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Jenner posted:It is my opinion that the Deplorables aren't really suffering with things the way they are now. (Not to the extent the others are at any rate.) And they feel that things like Affirmative Action and Non-Discrimination policies actually shut the door on them and limit their opportunities. They are more concerned with safeguarding their own quality of life than making a better place for everyone. This sucks and is really lovely. People aren't really big on the whole "sacrifice for the sake of society" thing. Sometimes they choose to, but they don't appreciate being forced to, and they certainly don't see the social benefit as proper compensation for their loss - especially since they're often convinced that the supposed social benefit is bullshit someone cooked up as a lame excuse to deprive them of what they rightly deserve. A more equitable distribution of wealth and opportunity might benefit society as a whole, but that's no comfort to the people who benefited from the existing inequities. The deplorables feel that their prosperity and comfort was earned, and that anyone could earn it. They believe in meritocracy and long ago rationalized or repressed anything that contradicted that. They believe that everything they've accomplished has been the result of their own efforts, and interpret accusations of privilege as being told that all their hard work and stress didn't matter one bit. Moreover, they're being told that things they've said or done for decades are now offensive or racist, and since they believe that racists are bad people, they rebel against that because basically no one thinks of themselves as a bad person.
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Jan 10, 2017 16:18
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Guy Goodbody posted:I think that's a pretty big flaw in Privilege Theory. Casting any gain by black people as a loss for white people is not a great way to get white people on-board with anti-racism. Enriching white people to the detriment of everyone else is literally the point of racism. It's essentially why racism was invented. There's hardly any point in tap-dancing around it because anyone with a brain is already well aware, and combating racism has always come at the detriment of some group of white people because the literal, actual, specific purpose of racism was to elevate white people at the expense of minorities.
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Jan 10, 2017 17:11
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wateroverfire posted:Who specifically is *that group* of white people? Depends on what aspect of racism was being fought. For instance, preventing non-whites from voting was mostly done to protect and increase the political power of white elites. Redlining and other housing discrimination, on the other hand, largely served the white middle class by creating cleanly segregated geography so that money and investment could be directed away from minority neighborhoods and into white neighborhoods instead. The discriminatory implementation of much of the New Deal benefited poor and middle-class whites by allowing more of the money allocated to those programs to be spent on them. Combating racism is a sacrifice. However, it's a sacrifice in much the same way as bringing an unconscious person to the hospital instead of stealing their wallet and dumping them on the side of the road: it imposes a quantifiable cost by taking your time, gas, and money, but you should do it anyway because robbing, abusing, and endangering others for your own personal profit and convenience is wrong.
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Jan 10, 2017 17:54
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TomViolence posted:Say you're right and anti-racism is a material sacrifice that will adversely effect even lower class white people in meaningful ways, thus making it some honourable sacrifice that it's morally imperative they undertake. How do you sell that to the vast bulk of people, many of whom feel that even as things stand -- with the deck ostensibly stacked significantly in their favour -- that they're getting a raw deal? You can't wield this guilt-tripping idea that poor whites are the enemy of progress and hope to change their minds with it, all you do is feed their own persecution narrative and further entrench whatever prejudices they have. The same way you sell "don't rob people, even if you feel disadvantaged and think you need the money"? Poor whites certainly don't have any problem moralizing about high crime rates among disadvantaged minorities, so why should it be an excuse for them?
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Jan 10, 2017 18:31
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