Liberals, progressives and conservatives of note sign open letter to end cancel culture. (Noam Chomsky/J.K. Rowling/Gloria Steinem/David Brooks etc.)

[TheMysteriousGX]

If we could find a way to rob and brutalize them for generations I’m sure we can find a way to do a bit of justice.

Considering the Supreme Court just declared half of Oklahoma to be several different Native American Tribal Reservations, maybe we go with 40 acres and a mule adjusted for inflation and interest.

Like, I still don't trust Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, but he seems to be an actual Literalist and not a Conservative "Literalist"

 

[Trunkage]

Buyetyen was replying to me saying this, "????? You don't think "white guilt" falls under that? Are you kidding me? Wtf do you think the people calling for "black reparations" are asking for?" They replied with, "There are also people who still fly the Confederate battle flag and want Confederate participation trophies to remain in place." in response to what I said implies that people flying the Confederate flag today indicates that there is a reason for white guilt. Why else would they reply with that statement when it otherwise has no relevance to what I said?

Nobody cares about yours or anyone else ‘guilt’. They care about fixing the problem.

Promises were made and then weren’t fulfilled. That’s not about a certain demographic guilt. That’s the whole of the US. Unless you are claiming the only real US citizens are white, it has nothing to do with ‘white guilt’. If you want to blame it on past administrations, that’s fine. But no one cares about the guilt, because it hasn’t fixed the problem

If your so offended at people pointing out your ancestors pretended other humans were animals and were rapist, plunderers, mass murderers and thieves, that’s only on you. Many of them were, including many of the Foundinf Fathers. I, personally, see it as an opportUnity to be better than them. And, I’ll say again, I don’t care about whether you feel guilty. I care if you fix the problem

 

[Agema]

Gergar was bringing up how the current ideology of the left has a very bad end if it is continued to its logical conclusion which is to constantly try to eat whoever is viewed as the biggest oppressor. Zeke in turn dismissed it by making a comment about how people still haven't made a value judgement of the those that wore "slave made cotton". My response was about how people DO make that kind of judgement now with things, such as, reparations which in order to make work would require all Americans to be taxed, among whom none were involved in the slave trade that happened over 100 years ago and many of whom are not even related to the people that were part of the slave trade which includes many other ethnicities outside of white people.

This concept is foisting guilt on people who have nothing to do with what happened to the ancestors of blacks simply because the USA is, as a majority, ethnically white and everyone of today that is white is guilty and should give up their money for other people. Further, how would reparations be any different than all the other government projects that have been tried in the past? Just changing the exact reason for the tax won't make the methods, if they are the same methods that have been used for years, work any better.

A state is an independent legal and societal entity. The "guilt" lies with the state, so it is the job of the state to pay reparations. The fact that that will de facto be paid by the current population is a side issue: they don't have to take personal responsibility, but they should accept their responsibilities as citizens of their country.

Germany still pays reparations for the Holocaust, which means that for decades reparations have been paid mostly by people who had no part in that mass murder. Likewise similar concepts exist for corporations. At the point tobacco companies paid compensation to smoking victims, they surely had considerably different shareholders and workers from much of when they engaged in denialism. Who here thinks they should have been excused payign compensation because of that? In fact, for a whole host of historical injustices, claims have been paid by different companies, because when they bought up the forerunner company that caused the transgression, they bought its responsibilities, too. (In such cases of course, the offenders in terms of individuals have walked away scot free because they have sold up their stakes and do not pay compensation.)

So really, none of this is that legally or morally controversial, because we accept so many forms of it already. The objection that the current population is being unfairly made to "feel guilty" is thus a somewhat bogus one. At core, it's a simpler reality that they just don't want to have to give up money to other people, but they need some way to rationalise it.

 

[Aegix Drakan]

At core, it's a simpler reality that they just don't want to have to give up money to other people, but they need some way to rationalise it.

Isn't that like... 95% of republican politics?

"What, why should I pay for the healthcare of someone who can't afford it?! BOOTSTRAPS!!", "Why should my taxes go to a school I'm not using in the poor part of town, BOOTSTRAPS!!", "Why should I pay for the foodstamps of some single mother on minimum wage?! BOOTSTRAPS!!"

Heck you can even extend it beyond money these days, what with all the people going "Why should I have to wear an uncomfortable mask just because I might pass a disease around that I may not know I have?! MUH FREEDOMS are being denied if I have to do that!!"

 

[tstorm823]

So really, none of this is that legally or morally controversial, because we accept so many forms of it already. The objection that the current population is being unfairly made to "feel guilty" is thus a somewhat bogus one.

But it isn't bogus. Setting aside the reparations issue for a moment, if you examine the rhetoric around slavery in America, the current population is being nonsensically made to feel guilty. It's one thing to offer reparations to someone whose relatives died in the Holocaust, it's another thing entirely to accuse every non-Jewish person in Germany of benefiting from a nation built on Nazi labor camps. That argument is so absurd, I can't even imagine someone making it, suggesting that the people of Germany are better off now because the Holocaust happened, but that is how slavery gets framed here. People claim the nation was built on slavery, and white Americans still benefit from it. That's absurd. An enslaved person forced to work for the benefit of a single household was not of greater benefit to society than a free person working for their own benefit. An incredibly bloody war to end the practice is not making the US more prosperous. The legacy of continued racism doesn't make our society better. Yes, African Americans are the primary victims of slavery in America, but everyone here is worse off because it existed. The suggestion that white people benefit from racial injustice is constant and disgusting, and primarily sourced from people who seem to actively want a race war.

 

[Agema]

People claim the nation was built on slavery, and white Americans still benefit from it. That's absurd.

No, it isn't.

Although social mobility occurs, statistics clearly show that the biggest contributor to your socioeconomic status is your parents' socioeconomic status. Thus from a start point where one race is all at the bottom of the heap and another spread throughout classes, it will take many, many generations before eventually enough of the disavantaged race clamber up to reach overall demographic parity. If you want an idea of this, someone looked through the reconds of Florence, Italy, and found the surnames of the upper classes in the 1400s are still heavily overrepresented in Florence's affluent today.

The result of slavery and subsequently racism is that black people were both stuck at the bottom and heavily restricted in their ability to advance for 200 years. That's 200 years where many white Americans had at least 10% less competition for jobs - especially the high value and status ones. White people have had advantages that have been amassed in family wealth, land ownership, status and resources to get better educations and opportunities for offspring. Take something simple like legacy admissions criteria at top universities, and the advantages that accrue from top degrees and the ability to network with other elites. Who gets those? I bet they're disproportionately white people, because black people could barely get into those institutions.

We could extend this idea to native Americans: unceremoniously dispossessed and culturally devastated by technically legal but plainly, morally disgusting tactics which are extraordinarily likely to have contributed to persistent social problems in their communities today. Who took that land, put farms on them, dug out the gold and oil, built themselves beautiful estates and dynasties? White people did.

What we have to accept is that of course millions of white Americans haven't significantly benefitted, and they're dirt poor and struggling, too, and that talking about an average advantage for white people very understandably doesn't cut the mustard with a lot of them. And there are of course also more recent immigrants and their descendants.

Despite all this being true, I don't think it necessarily needs to be the basis of an argument on reparations, because (as said) the argument for claim should be levelled at the state, not white people.

An enslaved person forced to work for the benefit of a single household was not of greater benefit to society than a free person working for their own benefit. An incredibly bloody war to end the practice is not making the US more prosperous. The legacy of continued racism doesn't make our society better. Yes, African Americans are the primary victims of slavery in America, but everyone here is worse off because it existed. The suggestion that white people benefit from racial injustice is constant and disgusting, and primarily sourced from people who seem to actively want a race war.

If you steal a loaf and then accidentally drop it in the river so you don't benefit from it, it doesn't make your theft any less a theft and it doesn't make the loss of that loaf any less a lost loaf for the proper owner. Whether the USA as a whole benefitted from slavery is an assessment bordering between the extremely difficult and impossible: but the thing is, it doesn't really matter.

 

[Buyetyen]

Gotta say, "My ancestors working for people who owned slaves was just as dehumanizing as being a slave," is one of the newer excuses I've heard for never, ever doing anything to address systemic racism.

 

[tstorm823]

If you steal a loaf and then accidentally drop it in the river so you don't benefit from it, it doesn't make your theft any less a theft and it doesn't make the loss of that loaf any less a lost loaf for the proper owner. Whether the USA as a whole benefitted from slavery is an assessment bordering between the extremely difficult and impossible: but the thing is, it doesn't really matter.

It does matter if the USA benefited when people are claiming exactly and specifically that.
And if I steal a loaf of bread and drop it in the river, it doesn't make my theft less of a theft. But the proper owner losing that loaf didn't make the community overall any less hungry, rather it made everyone on average hungrier.

Gotta say, "My ancestors working for people who owned slaves was just as dehumanizing as being a slave," is one of the newer excuses I've heard for never, ever doing anything to address systemic racism.

Who is saying that?

 

[stroopwafel]

What we have to accept is that of course millions of white Americans haven't significantly benefitted, and they're dirt poor and struggling, too, and that talking about an average advantage for white people very understandably doesn't cut the mustard with a lot of them. And there are of course also more recent immigrants and their descendants.

Yeah, I think that is really the crux of the problem. By admitting to some white man's collective debt against the injustices of slavery and racial disparity by the elite then the rightful grievances of the poor white man are posthumously denied by identity politics driven historic revisionism.

There is no denying institutional racism exists and that black people(espescially young men) are overrepresented in almost every negative statistic with incarceration rates being the most horrid example. But I don't think the 'white man' is to blame for this neither do I think shifting the blame to what happened hundreds of years ago is a very constructive approach to improve people's lives in the present. As a side note it is also the white man that is majorly overrepresented in suicide rates and a whole list of other negative lists so it is more a question of class rather than race.

It reminds me how sunni and shia muslims are still killing eachother today because they disagreed on some caliph 1400 years ago. Historic events are recontextualized and nefariously exploited even with less extreme examples. If this kind of thinking is cultivated and actually actively encouraged then expect society to irrevocably fracture. If people internalize they are professional victims because of historic slavery and 'the white man' who, besides a lucky few, gets the blame and have their struggles discredited then group think on both sides is reinforced. Nothing ever good comes from that.

 

[Agema]

It does matter if the USA benefited when people are claiming exactly and specifically that.

Go find and argue with them, then.

Who is saying that?

It is a crude but not entirely inaccurate caricature of the argument you just presented, which comes across as "The whole nation lost out from slavery, so I and my white ancestors suffered from it too."

Of course, the implicit conclusion that someone could tack onto that is "...therefore black people have nothing particular to complain about and don't deserve anything."

 

[tstorm823]

Go find and argue with them, then.

I'm arguing with you, who said "The objection that the current population is being unfairly made to "feel guilty" is thus a somewhat bogus one ." So I'm showing you how the current population is being made to feel guilty by poor arguments. It isn't bogus. That doesn't mean that reparations are out of line by any means, but you should know, people are absolutely being made to feel guilty for things that they did not cause and they themselves suffered from.

It is a crude but not entirely inaccurate caricature of the argument you just presented, which comes across as "The whole nation lost out from slavery, so I and my white ancestors suffered from it too."

Of course, the implicit conclusion that someone could tack onto that is "...therefore black people have nothing particular to complain about and don't deserve anything."

Well, not many of my white ancestors, my family hasn't been in this country that long, I'm basically Irish and Italian and I think the furthest back any of us go is the late 1800s. But that's beside the point, your paraphrase of what I said in the first line here is spot on. The part you tack on afterwards and Buyetyen's version are not at all what I said. I literally said that African Americans are the primary victims of slavery in America. I explicitly acknowledged that their suffering is worse, leaving no room to infer what they did.

And far, far removed from what I was saying. I'm not saying slavery, segregation, racial discrimination, or any of the consequences there of aren't exceptionally bad for black people, I'm saying they aren't good for white people either. If discrimination has taken the opportunities for success away from generations of racial minorities who otherwise could have done great things, the whole world has been robbed of those great things. It has nothing to do with whether my ancestors were rich and privileged or poor and downtrodden in comparison to anyone else, this nation is worse off than if black Americans had been allowed to prosper. It's not that they don't have anything particular to complain about, it's that they do, but it matters to everyone.

White people should not be made to feel responsible for black suffering by virtue of their skin color. If reparations are to be made, it should be in an effort to promote prosperity among people who haven't had that opportunity, which would inevitably help everyone regardless of race. A black doctor instead of a black drug dealer is great for that person, and good for the black community, but also good for everyone else.

 

[Breakdown]

Reparations is a loaded term. You could alternatively see things in an economic sense - we should invest money in helping out deprived communities in order for society to become stronger and more productive as a whole. And it's better to have money in the hands of the working class, because they're more likely to spend it, and less likely to hoard wealth and find ways to avoid paying tax.

 

[Agema]

I'm arguing with you, who said "The objection that the current population is being unfairly made to "feel guilty" is thus a somewhat bogus one ." So I'm showing you how the current population is being made to feel guilty by poor arguments. It isn't bogus. That doesn't mean that reparations are out of line by any means, but you should know, people are absolutely being made to feel guilty for things that they did not cause and they themselves suffered from.

I feel the need to flippantly reply with what my psychologist wife might say to that: "Nobody can make you feel anything".

Poor arguments are ten-a-penny, and appeals to emotion can be a lot of them. There is a rationale to it: reparations come from the state, but a democratic state is beholden to its citizens, so persuasion is often more a case of tugging at the heart strings of the citizens than the cynical bean-counters in elected office. I might also sympathise with a certain conflation of current and historical issues in slightly inaccurate ways. After all, the white man really did spend many years keeping the black man down, and that's going to leave an embedded cultural attitude that will also take generations to subside. It's a bit cheap and easy for white people to dismiss that as "Hey, it's all okay now, get over it already". I think we need latitude to accept that such lasting grievances will inevitably enter into discourse and grant them some empathy, even if they may not be totally right or totally fair in the modern day.

I literally said that African Americans are the primary victims of slavery in America. I explicitly acknowledged that their suffering is worse, leaving no room to infer what they did.

Sure, but's that's why I described Buyetyen's statement as a caricature, not a precise explanation. I thought it was quite a funny interpretation.

I can totally imagine a talking head on Fox News like Tucker Carlson coming out with that sort of line, modified to whip up a sense of perceived victimhood in his white audience at black people asking for unfair special favours.

 

[Buyetyen]

Sure, but's that's why I described Buyetyen's statement as a caricature, not a precise explanation. I thought it was quite a funny interpretation.

I can totally imagine a talking head on Fox News like Tucker Carlson coming out with that sort of line, modified to whip up a sense of perceived victimhood in his white audience at black people asking for unfair special favours.

Funny enough, I was actually imagining that line in Tucker Carlson's voice when I wrote it.

 

[Agema]

Funny enough, I was actually imagining that line in Tucker Carlson's voice when I wrote it.

I don't think I've ever heard Tucker Carlson's voice. I'm happy to leave it that way.

It's not just that he had a vicious racist as his main writer - and I cannot believe no-one who worked with him noticed - Carlson's reputed to have quite the personal history in that regard too: just he's managed to keep any really bad stuff off the record.

 

[tstorm823]

This is just two people writing fanfiction at this point.

 

[Terminal Blue]

It's very hard to escape the impression that "white guilt" is a deliberate strategy to shift responsibility for racial inequality away from structural economic and social issues, which can be resolved, and into individual emotional issues, which cannot.

 

[tstorm823]

It's very hard to escape the impression that "white guilt" is a deliberate strategy to shift responsibility for racial inequality away from structural economic and social issues, which can be resolved, and into individual emotional issues, which cannot.

It's hard not to notice the people most often focusing on structural economic issues with regards to racial inequality are the ones selling crap like white people benefiting from racism, as though one group hurting automatically makes another group benefit.

 

[Agema]

It's hard not to notice the people most often focusing on structural economic issues with regards to racial inequality are the ones selling crap like white people benefiting from racism, as though one group hurting automatically makes another group benefit.

In something like job seeking, where multiple candidates tend to vie for each post (particularly higher status/salary jobs), the effect of a race, sex, etc. being unable to make the best of their talent and be competitive necessarily means the posts will be filled by other demographic groups. If 10% of the population basically can't apply for the same job as you because they're disadvantaged, you have 10% less competition, so it's more likely you'll get the job, which is a benefit.

Or to look at it from another perspective, imagine a society can support 50% low level jobs, 40% mid, and 10% high level. If a demographic group comprising 10% of the population is stuck filling the low level jobs due to racism even though half of them should be able to do better, that means 5% of the other people get "bumped up" to fill a higher level vacancy, which is to their benefit.

However you want to look at it, racism surely benefits some people from the group not discriminated against. Therefore in aggregate, the non-disadvantaged group benefits.

 

[tstorm823]

That means 5% of the other people get "bumped up" to fill a higher level vacancy, which is to their benefit.

And literally everyone else's detriment. A less qualified candidate getting a job doesn't lift that one person up in a vacuum, and it sucks having sucky coworkers and sucky employees and sucky people taking care of you as a customer. A sucky white person getting a position in place of a better black person is going to drag down more people than the one it lifts up.

For your "in aggregate" claim to hold up, you have to assume society as a whole experienced a net 0 change having swapped people around based on race in spite of competence. And I'm not inclined to see it that way; when you push someone down like that, the whole of society is taken down a bit as well.