Since that example of that element of White Culture apparently merits Very Concerned Nitpickery, I hereby replace it with this classic example:
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Broken one-box on your link, but it works. Yup, that’s a classic. “Finding” stuff in a store is just the white thing to do.
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Regardless, one looks whiter than the other.
They could be fraternal twin brothers, and I’d still bet you the whiter looking one would get treated better.
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Right? In society at large – and in terms of how journalists might write about yourself – what matters in terms of race is how you’re perceived. Not whatever your racial makeup actually is (or supposedly is).
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Oh well I’ll get my paint chart out.
You’re not another one of those people who “doesn’t see race”, are you?
Racial colorblindness is very much White Culture.
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Yes I can see their skin colours.
But the colour of Ayoub Majdouline’s skin was not the point I was making.
What was yours in claiming that it was regardless?
White culture too?
De facto segregation of many kinds still IS a thing tho.
Just scratch under the skin of a white parent a bit to find out what the idea of a “good school” really means for them.
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Now I feel bad for using the stick, so that the people in front of me don’t have to pay for my shit?
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Meh. That meme seems more metaphorical than literal.
I don’t know if people who aren’t white actually use it any less.
Calling all ethnographers, we need a study!
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Metal shows in the US are pretty damn white, but there’s no mandate. Everyone is welcome!
There is some notable commercially viable bands with POC, though. But they are sparse and most of the ones I can think of are B and C listers. (Dream Theater, Metallica are the A-listers)
Fun fact: Google Image Search for “Black Metal Singers” does not bring up the kinds of people you think it would. lol
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Precisely.
Without understanding the background and the narrative to the story (the murder of another young black boy by stabbing in London in a rash of such deaths) you might assume that the right wing press were using their paint chart, and I have no wish to support or defend them, but that assumption could be incorrect (in this case).
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Metro is owned by the Daily Mail group. No surprise there.
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I created this thread and then mostly sat back to read rather than being in the conversation. This is one that has really gotten to me. The tl;dr is, yeah, fucking white people and their segregated schools, but I’m going to write the long version here.
I was not exactly pleased when I found out about my school zoning. This (scale) diagram explains why:
We are just close enough to the school we are zoned for to not qualify for busing, and the city bus stop to get there is literally right across the street from the closest school to our home. Walking my kids out to wait for a city bus while looking across the street at the school that I was zoned for when I moved into the place I live felt a little like being mocked. Plus this was going a really inconvenient direction for my morning commute and would have caused some doubling back. And of course I was extra annoyed by all of this because when I moved to where I live the zoning would have put my kids in the school across the park bu that had changed since.
This is a problem of extreme privilege. The bus I’d be taking my kid to school on if we went to our zoned school comes about every ten minutes at peak times. I could connect to a street car to get to work, which is worse than the subway but we’re talking about adding 15-20 minutes, not hours. People do much more than this to get their kids to school.
And then I’m even more privileged to have other options. We are allowed to ask for French immersion. There are alternative schools. There are options and we considered them.
When my oldest was getting old enough to live daycare and move on to kindergarten I’d often have conversations with other parents about what we were doing with our kids next year. It’s what people talked about. My participation in conversations is a sort of mimicry where I act like I think a normal person would act. So I lamented our zoning situation. And the people I spoke to sympathized with me.
Toronto is not a very ghettoized city. The school across the park is not all white kids, the one I’m zoned for is not all black kids. But my zoned school is one with a disproportionately large black population.
Mostly when people talk about good and bad schools they talk about ranking from the Frasier Institute, a right-wing think-tank that publishes school rankings based on standardized tests. I can’t help but feel they mostly wouldn’t trust right-wing think-tanks to tell them anything else in their lives.
But no matter how people tried to talk their way around it, it felt like they were talking in code for wanting to send their kids to white school (well, more like less-black school). Of course to them I’d done the same thing. In their mind sending your kid to a good school is far too important a decision to make based on your commute (in their minds, honestly another way I’m super privileged is that I can have faith in the public schools). And they are right because even my commute-based reasons encode racism in them. We live in a racist society, so race correlates with wealth, which says where you can live, which says which schools are better for your morning commute. There’s a lot of probability involved in getting down to my specific case, but the pattern of white neighborhoods having white schools that are on the way to white jobs is one that will show up in the data.
So the comment about scratching the surface of white parents really speaks to me. I really felt like by bringing up school zoning (which seems like a very light scratch) I would end up giving people permission to speak (in coded language, probably often in ways they didn’t consciously recognize) about how we don’t want our kid going to school with black children (and how we wouldn’t want our kid going to school with Indigenous children if we remembered that Indigenous people existed) and we’ll find any rationalization to accomplish that.
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Yes, exactly (and to the rest of your post – thanks for sharing your situation). I think part of white culture, or an example or manifestation of it, is acting in racist ways while pretending, even to oneself, that you’re not doing so. And also while “rationalizing” that one is doing what they’re doing for other reasons instead.
I can see why you don’t want to call this situation out as a pattern of parental behavior grounded in racism. Still, as I said above, it would be brave, and revealing, while speaking with other white people to label things that are white seemingly (seemingly) by default with that word, “white.”
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This is probably not new to anyone here, but it is worth reading anyways…
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It was new to me.
Thank you for sharing the link!
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