That’d be a fairly narrow measure. There are plenty of rich racists who are supportive of LGBTQ rights.
It’s notable that the area of civil rights that has seen the most striking progress over the last few decades (LGBTQ) is one of the few areas where reform does not immediately threaten existing wealth and power relationships.
True. There are also plenty of African-American preachers who still oppose LGBTQ rights. All of which is beside my point that the basic thought experiment is far from impossible.
And yet wealthy and powerful people still opposed those rights, if only because it was a way to pander to their Know-Nothing suckers and distract them while they pick their pockets.
Given that we’ve observed you refusing to acknowledge other people’s lived experiences as valid over your own internet citations, fail to acknowledge why your “academic tone” (your words) of outsider judgement might be considered offensive when contradicting those experiences and you are judging others to be emotional, while pretendingthat you are being logical:
I think they have a point. You are checking all the boxes for condescension (and disingenuous if not sexist behavior): you have ignored or dismissed (not just in this topic, either) multiple women who have cited to you their actual expertise on the topic, in favor of your own opinions. You’ve claimed your opponents are just been “emotional” and you are bring logical and removed about the whole thing (which, incidentally, is easy when it doesn’t affect you – when it’s not your culture being misrepresented, not your research and expertise being dismissed by a guy using Wikipedia and quote repositories as their definitive sources). It’s not just your tone that has been condescending, it’s your behaviour.
If you want to flag this, you are free to, but you asked why multiple other posters found you to be patronizing. I am telling you why I do.
Also, responding to the history professor with a Wikipedia article is a bit mansplainy, is it not?
The burden of reaching understanding is primarily on the person doing the communicating, not on their audience.
When I was a kid the prevailing attitude of the US was very anti-homosexual. I picked up from my peers using the word “gay” as an insult. I learned better over time, but there was still that period where I was part of the crowd.
Looking at photos of the horrors of the violent reactions to the Civil Rights movement was a wake up call to a lot of Americans. But prior to that it was still an invisible issue to white people.
I like to think I would do the moral thing in that position, but who would I really be in 1955? The parents that raised me would be different, my peers would have been different, television and radio would have been different. This is why I think it’s impossible to know, a very abstract hypothetical. And you can call bullshit on that if you want, fair enough.
Some of the comments here are inferring ideas that I don’t hold and never intended, and it’s frustrating to address them all. There are aspects of history that I thought we all took for granted, and it’s not necessary to reference them every time.
When we say “Elvis” what are we talking about, the person, or the icon, and who decides what the icon represents? I think both are complicated and imperfect.
I would never flag this. And I am listening and learning. If I say “that a great quote” it’s because I really mean it not because I am being condescending. I recognize that I crossed the line in regards to other’s lived experiences and apologize to everyone here (and I already apologized privately to some people.)
I’m just not very good at this.
Pro Tip: Not getting doxxed for being “not very good at this” is the very essence of white privilege.
POC/LGBTQ+ get doxxed simply for relating lived experiences. You’re living in a bubble.
The thought experiment isn’t about children and adolescents but about adults. If you were for LGBTQ rights in 1995 and over age 25, chances are you would have been for civil rights for African-Americans if you were an American of the same age in 1955. The latter issue was as “invisible” to most white adults in 1955 as the former was to most heterosexual adults in 1995. Furthermore, anti-LGBTQ sentiment was still a pervasive and societally “acceptable” form of bigotry in 1995 to the degree that anti-black sentiment was in 1955.
Were you over 25 in 1995 (when TV and radio were just losing their dominance)? Were you opposed to same-sex marriage or did you support it? [these are rhetorical questions – don’t answer] There’s your very concrete and not-impossible thought experiment that will give you an idea of where you might have been in roughly similar circumstances 40 years earlier.
Only two more days until this total shitshow of a thread closes; thank fuck.
No, we can’t. So when someone says you are coming across as patronizing, it is in your best interests to re-evaluate how your tone could come off as patronizing.
We are lucky to have a diverse group of users who have self-identified as women here. Far more than most mutant-centric forums do. It would be wise to listen to them when they tell you how your words and actions may be construed as patronizing or dismissive, regardless of your intent.
Thanks.
A friend of mine joined Twitter but never ever commented, only followed people, he said “I just like hearing what people have to say.”
I will try that for a while.
I would like to offer individual apologies to @mindysan33 and @Melz2, though I imagine more are in order.
“If I have been unkind, I hope you can just let it go by.” --Leonard Cohen
My mother was born in the very early 50’s. She participated in Civil Rights activism. She’d be the first to tell you that a lot of people were racist and bigoted back then and that they were wrong… including some of the kindest members of her family while growing up. Ignorance has long been a convenient excuse for that generation and not much more. Reagan was straight up racist, so was the music industry, so was the way the music industry manufactured the phenomenon of Elvis, and so are a lot of people today. They could have known better at any point between now and then. Most of them didn’t and don’t want to. Personally, I’m sick of hearing the excuses.
I really don’t understand why you think it would make a difference if you had theoretically been a part of a time period, personally.
If you had been raised in a circus in the 1930s, you might have different views on tight-rope walking than you currently have. If you had been raised by Hells Angels, you might have completely different views on motorcycles and cocaine.
If you’re thinking that if you had been raised before the Civil Rights Movement you might have a different view of black people, well, OF COURSE YOU WOULD. That just means that you would have been raised in a different racist framework, it doesn’t mean the racism would have been in any way justifiable.
If you were raised in a 1950s Klan household, it wouldn’t be “you”, and that you would probably be a racist shit. If you were raised in a 1950s somehow-oblivious-to-race household, the fact that it was “invisible to you” wouldn’t mean there wasn’t systemic racism. (Setting aside that nobody in the 1950s was absolutely oblivious to race. The subject of this thread, Ronald Reagan, didn’t talk about gay people 99% of the time; do you think he didn’t know or think about them?)
Well, he certainly thought up enough ways to do them harm.
Not to mention his VP…
I’m laughing in a kinda horrified way.
Man, that second one with Poppy Bush is dark.
