Check Your Privilege Holocaust Survivors
I am not a tweeter by habit-but this is ridiculous (MSNBC). My favorite retweet-they got free healthcare and all!
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It should also be noted that many people in Latin America also attempt to immigrate to America in order to flee oppressive conditions in their home countries, but are blocked from doing so due to the current immigration policies of the United States, which weren't in place when Jews were fleeing Europe during WWII. There's a documentary called "Harvest of Empire" which goes into great detail about this:
Harvest of Empire Trailer:
http://vimeo.com/48145023
Harvest of Empire Website:
http://harvestofempiremovie.com/
I suspect there is truth to what he's saying. If the same people had arrived with dark skin, it might have made it even harder to succeed. It's really pointless, IMHO, though to focus on this. It's counterproductive to focus on some difficulty you can't do anything about.
An example I think of is my sexism. If I call a vendor and ask to speak to an engineer and I get a woman, I immediately suspect they put me through to someone not knowledgeable about electronics. This is VERY wrong. But once I realize the person is knowledgeable, I never think of it again. It's unfair that people have to overcome that with me. I try not to do it. it would be very counterproductive for people to focus how cheated they feel by my stupid sexist reaction. Focus on things you can fix. Most people don't mean to be sexist or racist and those who do it on purpose would be mean to you for some other reason.
What does this mean? I believe just focusing your disadvantages makes you less likely to succeed. It makes you think about things you can't change instead of things you can. I don't think very many people win consistently by focusing on their disadvantages.
According to Wikipedia, there were in excess of 300,000 Chinese immigrants. I don't think it much of a stretch to extrapolate that the other immigrants from the rest of Asia, India, and other areas of non-white skin color would number in excess of a million.
I hate the term. I am insulted by the term and I want people everywhere to stop using it. Save your rationale.
Where are these people who say it. It must be because I work with almost all males of European and Asian race.
You REALLY need to apply a little logic to your statements before you press the reply button...
I've never actually heard someone say it but it sounds like basic poisoning the well. I really reject it.
+1, as if anyone gives a whit, for explaining a controversial position.
So there is an answer to the problem of sexism: smack'upside the head with a stick a few times and recalibrate their world view.
Jan
*(unless someone has warned him)
I wouldn't want to have to kill you.
When shit hits the fan and people get upset is when other people have that same subconscious prejudice that you have, but unlike you, they are either unable or unwilling to examine their own thoughts and recognize the subconscious prejudice in their own minds. That's where the phrase "Check your privilege" comes from. Basically what it means is, "You have subconscious prejudices that you're not aware of, and you need to be more conscious of how those prejudices hurt others while benefiting you."
To go with the example you provided, the subconscious assumption that men are automatically more knowledgeable than women about electronics is a form of male privilege, and it negatively impacts women who really are technologically minded and skilled with computers. This often carries over to the workplace, where if the management of a company consists entirely of men, those men will tend to assume that skilled women are not actually skilled, or that they are less skilled than their male counterparts. As a result, those women are given less challenging assignments at work, and are often overlooked for promotions. When a man at such a company is told to check his privilege, this is what that's referring to. If people were more willing to recognize their own subconscious prejudices and make an effort to work on them, the world would be a much better place.
I’ll be damn if I will be impressed with a social movement that got it’s origins most likely from a late-night of reefer-smoking and Cheetos crunching.
Acknowledging the inherent differences in the sexes, both physically, mentally, and psychologically is not sexist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlKcbCsz...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRw5BxFT...
That's like saying there's no characteristic which is exclusive to humans or gorillas.
Thank you for the explanation for this check-your-privilege thing. I agree with your statement of the problem, but I'm very cautious about the cure. We sabotage ourselves if we focus on one shortcoming in our life: i.e. some physical disfigurement, having an abusive parent, being born poor, race, sex, a bogus ding on our professional license, having a baby at a young age, having a baby at an older age, etc" Those things really can have an unfair impact on your life. But focusing on them leads nowhere. If people are trying not to be racist, demanding people recognize their subconscious feelings of privilege isn't helpful for anyone. It actually might make the problem worse, even if all parties are trying act in good conscience. We waste so much time thinking about these things.
I know a female engineer who dark skinned and homosexual. When I first met her I was kind of overwhelmed in my own stereotypes. Very soon, however, I wasn't even thinking about these identity politics. There was a little bit of unfairness, though, in my thought process at the very beginning. There could have been similar unfairness toward someone born rich, who I might imagine got this far on their wealth rather than merit. Eventually you work with someone and past that nonsense. I am VERY cautious about intentionally focusing on what I disparagingly call "identity politics."
And if the women are less experienced than the men, they will be less skilled.
Acknowledging the differences in the sexes is not privilege.
"“When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.”"
I was born inside the U.S. to citizens also born here.
I had no choice of family nor nation.
when I turned 22, I took an oath to support and defend this nation, etc., as a military member.
from my point of view, the nation is my extended family. my family has decided to restrict membership via immigration laws. just as my wife and I restrict membership to our family. if we conceive a child or adopt, we are extending our arms to added members. this is a completely moral choice, as is the national choice to admit members -- and if our restriction were according to race (for adoption), it would be racist.
if the nation's "adoption" rules employ racism, then they are racist. If not, they are not. if the rules require that only producers be admitted, they are not racist. the nation may close its borders to immigration, just as a family may close itself to added members.
my oath, taken as I entered the USAF in '71, is tantamount to the oath which I believe every U.S. citizen should take, before receiving the benefits of living here as an adult. and, yes, this includes roads and bridges. if you don't want to take the oath, in english, then you must leave. pick a place, and go there. leave us alone.
my family hosted a swiss exchange student when I was in high school. he told me that every swiss citizen had to either serve in the military or else pay a lifetime tax. this is an alternative view -- take the oath or pay for life, so to speak.
yes, I was privileged, and I thank God for it. I volunteered to perform, in exchange, for 28 years. we should require that everyone receiving the privilege of U.S. citizenship contribute in response, or find a charity (NOT our government) for support. or leave. -- j
well, it's a thought. some would take it seriously. -- j
When it comes to the issue of immigration, the only non-racist position is support complete and totally open borders and free immigration to all, without any restrictions whatsoever. To endorse or advocate any other position is inherently racist. So when someone brags about how their grandparents came here LEGALLY, they are implying that they do not advocate or support open borders, which means that yes, they are, in fact, being slightly racist. Immigration control of any kind = white nationalism / white supremacy.
As for the twitter angst, the retweet by Touré does not seem to be suggesting that the holocaust survivors were beneficiaries of white privilege, because obviously they weren't. Rather, I interpret Touré's retweet as saying that the person who is posting under the twitter handle Dat's Racis' (.com) is speaking from a position of white privilege themselves, not that their grandparents benefited from white privilege.
Asserting immigration restrictions are racist is patently fallacious. Maphesdus needs to stop looking idiotic with the victim rhetoric.
The point that immigration should be open has a great deal of validity in a free market world. If you, Robbie, hypothetically ignore the welfare/socialist benefits bestowed by residency, I believe you would agree. Restricting immigration is a suboptimal economic condition (given our hypothetical world), and imposes costs even on residents, through higher prices, or reduced opportunities. This part I agree with Maphesdus on (though I hope I'm making it a little less inflammatory.)
HOWEVER, that position, if unqualified like Maphesdus' does (though he later suggests modified conditions), ignores the reality that residency DOES grant benefits, and therefore costs on current residents. So, the reality is that these benefits to immigrants should be mitigated. Reduction in overall benefits would be favored by us on this site, but alternatives exist. All the exceptions and special cases need codification (e.g. The $100k phd from India probably gets full benefits, the unemployed Swiss partying all day doesn't).
Do we have common ground? Maph?
And nations do not need to prevent people from entering the country in order to maintain their so-called "national sovereignty." A government can function perfectly well without tracking every single individual who wants to reside within its borders.
You have the strangest collection of positions lol.
It has courthouses; it has businesses; it has utilities. It has homes It's not a club, it's a community. An extended tribe.
Why would a "club" be any more righteous in controlling who enters a region under their control than a nation?
As for jobs and cheaper labor, the free market should determine how much people get paid for any particular job. To "protect" jobs from cheaper labor is to interfere in the free market.
And yes that is why they have border control, so they can interfere with the free market. That's what I meant when I said they use border control for economic reasons.
Stop calling everyone who supports border control racist.
Our rules aren't racist. It's not our fault that the invasion vector is from Latino countries.
An immigrant, by implication, is seeking to join the culture of the place to which he migrates.
Illegal alien invaders have, for the past 30+ years, invaded the U.S. with the intent of keeping their failed culture and making it dominant, and siphoning off all the largesse they can.
At least twice in history such invasions took place. The Germanic invasion of Rome, and the Mexico/central/south America invasion of the U.S.
Where you get the idea that an invasion requires a *military* force I have no idea. May I introduce you to the concept of a dictionary?
When a doctor performs an invasive procedure, does he call in Seal Team Six?
As for your examples, I don't know anything about any Germanic invasion of Rome, but I will assert that the Latino presence in the United States is most certainly NOT an invasion, and to label it as such is racist.
And you oppose property rights.
Why am I not surprised?
Milton Freedman , a somewhat smart and of slight libertarian view, economic authority, has a great YouTube video on this subject http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3eyJIbSgdSE...
Borders should never keep people IN; that I'll agree with. But civilization wouldn't be possible without the definition and establishment of borders.
http://www.galtsgulchonline.com/posts/7c...
It's nice to hear, though, that Maph, like me, has no problems with the European conquest of the N. American continent...
The Romans could have treated the Britons better; the Germans could have treated the French better. The Zulus could have treated everybody better. The Apaches could have treated the Cheyenne better.
It is a leftist myth that the Europeans who came to American were particularly evil, cruel and/or unique in their behavior. The only difference, morally, between the behavior of American colonists and the behavior of any other culture or civilization, *including* those of the American aborigines, was that the colonists were technologically incredibly more advanced than the stone-age cultures of N. America.
Hmm... somebody doesn't know what "race" is...
Yes, regulating who can come into and out of a nation is extremely nationalist. What is your point?
From wikipedia:
–––––––––––––––––––––––
The shorthand Nazi was formed from the first two syllables of the German pronunciation of the word "national" (IPA: [na-tsi̯-o-ˈnaːl]).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism#Etym...
–––––––––––––––––––––––
For a more in depth philosophical analysis of Nazism/Nationalism, I suggest you watch this video:
Slavoj Žižek on Jaws and Fascism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQHoGwnX...
By the way, illegal immigrants actually don't receive any welfare. There are many Hispanic people on welfare, yes, but they are legal immigrants, not illegal ones. Getting on welfare requires a social security number, which an illegal immigrant wouldn't have.
This was the lab that also taught me about prejudice and glass ceilings. Most of the Latino techs working there were very bright - I suspect that they might have been doctors under other circumstances. One of them, the microbiologist, spoke some English and was working his way through college...he might even have made it through the glass ceiling.
Jan
Would the same thing be true for policing? I say no because someone who doesn't pay still receives the benefit of policing. Suppose we find that we could get some of the benefits of policing from a well-design welfare or education program. It seems like everyone should have to contribute to that too. Otherwise we arrive that absurd (IMHO) position that it's okay to use gov't to solve a problem if the solution involves guns and clubs but not if it involves food and education.
I agree, though, overall I'd like less gov't focus to solve problems. If it would work, I'd rather have voluntary contributions and just live with some free riders who don't pay their way.
And you are mistaken that illegal immigrants do not receive government payments. You are also incorrect that it is impossible for an illegal immigrant to obtain a social security number. Whether that number is valid or not is another issue.
It's all a question of value systems...
Y'think that method should be legal?
Let's apply this open border rule Maph wants to apply to the country to... say.. your house...
There's an old story, dunno if it's true, about a border patrol agent. Every weekend, he'd see this guy drive his white Cadillac into Mexico. The guy just... looked suspicious. He knew the guy was up to something.
He'd stop the guy and search his car top to bottom, search the guy, his baggage... nothing.
Years later, the border patrol agent retired. He took a vacation to a small seaside Mexican town, and there, sitting at a cafe, was the Cadillac man.
So the agent sits down beside him and says, "I don't know if you remember me, but years ago, I was a border patrol agent. Every weekend you'd come down to Mexico and I'd search your car. I was *certain* you were smuggling something, but, man you sure beat me."
The other man smiled and said, "I was smuggling something. I was smuggling white Cadillacs..."
And I first heard this back when most places in the U.S. didn't have much in the way of "automotive standards" and cars still burned leaded gasoline...
You need an SS number to get a job, too. This is why "identity theft" has been one of the fastest growing crimes.
They don't need SSN to use the emergency room, and they buy and "creatively acquire" SSN, driver licenses and other required documentation.
I know, I used to sit and eat lunch listening to illegals trade recipes on ways of milking the system...
Seriously, you think just anybody should be allowed to wander into the Gulch?
BTW, my reading is Toure was saying DR's grandparents benefitted from "white privileged" once they arrived in the US. DR responded with a display of fake indignation that anyone would suggest a holocaust survivor ever benefited from any privilege.
This is as unhealthful as me speculating if I could have won a project if I were taller.
But given how this whole situation has kind of blown up, I'm sure we'll be getting an official statement from MSNBC in the next day or two. We'll just have to wait until then.
The new Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness:
http://www.kropfpolisci.com/racial.justi...
And I can disprove your misconceptions about affirmative action, as well. The claim that affirmative action discriminates against white people is a popular myth among conservatives, but that's all it is. A myth.
White Student Suing to Overthrow Affirmative Action Was Too Dumb to Get Into Her Chosen College:
http://gawker.com/5991588/the-white-stud...
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-02...
Though I would point out that case this does not appear to involve any detrimental impact on white people, which is generally the typical right-wing argument against affirmative action. When we've had debates on this issue in the past, you've stated that Asians didn't ever complain about their civil rights being violated. And now here you are presenting me with an article about an Asian-American complaining about his civil rights being violated. Don't you think that's interesting? I think that's very interesting... ;)
I didn't think so.
A couple of anthropologists are studying an alien culture on another planet. The planet grows trees miles high, and the aliens live along the tree branches and in the trunks.
What makes the aliens worth studying is that they are the most extremely sexist species imaginable. Literally, the males live on their side as homosexuals, and the females live on their side as lesbians. To cross the line would result in a very... very ugly death. Once a year or so, they'd be forced to get together to make babies, and for those who participated, that was the end of their sex lives. They became untouchables.
So, one day the male anthropologist, we'll call him Hamby Flagg because that was his name, saw something he shouldn't have seen and lived to talk about. A messenger had come from another tree (to each tribe, there was no world beyond their own tree); his hair was plucked out and he was quite dead.
So all the Lemmits (the aliens) went on a forced trek... and they came to where one of the trees was about to collapse. The Lemmits being studied pushed the members of the other tribe off the branches one by one. And then the other tree collapsed.
Because they had witnessed this, the humans were not permitted to return to the tree. They were blocked from going higher in the tree (which they needed to do to be retrieved), and had to go down down the tree to the ground level.
Where they discovered the cause of the trees' deaths... working for thousands of years, a race of giants were trying to cut down each tree with stone tools.
Running from these creatures, the humans stumbled upon the ruins of a civilization.
They escape and climb up another tree to be rescued.
The Lemmits had kept the giants as slaves, and one day there was a rebellion and the Lemmits were driven to the trees. Their guilt was so great, that they committed genocidal-suicide. They were slowing dying off, hundreds of generations later, with no one on either side remembering the reasons for the hate or the guilt each subsequent generation still felt.
Yes, caucasian-Americans remind me of that, because I see them, driven by a guilt I don't feel, destroying everything they built in the name of an unassuageable, phantom guilt.
It was Neal Barrett who wrote it.
Anyway, his lawyer has his crewmen take the stand one by one, and asks each of them to state his name and race.
For example, the chief engineer, Ernie Pryce (developer of the Stirling-Pryce hot-air engine), answers, "My name is Ernie Pryce, and my race is Ernie Pryce."
The point the lawyer makes is that each one is, genetically, unique. As I said, the whole scene needs work, but I'm trying to use it to exemplify Rand's "the smallest minority..." quote.
Let me tell you a story you won't like (don't worry, I won't be vulgar).
I guess I understand human nature better than most people, because I don't blind myself to the "dark side". I guess that, because I see things coming decades before pretty much everybody else. So I get to spend decades being derided and insulted... until it's too late.
Back in the 1970s, might have been earlier, you started seeing black, male celebrities start complaining about the term "boy" being applied to adult black men. I thought this reasonable.
In movies like, "In the Heat of the Night" (I think that was one of them) it was made a propaganda issue.
I thought at the time, "Fine, black, adult men shouldn't be called boy. But, I'll be damned if I'll let them start calling ME 'boy' in reparation..."
Not more than a few years later, you started hearing, in movies and television shows, at first applied to teenaged white males, "white boy". In recent years, although unmistakably mature physically, I've been referred to as "white boy", without an eyebrow being raised. This was long after seeing it used in movies, television, advertising...
The point being, perhaps the Jewish people should have raised hell about being persecuted before their wealth was stripped from them and they were herded off to death camps?
So, you keep sneering at the idea of Caucasians and Christians being persecuted while the persecution is still in its embryonic stage. But then remain silent when the death camps first appear as re-education camps.
At least the death camps of WWII weren't run by Jews...
― Warren Buffett
And Christians aren't being persecuted in America, they're being told to stop engaging in persecution. To say that oppressors and their victims are morally equivalent is moral nonsense.
No one is saying the oppressor and their victims are morally equivalent; I do see people saying that those accused of oppression... aren't engaged in oppression.
For example: refusing service to a particular group of people because your religion tells you those people are sinners? Oppression. Verbally harassing your coworker(s) and/or employees because you don't like the group they belong to? Oppression. Firing an employee who decides to come out of the closet? Oppression. Evicting a tenet from an apartment because you disagree with their choice of partner? Oppression. Passing legislation which forbids people from getting married if they disagree with your religion's definition of marriage? Oppression.
It all depends on context.