Texas State Newspaper writer fired for racist column

[Effie]

I would say that an absolute majority of people understand what ontological death is, and a lot of people understand whiteness in a similar sense to how critical race studies understands it.

Because people understand that "death to Packers fans" does not actually mean shooting up most of Wisconsin...

And yet, it would be considered at best in very poor taste for an editorial to write out "death to Packers fans, I hate Packers fans, I've hardly ever even met a decent Packers fan." Especially not in a publication read by large numbers of Packers fans.

People understand that Barack Obama is not simultaneously White and Black despite his parents being white and black people. Most of these fields of study focus on making the implicit explicit, teasing out the rules of the game to expose their ridiculousness and vileness.

Yes.

And yet somehow, inexplicably, miraculously, SOME of these fields that expose the ridiculousness and vileness of oppressive hierarchies have managed to come up with some basic vocabulary terms that at least make it reasonably possible to communicate the nature of the ridiculousness and vileness. And to do so without predictably triggering massive misunderstandings among everyone who hasn't completed a college course or three's worth of recommended reading.

Maybe the race studies people need to talk to the gender studies people about this?

I didn't accuse you of any of those things. I am genuinely curious as to why you're writing what you write, because it's genuinely bizarre to me that anyone would respond to the perceived argument that white people are incapable of being meaningfully anti-racist by arguing that yes, this is true, but you can't say that or else white people will become actively genocidal. It's even more bizarre that you'd argue this in conjunction with arguing from a position that is not in evidence anywhere, not even acknowledging that it's one you made up on the grounds that it's what one of the hoi polloi would think.

To be quite frank, you are so far away from correctly understanding my points and arguments that my initial reaction was "this has got to be a willful and deliberate way to dismiss my objections by accusing me of genocide fantasies." I then stopped and realized this was probably wrong.

My second reaction was "this is the product of a mindset so far detached from my own, that said mind doesn't even consider the possibility that it may be misinterpreting my own, and skips straight to the "wow, Simon is an evil ogre" interpretation."

You are a recent joiner on this forum, and presumably don't know me, but I like to think I've established my bona fides on this front. I resent the implication that I desire mass death or other humanitarian catastrophes, especially when in this very thread, let alone elsewhere on the forum at times when you may not have been here, I have explicitly stated otherwise.

It's honestly not worth the time and blood pressure it would take for me to back up and try to explain to you just how far off the mark you are, and how fully you have misunderstood what I'm saying, unless you're willing to agree to at least apply the principle of charity, of humanity, and the Gricean maxims to what I'm saying.

Unless, in short, you're willing assume I'm actually a rational and more-or-less-moral being who harbors no secret fantasies of massacre, destruction, evil, treachery, and so forth.

So, are you willing to start from there? Yes, or no?

Your response is a pretty good example of what people call "white fragility". I say that your argument is, from my perspective, "phrase things nicely or white people will get genocidally violent" and you accuse me of saying that you're in favor of genocide. Given that you're arguing in favor of nice phrasing, consistently, this is an utterly incomprehensible conclusion for you to come to on the basis of what is in the discussion. After all, if you were pro-genocide, you would hardly be making an argument over your view of what's necessary to forestall genocide.

But when we look at the rest of your post, it becomes apparent why you came to this conclusion. You are unable to handle a frank discussion of race in America, and racist violence, where we use plain and simple and informative, Gricean language like "genocide" to describe mass murder on racial grounds. That is to say, your ability to discuss these matters is fragile. It requires a great deal of padding to function without breaking. And it really is not worth engaging in all the necessary padding, for several reasons. 1, doing so obscures meaning. 2, it leaves you in the same position you were before, and 3, there are a lot of people out there who are not so fragile as you, and with whom these discussions can be had without them breaking.

2 is itself very important and relevant to the discussion you're having with Straha. The conclusions of most academic fields lead into areas that are genuinely radical and separate from common everyday experience. Learning about special and general relativity, or the infinite square well, or electron-sharing in metals, or ring species, or Grimm's Law, or the constructivist understanding of history and archaeology, should leave the learner's mind altered, their perceptions shifted. Why should critical studies be any different? It doesn't actually change the conclusions involved, all it does is dampen the ability of the student to think about the conclusions and engage with the field and contribute to it.

With that said, you seem to think that from an objective level, gender studies is simply more friendly than race studies. This is obviously not the case, because there are many people who object horrendously to gender studies too. There are even some of them who accept the conclusions of critical race theory while shying away from those of critical gender theory. That is, it is almost certainly a subjective conclusion you are coming to about the two fields.

It is not hard to see why that conclusion is one you came to, at least at a proximate level. You consider critical gender studies as consisting primarily, if not totally, as a non-radical formulation which declares clean lines between maleness, masculinity, patriarchy, etc. But there are plenty of other formulations, including ones which call for the annihilation of all those concepts, ones which call for the radical transformation of maleness and masculinity, ones which conclude that particular masculinities must be killed, ones which question maleness period. That is, your understanding seems to be "I have found a comforting-to-me theory in this subject but not in that subject, therefore the first subject is good and the second subject is flawed." I leave it as an exercise to the reader to note the two major problems with that understanding.

[Ziggy Stardust]

The conclusions of most academic fields lead into areas that are genuinely radical and separate from common everyday experience. Learning about special and general relativity, or the infinite square well, or electron-sharing in metals, or ring species, or Grimm's Law, or the constructivist understanding of history and archaeology, should leave the learner's mind altered, their perceptions shifted. Why should critical studies be any different? It doesn't actually change the conclusions involved, all it does is dampen the ability of the student to think about the conclusions and engage with the field and contribute to it.

There is a false analogy at play here.

The other examples you give aren't "radical" or non-intuitive in the same way that critical studies are. Special relativity and the other physics examples you provide are "radical" because they are properties derived from an understanding of complex, abstract mathematical models that can only be statistically verified through very specified types of observation in controlled experiments. Grimm's Law, likewise, is an emergent property of a mathematical model used to try and describe the distribution of consonant shifts in Indo-European languages. And so on for your other examples. These are based on mathematical rules applied to a hypothetico-deductive model of scientific inquiry.

This is categorically different from the types of inquiry you find in critical studies of any sort. Note please that I am not trying to make a qualitative argument about "hard" vs. "soft" sciences, or imply that critical studies are somehow inferior or not worthwhile fields of pursuit (indeed, as I mentioned earlier in this thread, I spend a lot of time reading and thinking about such studies, and there are plenty of very valid arguments to be had concerning the shortcomings of the hypothetico-deductive model itself). I am simply pointing out that the types of ontological constructs used in critical studies, and the way they are applied, interpreted, and discussed, are very different from the examples you give derived from other fields of inquiry.

In fact, if you look historically at the development of these critical studies, they emerged specifically as a response to the perceived shortcomings of the logical positivist models used by the "hard sciences". That is, the entire reason it exists as a field is because it was an alternative to such models. So to compare critical studies to these other sciences as you have is representing a misunderstanding of the entire point of those studies. It's like comparing semiotics with behavioral neuroscience: loosely speaking, they are deriving inference from the same types of phenomena, but the methods and goals of the fields are wildly divergent.

It's not to say that such comparison is inherently futile, but rather that using the comparison the way you have (i.e. claiming that Simon would be hypocritical to conceive of critical studies in a different way then he does of the various hard science examples you cite, and that there is a close analogy between general relativity and "Whiteness" as an ontological construct) is inherently fallacious.

[Effie]

The conclusions of most academic fields lead into areas that are genuinely radical and separate from common everyday experience. Learning about special and general relativity, or the infinite square well, or electron-sharing in metals, or ring species, or Grimm's Law, or the constructivist understanding of history and archaeology, should leave the learner's mind altered, their perceptions shifted. Why should critical studies be any different? It doesn't actually change the conclusions involved, all it does is dampen the ability of the student to think about the conclusions and engage with the field and contribute to it.

There is a false analogy at play here.

The other examples you give aren't "radical" or non-intuitive in the same way that critical studies are. Special relativity and the other physics examples you provide are "radical" because they are properties derived from an understanding of complex, abstract mathematical models that can only be statistically verified through very specified types of observation in controlled experiments. Grimm's Law, likewise, is an emergent property of a mathematical model used to try and describe the distribution of consonant shifts in Indo-European languages. And so on for your other examples. These are based on mathematical rules applied to a hypothetico-deductive model of scientific inquiry.

This is categorically different from the types of inquiry you find in critical studies of any sort. Note please that I am not trying to make a qualitative argument about "hard" vs. "soft" sciences, or imply that critical studies are somehow inferior or not worthwhile fields of pursuit (indeed, as I mentioned earlier in this thread, I spend a lot of time reading and thinking about such studies, and there are plenty of very valid arguments to be had concerning the shortcomings of the hypothetico-deductive model itself). I am simply pointing out that the types of ontological constructs used in critical studies, and the way they are applied, interpreted, and discussed, are very different from the examples you give derived from other fields of inquiry.

In fact, if you look historically at the development of these critical studies, they emerged specifically as a response to the perceived shortcomings of the logical positivist models used by the "hard sciences". That is, the entire reason it exists as a field is because it was an alternative to such models. So to compare critical studies to these other sciences as you have is representing a misunderstanding of the entire point of those studies. It's like comparing semiotics with behavioral neuroscience: loosely speaking, they are deriving inference from the same types of phenomena, but the methods and goals of the fields are wildly divergent.

It's not to say that such comparison is inherently futile, but rather that using the comparison the way you have (i.e. claiming that Simon would be hypocritical to conceive of critical studies in a different way then he does of the various hard science examples you cite, and that there is a close analogy between general relativity and "Whiteness" as an ontological construct) is inherently fallacious.

I'm not talking about ontology. I am talking about epistemology.

You're also yourself engaging in conflation of different kinds of knowledge and arguing that special relativity is no more radical than pre-Newtonian gravity because both require statistical analysis of controlled experiments, which is extremely curious.

[Straha]

Re: The White Fragility stuff.

It's telling that one of the things that wigs people out about the original article is the fact that the author makes explicit their hate for Whiteness and white people. The response to that hate here has been profoundly negative, yet I've been asking explicitly since page one why that hate would be illegitimate and have gotten no real answer.

The two answers that have been given are "White people didn't chose to be born" which is both irrelevant and not responsive and that "the reasons to hate them are all historical" which is simply false.

Yet being confronted with the idea that another group of people, living in the same space as you, could legitimately hate you is so profoundly unsettling as to require not just immediate rejection as wrong but also the firing of the messenger.

But, by contrast, non-white people in the United States are expected to internalize that a significant portion of the majority population hates them explicitly and openly, and that a majority of the country will act like they hate them even while they publicly disavow it.

[The Romulan Republic]

Re: The White Fragility stuff.

It's telling that one of the things that wigs people out about the original article is the fact that the author makes explicit their hate for Whiteness and white people.

I thought that your defense of this article is that "whiteness" means something different than "white people", and that the author was condemning the former, not the latter?

Are you changing your position on that? Because if you are, you are saying that (in your opinion) this article advocates genocide- and that you are defending that position.

This is not something that you want to be unclear or waffling on.

And I don't think taking offense at "You should not be alive because of your skin color" is a fair example of "white fragility", or an indication of white racism. This is something almost any person on this Earth would be expected tot take offence at- and rightly so. I will concede a great many things in the cause of equality. The right of people with white skin to exist is not one of them.

The response to that hate here has been profoundly negative, yet I've been asking explicitly since page one why that hate would be illegitimate and have gotten no real answer.

You are seriously asking why hatred of people based on their skin color is illegitimate?

There is a lot of oversensitivity from insecure white people. "I object to being told I should die because of the color of my skin" is not an example of that.

The two answers that have been given are "White people didn't chose to be born" which is both irrelevant and not responsive

It absolutely is relevant- as it underlines the fact that you are condemning people, not for any act they have committed or any character flaw, but simply for existing.

and that "the reasons to hate them are all historical" which is simply false.

I'll give you that, but at the same time would note that I oppose collective guilt in all forms- I'd rather condemn people for their own individual actions, rather than saying that an entire race shares the guilt for every offence committed by persons of that race.

Yet being confronted with the idea that another group of people, living in the same space as you, could legitimately hate you is so profoundly unsettling as to require not just immediate rejection as wrong but also the firing of the messenger.

Um, yeah? No shit?

Being told that millions of people are right to hate you simply for existing is bad. Less so for white people than non-white people perhaps, but only because non-white people have, on average, less means to act on that hate at present. Not because the hate is inherently more justified.

But, by contrast, non-white people in the United States are expected to internalize that a significant portion of the majority population hates them explicitly and openly, and that a majority of the country will act like they hate them even while they publicly disavow it.

Which is horrible, and can understandably lead to anger and hate.

That is not the same thing, however, as saying that applying that anger and hate to every white person down to the last child is justified, and both of those things are distinct from saying that applying that anger and hate to all white people is productive.

Because unless your goal is "race war until all but one group are exterminated", it isn't.

Edit: At best, you'll achieve nothing, because more reasonable people will ignore you. At worst, you'll actively contribute to more racial conflict.

[Simon_Jester]

Your response is a pretty good example of what people call "white fragility". I say that your argument is, from my perspective, "phrase things nicely or white people will get genocidally violent" and you accuse me of saying that you're in favor of genocide. Given that you're arguing in favor of nice phrasing, consistently, this is an utterly incomprehensible conclusion for you to come to on the basis of what is in the discussion. After all, if you were pro-genocide, you would hardly be making an argument over your view of what's necessary to forestall genocide.

This is starting to come across as you saying "no, I am not willing to start from the assumption that you are a decent human being who is trying to be reasonable, I can't be bothered to understand why you said the things you said before assuming it's all about you trying to protect your fragile ego."

But when we look at the rest of your post, it becomes apparent why you came to this conclusion. You are unable to handle a frank discussion of race in America, and racist violence, where we use plain and simple and informative, Gricean language like "genocide" to describe mass murder on racial grounds. That is to say, your ability to discuss these matters is fragile. It requires a great deal of padding to function without breaking. And it really is not worth engaging in all the necessary padding, for several reasons. 1, doing so obscures meaning. 2, it leaves you in the same position you were before, and 3, there are a lot of people out there who are not so fragile as you, and with whom these discussions can be had without them breaking.

And I'm reading this as "I'm too busy trying to psychoanalyzing Simon on the strength of a couple of forum posts I haven't read the context of, to actually talk or listen to him."

You could have just said "no, I consider ineptly psychoanalyzing people to be too important a part of my debating style to drop it for a relatively unimportant priority like hearing their words and responding to them."

Instead, you continue to misconstrue why I ever brought up the issue of large scale (as in, drastically larger than we have right now) racial violence, when I already explicitly discussed and explained why I was bringing it up.

So are you going to admit that you are doing so and that maybe this is bad debating practice? Or not?

2 is itself very important and relevant to the discussion you're having with Straha. The conclusions of most academic fields lead into areas that are genuinely radical and separate from common everyday experience. Learning about special and general relativity, or the infinite square well, or electron-sharing in metals, or ring species, or Grimm's Law, or the constructivist understanding of history and archaeology, should leave the learner's mind altered, their perceptions shifted. Why should critical studies be any different? It doesn't actually change the conclusions involved, all it does is dampen the ability of the student to think about the conclusions and engage with the field and contribute to it.

Exactly what is it, aside from my supposed fragile ego which is presumably a personality defect and not a specific concept, that I'm missing here? I mean, you can clearly name the concepts in physics and biology and linguistics that provoke these paradigm shifts in the learner's mind. Is 'the entire field of critical studies' a mind-blowing paradigm shift that is irreducible, such that you cannot even identify the components within it that carry such revolutionary significance?

Or are there specific propositions within the theory that have the effect of triggering a paradigm shift, a figure-ground inversion that suddenly makes it obvious why it is necessary for the Greater Good to have a Conversation that consists of people publishing certain kinds of newspaper editorials, and why this is obviously a good idea even if it results in lots of people deciding they have no more interest in listening to the newspaper because it hates them and sounds suspiciously like it secretly wants them dead?

With that said, you seem to think that from an objective level, gender studies is simply more friendly than race studies. This is obviously not the case, because there are many people who object horrendously to gender studies too. There are even some of them who accept the conclusions of critical race theory while shying away from those of critical gender theory. That is, it is almost certainly a subjective conclusion you are coming to about the two fields.

It isn't even a question of which of two fields is objectively more "friendly," it is specifically a question of how vocabulary impacts ability to communicate one's findings to a layman who is sympathetic to those findings, but not utterly unwilling to criticize or dissent from those findings.

If you choose the technical vocabulary of your field such that a call for ethnic cleansing, versus a call for an end to oppression in which nobody has to die or be driven from the land as a refugee, differ only in the capitalization of a few words, and if you ever, ever use that technical vocabulary in a discussion to which you know laymen will be listening... you're doing it wrong.

If my car blows out because I poured water in the gas tank, and you point to a friend of mine whose car did not blow out because they did not do such a foolish thing, I do not somehow win by presenting the counter-argument "yeah, well they still had to have the axle replaced because of that pothole they hit, so there can't be THAT much difference between what they do and what I do, huh?" Because it's not about "whose driving encounters the least obstacles," it's about "pouring water in my gas tank is a very bad idea and will not result in me reaching my destination."

And if I protest "YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND! If your ego weren't so fragile, you'd see why it is necessary that we all pour water in our gas tanks!" then that accomplishes nothing either.

It is not hard to see why that conclusion is one you came to, at least at a proximate level. You consider critical gender studies as consisting primarily, if not totally, as a non-radical formulation which declares clean lines between maleness, masculinity, patriarchy, etc. But there are plenty of other formulations, including ones which call for the annihilation of all those concepts, ones which call for the radical transformation of maleness and masculinity, ones which conclude that particular masculinities must be killed, ones which question maleness period. That is, your understanding seems to be "I have found a comforting-to-me theory in this subject but not in that subject, therefore the first subject is good and the second subject is flawed." I leave it as an exercise to the reader to note the two major problems with that understanding.

Suffice to say that the formulations you describe seem to have to some extent lost the internal struggle within gender studies for who gets to hold the microphone. Or at least whichever microphone it is that connects to the outlets I'm familiar with. This is not to say other viewpoints do not exist- admittedly.

Insofar as these other viewpoints succeed in getting ahold of the microphone, and in conveying their message to the part of the public which does not specifically identify as critical gender studies scholars or devotees of same... I predict that they're likely to actively undermine the cause of women, just as Martinez wound up acting in a way prone to undermine the cause of racial minorities.

---

Just to be clear... are you disagreeing with the proposition that a person can comment on how an idea is communicated in a manner separate from their agreement with its conclusions?

A. I'm saying that agreeing with what the field is communicating depends on whether or not you agree with its conclusions.

B. I'm also saying that to be able to offer comment you have to have some sort of engagement with the field, even if it's just a passing familiarity. When the field is communicating "Whiteness is bad and must be contested" and you respond with "What about calling it the right of the whip?" you are not offering a suggestion for how it should massage its message, you are disagreeing with a core conclusion of the field. Not knowing that you are disagreeing with a core conclusion of the field underlines the point I'm making here.

A. I submit that it can also depend on other factors, in addition to ignorance of the desired conclusions being drawn. I furthermore submit that if I tell Charles Darwin to consider calling his revolutionary theory of how organisms change over time "evolution" and not "fuck-you-God-doesn't-exist-deal-with-it," that is not disagreeing with the actual core conclusion of the theory of evolution.

Now, if we find that one of the core findings of the theory of evolution is "therefore, we need to hoist the Jolly Roger and consciously make our every utterance a blow struck against religion," it at least explains and motivates alt!Darwin's inflammatory choice of a name for his theory. At the same time, though, if I were looking at the theory from the outside, I couldn't help but say "wow, the part about speciation and natural selection explaining the origin of species sounds really smart, but the part about why this means we need to launch an anti-crusade against religion in the name of Truth sounds really dumb."

B. The specific term I came up with was something utterly casual and off the top of my head. I was trying to make an underlying point about how maybe it should at least be possible to talk about the racial dominance hierarchy and the ethnic group on top of the hierarchy with different words. Unless of course one is trying to enshrine the idea that literally every time the conversation starts to include members of the ethnic group on top of the hierarchy that haven't fully subscribed to the conclusions of the field, that they will come to regard the field as hostile and threatening to themselves personally, and start rejecting its conclusions out of hand.

Which sounds like a terrible idea for a way to convince anyone of anything.

Unless of course it's entirely missing the point to even talk about the goal of critical race studies being to convince people of things, which I'm beginning to believe may be true, but which in the process undermines the claim of the field to be a scholarly field, since convincing people of truthful things while not deliberately muddying the waters with falsehoods is a pretty important part of scholarship.

Even when you directly tell me the conclusions and I agree with them, that doesn't seem to be good enough to give me grounds to say "well, the effect of communicating the conclusions in the specific manner in question is going to be predictably disastrous all around." I'm not sure me reading a stack of books would help at that point, because if I don't interpret the books in a way that results in my viewpoint becoming literally identical to yours, we may still have disagreements on this and I'll still be getting clouds of ink in my face every time I try to discuss specific consequences of specific actions that occur in realms I do clearly understand.

Disagreements are good. I'm not preaching a singular way of viewing race studies, and I find the disagreements between Afro-pessimists, Afro-futurists, Black feminism, et al. profoundly enriching and rewarding. (To say nothing of the incredibly complicated relationship between these claims and Native studies.) I am saying that you should read these books so that you can begin to grok why what's being communicated is being communicated the way it is.

Dawkins and Gould disagreed with each other. Those disagreements were profoundly enriching. Gould and, say, Jerry Falwell disagreed with each other. That disagreement wasn't. I want whatever disagreements we have to be enriching, that requires a literacy about what's being discussed.

Okaaay, but my concern is that I feel like some of the reasons the disagreements weren't enriching before may not actually have very much to do with the difference between our starting positions, and may have more to do with other factors that I can't make go away by completing a reading list. That's why I'm still waiting and thinking over your responses to me elsewhere.

Hang on.

It sounds like the arguments you want to advance are arguments about how the other arguments should be communicated. That is to say, for you this isn't a question of how to obtain the best (or least-bad) PR for accomplishing some agenda. But rather, how the other arguments should be communicated is the entire point, the thing I cannot possibly understand without reading a stack of books. Or perhaps, the ONLY point under debate is how the argument should be phrased, and everything else is irrelevant.

Am I misunderstanding you?

Yes. I am saying your notion of justice isn't actually just. Which answers the question of "If your conclusions are logical and just, why are you communicating them this way?" quite nicely.

Okay, so what exactly do you think my notion of justice is, anyway? I feel as though a lot of opinions are being attributed to me without my consultation or consent, and that's the kind of thing I usually see when people are being dishonest or not really listening to me. I can acknowledge the possibility of exceptions to that pattern, but it's not a promising starting place from my point of view.

From my perspective, you've skipped to the second step of this process while I'm still a little vague on the first step. Thus my questions.

Honestly, perhaps this is on me, I thought you knew more than you did. I thought you were at least familiar with why certain terms were used and what core phrases (e.g. Postmodernism) mean. It became increasingly clear over the course of the thread that you weren't. To use your analogy if someone goes into that conversation with the Physics teacher mentioning Kip Thorne and whether or not black holes can destroy information and then reveals that they don't know anything about special relativity it's a whole different conversation. Hence, this breaking point here.

In some cases I am, and in some cases I'm not, but it seemed to me as though the conversation got increasingly dancing-round-the-point whenever I tried to point to consequences and impact of decisions made. And that is not encouraging me.

Because I would normally expect the reverse to be true, if the crux of the problem is simply that I am insufficiently educated.

It's like, in an evolution-creationism debate, the creationist tends to have to flail around and flounder all the more obviously when the discussion shifts to specific physical facts and cases and predictions and consequences of his theory. Because the creationist theory does not match the facts, it was constructed without reference to the facts and in defiance of the facts. And so it crumbles when faced with facts, and often has to engage in all manner of contorted reasoning to explain away facts that the theory of evolution can simply shrug and accept, or even be actively strengthened by.

If you took High School Simon, who for the sake of argument knew nothing of relativity, and asked him to talk about how he expected the universe to behave and whether or not his nonrelativistic picture of the universe physically mapped to what was actually going to happen... he'd lose, because relativity is true and the classical nonrelativistic interpretation is false. There wouldn't be any need for the physicist he was talking to to psychoanalyze him; the appeal to facts would be sufficient. That would be Young Simon's cue that he needed to learn more.

Here, I'm getting a sense that you're telling me "ah, but if you only read more books, you'd understand that these thing you perceive as facts don't matter, they're just ephemeral, inconsequential dross, and what really matters is satisfying this new utility function over here!"

Maybe that sense of mine is inaccurate, but it's troubling me at the moment. This doesn't feel like the cues-to-learn-more that I got the last umpty dozen times I didn't understand something because I didn't have enough knowledge to interpret it properly.

[Straha]

Re: The White Fragility stuff.

It's telling that one of the things that wigs people out about the original article is the fact that the author makes explicit their hate for Whiteness and white people.

I thought that your defense of this article is that "whiteness" means something different than "white people", and that the author was condemning the former, not the latter?

No, my point for a long time has been that white people are not intrinsically white, so that the idea that you are hated just for your skin colour is a non-starter. The idea that you are hated because you actively take a subject position that relies on violence towards others, however, fair.

Because if you are, you are saying that (in your opinion) this article advocates genocide- and that you are defending that position.

Bullshit.

And I don't think taking offense at "You should not be alive because of your skin color" is a fair example of "white fragility", or an indication of white racism. This is something almost any person on this Earth would be expected tot take offence at- and rightly so. I will concede a great many things in the cause of equality. The right of people with white skin to exist is not one of them.

Objectively not what I or the article said.

You are seriously asking why hatred of people based on their skin color is illegitimate?

This has been hashed out above at some length.

It absolutely is relevant- as it underlines the fact that you are condemning people, not for any act they have committed or any character flaw, but simply for existing.

Again, there's a pretty strong quote from the article itself about how people become white and choose to be white. It was quoted above and discussed there. I point you to that discussion.

I'll give you that, but at the same time would note that I oppose collective guilt in all forms- I'd rather condemn people for their own individual actions, rather than saying that an entire race shares the guilt for every offence committed by persons of that race.

Someone doesn't need to be 'guilty' to have benefited unjustly from the oppression of others. Undoing that injustice means taking away those benefits. The question is whether or not we see that as righting a wrong or harming those people who have benefited.

Um, yeah? No shit?

Being told that millions of people are right to hate you simply for existing is bad. Less so for white people than non-white people perhaps, but only because non-white people have, on average, less means to act on that hate at present. Not because the hate is inherently more justified.

Let's use Rogue's concentration camp analogy. I think it's informative here. We can all agree that a Jew in the concentration camp is legitimate in hating Nazis, right?

So, is it understandable for them to hate Germans? Germans actively created Nazis, elected them into power, abetted them, and did little to stop the suffering that the people in the concentration camp have to endure.

Now what about that analogy doesn't track for someone who lives on the Navajo reservation?

But, by contrast, non-white people in the United States are expected to internalize that a significant portion of the majority population hates them explicitly and openly, and that a majority of the country will act like they hate them even while they publicly disavow it.

Which is horrible, and can understandably lead to anger and hate.

Which seems to undercut your protests above.

That is not the same thing, however, as saying that applying that anger and hate to every white person down to the last child is justified, and both of those things are distinct from saying that applying that anger and hate to all white people is productive.

Where have I or anyone else said that's okay in this thread?

[The Romulan Republic]

Apologies. I forgot about the prior mod ruling that this debate was to be confined to you and Simon_Jester.

In light of that, I feel that I have no option but to concede. In any case, since you have confirmed the distinction between white skin, and "whiteness" as a cultural construct that is not necessarily synonymous with skin color, you have addressed my main concern with your post.

[Effie]

Your response is a pretty good example of what people call "white fragility". I say that your argument is, from my perspective, "phrase things nicely or white people will get genocidally violent" and you accuse me of saying that you're in favor of genocide. Given that you're arguing in favor of nice phrasing, consistently, this is an utterly incomprehensible conclusion for you to come to on the basis of what is in the discussion. After all, if you were pro-genocide, you would hardly be making an argument over your view of what's necessary to forestall genocide.

This is starting to come across as you saying "no, I am not willing to start from the assumption that you are a decent human being who is trying to be reasonable, I can't be bothered to understand why you said the things you said before assuming it's all about you trying to protect your fragile ego."

But when we look at the rest of your post, it becomes apparent why you came to this conclusion. You are unable to handle a frank discussion of race in America, and racist violence, where we use plain and simple and informative, Gricean language like "genocide" to describe mass murder on racial grounds. That is to say, your ability to discuss these matters is fragile. It requires a great deal of padding to function without breaking. And it really is not worth engaging in all the necessary padding, for several reasons. 1, doing so obscures meaning. 2, it leaves you in the same position you were before, and 3, there are a lot of people out there who are not so fragile as you, and with whom these discussions can be had without them breaking.

And I'm reading this as "I'm too busy trying to psychoanalyzing Simon on the strength of a couple of forum posts I haven't read the context of, to actually talk or listen to him."

You could have just said "no, I consider ineptly psychoanalyzing people to be too important a part of my debating style to drop it for a relatively unimportant priority like hearing their words and responding to them."

Instead, you continue to misconstrue why I ever brought up the issue of large scale (as in, drastically larger than we have right now) racial violence, when I already explicitly discussed and explained why I was bringing it up.

So are you going to admit that you are doing so and that maybe this is bad debating practice? Or not?

2 is itself very important and relevant to the discussion you're having with Straha. The conclusions of most academic fields lead into areas that are genuinely radical and separate from common everyday experience. Learning about special and general relativity, or the infinite square well, or electron-sharing in metals, or ring species, or Grimm's Law, or the constructivist understanding of history and archaeology, should leave the learner's mind altered, their perceptions shifted. Why should critical studies be any different? It doesn't actually change the conclusions involved, all it does is dampen the ability of the student to think about the conclusions and engage with the field and contribute to it.

Exactly what is it, aside from my supposed fragile ego which is presumably a personality defect and not a specific concept, that I'm missing here? I mean, you can clearly name the concepts in physics and biology and linguistics that provoke these paradigm shifts in the learner's mind. Is 'the entire field of critical studies' a mind-blowing paradigm shift that is irreducible, such that you cannot even identify the components within it that carry such revolutionary significance?

Or are there specific propositions within the theory that have the effect of triggering a paradigm shift, a figure-ground inversion that suddenly makes it obvious why it is necessary for the Greater Good to have a Conversation that consists of people publishing certain kinds of newspaper editorials, and why this is obviously a good idea even if it results in lots of people deciding they have no more interest in listening to the newspaper because it hates them and sounds suspiciously like it secretly wants them dead?

With that said, you seem to think that from an objective level, gender studies is simply more friendly than race studies. This is obviously not the case, because there are many people who object horrendously to gender studies too. There are even some of them who accept the conclusions of critical race theory while shying away from those of critical gender theory. That is, it is almost certainly a subjective conclusion you are coming to about the two fields.

It isn't even a question of which of two fields is objectively more "friendly," it is specifically a question of how vocabulary impacts ability to communicate one's findings to a layman who is sympathetic to those findings, but not utterly unwilling to criticize or dissent from those findings.

If you choose the technical vocabulary of your field such that a call for ethnic cleansing, versus a call for an end to oppression in which nobody has to die or be driven from the land as a refugee, differ only in the capitalization of a few words, and if you ever, ever use that technical vocabulary in a discussion to which you know laymen will be listening... you're doing it wrong.

If my car blows out because I poured water in the gas tank, and you point to a friend of mine whose car did not blow out because they did not do such a foolish thing, I do not somehow win by presenting the counter-argument "yeah, well they still had to have the axle replaced because of that pothole they hit, so there can't be THAT much difference between what they do and what I do, huh?" Because it's not about "whose driving encounters the least obstacles," it's about "pouring water in my gas tank is a very bad idea and will not result in me reaching my destination."

And if I protest "YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND! If your ego weren't so fragile, you'd see why it is necessary that we all pour water in our gas tanks!" then that accomplishes nothing either.

It is not hard to see why that conclusion is one you came to, at least at a proximate level. You consider critical gender studies as consisting primarily, if not totally, as a non-radical formulation which declares clean lines between maleness, masculinity, patriarchy, etc. But there are plenty of other formulations, including ones which call for the annihilation of all those concepts, ones which call for the radical transformation of maleness and masculinity, ones which conclude that particular masculinities must be killed, ones which question maleness period. That is, your understanding seems to be "I have found a comforting-to-me theory in this subject but not in that subject, therefore the first subject is good and the second subject is flawed." I leave it as an exercise to the reader to note the two major problems with that understanding.

Suffice to say that the formulations you describe seem to have to some extent lost the internal struggle within gender studies for who gets to hold the microphone. Or at least whichever microphone it is that connects to the outlets I'm familiar with. This is not to say other viewpoints do not exist- admittedly.

Insofar as these other viewpoints succeed in getting ahold of the microphone, and in conveying their message to the part of the public which does not specifically identify as critical gender studies scholars or devotees of same... I predict that they're likely to actively undermine the cause of women, just as Martinez wound up acting in a way prone to undermine the cause of racial minorities.

Let's condense all this down: it is necessary that I tiptoe around you and make all kinds of favorable assumptions about you, but this is not to be extended to me, or to the points of view I am representing. That is, I cannot use the word "genocide" in my posts or you will insist that I am calling you a genocidaire, but you can say that it's credible to believe that antiracists are genocidaires and so they need to police their language. I think this more or less sums up the argument.

Let me say that no, Simon, Judith Butler's theories of gender as performance or most trans people's understandings of myriad gender have not "lost the internal struggle", and suggesting that anything other than some dipshit centrism is "undermining the cause of women" is mind-boggling in its sheer chutzpah.

But you also failed to engage with the point that we don't soften the conclusions of other academic fields for the sake of students's existing worldviews, instead deciding to venture towards "critical theory suxxx". I think that's an interesting tack to take if you're trying to convince people. Maybe if you puff that statement up enough, stretch it out to a good thousand words, I'll burn my copies of Discipline and Punish and Gender Trouble.

[Ziggy Stardust]

I'm not talking about ontology. I am talking about epistemology.

Could you clarify what precisely you mean by this statement, and why you think it invalidates my argument?

By the way, my post was primarily about epistemology, given that I spent a good deal talking about modes of inference, which is an inherently epistemological line of discussion, which leads me to believe that you may not have read or fully understood my post. Careful consideration of the mode of inference is a pretty essential tenet of epistemology, being one of the defining factors that allows you to disambiguate the many different types of epistemological argument (e.g. rationalism, empiricism, positivism, etc.). That you would dismiss my arguments with a vague reference to "ontology" is rather confusing.

You're also yourself engaging in conflation of different kinds of knowledge and arguing that special relativity is no more radical than pre-Newtonian gravity because both require statistical analysis of controlled experiments, which is extremely curious.

I'm extremely puzzled by this statement, which again leads me to believe that you didn't understand exactly what my argument was. How did I "conflate" different kinds of knowledge, when the entire point of my post was explaining the difference between the different kinds of knowledge that you conflated in the post I was responding to? Where precisely did I make such a claim about special relativity vs. "pre-Newtonian gravity" (not that it is at all clear what you even mean by such a label, which makes it seem like you do not even understand the history of gravity as a concept and exactly what it was about Newton's work that was so innovative and influential to begin with), and how would my line of arguments come to imply such a bizarre comparison?

I never made a claim that "requiring statistical analysis of controlled experiments" was some sort of necessary and sufficient condition for labeling something as "radical". In fact, I thought my post made it pretty explicit that I didn't even agree with your usage of the word "radical" in the context in which you are using it, given that I only used it in quotes as I have here. The entire point was that you were conflating a variety of very different types of ideas derived from different academic traditions and vaguely referring to them all as "radical" in the same sense, as if it were at all meaningful. I was explaining why this is a serious misunderstanding of the way epistemology operates; I didn't make any kinds of qualitative comparisons about what arguments were more or less "radical". In fact, very early in my post I explicitly stated I was rejecting such comparisons. Which further makes me feel like you either didn't understand or didn't bother to read my post.

[Simon_Jester]

Let's condense all this down: it is necessary that I tiptoe around you and make all kinds of favorable assumptions about you, but this is not to be extended to me, or to the points of view I am representing.

The only thing I've assumed about you is that you're trying to explain my opinions without understanding them, via psychoanalysis of a person you've barely even encountered. And that's because I'm seeing you do it in front of my eyes and honestly am having trouble to think of a more charitable description. If that's not what you're doing, what are you doing?

That is, I cannot use the word "genocide" in my posts or you will insist that I am calling you a genocidaire, but you can say that it's credible to believe that antiracists are genocidaires and so they need to police their language. I think this more or less sums up the argument.

You can use the word genocide. What I do not appreciate is when statements of mine with the intent of "I honestly can't understand why anyone would want Outcome X, because the only logical endpoint I can see for Outcome X would be a genocidal race war and that would be bad" somehow get twisted around into "Mmm, I sure to wish I had an excuse to commit genocide."

You will note that I did not accuse Straha of "fantasizing about genocide." I didn't even accuse Martinez of "fantasizing about genocide." The worst I accused him of was using a tone carrying sufficient hate, and using sufficiently ambiguous language, that it would be hard to tell without extensive prior priming that he wasn't fantasizing about genocide.

If you want to accuse me of same, fine- and I will be happy to explain myself, and to declare my allegiance for the 'no, genocide is the worst thing and should never happen' cause. While it's not at all clear to me that Martinez has been.

Let me say that no, Simon, Judith Butler's theories of gender as performance or most trans people's understandings of myriad gender have not "lost the internal struggle", and suggesting that anything other than some dipshit centrism is "undermining the cause of women" is mind-boggling in its sheer chutzpah.

Do said theories clearly differentiate, or fail to clearly differentiate, between saying large groups of people need to be abolished as people, versus saying that large elements of our cultural customs need to be abolished as customs?

If the theories fail to thus clearly differentiate, then insofar as they grab the microphone and broadcast to the larger world, they are apt to score massive own-goals against their own cause's interests.

If the theories do thus clearly differentiate, then the specific problem I'm trying to discuss does not arise.

From an admittedly very cursory scan of the concept of 'gender as performance' I see no reason to expect the problem to arise unless the theorists adhering to the concept started making some very poor choices that are not required by the clearly rather solid core logic of the theory. If there's a problem with Butler's theories, I would have to dig rather deeper to find it than I did to find a problem with Martinez's editorial.

But you also failed to engage with the point that we don't soften the conclusions of other academic fields for the sake of students's existing worldviews...

By and large they don't have to, because other academic fields don't usually have this problem where excitable undergraduates publish editorials in school newspapers that talk about the majority of the newspaper's readership with recurring usage of verbs like 'hate' and 'die.'

You may be assured that if excitable biology undergrads kept doing this with "theists need to die" or if excitable engineering undergrads kept doing this with "people who don't understand technology need to die," there would be considerably more language about biology and engineering as disciplines needing to learn how to speak in a manner appropriate to public venues.

instead deciding to venture towards "critical theory suxxx". I think that's an interesting tack to take if you're trying to convince people. Maybe if you puff that statement up enough, stretch it out to a good thousand words, I'll burn my copies of Discipline and Punish and Gender Trouble.

Honestly, I'd rather you kept those and burned Martinez's editorial.

The problem isn't critical theory, and I know full well that the problem isn't critical theory. The problem is a very specific one, that of not burning down the public spaces in which it is possible for people with different opinions to meet and discuss the relevant issues. Critical theory that can refrain from destroying the forum is very much constructive, and all that is required to thus refrain is a basic effort to differentiate between very dissimilar concepts.

[Effie]

Let's condense all this down: it is necessary that I tiptoe around you and make all kinds of favorable assumptions about you, but this is not to be extended to me, or to the points of view I am representing.

The only thing I've assumed about you is that you're trying to explain my opinions without understanding them, via psychoanalysis of a person you've barely even encountered. And that's because I'm seeing you do it in front of my eyes and honestly am having trouble to think of a more charitable description. If that's not what you're doing, what are you doing?

That is, I cannot use the word "genocide" in my posts or you will insist that I am calling you a genocidaire, but you can say that it's credible to believe that antiracists are genocidaires and so they need to police their language. I think this more or less sums up the argument.

You can use the word genocide. What I do not appreciate is when statements of mine with the intent of "I honestly can't understand why anyone would want Outcome X, because the only logical endpoint I can see for Outcome X would be a genocidal race war and that would be bad" somehow get twisted around into "Mmm, I sure to wish I had an excuse to commit genocide."

You will note that I did not accuse Straha of "fantasizing about genocide." I didn't even accuse Martinez of "fantasizing about genocide." The worst I accused him of was using a tone carrying sufficient hate, and using sufficiently ambiguous language, that it would be hard to tell without extensive prior priming that he wasn't fantasizing about genocide.

If you want to accuse me of same, fine- and I will be happy to explain myself, and to declare my allegiance for the 'no, genocide is the worst thing and should never happen' cause. While it's not at all clear to me that Martinez has been.

Let me say that no, Simon, Judith Butler's theories of gender as performance or most trans people's understandings of myriad gender have not "lost the internal struggle", and suggesting that anything other than some dipshit centrism is "undermining the cause of women" is mind-boggling in its sheer chutzpah.

Do said theories clearly differentiate, or fail to clearly differentiate, between saying large groups of people need to be abolished as people, versus saying that large elements of our cultural customs need to be abolished as customs?

If the theories fail to thus clearly differentiate, then insofar as they grab the microphone and broadcast to the larger world, they are apt to score massive own-goals against their own cause's interests.

If the theories do thus clearly differentiate, then the specific problem I'm trying to discuss does not arise.

From an admittedly very cursory scan of the concept of 'gender as performance' I see no reason to expect the problem to arise unless the theorists adhering to the concept started making some very poor choices that are not required by the clearly rather solid core logic of the theory. If there's a problem with Butler's theories, I would have to dig rather deeper to find it than I did to find a problem with Martinez's editorial.

But you also failed to engage with the point that we don't soften the conclusions of other academic fields for the sake of students's existing worldviews...

By and large they don't have to, because other academic fields don't usually have this problem where excitable undergraduates publish editorials in school newspapers that talk about the majority of the newspaper's readership with recurring usage of verbs like 'hate' and 'die.'

You may be assured that if excitable biology undergrads kept doing this with "theists need to die" or if excitable engineering undergrads kept doing this with "people who don't understand technology need to die," there would be considerably more language about biology and engineering as disciplines needing to learn how to speak in a manner appropriate to public venues.

instead deciding to venture towards "critical theory suxxx". I think that's an interesting tack to take if you're trying to convince people. Maybe if you puff that statement up enough, stretch it out to a good thousand words, I'll burn my copies of Discipline and Punish and Gender Trouble.

Honestly, I'd rather you kept those and burned Martinez's editorial.

The problem isn't critical theory, and I know full well that the problem isn't critical theory. The problem is a very specific one, that of not burning down the public spaces in which it is possible for people with different opinions to meet and discuss the relevant issues. Critical theory that can refrain from destroying the forum is very much constructive, and all that is required to thus refrain is a basic effort to differentiate between very dissimilar concepts.

You decided to start up by chopping an argument into pieces. Not a good sign.

Then you follow it up with splitting hairs because you're mad I wasn't nice enough to you, so that instead of saying "why are you writing fantasies of genocide and how you would be compelled by utilitarianism to join in" I would have written "why are you writing about a hypothetical instance of genocide which would seem to, if taken in the wrong light, and in this tone, suggest that you might possibly and potentially be compelled to engage in the genocidal campaign according to the moral calculus of utilitarianism", which certainly offers many advantages as a soporific.

In any case, you're posting about how I refuse to understand you while refusing to understand what I wrote. Freudian, paranoid, and quite frankly a little worrying.

"From an admittedly very cursory scan," well, I mean, I think that about sums it up. That said, nobody, nobody actually endorses "abolished as people". Stalinism didn't endorse abolishing as people. The Khmer Rouge didn't endorse abolishing as people. Those ideologies killed a lot of people and tortured a lot of people- in the aim of abolishing customs. The end goal of dekulakization was to transform kulaks. The goal of Year Zero was to transform New People. These horrors exist within what you consider to be respectable. So, remember: the killing fields are acceptable, because they merely wished to brutally annihilate the custom of schoolteachers, but saying "I hate white people" is unacceptable. Verges on genocidal.

See, here's the thing. It is 100% acceptable to hate white people if you are not. It is 100% acceptable to hate men if you are not. It is 100% acceptable to hate straight people if you are not. It is 100% acceptable to hate cis people if you are not. It is 100% acceptable to hate abled people if you are not.

Demanding that people refrain from hating the people who are standing on their faces is totalitarian violence. Demanding that they never voice their hatred is totalitarian violence. Voicing their hatred, voicing the pain and suffering they experience, also has the helpful secondary effect of enlightening people that this suffering goes on. That there is no way to be neutral. Simply standing still involves inflicting suffering.

And here's the thing. Just about anyone can understand there's a difference between hating men as a group and hating all individual men, because that's something everyone does or experiences. When people fail to understand that hating white people doesn't mean wanting to murder all individual white people, that's because they are temporarily suspending their knowledge of that difference. And that suspension happens when they're placed under threat of discomfort, remarkably. Almost as if it's a defense mechanism to avoid acknowledging things...

I'm not talking about ontology. I am talking about epistemology.

Could you clarify what precisely you mean by this statement, and why you think it invalidates my argument?

By the way, my post was primarily about epistemology, given that I spent a good deal talking about modes of inference, which is an inherently epistemological line of discussion, which leads me to believe that you may not have read or fully understood my post. Careful consideration of the mode of inference is a pretty essential tenet of epistemology, being one of the defining factors that allows you to disambiguate the many different types of epistemological argument (e.g. rationalism, empiricism, positivism, etc.). That you would dismiss my arguments with a vague reference to "ontology" is rather confusing.

You're also yourself engaging in conflation of different kinds of knowledge and arguing that special relativity is no more radical than pre-Newtonian gravity because both require statistical analysis of controlled experiments, which is extremely curious.

I'm extremely puzzled by this statement, which again leads me to believe that you didn't understand exactly what my argument was. How did I "conflate" different kinds of knowledge, when the entire point of my post was explaining the difference between the different kinds of knowledge that you conflated in the post I was responding to? Where precisely did I make such a claim about special relativity vs. "pre-Newtonian gravity" (not that it is at all clear what you even mean by such a label, which makes it seem like you do not even understand the history of gravity as a concept and exactly what it was about Newton's work that was so innovative and influential to begin with), and how would my line of arguments come to imply such a bizarre comparison?

I never made a claim that "requiring statistical analysis of controlled experiments" was some sort of necessary and sufficient condition for labeling something as "radical". In fact, I thought my post made it pretty explicit that I didn't even agree with your usage of the word "radical" in the context in which you are using it, given that I only used it in quotes as I have here. The entire point was that you were conflating a variety of very different types of ideas derived from different academic traditions and vaguely referring to them all as "radical" in the same sense, as if it were at all meaningful. I was explaining why this is a serious misunderstanding of the way epistemology operates; I didn't make any kinds of qualitative comparisons about what arguments were more or less "radical". In fact, very early in my post I explicitly stated I was rejecting such comparisons. Which further makes me feel like you either didn't understand or didn't bother to read my post.

1. Your arguments are about how we can't compare these things because they are ontologically dissimilar. I am arguing that all of them offer an epistemological expansion regardless of their ontological status. And your argument doesn't really address that, nor does it offer any kind of argument for the idea that critical race theory must be softened, Fabianized, in order to be made acceptable for the masses.

2. You're explicitly arguing that it is unacceptable to group critical theory, linguistics, and physics together while arguing that it is acceptable to group linguistics and physics together. This would seem to require justification. You're also implicitly arguing that archaeology and history can be grouped with linguistics and physics, which would require more justification.

(In case you were unaware, there are limits to variable control which mean linguistics is proportionally more observational than physics, and in turn archaeology and history are almost purely observational. Ignoring this seems to exist solely to denigrate certain fields of knowledge.)

3. Well, I think it's meaningful to describe ideas that require major shifts in worldview to incorporate them into one's mind as "radical" for the purposes of comparison with other ideas that also require major shifts in worldview to incorporate them into one's mind, for the purposes of explaining why self-censorship in the latter field is equivalent to self-censorship in the former field.

[Straha]

A. I submit that it can also depend on other factors, in addition to ignorance of the desired conclusions being drawn.

Sure? But it still depends on whether or not you agree with the conclusions, and you flatly disagree with their conclusions. I don't think the rest of that matters in this case.

B. The specific term I came up with was something utterly casual and off the top of my head. I was trying to make an underlying point about how maybe it should at least be possible to talk about the racial dominance hierarchy and the ethnic group on top of the hierarchy with different words.

Yes. And you did that without understanding why the words were being used in the first place which begs the question as to how you thought you could be constructive?

Okaaay, but my concern is that I feel like some of the reasons the disagreements weren't enriching before may not actually have very much to do with the difference between our starting positions, and may have more to do with other factors that I can't make go away by completing a reading list.

I think at the end of a shared reading experience you will, at the very least, understand why categories and words are being used by theorists and will be able to respond to their ideas rather than your imagining of their ideas. The disagreement will then be informed disagreement which is better than what's going on now.

[Okay, so what exactly do you think my notion of justice is, anyway? I feel as though a lot of opinions are being attributed to me without my consultation or consent, and that's the kind of thing I usually see when people are being dishonest or not really listening to me. I can acknowledge the possibility of exceptions to that pattern, but it's not a promising starting place from my point of view.

A. I don't need to offer a complete description of your vision of justice to say that the way you've expressed it here is not able to offer a method to achieve racial justice. If I am defending a different approach to justice that can then my system is better.

B. I am listening. I've also tweaked to you not having engaged the field which means you're communicating a lot less than you think you are. This is why I'm making the good faith effort here to offer you more insight to the field and give us grounds for engagement.

[In some cases I am, and in some cases I'm not, but it seemed to me as though the conversation got increasingly dancing-round-the-point whenever I tried to point to consequences and impact of decisions made. And that is not encouraging me.

Yeah, because you didn't understand the answers and were reverting back to previous points. I can point out a bunch of broken record antics from you above (and places where you straight up ignored long detailed arguments in favor of relying on the broken record), I'm being polite about it here because I don't think it was malicious but rather ignorant. Which, again, fair. No judgment per se on you not knowing this shit if you haven't studied it.

Because I would normally expect the reverse to be true, if the crux of the problem is simply that I am insufficiently educated.

You teach. People often think they know things when they don't. Those people are the hardest to teach at times because you have to walk them down a path that starts with them rejecting what they think they already know. Same thing here. Again, no judgment. This is the human condition. It's also a side-effect of the nature of the board (especially this board.)

If you took High School Simon, who for the sake of argument knew nothing of relativity, and asked him to talk about how he expected the universe to behave and whether or not his nonrelativistic picture of the universe physically mapped to what was actually going to happen... he'd lose, because relativity is true and the classical nonrelativistic interpretation is false. There wouldn't be any need for the physicist he was talking to to psychoanalyze him; the appeal to facts would be sufficient. That would be Young Simon's cue that he needed to learn more.

Remember years back when Carinthium was posting ludicrous shit here about how nations should behave and he wasn't getting it when people pointed out that "Nations don't and can't behave that way". Remember how he said he did know and that if he were ignorant than people should have been able to explain it to him. Remember how his misunderstandings prevented him from getting what people were saying. Same process, but much higher functioning, here.

Maybe that sense of mine is inaccurate, but it's troubling me at the moment. This doesn't feel like the cues-to-learn-more that I got the last umpty dozen times I didn't understand something because I didn't have enough knowledge to interpret it properly.

When is the last time you were cued to learn more about race and how race is constructed in society? You've made clear you haven't engaged with race studies which makes that the important question. One of the underlying arguments of race (and gender) studies is that your subject position influences and changes how you read facts and how you internalize them. I'm willing to bet this is one of those times.

[Thanas]

See, here's the thing. It is 100% acceptable to hate white people if you are not. It is 100% acceptable to hate men if you are not. It is 100% acceptable to hate straight people if you are not. It is 100% acceptable to hate cis people if you are not. It is 100% acceptable to hate abled people if you are not.

Demanding that people refrain from hating the people who are standing on their faces is totalitarian violence. Demanding that they never voice their hatred is totalitarian violence. Voicing their hatred, voicing the pain and suffering they experience, also has the helpful secondary effect of enlightening people that this suffering goes on. That there is no way to be neutral. Simply standing still involves inflicting suffering.

And here's the thing. Just about anyone can understand there's a difference between hating men as a group and hating all individual men, because that's something everyone does or experiences. When people fail to understand that hating white people doesn't mean wanting to murder all individual white people, that's because they are temporarily suspending their knowledge of that difference. And that suspension happens when they're placed under threat of discomfort, remarkably. Almost as if it's a defense mechanism to avoid acknowledging things...

So if I hypothetically were to hate all Americans it is totally okay because I am not hating all individual americans. Just merely the idea of Americans as a whole. I highly doubt that this would be an acceptable viewpoint to defend.

One should hate action or inaction, not groups.

[Effie]

See, here's the thing. It is 100% acceptable to hate white people if you are not. It is 100% acceptable to hate men if you are not. It is 100% acceptable to hate straight people if you are not. It is 100% acceptable to hate cis people if you are not. It is 100% acceptable to hate abled people if you are not.

Demanding that people refrain from hating the people who are standing on their faces is totalitarian violence. Demanding that they never voice their hatred is totalitarian violence. Voicing their hatred, voicing the pain and suffering they experience, also has the helpful secondary effect of enlightening people that this suffering goes on. That there is no way to be neutral. Simply standing still involves inflicting suffering.

And here's the thing. Just about anyone can understand there's a difference between hating men as a group and hating all individual men, because that's something everyone does or experiences. When people fail to understand that hating white people doesn't mean wanting to murder all individual white people, that's because they are temporarily suspending their knowledge of that difference. And that suspension happens when they're placed under threat of discomfort, remarkably. Almost as if it's a defense mechanism to avoid acknowledging things...

So if I hypothetically were to hate all Americans it is totally okay because I am not hating all individual americans. Just merely the idea of Americans as a whole. I highly doubt that this would be an acceptable viewpoint to defend.

One should hate action or inaction, not groups.

Yes, it is absolutely okay to hate "Americans", but you tricksily added "all", making it tautological. But it's a pretty bad example for a gotcha because there are a lot of people who hate America for being an empire that goes around murdering and exploiting, and the point at which it becomes unacceptable is when people in other countries on the top of the empire try to use it to deflect from their own complicity in exploitation and slaughter, such as when white British people insist that they're victims of America too.

But telling someone they can't hate the people who murdered their family, who, y'know, sit and eat dinner without ever even acknowledging that murder was committed, who insist that the murders were done to preserve freedom- well, that's pretty fucked up, you know? It's a weird priority to have.

Also, weirdly, but the hatreds I listed are due to structural actions and inactions.

[Bob the Gunslinger]

Why are you fantasizing about situations where you feel morally compelled to take part in the extermination of people of color because of utilitarianism?

Why are you insistent on conflating concepts you have admitted you can distinguish between in order to suggest that radical antiracists want to kill all white people through violence?

Did you read the fucking OP? Have you read Straha's posts? Jesus Christ are you guys blinded to how your statements appear to everyone outside of a very narrow educational niche.

I'm a bleeding heart Berkeley liberal, and you've made me care noticibly less about social justice issues. Bravo.

I mean, don't let the door hit you on the way out, dude. You certainly are a caricature of a "bleeding heart Berkeley liberal", though, given the NIMBY attitudes many supposedly progressive people in the Bay Area have, fostering gentrification, homelessness, and general accelerating inequality. That is, there's a tendency among many "liberals" to actually be moderates. They want equality, so long as it doesn't make them uncomfortable.

So in turn, they- you- end up wanting to have your cake and eat it too. You want to have "social justice" without actual justice- without recognizing that the problem of racism might be broader or deeper than the existence of individual atoms of bigotry. So you talk from the position that race is real, that whiteness isn't bullshit, that there is something meaningful about it, and then conclude that the death of whiteness means the extermination of everyone who is classified as white today. And therefore that whiteness, something which, when examined in its boundaries, exists solely to define lines of oppression, must be preserved now and forever.

And in turn, that antiracism is actually fake, that it's just about people of color wanting to murder white people. The world wonders as to what gay liberation means then.

1. Attack your allies with an ad hominem. Great strategy. "All you ______ are the same" is your opening statement in a conversation about race studies?

2. You don't know shit about me. But now I know you love to stereotype. I guess you learned that in Race Studies class? Seems kind of self-defeating to me. Tell me more about my people.

3. Your last sentence is complete gibberish to me and 99.99% of society. Please communicate with the normals in a thread about poor communication aimed at the normals.

4. You didn't address the fucking point that you (collective you) are harming your own cause when you insist on communicating with the other 99% using jargon apparently designed to sound inflammatory to anyone not initiated. What are you even trying to accomplish?

5. Like Simon Jester, I would love to be educated. I've spent a lot of time marching against injustice, writing to politicians, motivating people to vote against discriminatory propositions, and I'd love to know if there's a more effective way to fight injustice or if there's a flaw in my understanding of the world. Unfortunately, all you two have taught me is that there are plenty of stubborn assholes on the correct side of any issue, and I should probably have more sympathy for the moderates and near-moderates who are repelled by both sides. You two insufferably smug bastards are really eroding my motivation to care.

6. Seriously, try for one second to imagine how this all looks to a normal human being who doesn't live in an academic bubble, the kind of poor dumb brute who reads a college newspaper or an online news story about that paper. Just try for one second to see yourselves from unsmug eyes.

[Effie]

1. Attack your allies with an ad hominem. Great strategy. "All you ______ are the same" is your opening statement in a conversation about race studies?

2. You don't know shit about me. But now I know you love to stereotype. I guess you learned that in Race Studies class? Seems kind of self-defeating to me. Tell me more about my people.

3. Your last sentence is complete gibberish to me and 99.99% of society. Please communicate with the normals in a thread about poor communication aimed at the normals.

4. You didn't address the fucking point that you (collective you) are harming your own cause when you insist on communicating with the other 99% using jargon apparently designed to sound inflammatory to anyone not initiated. What are you even trying to accomplish?

5. Like Simon Jester, I would love to be educated. I've spent a lot of time marching against injustice, writing to politicians, motivating people to vote against discriminatory propositions, and I'd love to know if there's a more effective way to fight injustice or if there's a flaw in my understanding of the world. Unfortunately, all you two have taught me is that there are plenty of stubborn assholes on the correct side of any issue, and I should probably have more sympathy for the moderates and near-moderates who are repelled by both sides. You two insufferably smug bastards are really eroding my motivation to care.

6. Seriously, try for one second to imagine how this all looks to a normal human being who doesn't live in an academic bubble, the kind of poor dumb brute who reads a college newspaper or an online news story about that paper. Just try for one second to see yourselves from unsmug eyes.

Hey man, if you're losing your motivation to care because someone was rude to you, you'd never have made it against serious opposition anyways...

But between "attacking your allies", "ad hominem", "race studies is racist against white people", "both sides are bad", "academic bubble" (I work in industry, my guy), and "normal human being = poor dumb brute", well, my bingo card is quite full.

[Straha]

4. You didn't address the fucking point that you (collective you) are harming your own cause when you insist on communicating with the other 99% using jargon apparently designed to sound inflammatory to anyone not initiated. What are you even trying to accomplish?

You know, last I heard that phrase trotted out regularly it was when advocates were fighting hard for gay marriage and people kept pushing back with "You're hurting your cause, ask for domestic unions instead so you're not so inflammatory."

[Effie]

4. You didn't address the fucking point that you (collective you) are harming your own cause when you insist on communicating with the other 99% using jargon apparently designed to sound inflammatory to anyone not initiated. What are you even trying to accomplish?

You know, last I heard that phrase trotted out regularly it was when advocates were fighting hard for gay marriage and people kept pushing back with "You're hurting your cause, ask for domestic unions instead so you're not so inflammatory."

Well, uh, you know, opposition to gay marriage was never about people having an ideological belief that gay people were inferior, it was all about people just being indifferent and having to be placated with soothing words. And of course I say "was", but...

[Simon_Jester]

There's a difference between saying "it's inflammatory to ask for 'gay marriage' when you could instead ask for 'domestic unions' ..."

And saying "it's inflammatory to literally say things like "I hate you all," "you X people are all the same," "there are almost no decent X people" and "X should die." "

It takes borderline terminal blindness or smugness to be unable to recognize or acknowledge this difference. And I have grown utterly weary of even trying to interact with people who lack this capability.

EDIT:

It is the special privilege of the obnoxious fool to verbally abuse those who are willing to sit still for it for the sake of a greater cause. The obnoxious fool can become blind to this privilege, over time, and never realize that they are poisoning the wells from which their cause draws strength.

[Bob the Gunslinger]

There's a difference between saying "it's inflammatory to ask for 'gay marriage' when you could instead ask for 'domestic unions' ..."

And saying "it's inflammatory to literally say things like "I hate you all," "you X people are all the same," "there are almost no decent X people" and "X should die." "

It takes borderline terminal blindness or smugness to be unable to recognize or acknowledge this difference. And I have grown utterly weary of even trying to interact with people who lack this capability.

This guy gets it.

You other two... I give up. I guess I'm not pure enough to help the cause in any way. I'd remind you that perfect is the enemy of good, but I'm sure you'll find some way to warp that.

[Rogue 9]

4. You didn't address the fucking point that you (collective you) are harming your own cause when you insist on communicating with the other 99% using jargon apparently designed to sound inflammatory to anyone not initiated. What are you even trying to accomplish?

You know, last I heard that phrase trotted out regularly it was when advocates were fighting hard for gay marriage and people kept pushing back with "You're hurting your cause, ask for domestic unions instead so you're not so inflammatory."

Are you actually so goddamned blind that you don't see the difference between demanding equality and proclaiming hatred and demanding death and/or the expulsion of a people from the continent?

[Bob the Gunslinger]

4. You didn't address the fucking point that you (collective you) are harming your own cause when you insist on communicating with the other 99% using jargon apparently designed to sound inflammatory to anyone not initiated. What are you even trying to accomplish?

You know, last I heard that phrase trotted out regularly it was when advocates were fighting hard for gay marriage and people kept pushing back with "You're hurting your cause, ask for domestic unions instead so you're not so inflammatory."

You really don't see the difference between "don't ask for full equality" and "don't tell people you hate them and wish they were dead because of a condition of their birth"? Really?

For fuck's sake, I made calls and stood at street corners campaigning for marriage equality. Good to know I should have just given up because I wasn't pure enough for the cause.

[Straha]

4. You didn't address the fucking point that you (collective you) are harming your own cause when you insist on communicating with the other 99% using jargon apparently designed to sound inflammatory to anyone not initiated. What are you even trying to accomplish?

You know, last I heard that phrase trotted out regularly it was when advocates were fighting hard for gay marriage and people kept pushing back with "You're hurting your cause, ask for domestic unions instead so you're not so inflammatory."

Are you actually so goddamned blind that you don't see the difference between demanding equality and proclaiming hatred and demanding death and/or the expulsion of a people from the continent?

I mean, that begs the a priori question as to why you think White people have an equal right to the continent as Native folks.

That also begs the question where anyone has made the claim that killing white people is something we ought do.

[Bob the Gunslinger]

4. You didn't address the fucking point that you (collective you) are harming your own cause when you insist on communicating with the other 99% using jargon apparently designed to sound inflammatory to anyone not initiated. What are you even trying to accomplish?

You know, last I heard that phrase trotted out regularly it was when advocates were fighting hard for gay marriage and people kept pushing back with "You're hurting your cause, ask for domestic unions instead so you're not so inflammatory."

Well, uh, you know, opposition to gay marriage was never about people having an ideological belief that gay people were inferior, it was all about people just being indifferent and having to be placated with soothing words. And of course I say "was", but...

.

You are a human gibberish machine. Make sense for a change, please.