Simon,
If you don't like the terms the define the concept because of other meanings the words have, we can call it "people viewed as normal happerdasch" or whatever word you want to call it, as long as we can get beyond the semantic argument.
Was justice served fairly in the Micheal Brown tragedy, whats your opinion ?
by Finkelstein 164 Replies latest social current
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Pacopoolio
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Simon
That is just one factor, among others like starting points and initial viewpoints and opportunities, etc.
Exactly. There are a myriad factors. Blaming everything on white people seems like a cop-out. Looking for individual outcomes at the population percentage level is silly. People should not be focusing on this but should be looking at what *they* can do for themselves.
If we had to generalise I would say that asians are very hard working and put a high value on education and their attitude serves them well. If only they could drive a little faster :)
Why do some groups more than others want the demographics to define and limit them?
The factor missing in all those stats is that they are meaningless except for large numbers. For any group there is a wide range of incomes and inequality. You simply cannot say "he is asian, therefore he must be doing better than that hispanic guy". It's about individuals and what they make of things.
To imagine your life trajectory is determined by your skin color is a very negative viewpoint.
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Simon
If you don't like the terms the define the concept because of other meanings the words have, we can call it "people viewed as normal happerdasch" or whatever word you want to call it, as long as we can get beyond the semantic argument.
That was the point I was trying to make. The terms and the negative weight they carry don't help people to have a constructive discussion.
They are thrown around without care and obviously don't help to improve anything so it's better simply not to use them.
Until people learn how to communicate without angering the other side there will never be any progress.
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Simon
To coincide to what I said, here is the income of the aboriginal peoples in the United States, which you didn't include ...
Yes, the figures for a small population can either be dreadfull (native american for historic reasons) or wildly different (trying to think of another very small group - maybe jewish? could be a steryotype and I don't know what the stats are)
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Pacopoolio
Simon,
- The discussion of privilege, sorry, happerdasch, didn't start around "blaming white people"; that is what several people who didn't know what happerdasch meant popped in and started railing against. It is a (probably unintentional) strawman started by those that didn't know what the concept was.
- You keep mentioning what "the black community" wants, and what "some groups" think - what is your source to show what the majority or even large percentages of those loosely grouped into a race want in these aspects? You said that you aren't in a community with many people of certain ethnicites elsewhere, so where are you getting the large sample sizes that you're basing these things on?- You're wondering why the two minorities that are composed mostly of decendents of people's that were enslaved and brought over to the country, or those that were conquered and forced to live in pretty messed up conditions are doing worse than the people that are descendants of people that took a lot of effort to cross entire oceans to get to this country to make a better life for themselves? That's a big mystery?
- With individuals, you look at individual circumstances, if possible (which sometimes include large range sociological issues!), with groups, you look broader. -
Simon
It's not that people don't know what the term meant, I think many don't agree with it fully or accept what it implies. You have proven a completely different point (there being advantage to being in a larger group) but then take the "advantage" and try and turn it into "privilege". This is what people object to.
People can have an advantage when applying for a job for various reasons but don't have any privilege that gives things to them. It does exist - rich kids get jobs for no other reason than who their family is. I don't buy that white people get given jobs for being white.
I go off what people want based on what the prevailing opinions voiced by them and their leaders say. I can't ask them all individually.
Actually, I think they do a piss poor job saying what they want in concrete and achievable terms and this is one of the problems they have which I blame their poor leadership for.
Far too much emotive rhetoric and not enough strategy and planning.
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Pacopoolio
To imagine your life trajectory is determined by your skin color is a very negative viewpoint.
"Your life trajectory is determined" is more specific than the concept describes.
A better analogy is that you have groups of people labeled A-F, all forced to play blackjack against each other, but are all given different personal decks with more or less face cards in them to use to play. It doesn't mean a person in group F will automatically lose to a person in Group A, especially since how someone plays the cards they have matters, but it does mean that a higher percentage of people in Group A will win more over time.
The issue then becomes, "how do we even out those decks?" that is, if you want that to happen, not pointing at singular people who busted out for not playing their hands as well as you (not Simon) did when dealt a blackjack. -
Simon
That is a better analogy and fits better with advantage vs privilege.
To explain better why I object to the term which may be a differnce in usage between the US and UK. In the UK privilege is very related to class. Little Lord Fontleroy would become chairman of the bank even though he's a clueless hooray henry, simply because of who his daddy is. You lose evry time to privilege - nothing can change the outcome.
Advantage is different. You can influence things. If you go to university and get a degree then you have more of an advantage than you did before. You can work to better your advantage in a way that you never can against privilege.
One encourages people to throw up their hands and say "what's the point? I can never win whatever I do" but the other one can be overcome even if you start with a disadvantage.
I think the key is to make it easier to 'level up' people's advantage points but it has to be real. If people are given credits then the system will adapt to take those into account. It's about removing obstacles to opportunity that others may not face. So maybe assistance with education costs (a whole other 'unfair') or some special programmes to develop skills in certain groups.
What I don't think works as well is trying to jump to the end result. i.e. setting quotas for jobs etc... as it creates resentment and possibly people who can't or don't want to do the job well. It needs to be a system that produces the correct results and is self sustaining and the results of which are respected.
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Pacopoolio
People can have an advantage when applying for a job for various reasons but don't have any privilege that gives things to them. It does exist - rich kids get jobs for no other reason than who their family is. I don't buy that white people get given jobs for being white.
I'll type this out as quickly as possible, and probably won't cover every base, but perhaps this gives you a better idea of the issue with "happerdasch." At this point in time, the "because they were a race" exists, but it's rare. Lots of the issues have to do with long term conditioning on BOTH sides, etc. here's a very quick case study about a guy named John Doe. Please accept the case study as-is without trying to change every aspect of the story, as it's just showing a perspective that many people don't imagine.
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- John is born black to black parents in the inner city. His grandfather was the child of sharecroppers (who were children of slaves), with no education, who had multiple kids, and died early (this happened a LOT ~3 generations ago).
- John's father got a second rate education in a "black" school. Because segregation was in play, his father's hopes throughout school, pretty much bottomed out at "factory worker," since that's the best that anyone around him achieved. Even when he looked at films and television, he only saw people of his race represented in menial labor, which curbed the expectations he had for himself and his children.
- He managed to eke out a lower class life and had kids of his own.
- John is born, and segregation is over now, but black people still aren't represented widely in media as successful (this basically started in wide range in the mid-80s), and due to so many other people coming from similar circumstances, people don't acheieve much.
- He sees himself as a person, and sees white people as people too at a very young age because they're represented more than anyone in all media (television, etc.). However, when he branches out to other people of different races on rare occeasions, perhaps he's fortunate enough to go to a charter school or something, many acknowledge his race in itself, giving him a default relation with his race.
- Because most people around him have similar experiences, they equate themselves with their race as well. When that's the first thing about you that everyone else recognizes, at a young age, especially, it's REALLY hard to remove it from your self "identity."
- He sees some people that share the color of the people he's seen in positions of power - CEOs, Presidents, Senators, etc. also deginerate his race from time to time through life, sometimes on a personal level. In the future, that raises a question of possibility or fear in his mind, when those people have power over him (a boss, teacher, etc.), whether they share similar views and just aren't vocalizing them.
- He sees in media that only his own race is attracted to his color (not many interracial relationships shown in media until the 2000s) except in the most rare occasions, which is also backed up by what he sees and hears in reality. Unless he lives in a black majority area, he always worries whether people aren't attracted to him because of his race or other reasons, as there's no real way to know the difference.
- In the inner city, due to varying starting conditions and the relation with income/education/family conditions, many peers and people around him turn to crime out of desperation. He sees that those people are able to obtain the luxuries that his parents can never acheieve or give them with their jobs. Media rarely shows successful people of his own race that aren't sports players or stars.
- Etc. etc. etc. I don't have time to write any more at the moment.
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That's a basic midpoint of the experience of a high, perhaps the highest percentage of 35-45 year old black people right now. "Race" comes into play in ridiculous amounts of aspects of their lives, and their self identity is framed through their race, because that was hoisted onto them by outside circumstances.
People often don't consider things like how media influence affects self-representation, etc. (if everything around you is not showing you that you can succeed, it's harder to find a drive to succeed), and you minimized the effect of outward racism on current condition (look in that case study, how closely removed adults are now, from parents who weren't allowed to be anything more than lower middle class, just by the law.
So, when John grows up to be an adult, maybe he got lucky and happened to a) find good influences, and b) found them at the right time and place to take advantage of them enough to get a "normal" level education in the end. He still has a bunch of baggage from his history and things going against him in his past that may put him behind his peers, and doubts and things that come from his racial self identity which are not his fault at all, but were bred into him at a suceptible age, etc. And he doesn't have a familial or community network that he can fall back on to give him the contacts to give him a job, nor does he have family/community peers that can really teach/tell him the tricks of the trade to maintain and excel at many jobs, because they did not experience that themselves.
As stated above, it's not about a 100% success/fail ratio; it's about a) recognizing that due to different starting conditions, different people deal with many things that work against them, that the average person does not even consider, and b) trying to make it so that as many people as possible have better starting positions, to minimize the failure rate of those in demographic groups in the end.
When people say things like "it's the 2000s, black president!" they're ignoring that children of the 70s and 80s didn't have the hopes to become president, or even professionals, and were just trying to survive, and those are the adults now. People act like just because those hopes exist to black kids now, it should retroactively affect people that have already lived most of their lives by default, and ignore what a lack of hope can do to people as a whole. Poor white people in bad areas still had images being fed to them of successful white people constantly, and had an identity that was not centered around race, unless they happened to be in areas where THEY were the minorities. -
Pacopoolio
Also, Simon, I'm glad that we're beyond semantics and are having an actual discussion now. Feels a lot more interesting.