Comment by AI_WAIFU
5 years ago
> It assigns no positive or negative connotations to those items; they're things people said off the top of their head when they were asked "What does 'white culture' mean to you?"
The result is the same, the subconscious associations between "white" and "whiteness" and those traits has been strengthened. The meaning of words comes from what people think about when they hear it. By increasing the amount of things people associate with the word "white" the definition is expanded.
No negative connotations have been assigned by the document. But "white" and especially "whiteness" has very negative connotations. I've never come across any text or material suggesting "whiteness" is a good thing. Its always stuff like this: https://news.csusm.edu/ask-the-expert-the-problem-with-white... (That alone is already pretty fucked up when you think about it for more than a second) Furthermore, the meaning of words comes from what people think about when they hear it. But "white supremacy" has extremely negative connotations, and so all those normal things get tarred by association with imagery of the Nazis and the KKK.
>Regarding the previous "iceberg" image---that's a lot of words to go looking through to try and pick out the items you're describing as 'perfectly normal and valuable things.' Can you highlight which ones you were referring to? Assuming good intent, I assume you didn't mean "Racial profiling" or "Fearing people of color."
Of course not, those are the actually bad things that are used to tar the "perfectly normal and valuable things". If the iceberg picture only contained good things, it would associate positive valence with the term "white supremacy" rather than associating negative valence with the normal things as the picture was designed to do.
To take specific examples, "Calling the police on black people". This is a perfectly normal thing to do if your being robbed or harassed and the perpetrator happens to be black. Doing so does not mean your promoting white supremacy. Now if you're doing it because they're black, thats a bad thing, but the image makes no destination, so the normal thing is tarred by the bad thing. There are also some supper egregious ones, things like "White parents" and "there's only one human race/We're all one big human family". These are actually anti-racist perspectives that are now being associated with one of the most racist and destructive ideologies in history. Another one is "All Lives Matter", this is an explicitly egalitarian message that is now viewed as racist by association.
I can keep going through the list but then my arguments would turn into a gish-gallop.
This kind of rhetorical tarring has been going on for so long that certain kinds of explicit institutional racism is now viewed as not racist (affirmative action), and explicitly anti-racist and unifying statements "All lives matter/there's only one human race" are viewed as racist.
All lives matter, in particular, is perceived as racist because it's only trotted out as a response to black lives matter (a phrase it is not at all incompatible with, so people tossing "all lives matter" out as a response to "black lives matter" are immediately casting it in a racist connotation).
As for the reason it isn't really a retort to "black lives matter", that's been explained better by Chris Straub than I ever could.
https://chainsawsuit.com/comic/2016/07/07/all-houses-matter-...
Not unlike the battle standard of northern Virginia, symbols pick up racist connotation when racists keep using them.
No, it's always been a valid response to BLM. BLM puts the focus on race and race alone. Effectively excluding every other major source of causation and axis of variation. You know, things like extreme poverty, heart disease, malaria, etc.(All of which kill 100,000s every year and very disproportionately affect black people, but you never hear a peep about it from BLM) By making it a race issue (especially without solid evidence), you deliberately antagonize people who are either disproportionally affected by the other factors of variation who belong to the "privileged" race or who care about other issues that can be convincingly argued to be far more serious.
To extend the house analogy, there aren't 2 houses, there are 7 billion and you're saying we should focus our attention on the black ones rather than the ones that are on fire because they are more likely to be black.
Unfortunately, you can't quite capture that logic with a catchy jingle like BLM, so your left saying ALM and crossing your fingers hoping racial tensions don't escalate.
It's more that they're saying people just believe black houses are likelier to catch fire innately and that's acceptable, when they're not and it's not.
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