So, I'm going to answer this in reverse, but before I do:Originally Posted by sugilite
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year - I'm sure 2022 will bring lots of insanity (especially from Brandon...) for us to argue overand as you can guess from my silence on here - I had a lovely Christmas break.
'Don't let the Marxist boogie man get you':
I'm fairly certain that it was you that first raised the issue of Systemic Racism and White Privilege.
Both of these are concepts that have a direct ideological lineage to Marxism. I've even cited the original works, given you direct quotes, referred you to the philosophers whose works is primarily responsible, linked University course descriptions that outright state the links - and yet you still think it's some form of conspiracy on my part.
At what point is the evidence sufficient for you to accept that these concepts and words that you use are merely tools designed to undermine society, so that it collapses and the glorious communist revolution can occur.
I keep calling out the Marxism, because you keep unknowingly make Marxist arguments - these concepts have no hard statistical evidence nor were they derived from experimental data. Take White Privilege for example, I listed some of the absurd things that Peggy McIntosh claims as white privilege - what you probably didn't know is that she literally just made it up. She didn't do any form of analysis, experiment, statistical investigation - no, she just said 'these are things I think I can do, therefore they are white privilege'. Most of them could be better conceptualized as 'Majority privilege' and 'Economic Privilege' - an argument that I would still dispute but would at least have a little more basis in reality.
So in short - each time you raise an idea that I know to be rooted in various Marxist academic fields, I'm going to bring it up - maybe one day you'll see just how far and how invasive the rot has spread, maybe not.
Have I though?
See, I can agree that at periods in history - the US was systemically racist.
I can agree that even today there are probably racists in positions of Power and Authority.
There are probably even small areas where there is what you would call 'Systemic Racism'.
But the claim the US as a whole, today, is Systemically Racist - should be rejected as laughable on it's face value. I mean just one single datapoint: President Obama - in any other systemically racist system - Did a Jew rise to become the leader of the Nazi party? Did a Black man rise to lead South Africa under Apartheid?
A Structure that was systemic wouldn't allow this.
Further to that, if we look at the 2 highest performing groups - Asians and Indians - and wouldn't you know it:
Even back in 1998, some people realised where this racial bigotry was headed...
One might call the claim in 1998 prophetic...
When I provided those image links to what the Marxists considered to by aspects of 'Whiteness': Hard work, self reliance, punctuality, family etc. It should become clear that this is not a skin colour issue, but a social group issue - if you adopt the 'Aspects of Whiteness', you'll succeed. If you take the word Whiteness out of it - I'm guessing your Dad (like mine) would have told you something similar:
'Son, if you work hard and do your best, you'll do well in life' - And I'm not sure if you went to school with Asian students, I certainly did - I can personally attest to their hard working nature, there's even a Meme of Asian Parents/parenting styles - and guess who propagates it the most?
Asians.
And I should be clear, this isn't even a gripe against them - they work hard, they reap the benefits and society reaps the benefits. Long may they continue to succeed and exceed.
Getting back to the Systemic issue - I can explain without racism why there's a disparity between Black and White people in Drug offending:
- Longer drug use over the course of a lifetime.
- Proximity to visible crime.
If you add in the Fatherlessness in Black Communities and all the associated issues that causes - that will account for almost all of your disparity.
This is just like the old Feminist Wage Gap argument - where you aggregate all the wages between Men and women and find that women earn '77c to the dollar', but when you actually account for all the factors that might affect pay: Education, Experience, Position, time in continuous employment etc. That gap shrinks to something like '97c to the dollar', so that must be where the Sexism is, right? But if you look at industries where Pay negotiation is more common, you see the gap expands whereas industries where pay negotiation isn't common - it disappears.
The point is: The issue raised is a complex problem, it's absolute insanity to assert that such a complex problem could have a single cause an a single solution. Is Racism a component? Possibly - but there are other factors that have a far greater effect than just Race. Just like the Wage gap argument, there are other factors that have a far greater effect than just Sex.
Both of these theories are drawn from the same ideological presuppositions (Marxist) and which is why they take the same form and it's also why they both have the same inherent flaws in their argumentation.
I'll end with this: If you can show definitively a situation where Racism was the sole or at least, the most significant factor in an issue - I'm happy to champion it. I happen to be quite opposed to any form of discrimination (see my stance on Vaccine passports and my long history on this forum of speaking up for people I either have disagreed with or am currently disagreeing with on a topic) - The issue is that most of the claims of racism, when investigated a little bit further have either nothing to do with Race or the implied Racism only exists in an ideological framing that I reject.
Just look at the left-wing media Coverage of the Kyle Rittenhouse case, regardless of what you personally think of him - the objective facts of the case show that there was no racial component, but prominent Media outlets were more than happy to first circulate the story of 'White Racist shoots black people'...
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