You and me agreeing twice in one year?!?!??!
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To the various of y’all thinking about having not ever been to the house of a minority person, what might you expect of the experience?
Edit: fixed an auto correct error
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It’s diverse in some ways. Asian (India-Asia and China-Asian), Jewish, Catholic (does that count?) but few hispanics and African Americans. The Hispanic side I got covered from my mom’s side (she’s mostly Mexican).
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Say what? Not thinking it’ll be anything really. It just points out that despite the “progress” made in the last X decades we’re more separated than TV shows might have us thinking.
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I’ll try to track it down, but she recounted recently what several prominent feminists said about her at the time, and it wasn’t pretty.
wow, the comments on that video are SO disturbing.
I’m pretty sure it’s in here.
http://www.ted.com/talks/monica_lewinsky_the_price_of_shame
or here:
yep
And so it went from there. Ms. Lewinsky was quickly cast by the media as a “little tart,” as The Wall Street Journal put it. The New York Post nicknamed her the “Portly Pepperpot.” She was described by Maureen Dowd in The New York Times as “ditsy” and “predatory.”
And other women — self-proclaimed feminists — piled on. “My dental hygienist pointed out she had third-stage gum disease,” said Erica Jong. Betty Friedan dismissed her as “some little twerp.”
“It’s a sexual shaming that is far more directed at women than at men,” Gloria Steinem wrote me in an email, noting that in Ms. Lewinsky’s case, she was also targeted by the “ultraright wing.” “I’m grateful to [her],” Ms. Steinem said, “for having the courage to return to the public eye.”
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There was no snark in my question. Sometimes hosting or being a guest of another culture is easy, sometimes less so. My question was literal. I’m have my experience but wanted to know the thoughts of others.
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I feel like there’s not a lot being said here about people on the Left who actually do make victims out of people in a bad way… I don’t mean people trying to talk about their own issues which haven’t been addressed, and they’re drawing attention to things that matter (e.g. black lives), and then of course there’s somebody on the right saying that’s too much to ask.
I’m talking about people who have some kind of privilege and then they’re talking about someone else’s problem saying “look at this poor oppressed person, now don’t you want to support my political agenda,” often choosing a more minor issue, like gays/trans people being included in some institution or another, to cover up a larger, often related one, which they then never want to talk about, like decriminalizing sex work. Of course I don’t really feel like they’re a part of my Left, but they call themselves progressives, and they’re always trying to be PC…
I hate half-assed fake allyship and I’m tired of it contributing to this whole problem of who’s really a victim.
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I have to say that I have been lucky enough to be a guest in a lot of homes, and the experience has always been welcoming. If anything, the least advantaged people are often the most generous with hospitality. Beyond that, they are probably more likely to invite you into their home, and genuinely welcome you there.
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I do think this is the root of many problems, simple lack of exposure to people different than ourselves.
I kinda/sorta grew up in the south-ish, and I attended the University of Virginia in the very early 90s. It always surprised me how the cafeteria broke down into largely tables of black people sitting with other black people, and white people sitting with other white people. I wonder if that is significantly different today in 2017. I certainly hope so. If we can’t sit down to meals with each other, how can we understand each other at all?
The good news is our kids (here in California) are definitely exposed to other kids of many different races and backgrounds, all the time. One of the things I love about this place.
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Oddly enough meals can be quite complicated. For example even before I started keeping kosher, one of the most common questions I’d get from Japanese people was “can you eat (name of food item)?” Believe it or not as a kid I’d just as often hear the same thing from friends moms the first time I’d visit the house of friends whose families were of a different race or culture.
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I’m neither practicing nor kosher, the amount of times in my life I have been asked if I can eat pork or not is unbelievable. It’s something I have always been ambivalent about, should I be happy that people are always trying to be kind and accommodating, or should I feel awkward because they are stereotyping me based on how I look. I highly doubt this kind of thing is limited to ethnicity and religion.
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I honestly just wish that people would remember that I don’t eat pig, or meat and dairy, or shellfish. The number of times I’ve gone to someone’s house and had to leave hungry… argh.
(and then there are the people who deliberately try to adulterate food with pork as what I can only imagine is some kind of twisted Christian ‘gotcha! Made you sin!’ assholeness; I’ve managed to avoid their traps, but not all of my friends and associates have been so lucky)
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In the context of the cafeteria, though, everyone picks their own food. So it should be easiest there.
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I love how this idea of political correctness has been twisted to be “I’m not an asshole, I’m just not being PC”. Calling out these assholes then makes you “libtard” and a “SJW”. It’s ridiculous.
The right sure loves inventing non-existent enemies. I’m sure everybody remembers Reagan’s mythical welfare queens.
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Cafeterias are rarely set up to accommodate multiple dietary requirements much less different cultural diets so to me the situation you propose is of various kids who are already assimiled to majority food culture.
(I almost didn’t type those last two words and feel a bit dirty but in a hurry and can’t think of better words)
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I totally agree with you here. In fact, on a personal level this is something that hits very close to home: one of my daughters (who goes to college locally) comes home regularly not because she misses us but because she literally cannot get enough nutrition in her dorm cafeteria. She’s talked with the employees numerous times and while they are lovely people, they literally do not know basic nutritional facts nor the ingredients of the food they serve. And they don’t understand the concept that certain dietary needs require careful separation from other foods from start to finish.
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Isn’t there an element of “expected conformity” that makes the comment problematic as well? There’s a dialect which is predominantly spoken by black Americans, which has grammatical rules which differ slightly from other dialects spoken in America, to the point that being “articulate” sounds different in each dialect.
It was my understanding that part of the problem of a white person calling a black person “articulate” was that you were saying, “Good job, you’re conforming to our culture instead of their culture.”
Am I mistaken?
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And white southerners.
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Not quite the same dialect (see the article I linked).
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