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I get where you're coming from and it took me (a white person from the US) a long time to wrap my head around what most progressives talking about responsibilit

I get where you're coming from and it took me (a white person from the US) a long time to wrap my head around what most progressives talking about responsibility and the US's history of slavery were really trying to say. Let me try to explain with an analogy. Your grandfather dies. In his will, he leaves you his house, which has been in your family several generation. It's a nice place, better than the crappy apartment you live in, and it's yours now by all rights, so you move in. When you do, you discover to your delight that you water bill is zero dollars every month. What a nice bonus! Free water from the tap! One day, when poking around the basement, you discover the secret to this mystery. Apparently one of your ancestors many years ago dug a secret tunnel over to the neighbor's house put a T on their water main, and ran a pipe back to your house. Your water isn't free. Your neighbors have been paying for it the whole time. In fact, they have even known this and been trying to tell you. But, you know, you were so busy getting settled in and dealing with all the stuff in your own life that their discussion about "water equality" never really registered for you. It's not that you didn't care (you love equality), you just didn't think it had anything to do with you. So what is your moral position today? It is not one of guilt. You didn't put that sneaky pipe in. And while, yes, you certainly took some showers with free water, at the time you honestly didn't realize that anyone was paying for it. There was no malice on your part. You could argue that since it's your neighbors who are suffering from the jacked up water bill, they should be the ones to pay to cut that pipe and remove it. After all, you didn't cause the problem, and you don't have any personal incentive to fix it. You aren't trying to steal their water, it's just the way your plumbing happens to be set up. At the same time, your neighbors are actually poorer than you, in large part because they have been paying your water bill the whole time. It feels pretty selfish to expect them to foot the plumbing bill to get it fixed. So I think that you bear a responsibility to fix the plumbing because you now own the house. And you have some moral obligation in the sense that those who are most able to do a thing bear some obligation to their community to do that thing. If we're all in this together, then we give back to society in the ways we best can. Since you can more easily afford to the fix the plumbing (all those months of free water let you save up some cash), you should be the one to do so. Now, granted, there are certainly some progressives (of all races) who take the history of slavery in a guilt/shame direction. If you're white, you're just supposed to feel bad. We should all be walking around in hairshirts as a penance for the sins of our fathers. There is a real weird Catholic guilt vibe in some progressive circles today. But I think for most, it's not that. And the most charitable interpretation of people saying that whites today bear responsibility for slavery is just what my example here says: we have some ownership over the institutions that benefited from slavery, and we have a greater capacity to amend that problem, thus responsibility to do that falls on our shoulders. The most compassionate way to look at this is as an opportunity. What a great thing it is to be in a position to help address one of the most grievious injustices in the United States.

fighterpilot 5y ago
I reject this way of thinking because it groups second generation Irish immigrants with those who inherited wealth from the days of slavery. I get that you're trying to be charitable but there really isn't a valid defence for an ideology that tries to slap a label onto heterogeneous groups of people with nothing in common beyond their skin tone. It is a racist way of thinking and should be called out as such.
- munificent 5y ago
  > I reject this way of thinking because it groups second generation Irish immigrants with those who inherited wealth from the days of slavery. I understand that this is an extremely sensitive topic that can make it hard to reason about. People never feel good when accusations—false or not!—start flying. And once those kind of intense feelings get involved, it's hard to lower your defenses and try to read what people say charitably. The point of my comment was entirely that it is not about guilt. None of us living today bear responsibility for historical slavery in the US, even those whose ancestors owned slaves. How can I be considered at fault for something that happened literally before I existed? How could I have caused that? (Edit: I realize now that my analogy where the house is inherited obscures that. I think the analogy would work better if I said you won the house in a lottery.) What we carry is not guilt from the past but responsibility for today. Because of that history of slavery, many institutions today still unfairly benefit white people. (In my analogy, the pipe continues to deliver water long after the person who unfairly plumbed it has died.) Because of those benefits, white people today have more power as a group generally than Black people do. It is today's unearned benefits and the greater capacity to remedy them that places responsibility on white people in the US, not any bloodline that traces back to slaveowners. We should fix racism today because it's wrong and because we can. We bear a moral obligation to people living today to give them the more just world they deserve.
  - fighterpilot 5y ago
    "many institutions today still unfairly benefit white people." When it comes to the criminal justice system, I'm mostly there with you. Although, it is wrong to call it pro-white, and the pro-white narrative comes from the ideology that I was criticizing. It is anti-black and anti-poor. The reason it is not merely pro-white is that the system treats Asians, Hindus, etc, well even though they're not white and even though there's not many officers from these demographics. Beyond that, I struggle to believe it, but perhaps you can fill me in if I'm missing something. As an example, in what way are institutions biased in favor of poor rural white people? Their entire culture hates them (music, movies, media) and they are quotad out of universities and flashy career paths. To add salt on the wound their manufacturing jobs are shipped overseas. This reality on the ground is the near opposite of any kind of institutional privilege of the sort you're talking about. In some cases (e.g soft quotas) this is demonstrable institutional racism working against white people.

fighterpilot 5y ago

I reject this way of thinking because it groups second generation Irish immigrants with those who inherited wealth from the days of slavery. I get that you're trying to be charitable but there really isn't a valid defence for an ideology that tries to slap a label onto heterogeneous groups of people with nothing in common beyond their skin tone. It is a racist way of thinking and should be called out as such.

munificent 5y ago
> I reject this way of thinking because it groups second generation Irish immigrants with those who inherited wealth from the days of slavery. I understand that this is an extremely sensitive topic that can make it hard to reason about. People never feel good when accusations—false or not!—start flying. And once those kind of intense feelings get involved, it's hard to lower your defenses and try to read what people say charitably. The point of my comment was entirely that it is not about guilt. None of us living today bear responsibility for historical slavery in the US, even those whose ancestors owned slaves. How can I be considered at fault for something that happened literally before I existed? How could I have caused that? (Edit: I realize now that my analogy where the house is inherited obscures that. I think the analogy would work better if I said you won the house in a lottery.) What we carry is not guilt from the past but responsibility for today. Because of that history of slavery, many institutions today still unfairly benefit white people. (In my analogy, the pipe continues to deliver water long after the person who unfairly plumbed it has died.) Because of those benefits, white people today have more power as a group generally than Black people do. It is today's unearned benefits and the greater capacity to remedy them that places responsibility on white people in the US, not any bloodline that traces back to slaveowners. We should fix racism today because it's wrong and because we can. We bear a moral obligation to people living today to give them the more just world they deserve.
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  "many institutions today still unfairly benefit white people." When it comes to the criminal justice system, I'm mostly there with you. Although, it is wrong to call it pro-white, and the pro-white narrative comes from the ideology that I was criticizing. It is anti-black and anti-poor. The reason it is not merely pro-white is that the system treats Asians, Hindus, etc, well even though they're not white and even though there's not many officers from these demographics. Beyond that, I struggle to believe it, but perhaps you can fill me in if I'm missing something. As an example, in what way are institutions biased in favor of poor rural white people? Their entire culture hates them (music, movies, media) and they are quotad out of universities and flashy career paths. To add salt on the wound their manufacturing jobs are shipped overseas. This reality on the ground is the near opposite of any kind of institutional privilege of the sort you're talking about. In some cases (e.g soft quotas) this is demonstrable institutional racism working against white people.