6 ms·

So you're basically saying black people should just accept racism is a thing and move on? If people can, good for them. If not, I don't feel in any position to

by gns24 6y ago

So you're basically saying black people should just accept racism is a thing and move on? If people can, good for them. If not, I don't feel in any position to tell people that obsessing over injustices that I'm not experiencing makes zero sense.

aphextron 6y ago
>"So you're basically saying black people should just accept racism is a thing and move on?" What is the alternative? That's the point. I, as a single individual, can't spend my extremely finite time and resources howling at the moon and railing against a monolithic machine that cares nothing for justice or humanity. I can only try to live my life as effectively as possible within the bounds of our current reality. The civil rights movement won us equality under the law. But expecting the same tactics to result in social equality is a pipe dream.
- munchbunny 6y ago
  > But expecting the same tactics to result in social equality is a pipe dream. Someone had to try, and someone has to try. Same tactics, or different tactics, whatever. Try things, do more of what works. We have to split our time between ourselves and our communities. Growing up as an immigrant Chinese person, "life is unfair, so you have to try harder than the white person" was what I was taught and what I did. It worked for my parents, to an incomplete extent, and it worked for my cohort of immigrants/ABC's, to a somewhat greater extent. However, that same community today is wrestling with the problem that without unified political action in local/state/national politics, it won't get much better than being a model minority, which is to say it's a more privileged existence than being black is (sorry for the bluntness), but you're still acutely aware of your Asian-ness in other people's eyes and when it works against you, such as being co-opted into the message of "well why don't [minority group] just work harder like [model minority group]?" as a distraction from actually talking about addressing root causes.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
    > it won't get much better than being a model minority, which is to say it's a more privileged existence than being black is (sorry for the bluntness), As an Asian, I actually think that Asians are more privileged than White people. As a group we earn more, have better life expectancy, and have to deal with less historical baggage. If you search for it, any group can find areas where they feel they are being mistreated, but on the whole, your parents’ strategy has succeeded spectacularly. I think this is in part, because it was a win-win strategy. We were able to make our lives better without making another race feel bad or making their lives worse. Nobody had to lose for us to win.
    - ithinkinstereo 6y ago
      What? No, Asians are definitely not more privileged than Whites (in western society). You're conflating socioeconomics with race. And how do Asians have less historical baggage? Many Asian countries have a history of being colonialized and being exploited.
    - rovolo 6y ago
      US Immigration policy prefers high socioeconomic migrants (after the 1965 immigration reform bill). Since most Asians have immigrated to the US since 1965, of course Asians as a group will have higher economic status than the average American. The question is whether you have better outcomes controlling for parental socioeconomic status. Census Date: Total US Asian population 1970: 1.5M 1980: 3.5M 1990: 7.2M 2000: 10.6M 2010: 15.2M 2020 (proj): 19.7M https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_demographics_of_the_United_States#Historical_data_for_all_races_and_for_Hispanic_origin_(1610%E2%80%932010) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...
      - analyst74 6y ago
        I remember there was an Soc119 class discussed that after controlling for education, asians actually make less than both whites and blacks. If you pick the cream of the crop from Asia, they are going to do well even if you kick them down a peg.
- oivey 6y ago
  Of course you, as an individual, can spend your finite resources to rail against the machine. That is what the civil rights movement was. Passively just being a better person is demonstrably not enough to effect change.
- BoorishBears 6y ago
  > can't spend my extremely finite time and resources howling at the moon and railing against a monolithic machine that cares nothing for justice or humanity This is not an argument in good faith. You can stand against racism without "howling at the moon", this is almost a dog whistle at this point for people saying that not standing for racism means being loud and brash, as if black people don't know any other way to stand tall. It's legitimately sad to see one of my own people use it. You don't need to be chanting at a protest on the lawn of the White House to not "accept racism". It's a valid form of standing tall, but realistically, not everyone can, or is willing to do that. But turning down opportunities with parties don't show any effort at all at diversity (or even worse, show racial bias), being willing to put people on the spot for their actions even if it comes at personal risk or embarrassment, being willing to actively advocate for diversity in cases where you have power to do so. There are so many ways at a personal level to not just accept the state of things that are not "all consuming", to act otherwise means you're not even interested in having a genuine conversation on the matter, and just comes as an attempt at post-hoc rationalization of giving up.
kaitai 6y ago
To try to make more explicit a point I tried to approach earlier: A Black person can't just crucify themselves over injustice in the world and thus fail to get all their own mission done and expect it to accomplish what was desired. Going back to mathematics, my own original world, I saw Black mathematicians being overloaded with mentorship responsibilities and education responsibilities and speaking responsibilities and recruitment responsibilities and and and, and oh yeah the research they're actually evaluated on! So this great mathematician spends all her time in the committees and recruitment and teaching classes and organizing outreach... and then fails to get tenure because her publication record isn't strong enough (only three papers! and with collaborators, so she probably didn't do the work, right, she's doing so much else how could she have had the time?), and then has to look for another job. While the white guy who didn't do any education or recruitment or outreach published five crappy papers (with collaborators) and got tenure. That Black mathematician's responsibility is her own survival and success. Her own survival and success is more valuable to the world than teaching freshman calculus this year, because if she gets tenure, she can teach freshman calc another year. "I don't live in a world where fairness is an option," is a fair statement. If she tries to change it alone, she fails and burns out. What was the benefit of that? What was the gain? So the rest of us (for any given value of 'us') ought to step up.
- idjango 6y ago
  I'd step in as black guy coming from what I'd qualify as a priviledged background in Africa. So I don't think I can really understand the issues for black communities in America. But in my opinion, what is lacking for black communities is usually a global community strategy that free individuals energy by showing some beaten track they can easily use to reach the position people before them reached and build over this to move higher. Sometimes I have the feeling that black people fight the wrong fight. You can't ask for change without power and in today world it means capital. Black as a "race" is more than 1 billion individuals that's enough to foster anything important for the community as a whole. I don't know for the US but for France very few black people support black initiatives. They usual answer is that they'll do it when they earn more but we all know that money is never enough... In a world where your real voting power is your dollars this can't work. Asians understood this maybe instinctively. You have to build a working community first (paths for education, culture, jobs, households...) so that any average black person get a "good environment" to nurture its growth so he can become a good, balanced, caring adult. The strategy so far was to publicly and politically fight (which is good) but after each protest the individuals are back to their own struggles with little to no help or care from other black people (again as a community). If everyone cares only for it's own issues it won't work. Our role is to educate young black people. Tell them how the world is but also show them that they have a functional place in it and that they can start to build it from elementary school!
stronglikedan 6y ago
> black people should just accept racism is a thing and move on That's exactly what's being said to white people right now, and as a white person, I don't think that any race should accept it. The current dilemma is that apparently not accepting racism towards white people, as a white person, seems to make me racist somehow. Go figure.
munchbunny 6y ago
> So you're basically saying black people should just accept racism is a thing and move on? Personal opinion: yes, but also no. I think this is a false dichotomy. As an individual, day to day, what can you do about the systemic issues? Not much. Maybe confront someone every now and then to improve things for a friend or coworker. But, for yourself, the only thing you can do is to accept that you have a shitty hand and do the best you can with it. The hand you have is the hand you have, arguing that it should be better won't make it better. However, year by year, the reality is that there is a systemic problem, and when a whole population all have a shitty hand to play, statistically you're going to expect worse outcomes. If you let yourself get crushed by the weight of the systemic issues, you're not going to be in any condition to help others, but if you don't do anything about the systemic problem, then future success stories of people like you will continue to be statistical anomalies. So take care of yourself, and then try your best to help the people that come after you.
- tomjakubowski 6y ago
  > As an individual, day to day, what can you do about the systemic issues? Not much. This is precisely why activists organize groups of people: so that they may act together and stand a chance of effecting change. Historically, with large enough organization, it has worked pretty well at times.
  - munchbunny 6y ago
    I completely agree, and I'm grateful there are activists to organize these efforts. Since this is such a sensitive topic, I think I need to elaborate a bit more on the individual vs. systemic perspective. When I was growing up, I was told that the game is rigged against me, and I was going to have to dig deep. I had to make peace with the idea that, for example, I needed better SAT scores for the same college applications. (I didn't pick the example for its severity, I picked it because it's a measured phenomenon.) That's just the reality of racism/sexism/ageism/whatever. That's the individual perspective: game's rigged against you, deal with it. But where this line of thinking becomes racist is when, for example, one of the Chinese immigrant parents in my community asks "why don't black people just work harder?" How do you know how hard they work? If it was just about working harder, the problem would be solved by now. In that case saying that black people should work harder comes from a place of ignorance of the real problems, which proves the point that it's important to make noise about systemic problems. That's the systemic perspective. I don't think either point has to invalidate the other, but I've personally experienced both people saying "work harder" as a form of victim-blaming out of ignorance as well as people blaming personal failings on the system holding them down, and everything in between including real role models who are just venting. So I tend to just keep my mouth shut about it in my personal life.
cal5k 6y ago
Nope. I'm saying that if I had children, I'd tell them the above. I'd argue it's ultimately a much more effective way to combat racism/bigotry/whatever, unless you accept the Critical Race Theory definition of racism, which I do not. The military is probably the best evidence that this works. They take black, white, hispanic, and Asian Americans and put them through rigorous training together. In the end, nobody gives a crap what the other people look like or where they came from - they're your brothers and sisters and you trust them with your life. Dehumanizing people, calling them out, invoking the mob, getting people fired... these are all tactics that are doomed to stoke animosity, not reduce it.
manfredo 6y ago
I think they're using "accept" to convey "come to terms with the fact that it exists" not accepting it as an inevitable part of society. You can accept that racism exists, but still actively try to mitigate or reduce it.

by gns24 6y ago

aphextron 6y ago

>"So you're basically saying black people should just accept racism is a thing and move on?" What is the alternative? That's the point. I, as a single individual, can't spend my extremely finite time and resources howling at the moon and railing against a monolithic machine that cares nothing for justice or humanity. I can only try to live my life as effectively as possible within the bounds of our current reality. The civil rights movement won us equality under the law. But expecting the same tactics to result in social equality is a pipe dream.

munchbunny 6y ago
> But expecting the same tactics to result in social equality is a pipe dream. Someone had to try, and someone has to try. Same tactics, or different tactics, whatever. Try things, do more of what works. We have to split our time between ourselves and our communities. Growing up as an immigrant Chinese person, "life is unfair, so you have to try harder than the white person" was what I was taught and what I did. It worked for my parents, to an incomplete extent, and it worked for my cohort of immigrants/ABC's, to a somewhat greater extent. However, that same community today is wrestling with the problem that without unified political action in local/state/national politics, it won't get much better than being a model minority, which is to say it's a more privileged existence than being black is (sorry for the bluntness), but you're still acutely aware of your Asian-ness in other people's eyes and when it works against you, such as being co-opted into the message of "well why don't [minority group] just work harder like [model minority group]?" as a distraction from actually talking about addressing root causes.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  > it won't get much better than being a model minority, which is to say it's a more privileged existence than being black is (sorry for the bluntness), As an Asian, I actually think that Asians are more privileged than White people. As a group we earn more, have better life expectancy, and have to deal with less historical baggage. If you search for it, any group can find areas where they feel they are being mistreated, but on the whole, your parents’ strategy has succeeded spectacularly. I think this is in part, because it was a win-win strategy. We were able to make our lives better without making another race feel bad or making their lives worse. Nobody had to lose for us to win.
  - ithinkinstereo 6y ago
    What? No, Asians are definitely not more privileged than Whites (in western society). You're conflating socioeconomics with race. And how do Asians have less historical baggage? Many Asian countries have a history of being colonialized and being exploited.
  - rovolo 6y ago
    US Immigration policy prefers high socioeconomic migrants (after the 1965 immigration reform bill). Since most Asians have immigrated to the US since 1965, of course Asians as a group will have higher economic status than the average American. The question is whether you have better outcomes controlling for parental socioeconomic status. Census Date: Total US Asian population 1970: 1.5M 1980: 3.5M 1990: 7.2M 2000: 10.6M 2010: 15.2M 2020 (proj): 19.7M https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_demographics_of_the_United_States#Historical_data_for_all_races_and_for_Hispanic_origin_(1610%E2%80%932010) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...
    - analyst74 6y ago
      I remember there was an Soc119 class discussed that after controlling for education, asians actually make less than both whites and blacks. If you pick the cream of the crop from Asia, they are going to do well even if you kick them down a peg.
oivey 6y ago
Of course you, as an individual, can spend your finite resources to rail against the machine. That is what the civil rights movement was. Passively just being a better person is demonstrably not enough to effect change.
BoorishBears 6y ago
> can't spend my extremely finite time and resources howling at the moon and railing against a monolithic machine that cares nothing for justice or humanity This is not an argument in good faith. You can stand against racism without "howling at the moon", this is almost a dog whistle at this point for people saying that not standing for racism means being loud and brash, as if black people don't know any other way to stand tall. It's legitimately sad to see one of my own people use it. You don't need to be chanting at a protest on the lawn of the White House to not "accept racism". It's a valid form of standing tall, but realistically, not everyone can, or is willing to do that. But turning down opportunities with parties don't show any effort at all at diversity (or even worse, show racial bias), being willing to put people on the spot for their actions even if it comes at personal risk or embarrassment, being willing to actively advocate for diversity in cases where you have power to do so. There are so many ways at a personal level to not just accept the state of things that are not "all consuming", to act otherwise means you're not even interested in having a genuine conversation on the matter, and just comes as an attempt at post-hoc rationalization of giving up.

kaitai 6y ago

To try to make more explicit a point I tried to approach earlier: A Black person can't just crucify themselves over injustice in the world and thus fail to get all their own mission done and expect it to accomplish what was desired. Going back to mathematics, my own original world, I saw Black mathematicians being overloaded with mentorship responsibilities and education responsibilities and speaking responsibilities and recruitment responsibilities and and and, and oh yeah the research they're actually evaluated on! So this great mathematician spends all her time in the committees and recruitment and teaching classes and organizing outreach... and then fails to get tenure because her publication record isn't strong enough (only three papers! and with collaborators, so she probably didn't do the work, right, she's doing so much else how could she have had the time?), and then has to look for another job. While the white guy who didn't do any education or recruitment or outreach published five crappy papers (with collaborators) and got tenure. That Black mathematician's responsibility is her own survival and success. Her own survival and success is more valuable to the world than teaching freshman calculus this year, because if she gets tenure, she can teach freshman calc another year. "I don't live in a world where fairness is an option," is a fair statement. If she tries to change it alone, she fails and burns out. What was the benefit of that? What was the gain? So the rest of us (for any given value of 'us') ought to step up.

idjango 6y ago
I'd step in as black guy coming from what I'd qualify as a priviledged background in Africa. So I don't think I can really understand the issues for black communities in America. But in my opinion, what is lacking for black communities is usually a global community strategy that free individuals energy by showing some beaten track they can easily use to reach the position people before them reached and build over this to move higher. Sometimes I have the feeling that black people fight the wrong fight. You can't ask for change without power and in today world it means capital. Black as a "race" is more than 1 billion individuals that's enough to foster anything important for the community as a whole. I don't know for the US but for France very few black people support black initiatives. They usual answer is that they'll do it when they earn more but we all know that money is never enough... In a world where your real voting power is your dollars this can't work. Asians understood this maybe instinctively. You have to build a working community first (paths for education, culture, jobs, households...) so that any average black person get a "good environment" to nurture its growth so he can become a good, balanced, caring adult. The strategy so far was to publicly and politically fight (which is good) but after each protest the individuals are back to their own struggles with little to no help or care from other black people (again as a community). If everyone cares only for it's own issues it won't work. Our role is to educate young black people. Tell them how the world is but also show them that they have a functional place in it and that they can start to build it from elementary school!

stronglikedan 6y ago

> black people should just accept racism is a thing and move on That's exactly what's being said to white people right now, and as a white person, I don't think that any race should accept it. The current dilemma is that apparently not accepting racism towards white people, as a white person, seems to make me racist somehow. Go figure.

munchbunny 6y ago

> So you're basically saying black people should just accept racism is a thing and move on? Personal opinion: yes, but also no. I think this is a false dichotomy. As an individual, day to day, what can you do about the systemic issues? Not much. Maybe confront someone every now and then to improve things for a friend or coworker. But, for yourself, the only thing you can do is to accept that you have a shitty hand and do the best you can with it. The hand you have is the hand you have, arguing that it should be better won't make it better. However, year by year, the reality is that there is a systemic problem, and when a whole population all have a shitty hand to play, statistically you're going to expect worse outcomes. If you let yourself get crushed by the weight of the systemic issues, you're not going to be in any condition to help others, but if you don't do anything about the systemic problem, then future success stories of people like you will continue to be statistical anomalies. So take care of yourself, and then try your best to help the people that come after you.

tomjakubowski 6y ago
> As an individual, day to day, what can you do about the systemic issues? Not much. This is precisely why activists organize groups of people: so that they may act together and stand a chance of effecting change. Historically, with large enough organization, it has worked pretty well at times.
- munchbunny 6y ago
  I completely agree, and I'm grateful there are activists to organize these efforts. Since this is such a sensitive topic, I think I need to elaborate a bit more on the individual vs. systemic perspective. When I was growing up, I was told that the game is rigged against me, and I was going to have to dig deep. I had to make peace with the idea that, for example, I needed better SAT scores for the same college applications. (I didn't pick the example for its severity, I picked it because it's a measured phenomenon.) That's just the reality of racism/sexism/ageism/whatever. That's the individual perspective: game's rigged against you, deal with it. But where this line of thinking becomes racist is when, for example, one of the Chinese immigrant parents in my community asks "why don't black people just work harder?" How do you know how hard they work? If it was just about working harder, the problem would be solved by now. In that case saying that black people should work harder comes from a place of ignorance of the real problems, which proves the point that it's important to make noise about systemic problems. That's the systemic perspective. I don't think either point has to invalidate the other, but I've personally experienced both people saying "work harder" as a form of victim-blaming out of ignorance as well as people blaming personal failings on the system holding them down, and everything in between including real role models who are just venting. So I tend to just keep my mouth shut about it in my personal life.

cal5k 6y ago

Nope. I'm saying that if I had children, I'd tell them the above. I'd argue it's ultimately a much more effective way to combat racism/bigotry/whatever, unless you accept the Critical Race Theory definition of racism, which I do not. The military is probably the best evidence that this works. They take black, white, hispanic, and Asian Americans and put them through rigorous training together. In the end, nobody gives a crap what the other people look like or where they came from - they're your brothers and sisters and you trust them with your life. Dehumanizing people, calling them out, invoking the mob, getting people fired... these are all tactics that are doomed to stoke animosity, not reduce it.

manfredo 6y ago

I think they're using "accept" to convey "come to terms with the fact that it exists" not accepting it as an inevitable part of society. You can accept that racism exists, but still actively try to mitigate or reduce it.