Model the behavior you want to see in the world. Best practice.
People can’t fight injustice while making peanut butter sandwiches either, but that doesn’t mean the most effective thing to do is to complain about the time lost while making lunch.
It’s not a zero-sum game. People who talk about how one thing is kinda racist, aren’t stopping the world from ever deciding something else is also hella racist.
Well, in my view, this suggests that you would prefer we ignore subtle types of racism in favour of only looking at the worst types. You are even ignoring black people telling you that doing so is detrimental.
Which makes me wonder why you are so adamant that we not “waste our energies” looking at and calling out all types of racism instead of just your pet ones. Because, as has been pointed out, most of us are capable of caring about all of it.
This photo set-up and party were based around racist themes. This has been called out by multiple people, not just on BB. Just because you don’t find it it sufficiently offensive doesn’t mean it isn’t or that people aren’t being hurt.
And trying to reframe the conversation that way is a form of derailment.
Random people of privilege having the audacity to try to dictate how, when and/or why POC and other marginalized people discuss and care about acts of prejudice, bigotry and hatred is yet another tool of racist patriarchal oppression.
But white supremacists are working to disconnect slavery from race, using the myth of “Irish slaves” who were supposedly treated even worse than Black slaves, to argue that the problems affecting African-American communities are not a consequence of slavery or racism.
The racism then flows as these various groups of Neo-Nazis posit why whites can overcome a “worse” situation than blacks and “do not whine about it.” So the “get over it” racism that so often accompanies the meme is not about history at all. It goes much deeper than that. Their belief is that non-whites can’t move on due to racial inferiority or social pathology. So through false equivalence and erasure, they attempt to remove history as a determinant so that they can claim the current socioeconomic position and mass incarceration of black people in the U.S. is due to racial inferiority.
Hogan’s doing incredible work on the subject. A lot of the early debunkings from American writers suffered from not really knowing enough of the history on the Irish side. Which made them really easy to undermine. Basically reasserting the same misrepresentations about the Irish Diaspora that the myth seeks to plug up with falsehoods. And the Irish ones had the opposite problem.
But Hogan seems to have a really comprehensive understanding of all the different bits and pieces. And he’s very good at tying it all together and contextualizing it, especially on how deliberately and recently the current form of those claims were put together.
The actual racists seem to prefer to ignore him rather than trying to argue with his work. He’s supposedly working on a book about the subject.
(I hope it’s not against community rules for me to wish aloud that a wild pig would come along and bite a certain Edgar in the bum?)
And the problem with that is… ? I’m honestly not seeing a downside. They could all opt-in to the Howard Hughes lifestyle package, and my day-to-day existence would remain unchanged. They can all save their fingernail clippings, bottle their urine, and continue to collect their obscene paychecks until “the peasants” come knocking down the doors for all I care.
Ah, but see, terrible for whom? If you ask the racists, those were the salad days. MAGA, etc.
That’s it in a nutshell, really. They’re just all pouty and spouty because their salad days are over.
i think your interlocutor above is being deliberately and offensively obtuse. possibly in an effort to derail the entire thread.
Their first post was demanding we stop talking about the subject. So I won’t, I’ll just say that I think it is perfectly valid to discuss a critique of how facets of society glorify and glamorize the past in particular the past with regards to slavery. I think it is well within anyone’s rights and a valid use of media to question the images that surround them. I have not been dissuaded from that position by anything in this thread and I won’t be anytime soon because I know I have damned good reasons for having come to the conclusions I have. Still I think a sincere attempt at a derail for… reasons.
There are places in Europe where you can still by candy with Sambo characters and other racially questionable things on the wrappers. No models in big chairs though.
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