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comment by KaliYugaz
KaliYugaz  ·  3211 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: America's struggle

    So how guilty should some random 16-year-old white person feel about slavery, considering he had precisely nothing to do with it?

It's not meaningful to talk about personal responsibility or guilt when it comes to dealing with issues of systemic racism. The idea is that we ought to sympathize with the struggle of oppressed groups and turn that into a push to reform the system; not out of white guilt, but out of moral conviction.

    Can our white, Western culture be both hypersensitive about racial issues and racist at the same time?

Yes. Interpersonal racism is treated as an unforgivable sin and a taboo, while systemic racism lies basically untouched. "SJWs" on the internet love to shame individual people, but they never manage to do more than talk about fixing systemic racism because nobody has the courage or sheer ability to organize and engage in direct political action IRL anymore. It's all displaced rage arising from feelings of political impotence.





shiranaihito  ·  3209 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    It's not meaningful to talk about personal responsibility or guilt when it comes to dealing with issues of systemic racism.

Sure it is. You're asking a vast group of individuals to feel guilty about bad things some of their ancestors did a long time ago. That still doesn't make any sense whatsoever, because these individuals had nothing to do with it.

    The idea is that we ought to sympathize with the struggle of oppressed groups and turn that into a push to reform the system; not out of white guilt, but out of moral conviction.

We do sympathize the shit out of them. That's exactly why White Guilt is even a thing. Without the hypersensitive sympathizing, people would see the inanity of feeling guilty for something someone else did.

    Yes. Interpersonal racism is treated as an unforgivable sin and a taboo, while systemic racism lies basically untouched.

You can't detach "the system" from the individuals. There is no systemic racism without individual racism, and since individual racism is not tolerated at all, there is no systemic racism either.

Besides, you've got it backwards:

.. We all know that if a white actor joked about how he got to kill black people in a movie, his career would be over instantly.

White people will lose their jobs over racist tweets for example, but a black person can laugh about killing white people on national TV and people just mindlessly "Woooo" at him.

You have no case. Stop spreading misguided ideas.

KaliYugaz  ·  3207 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Really, this doesn't even merit a response. You're just saying "nuh-uh" without backing anything up. But whatever:

    You're asking a vast group of individuals to feel guilty about bad things some of their ancestors did a long time ago.

No I'm not. It's likely you don't understand what guilt means, and how it is distinct from sympathy.

    We do sympathize the shit out of them. That's exactly why White Guilt is even a thing.

Suspicions confirmed.

Guilt implies that you did something wrong, and deserve to be punished. The vast majority of white people today never did anything wrong, so they shouldn't be supporting the cause of racial justice out of guilt. They should be supporting the cause out of universal moral duty, because the current configuration of our society is unfair and immoral.

    You can't detach "the system" from the individuals. There is no systemic racism without individual racism, and since individual racism is not tolerated at all, there is no systemic racism either.

You're saying, then, that it's not possible for everyone within a system to act with particular intentions, and yet yield a result that they did not intend or desire at all due to the way the incentive structure is configured? I hope you have proof of this claim, because the field of game theory would be revolutionized.

shiranaihito  ·  3206 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Really, this doesn't even merit a response. You're just saying "nuh-uh" without backing anything up. But whatever

You're just being dishonest. Without backing anything up? Somehow you conveniently ignored Jamie Foxx.