Alexander Hamilton was a biracial “qualified” person, 200 years ago. He was a batshit lunatic, beholden to central banking and English established colonial interest, but qualified.
Were it not for Aaron Burr, he might well have been the first black US vice-president, if not president - by the same Plessy-Ferguson standard that designates Obama as such.
I haven’t inherited any money, not directly.
I have inherited better neighborhoods, lowered expectations that I might be a criminal, better job opportunities (in that the people who do the hiring aren’t likely to have even a slight subconscious bias that I seem like a less friendly person than a lighter skinned person), and a myriad of other benefits that have helped my course through life.
That may not be money I inherited, but it’s all WORTH money, if you want to think in those terms (I mean, if there was a pre-life waiting room and you had currency you could invest in different starting conditions… it’d be a pretty good investment, being a white male). Worth more than any blame I’ve been subjected to in my life due to the actions of long-ago people who helped me inherit these benefits. Even if, as an objective measure, I haven’t done as much with my life and those benefits as other people.
And it’s not fair. I can’t give back those benefits, but I can, at the very least, acknowledge them, and that unfairness.
(And I’m not saying I deserve a cookie for that, but, you know, if you happen to have any extra, I do LIKE cookies!)
I think you might be on to something. 
This is where I would disagree with you. I think it’s absolutely fair that you’ve had those things. Those are basic rights that any decent society should extend to its citizens. It’s unfair that society has denied those basic rights to many of its citizens - but that is not the same as to say that it is unfair that society has extended those rights to SOME of its citizens. The situation of the world would not be improved if those rights were taken away from you, or anybody else - it improved if those rights were extended equally, as they should be. I don’t understand why you concentrate the idea of unfairness on you having basic rights - as opposed on others not having basic rights, which is where the unfairness actually lies.
He was?
You may notice, if you look back, that I said things like “better” neighborhoods, “lowered” expectations of criminality, etc, etc, all based on my race and gender (and to a certain degree, sexual orientation). It’s unfair that I have a BETTER shot than somebody else for no good reason. I didn’t earn that, just like I didn’t earn money I could hypothetically have inherited.
But yes, there are almost certainly benefits where I get something that is outright denied, something that should be considered a basic right, and that’s unfair that they don’t get it. But, to a degree, it’s a matter of semantics. You could say people who inherit money didn’t do anything to earn it and thus shouldn’t have it, or you can say that everybody else who didn’t inherit it should also have been granted an equal amount of money just for being born. One sounds a little weirder, but they mean approximately the same thing.
He’s saying that yeah, it is unfair - life is unfair, regardless of whether it’s to your personal advantage or not, and just like you would naturally spend an inherited wealth you have to be willing to pay off an inherited debt. Regardless of how “unfair” it is to you.
Life, conceived in the abstract, doesn’t dictate that some people should inherit wealth, and others poverty - our specific society does. A person might be prepared to spend inherited wealth - but that doesn’t make inherited wealth and inherited poverty a fair or equitable state of affairs in the world - and as such this is not a good argument as to why inherited debt should be accepted as simply a facet of life’s general unfairness. This is like telling somebody who grows up in grinding poverty: “Well, you have to except the debt you’ve inherited - 'cause if the dice had rolled differently, you’d have no problem spending all that cash you inherited! Life is unfair, but we have to roll with it, whether it is to our advantage or not.”
I cannot believe that’s what you got out of that interview.
Look, 99% of the people in America want to get along and enjoy this great country.
It’s very unfortunate that some African Americans insist that white people walk around with permanent guilt for shit which they never did.
Travel the world first my friend and then come back and tell me this is a racist country.
It’s not an inheritance of either or, and it’s not literally monetary wealth. In this particular analogy white people have inherited wealth and a debt, and that means they don’t get to spend what they have while simultaneously denying they owe anything. They have to own both.
That’s white people, the collective. Not a white person, the individual.
The fabled white person who is also monetarily poor and also grows up in like a “75% black” neighborhood where they suffer prejudice because they’re white isn’t a counter-example. Not just because they’re not indicative of the whole, but also because the prejudice they suffered is precisely because the whole refuses to acknowledge their debts.
This is the difference between the racism of an individual and systemic racism. In the United States, white people hold most of the political/economic/social power. Owning up to the past and helping dismantle the unjust system would be a good start. Too bad they’re so deeply in denial that it’s basically impossible to get them to even acknowledge there’s a problem.
I dunno what Chris Rock’s comedy has to do with anything. Comedians say all sorts of things onstage. It’s an act.
No, he wasn’t.
I couldn’t find anything about it, and had never heard that, so unless their is some new scholarship on him… Maybe @JeremiahC thought he was biracial because he was born in the Caribbean…But his mother was a Huguenot and his father was British, I think.
The reason people have white guilt is because they know deep down they DO get a pass because of the color of their skin. That’s OK-- we should feel guilty in those situations, even when it’s not our fault personally, it’s about being a moral human being, and knowing that benefiting from entrenched unfairness is wrong.
I’m still not sure what to do about it that will make a measurable difference, but I’m sure as hell not going to massage my ego by pretending blacks have it great and should stop complaining.
Chris Rock is one of the brightest entertainers around. The true heir to Carlin. Many comedians make me laugh, very few make me laugh and think
The trouble with guilt, and white guilt in particular, is that it doesn’t help anyone. It’s a very self-indulgent feeling! There’s a danger of it just staying as guilt; “Well at least I feel guilty, so I must be a good person.”
It’s important to take that guilt and think about how you personally benefit, or have benefited, and think about how you can help people in the same situation who didn’t.
Like for example, thanks to my career and background, my network is very white and predominantly male–so I have to make an extra effort to follow more women and people of colour on social media, news sites, especially in my field. That way, when someone asks me, “hey, do you know someone who knows about X”, there’s at least a chance I’ll be able to answer with someone who isn’t a white dude.
As a bonus, it gives me a bit of fucking perspective so I don’t go blaming racism on black people.
Louis CK much?
I agree. Good thing that’s not what this is about.
Try reading it again. Perhaps have someone with better reading comprehension read it first, then explain it to you.
I think “guilt” is incredibly simplistic and misses the point entirely, and also I don’t think that’s what Chris or anyone else is saying. You should be AWARE, not feel guilty. There is a difference.
I see your argument, and you’re probably right, but I’m still not convinced. To own both, they would have to, well, own both (ie both the metaphorical wealth, and the metaphorical debt). But the problem remains that some white people have inherited a real/and or metaphorical wealth from America’s history of racial oppression, and some certainly have not, and the analogy would not seem to hold for those who have not. To avoid this problem, you differentiate white people as a collective from individual white people:
Its hard to see what is gained from this - we apply a collective blanket of inherited wealth and debt over every white person from those born in grinding poverty to a Rockefeller, and yet simultaneously let the Rockefellers off the hook because they are, after all, only individual white people, not “white people, the collective.” This is, in my opinion, because applying universal standards to collective groups of people is inherently pernicious - however well-intentioned. Saying that a responsibility for terrorism inheres in Muslims as a collective, but not in a Muslim, the individual, seems like an extremely pernicious logic; are we not applying a similar logic, albeit for more admirable motivations, when we say that a collective responsibility for America’s racial oppressions, past and continuing, inheres in white people considered as a collective? Again, your probably right, but I personally have difficulty accepting the idea that people should ever have to own, or be “judged for”, the actions of other people in their racial grouping, historical or in the present tense. It seems like an inherently pernicious logic, regardless of its context.
