Twitter 2: Tweet harder

[Ormond]

28 minutes ago, mormont said:

Jewish people don't have white privilege, would be the short and pithy version. 

The more complex version is that race as we understand it is a social construct, and hence so is racism. But I don't want to derail the thread any further by getting into that in detail. 

I'm sorry, I'm going to disagree with you here. Jewish people certainly DO have a lot of "white privilege" as I understand the use of that term. In the USA, a lot of "White privilege" is exhibited by being able to shop in a store without being followed by security sure you are going to shoplift because of your physical appearance. Which is just one example -- Jewish people don't experience a lot of the everday problems people who don't "look White" have.

Concepts like "privilege" shouldn't be seen as binary but on a continuum. As a 71 one year old Christian White gay male with a Ph.D.  living in the United States in 2022, I have lots of "privilege". The fact that there are some venues where I could possibly have a few problems because of my sexual orientation exist ( and also a few where my age might subject me to "ageism") means that I don't have quite as much "privilege" as a heterosexual man who has all my other characteristics, but that doesn't mean that I am not very "privileged" compared to most others.  And it certainly doesn't make me "non-White", any more than the fact I have Native American mitochondria makes me "non-White".

There are plenty of examples in history where racism has been exhibited by one group that considered itself White against another group which they also considered to be White. Racism involves discrimination of some kind against people because of aspects of their biological heritage, no matter what their skin color. I well remember way back when I was a teenager reading a book on British legends written in the 19th century in England where the author went on a diatribe for a few pages about Methodists (because they had unseemly emotional "revivals") where he specifically blamed that on people who were attracted to wild religious displays having too much Celtic ancestry and not enough Anglo-Saxon or Norman ancestry like good upper-class Church of England people. It was quite specifically a racist explanation for something he didn't like, but did NOT mean he thought working class English Methodists or Celts in general were "non-White". It's perfectly possible for people to believe there are different racial categorie WITHIN the broader designations of White, Black, or Asian and to exhibit prejudice against a subcategory or to give another subcategory some sort of "privilege". A lot of the problems in Rwanda and Burundi between the Tutsi and Hutu are because the colonial power specifically gave the Tutsi more "privilege" because they thought they were racially superior to the Hutu. There have also been some times and places within the last century were in South Africa or other "western" countries the Japanese were seen as racially "better" or "worse" than other East Asians and this was explained in specifically hereditary racist ways. Racism doesn't have to be just manifested in a simplistic "White vs. non-White" dichotomy. 

 

[JGP]

It's worse than I thought. Almost a bad child vibe.

[Conflicting Thought]

a lot of groups that werent considered white are now "accepted" as white...until they arent anymore. whitness is a very fickle concept. 

[Relic]

26 minutes ago, JGP said:

It's worse than I thought. Almost a bad child vibe.

Gee, bro, thanks for sharing. I just spent 20 minute reading divergent threads, falling into deeper and deeper into an alt-right/incel/maga rabbit hole and now i too want to find the quickest way to Mars. Shit is so depressing

[JGP]

Mmn hmn.

 

[Zorral]

Many a person coming to the US from the Dominican Republic are shocked to learn in the US they are "Black," whereas back home they weren't -- those other, darker, people were black.

In Haiti, if one is rich, one is a Blanc Grande -- a big white.  It doesn't matter what the tone of the skin is, if there's lots of money, one is white.

Just sayin'.

But in the end, it is the European colonial imperium advanced upon the entire globe beginning in the 15th century, starting with Africa, that created that entire sense of Color Racism, since it always advocated for and justified the depopulation of Africa for the sake of making shyte loads of wealth heretofore impossible to have even dreamed, now that there were two entirely fresh, and unplundered continents for them to extract from -- three continents, actually, as they plundered Africa of its human wealth to plunder those of North and South America.

There are so many reasons the middle ages are considered finished by the end of the 15th century, and the age of Capitalism begun.

 

[JGP]

As an aside, I follow a metric fuckton of comic artists and other industry creatives, and over the last few days Hive seems to be what they're currently gravitating to. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

As someone who is actually Jewish and lives in the US this conversation is groan inducing to say the least. 

1 hour ago, Ormond said:

I'm sorry, I'm going to disagree with you here. Jewish people certainly DO have a lot of "white privilege" as I understand the use of that term. In the USA, a lot of "White privilege" is exhibited by being able to shop in a store without being followed by security sure you are going to shoplift because of your physical appearance. Which is just one example -- Jewish people don't experience a lot of the everday problems people who don't "look White" have.

Just use "some" as a qualifier. I have blue eyes, dirty blond hair and generally look like I'm Western European and more German than Jewish. Nobody ever bothers me and people tend to be surprised when I tell them I am. However, a lot of my family does look stereotypically Jewish and they catch a lot of L's because of it, especially if they're wearing anything that clearly tells others that they are. And because of anti-Semitism I no longer have my actual last name. My grandfather had to change it because in the late 40's/early 50's nobody would hire Jewish lawyers. Funny how that game flipped.

I hate the whole "our group is not a monolith" line because it should always go without saying. Some people, like myself, can pass as white and nobody would ever know if I didn't volunteer it. Others cannot. 

[DMC]

30 minutes ago, JGP said:

As an aside, I follow a metric fuckton of comic artists and other industry creatives, and over the last few days Hive seems to be what they're currently gravitating to. 

I feel like naming a social media site endeavoring to replace Twitter "Hive" is meant to be ironic.

[Varysblackfyre321]

2 hours ago, Heartofice said:

The issue for many on the left

Dude, the person who declared West in this particular thread can’t be a nazi because black appears to be on the right socially and politically(if not I stand to be corrected and apologize) and we’re mainly discussing Kanye because a right wing billionaire let him back on twitter.

Can you not immediately try to move the discussion to what’s wrong with the left?

[Derfel Cadarn]

If Musk’s management of Twitter has shown anything, no one shoukd go to Mars with him. He’d be withdrawing oxygen, food and water privileges on a whim

[Week]

8 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Can you not immediately try to move the discussion to what’s wrong with the left?

The issue for many on 'the Right' is that their parties support, espouse, and provide cover for racism, misogyny, and bigotry to the point of violence. A problem that is orders of magnitude greater than whatever 'the Right' is whining about.

[JGP]

33 minutes ago, DMC said:

I feel like naming a social media site endeavoring to replace Twitter "Hive" is meant to be ironic.

Mastodon is too siloed, and there are moderation issues [on some servers] From what I've seen without diving, looks like it might be trying to be a safeplace for white civility popo. 

I'll wait for Jibberjabber, or Yipyapp. 

 

edit: Looks like Bouzy is floating an alternative via Bot Sentinel. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

14 minutes ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

If Musk’s management of Twitter has shown anything, no one shoukd go to Mars with him. He’d be withdrawing oxygen, food and water privileges on a whim

Let's be honest about this, the first trip is probably a one way. Let Elon lead it, just don't put any of your family onboard unless they really want to go.

[DMC]

16 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

Let's be honest about this, the first trip is probably a one way. Let Elon lead it, just don't put any of your family onboard unless they really want to go.

I was figuring we just send him to Mars by himself like the boys sent Willzyx to the moon in South Park.

 

[JGP]

Going well on the business front though!

[mormont]

2 hours ago, Ormond said:

Concepts like "privilege" shouldn't be seen as binary but on a continuum.

I don't want to get too far into this, but I would go further and say privilege isn't binary or a continuum, but a multi-valent situation - various forms of social privileges, economic privileges, political privileges and so on, which groups may possess to greater or lesser degrees. My earlier post was simplifying all of that into a package of privileges known as 'white privilege', some of which, in a modern US context, are to a degree shared by Jewish people (though very recently they were not) and many of which are accessible, as Ty says and I noted earlier, to Jewish people who don't have any obvious indicators of Jewishness (e.g. name). But not to the extent that you can fairly say Jewish people have 'white privilege'.

I agree that some groups who do, now, get 'white privilege' didn't used to. But again, 'white' here is both a shorthand and a social construct. The boundaries can be changed, and frequently are.

I'm a 50 year old professional straight white cis male. That is the exemplar of what would generally be termed 'white privilege'. I've got all the privilege available in Western society, pretty much. And from that perspective, it's all the more important to perceive it. So many folks who share my characteristics are blind to it. Twitter in particular is full of them, Elon Musk among that number. It's almost impossible to imagine a person with more privilege than he has. But where he should use it to lift up the underprivileged, he instead uses it to inflate his own ego.

[Fragile Bird]

This conversation reminds of the fact that when I was a child the Anglo-Saxons in Toronto did not consider all those new Italian immigrants to be white. They were “Dagos”, which I gather was a typically English slurred version of “Diego”, and included Spanish and Portuguese people.

eta: sorry for wandering so far off the topic of Twitter 

[mormont]

Can we not repeat ethnic slurs, please?

Anyway, my final point is: stuff like this doesn't happen to groups who have white privilege. (CW)

[Ran]

I think we're all adult enough to actually be able to reference words in quotes that have a historical context without finding their very appearance offensive, for the most part. (I say this as one of the people who would have been referred to by said word, and has been referred to with more current related slurs.)