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Yes. This has been going on for a while. There were several civil war statues of various generals that have been pulled down because of their politics at the ti
by davesmith1983 7y ago
Yes. This has been going on for a while. There were several civil war statues of various generals that have been pulled down because of their politics at the time.
They tried to do the same to the Statue of Cecil Roads which I believe is in Oxford University.
There is also ideas of "Colonial Science" or "White Science" which reminds me of movement of removing "Jewish" Science and Mathematics in preference to "Aryan Science" before World War II.
- mieseratte 7y ago> There is also ideas of "Colonial Science" or "White Science" which reminds me of movement of removing "Jewish" Science and Mathematics in preference to "Aryan Science" before World War II. The use of "White Privilege" really does remind me of the "Global Jewish Conspiracy." As if there exists a cabal we're all in on.
- 0815test 7y agoEven more directly, "White privilege" is simply a variation of "bourgeois privilege". The whole idea of "bourgeois privilege" however rephrased and antiquated "counterrevolutionary elements" as something that should be purged wholesale from society is something that goes at least as far back as the Cultural Revolution in China; knowing that, it's incredibly scary that anyone in the West is still taking these notions at face value!
- krapp 7y ago>Even more directly, "White privilege" is simply a variation of "bourgeois privilege". The whole idea of "bourgeois privilege" however rephrased and antiquated "counterrevolutionary elements" as something that should be purged wholesale from society is something that goes at least as far back as the Cultural Revolution in China; knowing that, it's incredibly scary that anyone in the West is still taking these notions at face value! Your comment seems to imply that the premise of "white privilege" should carry a connotation of "white genocide," and that anyone who accepts the former likely desires the latter. I certainly hope that was not your intent, if so you are very mistaken. White privilege simply means that white people benefit, however implicitly , from a society which was founded on white supremacist ideals. Or more abstractly, that the descendants of the people who stacked the deck of Western civilization in their favor may enjoy privileges that those against whom the deck was stacked may not. No sinister overtones of purges or mass murder need by applied, except by those with an agenda.
- 0815test 7y agoThis connotation is entirely your own reading. Both politically-motivated killings of the sort that may have occurred during the Cultural Revolution, and cultural cleansing no matter how destructive or how close in its goals to erasing any group's distinct cultural values or self-perceived "integrity" as people, are very clearly excluded from the most common definition of genocide as adopted by the United Nations. And while one could definitely make the case that the most rabid haters and vilifiers of so-called "whiteness" (not the same thing, strictly speaking, as "white privilege", which is part of a slightly less radical memeplex) are pursuing something practically indistinguishable from cultural cleansing as described above - and indeed, that this sort of hate and vilification is something we should be quite concerned about - that is, again, not genocide of any sort.
- davesmith1983 7y ago> White privilege simply means that white people benefit, however implicitly , from a society which was founded on white supremacist ideals. You know what it really is. It is called in Christianity "Original Sin". There is no such thing as a society founded on White Supremacist Ideals. The only one that did exist was Nazi German and we damn well made sure that the German's would never move back to that. We just happen to be living at a time after the largest Empire in History was run by a country that happened to be white. Would you be talking about Mongol privilege if we living in the time where the Mongol empire was at its height? It is a total nonsense concept that is used by racists to guilt trip white people.
- rjf72 7y agoAmerica was founded on white supremacist ideals? Catholics, Irish, Italians...? The vast majority of "white" groups had absolutely no power within society. Even for groups such as the British the vast majority were also rather less than reigning supreme. But slavery... For centuries peoples around the world enslaved one another. White enslaving white, brown enslaving brown, black enslaving black. Even within the US while the majority of owners of slaves were white, so was the majority of the entire population. In America there was also native Americans that owned slaves, blacks that owned slaves, and people of every color and type owning slaves. But then why were most slaves black? Europe was almost exclusively Christian and the church had long since forbade Christians enslaving Christians. And across the world there were various powerful empires forming. In the Mideast there was the Ottoman empire, China had the Qing dynasty, and so on. Then there was Africa: a disorganized, technologically underdeveloped people whom also had a thriving domestic slave trade already in place. Africans were not chosen to be slaves because of their skin color, they were chosen because their nations' lack of development left them susceptible. But I think we should go even further on slavery. In spite of the normalcy of the practice of slavery at the time, many of the founding fathers were actively working to see its end. Thomas Jefferson, indeed a slave owner by inheritance, had penned an explicit condemnation of slavery into the original draft of the constitution. However this was not workable when trying to form a union of states when some still endorsed it. It was stripped from the final revision. In its place we saw two things. The first was the addition of "all men are created equal", which was a fully self aware statement. The second was an agreement that the US would not federally ban slavery prior to 1808. Thomas Jefferson was the president who would effect a law in 1807 that would ban the slave trade on January 1st, 1808. [1] America, in spite of an extensive "need" of slavery, was also a very small player in it. About 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the new world, 10.7 million survived the voyage. How many were shipped to North America? 388k, less than 4%. [2] There are complex reasons for this, but our mixed relationship with slavery no doubt played a significant role. But perhaps you mean voting laws. Once again this was hardly an American institution. The idea of the masses being able to vote is something very new. The reason this was avoided in the past was to try to avoid demagoguery and corruption. What do I mean there? Our current president is a reality TV star who had no experience in politics. At one point it looked like he might be running against Oprah, a TV talk show host - with no experience, for the 2020 election. We are a living demonstration of the very reasons that nations feared letting people vote without condition. After downvoting this because... reasons, please do at least consider that not a single statement I've made here is false. It's quite dangerous when ideology becomes more influential than facts. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_Prohibiting_Importation_of_Slaves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_Prohibiting_Importation_of... [2] - https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/how-many-slaves-landed-in-the-us/ https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cr...
- archagon 7y agoAre you fucking kidding me? One is referring to a thoroughly researched imbalance of power in society, if used a bit callously in recent years. The other is an unfounded, racist conspiracy theory that lead to a genocide of six million people.
- anon12345690 7y agotheres no imbalance because of your race. check who the last president was please.
- 113 7y agoAre you saying racism doesn't exist because you elected Obama?
- davesmith1983 7y agoRacism obviously does exist, however if someone who isn't white can be elected to the highest office in a majority white country, one would think that the race of that person is irrelevant for the most part in the electorate's mind. I am sure you can find some KKK or Neo Nazi nutcases somewhere but they are few and far between. Somewhat of a person anecdote. Somewhat recently in the UK we had a new Princess. She was mixed race. I'd had seen a few pictures of her and wasn't even aware she was mixed race until the news and television kept on constantly mentioning the fact that she was mixed race (half black, half white I guess, I don't really care). Now of course I know because people wouldn't shut up about it.
- Spooky23 7y agoThe civil war generals thing is different. Traitors should not be honored, and the honor was put in place reinforce the ideals and make it clear that those ideals still ruled. That is, black people need to know their place. If someone wants to put up a statue of a confederate private soldier, who was kept poor by the exploitation of slaves in a feudal system, and answered the call and sacrificed anyway, that’s also different. And would say more about southern culture than the worship of Lee or a monster like Forrest. The content of your politics doesn’t change whether folks are assholes or not. People pushing for eliminating challenging art are feeding their ego first.
- 0815test 7y ago> Traitors should not be honored And that's precisely why those generals were being honored; to proactively show that, despite them being on the losing side, we would not be regarding them as traitors! This kind of thing used to be seen as an important part of peacefully reabsorbing and reconciling the South with the rest of the nation. It strikes me as incredibly foolish to renege on this deal today even as cultural divides within the country are widening to the point where they might essentially split it apart all over again. (Not on racial or ethnic lines however, but, loosely speaking, on ones pitting "elite intellectualism" against the "common man's good sense". And I say this while fully acknowledging that the latter is at least as flawed as the former.) > ...the ideals... That is, black people need to know their place. Not so. The Civil War was indeed "about" slavery in many ways, but the "confederate private soldier, who was kept poor by the exploitation of slaves in a feudal system, and answered the call and sacrificed anyway" you mention above would be able to tell you plenty of reasons why he was going to fight the Yankees with full conviction no matter what. Slavery and "keeping black people in their place" were important to the opportunistic elite of the South; but in the common man's view, what was being threatened to the point of wholly justifying their sacrifice was their culture and way of life. And this viewpoint is still one way that the war is understood in many parts of the South.
- dctoedt 7y ago> This kind of thing used to be seen as an important part of peacefully reabsorbing and reconciling the South with the rest of the nation. It strikes me as incredibly foolish to renege on this deal today .... Except the South reneged on the deal almost as soon as the war ended, violently suppressing and oppressing the formerly-enslaved.