Journal of Other Forum Analysis (Volume II, Issue 1)

[DavidCroquet]

I’m guessing one mod is banning. Because let’s face it that whole tribunal of mods that have to get approval for a ban Is 100% bullshit. Just like it was 100% bullshit that it was “ impossible” to ban Twitter links. A higher up admin probably un banned him After he directly notified him that he was unfairly banned two weeks.

There's gotta be some background mod conflict about how spicy "angered" posters are allowed to post.

Their half-walkback of the cunt regulation sent (yet another!) signal that their guidelines are inconsistent and preferential: a rule is only a rule when you're not really upset...or something.

[HaughtyFrank]

It’s kind of crazy how games studios have basically just refused to hire the best software people for over a decade. Even more crazy that they employed these loonies instead.

the best software people work in industries that pay much better than games. so all that's left are these types

Thinking about how for a hot minute Corrinne Yu was considered like the tech messiah of gaming. Of course she ditched games and is now the VP of engineering at General Motors which probably pays insanely more.

[Nintex]

It’s kind of crazy how games studios have basically just refused to hire the best software people for over a decade. Even more crazy that they employed these loonies instead.

4 years ago: "Right Nintex as if there is a group of woke video game developers that are deliberately fucking up the games they're working on with their political agenda. It's just one of your dumb conspiracies"

[Blueball]

I went looking for the post where she says that "reckoning" would be centuries of slavery for white people. Found this instead from 2020, it's probably a good primer on her seething narcissist self-importance: https://www.resetera.com/threads/are-all-white-people-racist.184470/page-4#post-31268580

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

*(breathes in)*

*(breathes out)*

Alright kids, let's talk about how ideas spread. Marketing and advertising, propaganda, philosophy, whatever. Let's just start with this.

We can all acknowledge the fact that exposure to concepts will inevitably result in an individual being at least subconsciously aware of those concepts. Whether it's the fact that advertising is even a thing that, you know, works, the numerous stories of family members being lost to the Fox News or alt-right pipeline, the fast spread of memes, or even that "representation matters" because seeing folks on screen allows for the formation of even basic parasocial relationships which in turn fosters empathy for outgroups, I think you would be hard-pressed to argue against the fact that "continuous exposure to information makes a human being more susceptible to absorbing that information."

Now let's talk about demographic spread, or like, how folks kinda congregate and live with each other.

Taking data from the US Census Bureau from it's 2013-2017 American Community Survey, black and white segregation has... not actually moved all that much since the beginning of the century, with a dissimilarity index around 70 on average. White people, largely, keep to themselves, while black people do so as well but are seeing more integration with Hispanic/Latinx populations (howdy y'all). This is due to many factors regarding economics and business and culture and all that good shtuff I don't feel like talking about while I'm absolutely starving right now. But yeah, that's just another fact. White people largely still keep to themselves, and it really wouldn't be out of the question to call America segregated in all but law.

Okay. Do we agree on these two things as, like, facts? Advertising works, and America's population tends to cluster by race?

Good.

Alright.

NOW We can talk about racism.

Because racism is not just a conscious belief? It's like a spectrum of thoughts and behaviors, big ones and small ones, to varying degrees of consciousness where the outcome is inevitably a disdain or distrust of another race. And the sad fact is, America (and by extension Europe; you all started this mess) has done a bang-up job of putting out a shitload of propaganda both about the inferiority of black and brown people and the superiority of white people for centuries. The glossing over of native genocide as "manifest destiny," the fact that you all thought it was a good idea to allow confederates to rewrite history, the continuous hostility to black and brown protest, the awkward consumption of black and brown media that results in erasure, the outright conscious efforts to just outright write scientists, politicians, artists out of history, the fact that white people literally took one of the most inspiring Biblical figures from the Middle East and began to depict him as a white dude when... he couldn't have been white? The police in general..... Oh, Zwarte Piet; can't forget that! The Mounties committing genocide against the natives under Trudeau's watch.... Hell, Trudeau's blackface.

I mean, I literally don't think I have the character count to just go on about how much stuff, how much information, how much propaganda, has existed and continues to exist about how black and brown folks just ain't shit compared to white people.

But even if you're conscious of its existence and work to bat those nasty thoughts away... it doesn't mean the programming isn't working, hasn't already worked. If it takes seven viewings of an advertisement for you to remember a product, even subconsciously, you cannot dismiss centuries of cultural advertising. Especially when you are without the means to actively combat it. Because let's be honest, white people are fucking terrible at uprooting and getting rid of racism! And I can say that with confidence because in 400 years of undisputed rule in America the best you could do in 2016 is elect Donald Trump.... Donald Trump. You all chose to do that.

You largely don't live around black and brown people- the last Census says so- so the most exposure you get to us, if any, is through the media and forums like this one. But some tenuous viewings of Black Panther and readings of my posts can't compete with the fact that white people live and work around white people 24/7, who have been inundated across generations that they are the best, and it's an indoctrination that has been passively allowed to happen. Those pictures of white folks screaming at Civil Rights protestors, the lynchings, the concentration camps?

I mean, think about it. Those people were never arrested. Never punished. Never admonished. Most of them weren't even publicly named. They were allowed to go on and continue living their lives without having to confront the fact that they were, indeed, the baddies. It simply became something you couldn't talk about openly. You couldn't "tell it like it is." But that didn't mean they weren't spouting it around the house, on the job, at the dinner table. It didn't mean they weren't distrusting of the few black and brown folks they saw at the store, or on the corner, or on TV. That's why you still have shitty family members at holiday gatherings. Because there aren't any consequences for white supremacist thought, not really. There's always a place to go to stew in it to some degree, or to at least never confront it.

It's also why most people don't confront said shitty family members. It's not a big deal to you. The effects of white supremacy have worked on you too, and thus it's much more easier to let Uncle Bob spew his shit about the wall again than to actually take a meaningful dive into anti-racism. And even aggressive anti-racists like Tim Wise, those who come along once in a blue moon, still slip up once in awhile and let the message take over.

I say all this to say this: The thought that there is any white person on Earth where colonialism has touched that has not been susceptible to white supremacist thinking is laughable. The question is not "Are all white people racist?" The question should be "When are white people going to step up and actually work towards making a more equitable world?"

.... I'm going to go get food and pour one out for my mentions.

I just think there's a wider response globally and perhaps it's time to focus on solutions instead of problems being pointed out, which hasn't appeared to have made much impact thus far in the history of the world or USA.

The only reason we keep having "conversations" is because white people don't want to implement the solutions that black and brown people have been giving you for centuries. In 400 years of "whiteness" being a concept, we have basically had to drag you all kicking and screaming towards some nebulous end of "anti-racism," and even when we achieve some measureable milestone, whether it be abolition, or civil rights, or putting body cameras on police, or having you all not dress in blackface for your winter parades, it is almost inevitably set back by the continuance of white supremacy in other forms and ways allowable by law, or by "white lashes" such as the election of fascist figures all throughout the world in the last few years.

Reparations, affirmative action, dismantling the police, waiving both personal and national debt (hey France, stop fucking over Haiti m'kay?), actually deplatforming the alt-right, recognizing the sovereignty of natives, taking down confederate iconography, just not fucking voting for right-wing parties. There's plenty of solutions to combat racism. Nothing I've said in this thread is new, just regurgitated thoughts from more daring trailblazers and writers packaged up for you all. Black and brown people have had the conversation, and given you the solutions.

So again, the question is when are you all going to do something about it? My honest guess is never, because you simply have no incentive to do so.

The solution isn't easy and I don't pretend to have any start to answer that but calling all white people racist isn't a great start to that and it's just finger point the problem in place of workable solutions.

You don't have to pretend to have an answer, because black and brown people have done the thinking for you. There's tons of written and video content out there on what to do to get the ball rolling on dismantling white supremacy the world over, as well as plenty of organizations to join if that's your bag. In general, all white people have to do is implement the solutions that have been sitting there free of charge.

But that would mean admitting there is a problem and checking your ego at the door, instead of obfuscating the point and kicking the can down the road since the status quo is just so darn cozy. Because you can tell me you hire for diversity. You can tell me you teach your children right.

And yet you're in here pretending like conversations still need to happen, blaming Trump on minorities not outvoting 60% of the population, leaning into the falsehood the this is an American-centric problem, asking why I didn't put Latinos and Asians on blast, and ultimately not even actually trying to refute the propositions I put forth in that first post but still insisting that you are uncomfortable with me saying what I said.

Like, you're literally doing then thing I talked about in my first post and you don't even realize it.

The underlined part I take issue with. So I purposefully hire people that aren't just Aussie whites/mates, I teach my kids about world issues, we relish the opportunities for our kids to visit other countries or experience their culture locally but I still have to check my ego at the door? Why because I tell you we're not racist because we do those things?

It's because it's obvious that you're upset. You have made a number of deflections and have downplayed what I have said. You're continuously trying to shift the burden to others. You keep trying to prove to me you're one of the good ones. You literally aren't understanding that this defensive behavior- right here- is part of that "spectrum" of behaviors I talked about earlier, albeit more on the passive-aggressive end than the more aggressive end. It is a good thing that you are hiring Australian minorities, and it is good that you expose your children to other cultures. And yet despite all of that work, when a black American speaks about the systems of white supremacy that affect them the most, your answer included "Why aren't you talking about the Latinos and Asians, huh?!"

You literally just don't get it, and frankly I don't think there's anything I can say to better communicate to you the problem, which in itself is also a big issue. I don't know how to communicate my lived experience with someone who, by way of the forces of society, can not actually get a sense of how I live and how that lived experience informs my own philosophy. As I said, empathy is derived from exposure. But joke's on me. I can't expose white people to racism as felt by black people, no more than I can try to teach a dog about the number 5 when science has said dogs can only comprehend 4 instances of something, and anything beyond that is just "a lot."

Like, how the fuck do you break down the number 5? It's self-explanatory.

This is also why I say solving white supremacy is impossible, and it's why I've taken a hands-off approach in recent years in my life. It will persist long after I die, but the most I do is to fight for a better quality of life for myself. I don't need white people's approval to do what I want to do and be with who I wanna be with. So, take this as a victory. You've burnt me out.

I woke up and can't say I'm surprised at how this thread has gone...largely because it was going the same way when I was active. We're at the point now where the only way most people are willing to answer the question is to throw all other races into the mix to more easily absolve the horrible sinking feeling that being a good person is actually a really hard thing to do.

But I'm not going to address all that. My fellow minorities, specifically black folks, have once again done the work that they're not going to be rewarded with. I do want to talk about this silly notion going around because no one seems to have hit on it, and I definitely want to hit on it because I am THAT person.

The notion that you can't say "all" of white people in any context is silly for two reasons, those two reasons being metonymy and heritability.

Let's start with the first one because it's simple: Metonymy is just a fancy way of saying "using an encompassing concept to describe a wide spread phenomenon." And white supremacy- specifically white supremacy, not just "racial prejudice" to you non-Americans who continuously try to distance yourself from this (I see you, you Sassy Sues)- is a wide spread phenomenon.

For example, take the statement "America has an obesity problem." No one is going to really balk at this. Hell, many of you will take this as an opportunity to start ranting about the moral inferiority of the obese.

"America?! You're saying ALL Americans are obese?! You can't say that! I'M skinny!"

This is literally never the line of conversation because people can recognise that the use of "America" is meant to describe how wide-spread the phenomenon. Also, there is a degree of separation people have for their nationality, because it's something you can technically change or not feel as passionately about. Indeed I would say on a US-centric forum that leans left, feeling "American" is understandably not something to be overtly proud of because it carries with it certain connotations of horribleness considering what America continues to do to the world.

But race is different. Race is something that is biological (this is false, but let's go with it); it's something that's, like, apart of you in a way that can't be changed, and yet simultaneously it also has no bearing on your quality as a person. That's why racism is so bad! How can you apply this concept of metonymy to race?!

Easily, because of heritability. Shaun of Shaun and Jen talks about this at length in his episode about The Bell Curve, but if you don't want to watch two hours of video to get to the pertinent bit, here it is:

Heritability is not the passing of traits down between parents and off-spring. It is the rate of occurrence of a trait in any given population. That rate of occurrence can be due to anything, including social factors, and indeed heritability doesn't actually remark on the source for why a trait is the way it is. All it says is "this is a pattern in this population."

For example, if you have five of the same plant, and give all of them equal access to what they need to grow to 10 feet, (food, water, sunlight, etc.) and you see an equal distribution of this trait, tallness hitting 10 feet has 100% heritability. If you were to have taken one of the plants and given it shitty conditions, and it only grows to 5 feet, then heritability drops, not because of the biological potential of that plant to grow, but because of its worse environment.

If you're not a science denier and understand that heritability is a just a thing, and you agree that white supremacy is a world-wide phenomenon, then you actually have very little way of arguing out of the notion that all white people are racist to some degree. That widespread racism is NOT the result of genetic or biological factors, because race as a genetic phenomenon doesn't exist. Race is sociopolitical. So rest easy, white people; you're not born with a hate gene. You didn't literally inherit the sin. Instead, your ingrained dismissiveness of minorities is a result of social conditioning, namely the one that has said for centuries that white people are just better than everyone else just because they're white.

Which is actually great news for you because it means you can be a better person and fix the problem, in largely the same ways we try to tackle obesity as an American phenomenon.

Again, you are raised in this system whether you like it or not. It has colored your perceptions whether you like it or not. To deny this to make yourself feel better is not helping; indeed, it is the reason I still have to do so much work on this left-leaning forum in the first place. You all don't get it, and then inevitably post some nonsense I have to moderate.

And I can hear it now, because conversations about white culture (can we take a moment to recognize the irony of people from markedly different cultures and perspectives can still somehow consider themselves "white?" Huh. Odd how that works) always re-route to "what about the blacks and browns?" I know you're going to ask:

"Are you saying then it's fair for me to start talking about black criminals and smart Asians? These things can be heritable too!"

I'm sure a few of you are salivating at the chance to FINALLY "tell it like it is."

But I sure indeedly am not giving you that green light. You know why? Because you've been trained by white supremacy! Whenever a white person talks about Chicago's violence and they're actually not directly involved in the curtailing of those issues, do you think any black person listening is dumb enough to think that- deep down- this person doesn't think on some level that Chicago's crime is an inevitability because of some inherent genetic deficiency in black people to follow the law? Of course not. You know it, and I know it. And that's the difference.

By way of white supremacy, ethnic minorities possess a remarkable clarity to critique caste-based systems from a sociopolitical context, because to fight white supremacy you inevitably have to start with the notion that it doesn't exist as a scientific principle, if only to embolden your self-worth in a society that is always saying you're worth less than. This clarity is in turn countered by an amazing ignorance of white people to understand this fact because they are the ones on top of the food chain and are by default not victims to its horrors, and without any ability to attain true empathy, they default to what they have been trained to know as does anyone else when trying to comprehend something new. And the default belief of white supremacy is that the ills of the world are the result of non-white barbarians who are uncivilized by nature.

This is all nothing more than a belief system, like religion or traditional politics, which is why I am confident in attacking it this pointedly. It doesn't matter that your ancestors thought it was a nifty idea to tie the belief system to some vague notion of race in order to justify themselves, and that as a result you feel like I'm attacking you because of how you were physically born. You're not oppressed on the basis of whiteness; let's get that out of the way. Indeed, if you think I'm being harsh, you should try taking the advice of Urban Scholar and looking in on a typical dinner a politically-minded black family might have on a Sunday night. Content Warning before you do: It ain't pretty.

So what is it about racism that makes everyone want to immediately declare they aren't racist?

It's simple. Racism is something commonly considered both categorically evil and a conscious act of will.

White people don't want to be considered consciously evil, especially leftist ones.

So instead of coming to grips with the fact that they're not the heroes of this story (again, really hard to do when you've been raised in a system that says you are the hero as ordained by God), they instead deny and lash out.

I get your point here, but I don't think not being a racist means being a hero. I don't think either that every people who claims not to be a racist isn't one indeed. Yet I completly understand if someone not being a racist would deny it.

I am not talking about simply not being racist when I talk about hero narratives. I'm talking about the way white supremacy works. I'll make this quick because I have to go run an errand to my bank:

Whiteness is ultimately nothing. Like, literally nothing. It is not genetic, nor is it reasonably drawn upon ethnic or national lines. It's a nebulous philosophy at best that unites an arbitrary group of people against the rest of the world. You can also describe it as an antithesis. Whiteness is the absence of race. It is the absence of an easily-definable group. It is the absence of culture (that's why the Italians, Eastern Europeans, and Australians in here still know what it's like to be "white" before they know what it's like to be any of these other specific nationalistic identifiers). It's assimilative. That's literally what it was designed to do; to temper the horrors of colonialism and the Atlantic Slave trade by saying "Hey, random ass farmer dude; you deserve that land of yours because you're special. Science and God says so!"

Indeed, the best way to pave over uncomfortable truths is with hero narratives. Look at how almost all superhero movies have climaxes that pave the way to a good outcome through violence while at the same time black people can't even protest on the DA's front lawn. White people REALLY love hero narratives to an absurdly unhealthy degree. If that whole "manifest destiny" thing didn't prove it, and if Fox News talking about how black people were "the losers" and need to "get over it" didn't do it for you, there's this weird fascination you all have with ancestry that doesn't align with how black folks experience it.

I'm gonna get very anecdotal here, but hear me out in this example: Southerners love to paint the confederates in a positive light in part because there seems to be this sinking feeling that "If Great-Grandpappy was fighting to keep his slaves and not to protect his home, what does that make me?" Even otherwise liberal folks are strangely uncomfortable with finding out the may have had confederates in their lineage, when frankly I can't fathom why the fuck it even matters whether or not that's true. After all, I thought you guys didn't want to pay for the sins of your forefathers?

But still. Crack open any history book and you're going to get taught about white history. High-class music is European orchestral music. Great acting is defined by white Shakespearean theater. The best cuisine is French cuisine; they may eat snails and frogs, but that's extremely different from the bats Chinese people eat! The only period of great intellectual and scientific progress you learn about in the world is the European Renaissance. And this shit goes on and on and on. You would think that the rest of the world just wasn't doing shit, and indeed I as a black woman grew up with that mindset! When you're indoctrinated by adults to only learn what white people are doing as a kid, then you just put other people and cultures to the wayside except in small instances like the Civil Rights that inevitably have to be touched on, all the while lacking the critical thinking to understand that those instances had to nonetheless come from concurrent movements and springs of thought, philosophy, and action. Because you're never taught about those concurrent cultures and movements.

All of this creates this kind of thoroughline that white people came from great people, kings, leaders, and warriors (I guess that explains the foothold of Medieval fantasy in popular culture), or otherwise heroic and noble people, and that this condition of righteousness must be carried on at least in some part through genetics and ancestry. Society screams at white people that they were meant for greatness, because after all, the greatest things to experience are white things. And it leads into American exceptionalism (although let's be clear that American exceptionalism isn't only American- looking at you, Brexit), the idea that you are not held back at all by the social forces at play, but by the sweat of your own brow. You are the singular thing standing in between a life of toiling and a life that is completely walled off from that toiling through mounds of capital. Not society. Not capitalism. You. You are an individual. You have power. You have total control. You are, as they say, "the hero in your own story."

It's bullshit. Bullshit to assuage you that you aren't standing on a bedrock of blood.

Black people don't get that luxury. Yes, I grew up being told about the American Dream at school, and yet at home my parents gave me the talk that I would that I would never have an excuse to be an individual because I'm black, and being black comes with certain asterisks and addendums. I am not allowed to be stupid or ignorant; I need to know white culture better than white people know it, because if I make a mistake that's an indictment of the entire race. My clothes must be perfect and proper. My hair has to be chemically straightened to look like white people's. I am not allowed to make mistakes, because making a mistake could be the difference between coming home to live another day, and becoming a hashtag wherein you all argue whether or not I charged a cop and thus needed to be put down.

White people get the luxury of believing they are not bound by societal systems because white supremacy puts them in that position by default, because whiteness is the absence of grouping, and without a group you are free to be individualized. But it's a luxury that comes with a real human cost. Because when you believe that you're infallible, that you're not constrained by these kinds of social orders, that you aren't racist because you are some magical snowflake who's completely bucked the trend.... and yet your life still sucks, what do you do? Who do you get mad at? Who do you direct your dissatisfaction towards? Not the systems keeping you down, because they're simultaneously the systems propping up your ego. Black people largely shrug the suckiness of life off as an inevitability because we grow up behind the curve. Not to say we are impervious to things like substance abuse and mental anguish; we're human too.

But we're not the ones grappling with this kind of identity dissonance through mass shootings either.

A word isn't diluted simply because its definition applies to a wide swathe of situations.

Literally every single human being has to eat to live, but that doesn't magically dilute the biological importance of eating or the cultural traditions and norms around the world that surround the act of eating. No one says "If you say everyone needs to eat, well you are devaluing cuisine!" No, this is dumb.

This rhetoric, as with the majority of it in this thread, is borne from trying to distance yourself from the issue, and not from any real insistence on addressing the issue at hand. It's an attempt to frame racism as some nebulous evil that you, the special, impervious person you are, are definitely not influenced by, versus a system of beliefs and attitudes that happens to be so pervasive that you have no choice but to be exposed to it.

I like how the person in the video says all white people are racist, then says in her description below that anyone who disagrees with her has no right to speak to her. Hey, great way to encourage productive dialogue and bring people together. Thumbs up.

It's not on black people to heal racial divides. It's on white people to get their shit together and stop being surprised that scores of black people have had enough of talking to brick walls and just want to focus their energy on constructive outlets.

I haven't seen the first person argue against this concept, but I also haven't seen you use the words "All white people are racist." because you know it's absurd.

All white people are racist.

That was very easy for me to say.

Yea but you think songs about killing white babies are justified so who the hell is going to listen to a your view on the matter when you're a racist yourself?

Man, I bet you thought you had me.

Why do you think people are bringing up other races?

To deflect from having to examine white supremacy on its own.

Explain the ultimate goal of the topic question. It seems a quite useless one to me without any subsequent line of discussion.

The topic is pretty clear cut. It asks if all white people racist or not. Thus, you would think the discussion would follow trying to determine if that is true without asking about other ethnicities. If you think a question of such magnitude is useless, then I don't know what to tell you what to look for regarding productive discussion on a video game enthusiasts forum.

There's no examination being done in this question though. And I would say from the discussion seen here the topic is not quite so clear cut as you say it is.

The question itself is a bad one. Discussion around it is not bad, but it needs a direction better than assigning a characteristic to a group.

If the answer is yes - now what?

If the answer is no - now what?

Racism was never going to be lessened by this topic, or indeed any other you could frame yourself. Because frankly the time for talking has been over for centuries. The true question is when are white people going to be willing to make the altruistic sacrifices necessary to begin righting their wrongs.

As I said, my guess is never. No one has any incentive or spine to do so. So at the very least we can both take comfort in the lack of utilitarianism this topic has in regards to fixing society's ills (although, again, it must be noted that this threshold for a topic's existence is only leveled at white supremacy. Kinda funny how that works).

At the very least, it has given me a platform to speak on matters that are relevant to my daily life, help the few receptive people here better understand these concepts from a black perspective, and raise fragile people's hackles in the process. So not all was lost.

I feel like wanting to do the right thing and feeling like you aren't an awful human being are important to people, and the statement "all white people are racist" hits a nerve because generally speaking we wouldn't go around saying "some racists are alright", so there's a contradiction, or there isn't and I find that interesting. I don't disagree with the statement, I think no matter who you are you have your prejudices and it's all to varying degrees and what position you're in.

Again, I feel like being a truly good person is always a grindy work in progress because a lot of negative outcomes in society are the result of passive or normalized actions and customs you have to actively work to combat. In that vain, the desire to be a good person becomes irrelevant with regards to the work that needs to be done. I try to make my particularly moral choices on the basis of if it's going to help others. I don't care if doing so necessarily makes me a good person because it's not about me, or perhaps more specifically, the morality follow the actions. A good person is someone who is always consciously acting in the right even when they are burdened by a society built on wrong and, thus, will inevitably make mistakes and actions that are harmful anyway. Just as there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, there's no white person completely free of racism in a white supremacist world.

That doesn't mean you can't work towards making it better, nor does trying to make it better mean you are completely absolved of your responsibility to keep doing the work, in the same way that not buying Nike shoes doesn't mean you're necessarily a good person under an anti-capitalist lens either. Yes; being good is really hard!

So as I said in my opening post, racism is a spectrum of behaviors and beliefs. It's all bad, but to varying degrees of bad. Thinking black people are more impervious to pain is racist, but it's not going to illicit the same rebuking as being a klansman. Subsequently, any white person who, like, just recognizes their privilege or apologizes for personal screw-ups is a lot more forgivable than the white person who engages in the kind of dismissiveness and gaslighting this thread has been ripe with. You can, in a way (that doesn't give you a pass) be burdened with racism and still be a good person, because the former is inevitable.

Sacrifices like what? What steps should be taken?

You could start with reparations, for one. We know you got the money.

If the time for talking is over, what does that mean it's time for exactly?

It's time for white people to stop pretending they lack culpability, stop pretending they're ignorant, and kicking the can down the road. It's time for them to fix this mess. And yes, you're on a countdown timer. Demographic change is occurring whether you like it or not, and you cannot count on future generations to be as courteous as we are, despite the fact that right now today, we really have absolutely no reason to respect social graces and civility with how many bodies white people continue to leave in their wake. This is not a call to violence, by the way. I'm not saying black people should get violent, nor do I think that's even a reasonable risk today. No one wants to, especially since people feel they have other avenues of seeking justice. What I am saying is that history teaches us that violence is nearly an inevitability in cultures of mass inequality. America already fought one war over this.

Treat it like global warming. Do the work now to avoid getting absolutely fucked later.

Raising hackles isn't going to change much

Neither is having a conversion that placates the sensibilities of white people. Again, this is not in black people's court. It's in white people's, and for centuries the only attitude you all have shown towards racial progress is resentment and resistance.

I cannot give the white collective the will to want to do better by minorities, and frankly I would not even if I could. You need to find that in yourselves.

f you're expecting any diverse group to act as a monolith, you're going to be disappointed. But then it seems you already are.

It's easy to blast a faceless concept. Less so to work with individuals, and as much emphasis as you seem to place on it being up to white people, I simply can't imagine the job of bringing people together being the work (not responsibility, but the completed labours) of many different people.

There is no collective hive mind, so you're liable to keep your disappointed stance. Incremental changes pushed by motivated individuals though, I can see, and what ripples out to larger effect. The question is how best to motivate people.

The irony of this bit is that whiteness is inherently assimilating and homogenous, which is inherent in negative reactions by white people who then go on to appeal to their unique nationalities and personal struggles to separate themselves from what they see as an "Americanized" issue. It is amusing then how American critiques of a so-called American-centric phenomenon can nonetheless rile up non-Americans, almost as if whiteness itself is something that- despite being completely bogus- is nonetheless universally understood wherever there are white populations!

Alas, I don't think of you all as some borg collective. I do think of you all, in terms of the sociopolitics of race, as belonging to a single culture which in turn has unjustly amassed an unfair amount of capital and power through centuries of genocide and disenfranchisement, all of which is continually done. As such, it is not an issue at all to ascribe a generalized responsibility for white supremacy to everyone who opts in to white culture.

My son is mixed race. Which side of this does he fall on?

On whichever side he is treated by a society that ascribes to white supremacy ideals. If your son looks white, he will be treated as such, maybe with some asterisks. If he doesn't look white, he will be treated like any other non-white person, like Obama is. That's the name of the game.

This thread has been a real eye opener that's for sure, I have a question...

Do the people of colour on this board like white people? Or do you just dislike us all? Do you also actively stay away from white people in real life? Or do you have white friends? If you feel like they are racist is it even possible to maintain friendships with white people without feeling the need to have discourse with them all the time over the subject?

If you do have white friends how does the same question play out in real life? I'd imagine it's quite a nasty subject, is it one that's even bought up?

I'm just curious to know. It's not a trick question it's just the sentiment I always seem to see here of "fuck white people" and the such like that it almost comes across as if you hate the fact we exist.

OK, that was more than one question, but I'm genuinely curious about how your feelings play out in real life because as I say reading this thread has been a real eye opener.

It's not a question of like or dislike for me. It's a question of trust.

I would say like 95% of human beings regardless of ethnicity on this planet are a baseline good, and what I mean by a baseline good as that they are neither consciously oppressive nor anti-oppressive. They're pleasant, cordial, affable, they don't want to be mean to you, and if they are there's probably something going on in their day. They want to be helpful if you ask for help. They want people to socialize with in pleasant ways, they want to vent; when I was at Walgreens my goal was to get anyone talking and have them be more sociable and friendly going out than when they came in. Sometimes that meant really fun conversations about movies we just saw, other times that meant getting something off someone's chest and having them just smile for the first time that day.

People, in general, are very fun and awesome to be around. We are crazy-ass species, and I mean that in a good way.

That doesn't mean though that I necessarily trust white people to not be racist, because the fact is ever since becoming a more politically-minded person, I actually haven't met a white person yet in real life that hasn't said or done some dumb-ass shit regarding minorities or the way America's sociopolitical systems work, and it's not because of any active malice (most of the time). It's simply because you all don't know any better as a result of the society in which you were raised.

I've got two white friends whom I met through the furry community years and years ago, and I talk to them every week. Both of them have had to be checked by me and my other black friends and family members on more than one occasion regarding the n-word and white fragility (you would think that both being LGBTQA+ would give them some insight into the dynamics of oppression and whatnot, but nope). Working in retail I receive a markedly different treatment between people of color and white people in terms of things like eye contact, the fact that people of color never think it's a surprise that I'm eloquent, and even just the ways in which currency is dispensed to me (white people have a tendency to just throw it on the counter for me to pick up, but then expect me to give the change or card back in their hand. Meanwhile, I get regularly scolded by black people for reaching for anything they don't give me, because it's not my job to fetch things. So, you know, stop that shit; for real). Working with white people at my last job is markedly different than working with black people; Georgia is a conservative hellhole so, you know, fucking Fox News talking points abound (had an argument with a fill-in pharmacist my last week working there about confederate statues which ended in "agree to disagree," because you know, the confederacy is something to "agree to disagree" about), but even more liberally minded white folks don't believe Trump supporters are necessarily anymore bigoted than anyone else, and it's probably because they don't want to have to start going down that rabbit hole with their own family members.

I could go on and on. But regardless, white people live in a different culture than black folks do, and white culture is- again- one that was specifically born to justify the oppression of people who look like me, because to not do so would've made the Atlantic slave trade morally untenable if white people hadn't dehumanized the Africans they were subjecting that treatment to. That culture has been simultaneously exported the world over and never fully dismantled. There's very few places on Earth, if any, where I can go to escape it, and as such racial inequity abounds. But because white people don't suffer the brunt of the overtly negative effects of this system, it is very difficult for you all to perceive it until someone tells you about it, and even then there's that wall of fragility and defensiveness one must get through before it sinks in, because you all associate racism with a conscious act of evil and not simply the banal reality of the world we all live in and are all influenced by. Thus, you take a lot for granted and absorb a lot of shit that is, at best, casually racist. It's unavoidable.

So any interaction with a white person comes with the caveat of emotional distance. I can co-exist and interact with you all on the basis of you're human beings like anyone else, and humans are fun to be around. But I do not relax around you all in the same why I relax around black people, or even other ethnic minorities in general. I don't talk about 95% of the things that affect me or interest me in my real life from a black perspective on ERA because this is an overwhelmingly white space, and you all either won't get where I'm coming from or will actively be hostile and offended about it so there's no point in me bothering (for example, check out my Need For Speed Heat topic). But I talk to black folks about it, even black folks outside of the US, and those same folks talk to me. No matter where we're from, we get it.

Dude that's a 7388 words post. What the fuck is wrong with your life that you spend all your internet time doing this?

[Lonewulfeus]

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I went looking for the post where she says that "reckoning" would be centuries of slavery for white people. Found this instead from 2020, it's probably a good primer on her seething narcissist self-importance: https://www.resetera.com/threads/are-all-white-people-racist.184470/page-4#post-31268580

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

*(breathes in)*

*(breathes out)*

Alright kids, let's talk about how ideas spread. Marketing and advertising, propaganda, philosophy, whatever. Let's just start with this.

We can all acknowledge the fact that exposure to concepts will inevitably result in an individual being at least subconsciously aware of those concepts. Whether it's the fact that advertising is even a thing that, you know, works, the numerous stories of family members being lost to the Fox News or alt-right pipeline, the fast spread of memes, or even that "representation matters" because seeing folks on screen allows for the formation of even basic parasocial relationships which in turn fosters empathy for outgroups, I think you would be hard-pressed to argue against the fact that "continuous exposure to information makes a human being more susceptible to absorbing that information."

Now let's talk about demographic spread, or like, how folks kinda congregate and live with each other.

Taking data from the US Census Bureau from it's 2013-2017 American Community Survey, black and white segregation has... not actually moved all that much since the beginning of the century, with a dissimilarity index around 70 on average. White people, largely, keep to themselves, while black people do so as well but are seeing more integration with Hispanic/Latinx populations (howdy y'all). This is due to many factors regarding economics and business and culture and all that good shtuff I don't feel like talking about while I'm absolutely starving right now. But yeah, that's just another fact. White people largely still keep to themselves, and it really wouldn't be out of the question to call America segregated in all but law.

Okay. Do we agree on these two things as, like, facts? Advertising works, and America's population tends to cluster by race?

Good.

Alright.

NOW We can talk about racism.

Because racism is not just a conscious belief? It's like a spectrum of thoughts and behaviors, big ones and small ones, to varying degrees of consciousness where the outcome is inevitably a disdain or distrust of another race. And the sad fact is, America (and by extension Europe; you all started this mess) has done a bang-up job of putting out a shitload of propaganda both about the inferiority of black and brown people and the superiority of white people for centuries. The glossing over of native genocide as "manifest destiny," the fact that you all thought it was a good idea to allow confederates to rewrite history, the continuous hostility to black and brown protest, the awkward consumption of black and brown media that results in erasure, the outright conscious efforts to just outright write scientists, politicians, artists out of history, the fact that white people literally took one of the most inspiring Biblical figures from the Middle East and began to depict him as a white dude when... he couldn't have been white? The police in general..... Oh, Zwarte Piet; can't forget that! The Mounties committing genocide against the natives under Trudeau's watch.... Hell, Trudeau's blackface.

I mean, I literally don't think I have the character count to just go on about how much stuff, how much information, how much propaganda, has existed and continues to exist about how black and brown folks just ain't shit compared to white people.

But even if you're conscious of its existence and work to bat those nasty thoughts away... it doesn't mean the programming isn't working, hasn't already worked. If it takes seven viewings of an advertisement for you to remember a product, even subconsciously, you cannot dismiss centuries of cultural advertising. Especially when you are without the means to actively combat it. Because let's be honest, white people are fucking terrible at uprooting and getting rid of racism! And I can say that with confidence because in 400 years of undisputed rule in America the best you could do in 2016 is elect Donald Trump.... Donald Trump. You all chose to do that.

You largely don't live around black and brown people- the last Census says so- so the most exposure you get to us, if any, is through the media and forums like this one. But some tenuous viewings of Black Panther and readings of my posts can't compete with the fact that white people live and work around white people 24/7, who have been inundated across generations that they are the best, and it's an indoctrination that has been passively allowed to happen. Those pictures of white folks screaming at Civil Rights protestors, the lynchings, the concentration camps?

I mean, think about it. Those people were never arrested. Never punished. Never admonished. Most of them weren't even publicly named. They were allowed to go on and continue living their lives without having to confront the fact that they were, indeed, the baddies. It simply became something you couldn't talk about openly. You couldn't "tell it like it is." But that didn't mean they weren't spouting it around the house, on the job, at the dinner table. It didn't mean they weren't distrusting of the few black and brown folks they saw at the store, or on the corner, or on TV. That's why you still have shitty family members at holiday gatherings. Because there aren't any consequences for white supremacist thought, not really. There's always a place to go to stew in it to some degree, or to at least never confront it.

It's also why most people don't confront said shitty family members. It's not a big deal to you. The effects of white supremacy have worked on you too, and thus it's much more easier to let Uncle Bob spew his shit about the wall again than to actually take a meaningful dive into anti-racism. And even aggressive anti-racists like Tim Wise, those who come along once in a blue moon, still slip up once in awhile and let the message take over.

I say all this to say this: The thought that there is any white person on Earth where colonialism has touched that has not been susceptible to white supremacist thinking is laughable. The question is not "Are all white people racist?" The question should be "When are white people going to step up and actually work towards making a more equitable world?"

.... I'm going to go get food and pour one out for my mentions.

The only reason we keep having "conversations" is because white people don't want to implement the solutions that black and brown people have been giving you for centuries. In 400 years of "whiteness" being a concept, we have basically had to drag you all kicking and screaming towards some nebulous end of "anti-racism," and even when we achieve some measureable milestone, whether it be abolition, or civil rights, or putting body cameras on police, or having you all not dress in blackface for your winter parades, it is almost inevitably set back by the continuance of white supremacy in other forms and ways allowable by law, or by "white lashes" such as the election of fascist figures all throughout the world in the last few years.

Reparations, affirmative action, dismantling the police, waiving both personal and national debt (hey France, stop fucking over Haiti m'kay?), actually deplatforming the alt-right, recognizing the sovereignty of natives, taking down confederate iconography, just not fucking voting for right-wing parties. There's plenty of solutions to combat racism. Nothing I've said in this thread is new, just regurgitated thoughts from more daring trailblazers and writers packaged up for you all. Black and brown people have had the conversation, and given you the solutions.

So again, the question is when are you all going to do something about it? My honest guess is never, because you simply have no incentive to do so.

You don't have to pretend to have an answer, because black and brown people have done the thinking for you. There's tons of written and video content out there on what to do to get the ball rolling on dismantling white supremacy the world over, as well as plenty of organizations to join if that's your bag. In general, all white people have to do is implement the solutions that have been sitting there free of charge.

But that would mean admitting there is a problem and checking your ego at the door, instead of obfuscating the point and kicking the can down the road since the status quo is just so darn cozy. Because you can tell me you hire for diversity. You can tell me you teach your children right.

And yet you're in here pretending like conversations still need to happen, blaming Trump on minorities not outvoting 60% of the population, leaning into the falsehood the this is an American-centric problem, asking why I didn't put Latinos and Asians on blast, and ultimately not even actually trying to refute the propositions I put forth in that first post but still insisting that you are uncomfortable with me saying what I said.

Like, you're literally doing then thing I talked about in my first post and you don't even realize it.

It's because it's obvious that you're upset. You have made a number of deflections and have downplayed what I have said. You're continuously trying to shift the burden to others. You keep trying to prove to me you're one of the good ones. You literally aren't understanding that this defensive behavior- right here- is part of that "spectrum" of behaviors I talked about earlier, albeit more on the passive-aggressive end than the more aggressive end. It is a good thing that you are hiring Australian minorities, and it is good that you expose your children to other cultures. And yet despite all of that work, when a black American speaks about the systems of white supremacy that affect them the most, your answer included "Why aren't you talking about the Latinos and Asians, huh?!"

You literally just don't get it, and frankly I don't think there's anything I can say to better communicate to you the problem, which in itself is also a big issue. I don't know how to communicate my lived experience with someone who, by way of the forces of society, can not actually get a sense of how I live and how that lived experience informs my own philosophy. As I said, empathy is derived from exposure. But joke's on me. I can't expose white people to racism as felt by black people, no more than I can try to teach a dog about the number 5 when science has said dogs can only comprehend 4 instances of something, and anything beyond that is just "a lot."

Like, how the fuck do you break down the number 5? It's self-explanatory.

This is also why I say solving white supremacy is impossible, and it's why I've taken a hands-off approach in recent years in my life. It will persist long after I die, but the most I do is to fight for a better quality of life for myself. I don't need white people's approval to do what I want to do and be with who I wanna be with. So, take this as a victory. You've burnt me out.

I woke up and can't say I'm surprised at how this thread has gone...largely because it was going the same way when I was active. We're at the point now where the only way most people are willing to answer the question is to throw all other races into the mix to more easily absolve the horrible sinking feeling that being a good person is actually a really hard thing to do.

But I'm not going to address all that. My fellow minorities, specifically black folks, have once again done the work that they're not going to be rewarded with. I do want to talk about this silly notion going around because no one seems to have hit on it, and I definitely want to hit on it because I am THAT person.

The notion that you can't say "all" of white people in any context is silly for two reasons, those two reasons being metonymy and heritability.

Let's start with the first one because it's simple: Metonymy is just a fancy way of saying "using an encompassing concept to describe a wide spread phenomenon." And white supremacy- specifically white supremacy, not just "racial prejudice" to you non-Americans who continuously try to distance yourself from this (I see you, you Sassy Sues)- is a wide spread phenomenon.

For example, take the statement "America has an obesity problem." No one is going to really balk at this. Hell, many of you will take this as an opportunity to start ranting about the moral inferiority of the obese.

"America?! You're saying ALL Americans are obese?! You can't say that! I'M skinny!"

This is literally never the line of conversation because people can recognise that the use of "America" is meant to describe how wide-spread the phenomenon. Also, there is a degree of separation people have for their nationality, because it's something you can technically change or not feel as passionately about. Indeed I would say on a US-centric forum that leans left, feeling "American" is understandably not something to be overtly proud of because it carries with it certain connotations of horribleness considering what America continues to do to the world.

But race is different. Race is something that is biological (this is false, but let's go with it); it's something that's, like, apart of you in a way that can't be changed, and yet simultaneously it also has no bearing on your quality as a person. That's why racism is so bad! How can you apply this concept of metonymy to race?!

Easily, because of heritability. Shaun of Shaun and Jen talks about this at length in his episode about The Bell Curve, but if you don't want to watch two hours of video to get to the pertinent bit, here it is:

Heritability is not the passing of traits down between parents and off-spring. It is the rate of occurrence of a trait in any given population. That rate of occurrence can be due to anything, including social factors, and indeed heritability doesn't actually remark on the source for why a trait is the way it is. All it says is "this is a pattern in this population."

For example, if you have five of the same plant, and give all of them equal access to what they need to grow to 10 feet, (food, water, sunlight, etc.) and you see an equal distribution of this trait, tallness hitting 10 feet has 100% heritability. If you were to have taken one of the plants and given it shitty conditions, and it only grows to 5 feet, then heritability drops, not because of the biological potential of that plant to grow, but because of its worse environment.

If you're not a science denier and understand that heritability is a just a thing, and you agree that white supremacy is a world-wide phenomenon, then you actually have very little way of arguing out of the notion that all white people are racist to some degree. That widespread racism is NOT the result of genetic or biological factors, because race as a genetic phenomenon doesn't exist. Race is sociopolitical. So rest easy, white people; you're not born with a hate gene. You didn't literally inherit the sin. Instead, your ingrained dismissiveness of minorities is a result of social conditioning, namely the one that has said for centuries that white people are just better than everyone else just because they're white.

Which is actually great news for you because it means you can be a better person and fix the problem, in largely the same ways we try to tackle obesity as an American phenomenon.

Again, you are raised in this system whether you like it or not. It has colored your perceptions whether you like it or not. To deny this to make yourself feel better is not helping; indeed, it is the reason I still have to do so much work on this left-leaning forum in the first place. You all don't get it, and then inevitably post some nonsense I have to moderate.

And I can hear it now, because conversations about white culture (can we take a moment to recognize the irony of people from markedly different cultures and perspectives can still somehow consider themselves "white?" Huh. Odd how that works) always re-route to "what about the blacks and browns?" I know you're going to ask:

"Are you saying then it's fair for me to start talking about black criminals and smart Asians? These things can be heritable too!"

I'm sure a few of you are salivating at the chance to FINALLY "tell it like it is."

But I sure indeedly am not giving you that green light. You know why? Because you've been trained by white supremacy! Whenever a white person talks about Chicago's violence and they're actually not directly involved in the curtailing of those issues, do you think any black person listening is dumb enough to think that- deep down- this person doesn't think on some level that Chicago's crime is an inevitability because of some inherent genetic deficiency in black people to follow the law? Of course not. You know it, and I know it. And that's the difference.

By way of white supremacy, ethnic minorities possess a remarkable clarity to critique caste-based systems from a sociopolitical context, because to fight white supremacy you inevitably have to start with the notion that it doesn't exist as a scientific principle, if only to embolden your self-worth in a society that is always saying you're worth less than. This clarity is in turn countered by an amazing ignorance of white people to understand this fact because they are the ones on top of the food chain and are by default not victims to its horrors, and without any ability to attain true empathy, they default to what they have been trained to know as does anyone else when trying to comprehend something new. And the default belief of white supremacy is that the ills of the world are the result of non-white barbarians who are uncivilized by nature.

This is all nothing more than a belief system, like religion or traditional politics, which is why I am confident in attacking it this pointedly. It doesn't matter that your ancestors thought it was a nifty idea to tie the belief system to some vague notion of race in order to justify themselves, and that as a result you feel like I'm attacking you because of how you were physically born. You're not oppressed on the basis of whiteness; let's get that out of the way. Indeed, if you think I'm being harsh, you should try taking the advice of Urban Scholar and looking in on a typical dinner a politically-minded black family might have on a Sunday night. Content Warning before you do: It ain't pretty.

It's simple. Racism is something commonly considered both categorically evil and a conscious act of will.

White people don't want to be considered consciously evil, especially leftist ones.

So instead of coming to grips with the fact that they're not the heroes of this story (again, really hard to do when you've been raised in a system that says you are the hero as ordained by God), they instead deny and lash out.

I am not talking about simply not being racist when I talk about hero narratives. I'm talking about the way white supremacy works. I'll make this quick because I have to go run an errand to my bank:

Whiteness is ultimately nothing. Like, literally nothing. It is not genetic, nor is it reasonably drawn upon ethnic or national lines. It's a nebulous philosophy at best that unites an arbitrary group of people against the rest of the world. You can also describe it as an antithesis. Whiteness is the absence of race. It is the absence of an easily-definable group. It is the absence of culture (that's why the Italians, Eastern Europeans, and Australians in here still know what it's like to be "white" before they know what it's like to be any of these other specific nationalistic identifiers). It's assimilative. That's literally what it was designed to do; to temper the horrors of colonialism and the Atlantic Slave trade by saying "Hey, random ass farmer dude; you deserve that land of yours because you're special. Science and God says so!"

Indeed, the best way to pave over uncomfortable truths is with hero narratives. Look at how almost all superhero movies have climaxes that pave the way to a good outcome through violence while at the same time black people can't even protest on the DA's front lawn. White people REALLY love hero narratives to an absurdly unhealthy degree. If that whole "manifest destiny" thing didn't prove it, and if Fox News talking about how black people were "the losers" and need to "get over it" didn't do it for you, there's this weird fascination you all have with ancestry that doesn't align with how black folks experience it.

I'm gonna get very anecdotal here, but hear me out in this example: Southerners love to paint the confederates in a positive light in part because there seems to be this sinking feeling that "If Great-Grandpappy was fighting to keep his slaves and not to protect his home, what does that make me?" Even otherwise liberal folks are strangely uncomfortable with finding out the may have had confederates in their lineage, when frankly I can't fathom why the fuck it even matters whether or not that's true. After all, I thought you guys didn't want to pay for the sins of your forefathers?

But still. Crack open any history book and you're going to get taught about white history. High-class music is European orchestral music. Great acting is defined by white Shakespearean theater. The best cuisine is French cuisine; they may eat snails and frogs, but that's extremely different from the bats Chinese people eat! The only period of great intellectual and scientific progress you learn about in the world is the European Renaissance. And this shit goes on and on and on. You would think that the rest of the world just wasn't doing shit, and indeed I as a black woman grew up with that mindset! When you're indoctrinated by adults to only learn what white people are doing as a kid, then you just put other people and cultures to the wayside except in small instances like the Civil Rights that inevitably have to be touched on, all the while lacking the critical thinking to understand that those instances had to nonetheless come from concurrent movements and springs of thought, philosophy, and action. Because you're never taught about those concurrent cultures and movements.

All of this creates this kind of thoroughline that white people came from great people, kings, leaders, and warriors (I guess that explains the foothold of Medieval fantasy in popular culture), or otherwise heroic and noble people, and that this condition of righteousness must be carried on at least in some part through genetics and ancestry. Society screams at white people that they were meant for greatness, because after all, the greatest things to experience are white things. And it leads into American exceptionalism (although let's be clear that American exceptionalism isn't only American- looking at you, Brexit), the idea that you are not held back at all by the social forces at play, but by the sweat of your own brow. You are the singular thing standing in between a life of toiling and a life that is completely walled off from that toiling through mounds of capital. Not society. Not capitalism. You. You are an individual. You have power. You have total control. You are, as they say, "the hero in your own story."

It's bullshit. Bullshit to assuage you that you aren't standing on a bedrock of blood.

Black people don't get that luxury. Yes, I grew up being told about the American Dream at school, and yet at home my parents gave me the talk that I would that I would never have an excuse to be an individual because I'm black, and being black comes with certain asterisks and addendums. I am not allowed to be stupid or ignorant; I need to know white culture better than white people know it, because if I make a mistake that's an indictment of the entire race. My clothes must be perfect and proper. My hair has to be chemically straightened to look like white people's. I am not allowed to make mistakes, because making a mistake could be the difference between coming home to live another day, and becoming a hashtag wherein you all argue whether or not I charged a cop and thus needed to be put down.

White people get the luxury of believing they are not bound by societal systems because white supremacy puts them in that position by default, because whiteness is the absence of grouping, and without a group you are free to be individualized. But it's a luxury that comes with a real human cost. Because when you believe that you're infallible, that you're not constrained by these kinds of social orders, that you aren't racist because you are some magical snowflake who's completely bucked the trend.... and yet your life still sucks, what do you do? Who do you get mad at? Who do you direct your dissatisfaction towards? Not the systems keeping you down, because they're simultaneously the systems propping up your ego. Black people largely shrug the suckiness of life off as an inevitability because we grow up behind the curve. Not to say we are impervious to things like substance abuse and mental anguish; we're human too.

But we're not the ones grappling with this kind of identity dissonance through mass shootings either.

A word isn't diluted simply because its definition applies to a wide swathe of situations.

Literally every single human being has to eat to live, but that doesn't magically dilute the biological importance of eating or the cultural traditions and norms around the world that surround the act of eating. No one says "If you say everyone needs to eat, well you are devaluing cuisine!" No, this is dumb.

This rhetoric, as with the majority of it in this thread, is borne from trying to distance yourself from the issue, and not from any real insistence on addressing the issue at hand. It's an attempt to frame racism as some nebulous evil that you, the special, impervious person you are, are definitely not influenced by, versus a system of beliefs and attitudes that happens to be so pervasive that you have no choice but to be exposed to it.

It's not on black people to heal racial divides. It's on white people to get their shit together and stop being surprised that scores of black people have had enough of talking to brick walls and just want to focus their energy on constructive outlets.

All white people are racist.

That was very easy for me to say.

Man, I bet you thought you had me.

To deflect from having to examine white supremacy on its own.

The topic is pretty clear cut. It asks if all white people racist or not. Thus, you would think the discussion would follow trying to determine if that is true without asking about other ethnicities. If you think a question of such magnitude is useless, then I don't know what to tell you what to look for regarding productive discussion on a video game enthusiasts forum.

Racism was never going to be lessened by this topic, or indeed any other you could frame yourself. Because frankly the time for talking has been over for centuries. The true question is when are white people going to be willing to make the altruistic sacrifices necessary to begin righting their wrongs.

As I said, my guess is never. No one has any incentive or spine to do so. So at the very least we can both take comfort in the lack of utilitarianism this topic has in regards to fixing society's ills (although, again, it must be noted that this threshold for a topic's existence is only leveled at white supremacy. Kinda funny how that works).

At the very least, it has given me a platform to speak on matters that are relevant to my daily life, help the few receptive people here better understand these concepts from a black perspective, and raise fragile people's hackles in the process. So not all was lost.

Again, I feel like being a truly good person is always a grindy work in progress because a lot of negative outcomes in society are the result of passive or normalized actions and customs you have to actively work to combat. In that vain, the desire to be a good person becomes irrelevant with regards to the work that needs to be done. I try to make my particularly moral choices on the basis of if it's going to help others. I don't care if doing so necessarily makes me a good person because it's not about me, or perhaps more specifically, the morality follow the actions. A good person is someone who is always consciously acting in the right even when they are burdened by a society built on wrong and, thus, will inevitably make mistakes and actions that are harmful anyway. Just as there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, there's no white person completely free of racism in a white supremacist world.

That doesn't mean you can't work towards making it better, nor does trying to make it better mean you are completely absolved of your responsibility to keep doing the work, in the same way that not buying Nike shoes doesn't mean you're necessarily a good person under an anti-capitalist lens either. Yes; being good is really hard!

So as I said in my opening post, racism is a spectrum of behaviors and beliefs. It's all bad, but to varying degrees of bad. Thinking black people are more impervious to pain is racist, but it's not going to illicit the same rebuking as being a klansman. Subsequently, any white person who, like, just recognizes their privilege or apologizes for personal screw-ups is a lot more forgivable than the white person who engages in the kind of dismissiveness and gaslighting this thread has been ripe with. You can, in a way (that doesn't give you a pass) be burdened with racism and still be a good person, because the former is inevitable.

You could start with reparations, for one. We know you got the money.

It's time for white people to stop pretending they lack culpability, stop pretending they're ignorant, and kicking the can down the road. It's time for them to fix this mess. And yes, you're on a countdown timer. Demographic change is occurring whether you like it or not, and you cannot count on future generations to be as courteous as we are, despite the fact that right now today, we really have absolutely no reason to respect social graces and civility with how many bodies white people continue to leave in their wake. This is not a call to violence, by the way. I'm not saying black people should get violent, nor do I think that's even a reasonable risk today. No one wants to, especially since people feel they have other avenues of seeking justice. What I am saying is that history teaches us that violence is nearly an inevitability in cultures of mass inequality. America already fought one war over this.

Treat it like global warming. Do the work now to avoid getting absolutely fucked later.

Neither is having a conversion that placates the sensibilities of white people. Again, this is not in black people's court. It's in white people's, and for centuries the only attitude you all have shown towards racial progress is resentment and resistance.

I cannot give the white collective the will to want to do better by minorities, and frankly I would not even if I could. You need to find that in yourselves.

The irony of this bit is that whiteness is inherently assimilating and homogenous, which is inherent in negative reactions by white people who then go on to appeal to their unique nationalities and personal struggles to separate themselves from what they see as an "Americanized" issue. It is amusing then how American critiques of a so-called American-centric phenomenon can nonetheless rile up non-Americans, almost as if whiteness itself is something that- despite being completely bogus- is nonetheless universally understood wherever there are white populations!

Alas, I don't think of you all as some borg collective. I do think of you all, in terms of the sociopolitics of race, as belonging to a single culture which in turn has unjustly amassed an unfair amount of capital and power through centuries of genocide and disenfranchisement, all of which is continually done. As such, it is not an issue at all to ascribe a generalized responsibility for white supremacy to everyone who opts in to white culture.

On whichever side he is treated by a society that ascribes to white supremacy ideals. If your son looks white, he will be treated as such, maybe with some asterisks. If he doesn't look white, he will be treated like any other non-white person, like Obama is. That's the name of the game.

It's not a question of like or dislike for me. It's a question of trust.

I would say like 95% of human beings regardless of ethnicity on this planet are a baseline good, and what I mean by a baseline good as that they are neither consciously oppressive nor anti-oppressive. They're pleasant, cordial, affable, they don't want to be mean to you, and if they are there's probably something going on in their day. They want to be helpful if you ask for help. They want people to socialize with in pleasant ways, they want to vent; when I was at Walgreens my goal was to get anyone talking and have them be more sociable and friendly going out than when they came in. Sometimes that meant really fun conversations about movies we just saw, other times that meant getting something off someone's chest and having them just smile for the first time that day.

People, in general, are very fun and awesome to be around. We are crazy-ass species, and I mean that in a good way.

That doesn't mean though that I necessarily trust white people to not be racist, because the fact is ever since becoming a more politically-minded person, I actually haven't met a white person yet in real life that hasn't said or done some dumb-ass shit regarding minorities or the way America's sociopolitical systems work, and it's not because of any active malice (most of the time). It's simply because you all don't know any better as a result of the society in which you were raised.

I've got two white friends whom I met through the furry community years and years ago, and I talk to them every week. Both of them have had to be checked by me and my other black friends and family members on more than one occasion regarding the n-word and white fragility (you would think that both being LGBTQA+ would give them some insight into the dynamics of oppression and whatnot, but nope). Working in retail I receive a markedly different treatment between people of color and white people in terms of things like eye contact, the fact that people of color never think it's a surprise that I'm eloquent, and even just the ways in which currency is dispensed to me (white people have a tendency to just throw it on the counter for me to pick up, but then expect me to give the change or card back in their hand. Meanwhile, I get regularly scolded by black people for reaching for anything they don't give me, because it's not my job to fetch things. So, you know, stop that shit; for real). Working with white people at my last job is markedly different than working with black people; Georgia is a conservative hellhole so, you know, fucking Fox News talking points abound (had an argument with a fill-in pharmacist my last week working there about confederate statues which ended in "agree to disagree," because you know, the confederacy is something to "agree to disagree" about), but even more liberally minded white folks don't believe Trump supporters are necessarily anymore bigoted than anyone else, and it's probably because they don't want to have to start going down that rabbit hole with their own family members.

I could go on and on. But regardless, white people live in a different culture than black folks do, and white culture is- again- one that was specifically born to justify the oppression of people who look like me, because to not do so would've made the Atlantic slave trade morally untenable if white people hadn't dehumanized the Africans they were subjecting that treatment to. That culture has been simultaneously exported the world over and never fully dismantled. There's very few places on Earth, if any, where I can go to escape it, and as such racial inequity abounds. But because white people don't suffer the brunt of the overtly negative effects of this system, it is very difficult for you all to perceive it until someone tells you about it, and even then there's that wall of fragility and defensiveness one must get through before it sinks in, because you all associate racism with a conscious act of evil and not simply the banal reality of the world we all live in and are all influenced by. Thus, you take a lot for granted and absorb a lot of shit that is, at best, casually racist. It's unavoidable.

So any interaction with a white person comes with the caveat of emotional distance. I can co-exist and interact with you all on the basis of you're human beings like anyone else, and humans are fun to be around. But I do not relax around you all in the same why I relax around black people, or even other ethnic minorities in general. I don't talk about 95% of the things that affect me or interest me in my real life from a black perspective on ERA because this is an overwhelmingly white space, and you all either won't get where I'm coming from or will actively be hostile and offended about it so there's no point in me bothering (for example, check out my Need For Speed Heat topic). But I talk to black folks about it, even black folks outside of the US, and those same folks talk to me. No matter where we're from, we get it.

Dude that's a 7388 words post. What the fuck is wrong with your life that you spend all your internet time doing this?

Are you asking benji or nepenthe?

[CHOW CHOW]

Embiid got got https://www.resetera.com/threads/medicaid-is-fully-frozen-in-all-50-states-72-million-affected-see-threadmark.1093959/post-134989650

User Banned (2 Weeks): Inflammatory Commentary; Antagonizing Fellow Members

Good chance that a huge amount of the people that DID vote Harris will be dead by even midterms if this is all held up.

Yep, absolutely no doubt whatsoever that's goin down… all the while folks that sit out for voting due to social media ideological shit that doesn't even affect them on their ivory ass towers. I'm tired… like for real I'm cooked.

Hmm I wonder which mod banned him for this?  

Embiid already unbanned. The mystery deepens.

how is it that none of you incels (i.e. benji) don’t have access to their mod discord? imagine the drama 

[CHOW CHOW]

P.S. please stop quoting long posts for lulz. The last page is unreadable

[nachobro]

P.S. please stop quoting long posts for lulz. The last page is unreadable

shut up bitch

[Steven Snell]

Hey Blueballs is back!

[Alpacx]

P.S. please stop quoting long posts for lulz. The last page is unreadable

 Our Queen

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

[CHOW CHOW]

P.S. please stop quoting long posts for lulz. The last page is unreadable

shut up bitch

fuck offfffff

[StandingOvation]

Dude that's a 7388 words post. What the fuck is wrong with your life that you spend all your internet time doing this?

I knew you wouldn't quit us 

[CHOW CHOW]

1738174057[/url]']

1738131104[/url]']
I went looking for the post where she says that "reckoning" would be centuries of slavery for white people. Found this instead from 2020, it's probably a good primer on her seething narcissist self-importance: https://www.resetera.com/threads/are-all-white-people-racist.184470/page-4#post-31268580

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

*(breathes in)*

*(breathes out)*

Alright kids, let's talk about how ideas spread. Marketing and advertising, propaganda, philosophy, whatever. Let's just start with this.

We can all acknowledge the fact that exposure to concepts will inevitably result in an individual being at least subconsciously aware of those concepts. Whether it's the fact that advertising is even a thing that, you know, works, the numerous stories of family members being lost to the Fox News or alt-right pipeline, the fast spread of memes, or even that "representation matters" because seeing folks on screen allows for the formation of even basic parasocial relationships which in turn fosters empathy for outgroups, I think you would be hard-pressed to argue against the fact that "continuous exposure to information makes a human being more susceptible to absorbing that information."

Now let's talk about demographic spread, or like, how folks kinda congregate and live with each other.

Taking data from the US Census Bureau from it's 2013-2017 American Community Survey, black and white segregation has... not actually moved all that much since the beginning of the century, with a dissimilarity index around 70 on average. White people, largely, keep to themselves, while black people do so as well but are seeing more integration with Hispanic/Latinx populations (howdy y'all). This is due to many factors regarding economics and business and culture and all that good shtuff I don't feel like talking about while I'm absolutely starving right now. But yeah, that's just another fact. White people largely still keep to themselves, and it really wouldn't be out of the question to call America segregated in all but law.

Okay. Do we agree on these two things as, like, facts? Advertising works, and America's population tends to cluster by race?

Good.

Alright.

NOW We can talk about racism.

Because racism is not just a conscious belief? It's like a spectrum of thoughts and behaviors, big ones and small ones, to varying degrees of consciousness where the outcome is inevitably a disdain or distrust of another race. And the sad fact is, America (and by extension Europe; you all started this mess) has done a bang-up job of putting out a shitload of propaganda both about the inferiority of black and brown people and the superiority of white people for centuries. The glossing over of native genocide as "manifest destiny," the fact that you all thought it was a good idea to allow confederates to rewrite history, the continuous hostility to black and brown protest, the awkward consumption of black and brown media that results in erasure, the outright conscious efforts to just outright write scientists, politicians, artists out of history, the fact that white people literally took one of the most inspiring Biblical figures from the Middle East and began to depict him as a white dude when... he couldn't have been white? The police in general..... Oh, Zwarte Piet; can't forget that! The Mounties committing genocide against the natives under Trudeau's watch.... Hell, Trudeau's blackface.

I mean, I literally don't think I have the character count to just go on about how much stuff, how much information, how much propaganda, has existed and continues to exist about how black and brown folks just ain't shit compared to white people.

But even if you're conscious of its existence and work to bat those nasty thoughts away... it doesn't mean the programming isn't working, hasn't already worked. If it takes seven viewings of an advertisement for you to remember a product, even subconsciously, you cannot dismiss centuries of cultural advertising. Especially when you are without the means to actively combat it. Because let's be honest, white people are fucking terrible at uprooting and getting rid of racism! And I can say that with confidence because in 400 years of undisputed rule in America the best you could do in 2016 is elect Donald Trump.... Donald Trump. You all chose to do that.

You largely don't live around black and brown people- the last Census says so- so the most exposure you get to us, if any, is through the media and forums like this one. But some tenuous viewings of Black Panther and readings of my posts can't compete with the fact that white people live and work around white people 24/7, who have been inundated across generations that they are the best, and it's an indoctrination that has been passively allowed to happen. Those pictures of white folks screaming at Civil Rights protestors, the lynchings, the concentration camps?

I mean, think about it. Those people were never arrested. Never punished. Never admonished. Most of them weren't even publicly named. They were allowed to go on and continue living their lives without having to confront the fact that they were, indeed, the baddies. It simply became something you couldn't talk about openly. You couldn't "tell it like it is." But that didn't mean they weren't spouting it around the house, on the job, at the dinner table. It didn't mean they weren't distrusting of the few black and brown folks they saw at the store, or on the corner, or on TV. That's why you still have shitty family members at holiday gatherings. Because there aren't any consequences for white supremacist thought, not really. There's always a place to go to stew in it to some degree, or to at least never confront it.

It's also why most people don't confront said shitty family members. It's not a big deal to you. The effects of white supremacy have worked on you too, and thus it's much more easier to let Uncle Bob spew his shit about the wall again than to actually take a meaningful dive into anti-racism. And even aggressive anti-racists like Tim Wise, those who come along once in a blue moon, still slip up once in awhile and let the message take over.

I say all this to say this: The thought that there is any white person on Earth where colonialism has touched that has not been susceptible to white supremacist thinking is laughable. The question is not "Are all white people racist?" The question should be "When are white people going to step up and actually work towards making a more equitable world?"

.... I'm going to go get food and pour one out for my mentions.

The only reason we keep having "conversations" is because white people don't want to implement the solutions that black and brown people have been giving you for centuries. In 400 years of "whiteness" being a concept, we have basically had to drag you all kicking and screaming towards some nebulous end of "anti-racism," and even when we achieve some measureable milestone, whether it be abolition, or civil rights, or putting body cameras on police, or having you all not dress in blackface for your winter parades, it is almost inevitably set back by the continuance of white supremacy in other forms and ways allowable by law, or by "white lashes" such as the election of fascist figures all throughout the world in the last few years.

Reparations, affirmative action, dismantling the police, waiving both personal and national debt (hey France, stop fucking over Haiti m'kay?), actually deplatforming the alt-right, recognizing the sovereignty of natives, taking down confederate iconography, just not fucking voting for right-wing parties. There's plenty of solutions to combat racism. Nothing I've said in this thread is new, just regurgitated thoughts from more daring trailblazers and writers packaged up for you all. Black and brown people have had the conversation, and given you the solutions.

So again, the question is when are you all going to do something about it? My honest guess is never, because you simply have no incentive to do so.

You don't have to pretend to have an answer, because black and brown people have done the thinking for you. There's tons of written and video content out there on what to do to get the ball rolling on dismantling white supremacy the world over, as well as plenty of organizations to join if that's your bag. In general, all white people have to do is implement the solutions that have been sitting there free of charge.

But that would mean admitting there is a problem and checking your ego at the door, instead of obfuscating the point and kicking the can down the road since the status quo is just so darn cozy. Because you can tell me you hire for diversity. You can tell me you teach your children right.

And yet you're in here pretending like conversations still need to happen, blaming Trump on minorities not outvoting 60% of the population, leaning into the falsehood the this is an American-centric problem, asking why I didn't put Latinos and Asians on blast, and ultimately not even actually trying to refute the propositions I put forth in that first post but still insisting that you are uncomfortable with me saying what I said.

Like, you're literally doing then thing I talked about in my first post and you don't even realize it.

It's because it's obvious that you're upset. You have made a number of deflections and have downplayed what I have said. You're continuously trying to shift the burden to others. You keep trying to prove to me you're one of the good ones. You literally aren't understanding that this defensive behavior- right here- is part of that "spectrum" of behaviors I talked about earlier, albeit more on the passive-aggressive end than the more aggressive end. It is a good thing that you are hiring Australian minorities, and it is good that you expose your children to other cultures. And yet despite all of that work, when a black American speaks about the systems of white supremacy that affect them the most, your answer included "Why aren't you talking about the Latinos and Asians, huh?!"

You literally just don't get it, and frankly I don't think there's anything I can say to better communicate to you the problem, which in itself is also a big issue. I don't know how to communicate my lived experience with someone who, by way of the forces of society, can not actually get a sense of how I live and how that lived experience informs my own philosophy. As I said, empathy is derived from exposure. But joke's on me. I can't expose white people to racism as felt by black people, no more than I can try to teach a dog about the number 5 when science has said dogs can only comprehend 4 instances of something, and anything beyond that is just "a lot."

Like, how the fuck do you break down the number 5? It's self-explanatory.

This is also why I say solving white supremacy is impossible, and it's why I've taken a hands-off approach in recent years in my life. It will persist long after I die, but the most I do is to fight for a better quality of life for myself. I don't need white people's approval to do what I want to do and be with who I wanna be with. So, take this as a victory. You've burnt me out.

I woke up and can't say I'm surprised at how this thread has gone...largely because it was going the same way when I was active. We're at the point now where the only way most people are willing to answer the question is to throw all other races into the mix to more easily absolve the horrible sinking feeling that being a good person is actually a really hard thing to do.

But I'm not going to address all that. My fellow minorities, specifically black folks, have once again done the work that they're not going to be rewarded with. I do want to talk about this silly notion going around because no one seems to have hit on it, and I definitely want to hit on it because I am THAT person.

The notion that you can't say "all" of white people in any context is silly for two reasons, those two reasons being metonymy and heritability.

Let's start with the first one because it's simple: Metonymy is just a fancy way of saying "using an encompassing concept to describe a wide spread phenomenon." And white supremacy- specifically white supremacy, not just "racial prejudice" to you non-Americans who continuously try to distance yourself from this (I see you, you Sassy Sues)- is a wide spread phenomenon.

For example, take the statement "America has an obesity problem." No one is going to really balk at this. Hell, many of you will take this as an opportunity to start ranting about the moral inferiority of the obese.

"America?! You're saying ALL Americans are obese?! You can't say that! I'M skinny!"

This is literally never the line of conversation because people can recognise that the use of "America" is meant to describe how wide-spread the phenomenon. Also, there is a degree of separation people have for their nationality, because it's something you can technically change or not feel as passionately about. Indeed I would say on a US-centric forum that leans left, feeling "American" is understandably not something to be overtly proud of because it carries with it certain connotations of horribleness considering what America continues to do to the world.

But race is different. Race is something that is biological (this is false, but let's go with it); it's something that's, like, apart of you in a way that can't be changed, and yet simultaneously it also has no bearing on your quality as a person. That's why racism is so bad! How can you apply this concept of metonymy to race?!

Easily, because of heritability. Shaun of Shaun and Jen talks about this at length in his episode about The Bell Curve, but if you don't want to watch two hours of video to get to the pertinent bit, here it is:

Heritability is not the passing of traits down between parents and off-spring. It is the rate of occurrence of a trait in any given population. That rate of occurrence can be due to anything, including social factors, and indeed heritability doesn't actually remark on the source for why a trait is the way it is. All it says is "this is a pattern in this population."

For example, if you have five of the same plant, and give all of them equal access to what they need to grow to 10 feet, (food, water, sunlight, etc.) and you see an equal distribution of this trait, tallness hitting 10 feet has 100% heritability. If you were to have taken one of the plants and given it shitty conditions, and it only grows to 5 feet, then heritability drops, not because of the biological potential of that plant to grow, but because of its worse environment.

If you're not a science denier and understand that heritability is a just a thing, and you agree that white supremacy is a world-wide phenomenon, then you actually have very little way of arguing out of the notion that all white people are racist to some degree. That widespread racism is NOT the result of genetic or biological factors, because race as a genetic phenomenon doesn't exist. Race is sociopolitical. So rest easy, white people; you're not born with a hate gene. You didn't literally inherit the sin. Instead, your ingrained dismissiveness of minorities is a result of social conditioning, namely the one that has said for centuries that white people are just better than everyone else just because they're white.

Which is actually great news for you because it means you can be a better person and fix the problem, in largely the same ways we try to tackle obesity as an American phenomenon.

Again, you are raised in this system whether you like it or not. It has colored your perceptions whether you like it or not. To deny this to make yourself feel better is not helping; indeed, it is the reason I still have to do so much work on this left-leaning forum in the first place. You all don't get it, and then inevitably post some nonsense I have to moderate.

And I can hear it now, because conversations about white culture (can we take a moment to recognize the irony of people from markedly different cultures and perspectives can still somehow consider themselves "white?" Huh. Odd how that works) always re-route to "what about the blacks and browns?" I know you're going to ask:

"Are you saying then it's fair for me to start talking about black criminals and smart Asians? These things can be heritable too!"

I'm sure a few of you are salivating at the chance to FINALLY "tell it like it is."

But I sure indeedly am not giving you that green light. You know why? Because you've been trained by white supremacy! Whenever a white person talks about Chicago's violence and they're actually not directly involved in the curtailing of those issues, do you think any black person listening is dumb enough to think that- deep down- this person doesn't think on some level that Chicago's crime is an inevitability because of some inherent genetic deficiency in black people to follow the law? Of course not. You know it, and I know it. And that's the difference.

By way of white supremacy, ethnic minorities possess a remarkable clarity to critique caste-based systems from a sociopolitical context, because to fight white supremacy you inevitably have to start with the notion that it doesn't exist as a scientific principle, if only to embolden your self-worth in a society that is always saying you're worth less than. This clarity is in turn countered by an amazing ignorance of white people to understand this fact because they are the ones on top of the food chain and are by default not victims to its horrors, and without any ability to attain true empathy, they default to what they have been trained to know as does anyone else when trying to comprehend something new. And the default belief of white supremacy is that the ills of the world are the result of non-white barbarians who are uncivilized by nature.

This is all nothing more than a belief system, like religion or traditional politics, which is why I am confident in attacking it this pointedly. It doesn't matter that your ancestors thought it was a nifty idea to tie the belief system to some vague notion of race in order to justify themselves, and that as a result you feel like I'm attacking you because of how you were physically born. You're not oppressed on the basis of whiteness; let's get that out of the way. Indeed, if you think I'm being harsh, you should try taking the advice of Urban Scholar and looking in on a typical dinner a politically-minded black family might have on a Sunday night. Content Warning before you do: It ain't pretty.

It's simple. Racism is something commonly considered both categorically evil and a conscious act of will.

White people don't want to be considered consciously evil, especially leftist ones.

So instead of coming to grips with the fact that they're not the heroes of this story (again, really hard to do when you've been raised in a system that says you are the hero as ordained by God), they instead deny and lash out.

I am not talking about simply not being racist when I talk about hero narratives. I'm talking about the way white supremacy works. I'll make this quick because I have to go run an errand to my bank:

Whiteness is ultimately nothing. Like, literally nothing. It is not genetic, nor is it reasonably drawn upon ethnic or national lines. It's a nebulous philosophy at best that unites an arbitrary group of people against the rest of the world. You can also describe it as an antithesis. Whiteness is the absence of race. It is the absence of an easily-definable group. It is the absence of culture (that's why the Italians, Eastern Europeans, and Australians in here still know what it's like to be "white" before they know what it's like to be any of these other specific nationalistic identifiers). It's assimilative. That's literally what it was designed to do; to temper the horrors of colonialism and the Atlantic Slave trade by saying "Hey, random ass farmer dude; you deserve that land of yours because you're special. Science and God says so!"

Indeed, the best way to pave over uncomfortable truths is with hero narratives. Look at how almost all superhero movies have climaxes that pave the way to a good outcome through violence while at the same time black people can't even protest on the DA's front lawn. White people REALLY love hero narratives to an absurdly unhealthy degree. If that whole "manifest destiny" thing didn't prove it, and if Fox News talking about how black people were "the losers" and need to "get over it" didn't do it for you, there's this weird fascination you all have with ancestry that doesn't align with how black folks experience it.

I'm gonna get very anecdotal here, but hear me out in this example: Southerners love to paint the confederates in a positive light in part because there seems to be this sinking feeling that "If Great-Grandpappy was fighting to keep his slaves and not to protect his home, what does that make me?" Even otherwise liberal folks are strangely uncomfortable with finding out the may have had confederates in their lineage, when frankly I can't fathom why the fuck it even matters whether or not that's true. After all, I thought you guys didn't want to pay for the sins of your forefathers?

But still. Crack open any history book and you're going to get taught about white history. High-class music is European orchestral music. Great acting is defined by white Shakespearean theater. The best cuisine is French cuisine; they may eat snails and frogs, but that's extremely different from the bats Chinese people eat! The only period of great intellectual and scientific progress you learn about in the world is the European Renaissance. And this shit goes on and on and on. You would think that the rest of the world just wasn't doing shit, and indeed I as a black woman grew up with that mindset! When you're indoctrinated by adults to only learn what white people are doing as a kid, then you just put other people and cultures to the wayside except in small instances like the Civil Rights that inevitably have to be touched on, all the while lacking the critical thinking to understand that those instances had to nonetheless come from concurrent movements and springs of thought, philosophy, and action. Because you're never taught about those concurrent cultures and movements.

All of this creates this kind of thoroughline that white people came from great people, kings, leaders, and warriors (I guess that explains the foothold of Medieval fantasy in popular culture), or otherwise heroic and noble people, and that this condition of righteousness must be carried on at least in some part through genetics and ancestry. Society screams at white people that they were meant for greatness, because after all, the greatest things to experience are white things. And it leads into American exceptionalism (although let's be clear that American exceptionalism isn't only American- looking at you, Brexit), the idea that you are not held back at all by the social forces at play, but by the sweat of your own brow. You are the singular thing standing in between a life of toiling and a life that is completely walled off from that toiling through mounds of capital. Not society. Not capitalism. You. You are an individual. You have power. You have total control. You are, as they say, "the hero in your own story."

It's bullshit. Bullshit to assuage you that you aren't standing on a bedrock of blood.

Black people don't get that luxury. Yes, I grew up being told about the American Dream at school, and yet at home my parents gave me the talk that I would that I would never have an excuse to be an individual because I'm black, and being black comes with certain asterisks and addendums. I am not allowed to be stupid or ignorant; I need to know white culture better than white people know it, because if I make a mistake that's an indictment of the entire race. My clothes must be perfect and proper. My hair has to be chemically straightened to look like white people's. I am not allowed to make mistakes, because making a mistake could be the difference between coming home to live another day, and becoming a hashtag wherein you all argue whether or not I charged a cop and thus needed to be put down.

White people get the luxury of believing they are not bound by societal systems because white supremacy puts them in that position by default, because whiteness is the absence of grouping, and without a group you are free to be individualized. But it's a luxury that comes with a real human cost. Because when you believe that you're infallible, that you're not constrained by these kinds of social orders, that you aren't racist because you are some magical snowflake who's completely bucked the trend.... and yet your life still sucks, what do you do? Who do you get mad at? Who do you direct your dissatisfaction towards? Not the systems keeping you down, because they're simultaneously the systems propping up your ego. Black people largely shrug the suckiness of life off as an inevitability because we grow up behind the curve. Not to say we are impervious to things like substance abuse and mental anguish; we're human too.

But we're not the ones grappling with this kind of identity dissonance through mass shootings either.

A word isn't diluted simply because its definition applies to a wide swathe of situations.

Literally every single human being has to eat to live, but that doesn't magically dilute the biological importance of eating or the cultural traditions and norms around the world that surround the act of eating. No one says "If you say everyone needs to eat, well you are devaluing cuisine!" No, this is dumb.

This rhetoric, as with the majority of it in this thread, is borne from trying to distance yourself from the issue, and not from any real insistence on addressing the issue at hand. It's an attempt to frame racism as some nebulous evil that you, the special, impervious person you are, are definitely not influenced by, versus a system of beliefs and attitudes that happens to be so pervasive that you have no choice but to be exposed to it.

It's not on black people to heal racial divides. It's on white people to get their shit together and stop being surprised that scores of black people have had enough of talking to brick walls and just want to focus their energy on constructive outlets.

All white people are racist.

That was very easy for me to say.

Man, I bet you thought you had me.

To deflect from having to examine white supremacy on its own.

The topic is pretty clear cut. It asks if all white people racist or not. Thus, you would think the discussion would follow trying to determine if that is true without asking about other ethnicities. If you think a question of such magnitude is useless, then I don't know what to tell you what to look for regarding productive discussion on a video game enthusiasts forum.

Racism was never going to be lessened by this topic, or indeed any other you could frame yourself. Because frankly the time for talking has been over for centuries. The true question is when are white people going to be willing to make the altruistic sacrifices necessary to begin righting their wrongs.

As I said, my guess is never. No one has any incentive or spine to do so. So at the very least we can both take comfort in the lack of utilitarianism this topic has in regards to fixing society's ills (although, again, it must be noted that this threshold for a topic's existence is only leveled at white supremacy. Kinda funny how that works).

At the very least, it has given me a platform to speak on matters that are relevant to my daily life, help the few receptive people here better understand these concepts from a black perspective, and raise fragile people's hackles in the process. So not all was lost.

Again, I feel like being a truly good person is always a grindy work in progress because a lot of negative outcomes in society are the result of passive or normalized actions and customs you have to actively work to combat. In that vain, the desire to be a good person becomes irrelevant with regards to the work that needs to be done. I try to make my particularly moral choices on the basis of if it's going to help others. I don't care if doing so necessarily makes me a good person because it's not about me, or perhaps more specifically, the morality follow the actions. A good person is someone who is always consciously acting in the right even when they are burdened by a society built on wrong and, thus, will inevitably make mistakes and actions that are harmful anyway. Just as there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, there's no white person completely free of racism in a white supremacist world.

That doesn't mean you can't work towards making it better, nor does trying to make it better mean you are completely absolved of your responsibility to keep doing the work, in the same way that not buying Nike shoes doesn't mean you're necessarily a good person under an anti-capitalist lens either. Yes; being good is really hard!

So as I said in my opening post, racism is a spectrum of behaviors and beliefs. It's all bad, but to varying degrees of bad. Thinking black people are more impervious to pain is racist, but it's not going to illicit the same rebuking as being a klansman. Subsequently, any white person who, like, just recognizes their privilege or apologizes for personal screw-ups is a lot more forgivable than the white person who engages in the kind of dismissiveness and gaslighting this thread has been ripe with. You can, in a way (that doesn't give you a pass) be burdened with racism and still be a good person, because the former is inevitable.

You could start with reparations, for one. We know you got the money.

It's time for white people to stop pretending they lack culpability, stop pretending they're ignorant, and kicking the can down the road. It's time for them to fix this mess. And yes, you're on a countdown timer. Demographic change is occurring whether you like it or not, and you cannot count on future generations to be as courteous as we are, despite the fact that right now today, we really have absolutely no reason to respect social graces and civility with how many bodies white people continue to leave in their wake. This is not a call to violence, by the way. I'm not saying black people should get violent, nor do I think that's even a reasonable risk today. No one wants to, especially since people feel they have other avenues of seeking justice. What I am saying is that history teaches us that violence is nearly an inevitability in cultures of mass inequality. America already fought one war over this.

Treat it like global warming. Do the work now to avoid getting absolutely fucked later.

Neither is having a conversion that placates the sensibilities of white people. Again, this is not in black people's court. It's in white people's, and for centuries the only attitude you all have shown towards racial progress is resentment and resistance.

I cannot give the white collective the will to want to do better by minorities, and frankly I would not even if I could. You need to find that in yourselves.

The irony of this bit is that whiteness is inherently assimilating and homogenous, which is inherent in negative reactions by white people who then go on to appeal to their unique nationalities and personal struggles to separate themselves from what they see as an "Americanized" issue. It is amusing then how American critiques of a so-called American-centric phenomenon can nonetheless rile up non-Americans, almost as if whiteness itself is something that- despite being completely bogus- is nonetheless universally understood wherever there are white populations!

Alas, I don't think of you all as some borg collective. I do think of you all, in terms of the sociopolitics of race, as belonging to a single culture which in turn has unjustly amassed an unfair amount of capital and power through centuries of genocide and disenfranchisement, all of which is continually done. As such, it is not an issue at all to ascribe a generalized responsibility for white supremacy to everyone who opts in to white culture.

On whichever side he is treated by a society that ascribes to white supremacy ideals. If your son looks white, he will be treated as such, maybe with some asterisks. If he doesn't look white, he will be treated like any other non-white person, like Obama is. That's the name of the game.

It's not a question of like or dislike for me. It's a question of trust.

I would say like 95% of human beings regardless of ethnicity on this planet are a baseline good, and what I mean by a baseline good as that they are neither consciously oppressive nor anti-oppressive. They're pleasant, cordial, affable, they don't want to be mean to you, and if they are there's probably something going on in their day. They want to be helpful if you ask for help. They want people to socialize with in pleasant ways, they want to vent; when I was at Walgreens my goal was to get anyone talking and have them be more sociable and friendly going out than when they came in. Sometimes that meant really fun conversations about movies we just saw, other times that meant getting something off someone's chest and having them just smile for the first time that day.

People, in general, are very fun and awesome to be around. We are crazy-ass species, and I mean that in a good way.

That doesn't mean though that I necessarily trust white people to not be racist, because the fact is ever since becoming a more politically-minded person, I actually haven't met a white person yet in real life that hasn't said or done some dumb-ass shit regarding minorities or the way America's sociopolitical systems work, and it's not because of any active malice (most of the time). It's simply because you all don't know any better as a result of the society in which you were raised.

I've got two white friends whom I met through the furry community years and years ago, and I talk to them every week. Both of them have had to be checked by me and my other black friends and family members on more than one occasion regarding the n-word and white fragility (you would think that both being LGBTQA+ would give them some insight into the dynamics of oppression and whatnot, but nope). Working in retail I receive a markedly different treatment between people of color and white people in terms of things like eye contact, the fact that people of color never think it's a surprise that I'm eloquent, and even just the ways in which currency is dispensed to me (white people have a tendency to just throw it on the counter for me to pick up, but then expect me to give the change or card back in their hand. Meanwhile, I get regularly scolded by black people for reaching for anything they don't give me, because it's not my job to fetch things. So, you know, stop that shit; for real). Working with white people at my last job is markedly different than working with black people; Georgia is a conservative hellhole so, you know, fucking Fox News talking points abound (had an argument with a fill-in pharmacist my last week working there about confederate statues which ended in "agree to disagree," because you know, the confederacy is something to "agree to disagree" about), but even more liberally minded white folks don't believe Trump supporters are necessarily anymore bigoted than anyone else, and it's probably because they don't want to have to start going down that rabbit hole with their own family members.

I could go on and on. But regardless, white people live in a different culture than black folks do, and white culture is- again- one that was specifically born to justify the oppression of people who look like me, because to not do so would've made the Atlantic slave trade morally untenable if white people hadn't dehumanized the Africans they were subjecting that treatment to. That culture has been simultaneously exported the world over and never fully dismantled. There's very few places on Earth, if any, where I can go to escape it, and as such racial inequity abounds. But because white people don't suffer the brunt of the overtly negative effects of this system, it is very difficult for you all to perceive it until someone tells you about it, and even then there's that wall of fragility and defensiveness one must get through before it sinks in, because you all associate racism with a conscious act of evil and not simply the banal reality of the world we all live in and are all influenced by. Thus, you take a lot for granted and absorb a lot of shit that is, at best, casually racist. It's unavoidable.

So any interaction with a white person comes with the caveat of emotional distance. I can co-exist and interact with you all on the basis of you're human beings like anyone else, and humans are fun to be around. But I do not relax around you all in the same why I relax around black people, or even other ethnic minorities in general. I don't talk about 95% of the things that affect me or interest me in my real life from a black perspective on ERA because this is an overwhelmingly white space, and you all either won't get where I'm coming from or will actively be hostile and offended about it so there's no point in me bothering (for example, check out my Need For Speed Heat topic). But I talk to black folks about it, even black folks outside of the US, and those same folks talk to me. No matter where we're from, we get it.

Dude that's a 7388 words post. What the fuck is wrong with your life that you spend all your internet time doing this?

i scrolled right past this post due to the avatar thinking it was another one of benji’s dissertations

welcome back king 

[Steven Snell]

i scrolled right past this post due to the avatar thinking it was another one of benji’s dissertations

welcome back king 

Some clever fight-back by Blueball to use an avatar of a member on here like some people do with Era members. Appreciate the hustle as they say.

[CHOW CHOW]

i scrolled right past this post due to the avatar thinking it was another one of benji’s dissertations

welcome back king 

Some clever fight-back by Blueball to use an avatar of a member on here like some people do with Era members. Appreciate the hustle as they say.

you understand the joke isn’t funny anymore when you spell it out like this, right? 

[CHOW CHOW]

wait a minute   did i just get out-bired?

[Hap Shaughnessy]

Edit: Right link:
https://www.resetera.com/threads/nvidia-falls-12-in-premarket-trading-as-china%E2%80%99s-deepseek-triggers-global-tech-sell-off.1092594/page-10#post-135004203

User banned (permanent): Troll account

Compare the answers done by competitors like ChatGPT and ask it about war crimes done by certain countries.
It's night and day.

This is not about what you think it is, you should have attention on profile image used by user I quoted. Vast majority of users on world wide web on any event consume information from established media and or check Wikipedia articles for summaries along some of them look at sources that were used as references.

Relying on AI will inevitably at some point result in output that omits some facts as is case with narrative involving event known as Tiananmen Square massacre outside mainland China. AI LLM rely on scrapping information from articles thus distinct biases are present, more so when there is consensus it has is taken of off dominant narrative from western governments and media organizations that have interests from which they gain from.

In essence becomes a echo chamber.

Hence not a rarity to encounter misinformed people on internet that believe Tank man is dead.

Let alone people register fact that students threw objects and swarmed armored personnel carriers for going through metal fence and stayed on it, no one got hurt. Yet students attacked vehicle that had soldiers in it that did not shoot nor was vehicle armed with machine gun turret to begin with.
https://youtu.be/uuoXCki1jss?si=KQZHdBbwrGq9M3sK (12:40)

it is interesting how much bloodlust there is outside China for violence to occur in China at hands of Chinese government such as Hong Kong only for protester killing an soon to be retired old man janitor, protesters attacking anyone that spoke Mandarin hence Taiwanese tourists were attacked and those suspected they spoke Mandarin thus Japanese tourists were attacked. Along beating and setting on fire people that were fed up with them destroying public property such as metro stations and trains, women are fair game too for them. Few to dozen protesters gang up one person, often obscuring with open umbrellas while they pummel the person. Fighting with foreigners at airports. Etc... Only semblance of impartial reporting in western world was done by Sky News along one of reporters escorting a woman to safety away from protesters that hawked her and threw paint at her to mark her.

Goodnight.

[Propagandhim]

 
 

Dude that's a 7388 words post. What the fuck is wrong with your life that you spend all your internet time doing this?

I like how you distinguish between my "internet time" and all of my time as if they're different.  That's really cute.   Objectively false not unlike the MCU depiction of the Hulk’s transformations as solely triggered by anger and not also trauma as evidenced by the classic comic issue, Incredible Hulk Vol. 1, #248.......but cute.

[Hap Shaughnessy]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/anthony-mackie-receives-backlash-after-saying-captain-america-should-represent-honor-dignity-and-integrity-rather-than-america.1094895/#post-135027255

Anthony Mackie committed the horrible crime of actually understanding some of the concepts of the work he's in the adaptation of and talking about it, in an era where hot takes posers, grifters and hobby tourists take offense to everything in order to outrage farm literally everything.

It's actually crazy and goes on in everything.

Like Zeo and this thread?

[Besticus Maximus]

I need to know what blueball thinks of Kyuuji actually being a hulking ginger incel

[BananaBlast]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/trans-women-in-fmc-carswell-being-isolated-may-potentially-be-moved-into-units-with-men.1093374/

User banned (permanent): Troll account

Compare the answers done by competitors like ChatGPT and ask it about war crimes done by certain countries.
It's night and day.

This is not about what you think it is, you should have attention on profile image used by user I quoted. Vast majority of users on world wide web on any event consume information from established media and or check Wikipedia articles for summaries along some of them look at sources that were used as references.

Relying on AI will inevitably at some point result in output that omits some facts as is case with narrative involving event known as Tiananmen Square massacre outside mainland China. AI LLM rely on scrapping information from articles thus distinct biases are present, more so when there is consensus it has is taken of off dominant narrative from western governments and media organizations that have interests from which they gain from.

In essence becomes a echo chamber.

Hence not a rarity to encounter misinformed people on internet that believe Tank man is dead.

Let alone people register fact that students threw objects and swarmed armored personnel carriers for going through metal fence and stayed on it, no one got hurt. Yet students attacked vehicle that had soldiers in it that did not shoot nor was vehicle armed with machine gun turret to begin with.
https://youtu.be/uuoXCki1jss?si=KQZHdBbwrGq9M3sK (12:40)

it is interesting how much bloodlust there is outside China for violence to occur in China at hands of Chinese government such as Hong Kong only for protester killing an soon to be retired old man janitor, protesters attacking anyone that spoke Mandarin hence Taiwanese tourists were attacked and those suspected they spoke Mandarin thus Japanese tourists were attacked. Along beating and setting on fire people that were fed up with them destroying public property such as metro stations and trains, women are fair game too for them. Few to dozen protesters gang up one person, often obscuring with open umbrellas while they pummel the person. Fighting with foreigners at airports. Etc... Only semblance of impartial reporting in western world was done by Sky News along one of reporters escorting a woman to safety away from protesters that hawked her and threw paint at her to mark her.

Goodnight.

It got wiped already 

[Taco Bell Tower]

Embiid already unbanned. The mystery deepens.

I wonder there's mods or admins out there who loathe NepNep and Embiid is like the only Ree with the balls to take her down which is why they must of unbanned him to continue his bloodthirst.

[DavidCroquet]

Dude that's a 7388 words post. What the fuck is wrong with your life that you spend all your internet time doing this?

This is like some sort of spy fiction triple-agent scenario. 

Using the Benji avatar makes Blueball an official and honored member of The Bire in good standing, as far as I'm concerned.

[CHOW CHOW]

I need to know what blueball thinks of Kyuuji actually being a hulking ginger incel

[HaughtyFrank]

Dude that's a 7388 words post. What the fuck is wrong with your life that you spend all your internet time doing this?

This is like some sort of spy fiction triple-agent scenario. 

Using the Benji avatar makes Blueball an official and honored member of The Bire in good standing, as far as I'm concerned.

What makes it high art is that it's exactly the kind of reply Benji makes to his own posts. Not sure blue balls even knew that

[JoeBoy101]

1738174057[/url]']

1738131104[/url]']
I went looking for the post where she says that "reckoning" would be centuries of slavery for white people. Found this instead from 2020, it's probably a good primer on her seething narcissist self-importance: https://www.resetera.com/threads/are-all-white-people-racist.184470/page-4#post-31268580

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

*(breathes in)*

*(breathes out)*

Alright kids, let's talk about how ideas spread. Marketing and advertising, propaganda, philosophy, whatever. Let's just start with this.

We can all acknowledge the fact that exposure to concepts will inevitably result in an individual being at least subconsciously aware of those concepts. Whether it's the fact that advertising is even a thing that, you know, works, the numerous stories of family members being lost to the Fox News or alt-right pipeline, the fast spread of memes, or even that "representation matters" because seeing folks on screen allows for the formation of even basic parasocial relationships which in turn fosters empathy for outgroups, I think you would be hard-pressed to argue against the fact that "continuous exposure to information makes a human being more susceptible to absorbing that information."

Now let's talk about demographic spread, or like, how folks kinda congregate and live with each other.

Taking data from the US Census Bureau from it's 2013-2017 American Community Survey, black and white segregation has... not actually moved all that much since the beginning of the century, with a dissimilarity index around 70 on average. White people, largely, keep to themselves, while black people do so as well but are seeing more integration with Hispanic/Latinx populations (howdy y'all). This is due to many factors regarding economics and business and culture and all that good shtuff I don't feel like talking about while I'm absolutely starving right now. But yeah, that's just another fact. White people largely still keep to themselves, and it really wouldn't be out of the question to call America segregated in all but law.

Okay. Do we agree on these two things as, like, facts? Advertising works, and America's population tends to cluster by race?

Good.

Alright.

NOW We can talk about racism.

Because racism is not just a conscious belief? It's like a spectrum of thoughts and behaviors, big ones and small ones, to varying degrees of consciousness where the outcome is inevitably a disdain or distrust of another race. And the sad fact is, America (and by extension Europe; you all started this mess) has done a bang-up job of putting out a shitload of propaganda both about the inferiority of black and brown people and the superiority of white people for centuries. The glossing over of native genocide as "manifest destiny," the fact that you all thought it was a good idea to allow confederates to rewrite history, the continuous hostility to black and brown protest, the awkward consumption of black and brown media that results in erasure, the outright conscious efforts to just outright write scientists, politicians, artists out of history, the fact that white people literally took one of the most inspiring Biblical figures from the Middle East and began to depict him as a white dude when... he couldn't have been white? The police in general..... Oh, Zwarte Piet; can't forget that! The Mounties committing genocide against the natives under Trudeau's watch.... Hell, Trudeau's blackface.

I mean, I literally don't think I have the character count to just go on about how much stuff, how much information, how much propaganda, has existed and continues to exist about how black and brown folks just ain't shit compared to white people.

But even if you're conscious of its existence and work to bat those nasty thoughts away... it doesn't mean the programming isn't working, hasn't already worked. If it takes seven viewings of an advertisement for you to remember a product, even subconsciously, you cannot dismiss centuries of cultural advertising. Especially when you are without the means to actively combat it. Because let's be honest, white people are fucking terrible at uprooting and getting rid of racism! And I can say that with confidence because in 400 years of undisputed rule in America the best you could do in 2016 is elect Donald Trump.... Donald Trump. You all chose to do that.

You largely don't live around black and brown people- the last Census says so- so the most exposure you get to us, if any, is through the media and forums like this one. But some tenuous viewings of Black Panther and readings of my posts can't compete with the fact that white people live and work around white people 24/7, who have been inundated across generations that they are the best, and it's an indoctrination that has been passively allowed to happen. Those pictures of white folks screaming at Civil Rights protestors, the lynchings, the concentration camps?

I mean, think about it. Those people were never arrested. Never punished. Never admonished. Most of them weren't even publicly named. They were allowed to go on and continue living their lives without having to confront the fact that they were, indeed, the baddies. It simply became something you couldn't talk about openly. You couldn't "tell it like it is." But that didn't mean they weren't spouting it around the house, on the job, at the dinner table. It didn't mean they weren't distrusting of the few black and brown folks they saw at the store, or on the corner, or on TV. That's why you still have shitty family members at holiday gatherings. Because there aren't any consequences for white supremacist thought, not really. There's always a place to go to stew in it to some degree, or to at least never confront it.

It's also why most people don't confront said shitty family members. It's not a big deal to you. The effects of white supremacy have worked on you too, and thus it's much more easier to let Uncle Bob spew his shit about the wall again than to actually take a meaningful dive into anti-racism. And even aggressive anti-racists like Tim Wise, those who come along once in a blue moon, still slip up once in awhile and let the message take over.

I say all this to say this: The thought that there is any white person on Earth where colonialism has touched that has not been susceptible to white supremacist thinking is laughable. The question is not "Are all white people racist?" The question should be "When are white people going to step up and actually work towards making a more equitable world?"

.... I'm going to go get food and pour one out for my mentions.

The only reason we keep having "conversations" is because white people don't want to implement the solutions that black and brown people have been giving you for centuries. In 400 years of "whiteness" being a concept, we have basically had to drag you all kicking and screaming towards some nebulous end of "anti-racism," and even when we achieve some measureable milestone, whether it be abolition, or civil rights, or putting body cameras on police, or having you all not dress in blackface for your winter parades, it is almost inevitably set back by the continuance of white supremacy in other forms and ways allowable by law, or by "white lashes" such as the election of fascist figures all throughout the world in the last few years.

Reparations, affirmative action, dismantling the police, waiving both personal and national debt (hey France, stop fucking over Haiti m'kay?), actually deplatforming the alt-right, recognizing the sovereignty of natives, taking down confederate iconography, just not fucking voting for right-wing parties. There's plenty of solutions to combat racism. Nothing I've said in this thread is new, just regurgitated thoughts from more daring trailblazers and writers packaged up for you all. Black and brown people have had the conversation, and given you the solutions.

So again, the question is when are you all going to do something about it? My honest guess is never, because you simply have no incentive to do so.

You don't have to pretend to have an answer, because black and brown people have done the thinking for you. There's tons of written and video content out there on what to do to get the ball rolling on dismantling white supremacy the world over, as well as plenty of organizations to join if that's your bag. In general, all white people have to do is implement the solutions that have been sitting there free of charge.

But that would mean admitting there is a problem and checking your ego at the door, instead of obfuscating the point and kicking the can down the road since the status quo is just so darn cozy. Because you can tell me you hire for diversity. You can tell me you teach your children right.

And yet you're in here pretending like conversations still need to happen, blaming Trump on minorities not outvoting 60% of the population, leaning into the falsehood the this is an American-centric problem, asking why I didn't put Latinos and Asians on blast, and ultimately not even actually trying to refute the propositions I put forth in that first post but still insisting that you are uncomfortable with me saying what I said.

Like, you're literally doing then thing I talked about in my first post and you don't even realize it.

It's because it's obvious that you're upset. You have made a number of deflections and have downplayed what I have said. You're continuously trying to shift the burden to others. You keep trying to prove to me you're one of the good ones. You literally aren't understanding that this defensive behavior- right here- is part of that "spectrum" of behaviors I talked about earlier, albeit more on the passive-aggressive end than the more aggressive end. It is a good thing that you are hiring Australian minorities, and it is good that you expose your children to other cultures. And yet despite all of that work, when a black American speaks about the systems of white supremacy that affect them the most, your answer included "Why aren't you talking about the Latinos and Asians, huh?!"

You literally just don't get it, and frankly I don't think there's anything I can say to better communicate to you the problem, which in itself is also a big issue. I don't know how to communicate my lived experience with someone who, by way of the forces of society, can not actually get a sense of how I live and how that lived experience informs my own philosophy. As I said, empathy is derived from exposure. But joke's on me. I can't expose white people to racism as felt by black people, no more than I can try to teach a dog about the number 5 when science has said dogs can only comprehend 4 instances of something, and anything beyond that is just "a lot."

Like, how the fuck do you break down the number 5? It's self-explanatory.

This is also why I say solving white supremacy is impossible, and it's why I've taken a hands-off approach in recent years in my life. It will persist long after I die, but the most I do is to fight for a better quality of life for myself. I don't need white people's approval to do what I want to do and be with who I wanna be with. So, take this as a victory. You've burnt me out.

I woke up and can't say I'm surprised at how this thread has gone...largely because it was going the same way when I was active. We're at the point now where the only way most people are willing to answer the question is to throw all other races into the mix to more easily absolve the horrible sinking feeling that being a good person is actually a really hard thing to do.

But I'm not going to address all that. My fellow minorities, specifically black folks, have once again done the work that they're not going to be rewarded with. I do want to talk about this silly notion going around because no one seems to have hit on it, and I definitely want to hit on it because I am THAT person.

The notion that you can't say "all" of white people in any context is silly for two reasons, those two reasons being metonymy and heritability.

Let's start with the first one because it's simple: Metonymy is just a fancy way of saying "using an encompassing concept to describe a wide spread phenomenon." And white supremacy- specifically white supremacy, not just "racial prejudice" to you non-Americans who continuously try to distance yourself from this (I see you, you Sassy Sues)- is a wide spread phenomenon.

For example, take the statement "America has an obesity problem." No one is going to really balk at this. Hell, many of you will take this as an opportunity to start ranting about the moral inferiority of the obese.

"America?! You're saying ALL Americans are obese?! You can't say that! I'M skinny!"

This is literally never the line of conversation because people can recognise that the use of "America" is meant to describe how wide-spread the phenomenon. Also, there is a degree of separation people have for their nationality, because it's something you can technically change or not feel as passionately about. Indeed I would say on a US-centric forum that leans left, feeling "American" is understandably not something to be overtly proud of because it carries with it certain connotations of horribleness considering what America continues to do to the world.

But race is different. Race is something that is biological (this is false, but let's go with it); it's something that's, like, apart of you in a way that can't be changed, and yet simultaneously it also has no bearing on your quality as a person. That's why racism is so bad! How can you apply this concept of metonymy to race?!

Easily, because of heritability. Shaun of Shaun and Jen talks about this at length in his episode about The Bell Curve, but if you don't want to watch two hours of video to get to the pertinent bit, here it is:

Heritability is not the passing of traits down between parents and off-spring. It is the rate of occurrence of a trait in any given population. That rate of occurrence can be due to anything, including social factors, and indeed heritability doesn't actually remark on the source for why a trait is the way it is. All it says is "this is a pattern in this population."

For example, if you have five of the same plant, and give all of them equal access to what they need to grow to 10 feet, (food, water, sunlight, etc.) and you see an equal distribution of this trait, tallness hitting 10 feet has 100% heritability. If you were to have taken one of the plants and given it shitty conditions, and it only grows to 5 feet, then heritability drops, not because of the biological potential of that plant to grow, but because of its worse environment.

If you're not a science denier and understand that heritability is a just a thing, and you agree that white supremacy is a world-wide phenomenon, then you actually have very little way of arguing out of the notion that all white people are racist to some degree. That widespread racism is NOT the result of genetic or biological factors, because race as a genetic phenomenon doesn't exist. Race is sociopolitical. So rest easy, white people; you're not born with a hate gene. You didn't literally inherit the sin. Instead, your ingrained dismissiveness of minorities is a result of social conditioning, namely the one that has said for centuries that white people are just better than everyone else just because they're white.

Which is actually great news for you because it means you can be a better person and fix the problem, in largely the same ways we try to tackle obesity as an American phenomenon.

Again, you are raised in this system whether you like it or not. It has colored your perceptions whether you like it or not. To deny this to make yourself feel better is not helping; indeed, it is the reason I still have to do so much work on this left-leaning forum in the first place. You all don't get it, and then inevitably post some nonsense I have to moderate.

And I can hear it now, because conversations about white culture (can we take a moment to recognize the irony of people from markedly different cultures and perspectives can still somehow consider themselves "white?" Huh. Odd how that works) always re-route to "what about the blacks and browns?" I know you're going to ask:

"Are you saying then it's fair for me to start talking about black criminals and smart Asians? These things can be heritable too!"

I'm sure a few of you are salivating at the chance to FINALLY "tell it like it is."

But I sure indeedly am not giving you that green light. You know why? Because you've been trained by white supremacy! Whenever a white person talks about Chicago's violence and they're actually not directly involved in the curtailing of those issues, do you think any black person listening is dumb enough to think that- deep down- this person doesn't think on some level that Chicago's crime is an inevitability because of some inherent genetic deficiency in black people to follow the law? Of course not. You know it, and I know it. And that's the difference.

By way of white supremacy, ethnic minorities possess a remarkable clarity to critique caste-based systems from a sociopolitical context, because to fight white supremacy you inevitably have to start with the notion that it doesn't exist as a scientific principle, if only to embolden your self-worth in a society that is always saying you're worth less than. This clarity is in turn countered by an amazing ignorance of white people to understand this fact because they are the ones on top of the food chain and are by default not victims to its horrors, and without any ability to attain true empathy, they default to what they have been trained to know as does anyone else when trying to comprehend something new. And the default belief of white supremacy is that the ills of the world are the result of non-white barbarians who are uncivilized by nature.

This is all nothing more than a belief system, like religion or traditional politics, which is why I am confident in attacking it this pointedly. It doesn't matter that your ancestors thought it was a nifty idea to tie the belief system to some vague notion of race in order to justify themselves, and that as a result you feel like I'm attacking you because of how you were physically born. You're not oppressed on the basis of whiteness; let's get that out of the way. Indeed, if you think I'm being harsh, you should try taking the advice of Urban Scholar and looking in on a typical dinner a politically-minded black family might have on a Sunday night. Content Warning before you do: It ain't pretty.

It's simple. Racism is something commonly considered both categorically evil and a conscious act of will.

White people don't want to be considered consciously evil, especially leftist ones.

So instead of coming to grips with the fact that they're not the heroes of this story (again, really hard to do when you've been raised in a system that says you are the hero as ordained by God), they instead deny and lash out.

I am not talking about simply not being racist when I talk about hero narratives. I'm talking about the way white supremacy works. I'll make this quick because I have to go run an errand to my bank:

Whiteness is ultimately nothing. Like, literally nothing. It is not genetic, nor is it reasonably drawn upon ethnic or national lines. It's a nebulous philosophy at best that unites an arbitrary group of people against the rest of the world. You can also describe it as an antithesis. Whiteness is the absence of race. It is the absence of an easily-definable group. It is the absence of culture (that's why the Italians, Eastern Europeans, and Australians in here still know what it's like to be "white" before they know what it's like to be any of these other specific nationalistic identifiers). It's assimilative. That's literally what it was designed to do; to temper the horrors of colonialism and the Atlantic Slave trade by saying "Hey, random ass farmer dude; you deserve that land of yours because you're special. Science and God says so!"

Indeed, the best way to pave over uncomfortable truths is with hero narratives. Look at how almost all superhero movies have climaxes that pave the way to a good outcome through violence while at the same time black people can't even protest on the DA's front lawn. White people REALLY love hero narratives to an absurdly unhealthy degree. If that whole "manifest destiny" thing didn't prove it, and if Fox News talking about how black people were "the losers" and need to "get over it" didn't do it for you, there's this weird fascination you all have with ancestry that doesn't align with how black folks experience it.

I'm gonna get very anecdotal here, but hear me out in this example: Southerners love to paint the confederates in a positive light in part because there seems to be this sinking feeling that "If Great-Grandpappy was fighting to keep his slaves and not to protect his home, what does that make me?" Even otherwise liberal folks are strangely uncomfortable with finding out the may have had confederates in their lineage, when frankly I can't fathom why the fuck it even matters whether or not that's true. After all, I thought you guys didn't want to pay for the sins of your forefathers?

But still. Crack open any history book and you're going to get taught about white history. High-class music is European orchestral music. Great acting is defined by white Shakespearean theater. The best cuisine is French cuisine; they may eat snails and frogs, but that's extremely different from the bats Chinese people eat! The only period of great intellectual and scientific progress you learn about in the world is the European Renaissance. And this shit goes on and on and on. You would think that the rest of the world just wasn't doing shit, and indeed I as a black woman grew up with that mindset! When you're indoctrinated by adults to only learn what white people are doing as a kid, then you just put other people and cultures to the wayside except in small instances like the Civil Rights that inevitably have to be touched on, all the while lacking the critical thinking to understand that those instances had to nonetheless come from concurrent movements and springs of thought, philosophy, and action. Because you're never taught about those concurrent cultures and movements.

All of this creates this kind of thoroughline that white people came from great people, kings, leaders, and warriors (I guess that explains the foothold of Medieval fantasy in popular culture), or otherwise heroic and noble people, and that this condition of righteousness must be carried on at least in some part through genetics and ancestry. Society screams at white people that they were meant for greatness, because after all, the greatest things to experience are white things. And it leads into American exceptionalism (although let's be clear that American exceptionalism isn't only American- looking at you, Brexit), the idea that you are not held back at all by the social forces at play, but by the sweat of your own brow. You are the singular thing standing in between a life of toiling and a life that is completely walled off from that toiling through mounds of capital. Not society. Not capitalism. You. You are an individual. You have power. You have total control. You are, as they say, "the hero in your own story."

It's bullshit. Bullshit to assuage you that you aren't standing on a bedrock of blood.

Black people don't get that luxury. Yes, I grew up being told about the American Dream at school, and yet at home my parents gave me the talk that I would that I would never have an excuse to be an individual because I'm black, and being black comes with certain asterisks and addendums. I am not allowed to be stupid or ignorant; I need to know white culture better than white people know it, because if I make a mistake that's an indictment of the entire race. My clothes must be perfect and proper. My hair has to be chemically straightened to look like white people's. I am not allowed to make mistakes, because making a mistake could be the difference between coming home to live another day, and becoming a hashtag wherein you all argue whether or not I charged a cop and thus needed to be put down.

White people get the luxury of believing they are not bound by societal systems because white supremacy puts them in that position by default, because whiteness is the absence of grouping, and without a group you are free to be individualized. But it's a luxury that comes with a real human cost. Because when you believe that you're infallible, that you're not constrained by these kinds of social orders, that you aren't racist because you are some magical snowflake who's completely bucked the trend.... and yet your life still sucks, what do you do? Who do you get mad at? Who do you direct your dissatisfaction towards? Not the systems keeping you down, because they're simultaneously the systems propping up your ego. Black people largely shrug the suckiness of life off as an inevitability because we grow up behind the curve. Not to say we are impervious to things like substance abuse and mental anguish; we're human too.

But we're not the ones grappling with this kind of identity dissonance through mass shootings either.

A word isn't diluted simply because its definition applies to a wide swathe of situations.

Literally every single human being has to eat to live, but that doesn't magically dilute the biological importance of eating or the cultural traditions and norms around the world that surround the act of eating. No one says "If you say everyone needs to eat, well you are devaluing cuisine!" No, this is dumb.

This rhetoric, as with the majority of it in this thread, is borne from trying to distance yourself from the issue, and not from any real insistence on addressing the issue at hand. It's an attempt to frame racism as some nebulous evil that you, the special, impervious person you are, are definitely not influenced by, versus a system of beliefs and attitudes that happens to be so pervasive that you have no choice but to be exposed to it.

It's not on black people to heal racial divides. It's on white people to get their shit together and stop being surprised that scores of black people have had enough of talking to brick walls and just want to focus their energy on constructive outlets.

All white people are racist.

That was very easy for me to say.

Man, I bet you thought you had me.

To deflect from having to examine white supremacy on its own.

The topic is pretty clear cut. It asks if all white people racist or not. Thus, you would think the discussion would follow trying to determine if that is true without asking about other ethnicities. If you think a question of such magnitude is useless, then I don't know what to tell you what to look for regarding productive discussion on a video game enthusiasts forum.

Racism was never going to be lessened by this topic, or indeed any other you could frame yourself. Because frankly the time for talking has been over for centuries. The true question is when are white people going to be willing to make the altruistic sacrifices necessary to begin righting their wrongs.

As I said, my guess is never. No one has any incentive or spine to do so. So at the very least we can both take comfort in the lack of utilitarianism this topic has in regards to fixing society's ills (although, again, it must be noted that this threshold for a topic's existence is only leveled at white supremacy. Kinda funny how that works).

At the very least, it has given me a platform to speak on matters that are relevant to my daily life, help the few receptive people here better understand these concepts from a black perspective, and raise fragile people's hackles in the process. So not all was lost.

Again, I feel like being a truly good person is always a grindy work in progress because a lot of negative outcomes in society are the result of passive or normalized actions and customs you have to actively work to combat. In that vain, the desire to be a good person becomes irrelevant with regards to the work that needs to be done. I try to make my particularly moral choices on the basis of if it's going to help others. I don't care if doing so necessarily makes me a good person because it's not about me, or perhaps more specifically, the morality follow the actions. A good person is someone who is always consciously acting in the right even when they are burdened by a society built on wrong and, thus, will inevitably make mistakes and actions that are harmful anyway. Just as there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, there's no white person completely free of racism in a white supremacist world.

That doesn't mean you can't work towards making it better, nor does trying to make it better mean you are completely absolved of your responsibility to keep doing the work, in the same way that not buying Nike shoes doesn't mean you're necessarily a good person under an anti-capitalist lens either. Yes; being good is really hard!

So as I said in my opening post, racism is a spectrum of behaviors and beliefs. It's all bad, but to varying degrees of bad. Thinking black people are more impervious to pain is racist, but it's not going to illicit the same rebuking as being a klansman. Subsequently, any white person who, like, just recognizes their privilege or apologizes for personal screw-ups is a lot more forgivable than the white person who engages in the kind of dismissiveness and gaslighting this thread has been ripe with. You can, in a way (that doesn't give you a pass) be burdened with racism and still be a good person, because the former is inevitable.

You could start with reparations, for one. We know you got the money.

It's time for white people to stop pretending they lack culpability, stop pretending they're ignorant, and kicking the can down the road. It's time for them to fix this mess. And yes, you're on a countdown timer. Demographic change is occurring whether you like it or not, and you cannot count on future generations to be as courteous as we are, despite the fact that right now today, we really have absolutely no reason to respect social graces and civility with how many bodies white people continue to leave in their wake. This is not a call to violence, by the way. I'm not saying black people should get violent, nor do I think that's even a reasonable risk today. No one wants to, especially since people feel they have other avenues of seeking justice. What I am saying is that history teaches us that violence is nearly an inevitability in cultures of mass inequality. America already fought one war over this.

Treat it like global warming. Do the work now to avoid getting absolutely fucked later.

Neither is having a conversion that placates the sensibilities of white people. Again, this is not in black people's court. It's in white people's, and for centuries the only attitude you all have shown towards racial progress is resentment and resistance.

I cannot give the white collective the will to want to do better by minorities, and frankly I would not even if I could. You need to find that in yourselves.

The irony of this bit is that whiteness is inherently assimilating and homogenous, which is inherent in negative reactions by white people who then go on to appeal to their unique nationalities and personal struggles to separate themselves from what they see as an "Americanized" issue. It is amusing then how American critiques of a so-called American-centric phenomenon can nonetheless rile up non-Americans, almost as if whiteness itself is something that- despite being completely bogus- is nonetheless universally understood wherever there are white populations!

Alas, I don't think of you all as some borg collective. I do think of you all, in terms of the sociopolitics of race, as belonging to a single culture which in turn has unjustly amassed an unfair amount of capital and power through centuries of genocide and disenfranchisement, all of which is continually done. As such, it is not an issue at all to ascribe a generalized responsibility for white supremacy to everyone who opts in to white culture.

On whichever side he is treated by a society that ascribes to white supremacy ideals. If your son looks white, he will be treated as such, maybe with some asterisks. If he doesn't look white, he will be treated like any other non-white person, like Obama is. That's the name of the game.

It's not a question of like or dislike for me. It's a question of trust.

I would say like 95% of human beings regardless of ethnicity on this planet are a baseline good, and what I mean by a baseline good as that they are neither consciously oppressive nor anti-oppressive. They're pleasant, cordial, affable, they don't want to be mean to you, and if they are there's probably something going on in their day. They want to be helpful if you ask for help. They want people to socialize with in pleasant ways, they want to vent; when I was at Walgreens my goal was to get anyone talking and have them be more sociable and friendly going out than when they came in. Sometimes that meant really fun conversations about movies we just saw, other times that meant getting something off someone's chest and having them just smile for the first time that day.

People, in general, are very fun and awesome to be around. We are crazy-ass species, and I mean that in a good way.

That doesn't mean though that I necessarily trust white people to not be racist, because the fact is ever since becoming a more politically-minded person, I actually haven't met a white person yet in real life that hasn't said or done some dumb-ass shit regarding minorities or the way America's sociopolitical systems work, and it's not because of any active malice (most of the time). It's simply because you all don't know any better as a result of the society in which you were raised.

I've got two white friends whom I met through the furry community years and years ago, and I talk to them every week. Both of them have had to be checked by me and my other black friends and family members on more than one occasion regarding the n-word and white fragility (you would think that both being LGBTQA+ would give them some insight into the dynamics of oppression and whatnot, but nope). Working in retail I receive a markedly different treatment between people of color and white people in terms of things like eye contact, the fact that people of color never think it's a surprise that I'm eloquent, and even just the ways in which currency is dispensed to me (white people have a tendency to just throw it on the counter for me to pick up, but then expect me to give the change or card back in their hand. Meanwhile, I get regularly scolded by black people for reaching for anything they don't give me, because it's not my job to fetch things. So, you know, stop that shit; for real). Working with white people at my last job is markedly different than working with black people; Georgia is a conservative hellhole so, you know, fucking Fox News talking points abound (had an argument with a fill-in pharmacist my last week working there about confederate statues which ended in "agree to disagree," because you know, the confederacy is something to "agree to disagree" about), but even more liberally minded white folks don't believe Trump supporters are necessarily anymore bigoted than anyone else, and it's probably because they don't want to have to start going down that rabbit hole with their own family members.

I could go on and on. But regardless, white people live in a different culture than black folks do, and white culture is- again- one that was specifically born to justify the oppression of people who look like me, because to not do so would've made the Atlantic slave trade morally untenable if white people hadn't dehumanized the Africans they were subjecting that treatment to. That culture has been simultaneously exported the world over and never fully dismantled. There's very few places on Earth, if any, where I can go to escape it, and as such racial inequity abounds. But because white people don't suffer the brunt of the overtly negative effects of this system, it is very difficult for you all to perceive it until someone tells you about it, and even then there's that wall of fragility and defensiveness one must get through before it sinks in, because you all associate racism with a conscious act of evil and not simply the banal reality of the world we all live in and are all influenced by. Thus, you take a lot for granted and absorb a lot of shit that is, at best, casually racist. It's unavoidable.

So any interaction with a white person comes with the caveat of emotional distance. I can co-exist and interact with you all on the basis of you're human beings like anyone else, and humans are fun to be around. But I do not relax around you all in the same why I relax around black people, or even other ethnic minorities in general. I don't talk about 95% of the things that affect me or interest me in my real life from a black perspective on ERA because this is an overwhelmingly white space, and you all either won't get where I'm coming from or will actively be hostile and offended about it so there's no point in me bothering (for example, check out my Need For Speed Heat topic). But I talk to black folks about it, even black folks outside of the US, and those same folks talk to me. No matter where we're from, we get it.

Dude that's a 7388 words post. What the fuck is wrong with your life that you spend all your internet time doing this?

When you start giving Likes… that’s how it starts. You get that dopamine drip that starts twisting your opinions and growing your titties.

“Well, it was funny so I guess… I’ll… hit the ‘Like’ button.”

You know you want to, Blueball. Become an active member of the Like economy and understand what it means to be loved.

[Hap Shaughnessy]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/a-2032-asteroid-has-a-1-in-83-chance-of-hitting-earth.1094790/

Eh why not at this point

Sounds good to me.

Doesn't seem very big. We need bigger.

lord i haven't asked for much from you lately but i insist you give me the space rock

We would be so lucky

why not at this point lol

Yes please.

Best news ive heard in 2025 so far

Can we expedite this somehow? I'm so very, very tired already.

Eh why not at this point

basically

If we send boosters can it get here faster?

I'll take two please

🤞🤞🤞🤞

Just land it smack-dab in the center of the US. I'll take a drive and park in the epicenter.

Why not?

Is there anything we can do to improve those odds?

60m, lol you gotta try harder universe.

Kinda like those odds tbh

🤞🏾

Team Asteroid

odds

Oh please please please

Who gives a fuck at this point

Oh cool.

I like those odds.

Only 60m wide?

Bummer.

We're not that lucky. We've made our bed, shat in it and now we have to lie in it. No cosmic intervention for you.

Take us out fam

I'm kind of starting to think some people here aren't joking and that's hilarious.

[Hap Shaughnessy]

Dude that's a 7388 words post. What the fuck is wrong with your life that you spend all your internet time doing this?

This is like some sort of spy fiction triple-agent scenario. 

Using the Benji avatar makes Blueball an official and honored member of The Bire in good standing, as far as I'm concerned.

What makes it high art is that it's exactly the kind of reply Benji makes to his own posts. Not sure blue balls even knew that

Didn't notice it wasn't benji until it was pointed out.

[CHOW CHOW]

When you start giving Likes… that’s how it starts. You get that dopamine drip that starts twisting your opinions and growing you titties.

[Tucker's Law]

We were two weeks too early to see this tweet from Nepenthe's brother:

   

I can't believe I'm thinking this, but it appears that Nepenthe might be the smarter of these siblings.

Wow!