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The left is abandoning enlightenment principles of individualism in favor of skin color. They define people based on external features rather than their actions

The left is abandoning enlightenment principles of individualism in favor of skin color. They define people based on external features rather than their actions or thoughts. That doesn't smell like freedom to me. Ala, I am racist because I am a white person who is not racist.

mhoad 6y ago
I don’t know you do I’m not going to pretend to understand your beliefs based on a couple of comments in this thread. Instead I wanted to try and reframe this in a way that is a lot more inline with how many people on the left talk about this issue which is in my mind fundamentally different from how I read your comments. I hope it offers a less inflammatory way to consider what often gets thrown under the umbrella of “identity politics”. When trying to understand the root causes of problems and outcomes in society it’s often helpful to cut the data in certain ways to identify where patterns might be emerging or have existed for a long time. This is basically the attempt to try and apply the scientific method to issues that simply can not be controlled in a lab environment. If you were to take an issue like poverty or incarceration rates for example and then attempted to break those issues down through the context of education for example you might start to notice some interesting correlations. However, there is nothing about this approach that does or should stop researchers from also looking at the data in the context of immutable traits either. A big part of the conversation that is happening around these topics is that certain groups keep appearing again and again in ways that very few other groups do. The follow up question to that is obviously why? This commonly gets reduced to comments such as the one you made like “I am racist because I am a white person who is not racist.” which is not at all what is being said. I too am in the straight white male group and I’m not unaware of how often it can feel like that label is thrown around to the point where it can feel like a dirty word but I would beg you to put aside that initial knee jerk reaction and maybe consider that we as a society (not necessarily you personally) do in fact have some pretty serious issues that are going to overlap with immutable traits like gender, sexuality and race.
- pnw_hazor 6y ago
  Critical race theory and its sister anti-racism reject liberalism by assigning blame, power, guilt, victimhood, privilege, etc., to individuals based on their race. DiAngelo’s thesis [White Fragility]: All white Americans are racist. All white Americans are a product of white supremacy and are actively or unwittingly complicit in maintaining this power structure. If you say you are not racist, that is only proof that you are racist. If you believe you are not racist, same thing. Black people exist in America only to be oppressed by whites. In DiAngelo’s worldview, any progress black Americans have made is because white Americans have allowed such growth as pacifiers. https://nypost.com/2020/08/06/peddling-the-idea-that-all-white-people-are-racist-for-profit/ https://nypost.com/2020/08/06/peddling-the-idea-that-all-whi...

mhoad 6y ago

I don’t know you do I’m not going to pretend to understand your beliefs based on a couple of comments in this thread. Instead I wanted to try and reframe this in a way that is a lot more inline with how many people on the left talk about this issue which is in my mind fundamentally different from how I read your comments. I hope it offers a less inflammatory way to consider what often gets thrown under the umbrella of “identity politics”. When trying to understand the root causes of problems and outcomes in society it’s often helpful to cut the data in certain ways to identify where patterns might be emerging or have existed for a long time. This is basically the attempt to try and apply the scientific method to issues that simply can not be controlled in a lab environment. If you were to take an issue like poverty or incarceration rates for example and then attempted to break those issues down through the context of education for example you might start to notice some interesting correlations. However, there is nothing about this approach that does or should stop researchers from also looking at the data in the context of immutable traits either. A big part of the conversation that is happening around these topics is that certain groups keep appearing again and again in ways that very few other groups do. The follow up question to that is obviously why? This commonly gets reduced to comments such as the one you made like “I am racist because I am a white person who is not racist.” which is not at all what is being said. I too am in the straight white male group and I’m not unaware of how often it can feel like that label is thrown around to the point where it can feel like a dirty word but I would beg you to put aside that initial knee jerk reaction and maybe consider that we as a society (not necessarily you personally) do in fact have some pretty serious issues that are going to overlap with immutable traits like gender, sexuality and race.

pnw_hazor 6y ago
Critical race theory and its sister anti-racism reject liberalism by assigning blame, power, guilt, victimhood, privilege, etc., to individuals based on their race. DiAngelo’s thesis [White Fragility]: All white Americans are racist. All white Americans are a product of white supremacy and are actively or unwittingly complicit in maintaining this power structure. If you say you are not racist, that is only proof that you are racist. If you believe you are not racist, same thing. Black people exist in America only to be oppressed by whites. In DiAngelo’s worldview, any progress black Americans have made is because white Americans have allowed such growth as pacifiers. https://nypost.com/2020/08/06/peddling-the-idea-that-all-white-people-are-racist-for-profit/ https://nypost.com/2020/08/06/peddling-the-idea-that-all-whi...