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Did you read the piece?
by Kinnard 9y ago
Did you read the piece?
- ameister14 9y agoI did, and it was interesting to see that its author coined such a term 'white fragility'- it is almost as if they were deliberately working to provoke reactions that would reinforce the fundamental thesis of the paper. There are a lot of assumptions in this paper, and it makes statements based on those assumptions as if they are simply obviously true. It's not terribly well put-together or convincing if you don't initially agree with the statement the author is making, and it feels like it was written solely for the consumption of people who already possess the proper mindset and beliefs. For example, they take the sourced statement that 'good neighborhood' is coded language for 'white' and then apply that to all things. (Also, I looked into the source for that and it's much more complicated than this paper makes it appear, and does not in fact only mean 'white.') >The quality of white space being in large part measured via the absence of people of color (and Blacks in particular) is a profound message indeed, one that is deeply internalized and reinforced daily through normalized discourses about good schools and neighborhoods. I don't agree that this is a daily or normalized discourse. Do you often find yourself talking in veiled terms about how good the schools are in your area? I also noticed that it was extremely class-biased, effectively linking wealth and race so that they appear to work hand in hand and yet also displaying fundamental misconceptions about what 'normal' is, at least in the US. For example, the author seemed to assume that all white men go to college, when in reality it's closer to 30%.