or dumb, or presume you less or more morally upright, or presume that you are particularly over or under privileged merely by your physical characteristics. That's a start, right?

Exactly. We are individuals, not simply members of a group. You don't create fairness by giving a bonus to one member of a group to make up for a harm suffered by another member of the group.

 

[laughing dog]

Nice job of missing the point. I'm saying that's the leftist position, not mine.

Rational people reading understood what you meant. Dog had to go out of his way to feign misunderstanding in order to attack you.

It does not take much intelligence or disinterested analysis to understand there is no logical connection between the OP and “inferiority of minorities”.

I realize that neither you nor LP have to go out of your way to attack those who make that observation.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I don't know what "verbal competence" is, but in general people tend to simplify language when they are code-switching, especially if they believe themselves to be talking to someone of lower social class than themselves. It is a patronizing habit, and should be avoided.

The thing is, tailoring our speech for our audience is normal and correct behavior. If your doctor spoke doctor to you you probably wouldn't understand much of what they said. I've had many, many experiences of speaking IT to someone and having others that overheard having no comprehension of what I said.

The problem comes when we incorrectly evaluate our audience, taking things like social class, accent etc as evidence that we need to lower our speech level.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

When talking to clients, I always try to simplify things, though not to the point of idiocy.

I'm guessing your work involves issuing food stamps?

Anybody who works in a field that requires substantial technical understanding and has clients has to do this routinely.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

LP had an opportunity to clarify... he really hasn't. Maybe you could enlighten us as to what it means. Because within the context of the OP link, LP is saying liberals are doing the exact opposite of the OP link claim.

JP had no problem understanding what I actually said.

I'm saying the implication of many leftist approaches to racism amount to a hidden assumption that the minorities are inferior and we should pretend that isn't the case, that what they are seeing is evidence of widespread discrimination. (What it actually is is a cultural problem, not a racial problem.)

Oh, I got it. So attempts to suppress the vote of minorities is cultural, not racial.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

LP had an opportunity to clarify... he really hasn't. Maybe you could enlighten us as to what it means. Because within the context of the OP link, LP is saying liberals are doing the exact opposite of the OP link claim.

JP had no problem understanding what I actually said.

I'm saying the implication of many leftist approaches to racism amount to a hidden assumption that the minorities are inferior and we should pretend that isn't the case, that what they are seeing is evidence of widespread discrimination. (What it actually is is a cultural problem, not a racial problem.)

Oh, I got it. So attempts to suppress the vote of minorities is cultural, not racial.

Now this is about suppressing votes?

 

[ruby sparks]

When talking to clients, I always try to simplify things, though not to the point of idiocy.

I'm guessing your work involves issuing food stamps?

Engineering but whatever floats your boat

I hope you know I was joking. I was just knocking off work for the weekend at the time. Downing tools. I was being a bit giddy. Or, if you're white, I was being spiritedly lightheaded on account of an anticipated and imminent respite from the mundanity of my weekly remunerated endeavours.

 

[ruby sparks]

We are individuals, not simply members of a group. You don't create fairness by giving a bonus to one member of a group to make up for a harm suffered by another member of the group.

Ok I know I'm always saying this sort of thing, but...

That's partly true and partly untrue. I do agree with Jolly when he says that we should strive to treat people as individuals and not as members of a group. But, at the same time, we cannot and should not avoid treating people and issues regarding people in group terms also, when appropriate. This imo is partly why Jolly (in certain ways rightly) decries identity politics yet can't avoid inadvertently straying into it.

I'm not sure how to express this, but I'll try. Perhaps, if you are dealing with or talking to or about an individual, it is important not to 'group' them. But when you are talking about or issues affecting groups (and such issues do undeniably exist) it is often necessary and valid to see things, and address them (including inequalities and unfairness) in group terms.

In other words, it's context-specific and not an either/or thing, it's a matter of emphasis and balance in a variety of scenarios. You are right up to a point to say that you do not create fairness by giving preferential treatment to individuals, but at the same time, you do not create fairness by not acknowledging and doing something about structural unfairness at the group level either.

In other words, doing something for disadvantaged groups can be justified, but it can be taken too far. The tricky part, as with almost everything, is working out where to reasonably draw the line.

 

[ruby sparks]

Something comes to mind here--how good were the controls on accent?

The thing is, many people treat different speech as evidence of a lack of intelligence. People are stupid for not speaking perfect English (even if they immigrated here as an adult), people are stupid for not using the same accent as the listener. Watch Americans in a foreign country and you'll see plenty of this at work.

It's not just Americans. Brits are famous for something similar.

Yes, neither accent, nor indeed vocabulary, are necessarily an indicator for intelligence.

 

[ruby sparks]

This isn't a surprise for anyone who bothers to pay attention.

Racism isn't a binary thing. Too many people think that either you're completely not racist or else you're wearing a pillow case on your head and burning crosses in the neighbor's yard while shouting "Make America great again!" with nothing in between. Let me clue you in: almost everyone is somewhere in between.

Most white liberals are indeed less racist than Republicans (although some are just as racist or nearly so), but that's not the same thing as not racist at all. Most white people suffer from white fragility, liberal and conservative alike. If you simply bring up the topic of racism, many white people get offended or defensive or both and complain about the fact that you brought up the topic at all. Instead of talking about the racism and figuring out what anyone can do about it, they change the topic to whether or not the topic should have been brought up in the first place.

• Everyone is at least a little bit racist.
• Yes, including liberals.
• Many white liberals are in complete denial about their own racism to whatever degree they have it.
• Conservatives are either in denial of their own (often worse) racism as liberals, or else they know they are racist and lie, claiming to not be racist.
  • Ironically, that last group is more aware of the extent of their own racism than any of the other white people.

Then of course, there's the regional thing. White people in some places are clearly worse with regards to racism.

Things like this are why I argue that racism is a property of culture, not just a property of individuals.

Most white people are in denial about all of this. They don't want to be racist, but they also want to avoid carefully examining the topic of racism enough to figure out if anything they've done or do regularly is racist. Thus, I think I am safe in saying that none of the denialists chose to be racist. If racism comes to us through culture (a series of premises that are almost never openly discussed by people in the culture), then that would explain why we have so many people who don't want to be racist but say and do racist things anyway.

Many people don't realize what assumptions underlie the premises they use to support arguments that they use to evaluate conclusions. This is why culture is such a powerful tool for Christian missionaries, who are trained to manipulate culture to convert entire populations. For example, they didn't have as much success converting indigenous Americans until they altered indigenous culture to treat women and homosexuals worse. Once that change was successfully made to indigenous culture, conversions became much easier.

But I think the best argument that racism is baked into our culture and infects us with bad assumptions that we don't realize we are making is a series of scientific studies done with young children.

[YOUTUBE]QRZPw-9sJtQ[/YOUTUBE]

These experiments were first done in the 1940s, and the results are heartbreaking.

It is incredibly unlikely that the parents of those young children (especially the parents of the young minority children) overtly taught their children to make racist assumptions. If those children were not expressly told to make racist assumptions but make them anyway, where did those assumptions come from? Our culture seems the most reasonable explanation to me for how this can happen, and if it can happen in young children, you'd have to be pretty delusional to think that adults are not also affected by this, and from what I can see most are just as unaware that they make those assumptions as the children in these studies.

This only changes when you start accepting that it affects you as well.

In the 1990s, I realized that I was wrong to look down on homosexuals, transgendered, etc. I consciously made the decision to not be prejudiced against them, but when I look back at some of my behavior towards them or in regards to them in the 1990s, some of those memories made me cringe. No doubt a decade from now, I will look back at some of the things I currently say or do with regards to LGBTQ people and cringe all over again. I still have improvements to make, but to the extent that I got this far, I improved as much as I have because I know that simply deciding to not be prejudiced is not enough. Uncomfortable and unpleasant self-criticism is necessary as well, and if you simply assume that you're definitely not prejudiced without that self-examination, you're not going to make any progress.

Well said.

And thanks for posting that compelling video illustration.

 

[ruby sparks]

Maybe I'm at a loss here, but why would any special competence when interacting with African-Americans be necessary? Why wouoldn't you just interact with them as with any other people? Why this separation and otherization?

I have never met any African-Americans, because I don't live in the US. But I have met black people here in Sweden. I interacted with them the same way I'd interact with any other people. Some of these black people were nice and friendly fellows, some of them were assholes. Just like with everybody else. Because black people are just like everybody else.

Any black person is born with the same potential as any other person. This is not in contention, at least not among most of us here on "the left". The issue arises not from the conception of individuals, but rather with imbalanced exposure to a population of individuals who, due to factors arising from cultural associations unique to the US, are taught that making things 'about race' will 'solve' certain social games in a 'favorable' manner to them and coincidentally detrimentally to the other players in said social game. As such, for everyone else, it becomes a smart strategy for the "everyone else" in such situations to guard against anything that would allow this strategy to be leveraged.

For example, let's say I am on a bus in the US, and am sitting next to someone who is (illegally) playing music loudly and without headphones, on a route that runs through the inner city. Because I dislike loud disruptions that I cannot escape, and because this is explicitly illegal, I have a choice: I can either confront the person or I can just deal with it for 30 minutes.

If this person is black, there is a high (>50% chance) that the person doing this will use aforementioned strategy to inpugn my intentions, with the excuse that this is a 'black' behavior and being against it is 'racist'; indeed, it is something that about 9:1 is done by people who happen to be black in my experience, but it is in fact entirely a product of cultural programming and not race. Nevertheless, there is this high chance that I will get chewed out for being a "racist" and see social consequences in the future when I commute. This is enough to change how I interact, as I do not want to do something with a high risk of social consequences, especially in a context I will have to return to daily.

Whereas if they were white, I'd just ask them to turn their music down or off, because there is no risk of social consequences, since there is no public perception that it is being done as a criticism of their race.

Good points.

I'd guess that the phenomenon illustrated in the OP studies has a variety of explanations, some benign, others (including regrettable unconscious bias) not.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

LP had an opportunity to clarify... he really hasn't. Maybe you could enlighten us as to what it means. Because within the context of the OP link, LP is saying liberals are doing the exact opposite of the OP link claim.

JP had no problem understanding what I actually said.

I'm saying the implication of many leftist approaches to racism amount to a hidden assumption that the minorities are inferior and we should pretend that isn't the case, that what they are seeing is evidence of widespread discrimination. (What it actually is is a cultural problem, not a racial problem.)

Oh, I got it. So attempts to suppress the vote of minorities is cultural, not racial.

Since when is this thread about vote suppression?

And vote suppression is in a sense cultural--it's about suppressing Democrat votes. Race is a proxy for what they're really after.

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We are individuals, not simply members of a group. You don't create fairness by giving a bonus to one member of a group to make up for a harm suffered by another member of the group.

Ok I know I'm always saying this sort of thing, but...

That's partly true and partly untrue. I do agree with Jolly when he says that we should strive to treat people as individuals and not as members of a group. But, at the same time, we cannot and should not avoid treating people and issues regarding people in group terms also, when appropriate. This imo is partly why Jolly (in certain ways rightly) decries identity politics yet can't avoid inadvertently straying into it.

I'm not sure how to express this, but I'll try. Perhaps, if you are dealing with or talking to or about an individual, it is important not to 'group' them. But when you are talking about or issues affecting groups (and such issues do undeniably exist) it is often necessary and valid to see things, and address them (including inequalities and unfairness) in group terms.

In other words, it's context-specific and not an either/or thing, it's a matter of emphasis and balance in a variety of scenarios. You are right up to a point to say that you do not create fairness by giving preferential treatment to individuals, but at the same time, you do not create fairness by not acknowledging and doing something about structural unfairness at the group level either.

In other words, doing something for disadvantaged groups can be justified, but it can be taken too far. The tricky part, as with almost everything, is working out where to reasonably draw the line.

Individuals can care about issues that apply to a group they are in. That doesn't change the fact that they are individuals.

And you're doing nothing to address the issue of helping A because of wrongdoing done to B just increases the wrongdoing, it doesn't help things.

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Something comes to mind here--how good were the controls on accent?

The thing is, many people treat different speech as evidence of a lack of intelligence. People are stupid for not speaking perfect English (even if they immigrated here as an adult), people are stupid for not using the same accent as the listener. Watch Americans in a foreign country and you'll see plenty of this at work.

It's not just Americans. Brits are famous for something similar.

Yes, neither accent, nor indeed vocabulary, are necessarily an indicator for intelligence.

I figure it's probably worldwide.

 

[ZiprHead]

O, the Cultural Appropriation!

Funny, I haven't seen anyone but right-wingers complaining about it.

Wait, all those people complaining about cultural appropriation are right wingers?

I did not know that.

I mean the people complaining about Hillary quoting a gospel song. Do you have an example of someone other than a right-winger complaining about it?

 

[Derec]

I mean the people complaining about Hillary

It's not so much complaining but mocking her trying to sound black. Had she quoted the damn song in her normal speaking voice nobody would have remembered it.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

In other words, doing something for disadvantaged groups can be justified, but it can be taken too far. The tricky part, as with almost everything, is working out where to reasonably draw the line.

Why can't you "do for groups" by doing for individuals? You want to help the poor? That's noble. You do so by assisting individuals who lack financial resources and making them more available to all.

But other than by doing this as individuals how do you "do something for a group", without acting on prejudice or mistreating individuals? Using particular races as proxies for poverty is an example.

Do you see it as a good thing to do what Loren spoke against, and give a benefit to somebody because they share a trait with somebody else who was wronged?

 

[dismal]

Wait, all those people complaining about cultural appropriation are right wingers?

I did not know that.

I mean the people complaining about Hillary quoting a gospel song. Do you have an example of someone other than a right-winger complaining about it?

So you’re saying people on the left are hypocrites for not complaining about Hillary’s cultural appropriation?

 

[Jarhyn]

Wait, all those people complaining about cultural appropriation are right wingers?

I did not know that.

I mean the people complaining about Hillary quoting a gospel song. Do you have an example of someone other than a right-winger complaining about it?

So you’re saying people on the left are hypocrites for not complaining about Hillary’s cultural appropriation?

I don't know anyone IRL that has ever made a claim of cultural appropriation whatsoever, and most all my friends are on the left. More accurately "so you're saying that some rare people on the left that few people have ever even MET on the left are hypocrites for not complaining about Hillary's 'cultural appropriation'", to which I would certainly agree. But that doesn't really leverage anyone against "the left"; so it seems you left out some important details, and so your statement appears to be pure dissembly and punditry

 

[dismal]

So you’re saying people on the left are hypocrites for not complaining about Hillary’s cultural appropriation?

I don't know anyone IRL that has ever made a claim of cultural appropriation whatsoever, and most all my friends are on the left. More accurately "so you're saying that some rare people on the left that few people have ever even MET on the left are hypocrites for not complaining about Hillary's 'cultural appropriation'", to which I would certainly agree. But that doesn't really leverage anyone against "the left"; so it seems you left out some important details, and so your statement appears to be pure dissembly and punditry

Why don’t you search the forum for “cultural appropriation” threads. You might find we have a significant number of people here who don’t dismiss it as silliness. Then you can lecture them if you like.