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Kristov posted:Yeah, but that's what I meant by the author not really saying anything. That's a very 'no duh' position to make. We all weren't born yesterday nor are we beep-boop robots. Most people can understand on a societal level that women, darker skinned people, mentally ill people, etc. get readily poo poo on by society. Charles Barkley's and Bill Cosby's skin is black and they insist racism is all the fault of lazy and criminal black people. But Mr.White Privilege here thinks he knows better than actual PoC. Phyllis Schlafly is a chick and she says women's real problem is that they refuse to accept their divinely ordinated role as housewives and mothers. Where do you get off, with your male privilege, pretending that you completely understand what her life is like better than she does? Check. Your. Privilege. :checkyourprivilege: (someone buy this smilie)
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Dec 5, 2014 03:08
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Lightanchor posted:Have we established that privilege theory is correct but harsh language offends smarmy neoliberals yet This is ironic because privilege "theory" is the sort of thing neoliberalism loves in that it atomizes society and serves as a barrier to class consciousness
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Dec 7, 2014 03:00
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Sharkie posted:So you're saying white privilege doesn't exist or what exactly? Do you seriously believe that black people or gay people or women should set aside the issues that concern exclusively them in order to recognize that really, it's about class, and concerns about racism/homophobia are atomizing? I hope you don't, but that's what this post seems to be suggesting. Racism was(and is) used to create a false sense of shared identity between poor whites and white elites so the latter court exert social control. That's hardly a novel or controversial observation. Anti-racism in the form of so-called privilege theory plays a similar role in creating an illusory connection between the black proletariat and the black haute bourgeoisie. It serves to create a form of false consciousness by pretending that Eric Garner and Henry Louis Gates or Barack Obama have meaningful shared interests.
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Dec 7, 2014 09:02
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Sharkie posted:You mean the Henry Louis Gates that was arrested by a white cop for trying to get into his own house? Yes the Henry Louis Gates who was arrested and temporarily inconvenienced by cops on the doorstep of his seven-figure Cambridge home. Not the Eric Garner who was choked to death by cops for suspicion of selling cigarettes on a street corner on Staten Island. The outrage over the arrest of Gates was ultimately about the fact that he wasn't given the deference and class privilege he was due. If you think the Garner and Gates cases were even remotely similar then you are part of the problem.
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Dec 7, 2014 12:02
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Mortley posted:This was one of my favorite threads in LF - "explain yourselves, sex havers!" - accusing anyone who had ever had sex of discrimination. After all, if you are at all sexually attractive or good at sex, sleeping with you is a benefit. And if you distribute benefits based on things that people have no control over - the symmetry of their faces, broadness of their hips or shoulders, etc. - you're being discriminatory by definition. It's one of the reasons that I consider egalitarianism a goal always worth striving for but which is absolutely unachievable (and not desirable to achieve). This is a definite IMHO though. False consciousness is the means by which capitalist societies veil the way relations between classes operate, and mislead the proletariat into not perceiving themselves as such. A specious sense of kinship between the Trayvon Browns and the Barack Obamas is just that. Effectronica posted:In other words, you've never read Ralph Ellison or Richard Wright. Granted, Ellison was an existentialist and thus effectively bourgeois in an artistic sense. If you managed to so wildly misread "Invisible Man" not as Ellison's rejection of a Stalinist CPUSA but instead an endorsement of a proto-neo-liberal anti-socialism written by a black Thomas Friedman then I really don't know how to help you other than to tell you to go back and try again.
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Dec 8, 2014 03:48
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Sharkie posted:"Why didn't MLK stand up for the rights of white guys, too? How could he expect to get anywhere unless he addressed the problems of the majority of white society?" So you quote a passage from Letter from a Birmingham Jail in which King talks about how asking individuals to give up their privilege is an ineffective remedy because privilege arises from and exists between groups, and also manage to completely ignore the Poor People's Campaign.
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Dec 8, 2014 12:22
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SedanChair posted:Seriously what happened to culture? It seemed like we were about to get all this poo poo handled back in like 1990. Naomi Wolf was on TV and everybody had an X hat. Did Rush Limbaugh really single-handedly orchestrate the strategic dominance of reactionary America? Because it seems like that's what happened. Overreach by leftist activists led to a fracturing of of the left-liberal coalition and a backlash by reactionary forces. As we watch it happen all over again, I can't help but wonder if some people want to trigger that backlash because it will let them sink deeper into their narcissistic sense of righteous aggrievement. Job Truniht posted:I think any serious leftist fears, deep down, that there may be a social issue that the capitalists can use to divide them. History conflates with this narrative. The reality is that so much of "white privilege" or "male privilege" is said to be the sort of thing that no decent human being would really object to losing. Dismantling class privilege means attacking a system which provides the bourgeoisie with great material rewards, which is why self-described leftists love to bleat about how they'd have no problem with giving up the "privilege to commit sexual violence with relative impunity"(well, most of them wouldn't, there are a few exceptions...) but hate to talk about giving up their far more concrete and substantial class privilege.
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Dec 9, 2014 04:41
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Mortley posted:"Policy as market efficiency" is of course one of the hallmarks of neoliberal thinking, and the point-by-point of his final policy recommendations were out of my wheelhouse. I had one point of disagreement with him - I said, "what you're doing is political, in the sense that it is an argument about the ideal way to run society. You should think of it as political, not only as an engineering problem." He disagreed, saying that there was simply a best way of doing things, like there's a best way to build a bridge. The idea that they stand in some sort of ideological privileged frame is, as you've experienced, pretty common to neoliberal thinking. You can't really argue with it directly, because it's a sort of circular reasoning. Economically optimal solutions are socially optimal because they're economically optimal. Short of convincing them of that, you can always point out that a distribution in which all wealth is held by a single individual is Pareto optimal, but so is one where all wealth is divided up completely equally among all the members of the group. I don't think there's anybody, neoliberals included, who is willing to admit they believe that both those distributions are socially optimal.
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Dec 14, 2014 11:19
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