Pointing at white people and screaming "RACIST!"

[ericbarbour]

The new "big entertainment thing", thanks partly to the internet. I've had it done to me a couple times (very badly and ineffectually) and seen it done to others--always online. Twitter is the most popular vehicle, but sometimes, a private mailing list produces some deeply extreme and disturbing behaviour. Both the right and the left have their respective classes of special loonies.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06 ... -shor.html

Yes, many of the comments for the article are bonkers. Damn. This is another example of the "Mighty Empire" in decline. If this shit keeps up, the Democratic Party is liable to self-immolate.

As usual, the right is giggling at them:
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/06/ ... iot-study/
https://www.theamericanconservative.com ... avid-shor/

[badmachine]

2016 broke a lot of people.

[Abd]

Racism is normal human instinctive behavior. it becomes toxic when mixed with hate and arrogance, and the accusation is offensive when it is itself mixed with hatred. The basic reactive instinct is dangerous, like all instinctive responses, but if the racism is not mixed with entrenched hatred or arrogance, it is not difficult to recognize it and compensate.

Hatred of racism is understandable, but probably retards progress, as it encourages denial.

[Abd]

2016 broke a lot of people.

Yes, many. When people break, many become haters. It may seem easier than taking responsibility, and then haters reinforce each other.

[ericbarbour]

This old thread deserves an addendum. It's five years later.

David Shor ought to be a paragon of progressive politics. Nerdy, Jewish, worked for the Democrats for years. But his article goes on and on about that stupid Twitter war instead. Said flap is almost totally forgotten today otherwise. I wonder how many times a prospective employer looked at Shor's WP bio and said "nope, not hiring him, too racist/too crazy/too risky/whatever". And American progressives call themselves "tolerant". Ha ha.

Meanwhile, Robin DiAngelo is treated like a hero. Despite not actually being very heroic. Largest editor: Bilorv, a noticeboard nutcase who loved to talk about the Black Mirror tv series and transgender issues. Other editors of DiAngelo's BLP include some suspected Cirt socks. Bilorv quit last year. Not "fun" anymore?

[Archer]

As with most political neologisms, one loses very little by removing the word "racist" from their vocabulary entirely.

If anyone can think of a sentence that includes the word "racist" and cannot be phrased just as clearly and precisely (if not more) without using the word, please do share it. The media constantly drills this word into the public consciousness. "Racism" represents a sin, we're told. Yet it seems as though most instances of "racism" either involve some other serious wrongdoing ("assault", "murder", and so forth - old words) or amount to 'thoughtcrime' i.e. having the wrong opinion. Last I checked, one is entitled to their own opinions and values and deciding upon them is not the prerogative of others.

It seems best not to use the word. Personally I make it a point to avoid using the media's fluff political jargon in the first place.

[Archer]

The zen of python (pep 20) asserts
Explicit is better than implicit - a self-evident principle that I believe applies to any sort of communication.* So to make the above point explicit, I believe the word "racism" represents a (presumably deliberate) conflation of two distinct concepts - "thought crime", as it were, and violence/oppression. The powers that be (ab)use it for chilling effect and to smear people who have inconvenient opinions.

* Incidentally, I do not trust those who enshrine allegory, symbolism and other needless abstractions/obfuscations. This had always struck me as pretentious and annoying in the past but the more I think about it, the more it seems like a type of madness, if not outright malevolent.

[ericbarbour]

As I said back in 2020:

If this shit keeps up, the Democratic Party is liable to self-immolate.

And so......
https://apnews.com/article/democrats-po ... e7cad4e536
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/1 ... e-00188547
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/11/6/ ... trumps_win
https://www.foxnews.com/media/ny-times- ... o-far-left

And we could go on and on about Chuck Schumer.
https://jacobin.com/2025/03/democratic- ... ck-schumer

[Strelnikov]

This old thread deserves an addendum. It's five years later.

Meanwhile, Robin DiAngelo is treated like a hero. Despite not actually being very heroic. Largest editor: Bilorv, a noticeboard nutcase who loved to talk about the Black Mirror tv series and transgender issues. Other editors of DiAngelo's BLP include some suspected Cirt socks. Bilorv quit last year. Not "fun" anymore?

Robin DiAngelo was roundly ripped to pieces by the "dirtbag left" podcast Chapo Trap House back when DiAngelo's book White Fragility started building steam among corporate HR types two years after it hit the market, especially by Chapo member Amber A'lee Frost. So not all of this is applauded by left-wing people.

[ericbarbour]

They did a good number on DiAngelo--she's doing this not because she really cares about POC, she's doing it because IT IS A BUSINESS.

Now, six months into Trump II, when the Mighty President and his acolytes are running around the country trying to destroy and demonize all DEI programs......DiAngelo has practically disappeared. This happened last year and received very little notice. The usual claim that it was a "dirty trick" by the political right was made; she appears to be right (it was ignored by "ordinary media" but jabbered about by right-wing outlets) yet I can't tell if this "plagiarism investigation" ever amounted to much. The NYT mentioned it dismissively-once.

Still, I suspect the current climate has been very bad for DiAngelo's business, as corporations and government agencies destroy or de-emphasize their DEI programs. Actual bigotry continues in the USA at its classical volume. She was pranked by Matt Walsh. Lucky her?

Right now, if anyone even mentions DEI, it is usually something incredibly petty and stupid. Like that weirdly-popular Mr. White Fragility, Charlie Kirk, blaming the Texas floods on DEI. Oppression has become a joke. Podcasts are now the "political will", usually mealy-mouthed (Chapo being a very rare exception). And this country is screwed--as it always was in the past.

A recent book about this was Redefining Racism by Jake Klein. It received very few reviews, but this one was a good summary. Ouch:

In the “Reading Guide” for White Fragility, for instance, DiAngelo writes that “this book and its arguments build on antiracism scholarship and activism that people of color have written for generations.” But of course this isn’t true. DiAngelo draws so heavily from the works of Bidol, Terry, Edler, Katz, and others that, as Klein writes, “her decision not to cite any of them could arguably be described as plagiarism.”

All of whom are white people who made "careers" like DiAngelo, by talking about racism. Ouch again:

In 2017, More In Common published a taxonomy of seven different political tribes in the United States, ranging from “Progressive Activists” (those on the far-left) to “devoted conservatives” (those on the far-right). The study found that 80 percent of progressive activists are white. Only three percent are black. Contrary to the claims of DiAngelo and others, this movement is mostly white people talking to other white people about minorities. Klein makes an important point that it’s been this way for the past sixty years.

I'm still amazed that Chapo Trap House survived the past few years. Didn't somebody try to "cancel" them or something? Barely remember it. The only recent mention I can find is this Vanity Fair story from January. They made no bones about why the Harris campaign failed: "she didn't believe in anything".