FTA:
It’s about white people adjusting to a new reality?
Owning their actions. Not even their actions. The actions of your
dad. Yeah, it’s unfair that you can get judged by something you didn’t
do, but it’s also unfair that you can inherit money that you didn’t work
for.
I don’t think Mr Rock is blaming you, some people might of course, but its really about owning the structures of power that were inherited to us, yeah, we didn’t create them, but we do inhabit them.
In fairness, his argument here is VERY weak: “Yeah, it’s unfair that you can get judged by something you didn’t do, but it’s also unfair that you can inherit money that you didn’t work for.” This seems like a non-starter because 1) two wrongs don’t make a right, and 2) that other people are inheriting money that they didn’t work for is hardly much of consolation to the person who inherits the judgement of past sins, but no money that they didn’t work for.
We’re you raised Mohawk? My grandpa was half-white and that wasn’t a golden ticket to a post-racial world.
There, fixed it for you. You clearly read what you WANTED to read. But by all means, feel free to express your outrage.
You seem to have a need to insult people and contradict yourself in less than 20 words. Feel free. But your approach is unproductive.
Well, I disagree. He’s making an extremely astute observation and I think he explained it very well. His talk about Obama is perfect:
So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years.
I don’t know how that’s ‘uni-directional’ except insofar as he is pointing out a very uni-directional problem. Just the other day I compared police on non-police violence to child abuse because of the power difference, Rock makes a similar analogy to Tina and Ike Turner - in an abusive relationship the onus to reform is on the abuser, not on the abused.
Yes, white people are crazy and black people are crazy, but he was talking about racism, not about how weird individuals are. White people have clung to (and still cling to) a certain kind of collective craziness when it comes to how they see other humans that don’t look like them. White people aren’t unique in this - lots of cultures have been xenophobic throughout history - but they are the ones who are doing it here and now when it seems like we all have access to the information that would let us know better. When black men decide to flee from the police they aren’t being any more crazy than if someone decided to flee from a bear. When black people complain about white people - and I’m sure there is plenty of complaining about white people going on - that can’t be reasonably compared to white racism against black people because those complaints aren’t xenophobic or crazy, they are reality.
I can’t say I really know anything about what it’s like to be a black American, I only know the stories I see through the media. In Canada the worst racism is for indigenous people. We incarcerate them at a rate that is more disproportionate than that at which America incarcerates black people. Am I supposed to ask what they can do to improve the situation? Am I supposed to ask what they should have done to avoid having us intentionally infect them with smallpox or kidnap two generations of their children? That last one ended just a few decades ago and it took until a few years ago for our government to offer so much as a “Ooops, sorry.”
If white people have been treating black people like a disease instead of like humans then that is white people being crazy. Chris Rock is absolutely right: Two hundred years ago there was a black American who would have made a great president, and it was white America that made that an impossibility. They couldn’t have worked at it and made it, they couldn’t have been more respectable or more reconciliatory. White people have to change. And black people, unjustly, have to keep reminding white people that they have the change, because white people aren’t going to do it on their own.
《To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before》
That’s worth a mic drop right there. It really does seem to take a joker to speak the truth!
No, it’s not weak. He’s not trying to ace his critical thinking exam, he’s answering a question in an interview in a way that he hopes conveys his meaning. If that’s all the meaning you took from it, then he hasn’t made a bad argument, he’s just expressed himself in a way that you didn’t really understand. Or you might be just nit-picking one line out of a very long discussion because that’s an easy way to cast aspersions on the whole without actually addressing the point he is making.
It’s not blaming you for what others have done. It’s blaming you for not realizing what others have done, and the advantages that gives you (whether you asked for them or not).
That is a great place to start. To build on this, an important part of “seeing racism” is looking at your life, and noting that there are struggles that you don’t have to endure, simply because you’re not black. There are certainly other struggles that you face, but they are not the same struggles. That puts you in a position to really hear and accept and recognize the unique problem of race. Your experience of prejudice and a black person’s experience of it aren’t the same thing. You can hear what they have to say, but you won’t know what it’s like to live life like that – you need to listen to THEIR experience, if you want to help make it better.
Two things that you can do starting today:
Don’t try to compare your experience of prejudice to the experience of people suffering from racism. I’m sure your experience is legitimate, but it’s not the same thing, because there’s a different context for it. It’s apples and oranges, really. Internalize the idea that you can’t know what that struggle is like first hand, and respond first with an attempt to hear and listen to others’ experiences. Don’t make this about yourself and your struggles.
Confront accusation with good intentions. Recognize that you’re going to make mistakes when addressing this issue, and don’t let that trip up your underlying desire to be an ally here. Own the blame, own the responsibility, own your own ignorance. Be humble, and be persistent. Not everyone is going to be fair to you, and the blame hurled at you won’t always be something you’ve earned, but if you adopt a mantra of listening and asking rather than telling and instructing, you’ll be in a place to respond to that hostility. People want to be heard, and sometimes shouting is the only way they know of in the moment to try to be heard. So let them know they’ve been heard. Ask questions, and listen to the answers.
Funny that some white folks mistake resentment directed towards them as prejudice.
To be clear, I’m not defending the dumb arguments being made here, but the idea of resenting someone because of their skin color is pretty much textbook prejudice. It’s not racism, though.
I stand corrected. You did a better job of expressing what I was thinking of. Thanks!
Have you actually watched any of Chris Rock’s standup? You really should, to give context to all your dialoguing.
There is plenty of prejudice, mistrust, ignorance and hate in the black community here in the USA. And I don’t even remotely mean solely directed at caucasians. But we’re not here to talk about that. We’re just here to talk about crazy white people, remember?
Half-black friends. Can’t go full-black. That would be too far.
Small correction…
stand-up philosopher?
There is plenty of prejudice, mistrust and ignorance in any sufficiently large group of humans. Rock’s insight here that racism in the USA is about white people being crazy stands unaffected by that.
I don’t think I have much to add to that without just repeating what I said above. I feel like you just keep hammering this point that human beings, regardless of skin colour, can be nasty, prejudiced, and generally awful. I understand and fully accept that. I also accept that racism is a subset of humans being generally awful to one another. But it is a particular subset that we are interested in here, and what Rock has done with that line is given it the comedian treatment - he’s taken something we already know and simply stated it to us in an impactful way that gets the message across better than academics talking about power structures. We all know that racism is about a more powerful group oppressing a less powerful group, we all know that oppressors are responsible for oppression and that abusers are responsible for abuse. I don’t think he really said anything other than that.
sigh You almost ‘won’ the argument with this line. Yes, I have seen plenty of Chris Rock standup. Are we now doing a historical analysis of Chris Rock’s comedy rather than talking about the character of racism in the US and whether Chris Rock accurately depicted it?
Racism can exist structurally even if no one holds explicitly racist beliefs (see Schelling’s research on housing patterns), and even if that kind of situation turns out to be eventually self-resolving, it could take (far too) many generations.
Well, here are some questions. Can someone who says they have a grandparent that is a half-Mohawk, claim to be white? Wouldn’t that make John one-eighth? That’s usually enough to be on the national register for any tribe. Who is ‘white’ and who is ‘passing for white’? Can you be white, while also one-eighth non-white?
I read John as saying he passes for white; he has a close family ancestry that is Native American, so he’s not unaware or insensitive to the issue of racism. He chooses not to hold all living “white” people accountable for the crimes committed against this country’s indigenous people. You don’t know what his experience of prejudice is, or that he’s never suffered such experience. He didn’t say. Did you see the word ‘white’ and make assumptions about his experiences in life? And still lectured him on how to be more open-minded?
Ever hear that Talking Heads lyric “You’re talking alot/But you’re not saying anything”? I would take it as a given that when people talk, in virtually any context, they do so in a way which they hope conveys their meaning. That’s surely a vacuous observation to make about speech of any kind. Fair enough - tell me what meaning he was trying to convey by saying “Yeah, it’s unfair that you can get judged by something you didn’t do, but it’s also unfair that you can inherit money that you didn’t work for” and I’ll agree with it.
