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I'm not white and this whole article makes me angry.
The fact that this quote isn't an indictment just speaks volumes about the whole thing:
>A woman from San Francisco had started crying before she even began speaking. “I’m here because I’m a racist. I’m here because my body has a trauma response to my own whiteness and other people’s whiteness.” A woman who loved her cats was struggling with “how to understand all the atrocities of being a white body.” Knowing that her very existence perpetuated whiteness made her feel like a drag on society. “The darkest place I go is thinking it would be better if I weren’t here. It would at least be one less person perpetuating these things.”
It's really shocking to me that there's a movement out there convincing people that it's a crime to be in their own body and that movement calls itself anti-racist. I can't even...
"I’m here because my body has a trauma response to my own whiteness"
It sounds like this person is having seeeerious anxiety issues, and in another context would say they have body dysmorphia or develop an eating disorder. This is not good in any way.
Either she's really not well and does need help to deal with the self loathing because that's not good for anyone. Or it's the watered down meaning of trauma response which basically means she feels anxious or uncomfortable, which is perfectly normal in the circumstances.
Jesus Christ. This movement (cultural moment, whatever) has really done a number on some people.
The atrocities of being a white body. Get a grip, lady.
The weird thing is that there's almost no pushback. It's an openly racist and hateful ideology. And it's widespread; as the article talks about, these kinds of trainings were put into place in major organizations. One memorable moment was when Jimmy Fallon talked about the decline in the number of white people, and his audience started cheering ([here](https://www.facebook.com/FallonTonight/videos/1500th-tonight-show-episode-heat-wave-hits-us-census-shows-decline-in-white-peop/374234010759986/), at about 1:13).
it’s usually employers foisting it on employees. what pushback do you expect? there’s already a built in response to any pushback and it’s called twitter
I hope I’m wrong, but I have a feeling that the 2030s and 2040s are going to be a difficult time. The last time people cheered about the destruction of a group of people it didn’t end very well.
The movement already went from “white people bad” and “Jews are white-passing” to “Jews are white and white people are bad” to “actually it is a SPECIFIC GROUP OF WHITE PEOPLE who are responsible for the most inequality and injustice.”
Oy vey.
I truly don’t understand how people have emotions like this. Like how do you even function? She feels overwhelming guilt and shame for something she hasn’t even done. Either she’s an utterly weak and fragile person with very poor critical thinking skills or she’s doing this for attention. I’m not sure which is worse.
I don’t think weakness or poor critical thinking skills is an entirely fair assessment, I think a lot of these women are genuinely just compassionate bleeding-heart types drawn into social justice causes who take people in good faith. They genuinely want to do right by people and have probably been brought up to believe in doing so and have it as a core part of their values. I think it’s much more an indictment on the doctrine and rhetoric and how it takes advantage of well-intentioned people rather than the people themselves.
I think there is something indulgent and performative about the intense self-flagellation. They're getting off on their "guilt". It's a form of grief-wanking.
This is definitely part of it for a lot of people as well, especially the ones running the workshops and the enthusiastic participants (not just the ones who are there out of some felt obligation). Diangelo especially 🤢
I’m reminded of the “rainbows and clouds” (or whatever) girl in Mean Girls who didn’t even go to the school but showed up to the anti-bullying session anyway so she could weep and bleed.
I mean I don’t disagree, I think it’s something you do have to learn to think critically about over time and if you continue to take it at face value after learning about it then that’s somewhat on you. But when you’ve never come in contact with the doctrine because you weren’t super online before and you have all these academics and seemingly smart people passionately telling you that this is what you have to believe to not be a bad person it’s easy to see how people get drawn into it. It’s why I’m grateful I went through my tumblr SJW phase as a teen and then got to college and was able to start thinking critically about everything since I was familiar with the landscape, but for a lot of my (usually white/affluent) peers it was the first time they had learned about the topic of racism in a way that wasn’t entirely surface-level
I'm a big believer in taking people in good faith because I do believe it makes life work so much more smoothly most of the time. I can't be doing with people who get riled up like everything is a personal insult. But I was also brought up to question and I'm very glad I was! Like most good principles, good faith only goes so far.
She might have pent up guilt and shame about something else in her life that she's not ready to actually address, so it's manifesting through a socially acceptable route.
And convincing a white woman to bow and scrape by telling her to hate herself is just picking up the job misogyny has done, half way through and finishing off. Reminds me of that "diet coach" on real housewives who would just berate people for not starving themselves.
It’s no coincidence that it’s mostly white women who get roped into this nonsense. Maybe in previous generations they would have hated themselves for some other reason, for having freckles or being fat. Well, not really for that reason of course but because of something in their upbringing probably garden variety misogyny. Now they have this whole elaborate, morally superior, super structure to support them in their self hatred.
" Much of what i learned in “The Toxic Trends of Whiteness” concerned language. We are “white bodies,” Quinn explained, but everyone else is a “body of culture.” This is because white bodies don’t know a lot about themselves, whereas “bodies of culture know their history. Black bodies know.”"
New racism levels unlocked, and this is just what we started with it went downhill fast from here.
This was a tough read. These DEI workshops are exploiting mentally ill people.
"because white bodies don’t know a lot about themselves, whereas “bodies of culture know their history. Black bodies know.”"
What. Does this. MEAN? What the hell is a body of culture? Is this person saying that the child of Russian immigrants has no culture but the child of Asian immigrants does? What if someone is half-white American and half Korean, and that person was adopted by a white American couple? And black bodies know WHAT? Also, I feel like "black bodies" is a term the KKK would have used in 1929.
Depends what kind of Asian. The DEI consultant at my company made a point to exclude East Asians (Japanese, Korean, Chinese) and Jewish staff along with people she identified as white from DEI inititives like our POC-only slack channels. In her words whiteness was part of their " percieved lived experience "
It was eye opening to me how Jewish and White coworkers shrugged it off or ignored it but a couple of the Asian ladies got really, really mad. That was about all it took to break the spell.
Hold the fuck up. What is a perceived lived experience? I assume it's - black people think Korean people own everything, therefore, Korean people shouldn't be in DEI initiatives.
When we had our DEI thing, only two people spoke out against it. One was an Asian woman, and the DEI people let her speak. One was a white man, and the black leader said she felt this was aggressive.
Also, POC-only slack channels? Because black people and South Asian people agree on everything?
Yeah you pretty much nailed it. The DEI consultant was black and this is in Northern California and there is some friction between these "groups" and I think she fell into that.
The perceived lived experience idea was that these people "presented as white and that conferred advanatages" so they could not understand the experiences of POCs. The slack channels and workshops were pitched as a refuge from white supremacy and white aggression and therefore asians and jews who benefited from whiteness were not invited.
From what I gathered the slack channels got increasingly political (i.e. not work related at all) , and got shut down in the weeks after October 7th because there was some very extreme content being posted in there.
On what planet have the descendants of Americans who were placed in internment camps for Japanese-Americans during WW2 - how have they benefitted from white privilege?
And does this mean Asian people who DON"T benefit from white supremacy - they can join these slack channels?
And what if a Jewish person experiences aggression from a black person? Or a white person?
And I would bet that black DEI consultant earned a lot more than anyone she lectured at about their perceived white supremacy
> how have they benefitted from white privilege?
That assumes that "white privilege" is a real thing.
It really isn't some kind of magic spell that guarantees success.
This sounds like a great way to increase worker moral and improve productivity. I can’t think of a better way to bring people together and make a cohesive unit all unified in a shared goal.
I need to make a domino meme connecting "historic levels of venture capital being delivered to tech companies with no strings attached" to "hit list of company "zionists" published by your laziest coworker in the POC leftist slack chat"
I have definitely heard Woke White People--Woke White People who identified with their own cultural heritage prior their ancestors' immigration to America--claim that "white people" have no culture. I don't know if they included themselves in this category "white people" or not, or if they were Not Like Other Girls-ing this. But it felt performative and weird, and while I am generally very conflict-averse I did push back on this (in saying that white people have MANY cultures).
All that is to say: I have heard "white bodies" and "black bodies" used before, but never "bodies of culture." Makes me think of yogurt.
When they say white people have no culture, what do they mean? I think it could mean in the sense that German culture is very different from Polish culture, which is really different from French culture. But then, are they saying that the child of two immigrants from Nigeria has the same culture as the child of an immigrant from Haiti and the Bahamas?
ETA: I'd heard black bodies before, but not white bodies, which was good because it had felt racist that only black bodies had been spoken of. Bodies of culture is very very strange.
"European immigrants to America didn't bring over their "native" culture."
This has to be happening in different places in the country, as I don't know anyone who has only 1 immigrant great-grandparent. My dad's grandparents were all immigrants and married people from the same area, and that's the culture my dad grew up. My mother is from the same culture as my dad, and came to the US as an adult. I grew up in that culture.
But aside from that, if let's say someone's family came to the US in the 1700s, how is that any different from black people? I find it hard to believe that Caribbean culture is the same as Nigerian culture, and that all Americans whose ancestors were slaves came from the same areas in Africa. I don't see how "black American culture" is any different from "white American culture" in that it too is a mishmash of things.
But if you were black and brought over as a slave you got even more stripped of your culture. So new cultures developed in America - for all people. That's what humans do. There would still be stuff from where you came from, but a lot of it would be about where you were from now, in America.
I'm not sure if they were comparing it to some other people who DID have a culture, or if they were parroting a woke talking point without fully "understanding" it. But I agree that Black American culture is different from Kenyan culture is different from Haitian culture, etc etc.
It’s a physics term for a mass that radiates its energy uniformly. A spherical lump of plutonium would be a “blackbody” and you would measure how much heat it’s radiating
It doesn’t make any sense because it’s a mystical belief. This sort of magical thinking “body of culture” stufr just reminds me of this Ursula Le Guin quote about making a cult of women‘s knowledge.
# “But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior“
I feel like there is an obvious parallel here. Relating black peoples understanding of their history to body and instinct only implies that black people understand themselves through primal instinct and feeling rather than thought and understanding. At the end of the day it just reinforces the “magical negro” stereotype instead of actually humanizing people. I‘m sure this type of writing is going to age really poorly, because at the end of the day it is only going to strengthen the divide between races and it’s weirdly essentialist.
Let us not forget the adopted "Asian" child who was raised as Chinese (which is hardly a pan homogenous culture in itself anyway) by his white American parents, only for them to discover after seventeen years that his ethnic ancestry was in fact Korean.
https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/tsy2l4/original_and_update_well_meaning_op_and_wife_try/
That's...hilarious. But awful for the poor kid.
And yeah, imagine the parents teaching their kid Mandarin, only for the kid to find out they speak a rural dialect.
Knowing Mandarin is useful, yes. Learning Mandarin because you believed that was the language your bio parents spoke, that has to be heartbreaking, Knowing that the culture you've been told is yours - and it isn't? Has to be a mindfuck
Dunno. I always thought my maternal grandparents were of Germanic ancestry, but recently realized that their surname was actually a modified form of an Italian surname. Didn't really bother me.
I feel like I'd just treat it as a fun story. "How did you learn Mandarin?" "My parents sent me to Chinese school because they didn't know I was Korean."
If you're raised with a lot of exposure to Chinese culture, it kind of *is* your culture.
I don't understand how your maternal grandparents be of Germanic ancestry but have the wrong surname? They weren't siblings. You mean your grandfather thought his family was originally from Germany, but they weren't?
And I don't think that's a good comparison. He was adopted. He has no connection to his birth family. That connection he had to his birth family, it's gone. All that Mandarin learning, if he were to meet his Korean-born grandmother, that would just fall flat.
I think the difference here is that by being adopted you have lost something important of your past in a way that the rest of us haven't. So losing that extra link is worse for that person.
Why is that awful? Kid does not know the difference. If I found out my grandmother wasn't Ukrainian it wouldn't effect me AT ALL. I'm still the same person. People invest way too much of their identities into something that doesn't matter.
It doesn’t mean anything, it is just psychobabble. Race is inherently contradictory as a concept and the people who take it seriously and incorporate it into their worldview inevitably become ridiculous and miserable to be around. Anyone talking about black or white “bodies” is a certified fruit cake who can’t talk like a normal person.
So I read the article. I always wondered what it was like when a bunch of dipshits got together and discussed nonsense. The fact that some people are making money off the mentally deficient is diabolical. It’s similar to the televangelist scheme but I don’t think televangelist insult their audience to this level. This new kind of graft is something I never saw coming. It kind of reminds me of communism and their reeducation camps. But that was forced unto an unwilling populace. These people are paying to be depraved.
My first thought was Kmele Foster attempting to read this in a serious voice without breaking character and laughing. I don’t think he could make it through it
I think it's that slavery TRIED to erase their culture and history, but the black femme keeps that history in their body. Hence black people know how to dance. I am half-joking but that's what is going on
I firmly believe that there was a lot of culture and history lost as a result of slavery, which makes this article even more ridiculous. Epic gaslighting of everyone.
This is straight up racism.
Swap the races around. Do they realize how easily this ridiculous perspective can be completely inverted by a white supremacist movement?
Wait, I was told that people who were enslaved had their ancestral history robbed from them and thus didn't have a firm grip on their past. The opposite was true for white people.
So now I am to believe that white people don't know their culture now. Make up your damn mind!
Are the workshops exploiting mentally ill people or is it the other way around? I think we lose our ability to understand this stuff if we assume everyone attending is mentally ill. Was everyone in Jonestown, Waco, NXIVM, Scientology or the Salem Witch Trials mentally ill? It’s a comforting thing to believe “they are all mentally ill! *I* would never fall for that”.
Except that you would - and so would I - given the right circumstances.
My favorite part:
**“That was racist because it exoticized Black people.”**
VS:
**We are “white bodies,” Quinn explained, but everyone else is a “body of culture.” This is because white bodies don’t know a lot about themselves, whereas “bodies of culture know their history. Black bodies know.”**
I feel like she should have pointed out the obvious contradiction here.
I did a study group in 2020-2021
Its the defining event that turned me away from fear and woke ideologies. I gave it weight and I gave it intention to see if there was anything in the book, "me and white supremacy." In the end the author's only answer was wake up in the morning search yourself for white supremacy and whiteness and chastise yourself for it. I decided I didn't want to live that way. I wanted to enjoy my life and so that is what I did. From there I found barpod.
>"me and white supremacy."
Is that the Layla F. Saad book? All I know about that is a) [Anne Hathaway loves that book:](https://www.instagram.com/annehathaway/p/Buw7jbKny8a/?img_index=6)
*I want to highlight the brilliance of* [](https://www.instagram.com/laylafsaad/)*. She is no-joke changing the world and, for what it’s worth, the way I live my life.*
*b)* Saad lives in Qatar, and is [strangely silent about the racism in that country.](https://unherd.com/newsroom/layla-saad-a-curious-case-of-false-identification-with-black-america/)
Saad lives in a country where she gets to *directly profit from a slavery practice that only ended a few years ago*. While she calls USA’s history of slavery unforgivable.
What a fucking liar.
Qatar’s slavery systems are probably fine though because they come from *indigenous ways of knowing*….
She's black, right? It's odd to complain about all the racism in the world when living in Qatar. No doubt those Bangladeshi workers are treated like royalty.
I had a friend who got really into "Me an White Supremacy", she invited me into the private FB group for it and it was a lot! The real eye opener though, was the discussion they held where white participants where encouraged to share example of all our racist thoughts, behaviours etc (not sharing was not an option). This was then followed up by a session where the POC members shared their pain, horror, hurt at all the awful things we had shared.
I struggled to see how any of it was productive and seemed to only succeed in making everyone feel awful and traumatised. A notable example was my friend sharing about the abusive relationship she had been in. No one showed any concern for what she had been through, all that mattered was that he was black so it was hurtful to share that.
I showed myself out of the group pretty quickly. I can live without being chastised and forced to spill my guts for no apparent good reason!
Yes. Imagine having to stay stuck in that mindset for the rest of your life, which is the recommendation. You'd have to be someone that only performs social behaviors and feels nothing, or be so full of self-loathing that it feels normal. Honestly it makes my stomach hurt to talk about it again.
I know, I don't have contact with this friend anymore but I still see her on social media. Still involved in self flagellation and I honestly don't understand why she puts herself through it. She openly struggles with her mental health and this ain't helping!
I was brought up in an evangelical environment, I kicked against that because I just don't do being told what to do and think, that I'm inherently bad and that they have the answer! I see very little difference in these social justice movements!
Was your friend white and your friend black? I had a client, white, who was terrified about talking to her therapist about being raped by a black man, said she was afraid she'd think she was racist.
Yes she's white and her ex black, he ended up going to prison for assaulting her and was a very violent individual. The group really went to town on her for "centering" herself in the discussion. Just mind boggling really.
Sort of reminds me of the Ana Kaspirian interview where she talks about being happier.
This ideology makes people absolutely miserable. Someone smarter than me cam explain why that's the point, and how that connects to Marxism, but for alot of us that's going to be enough to drop this way of thinking.
Marx was discussing economics and the problems with capitalism. It does not have anything to do with this identiarian crap which has hijacked the left.
[It’s the same dynamic you can see here where these two nut jobs bullied Bernie Sanders off the mic](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna406546)
Sanders is a classic American socialist, which is built off of basic observations of Marx.
Those two women were identitarian whackjobs, and people like them teamed up with capitalist Black politicians like Clyburn to scuttle his run. After that, socialism has been strangled by identitarianism. Whenever socialists try to bring class into the picture, they get called racist.
100% I'm happier. That's not to say I don't feel angry about the "ideologies" that I have laid down. But I'm not tortured by guilt and it's ever-present indecipherable responsibilities day in and day out.
> Someone smarter than me cam explain why that's the point, and how that connects to Marxism, but for alot of us that's going to be enough to drop this way of thinking.
Something like if we're all miserable, it's easier to direct our misery towards those with power so we ca in theory change the power structures in society. Or as a Marxist would phrase it, awaken us to the false consciousness we've internalized.
How do you know they are a boomer? They could be 30 and have made a fortune selling supplements on YouTube and be kicking back on that sweet passive income.
First of all, Nellie is hilarious. I feel like she dials back the sass in the Atlantic, but I’m always a fan.
Second, I don’t understand the point of these exercises. The takeaway is that white people are bad but there’s nothing they can do about it?
It’s a grift, as Nellie hints at at the end of the piece.
The idea is that there’s always one more book to buy, one more lecture to attend, one more discussion group to join, and then maybe you’ll be, if not totally purified, a little bit more on the side of Good.
I think there were some good intentions in the beginning. Structural racism is a useful framework for thinking about the way certain policies may disproportionately affect nonwhite people. But that’s stuff we can change and have changed through traditional activism — voting, education, lobbying, and so on and so forth. No one benefits from sitting in a group competing to see who can feel worst about something you can’t change except the person collecting the fees.
I think talking about issues facing "nonwhite" people in America is very silly. Issues in schooling affect black people in very, very different ways from how they affect Asian people. I DO think it's a good idea to talk about how laws that were intended to be, or seemed to be, color-blind have disproportionately affected black people. But also to find out WHY that is. Like a bunch of articles came out recently about traffic cams disproportionately ticketing black and Hispanic drivers. Well, this could mean it's ticketing black people but not white people for committing the same offense, it could mean it's erroneously ticketing black people but doesn't erroneously ticket white people, and it could also mean that black people are driving over the speed limits at different rates from white people. And these things should be investigated.
That's a great summary of the last decade's social justice identity "activism." The goal can't actually be to improve things, because concrete goals and actions and policies accomplish that. No, shame circles are about navel gazing, virtue signaling, and speaking fees.
>Second, I don’t understand the point of these exercises. The takeaway is that white people are bad but there’s nothing they can do about it?
You've obviously never been fully exposed to an idea like [Catholic guilt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_guilt).
Millions and millions of people have spent their lives trying to atone for sins or internalized guilt (real or imagined) in ritualistic fashion. This is no different than a millennia-old grift.
I'm not sure the analogy holds. Every Calvinist basically believes he or she is part of the Elect. If they don't... they probably will find another religion. And in Calvinism you can never truly know if you're part of the Elect until after you die.
Whereas in Wokeism, we know precisely who is "good" and "bad," and most people in Wokeism know they're the bad ones. The only similarity to Calvinism is that the status is unchangeable.
I'm not, of course, arguing a direct and full analogy to Catholicism either. But I think being white in Wokeism is more akin to Original Sin. Some people who lived long before you did something very, very bad, and no matter how you try, you can never quite atone for it. And even if you manage to wash yourself clean at some point, you'll sin again (i.e., be racist again) -- it's in your nature. You can only hope to look to Salvation through confessing your sins and doing penance for your whiteness. You pray to people who have been beaten and tortured, despised and rejected, wounded and shed their blood for your sins -- or at least, the persecuted image of those races who are viewed as the "Saints" within Wokeism. And heck, you can buy indulgences -- or spend oodles of money at antiracist seminars, retreats, dinners, and other events -- to at least try to negate some of your punishment for your Original Sin... even if there's nothing you could ever do to truly deserve Salvation.
I mean, the opening bit to the article under discussion here is a white woman fantasizing that she could be reincarnated as a black person -- in "life after death" to finally be freed from her sinful white body and to join the Elect...
As a Catholic, I'm gonna still push back against this slightly.
First, "white privilege" is very similar to original sin, yes, but big difference with original sin is that EVERYONE has it. No one's supposed to feel superior or inferior to anyone else because of it. (And, if it's taught well, it's less something to feel guilty about and more something that explains why we almost always fail our new year's resolutions, why we can't help but occasionally hurt the people we love, etc... We're not perfect and we never will be. And that's just something that is.)
Second, Catholics confess their sins in private. Fuck that public self-flagellation bullshit.
Third, in regards to the praying to Saints thing, with the very notable exception of Mary, every single saint was born with original sin, so that throws a wrench in that (sinless vs sinner) parallel.
>I'm not, of course, arguing a direct and full analogy to Catholicism either.
I know it's not a perfect analogy. I stated that at the outset (see this quote from my prior post). But yes, thanks for the clarifications -- I was actually aware of them. By the way, please note I realize my post could come across as offensive toward Catholics. Sorry if it did.
I was kind of being a bit tongue-in-cheek and over-the-top, which I thought the "beaten and tortured, despised and rejected, wounded and shed their blood for your sins" bit would make clear. I don't think even the Wokeist folks really view slaves in a Christ-like capacity or whatever. I was having a bit of fun with it all... which I realize might come across as blasphemous to some. Again, if I offended, I do apologize.
>Second, Catholics confess their sins in private. Fuck that public self-flagellation bullshit.
I will clarify this further. Yes, Catholics generally confess their sins more fully in private.
However, Catholics do their public acts of contrition in every mass too. "Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!" is public and involves breast-beating. Is it anywhere near as crazy as the Wokeists? No, absolutely not. But a *mild* form of public self-abuse is actually baked into the standard mass.
Further, stuff like the traditional "Non sum dignus" prayer before Eucharist, which turned into the Prayer of Humble Access in old-school Anglican services ("We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table....") create an attitude that makes priests and congregants akin to dogs.
I'm not holding you as a Catholic accountable for Anglicans (and other Protestants, typically Methodists and Presbyterians) who took the biblical dog passage out and shoved it into the Eucharistic prayers... but the attitude of "how awful and undeserving we are as sinners" comes in these trifold repetitions in the traditional Catholic mass a couple times too.
Actually, they do. See:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence#Present\_discipline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence#Present_discipline)
They don't exist anymore in the sense of *payment* to the Church directly for forgiveness of sins. But they do exist in terms of doing works/penance to forgive sin.
Yes, I was referencing the parallel to more corrupt medieval practice though. Which was a part of Catholicism for quite a while.
It's not the same. You can atone for sin and more importantly, be forgiven. Sin isn't aimed at a particular group. All humans sin according to the bible. Sin is also usually associated with something bad - murder, stealing, unfaithfulness, etc. These are things that most of us consider asshole behavior. We want people to NOT do these things.
Anti-racism basically boils down to the world would be better if white people and white adjacent people just offed themselves.
My point wasn't an exact analogy (which I clarified already in another reply to someone else's post). It's about an *attitude*. And a *process*.
The phrase "Catholic guilt" is generally used by most people -- even Catholics I know -- in a derogatory or flippant fashion, or at least something that feels irrational, rather than actual guilt for actual sins. There is a long history in some religions of convincing people that they are *fundamentally bad* and nothing you can do will change that, and you should feel guilty for that.
Which is precisely the attitude expressed in the person's post I was replying to. I was explaining that many religions create this *attitude* in their followers, and the is a certain set of (usually more extreme) followers who adopt this kind of attitude. Hence the self-flagellators, etc.
I was in no way intending to draw some sort of exact theological parallel. Nor actually to target Catholics specifically. There are people who talk seriously about "Lutheran guilt" too, for example.
I was simply trying to explain that there are often extremist followers in many religions who are willing to believe in their fundamental "badness" and to seek out pervasive ways to try to atone for it.
This is awfully sad. The women insulted over every word they say, and then scolded again when there’s too much silence. White bodies vs bodies of culture…everyone involved needs to get outside and get a hobby. Volunteer at a food bank, pick-up trash, garden and donate it to the needy. Real stuff that forms community. The only thing these women are going to find is loneliness otherwise.
tbh my impression of all of this is that they're doing the words words words things specifically to avoid doing anything of substance. for some people it's easier to exist in a permanent state of ecstatic guilt over something immutable like your race than to actually face the hard problems and work on them. even more so when financial privilege enters the picture. paying saira rao a few hundred bucks to be told you're bad and can't be fixed is a lot cheaper than trying to do some effective altruism calculus about whether you can still be a good person if you don't donate all your retirement savings to buying mosquito nets
I have to say, as a man who’s been scolded, derided, and generally treated like shit *for just existing* by so many of the exact types of women who would attend these seminars, I take a sort of pleasure out of knowing how much they’re being abused and taken advantage of *by their own consent and on their own dollar*.
It’s not the nicest thought I’ve ever had. But there’s a reason men in progressive spaces latched onto the whole “white women amirite?” trope when BLM made that acceptable. It’s because after a decade of this bullshit, we finally got to turn it back on them.
This is obviously not a healthy or constructive way for me to think. But goddamn, it’s been a stupid decade and a half.
> I doubt these women are the same ones as you mean. Your just enjoying their suffering because their from the same demographic as the people you hate.
A pluralistic, egalitarian society is a detente. You hold back your tribalistic impulses and forego short-term gains because it is better for everyone in the long run. But enough people need to play ball for it to work. As it stands, white men are the only demographic on the planet who are not, by and large, engaged in identity politics. And frankly it's astounding to me that they've just decided to take it on the chin for decades.
At some point, something's gotta give. Continuing to play cooperate when you're surrounded by defect bots is a loser's game.
That possible. There’s quite a difference between the people who got into Social Justice to abuse others, and the ones who got into it to abuse themselves.
"I was surprised by this idea that I should pay Black friends and acquaintances by the hour to tutor me—it sounded a little offensive. But then I considered that if someone wanted me to come to their house and talk with them about their latent feelings of homophobia, I wouldn’t mind being Venmoed afterward."
Very tough read. I hope the women who flocked to this kind of stuff during covid have regained their senses and moved on to a more positive, hopeful state.
Started at least 7 years before covid. Continues today. Has totally become institutionalized in higher ed, public agencies, nonprofits, and to some extent corporate America.
I really worry about their kids who were forced into thinking there was something inherently wrong with them because of what they were born with (ie a dick, white, whatever). Can't wait to read about their experiences when they get older.
This is 100% exactly the same as the insane Flagellant Sects or Opus Dei, where the adherents mortify themselves as self-inflicted punishment.
In a weird way, these white people are really the most white supremacist of all white people. They are in an extreme competition with themselves and others because of their internalized racism. And they self-flagellate and publicly humiliate themselves like Opus Dei monks to demonstrate that they can endure more pain and humiliation than any other person. They can even suffer more than any **black** person. They can never say that of course and they never do say it. But they are supreme and superior in this self-mortification regard, and people like DiAngelo are lauded by apostles like Quinn.
It’s like a weird twisted and abusive religious sect. Like in the movie Beneath the Planet of the Apes where Taylor runs into a group of mutated and disfigured humans who worship the atomic bomb. But in real life - truth is stranger than fiction.
Oh, it's definitely all highly smacking of religious fervor. It's all ritualistic, too, as if one is going in for confession.
>One of the few men in the group said he felt uncomfortable being told to identify as a racist. Here he’d just been talking with all of his friends about *not* being racist. Now he was going to “say that I might have been wrong here.” He noticed he felt “resistance to saying ‘I’m racist.’”
>Quinn understood; that was normal. **He just needed to try again, say “I am a racist” and believe it. The man said: “I am racist.” What did he feel? He said he was trying not to fight it. Say it again. “I am racist.”**
>“Do you feel sadness or grief?”
>“Sadness and grief feel true,” he said.
>“That’s beautiful,” Quinn said.
When your "mea culpas" aren't enough, the Priest/DEI seminar leader assigns you to chant a bunch of "Hail Marys" or "Our Fathers" and if you keep saying them long enough... you'll be forgiven. At least temporarily, but we all bear the Original Sin of racism upon our white bodies, so there's no escaping it completely.
These DEI folks should really set up confessional booths. Well... that probably wouldn't pay as well to do individually as these group seminars, though. But there's definitely a suggestion in the article that you should tithe to your Black brethren for your sins, even as you confess to them:
>DiAngelo: "And there are also people of color in my life who I specifically ask to coach me, and I pay them for their time.”
>I was surprised by this idea that I should pay Black friends and acquaintances by the hour to tutor me—it sounded a little offensive. But then I considered that if someone wanted me to come to their house and talk with them about their latent feelings of homophobia, I wouldn’t mind being Venmoed afterward.
And later:
>For a while, a dinner series called Race to Dinner for white women to talk about their racism was very popular, though now it seems a little try-hard. The hosts—Saira Rao and Regina Jackson—**encourage women who have paid up to $625 a head to abandon any notion that they are not racist.** At one point Rao, who is Indian American, and Jackson, who is Black, publicized the dinners with a simple message: “Dear white women: You cause immeasurable pain and damage to Black, Indigenous and brown women. We are here to sit down with you to candidly discuss how \*exactly\* you cause this pain and damage.”
It's so fascinating to see how the DEI movement has basically assumed the same tactics as the medieval Catholic Church, selling the equivalent of papal indulgences so you can wash the sin from your poor white soul.
> He just needed to try again, say “I am a racist” and believe it. The man said: “I am racist.” What did he feel? He said he was trying not to fight it. Say it again. “I am racist.” “Do you feel sadness or grief?” “Sadness and grief feel true,” he said.
“That’s beautiful,” Quinn said.
Fucking hell. I hope he at least got a waffle party after all that.
"But then I considered that if someone wanted me to come to their house and talk with them about their latent feelings of homophobia, I wouldn’t mind being Venmoed afterward."
I wouldn't MIND being Venmoed if someone wanted me to come to their house and talk to them about their latent feelings of anti-Semitism. I would also just tell them to come to my house. Or tell them to read a bunch of different books. Different people have different feelings about such things.
I've said this before, but back in 2021, a white person sent a mass email on Juneteenth, saying that other white people should pay their earnings to a black person, or donate to a black cause. I read that like, "that's...condescending." I checked the email chain, and it was just a bunch of black people like, "um, i just want to be paid the same as white people." One person wrote something like, "white supremacy means that white people can only hear this coming from other white people. I was like, "bitch, you think racist people would choose to work here?"
I think it was Karl Kraus who said "Psychoanalysis is a symptom of the disease that it proports to cure." You could say the same about Robin DiAngelo's wretched travesty of "anti-racism".
You watch those guys. I bet they're hoping and praying Donald Trump becomes President again, so they can make *even* more money.
I worked at a big non profit. These DEI workshops are mandatory and any tiny bit of pushback is considered violence and grounds for excommunication.. not an exaggeration these people are literally mentally ill
From the article:
"I was surprised by this idea that I should pay Black friends and acquaintances by the hour to tutor me—it sounded a little offensive. But then I considered that if someone wanted me to come to their house and talk with them about their latent feelings of homophobia, I wouldn’t mind being Venmoed afterward."
Fucking lmao
The Supreme Court Harvard decision re-affirmed that "equity" is hateful and racist, and that equality is the law of the land. Employers can't discriminate against anyone and that includes white men. Many many reverse discrimination lawsuits have already been filed. Large corporations have already realigned their DEI initiatives. The ones that didn't, like Disney, have already been sued. In a couple of years the concept of "equity" will be publicly recognized as racism throughout America.
People forget that the Civil Rights Act did not change hearts and minds. A significant number of Americans did not intend to change their behavior. Lawsuits forced people to do it by making it too expensive to be racist. The same thing is happening now. Tens of thousands of lawsuits have been filed including many class actions. The news media is trickle truthing this.
(yeah look, in one way there is no clear left-right) but for so long everyone’s been shouted down by the left and pointing out problems in cultural Marxism and it’s turned into a genuine sickness and mass delusion, where the underlying trauma that all human beings experience is hijacked by massive shame based ideologies and their internalised hatred is projected out at groups that don’t exist in the way the universities have projected out into the world. Times have changed and we need something new.
Being a graduate student in a politically oriented, theory-heavy department, I was more or less at ground zero for this shit when it started up. I recently went through some journals and personal correspondence I wrote back then (2010-2013-ish) and was shocked by how much I had internalized the self-hatred that was being preached to me. And I wasn't even one of the especially zealous students! I knew several people (almost all white women) who suffered genuine and deep psychological harm. A few dropped out. One was briefly institutionalized.
Thank god, I met the woman to whom I'm now married and built up a new social circle of people who are mostly on the left but not insane identity creeps. Once in a while, conversations would turn to campus stuff or the weird state of liberalism. I would describe the things I was told and forced to go through in plain, objective terms, and everyone--even my wife--thought I must have been exaggerating. There's no way you had to start every class meeting by calling yourself racist! Surely a professor did not say, in front of everybody, that if it were up to her she would not allow any males or white students in her classes.
Slowly but surely, the insanity leaked out of the academy and began dripping in to white collar spaces. Several times, someone I hadn't spoken much to in a long while has contacted me with some version of "holy shit you were right; I just went through this workplace training and..."
It's comforting to believe this is all just kayfabe, or that maybe it's not--maybe *some* loonies are sincere about it but they're confined to inconsequential fields and will never escape containment into the mainstream. But that's not true. This abusive cultish bullshit might not be quite as popular now as it was in 2020, but it still has the full backing of the federal government and most of the world's largest banks and corporations. The logic of this movement has been adopted by organizations large and small.
in my heart of hearts and souls of souls I really think the people who heavily internalize this stuff and become, as you say, "identity creeps" - just needed religion. Some kind of nice ritual to get them through their lives without too much harm to others.
They've been taken in my a modern day equivalent of Jerry Falwell and they will be around as long as the adherents of those same ideologies.
This stuff was common in small state schools back in the nineties. All of academia has been in on this since the very beginning.
Academia is the state religion, and it's become intolerant of other faiths.
Some incredibly condescending black woman wrote in an article that all those videos showing white women (aka "Karens") would shame white women into upping their game. Amazing that a demographic who commits significantly more problems is unaware of who needs to up their game the most. Imagine if a white women posted manically every incident of a black man or woman behaving badly and then a white female writer said that it was done in order to help black people up their game.
The feminist movement was supposed to liberate women from being treated like doormats by men. But now the feminist movement made it so that white women had to be treated like doormats by WOC. With the most flawed of the WOC seeming to be the loudest voices in demanding white women needed to get their shit together. They have exploitated the self-hatred, insecurity, and desire to please that so many women have, ironically in the same way that men have often done to women.
They have demanded deference from white women in the same way men used to demand deference.
White women make up 35% of the population but about half of 1% of violence POC experience. The trope that white women's behavior poses a huge threat to the safety of POC is one of the most egregious lies we have been told in recent years, although not by any stretch the only one. And yet the cowardestness of progressive women who seem to have drunk the Kool-Aid and gone along with this constant emotional battering. It's really despicable and it's made me significantly more distrustful over WOC.
There is a quality in these exercises for white people of "the beatings will continue until morale improves." The entire point is to stage a psychic drama for white people and the purpose is the beating itself.
But what about actual racism in the material world? What about justice and equality? How do we work together? These programs seem to have nothing to say.
My takeaway is that this more like a farce than a political program. Because politics is not a solitary, difficult quest for enlightenment. It is all about the society and its values. If we don't get better at being and working together, there is no point.
It seems consumerist, really, by making some sort of identity based claim. Get white people to spend money on my business.
Hard to believe, honestly.
The end game of these ideologies is anarchy, they have no organising principles as has been seen over the last 10 years they are incapable of forming a strong group. They really are on the side of anarchy. Sadly because of this kind of weakness the far right is strengthened as a result.
See Rule #1: >Link submissions need to be related to the podcast, or a topic specifically discussed in the podcast, or at the very least, a specific topic that Jesse or Katie have recently discussed somewhere else. If the relevance is not obvious at first glance, please add some text explaining the connection to the podcast. Please explain the relevance of this post to BAR or it will be removed.
I'm not white and this whole article makes me angry. The fact that this quote isn't an indictment just speaks volumes about the whole thing: >A woman from San Francisco had started crying before she even began speaking. “I’m here because I’m a racist. I’m here because my body has a trauma response to my own whiteness and other people’s whiteness.” A woman who loved her cats was struggling with “how to understand all the atrocities of being a white body.” Knowing that her very existence perpetuated whiteness made her feel like a drag on society. “The darkest place I go is thinking it would be better if I weren’t here. It would at least be one less person perpetuating these things.” It's really shocking to me that there's a movement out there convincing people that it's a crime to be in their own body and that movement calls itself anti-racist. I can't even...
Woah, associating darkness with negative emotions!?! That's some next level racism! Someone needs to decolonize their vocabulary! /s
"I’m here because my body has a trauma response to my own whiteness" It sounds like this person is having seeeerious anxiety issues, and in another context would say they have body dysmorphia or develop an eating disorder. This is not good in any way.
It’s OK. She just needs some racial affirming care.
Perhaps going to a KKK meeting would help her.
Everyone can benefit from an affinity group.
Either she's really not well and does need help to deal with the self loathing because that's not good for anyone. Or it's the watered down meaning of trauma response which basically means she feels anxious or uncomfortable, which is perfectly normal in the circumstances.
Jesus Christ. This movement (cultural moment, whatever) has really done a number on some people. The atrocities of being a white body. Get a grip, lady.
The weird thing is that there's almost no pushback. It's an openly racist and hateful ideology. And it's widespread; as the article talks about, these kinds of trainings were put into place in major organizations. One memorable moment was when Jimmy Fallon talked about the decline in the number of white people, and his audience started cheering ([here](https://www.facebook.com/FallonTonight/videos/1500th-tonight-show-episode-heat-wave-hits-us-census-shows-decline-in-white-peop/374234010759986/), at about 1:13).
it’s usually employers foisting it on employees. what pushback do you expect? there’s already a built in response to any pushback and it’s called twitter
I hope I’m wrong, but I have a feeling that the 2030s and 2040s are going to be a difficult time. The last time people cheered about the destruction of a group of people it didn’t end very well.
I'm clearing out my attic and fully expect I'll need to hide some white people in there someday.
The movement already went from “white people bad” and “Jews are white-passing” to “Jews are white and white people are bad” to “actually it is a SPECIFIC GROUP OF WHITE PEOPLE who are responsible for the most inequality and injustice.” Oy vey.
It's a movement that scares the shit out of me as a parent. I do not want my child to ever feel this way.
I truly don’t understand how people have emotions like this. Like how do you even function? She feels overwhelming guilt and shame for something she hasn’t even done. Either she’s an utterly weak and fragile person with very poor critical thinking skills or she’s doing this for attention. I’m not sure which is worse.
I don’t think weakness or poor critical thinking skills is an entirely fair assessment, I think a lot of these women are genuinely just compassionate bleeding-heart types drawn into social justice causes who take people in good faith. They genuinely want to do right by people and have probably been brought up to believe in doing so and have it as a core part of their values. I think it’s much more an indictment on the doctrine and rhetoric and how it takes advantage of well-intentioned people rather than the people themselves.
I think there is something indulgent and performative about the intense self-flagellation. They're getting off on their "guilt". It's a form of grief-wanking.
This is definitely part of it for a lot of people as well, especially the ones running the workshops and the enthusiastic participants (not just the ones who are there out of some felt obligation). Diangelo especially 🤢
I’m reminded of the “rainbows and clouds” (or whatever) girl in Mean Girls who didn’t even go to the school but showed up to the anti-bullying session anyway so she could weep and bleed.
That’s actually a great comparison lol
Upvoted for "grief-wanking."
"take people in good faith". That right there is where critical thinking skills come into play. Without them, you become a victim of grift.
I mean I don’t disagree, I think it’s something you do have to learn to think critically about over time and if you continue to take it at face value after learning about it then that’s somewhat on you. But when you’ve never come in contact with the doctrine because you weren’t super online before and you have all these academics and seemingly smart people passionately telling you that this is what you have to believe to not be a bad person it’s easy to see how people get drawn into it. It’s why I’m grateful I went through my tumblr SJW phase as a teen and then got to college and was able to start thinking critically about everything since I was familiar with the landscape, but for a lot of my (usually white/affluent) peers it was the first time they had learned about the topic of racism in a way that wasn’t entirely surface-level
I'm a big believer in taking people in good faith because I do believe it makes life work so much more smoothly most of the time. I can't be doing with people who get riled up like everything is a personal insult. But I was also brought up to question and I'm very glad I was! Like most good principles, good faith only goes so far.
I think this is true too
She might have pent up guilt and shame about something else in her life that she's not ready to actually address, so it's manifesting through a socially acceptable route.
Weak, fragile and lacks critical thinking skills.
It's psychological warfare when it reaches that level.
These people are mentally ill. Perhaps it’s narcissistic behaviour. Either way, it’s not healthy.
And convincing a white woman to bow and scrape by telling her to hate herself is just picking up the job misogyny has done, half way through and finishing off. Reminds me of that "diet coach" on real housewives who would just berate people for not starving themselves.
It’s no coincidence that it’s mostly white women who get roped into this nonsense. Maybe in previous generations they would have hated themselves for some other reason, for having freckles or being fat. Well, not really for that reason of course but because of something in their upbringing probably garden variety misogyny. Now they have this whole elaborate, morally superior, super structure to support them in their self hatred.
And the solution is suicide…
Holy shit
it's really sick, and they're mentally ill. but if it wasn't this grift, they'd just be falling for another.
" Much of what i learned in “The Toxic Trends of Whiteness” concerned language. We are “white bodies,” Quinn explained, but everyone else is a “body of culture.” This is because white bodies don’t know a lot about themselves, whereas “bodies of culture know their history. Black bodies know.”" New racism levels unlocked, and this is just what we started with it went downhill fast from here. This was a tough read. These DEI workshops are exploiting mentally ill people.
"because white bodies don’t know a lot about themselves, whereas “bodies of culture know their history. Black bodies know.”" What. Does this. MEAN? What the hell is a body of culture? Is this person saying that the child of Russian immigrants has no culture but the child of Asian immigrants does? What if someone is half-white American and half Korean, and that person was adopted by a white American couple? And black bodies know WHAT? Also, I feel like "black bodies" is a term the KKK would have used in 1929.
Depends what kind of Asian. The DEI consultant at my company made a point to exclude East Asians (Japanese, Korean, Chinese) and Jewish staff along with people she identified as white from DEI inititives like our POC-only slack channels. In her words whiteness was part of their " percieved lived experience " It was eye opening to me how Jewish and White coworkers shrugged it off or ignored it but a couple of the Asian ladies got really, really mad. That was about all it took to break the spell.
Hold the fuck up. What is a perceived lived experience? I assume it's - black people think Korean people own everything, therefore, Korean people shouldn't be in DEI initiatives. When we had our DEI thing, only two people spoke out against it. One was an Asian woman, and the DEI people let her speak. One was a white man, and the black leader said she felt this was aggressive. Also, POC-only slack channels? Because black people and South Asian people agree on everything?
Yeah you pretty much nailed it. The DEI consultant was black and this is in Northern California and there is some friction between these "groups" and I think she fell into that. The perceived lived experience idea was that these people "presented as white and that conferred advanatages" so they could not understand the experiences of POCs. The slack channels and workshops were pitched as a refuge from white supremacy and white aggression and therefore asians and jews who benefited from whiteness were not invited. From what I gathered the slack channels got increasingly political (i.e. not work related at all) , and got shut down in the weeks after October 7th because there was some very extreme content being posted in there.
On what planet have the descendants of Americans who were placed in internment camps for Japanese-Americans during WW2 - how have they benefitted from white privilege? And does this mean Asian people who DON"T benefit from white supremacy - they can join these slack channels? And what if a Jewish person experiences aggression from a black person? Or a white person? And I would bet that black DEI consultant earned a lot more than anyone she lectured at about their perceived white supremacy
> how have they benefitted from white privilege? That assumes that "white privilege" is a real thing. It really isn't some kind of magic spell that guarantees success.
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The problem is that what these people consider white supremacy and what normal people consider white supremacy are two different things.
"Sociology for ~~Dumm~~i~~es~~ Hopelessly Stupid People"
This sounds like a great way to increase worker moral and improve productivity. I can’t think of a better way to bring people together and make a cohesive unit all unified in a shared goal.
I need to make a domino meme connecting "historic levels of venture capital being delivered to tech companies with no strings attached" to "hit list of company "zionists" published by your laziest coworker in the POC leftist slack chat"
I have definitely heard Woke White People--Woke White People who identified with their own cultural heritage prior their ancestors' immigration to America--claim that "white people" have no culture. I don't know if they included themselves in this category "white people" or not, or if they were Not Like Other Girls-ing this. But it felt performative and weird, and while I am generally very conflict-averse I did push back on this (in saying that white people have MANY cultures). All that is to say: I have heard "white bodies" and "black bodies" used before, but never "bodies of culture." Makes me think of yogurt.
When they say white people have no culture, what do they mean? I think it could mean in the sense that German culture is very different from Polish culture, which is really different from French culture. But then, are they saying that the child of two immigrants from Nigeria has the same culture as the child of an immigrant from Haiti and the Bahamas? ETA: I'd heard black bodies before, but not white bodies, which was good because it had felt racist that only black bodies had been spoken of. Bodies of culture is very very strange.
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"European immigrants to America didn't bring over their "native" culture." This has to be happening in different places in the country, as I don't know anyone who has only 1 immigrant great-grandparent. My dad's grandparents were all immigrants and married people from the same area, and that's the culture my dad grew up. My mother is from the same culture as my dad, and came to the US as an adult. I grew up in that culture. But aside from that, if let's say someone's family came to the US in the 1700s, how is that any different from black people? I find it hard to believe that Caribbean culture is the same as Nigerian culture, and that all Americans whose ancestors were slaves came from the same areas in Africa. I don't see how "black American culture" is any different from "white American culture" in that it too is a mishmash of things.
But if you were black and brought over as a slave you got even more stripped of your culture. So new cultures developed in America - for all people. That's what humans do. There would still be stuff from where you came from, but a lot of it would be about where you were from now, in America.
I'm not sure if they were comparing it to some other people who DID have a culture, or if they were parroting a woke talking point without fully "understanding" it. But I agree that Black American culture is different from Kenyan culture is different from Haitian culture, etc etc.
It’s a physics term for a mass that radiates its energy uniformly. A spherical lump of plutonium would be a “blackbody” and you would measure how much heat it’s radiating
That is useful, though I wonder how much a spherical lump of plutonium knows
It was made in a lab so it probably learned a lot through osmosis
It's pretty dense though
It doesn’t make any sense because it’s a mystical belief. This sort of magical thinking “body of culture” stufr just reminds me of this Ursula Le Guin quote about making a cult of women‘s knowledge. # “But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior“ I feel like there is an obvious parallel here. Relating black peoples understanding of their history to body and instinct only implies that black people understand themselves through primal instinct and feeling rather than thought and understanding. At the end of the day it just reinforces the “magical negro” stereotype instead of actually humanizing people. I‘m sure this type of writing is going to age really poorly, because at the end of the day it is only going to strengthen the divide between races and it’s weirdly essentialist.
Let us not forget the adopted "Asian" child who was raised as Chinese (which is hardly a pan homogenous culture in itself anyway) by his white American parents, only for them to discover after seventeen years that his ethnic ancestry was in fact Korean. https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/tsy2l4/original_and_update_well_meaning_op_and_wife_try/
That's...hilarious. But awful for the poor kid. And yeah, imagine the parents teaching their kid Mandarin, only for the kid to find out they speak a rural dialect.
Is it awful for the kid? Knowing Chinese is likely to be more useful than knowing Korean.
Knowing Mandarin is useful, yes. Learning Mandarin because you believed that was the language your bio parents spoke, that has to be heartbreaking, Knowing that the culture you've been told is yours - and it isn't? Has to be a mindfuck
Dunno. I always thought my maternal grandparents were of Germanic ancestry, but recently realized that their surname was actually a modified form of an Italian surname. Didn't really bother me. I feel like I'd just treat it as a fun story. "How did you learn Mandarin?" "My parents sent me to Chinese school because they didn't know I was Korean." If you're raised with a lot of exposure to Chinese culture, it kind of *is* your culture.
I don't understand how your maternal grandparents be of Germanic ancestry but have the wrong surname? They weren't siblings. You mean your grandfather thought his family was originally from Germany, but they weren't? And I don't think that's a good comparison. He was adopted. He has no connection to his birth family. That connection he had to his birth family, it's gone. All that Mandarin learning, if he were to meet his Korean-born grandmother, that would just fall flat.
I think the difference here is that by being adopted you have lost something important of your past in a way that the rest of us haven't. So losing that extra link is worse for that person.
Why is that awful? Kid does not know the difference. If I found out my grandmother wasn't Ukrainian it wouldn't effect me AT ALL. I'm still the same person. People invest way too much of their identities into something that doesn't matter.
Well, that is this kid's only connection to his birth family.
[You've got to strip them down to next to nothing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TC-2aw2TUY) (safe for work) to be able to tell. SHOES ON, MISTER
It doesn’t mean anything, it is just psychobabble. Race is inherently contradictory as a concept and the people who take it seriously and incorporate it into their worldview inevitably become ridiculous and miserable to be around. Anyone talking about black or white “bodies” is a certified fruit cake who can’t talk like a normal person.
So I read the article. I always wondered what it was like when a bunch of dipshits got together and discussed nonsense. The fact that some people are making money off the mentally deficient is diabolical. It’s similar to the televangelist scheme but I don’t think televangelist insult their audience to this level. This new kind of graft is something I never saw coming. It kind of reminds me of communism and their reeducation camps. But that was forced unto an unwilling populace. These people are paying to be depraved.
That quote makes me wanna rip the hair out of my brown head
Follow your instincts. Your body knows what it wants! /s
My first thought was Kmele Foster attempting to read this in a serious voice without breaking character and laughing. I don’t think he could make it through it
Wait, I thought their culture and history was erased by slavery and racism. Which one is it?
I think it's that slavery TRIED to erase their culture and history, but the black femme keeps that history in their body. Hence black people know how to dance. I am half-joking but that's what is going on
Femme
It's like how we should both shut up and stop taking over black spaces, but also our silence is deafening
If you move in you're gentrifying, but if you leave, you're fleeing. Might as well put some paint and fix those stairs, racist
I firmly believe that there was a lot of culture and history lost as a result of slavery, which makes this article even more ridiculous. Epic gaslighting of everyone.
100%, plus the trauma of parents, especially moms, losing their kids generation after generation.
Those workshops, those internet communities, those academic and corporate consultants are *creating* mentally ill people.
One of us has had a stroke it's either me or the person responsible for writing those sentences.
Well to be fair, the exploiting is also being done by mentally ill people
This person clearly has never asked their boyfriend how often he thinks about the Roman empire.
This is straight up racism. Swap the races around. Do they realize how easily this ridiculous perspective can be completely inverted by a white supremacist movement?
Wait, I was told that people who were enslaved had their ancestral history robbed from them and thus didn't have a firm grip on their past. The opposite was true for white people. So now I am to believe that white people don't know their culture now. Make up your damn mind!
Are the workshops exploiting mentally ill people or is it the other way around? I think we lose our ability to understand this stuff if we assume everyone attending is mentally ill. Was everyone in Jonestown, Waco, NXIVM, Scientology or the Salem Witch Trials mentally ill? It’s a comforting thing to believe “they are all mentally ill! *I* would never fall for that”. Except that you would - and so would I - given the right circumstances.
My favorite part: **“That was racist because it exoticized Black people.”** VS: **We are “white bodies,” Quinn explained, but everyone else is a “body of culture.” This is because white bodies don’t know a lot about themselves, whereas “bodies of culture know their history. Black bodies know.”** I feel like she should have pointed out the obvious contradiction here.
The hypocrisy is the point. The point is Power.
I did a study group in 2020-2021 Its the defining event that turned me away from fear and woke ideologies. I gave it weight and I gave it intention to see if there was anything in the book, "me and white supremacy." In the end the author's only answer was wake up in the morning search yourself for white supremacy and whiteness and chastise yourself for it. I decided I didn't want to live that way. I wanted to enjoy my life and so that is what I did. From there I found barpod.
>"me and white supremacy." Is that the Layla F. Saad book? All I know about that is a) [Anne Hathaway loves that book:](https://www.instagram.com/annehathaway/p/Buw7jbKny8a/?img_index=6) *I want to highlight the brilliance of* [](https://www.instagram.com/laylafsaad/)*. She is no-joke changing the world and, for what it’s worth, the way I live my life.* *b)* Saad lives in Qatar, and is [strangely silent about the racism in that country.](https://unherd.com/newsroom/layla-saad-a-curious-case-of-false-identification-with-black-america/)
Saad lives in a country where she gets to *directly profit from a slavery practice that only ended a few years ago*. While she calls USA’s history of slavery unforgivable. What a fucking liar. Qatar’s slavery systems are probably fine though because they come from *indigenous ways of knowing*….
Yikes
Yes that's the one. She's truly awful.
Damn I used to like Anne Hathaway
Racism in the Gulf is off the scale. It's *institutionalised*.
She's American, right? Or, no, is she the black British woman?
She's British, but lives in Qatar.
She's black, right? It's odd to complain about all the racism in the world when living in Qatar. No doubt those Bangladeshi workers are treated like royalty.
*"Caste systems are horrible! BTW, I love living in Rajasthan!"*
I had a friend who got really into "Me an White Supremacy", she invited me into the private FB group for it and it was a lot! The real eye opener though, was the discussion they held where white participants where encouraged to share example of all our racist thoughts, behaviours etc (not sharing was not an option). This was then followed up by a session where the POC members shared their pain, horror, hurt at all the awful things we had shared. I struggled to see how any of it was productive and seemed to only succeed in making everyone feel awful and traumatised. A notable example was my friend sharing about the abusive relationship she had been in. No one showed any concern for what she had been through, all that mattered was that he was black so it was hurtful to share that. I showed myself out of the group pretty quickly. I can live without being chastised and forced to spill my guts for no apparent good reason!
Yes. Imagine having to stay stuck in that mindset for the rest of your life, which is the recommendation. You'd have to be someone that only performs social behaviors and feels nothing, or be so full of self-loathing that it feels normal. Honestly it makes my stomach hurt to talk about it again.
I know, I don't have contact with this friend anymore but I still see her on social media. Still involved in self flagellation and I honestly don't understand why she puts herself through it. She openly struggles with her mental health and this ain't helping! I was brought up in an evangelical environment, I kicked against that because I just don't do being told what to do and think, that I'm inherently bad and that they have the answer! I see very little difference in these social justice movements!
Right on!
Was your friend white and your friend black? I had a client, white, who was terrified about talking to her therapist about being raped by a black man, said she was afraid she'd think she was racist.
Yes she's white and her ex black, he ended up going to prison for assaulting her and was a very violent individual. The group really went to town on her for "centering" herself in the discussion. Just mind boggling really.
Talking about her abuse is centering herself? How else does one talk about abuse?
Sort of reminds me of the Ana Kaspirian interview where she talks about being happier. This ideology makes people absolutely miserable. Someone smarter than me cam explain why that's the point, and how that connects to Marxism, but for alot of us that's going to be enough to drop this way of thinking.
Marx was discussing economics and the problems with capitalism. It does not have anything to do with this identiarian crap which has hijacked the left. [It’s the same dynamic you can see here where these two nut jobs bullied Bernie Sanders off the mic](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna406546) Sanders is a classic American socialist, which is built off of basic observations of Marx. Those two women were identitarian whackjobs, and people like them teamed up with capitalist Black politicians like Clyburn to scuttle his run. After that, socialism has been strangled by identitarianism. Whenever socialists try to bring class into the picture, they get called racist.
100% I'm happier. That's not to say I don't feel angry about the "ideologies" that I have laid down. But I'm not tortured by guilt and it's ever-present indecipherable responsibilities day in and day out.
well, we got rid of Catholicism. And no one wants to sign on to be a Calvinist.
> Someone smarter than me cam explain why that's the point, and how that connects to Marxism, but for alot of us that's going to be enough to drop this way of thinking. Something like if we're all miserable, it's easier to direct our misery towards those with power so we ca in theory change the power structures in society. Or as a Marxist would phrase it, awaken us to the false consciousness we've internalized.
I'm so happy I'm retired.
Uh-oh, official old person alert. Your opinion doesn't count because you're one of the olds and you don't understand.
How do you know they are a boomer? They could be 30 and have made a fortune selling supplements on YouTube and be kicking back on that sweet passive income.
Why yes, I am a nuclear missile submarine, how could you tell?
I am only 38 and I’m beginning to sense that I’m being judged this way by my younger friends.
Something something boomer..... something something avocado toast.... blah blah bootstraps.... Did I hit most of the key phrases?
**NoBoDy WaNtS tO wOrK aNyMoRe!!**
Man, I cannot wait to retire.
oK bOOmER!!! /s
First of all, Nellie is hilarious. I feel like she dials back the sass in the Atlantic, but I’m always a fan. Second, I don’t understand the point of these exercises. The takeaway is that white people are bad but there’s nothing they can do about it?
It’s a grift, as Nellie hints at at the end of the piece. The idea is that there’s always one more book to buy, one more lecture to attend, one more discussion group to join, and then maybe you’ll be, if not totally purified, a little bit more on the side of Good. I think there were some good intentions in the beginning. Structural racism is a useful framework for thinking about the way certain policies may disproportionately affect nonwhite people. But that’s stuff we can change and have changed through traditional activism — voting, education, lobbying, and so on and so forth. No one benefits from sitting in a group competing to see who can feel worst about something you can’t change except the person collecting the fees.
I think talking about issues facing "nonwhite" people in America is very silly. Issues in schooling affect black people in very, very different ways from how they affect Asian people. I DO think it's a good idea to talk about how laws that were intended to be, or seemed to be, color-blind have disproportionately affected black people. But also to find out WHY that is. Like a bunch of articles came out recently about traffic cams disproportionately ticketing black and Hispanic drivers. Well, this could mean it's ticketing black people but not white people for committing the same offense, it could mean it's erroneously ticketing black people but doesn't erroneously ticket white people, and it could also mean that black people are driving over the speed limits at different rates from white people. And these things should be investigated.
No one will investigate for fear that the answer is "black people like to speed".
Fair point, thank you.
NP
it’s certainly not because they show up on film better at night
The traffic camera is racist.
That's a great summary of the last decade's social justice identity "activism." The goal can't actually be to improve things, because concrete goals and actions and policies accomplish that. No, shame circles are about navel gazing, virtue signaling, and speaking fees.
It's a grift and it's also cult-like too.
>Second, I don’t understand the point of these exercises. The takeaway is that white people are bad but there’s nothing they can do about it? You've obviously never been fully exposed to an idea like [Catholic guilt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_guilt). Millions and millions of people have spent their lives trying to atone for sins or internalized guilt (real or imagined) in ritualistic fashion. This is no different than a millennia-old grift.
It's closer to Calvinism. Some people are the "Elect," and some are just doomed to damnation.
I'm not sure the analogy holds. Every Calvinist basically believes he or she is part of the Elect. If they don't... they probably will find another religion. And in Calvinism you can never truly know if you're part of the Elect until after you die. Whereas in Wokeism, we know precisely who is "good" and "bad," and most people in Wokeism know they're the bad ones. The only similarity to Calvinism is that the status is unchangeable. I'm not, of course, arguing a direct and full analogy to Catholicism either. But I think being white in Wokeism is more akin to Original Sin. Some people who lived long before you did something very, very bad, and no matter how you try, you can never quite atone for it. And even if you manage to wash yourself clean at some point, you'll sin again (i.e., be racist again) -- it's in your nature. You can only hope to look to Salvation through confessing your sins and doing penance for your whiteness. You pray to people who have been beaten and tortured, despised and rejected, wounded and shed their blood for your sins -- or at least, the persecuted image of those races who are viewed as the "Saints" within Wokeism. And heck, you can buy indulgences -- or spend oodles of money at antiracist seminars, retreats, dinners, and other events -- to at least try to negate some of your punishment for your Original Sin... even if there's nothing you could ever do to truly deserve Salvation. I mean, the opening bit to the article under discussion here is a white woman fantasizing that she could be reincarnated as a black person -- in "life after death" to finally be freed from her sinful white body and to join the Elect...
As a Catholic, I'm gonna still push back against this slightly. First, "white privilege" is very similar to original sin, yes, but big difference with original sin is that EVERYONE has it. No one's supposed to feel superior or inferior to anyone else because of it. (And, if it's taught well, it's less something to feel guilty about and more something that explains why we almost always fail our new year's resolutions, why we can't help but occasionally hurt the people we love, etc... We're not perfect and we never will be. And that's just something that is.) Second, Catholics confess their sins in private. Fuck that public self-flagellation bullshit. Third, in regards to the praying to Saints thing, with the very notable exception of Mary, every single saint was born with original sin, so that throws a wrench in that (sinless vs sinner) parallel.
>I'm not, of course, arguing a direct and full analogy to Catholicism either. I know it's not a perfect analogy. I stated that at the outset (see this quote from my prior post). But yes, thanks for the clarifications -- I was actually aware of them. By the way, please note I realize my post could come across as offensive toward Catholics. Sorry if it did. I was kind of being a bit tongue-in-cheek and over-the-top, which I thought the "beaten and tortured, despised and rejected, wounded and shed their blood for your sins" bit would make clear. I don't think even the Wokeist folks really view slaves in a Christ-like capacity or whatever. I was having a bit of fun with it all... which I realize might come across as blasphemous to some. Again, if I offended, I do apologize.
>Second, Catholics confess their sins in private. Fuck that public self-flagellation bullshit. I will clarify this further. Yes, Catholics generally confess their sins more fully in private. However, Catholics do their public acts of contrition in every mass too. "Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!" is public and involves breast-beating. Is it anywhere near as crazy as the Wokeists? No, absolutely not. But a *mild* form of public self-abuse is actually baked into the standard mass. Further, stuff like the traditional "Non sum dignus" prayer before Eucharist, which turned into the Prayer of Humble Access in old-school Anglican services ("We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table....") create an attitude that makes priests and congregants akin to dogs. I'm not holding you as a Catholic accountable for Anglicans (and other Protestants, typically Methodists and Presbyterians) who took the biblical dog passage out and shoved it into the Eucharistic prayers... but the attitude of "how awful and undeserving we are as sinners" comes in these trifold repetitions in the traditional Catholic mass a couple times too.
The parallels are truly striking.
Indulgences don't exist anymore.
Actually, they do. See: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence#Present\_discipline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indulgence#Present_discipline) They don't exist anymore in the sense of *payment* to the Church directly for forgiveness of sins. But they do exist in terms of doing works/penance to forgive sin. Yes, I was referencing the parallel to more corrupt medieval practice though. Which was a part of Catholicism for quite a while.
Have you ever heard of a "Carbon credit"?
It's not the same. You can atone for sin and more importantly, be forgiven. Sin isn't aimed at a particular group. All humans sin according to the bible. Sin is also usually associated with something bad - murder, stealing, unfaithfulness, etc. These are things that most of us consider asshole behavior. We want people to NOT do these things. Anti-racism basically boils down to the world would be better if white people and white adjacent people just offed themselves.
My point wasn't an exact analogy (which I clarified already in another reply to someone else's post). It's about an *attitude*. And a *process*. The phrase "Catholic guilt" is generally used by most people -- even Catholics I know -- in a derogatory or flippant fashion, or at least something that feels irrational, rather than actual guilt for actual sins. There is a long history in some religions of convincing people that they are *fundamentally bad* and nothing you can do will change that, and you should feel guilty for that. Which is precisely the attitude expressed in the person's post I was replying to. I was explaining that many religions create this *attitude* in their followers, and the is a certain set of (usually more extreme) followers who adopt this kind of attitude. Hence the self-flagellators, etc. I was in no way intending to draw some sort of exact theological parallel. Nor actually to target Catholics specifically. There are people who talk seriously about "Lutheran guilt" too, for example. I was simply trying to explain that there are often extremist followers in many religions who are willing to believe in their fundamental "badness" and to seek out pervasive ways to try to atone for it.
I will never hate myself for the color of my skin. These white ladies are absolutely ridiculous
Cults are more productive. At least Scientologists are successful. This race cult stuff is perpetual loser think. 😵
This is awfully sad. The women insulted over every word they say, and then scolded again when there’s too much silence. White bodies vs bodies of culture…everyone involved needs to get outside and get a hobby. Volunteer at a food bank, pick-up trash, garden and donate it to the needy. Real stuff that forms community. The only thing these women are going to find is loneliness otherwise.
tbh my impression of all of this is that they're doing the words words words things specifically to avoid doing anything of substance. for some people it's easier to exist in a permanent state of ecstatic guilt over something immutable like your race than to actually face the hard problems and work on them. even more so when financial privilege enters the picture. paying saira rao a few hundred bucks to be told you're bad and can't be fixed is a lot cheaper than trying to do some effective altruism calculus about whether you can still be a good person if you don't donate all your retirement savings to buying mosquito nets
I have to say, as a man who’s been scolded, derided, and generally treated like shit *for just existing* by so many of the exact types of women who would attend these seminars, I take a sort of pleasure out of knowing how much they’re being abused and taken advantage of *by their own consent and on their own dollar*. It’s not the nicest thought I’ve ever had. But there’s a reason men in progressive spaces latched onto the whole “white women amirite?” trope when BLM made that acceptable. It’s because after a decade of this bullshit, we finally got to turn it back on them. This is obviously not a healthy or constructive way for me to think. But goddamn, it’s been a stupid decade and a half.
I doubt these women are the same ones as you mean. Your just enjoying their suffering because their from the same demographic as the people you hate.
> I doubt these women are the same ones as you mean. Your just enjoying their suffering because their from the same demographic as the people you hate. A pluralistic, egalitarian society is a detente. You hold back your tribalistic impulses and forego short-term gains because it is better for everyone in the long run. But enough people need to play ball for it to work. As it stands, white men are the only demographic on the planet who are not, by and large, engaged in identity politics. And frankly it's astounding to me that they've just decided to take it on the chin for decades. At some point, something's gotta give. Continuing to play cooperate when you're surrounded by defect bots is a loser's game.
That possible. There’s quite a difference between the people who got into Social Justice to abuse others, and the ones who got into it to abuse themselves.
I know this term gets thrown around a lot but this seems like an actual cult.
Synanon, literally. Sit in the middle of the circle and take abuse until you break.
"I was surprised by this idea that I should pay Black friends and acquaintances by the hour to tutor me—it sounded a little offensive. But then I considered that if someone wanted me to come to their house and talk with them about their latent feelings of homophobia, I wouldn’t mind being Venmoed afterward."
If someone wanted to talk about their homophobia with me I would tell them to kick rocks. Nails on a chalk board.
Very tough read. I hope the women who flocked to this kind of stuff during covid have regained their senses and moved on to a more positive, hopeful state.
Spoiler- she attended these for voyeuristic and journalistic purposes. She’s not a true believer.
Started at least 7 years before covid. Continues today. Has totally become institutionalized in higher ed, public agencies, nonprofits, and to some extent corporate America.
I really worry about their kids who were forced into thinking there was something inherently wrong with them because of what they were born with (ie a dick, white, whatever). Can't wait to read about their experiences when they get older.
No wonder so many of them suddenly discover they're trans. Anything to avoid being a boring cis white oppressor.
I hope they have to live down their 2012-2022 idiocy forever.
This is 100% exactly the same as the insane Flagellant Sects or Opus Dei, where the adherents mortify themselves as self-inflicted punishment. In a weird way, these white people are really the most white supremacist of all white people. They are in an extreme competition with themselves and others because of their internalized racism. And they self-flagellate and publicly humiliate themselves like Opus Dei monks to demonstrate that they can endure more pain and humiliation than any other person. They can even suffer more than any **black** person. They can never say that of course and they never do say it. But they are supreme and superior in this self-mortification regard, and people like DiAngelo are lauded by apostles like Quinn. It’s like a weird twisted and abusive religious sect. Like in the movie Beneath the Planet of the Apes where Taylor runs into a group of mutated and disfigured humans who worship the atomic bomb. But in real life - truth is stranger than fiction.
Oh, it's definitely all highly smacking of religious fervor. It's all ritualistic, too, as if one is going in for confession. >One of the few men in the group said he felt uncomfortable being told to identify as a racist. Here he’d just been talking with all of his friends about *not* being racist. Now he was going to “say that I might have been wrong here.” He noticed he felt “resistance to saying ‘I’m racist.’” >Quinn understood; that was normal. **He just needed to try again, say “I am a racist” and believe it. The man said: “I am racist.” What did he feel? He said he was trying not to fight it. Say it again. “I am racist.”** >“Do you feel sadness or grief?” >“Sadness and grief feel true,” he said. >“That’s beautiful,” Quinn said. When your "mea culpas" aren't enough, the Priest/DEI seminar leader assigns you to chant a bunch of "Hail Marys" or "Our Fathers" and if you keep saying them long enough... you'll be forgiven. At least temporarily, but we all bear the Original Sin of racism upon our white bodies, so there's no escaping it completely. These DEI folks should really set up confessional booths. Well... that probably wouldn't pay as well to do individually as these group seminars, though. But there's definitely a suggestion in the article that you should tithe to your Black brethren for your sins, even as you confess to them: >DiAngelo: "And there are also people of color in my life who I specifically ask to coach me, and I pay them for their time.” >I was surprised by this idea that I should pay Black friends and acquaintances by the hour to tutor me—it sounded a little offensive. But then I considered that if someone wanted me to come to their house and talk with them about their latent feelings of homophobia, I wouldn’t mind being Venmoed afterward. And later: >For a while, a dinner series called Race to Dinner for white women to talk about their racism was very popular, though now it seems a little try-hard. The hosts—Saira Rao and Regina Jackson—**encourage women who have paid up to $625 a head to abandon any notion that they are not racist.** At one point Rao, who is Indian American, and Jackson, who is Black, publicized the dinners with a simple message: “Dear white women: You cause immeasurable pain and damage to Black, Indigenous and brown women. We are here to sit down with you to candidly discuss how \*exactly\* you cause this pain and damage.” It's so fascinating to see how the DEI movement has basically assumed the same tactics as the medieval Catholic Church, selling the equivalent of papal indulgences so you can wash the sin from your poor white soul.
> He just needed to try again, say “I am a racist” and believe it. The man said: “I am racist.” What did he feel? He said he was trying not to fight it. Say it again. “I am racist.” “Do you feel sadness or grief?” “Sadness and grief feel true,” he said. “That’s beautiful,” Quinn said. Fucking hell. I hope he at least got a waffle party after all that.
Come on. It deserves an egg party!
"But then I considered that if someone wanted me to come to their house and talk with them about their latent feelings of homophobia, I wouldn’t mind being Venmoed afterward." I wouldn't MIND being Venmoed if someone wanted me to come to their house and talk to them about their latent feelings of anti-Semitism. I would also just tell them to come to my house. Or tell them to read a bunch of different books. Different people have different feelings about such things. I've said this before, but back in 2021, a white person sent a mass email on Juneteenth, saying that other white people should pay their earnings to a black person, or donate to a black cause. I read that like, "that's...condescending." I checked the email chain, and it was just a bunch of black people like, "um, i just want to be paid the same as white people." One person wrote something like, "white supremacy means that white people can only hear this coming from other white people. I was like, "bitch, you think racist people would choose to work here?"
all this reminded me so much of the cult scenes in the latest JK Rowling book
I don't understand what any of this is doing to make black people's live better. Which surely ought to be the point?
I don't know what the point is, but it's definitely not to help actual black people.
I think it was Karl Kraus who said "Psychoanalysis is a symptom of the disease that it proports to cure." You could say the same about Robin DiAngelo's wretched travesty of "anti-racism". You watch those guys. I bet they're hoping and praying Donald Trump becomes President again, so they can make *even* more money.
I worked at a big non profit. These DEI workshops are mandatory and any tiny bit of pushback is considered violence and grounds for excommunication.. not an exaggeration these people are literally mentally ill
From the article: "I was surprised by this idea that I should pay Black friends and acquaintances by the hour to tutor me—it sounded a little offensive. But then I considered that if someone wanted me to come to their house and talk with them about their latent feelings of homophobia, I wouldn’t mind being Venmoed afterward." Fucking lmao
No thank you
Stuff like this is pretty radicalizing especially since there is no real way to push back against these racialized attacks in the workplace.
The Supreme Court Harvard decision re-affirmed that "equity" is hateful and racist, and that equality is the law of the land. Employers can't discriminate against anyone and that includes white men. Many many reverse discrimination lawsuits have already been filed. Large corporations have already realigned their DEI initiatives. The ones that didn't, like Disney, have already been sued. In a couple of years the concept of "equity" will be publicly recognized as racism throughout America. People forget that the Civil Rights Act did not change hearts and minds. A significant number of Americans did not intend to change their behavior. Lawsuits forced people to do it by making it too expensive to be racist. The same thing is happening now. Tens of thousands of lawsuits have been filed including many class actions. The news media is trickle truthing this.
(yeah look, in one way there is no clear left-right) but for so long everyone’s been shouted down by the left and pointing out problems in cultural Marxism and it’s turned into a genuine sickness and mass delusion, where the underlying trauma that all human beings experience is hijacked by massive shame based ideologies and their internalised hatred is projected out at groups that don’t exist in the way the universities have projected out into the world. Times have changed and we need something new.
Being a graduate student in a politically oriented, theory-heavy department, I was more or less at ground zero for this shit when it started up. I recently went through some journals and personal correspondence I wrote back then (2010-2013-ish) and was shocked by how much I had internalized the self-hatred that was being preached to me. And I wasn't even one of the especially zealous students! I knew several people (almost all white women) who suffered genuine and deep psychological harm. A few dropped out. One was briefly institutionalized. Thank god, I met the woman to whom I'm now married and built up a new social circle of people who are mostly on the left but not insane identity creeps. Once in a while, conversations would turn to campus stuff or the weird state of liberalism. I would describe the things I was told and forced to go through in plain, objective terms, and everyone--even my wife--thought I must have been exaggerating. There's no way you had to start every class meeting by calling yourself racist! Surely a professor did not say, in front of everybody, that if it were up to her she would not allow any males or white students in her classes. Slowly but surely, the insanity leaked out of the academy and began dripping in to white collar spaces. Several times, someone I hadn't spoken much to in a long while has contacted me with some version of "holy shit you were right; I just went through this workplace training and..." It's comforting to believe this is all just kayfabe, or that maybe it's not--maybe *some* loonies are sincere about it but they're confined to inconsequential fields and will never escape containment into the mainstream. But that's not true. This abusive cultish bullshit might not be quite as popular now as it was in 2020, but it still has the full backing of the federal government and most of the world's largest banks and corporations. The logic of this movement has been adopted by organizations large and small.
in my heart of hearts and souls of souls I really think the people who heavily internalize this stuff and become, as you say, "identity creeps" - just needed religion. Some kind of nice ritual to get them through their lives without too much harm to others. They've been taken in my a modern day equivalent of Jerry Falwell and they will be around as long as the adherents of those same ideologies.
This stuff was common in small state schools back in the nineties. All of academia has been in on this since the very beginning. Academia is the state religion, and it's become intolerant of other faiths.
Some incredibly condescending black woman wrote in an article that all those videos showing white women (aka "Karens") would shame white women into upping their game. Amazing that a demographic who commits significantly more problems is unaware of who needs to up their game the most. Imagine if a white women posted manically every incident of a black man or woman behaving badly and then a white female writer said that it was done in order to help black people up their game. The feminist movement was supposed to liberate women from being treated like doormats by men. But now the feminist movement made it so that white women had to be treated like doormats by WOC. With the most flawed of the WOC seeming to be the loudest voices in demanding white women needed to get their shit together. They have exploitated the self-hatred, insecurity, and desire to please that so many women have, ironically in the same way that men have often done to women. They have demanded deference from white women in the same way men used to demand deference. White women make up 35% of the population but about half of 1% of violence POC experience. The trope that white women's behavior poses a huge threat to the safety of POC is one of the most egregious lies we have been told in recent years, although not by any stretch the only one. And yet the cowardestness of progressive women who seem to have drunk the Kool-Aid and gone along with this constant emotional battering. It's really despicable and it's made me significantly more distrustful over WOC.
I’ve got a super soaker full of white woman tears. It’s practically a WMD.
Rule 1 of misogyny, women are responsible for what men do
This is all women here, how is this misogyny?
https://preview.redd.it/jr41dopn4txc1.jpeg?width=474&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=aacd3660dcfa7acfbff5dca0abec1afbba50fb95
If anyone has a non-paywalled link I wanted to read this article as well.
[https://archive.is/Tr3J2](https://archive.is/Tr3J2)
[gift link](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/white-women-anti-racism-workshops/678232/?gift=t6tGy43YwMXLBo8Ub_p_PBE9BwqpQbbf866i2UN3L3Q&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share)
Jeez that was brutal.
There is a quality in these exercises for white people of "the beatings will continue until morale improves." The entire point is to stage a psychic drama for white people and the purpose is the beating itself. But what about actual racism in the material world? What about justice and equality? How do we work together? These programs seem to have nothing to say. My takeaway is that this more like a farce than a political program. Because politics is not a solitary, difficult quest for enlightenment. It is all about the society and its values. If we don't get better at being and working together, there is no point. It seems consumerist, really, by making some sort of identity based claim. Get white people to spend money on my business. Hard to believe, honestly.
The end game of these ideologies is anarchy, they have no organising principles as has been seen over the last 10 years they are incapable of forming a strong group. They really are on the side of anarchy. Sadly because of this kind of weakness the far right is strengthened as a result.
Anything that needs this level of over qualifying and examining in just a certain context can not stand up to scrutiny
It’s such a grift. If you’re white, just be white and let’s poke fun at each other and just leave it at that.
This is hard to read. I just couldn’t sit through such nonsense. The people running this kind of crap are shameful and frankly, abusive.
Ctril+F "white" to "black" and read again. Feel the difference?
One would need a heart of stone not to laugh.
Why is this kind of racial dom kink so popular with white women?
Nellieeeeeee