Re: What has America become?
Posted: Mon Feb 01, 2021 3:28 am
Stop tiptoeing around the subject. Try and have a Miss White America and see what happens. Try having a white congressional caucus and see what happens. Try having a white entertainment television channel and see what happens. Say any life, other than black lives matter, and see what happens. Try and create a white scholarship fund and see what happens.DeCav wrote: ↑Sun Jan 31, 2021 7:37 pm"if we dislike a black person, we’re racist and if a black person dislikes whites, its their 1st Amendment right"
Kind of an incoherent thought. First of all, I'm not sure disliking anyone even falls under the 1st Amendment. It strikes me in the strictest sense as something Orwell described as a "thought crime". I might dislike my neighbor and at the same time never tell anyone, including him, about my dislike. But that's getting a bit down in the weeds. Just thinking out loud here, btw.
Probably the most disturbing aspect of this sentence just jumped out at me only now. I've read this statement 3 or more times and given it some thought but it wasn't until I pasted it into this post did one of the more subtle notes of the statement occur to me. Read it one more time with an emphasis on certain words...
"If we dislike a black person, we're racist and if a black person dislikes whites it's their 1st Amendment right."
Interesting that the second part of the statement is worded, "dislikes whites" and not "dislikes us".
I mean, who is "we" in this statement? Is it "we" as in...
I don't think that's who the author meant when he said "we".
I think it's not that much of a stretch to reach the conclusion that the whole tone of this statement is basically a veiled complaint of an "us vs. them/black vs. white" perceived grievance. I'm super uncomfortable identifying with this remark (no pun intended). What's really deep here is that I don't think the wording was a clever dog whistle or coded message. It seems completely hypothalamic to me and not even worded that way on a conscious level. There's a lot of baggage that could have been detached from this statement by more carefully re-wording it thus...
"if a white person dislikes a black person, it's racism but if a black person dislikes a white person, it's their 1st Amendment."
For the record, let me reiterate....I completely missed that the first several times I read that statement and I point the finger at myself for that. It seems logical for me to deduce that there might be some latent privilege or form of unconscious group identity deeply embedded within me that just substituted "white people" for the word "we". Very interesting to me. In my estimation, it signals that we (all of us, not just white people as the statement originally implies) have a long way to go before we're free of group and racial identity.
I say group and racial because this "we" pronoun is a tricky little word. Even in the Constitution, it only implies "Americans" and that's only if you're willing to be very generous to the founding fathers. "We" all know what I'm referring to.
In any online group or forum, "we" can literally mean anything. Here it might refer to high school football fans, or Dorman fans, or Gaffney fans depending on what thread the word is used in. In other forums "we" might mean people who voted for Trump or people who voted for Biden, or Libertarians, men, women, trans, BLM members, Proud Boys, people afflicted with cancer, victims of sexual abuse....etc.
Anyway, having pointed that last bit out and offered a correction, I'll share my other thoughts on the statement.
Expressing a dislike for a black person isn't being a racist. If that were the case then anyone who posted negative comments about Victory6 is a racist including some black people who I know for a fact posted negative comments about Victory6. I disliked Ray Carruth, the wideout for the Panthers who was convicted of conspiring to have his pregnant girlfriend murdered. I mention him because when Chuck and I were younger and playing Madden 64 weekly in franchise mode, I insisted on trading Carruth off our fantasy roster on a moral and ethical basis. Chuck resisted because his stats were through the roof on the video game and argued reasonably that it was just only a game but eventually caved and got rid of the dude.
If a white person doesn't like a black person and is vocal about it, guess what? That's their first amendment right. If a black person doesn't a white person and is vocal about it, that's also their 1st Amendment right. If a white person calls a black person the N word, it's protected under the 1st Amendment. If a black person calls a white person a cracker or redneck, or more to the point a racist, that's their 1st Amendment right also. Look it up. Hate speech is protected under freedom of speech. You can dislike anyone you want for any reason that you want and call them just about anything you want. Here's the trick though....the second part of the statement is much more accurate than the first part of the statement. It's everyone's right under free speech to call anyone else a racist. For that reason, I try not to invite reasons for people to call me such a word. The person who wrote this editorial probably understands all this. Heard a good way to look at "rights". Everyone is always talking about their rights. George Carlin has a good piece on this. I try not to think of my rights as rights but as responsibilities. I don't have the right to own a gun. I have the responsibility to own a guy. People can dislike whoever they want. But why complain if people don't like you back?