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[wierd]

If I am picking up on it rightly..

"It being offensive is not important to the factual nature of a statement."  is the thesis.

EG, the state of being offended by the discussion has no bearing on the factual nature of the discussion.  Being labeled a racist bigot makes people feel bad, but if they demonstrably do and say things that fit that description, their status of being offended is moot.

Deferring to placate that upset feeling, rather than dealing with the problematic behaviors/extant conditions, is how the bigotry persists.



No?

[sluissa]

If I am picking up on it rightly..

"It being offensive is not important to the factual nature of a statement."  is the thesis.

EG, the state of being offended by the discussion has no bearing on the factual nature of the discussion.  Being labeled a racist bigot makes people feel bad, but if they demonstrably do and say things that fit that description, their status of being offended is moot.

Deferring to placate that upset feeling, rather than dealing with the problematic behaviors/extant conditions, is how the bigotry persists.



No?

How about the corollary that labeling others a racist bigot makes you feel good and better about yourself regardless of any accuracy of that labeling or actual effect that labeling has, even if it's sometimes ineffective or counterproductive.

[wierd]

I was not attempting to own a position Sluissa.  I was wanting clarification on Trekkin's position, to remove doubts in my understanding.

[sluissa]

I was not attempting to own a position Sluissa.  I was wanting clarification on Trekkin's position, to remove doubts in my understanding.

My apology then.

This is getting a bit heated and I'm going to bed.

[Trekkin]

I was not attempting to own a position Sluissa.  I was wanting clarification on Trekkin's position, to remove doubts in my understanding.

The thesis of my argument -- which, admittedly, I was too incensed to state clearly -- is indeed about the manner in which bigotry persists, and you've identified part of it. There's a series of ablative defenses people put up about pride in their history and whether this is really the right venue for this sort of discussion and all that happened a long time ago and so on and so forth that effectively create safe spaces for bigots -- and what's more, they sound sensible enough that even well-meaning people can perpetuate them. If we don't point out when that happens, we're giving them a free pass, and that does more for the spread of racism than the backlash from pointing it out. 

So, yes, sluissa is right: not everyone born or living in the Deep South is a racist. That said, this is a region where people put up giant statues of traitors who led a failed rebellion to defend their right to keep other human beings as chattel slaves and did so with increasing frequency when the civil rights movement started picking up steam. Yes, there are racists in other places, but the ones in the Deep South are disproportionately well woven into its cultural fabric. Places can acquire cultures beyond their inhabitants, and that of the Deep South is actively hostile towards a lot of people. We can't change that if we keep giving the actual bigots places to hide so they can come out later and keep that culture intact.

[wierd]

It is my position that both sides are slamming into the brick wall of the backfire effect.

People in the south get called racist quite often, and often by people like Sluissa asserts-- SJWs who are noplace anywhere close to a moral high ground, who make accusations for purposes of self-aggrandizement and self-affirmation, but who lack any real basis for their accusations. (See also, all the falsely accused people who have been doxxed by such groups, who have had their careers and lives ruined, just so some people can feel smug about "doing something" in a race they really dont have a horse in.)

This leads to a confirmation bias:  'The people who shout "RACIST!", are just morons with no horse in the race.'  this results in downplay or outright ignoring of people who try to qualify their statement. eg, "Dude, when you refuse to hire somebody because of their skin color, that is racist bigotry. You TOTALLY *JUST* did that!" is met with "What are you, one of those idiot SJWs? How does this even impact you?"

Likewise, the position that Trekkin takes also leads to a confirmation bias.  All the people that take offense, or take exception to venue for the discussion topic, must be racists seeking to defer the argument, to avoid being confronted about their racist bigotry.


Short of getting a non-human mediator that both camps can agree to listen to, this cogitative dissonance between what is being said/done, and what people perceive about it, causes effective movement to grind to a halt.


Trekkin is right--  Failure to be taken to task for clearly racist actions or statements (Like refusal to hire due to race, etc), by deflecting with appeals to emotion ("It makes me upset that you would call me a racist! I don't want to discuss that with you!" or "This company has been 100% white for 100 years, and it's part of its traditional heritage and culture! I'm not being racist, I'm protecting the legacy of the business!") is how those clearly racist actions or statements continue unimpeded.

Sluissa is also right--  There are people who make unfounded assertions about whole groups of people in order to make themselves feel better about themselves, regardless of the actual legitimacy of the claims being made, and this has real effects on people and their desire to change.


The DESIRE to change is important here.  A person who is unintentionally racist (and yes, that is a thing), can cease being so if they are informed about it discretely, and they have a personal interest in change for self-betterment.  Often, such "cultural" racism is of this unintentional ('I'm just conforming to social norms') type.  People are a product of the culture and society in which they were produced, but also have free agency and can choose for themselves when presented with an option. Cultivation of the desire to take that option, in contravention of the social norm that produces the racism, is fundamental to altering that culture, and changing the cultural norm such that the racism ceases.

You don't get that by pouring scathing hot vitriol on people, but you do have to be a bit pointed with presentation of facts.  Tactful, but persistent and accurate, without embellishment or self-aggrandizement.  It also takes good public speaking and debate skills, because you have to diffuse the "You're just an SJW with no horse in the race!" type arguments. ("No, I am a white person who has to deal with the stigma associated with being both white and successful. When you artificially keep another group down, you add to that stigma, and I don't like it. That's my horse in this race. I want to be seen as successful on my own merits, not because of centuries of dirty pool creating an unfair environment. When you make statements like 'this company has been this way since its founding', you are holding up those centuries of dirty pool like a trophy. Exclusion of employment based on race is dirty pool.  I dislike that. Please stop." etc.)

Sadly, it has also been my observation that once people get "incensed!" by a topic, their ability to think rationally, and make informed decisions vanishes. 

I really have no idea how we can truly and effectively combat this set of problems; they are inherent to the human condition.  Short of making humans stop acting human, I dont really have a viable solution to offer, other than balanced tact, with stern assertion of fact-- even though it is doomed to failure in at least some incidents.

[Starver]

but he's the only guy who isn't calling the working class "deplorable".

Who even actually called the working class "deplorable"?

[wierd]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basket_of_deplorables

Hillary basically said that half of trump's supporters were deplorables.


The majority of Trumps supporters are (deceived) middle to lower class persons.  By combining the two, she called a good chunk of the lower to middle class deplorable.

[thompson]

but he's the only guy who isn't calling the working class "deplorable".

Who even actually called the working class "deplorable"?

No one, but Hillary Clinton was sufficiently ambiguous in her statement that many interpreted it that way.

[thompson]

Now that I'm at a computer I'll provide a little more context that people from an urban background may not appreciate. Wierd has covered most of what I was going to say, so I'll keep it brief. It is also worth noting (with some irony) that much of what I say below can also be applied to how people from racial minorities feel.

As you move away from the major metropolitan centres people have access to much poorer quality infrastructure, government services, employment opportunities and education. The people who live in these areas, of course, understand this as an inevitable consequence of the fact that you get much better economies of scale in the provision of those services in built-up areas, and that schools and hospitals away from major cities have much greater difficulty attracting and retaining staff so the quality of those services suffers as a result. People born in those communities are therefore presented with an ultimatum: stay, or uproot yourself from your family and the community you were raised in and plant yourself into a completely foreign environment somewhere else so that you can potentially (though not necessarily) improve your lot in life. No one is really happy with this state of affairs, but they begrudgingly accept it because there isn't an alternative.

At the same time, these people are also subject to degrading stereotypes about being stupid rednecks. This is a bit of a sore spot in these communities because they feel they are being denigrated for being denied the opportunities that many urbanites simply take for granted. So they resent it. This also drives a breakdown in trust between urban and rural communities where each assumes bad faith on the other's part. Then, when someone from outside these communities points out a real instance of racism no one is listening because the boy has been crying "Wolf" every day for the last 40 years. Community organisations such as churches become particularly central in these communities as there are few other groups with the social clout to organise major events, so attacks against religion are also soft spots for some. Since many on the left also have anti-religious attitudes this further delineates the "us vs them" divide.

The deliberate racists know all this, and they're doing their best to take full advantage of it to drive a wedge between different segments of society. They intentionally discuss issues such as history education in terms of this cultural divide between the semi-mythical urban elite and the long-suffering citizen of [insert location here] to frame it as an arbitrary ideologically motivated attack on their communities and sense of place in the world.

We all have a choice. We can either help the racists recruit these people to their cause by declaring ourselves their enemies, or we can try and engage them in a constructive, respectful dialogue about what are sensitive, complex issues.


EDIT: Another thing work noting is that reputation works very, very differently between urban and rural areas. In an urban area you can walk past a thousand people and not recognise any of them. In a rural area you will probably know every single person you meet. So, if you make a racist joke in an urban setting people will quickly judge you for it. In a rural setting they will probably also know your parents, where you went to school, your employer, where you live, who your friends and associates are, the places you tend to go on holidays, your hobbies, and pretty much everything else there is to know about you. So, that one joke seems very superficial compared to the vast body of knowledge they have already acquired about you over the course of your life and is given very little weighting in their assessment of your character. This creates a culture where people can speak more freely, rather than suppressing whatever racist instincts they may have. People do of course notice these things if it is part of a broader pattern of behaviour, but they also understand that the cost of ostracising someone from that community is greater (especially for high-status individuals who serve important community functions), so people tend to quietly tolerate it. This makes racism much more difficult to deal with as you're fighting against a tightly-knit community fabric. Hence why tact is important.

[Starver]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basket_of_deplorables

Hillary basically said that half of trump's supporters were deplorables.


The majority of Trumps supporters are (deceived) middle to lower class persons.  By combining the two, she called a good chunk of the lower to middle class deplorable.

I know what Hilary said. But that explanation (that I'm afraid I expected and, to my shame, invited) buys into the counter-rhetoric. She never said that the working classes were Deplorable. That's how it was spun, perhaps, but Trump has maligned far more people in both deliberate and unconsideted slurs. (He just brazens those storms out, which might be a 'successful' strategy, but not one that lends itself to what I might term 'accountability'.)


And, mathematically, if even half of the US were Trump supporters (which is arguable: only 46% of those that voted did vote for Trump, only 52% didn't vote for Hillary, before getting into the non-voting voters and the unenfranchised population to introduce further error-bars but "Never Hillary and Never Trump" non-votes by principled Bernieites might estimated by swings to third-party support, tom) that makes her assertion that 25% of the country is Deplorable, and in most definitions of a class system if only 25% are "working" class (should we include non-working "workers" in that count or not?) then you've got a funny class-pyramid. Typically you look at from a third to a half being "working class", sat on the foundation of 5-10% NWWs, a 10% of 'uppers' at the tip (of whatever form the country accepts as its effective-aristocracy - with a Venn diagram of celebrity, hereditary and tycoon sub-classes defining reasons for membership) and the remaining bit between the "workers" and the "rulers" generally gets split ⅔/⅓ as lower/upper middle-class.


The much-touted Basket (the subset of Trump voters) probably contains a groundswell (but by no means not a majority) of W/NWW class people with a proportion in the LMC, less of one from the UMC (given educational biases) and then it's a coin-flip for most of the top echelon, who are probably already set for which side of the bread they think they'd like buttered, and then there's the 1% who likely already have it buttered both sides regardless of whether it's currently wholemeal granary, bagel or brioche.

And the truth is that there are Deplorablesque ("never gonna vote for <us>, they just hate <us> and there's no point trying to attract them, they'll never ever allow themselves to understand <our> perspective") people all over the spectrum, allied/opposed to all parties and subtleties of viewpoint. The kind of Deplorables that are the Trump working-class base don't even like the Deplorables at the other ends of the wealth/political/etc, like the die-hard Bernie supporters who by being Never Hillary in their vote/non-vote probably inadvertently did some of the work in getting Trump over the EC line.

Because it was so tight a race. And a day earlier or later (of the vote and of the initiating of the advanced/postal voting cycles) could have made different reactions to the evolving campaigns push everything every which way by altered protest voting/abstaining. Or we can speculate.

[wierd]

It's a simple logic problem.

Let's say, for sake of argument, that 33% of the public is in the "Never Trump, Never Hillary, FEEL THE BERN!" camp, 33% is in the "I'm With HER!" camp, and 33% is in the "MAGA!" camp.

Hillary says "Half of Trump's supporters are deplorable."

Half of 33% is 16.5%. 


According to WaPo:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/05/its-time-to-bust-the-myth-most-trump-voters-were-not-working-class/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.c9f0c0a62bc9

a March 2016 NBC survey that we analyzed showed that only a third of Trump supporters had household incomes at or below the national median of about $50,000. Another third made $50,000 to $100,000, and another third made $100,000 or more

I DO NOT accept WaPo's verdict, because "Working Class" means different things in different regions.  For example, their cutoff would have people be impoverished, if seen by California standards.  It needs to be weighted not on some imaginary figure that they pulled out of their keester, but by average weighted against the states that are predominantly trump supporting, and what their cost of living and median incomes are. (which WaPo DID NOT DO.)

But let's go with 2/3 of that base.

Even with the above "VERY GENEROUS" allowance for "Feel the BERN!", her comment applies to 10% of the working class.  That's not a small amount. 


With less generous, and more reasonable numbers, since the official national vote tally was 48% for Clinton, 46% for Trump...

Half of trump's base is 23% of the population, which arguably 2/3 could be said to be working class. Or, 15%.


I will stand with you that 10-15% does not come close to "all working class americans".  However, it is above the threshold required to stir and tip a movement.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110725190044.htm


SO,  what Hillary did was extremely not smart.

M'kay?

[Starver]

And we have both 'proven' that she did not call the working class deplorable. You even gave figures less than the ones I was open to considering.

And she did not even describe the Deplorables as working class, which is an alternate skew of the sentiment that sounds similar enough for confusion but still isn't the same.

[wierd]

If you will note, I said "A good chunk", Not "all of the middle class"

10-15% is exactly that. A good chunk. 

Specifically, it is a chunk large enough to foment an unavoidable social convergence.

[Frumple]

And in actual news that isn't relitigating the fucking 2016 election a-fucking-gain, the House has gotten directly involved in one of the legal challenges to the ACA. Here's hoping the new chamber manages to knock some sense into some GOP shitheels.