I'm ashamed to say that I feel myself being pushed in that direction by some of the Medium writers who publish a new "racist white person did this" story every day. If I suggest that racism is being given too much sway, I'm likely to be told, "Sit down, listen and learn white man. You can't possibly have anything to say." It's like they are trying to motivate me to look for a local Proud Boys chapter or something.
"I'm ashamed to say that I feel myself being pushed in that direction by some of the Medium writers who publish a new "racist white person did this" story every day."
Yeah, sadly I know you're not alone. As I've pointed out many times, there's only so long you can tell any group of people that they're worthless simply because of their membership of that group before they lose interest in what you have to say. This is a universal human truth.
Now, of course, black people know something about being told (and treated as if) they're worthless. I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that a lot of the anger and frustration from certain black people comes from the exact same place the frustration you're feeling now comes from.
But I'll admit this fact does make it all the more frustrating to me that those black people can't understand (or don't care about) the cycle they're perpetuating. We all need to get better at looking at things from the opposite perspective.
This reminds me of something I have tried not to think about for a long time because it made me so angry.
Gay people of course got a lot of the same message, and by the time they finally started pushing back they acquired a lot of practice at resisting negative messages about gay sex. Promiscuity became the gay birthright, our offering to the repressed heterosexual world.
Then came AIDS.
While a lot of people changed their behavior and many worked hard getting out the message of safe sex and responsible behavior, a significant number went the other way, becoming aggressively promiscuous and even seeing HIV seroconversion as some sort of rite of passage. They refused condoms, they all but moved into the bathhouses, and they didn't care how many they infected nor how many died. Die they did, by the hundreds of thousands.
We're seeing something of a repeat of that with the politicizing of COVID, the insanity of the antivaxxers, though COVID is not the death sentence that AIDS was.
When I moved back to Seattle after caring for my mother and her cancer as long as I could and looked up my good friend Michael Taylor, who by the way was black, I learned that he had died only a few weeks before, of AIDS. And I wondered if the person who had infected him knew that he was a carrier.
As you know, I am often a harsh critic of partisan politics. I have friends and acquaintances ranging from didn't want to leave their house, even to see their doctor (Might be people with COVID in there) to anti-vax, where can I shop without wearing a muzzle? I'm no fan of politicians making medical decisions for me, but my wife and I have been jabbed four times for COVID since we are in our 70s with "issues".
Having said that, after putting it off during the early days of the pandemic we did the get together with family thing (I see socialization as a significant health issue). As you might predict, the whole extended family had the same symptoms with some testing positive (one healthy young unvaccinated man hospitalized) and others testing negative. I don't think that the tests are all that reliable, but that's just my lay opinion. We took a risk, but we didn't get all those jabs to stay home and live in fear.
Your description of the evolution of reaction to AIDS in the gay community is tragic.
AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease, which means that by definition it is one of the hardest to transmit. COVID is the opposite, aerosol droplets, you can be infected in an empty hallway.
By 1982 we knew all we needed to know to stop HIV from infecting a single new individual. Nothing could have been easier.
I'm sure that there are vestiges of slave racism alive and well in our culture. Considering that Puritan cruelty and intolerance is still very much with us after a longer time, it would be folly to doubt the same of slavery.
But there is not a single white person alive today who is in any way personally culpable for slavery and the ones who like to say that it "wasn't so bad" or even "a sweet deal" are easily-ignored attention freaks. So calls for reparations are ridiculous.
Racism is an equal-opportunity destroyer. The best of us try hard to recognize and combat it. But it far from something limited to white people.
Are you seriously suggesting that white Americans are genetically inclined to be cruel & intolerant?
I'd always assumed it was a cultural failing, one of the unfortunate consequences of starting from an "out-group" from European society and developing in isolation. The rest of Europe seems to have managed to make those behaviours less & less acceptable.
Calls for reparations are more to do with the practical consequences for today's citizens of previous generations' cruelty & greed than any personal animosity. The inherited inequality is financial, not genetic - the result of not allowing "coloured" people to get mortgages or own land, feeding down to poverty today.
"𝘍𝘪𝘳𝘴𝘵, 𝘴𝘭𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺/𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘮 𝘨𝘦𝘵𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘣𝘭𝘢𝘮𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘴𝘰 𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘳𝘪𝘥𝘪𝘤𝘶𝘭𝘰𝘶𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 𝘪𝘯 2022, 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦’𝘴 𝘥𝘦𝘧𝘢𝘶𝘭𝘵 𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘴𝘶𝘨𝘨𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘴𝘭𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘢𝘯 𝘪𝘮𝘱𝘢𝘤𝘵 𝘰𝘯 𝘣𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘬 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘵𝘰𝘥𝘢𝘺 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘥𝘶𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘺."
I'm ashamed to say that I feel myself being pushed in that direction by some of the Medium writers who publish a new "racist white person did this" story every day. If I suggest that racism is being given too much sway, I'm likely to be told, "Sit down, listen and learn white man. You can't possibly have anything to say." It's like they are trying to motivate me to look for a local Proud Boys chapter or something.
"I'm ashamed to say that I feel myself being pushed in that direction by some of the Medium writers who publish a new "racist white person did this" story every day."
Yeah, sadly I know you're not alone. As I've pointed out many times, there's only so long you can tell any group of people that they're worthless simply because of their membership of that group before they lose interest in what you have to say. This is a universal human truth.
Now, of course, black people know something about being told (and treated as if) they're worthless. I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that a lot of the anger and frustration from certain black people comes from the exact same place the frustration you're feeling now comes from.
But I'll admit this fact does make it all the more frustrating to me that those black people can't understand (or don't care about) the cycle they're perpetuating. We all need to get better at looking at things from the opposite perspective.
This reminds me of something I have tried not to think about for a long time because it made me so angry.
Gay people of course got a lot of the same message, and by the time they finally started pushing back they acquired a lot of practice at resisting negative messages about gay sex. Promiscuity became the gay birthright, our offering to the repressed heterosexual world.
Then came AIDS.
While a lot of people changed their behavior and many worked hard getting out the message of safe sex and responsible behavior, a significant number went the other way, becoming aggressively promiscuous and even seeing HIV seroconversion as some sort of rite of passage. They refused condoms, they all but moved into the bathhouses, and they didn't care how many they infected nor how many died. Die they did, by the hundreds of thousands.
We're seeing something of a repeat of that with the politicizing of COVID, the insanity of the antivaxxers, though COVID is not the death sentence that AIDS was.
When I moved back to Seattle after caring for my mother and her cancer as long as I could and looked up my good friend Michael Taylor, who by the way was black, I learned that he had died only a few weeks before, of AIDS. And I wondered if the person who had infected him knew that he was a carrier.
As you know, I am often a harsh critic of partisan politics. I have friends and acquaintances ranging from didn't want to leave their house, even to see their doctor (Might be people with COVID in there) to anti-vax, where can I shop without wearing a muzzle? I'm no fan of politicians making medical decisions for me, but my wife and I have been jabbed four times for COVID since we are in our 70s with "issues".
Having said that, after putting it off during the early days of the pandemic we did the get together with family thing (I see socialization as a significant health issue). As you might predict, the whole extended family had the same symptoms with some testing positive (one healthy young unvaccinated man hospitalized) and others testing negative. I don't think that the tests are all that reliable, but that's just my lay opinion. We took a risk, but we didn't get all those jabs to stay home and live in fear.
Your description of the evolution of reaction to AIDS in the gay community is tragic.
AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease, which means that by definition it is one of the hardest to transmit. COVID is the opposite, aerosol droplets, you can be infected in an empty hallway.
By 1982 we knew all we needed to know to stop HIV from infecting a single new individual. Nothing could have been easier.
I'm sure that there are vestiges of slave racism alive and well in our culture. Considering that Puritan cruelty and intolerance is still very much with us after a longer time, it would be folly to doubt the same of slavery.
But there is not a single white person alive today who is in any way personally culpable for slavery and the ones who like to say that it "wasn't so bad" or even "a sweet deal" are easily-ignored attention freaks. So calls for reparations are ridiculous.
Racism is an equal-opportunity destroyer. The best of us try hard to recognize and combat it. But it far from something limited to white people.
Are you seriously suggesting that white Americans are genetically inclined to be cruel & intolerant?
I'd always assumed it was a cultural failing, one of the unfortunate consequences of starting from an "out-group" from European society and developing in isolation. The rest of Europe seems to have managed to make those behaviours less & less acceptable.
Calls for reparations are more to do with the practical consequences for today's citizens of previous generations' cruelty & greed than any personal animosity. The inherited inequality is financial, not genetic - the result of not allowing "coloured" people to get mortgages or own land, feeding down to poverty today.