[Discussion] Privilege and Racism

A place to discuss issues surrounding racism, classism and privilege.

That whole story is so weird. Seems more like he's using the time honored 'fear of the Blacks' excuse for murdering his wife.

Luke Cage crashes Netflix. But movies need Boring White Male Protagonists to bring audiences in.

Also, because of course, White people complaining about the lack of diversity in Luke Cage.

Starting this tonight and I'm so thrilled. I love media that isn't aimed at me. I am a Vanilla White Dude, I completely fail to understand why "my people" want to see so many other Vanilla White Dudes.

And yet suburban White teens are the largest consumers of rap music... So I've heard. Selective blindness, I guess.

I remember thinking that it was a little weird to see ONLY black people (or almost only, there's a few bit parts that aren't black) in the show, but it's set in freaking Harlem.

And it's not like their actors are bad. They're superb.

edit: another weird bit from the other direction is that nearly all the black people in the show are using 'white English' most of the time, even among themselves. That part is wildly unrealistic, but I'm glad they did it, because I'd have a hard time following it otherwise.

Malor wrote:

I remember thinking that it was a little weird to see ONLY black people (or almost only, there's a few bit parts that aren't black) in the show, but it's set in freaking Harlem.

And it's not like their actors are bad. They're superb.

edit: another weird bit from the other direction is that nearly all the black people in the show are using 'white English' most of the time, even among themselves. That part is wildly unrealistic, but I'm glad they did it, because I'd have a hard time following it otherwise.

Yeah, you know what's weirder? Girls having only white people, when it's set in New York F*cking City.

So there's that.

I remember a similar thing happened when Jessica Jones came out, with lots of guys grumbling that all the male characters were a bit underwritten. At least some of them realized what they were saying and took it as a learning experience.

sometimesdee wrote:

Yeah, you know what's weirder? Girls having only white people, when it's set in New York F*cking City.

So there's that.

I've never seen that show, dunno nothin' about it. I can only notice the ones I see.

Malor wrote:
sometimesdee wrote:

Yeah, you know what's weirder? Girls having only white people, when it's set in New York F*cking City.

So there's that.

I've never seen that show, dunno nothin' about it. I can only notice the ones I see.

Neither have I, because I'd seen that criticism. However, it seems that Dunham tried to from the experience, but still doesn't quite get it.

Not to continue the derail, but Neener and I paused Luke Cage after episode 6 to binge Jessica Jones. The ...
What in the actual f*ck, Google?!
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Seems like the most appropriate thread, though there are a couple it could fit in

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Malor wrote:

I remember thinking that it was a little weird to see ONLY black people (or almost only, there's a few bit parts that aren't black) in the show, but it's set in freaking Harlem.

The thing is, even with a majority black cast there are quite a few non-black characters that are fairly important to the story:

Spoiler:

Claire Temple
Shades
Connie & her husband
Scarfe
Rackham
Dr. Noah Burstein
Domingo and his gang

I mean compared to your average piece of all-white media with maybe one or two token minorities, Luke Cage is still pretty diverse. The majority of the people on my list are either hispanic or asian though, so probably when the average Angry Internet Man complains about a lack of diversity in Luke Cage, they're actually complaining about a lack of white people. After all, you can't have true diversity without a lot of white people /s

But there's only *THREE* white people-

Oh, you already covered that.

(Yes, that's what they're complaining about.)

Unless it's 95% white it's just not enough.

5% whole wheat in your white bread is enough to make it healthy, right?

Robear wrote:
RnRClown wrote:

People are not born racist.

Yes, we are all born with the innate tendency to favor their own in-group over out-group members. Skin color not only changes our perception of others, but even different *clothing* colors can bring out the bias in small children. What's worse, this bias extends to learning, so it is applied even as the child becomes more sophisticated about the world, because it selectively affects the lessons they take from learning experiences.

In other words, it's worse than you thought.

Time wrote:

The latest evidence for that decidedly unlovely trait comes from research out of the University of Washington that actually sought to explore one of babies’ more admirable characteristics: their basic sense of fairness. In the study, 15-month-old toddlers watched an experimenter with a collection of four small toys share them either evenly or unevenly with two other adult volunteers. When allowed to choose which experimenters the babies wanted to play with later, 70% of them preferred the ones who had divided the toys evenly.
Nice, but there was an exception: when the two adults who were receiving the evenly or unevenly divided toys were of different races and the race of the one who got more toys matched the babies’ own, the 70% preference for the fair distributor dropped and the share of babies wanting to play with the unfair one rose. The implication: unfairness is bad, unless someone from your clan is getting the extra goodies.

“If all babies care about is fairness, they would always pick the fair distributor,” said University of Washington associate professor psychology of Jessica Somerville, in a statement that accompanied the study. “But we’re also seeing that they’re interested in consequences for their own group members.”
...
A study by psychologist Yarrow Dunham, now at Yale University, showed that color is an especially salient feature for very young people to overlook. Children in a classroom experiment who were divided into two groups and given two different color t-shirts to wear were, later on, much likelier to remember good things about all of the children who wore their color shirt and bad things about the ones who wore the other. “Kids will begin to show these preferences right away, in the lab, on the spot,” Dunham told me. “It’s not just a preference, it’s also a learning bias—the children actually learn differentially about the in-group and the out-group.”

We not only need to prevent people from acting on their racist impulses, we essentially have to *retrain* them to actually think differently about race in the process.

This is learned behaviour. 15 month olds will have formed traits based on the race of their parents and others they interact with frequently.

I am talking about being born with an innate (natural) preference for one race with an equally opposing disdain for another. Something independent of upbringing and learning. I don't think this experiment proves that. It proves that young children form a bias towards those most like them, and those they trust. It's a safety mechanism. It really didn't need testing. It proves that we're what we are exposed to in our youth, until education and a broader interaction takes place.

A more interesting study would be seeing how babies from mixed race families react. How did predominantly white family babies respond? How did predominantly black family babies respond? How did predominantly asian family babies respond? How did mixed race family babies respond? Was there still a bias against a race the mixed family babies had not encountered? The results would likely be as expected.

My Primary School had cross community events to bridge the divide between Protestants and Catholics. My Secondary School dedicated parts of history class and religious education class to destroying myths about different races and different countries. This corrected any wayward learned behaviour. I remember thinking Catholics were incapable of honesty. Germans were all violent. Pakistanis were poor and unhygienic. This is of course all nonsense. I picked it up from media and other children. My mother almost made my backside permanently red. Teachers would calmly educate us on how this was incorrect and then show a human nature to those we looked upon as different beings, almost as objects.

I'm not sure how this coming story pertains, but it feels like it fits here.

I was friends with a boy called Joseph growing up, for a brief period. We were young. We got on great. We were inseparable one summer. One day we were made aware of the fact that we were from different communities. I was Protestant. He was Catholic. We never knew. It never came up. Did it matter? Other kids gathered around us and started to say this and that, I'm assuming lying about what each of us had supposedly been saying about the other. I got angry. We got in a fight until a youth club supervisor saw what was happening and separated us. I was confused. I didn't know how to move on from it. We were both uneasy afterwards. Avoiding each other. We had another disagreement a day or two later. We were separated once more. I remember being upset by it. I wanted it to be like before.

This kid (not Joseph) whom I didn't get along with started being nice to me after these incidents. He got involved when Joseph had a few others with him whilst I was alone. I was glad, but I was confused. Why did this kid all of a sudden consider me his friend when we would clash prior to knowing we were from the same side. Why did Joseph and I fall out when it became apparent we were from opposing sides. As two kids without any of that baggage we were like brothers. Afterwards it was over. It made us uneasy. Onlookers would stoke the flames and take their respective sides. Joseph stopped attending the youth club. He stopped coming around my way. I never saw him again. Mum had it so I only mixed with our own community after that. She was afraid.

I remember when a Korean boy moved to our Primary School. He was greeted like a hero by our class. Everyone wanted to know him. We all wanted to hear about his interests and where he had gotten such cool toys and unique clothing. His family decided to move back to Korea eventually. He got every kid in the class a gift when he was leaving. Well, I assume he bugged his parents to. I got a spinning pen with a black cat on top. I still have it somewhere. The class waved him off when he was picked up for the final time.

No one had any misconceptions about a Korean family. Yet a lot of us had reservations about Catholics and Pakistanis. What we were exposed to shaped that.

If media representation improves. If more diverse communities arrise. If education addresses the need for knowledge to replace misconception. Children should never again grow up with false views.

Is it too late for those who make it to adulthood without this? I'd like to think that if shown how they got to where they are, why it is wrong, and how they could remedy it, that they'd be all for being that better human being.

Or maybe I'm just a naive fool?

Apologies for rambling on. It sort of got away from me there.

Six-month old children notice racial differences (as well as we can tell, through dishabituated gaze lingering times); they are speculated to compare them to the faces of their caretakers. I'd argue that if children have developed their racist tendencies on top of infants remarkable pattern-sensing abilities, by the age of 15 months, simply through comparison to the faces they see every day in their family, that is as close to innate as doesn't matter. Unless we rebuild the structure of *families*, this will have to be undone in ways similar to the ones you described, in school.

Privilege is visiting another country, then walking into a house of worship to unplug their loudspeaker because their sermon is interrupting your sleep. I'm not a fan of special treatment for state religions, but come ON, it takes a sh*tload of privilege to think that's okay.

sometimesdee wrote:
Malor wrote:
sometimesdee wrote:

Yeah, you know what's weirder? Girls having only white people, when it's set in New York F*cking City.

So there's that.

I've never seen that show, dunno nothin' about it. I can only notice the ones I see.

Neither have I, because I'd seen that criticism. However, it seems that Dunham tried to from the experience, but still doesn't quite get it.

I stumbled onto the YouTube channel of Dylan Marrow (aka the voice of Carlos from Welcome to Nightvale). He posts videos of TV shows and movies where all the dialog from white actors have been edited out.

Robear wrote:

Six-month old children notice racial differences (as well as we can tell, through dishabituated gaze lingering times); they are speculated to compare them to the faces of their caretakers. I'd argue that if children have developed their racist tendencies on top of infants remarkable pattern-sensing abilities, by the age of 15 months, simply through comparison to the faces they see every day in their family, that is as close to innate as doesn't matter. Unless we rebuild the structure of *families*, this will have to be undone in ways similar to the ones you described, in school.

Prior to that 6-month mark, starting around the 3-month mark, kids will react to faces in general. Human faces, other mammal faces, cartoon faces. But they rapidly start forming categories and comparisons in their head. By 6 months, they don't react as strongly to faces that don't look much like they faces they see regularly.

Yeah, that means something if the kids mostly stay inside with their parents. On the other hand, it was a compelling reason for us to make sure our kid got out and saw and continues to see more kinds of faces as often as possible. I guess we're lucky that we live in an incredibly diverse neighborhood (well, lucky and we chose it in part because of that).

Maybe rather than restructuring families, we could just look into restructuring the geographic and cultural isolation of so many white households.

Changing that cultural isolation is exactly what I meant by "restructuring families", because it means that there is more to the world than "Father Knows Best". I do suspect that it's true for more than just Whites, however. "It takes a village" is maybe more appropriate.

If you think about it, school is the first chance to go outside the family to break that isolation. If it's not done in the family, it will need to be done in school.

Ah, I thought you were more pointing to something like breaking up the notion of the nuclear family, via institutional newborn creches or something. That's a far cry from fairly recent historical cultural dynamics, like the "takes a village" idea.

Twitchcon panel on diversity and racism is deluged by racists

http://www.polygon.com/2016/10/6/131...

It's absolutely depressing how many young people online are horrible human beings.

Those of you who have Netflix need to go watch 13th (metacritic). It's an excellent deconstruction of the "War on Drugs", "Law and Order", the for-profit prison system and the integration of corporations using prison labor.

Plus you get to hear Newt Gingrich say the words "The objective reality is that virtually no-one who is white understands the challenge of being black in America."

*mind blown*

Edit: it pulls no punches on either party politically... Didn't want that quote to falsely represent the bipartisan presentation of the piece. That being said, it represents the race issues in the presidential campaign accurately.

Edit: made sure I got the Gingrich quite right, added direct and metacritic links. Amended for the final section's political messaging regarding Trumps xenophobia.

And how does the right wing media respond? The parsing of words and the continued white-washing of of radical nonviolence: 13th is an insult to MLK, by Ny Post's Kyle Smith.

Wordsmythe wrote:

Ah, I thought you were more pointing to something like breaking up the notion of the nuclear family, via institutional newborn creches or something. That's a far cry from fairly recent historical cultural dynamics, like the "takes a village" idea.

Good grief, no. A guiding principle for me is "Do the least necessary to achieve the result, when tinkering with complicated systems". If it can be done by re-educating families (in the media, say, or in churches) that's cool. If not, do it in the schooling process.

That latter idea is the one that's usually put in place, and it's primarily what has prompted social conservatives to start their own schools and oppose public (secular) schooling entirely. Opposition to changing fearful, hateful and biased thinking is already entrenched in the system, thanks to religious beliefs we'd quickly label extremist if they weren't held by American Christians in massive numbers.

Or you can do what I did, and start a multi-racial family.

That works, definitely.

wordsmythe wrote:
Robear wrote:

Six-month old children notice racial differences (as well as we can tell, through dishabituated gaze lingering times); they are speculated to compare them to the faces of their caretakers. I'd argue that if children have developed their racist tendencies on top of infants remarkable pattern-sensing abilities, by the age of 15 months, simply through comparison to the faces they see every day in their family, that is as close to innate as doesn't matter. Unless we rebuild the structure of *families*, this will have to be undone in ways similar to the ones you described, in school.

Prior to that 6-month mark, starting around the 3-month mark, kids will react to faces in general. Human faces, other mammal faces, cartoon faces. But they rapidly start forming categories and comparisons in their head. By 6 months, they don't react as strongly to faces that don't look much like they faces they see regularly.

Yeah, that means something if the kids mostly stay inside with their parents. On the other hand, it was a compelling reason for us to make sure our kid got out and saw and continues to see more kinds of faces as often as possible. I guess we're lucky that we live in an incredibly diverse neighborhood (well, lucky and we chose it in part because of that).

Maybe rather than restructuring families, we could just look into restructuring the geographic and cultural isolation of so many white households.

I'd argue that decoupling property taxes from school funding would be a great way to start this, but good f*cking luck getting white folks to agree to that.

Currently in the process of closing on a condo, it's been really...troubling to me at certain points in the whole deal. Primarily the whole "are the schools good" and "the property values will (or will not) go up" sentiments.

Maybe if Trump crashes the economy, we'll all get to live together in the ruins...

Robear wrote:

Maybe if Trump crashes the economy, we'll all get to live together in the ruins...

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