Berkley or Dallas?
- Thread starter ClimateSanity
- Start date
No one wants you to apologize for what your ancestors have done. You're only responsible for what you yourself have done. We want you to acknowledge the advantages that have benefited you and prevented other people from doing as well, and to begin to challenge those systems.
That's a combination of victim-blaming and minimization. "The Jews" weren't "antagonized". They were rounded up and slaughtered for the sake of Hitler's power and the salvation, as he told it, of their race. They were scapegoated. Hitler used their lives to seize and grow his power. He identified a group that he could single out for vilification and murdered them.
This can happen here. All it would take is one aggressive leader to engage the hatred of the masses and stoke their sense of dispossession and victimhood.
Experiencing white privilege is not blameful. Creating it is. There's a difference.
That's right. You're not. You just want to be.
Whereas the descendants of slaves and the Native Americans whose ancestors were murdered as they were driven from their lands have actually been dispossessed have a genuine grievance rooted in things that happened outside of your self-pitying fantasies.
You're comparing the relative loss of advantage by the fading majority to a campaign of mass slaughter that actually happened.
I'm not entirely sure I understood that grammatically.
But Trump and his cronies are the elite. They aren't the liberal elite. They're the economic elites. They buy the access they need to expand their power and wealth, which they turn around and use that new power and wealth that they've stolen to buy more. And they tell poor white folks that it's all the fault of black and brown folks so that they'll keep voting for them, because the poor whites fear nothing as much as equality with people of color.
Those social programs by the federal government after WW2 were deliberately closed to people of color. They didn't even hide it. If you were white and you didn't benefit from it, it was because you didn't take advantage of it. If you were black or brown, and you didn't benefit, it was because of who you were. And ever since then, the efforts have been to tear down those programs, so even legal integration couldn't give the advantages back to those groups.
When Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, he was working on the Poor People's Campaign. That included poor whites, because he recognized at the time that there was a natural economic interest in common between poor whites and people of color. The problem was, poor whites fear equality with people of color, so they were still enticed against their interests, by the very rich creeps holding them down to vote for their candidates.
https://www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/
But hey....tax cuts!!! Here's a nickel. Go wash all ten of my yachts.
What you are is conveniently misdirected.
Berkley is more a college town, one of the most liberal cities. It would make more sense to compare Dallas with Oakland.
Dallas is a fairly typical American city, same with Houston and Phoenix Arizona. Older east cost cities are slightly more liberal, such as Philadelphia, yet Pittsburgh is preferably more conservative than Dallas.
The most conservative large cities are located in the deep south, Birmingham AL, Jackson MS, Columbus SC, while the most liberal cities are located on the wast coast, such as SF, LA, SD, in CA Portland and Seattle Washington.
I have money, but am not elitist, not at all!
I see no reason to have any guilt about my past, or my ancestors' past. Some were in the US when the Louisiana Purchase was made, then moved back to France; they did not like the English, should I feel guilty they 'betrayed' America, no way! Some had plantations and held slaves, feel guilty why? That was the way things were in those days, and I am not living in that time and if I were what if I did no different? Why do something, which make one feel guilty, why, in effect, be a bad person. I those days many thought is was right and proper, and those known as Abolitionists thought too much, and did not make a profit on what they were against. It is easy to be against something when it cost one nothing, and much harder to do what is right when it does cost one own life and wealth.
Thomas Jefferson, I have read would have freed his slaves when he died, well, if true, so what? If he thought it was wrong, then he should have freed them at that time, not wait until he dies, so he might have felt guilty, poor man. I do not look back and fell like "oh gee, how terrible my ancestors were" it was what it was at the time and is more more. so why ruminate upon it?
ClimateSanity
New member
Having money is not what makes an elitist.
No, but having power and using it to prevent others from gaining power is.
ok doser
lifeguard at the cement pond
got an example in mind?
correct and that happens even on a small level when one has a million invested they take part in placing a value on a company, which may be distorted.
Sure. Say you're a millionaire who pretends to be a billionaire in order to entice people to join a fake university that you run to bilk them of their hard-earned money with the false promises that you'll share your secrets.
Or, suppose you're a private school billionaire, and you use your money to get appointed the head government official in charge of public schools, and then you use that power to subvert the public schools that might compete with your private business interests.
Or maybe you're an investment banker, and you use your connections to wealth and power to get placed in charge of the government's money, and you use that power to protect your private wealth, and avoid accountability for your actions.
Current events are the most salient. But then, what made you think I was talking about Trump? Only one of my examples would have connected to that.
ClimateSanity
New member
Here is an article talking exactly about my subject. It describes how the cultural elites have extreme hatred for the people I was describing:
https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/05/the-elitist-war-on-the-deplorables/
Excerpt:
Last week, the New York Times named tech writer Sarah Jeong to its editorial board with apparent knowledge of her long history of racist tweets, as well as verbal attacks on police and males in general. Perhaps such gutter venom was proof of militant orthodoxy to be appreciated rather than medieval racism to be shunned. Her mostly empty résumé seems compensated by her identity and her politics—as the Times more or less confessed in its sad defense of her racist outbursts.
Jeong claimed that white people smelled like wet dogs. She had bragged that she hated them, and hoped that soon they would become childless and disappear. Her final solution of demographic extinction was, she said (in historically dense fashion), “my plan all along.”
One wonders whether she will canonize her collected tweets into something like “My Struggle,” replete with less abstract territorial theories how to reify her “plan” or add pseudo-scientific details explaining why and how whites, as she alleges, smell or have had no cultural or scientific achievements.
Lots of her other tweets about toxic white people and culturally repugnant white heterosexual males suggest that Jeong’s twitter corpus is not, as alleged, one of flippant jest, counterpunches to trolls, or accidental streaming.
Rather it is consistent with the profile of an embittered but otherwise mostly undistinguished social justice warrior who had fueled her bias at Harvard Law School and honed its expression in the no-consequences world of left-wing blogs.
Of course, once caught, Jeong predictably retreated to victim status: she was simply replying to hateful trolls. (One wonders whether her venom against police was likewise supposedly prompted by police attacks on her?)
The Times, which claims it has a practice of calling out hate speech, and blackballing any with Jeong-like skeletons, suddenly tsk-tsked its hiring by claiming that she was merely overzealous in her eliminationist response to Internet trolls. More likely, the Times liked her verve and smiled at the click-bait attention she earned. It’s a free country, after all, and the Times is perfectly free to hire all the progressive racists it wishes to enhance its brand.
annabenedetti
like marbles on glass
Or maybe your foundation (headed by your wife), is connected to a real estate deal backed by the chairman of Halliburton, who would in turn benefit from your department's decision to open public lands for oil drilling and exploration.
Oh, no. That sounds way to swampy for our stable genius President. Hey did you know that California's water ran to the Pacific??? I just found out from our own Dear Leader. Who knew?