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All of this revolves around a selective assumption that a disproportionate outcome (if the outcome isn't favorable to a group with a large activist base in US universities) is evidence of discrimination. Note that I say "selective". Males are disproportionately incarcerated and killed by police, but nobody is saying police are systemically bigoted towards males, because it's blatantly obvious that males disproportionately commit crimes vs. women. However, the same depth of thought is ignored the minute the discussion turns towards discrepancies where women/Black/etc are on the "losing" end. At the end of the day, the ideology is shallow, and equates to something very similar that emerged in the waning days of the Weimar Republic: Group X (German Jews) has more on average than Group Y (German Gentiles), and this must be because those with more are rigging the system and taking from Group Y. They ignored the cultural differences that make Ashkenazi Jews vastly more successful than other ethnic groups wherever they go, because that would have forced German gentiles to look inward, rather than externalizing blame. I grew up in a mostly Black county, and didn't sit in a classroom where I wasn't in the minority until I left to college. By all definitions, my mostly Black school was underfunded and fit the narrative of "systemic racism". But this ideology makes no allowances for the non-Black students who attended my school. Was I a victim of systemic racism because I attended the same schools? I lived in a trailer park, and my family's income put us squarely below the federal poverty line. But this ideology makes race the primary and essential reason for all things bad in the world, ignoring the complexity of life that emerges when viewing it at high resolution. Like all fundamentalist ideologues/religions, it constructs a low-resolution narrative, and places blame for all bad things in the world on a nebulous superstructure (Satan, White Supremacy). And predictably, it is filled with clerics who desperately try to blow up any incident into evidence that the nebulous superstructue "great evil" is far more prevalent than it really is. In the 80's it was devil worshippers, and today it's "White supremacists". The desperation is readily apparent in attempts to frame a wave of anti-Asian violence that was primarily perpetrated by young Black men into a narrative of newly ascendant White supremacy. The worst part of this ideology to me has been it's utterly US-centric focus, where things like objective testing, education, and work ethic have been labelled as "White", ignoring the numerous cultures throughout the world, such as your Middle Eastern ancestors or China, who were conducting Civil Service entrance exams while my ancestors in northern Europe were running around the woods with bows and arrows chopping each other's heads off. The biggest element of White privilege that I possess is not having a tiny group of useless, whiny, unelected activists get put on a pedestal by corporate media as personifying and representing my views on the world. Al Sharpton doesn't speak for Black Americans, and was never elected to do so. BLM doesn't speak for them either. They only claim to do so, and are convenient tools for White elites to shift the conversation from discussions on economic class to purely race. For an ideology based in Marxism, it's amazing how much it undermines the ability to organize unions. After all, Jeff Bezos just had to make s few donations here and there, put a few words on his website, and was let off scot free by the media for his awful treatment of workers and aggressive union busting. |
(sorry, im a little rusty on this subject)