I'd really appreciate if you'd frame your response as a critique, not a (for lack of a better word) salty parody. This comment accomplishes little. That said: - Yancy never says white America are all the same. The fact that white people are all racist does not imply that we are all the same in other aspects, and suggesting that it does is a childish fallacy. - Yancy never claims that white America can't suffer at the hands of others. He just wants us to acknowledge that whateber suffering we experience in white bodies would be magnified in a black body, and accept the call to action that that acknowledgement entails. - The issue is not that "others who looked like you gave someone who looks like me bad experiences first." The issue is that the continuing legacy of those bad experiences impacts and oppresses people of color to this day, and white America, in our failure to acknowledge and speak out against said legacy, becomes complicit in it. (To your signature, Yancy is a professor in one of the top 20 philosophy departments in the country, and a well-respected scholar on race.) (I had you muted for a while after a previous discussion on race. That discussion and now this comment, compared to your tone and contributions elsewhere on the site--which convinced me to unmute you--make me think you're falling prey to irrationality and anger.)
All right. He never outright says that all whites are the same, but in practice that is his assumption. Ex: If you are white, and you are reading this letter, I ask that you don’t run to seek shelter from your own racism. So if I'm white, then I'm racist. And because it's something that Yancy admitted to, then I'm supposed to be okay with being called a racist? Not going to happen. "As you reap comfort from being white, we suffer for being black and people of color. But your comfort is linked to our pain and suffering. Just as my comfort in being male is linked to the suffering of women, which makes me sexist, so, too, you are racist." A racist is someone who makes decisions based on race. I don't do that, I refuse to be called a racist just based on my skin tone. See how backwards that is? He starts off by offering that if you can listen to this with love that you will see his side of the argument. This implies that people who do not agree with him didn't listen right. It's a quick route to make the opposite side look inferior, but I don't think that's what he's doing here. He's doing the opposite, which is making the people who support him looking loving in accepting that they are sexist racists and are willing to work on it. I'm sick of this kind of white guilt preying nonsense. I'm not a bad person and I refuse to accept the mantle that just because someone before me built an imperfect system in which we currently live that I am responsible for it. He also outright says that pornography is proof of someone being sexist. Lots of people watch porn, not just men, and not just straight people, but Yancy does indeed imply that whites are the same simply by addressing a letter to 'all of us' collectively. You can't write a letter to white America and pretend that you don't see them as a homogenous group. Then he blames the media for objectifying women, without saying that men are 'objectified' in the same conceit. Instead he uses this as a bridge to further imply that as a member of white America I am sexist. Just because he admits that he thinks of himself as sexist because of this nonsense doesn't actually mean that I am. Then we go on to this letter being a mirror for my white racist self. "After all, it is painful to let go of your “white innocence,” to use this letter as a mirror, one that refuses to show you what you want to see, one that demands that you look at the lies that you tell yourself so that you don’t feel the weight of responsibility for those who live under the yoke of whiteness, your whiteness." My whiteness is not a burden under which I place others. If they feel that way, it is an echo of a system gone by and I am not responsible for that. Further implying that simply by being white that I am benefiting from racism and that no one else is ignored a lot of war and genocide that got us all here as a country. People of all races who are Americans today benefit from the wars against the Native Americans. Do they feel bad about that? Nope. So why would I feel bad about something done, not in my name, by someone who looked like me, but wasn't me? I didn't vote for Obama, I don't have a lot of black friends, I'm not a 'good' person, or any of the other stupid ways that people decide whether or not they look good to others. I'm kind to people I meet, I judge people based on their actions, and I'm not going to be okay with being called a racist, sexist, privileged white just to fit in with the narrative that seems to be permeating white progressive circles right now. That someone who would ever want to be my friend would ask me to hate myself is terribly insulting. George Yancy is a professor of Philosophy. And if this is the type of scholarly Philosophy which he provides, then I can not respect that.