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ClemenceDane's avatar

She's also assuming that any white person living today had ancestors who owned slaves, and those slave owning ancestors were miraculously spared death at the hands of the slaves once they were freed. This entails so many bizarre assumptions that I don't even know where to start.

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Miguelitro's avatar

Excellent observations, Steve.

Nothing paralyzes and holds human beings back more than the psychology of victimhood, that your current condition is “somebody else’s fault.” And this holds true even when you ARE a victim of something. This applies to being poor, being a historically oppressed racial minority, being disabled, getting injured by a drunk driver, whatever.

One has to adopt the mindset that if you don’t fix things for yourself, no one will. Without this mindset, human beings are basically dead-on-arrival in terms of personal success.

This is completely consistent with an expectation that a amends should and will be made by the victimizer. But whether that happens is partly out of your control. So advocate for it but focus primarily on yourself, because yourself is the only one you can control.

There is a subset of white liberal progressive that revels in Black victimhood--the Robin DeAngelos of this world. And there is a subset of Black activists that focus on everything but themselves. Ibram X Kendi and his everything is racist universe comes to mind. It’s an infantilizing codependent paralysis that will never improve lives because the very people responsible for improvement them have checked out--that’s someone else’s (the racists) job.

As a white man, maybe it’s naive for me to think that all we need is genuine empathy and deep mutual respect. Empathy means recognizing and acting upon the fact that there is deep unfairness in life and there is an uneven playing field. Respect means that immutable characteristics have no inherent bearing on an individual’s capacity to successfully compete and succeed.

It’s the latter especially that's missing from much of the progressive mindset. It just makes me cringe.

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