I’m sorry you are soaked in racism and sexism. I’m not, and I don’t believe you are qualified to make that statement about others, let alone everyone, but my (non-evidenced, ‘gut feel’) feeling is that both are wide spread and often hidden.
To state that 'everyone is , if they say they are not they don’t understand they are the ’ sounds more like some form of religious argument.
It also feels a little bit defeatist. If, no matter what people now do, say or act on, people are still misogynistic and/or racist, then it becomes pointless improving, does it not?
Anyway, of the two of us, only one of us knows anything about me. I stand by my statement.
It’s quite interesting with some of the commenters on BB where it’s not necessarily possible to tell the age, sex, race etc. from the name or icon (or ikon, in my case). A few of them have revealed information about themselves in the course of a later discussion and I’ve realised that I had imagined them as someone quite different the whole time. Usually it doesn’t really make any difference, but it sometimes makes me wonder if I would have taken what they said differently if my mental picture of them had been different. It shouldn’t really have any influence on most discussions, but it can show you where you are subconsciously saying “she’s a woman, so…” (for example). It’s also telling that I don’t tend to do much better than chance at guessing someone’s gender until they actually hint at it.
I guess the healthiest question to ask then is: Why?
I suspect, and this might be controversial, that SWM sees that some of these things, if they were to happen to him (indeed they may already have) would not bother him that much.
He realizes that there are legitimate (as he sees it) complaints and real racism/sexisms in the real world but may indeed believe that not every bad thing that happens to a person is caused by sexism/racism/homophobia (and he might have a point).
He may suspect that some people, having been treated with such fundamental lack of respect all their lives will easily conflate bad things that happen to him as caused by racism, even when not caused by it. (It COULD be true in some instances, but still misses the big picture).
If I were to be kind, I would say that the attempt to sympathize with people he sees are distressed comes off as misguided (It might be, I won’t be the judge of that) it certainly seems to be unwanted though.
I don’t want to demonize these attitudes, I get the feeling that it only makes the divide bigger, I will say that maybe, empathy would be better suited where sympathy seems to be on offer.
< /controversy >
That’s cause your only a pawn in their game and because you haven’t yet figured it out, you keep playing:
A South politician preaches to the poor white man
“You got more than the blacks, don’t complain.
You’re better than them, you been born with white skin,” they explain.
And the Negro’s name
Is used it is plain
For the politician’s gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game
Yep, generally ‘Not all men’ is a derailment, but in this case milliefink literally said all men are misogynist and all whites are racist. So not all men isn’t the derailment here, milliefinks comment is.
I must create a BoingBoing alt for myself that does not instantly expose my race and gender. Over time, I may be able to test the hypothesis of this thread.
Fair enough, I’ll leave the bait alone after that nibble and try to contribute something on topic.
One of the things I found interesting was that she didn’t change anything but the picture, still referred to herself as a black woman and talked about the same topics, but people still thought she was a white dude and treated her better. Even people who’d threatened, and abused her before at the same account, and people who’d clearly read what she posted.
What is it that makes the pic override what they read? Mikki Kendall even says none of the negative comments where racial, or gendered when she had a white man’s picture. Are the bigots using profile pictures to look for non-white-males to spew bile on or something?
It is so strange how this works. I’m straight, white, male, and was raised by a violently sexist and bigoted Rural Americoid, but even when I was a teenager my response to this experience was to become feminist and socially liberal. Still, when Americoids are attacked in anything more than an extremely generous way, some little part of me wants to rush to their defense. Sometimes I’m convinced that a big part of the draw for the Tea Party and the MRA movement and similar is something more like Stockholm syndrome than an overt urge for supremacy.
But then I remember that the media these folks choose to watch and browse is heavy on paranoia and nearly every shade of racism, sexism, and sexual bigotry dreamt up and refined for the media over the last four hundred years. So yeah, most of what they do is lazily parrot what they watch on TV or read on Infowars and Reddit: cynical, corporate-funded, bigoted garbage.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. And I can agree that it does seem that the different pictures lead to different outcomes, but I’m pretty sure that trying to understand a bigot is time that I won’t get back.
I had to put up with a couple years of really intense persecution from several directions at once. Not to go into any details, but pictures of me from that period are rather shocking because I looked like someone with a terminal disease. Anyway, at my lowest points, I could still say “Well if I were black, I’d probably think this was discrimination, but as a white guy I can be confident that all these people really just hate me for who I am as an individual.” But none of my troubles included police harassment, which isn’t the topic of this story, but a big factor in racism generally. So I am naive in that regard.
Have you ever taken, for example, Harvard’s implicit association tests?
Nope, I had never heard of them. I just had a look and did two of the tests, Gender-Science and Race. I have two results and two sore fingers. Quite a few on there I wouldn’t be able to do at all, Presidents, Native Americans, Weapons, Religions, etc.
I got moderate males in science bias and moderate affinity to African Americans bias.
Of course, it depends on the person and how much they’ve thought about it (also on the very incomplete and controversial science around what or if the “subconscious” even is).
But in this case, thatspecial was 100% correct that between him and milliefink, he’s the only one who knows anything about thatspecial. Of course, people like milliefink take comfort in the blind faith that they know we’re all sinners.
