Quote:
Originally Posted by troutman
The New York Times wrote that his direct confrontation on a social taboo is admirable regardless of whether the reader agrees with his conclusions. The newspaper writes that Vance's subject is despair and his argument is more generous in that it blames fatalism and learned helplessness rather than indolence. |
It's definitely worth a read, and I think the NYT hits the nail on the head with this assessment.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Matata
So no one feels it's touch ironic that people who tip toe around the failings of other racial groups find it perfectly acceptable to #### on white people at every opportunity? And that maybe, just maybe, behaving in such a way is step backwards from the racial equality they yearn for?
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No, because that's not the mode of thought that exists. It's not really about prejudice based on skin colour at base. It's only about that as an incidence of oppression as a group, and even that isn't based on real factors but on ingroup membership and loyalty demonstrations and other tribal motives. I haven't posted a super long two hour youtube video that maybe two people will probably pay attention to in some time, so here: this is an incredible listen on why we do things as opposed to what our alleged motives are (it's actually more like an hour once you skip the intro and ignore the audience questions if that helps).
Anyway in this context it's a fairly inexpensive tactic to simply ignore Cliff's point and say "no, we're just talking about Nazis, not any other white people", as if those same people crapping on him don't treat "uneducated white people from the south" with utter contempt as a class. If there were a thread about Isis and someone came in and made a joke denigrating Arabs, I suspect the people scoffing at this would have a different reaction.
And frankly, there are some broad brushes you can paint with there to justify contempt. As a group, poor white people from the south are more likely on average to hold some pretty terrible views, including racism, science denialism, a fetish for guns, and so forth. But Cliff's point, I think, is more that there's a double-standard, because many similar such things are also true of poor blacks from the south, and it's casually acceptable to only use one of those two as a punchline.