Z has a point with this @Californiagrown. Some of my in-laws were giving me a hard time over drinking a bang energy drink. I was confused. Apparently, they view bang as racist because they did not make a statement about the killing of George Floyd. I was thinking, is an energy drink really supposed to make a statement. I guess now they are.
Another instance of this was with a friend posting saying that she is going to stop following another person on Instagram because she posts too much about crafts, and not enough about fighting racism.
This is IMO an example of over correction. Do we really want every single company making virtue signaling statements for every event?
Surely you can think of a large number of societal changing thoughts, expressions, actions carried on by a few that touched people by the millions.
Christianity - a dozen guys
Islam - 1 guy and a few followers
Nazi - 1 guy and and a few followers originally
Marxism - a few thinkers
Social media - a few nerds in school
USA - handful of idealists
Rhodesia - a tyrant
BLM - couple of radicals
Not all ideas that gain traction for whatever reason or by however means, are useful for society. Most people consider chop as abnormal or deviant to society. And as listed above, some cancers would have been to have been better to have been eradicated from their early appearance.
I understand that big things can come from what started as only a few folks. I just dont understand your point with FB and i guess social media in general. Are you saying that they are bad because of what they allow people to do and allow bad ideas to take root and spread, or are you saying they are bad because these few companies intentionally shape opinions and narratives behind the scenes while claiming those opinions organically occured?
A statement on the corporate twitter does little of substance, so i get the revulsion towards blatant virtue signaling while not actually doing anything.
But actively fighting racism comes in many forms, not just in lip-service press releases. Folks seem to be placing too much emphasis on the saying and not the doing.
Being non racist CAN mean that you sit back and let racism happen around you, and you do nothing to stop it. which is why that is not deemed to be enough. Actively fighting racism means that you are working on not being racially biased, and speakup/act when you see racism around you.
I hate people who live their lives through the lense of social media. Usually people i donāt want to be friends with.
Being āanti racistā in practice has nothing to do with fighting racism because it is a racist notion to begin with. It requires an assumption of motive and those assumptions are shaped by skin color. It is Marxist nonsense, retooled to appeal to modern idiots.
Thatās how local restaurants get slandered and embroiled in the anti racist activism of people so stupid they canāt see past their own nose.
The only success stories of anti-racism exist in the minds and egos of those who practice it. It is a central tenant of cancel culture used to grant a veneer of justification for our modern American Red Guards behavior.
That sounds like an overreaction from a bunch of recreationally offended keyboard warriors.
Has the term anti-racist been accepted by society as something more than being anti-racist? Are you saying that calling out racism when I see it makes me anti-racist, or doesnāt make me anti-racist.
Lot of labels flying around these days without consensus on the meaning.
That is also by design. Marxist thinking requires muddying up the language. We used to broadly agree on what a word means. Thatās no longer the case.
But you are the one saying antiracist means something more than being antiracist. Everything i see says being antiracist, just means being actively antiracist.
So you would be the one muddying the meaning, and imparting a significance beyond the widely accepted, right?
Where does it say i must be anti-non-racist, in order to be antiracist?
Also, itās worth noting that a tame, anodyne letter published in Harperās Magazine by a bunch of leftist intellectuals warning about the dangers of cancel culture (although they take great pains no to mention it by name) and the importance of free speech is producing a visceral, Stalinist response from the woke crowd.
The CNN article is pretty tame, although it doesnāt fail to mention that the initiator of the letter, Thomas Chatterton Williams (guy in the middle) is advocating - oh the horror - that one should strive for an eventual transition to a post racial society. (some Baptist minister that got killed a while back was saying similar stuff if I recall correctly)
On Twitter itās even more bizarre - obese, non-binary (not to mention very white) individuals are hurling racist - sorry, āanti-racistā insults at him for having married a white woman and written on Twitter years ago that he prefers jazz to Jay Z.
Kinda funny that some signatories now want their name removed from the letter because āthey didnt know who their fellow signatories would beā. They dont want to be associated with the letter, not because they disagree with its content, but because they found out that other people who were supposed to be enemies, share their same opinions. SMH.
Iām sitting here trying to follow along but this particular term really doesnāt make sense to me.
Are you actively looking for racist things to rail against? What criteria do you use to identify the racist occurrence? And when you do successfully identify the racist occurrence, what exactly do you do? I guess, how does one actively be antiracist? Like what are the steps?
To me, it simply means trying to not be biased myself, and to speakout/act against racism when i see it.
But the folks here who are antiā¦antiracist, seem to be telling me im not going far enough and that to be antiracist i need to be anti-non-racist as well.
A couple examples would be telling a buddy āthats not coolā when he uses the n-word, instead of just cringing silently. Or an example from when i was in college: i went skiing with a buddy freshly from China and afterwards we stopped at the KFC in the small N. Idaho town because they had an all-you-can eat buffet that i was a regular at haha. Well, we go in and the lady behind the counter immediately points at my buddy and says āwe dont serve his kindā. We walked out and i never went back. Looking back, i should have called the cops, or reported to BBB, or in this day and age left a yelp review. Staying silent, while not participating in the racism would be me being non-racist. Acting as i described above would be me actively being antiracist.
Thats how i see it anyway. Ill probably just stick with what i think it means as that seems the most logical.
No one should be obligated to be actively anti racist. But if you arenāt, you are a racist. Imagine not having done anything racist in your life and then, when someone says in response to you claiming to not be a racist, that you are a racist. You canāt think of what you did that was racist so you ask, what did I do that was racist? The answer is not what you did but what you didnāt do. How does not doing something racist make you a racist?
No. I use a textbook definition of racism and modifiers like āantiā.
Anti-racism, as the term is used today, is an example of a muddied-up term introduced by Marxists to make their positions harder to argue against. They do this not because the positions are sound, but so they can pretend that words like āanti-racistā and āanti-fascistā are stand-alone good things, completely divorced from the actual actions being taken by people labeling their actions that way.
These idea and policies are so patently stupid that it requires muddied-up language to facilitate the mental gymnastics necessary to believe in them. You canāt mobilize a legion of idiots by making them fans of totalitarianism, you need to convince them to unknowingly support totalitarianism by believing they are great moral crusaders of anti-racism and anti-fascism.
Very little of whatās coming from the left can hold up to even basic levels of scrutiny. The reek of Marxism, long wafting off of the Democrats policy ideas and rhetoric, is now so strong and repulsive that it cannot be ignored.
I get what youāre saying and agree that kind of thinking is bad. I just donāt see it being pushed by any significant portion of the left, and I havenāt encountered it IRL in any shape or form. To me it seems like you are taking a view held by an extreme few and attributing as a problem of a large portion of folks left of center. Or that soon all of the left will be thinking they same way as the small extreme minority.
Iām admittedly VERY skeptical about slippery slope arguments, so maybe thatās why Im skeptical here.
The rhetoric being used would also suggest otherwise.
So would the unimplemented policies that are part of the DNC and Joe Bidenās platform, which would have been called fringe communist nonsense if he tried to run on it in the 1992 primary against Bill Clinton.
As does the reaction of police which has left cities like Atlanta, NYC and Chicago, even more violent and deadly. Tell the cops, ACAB. Have politicians join in the witch hunt, scapegoating and undermining. All because of a BLM (and Antifa) message of defund and abolish the police. None of the policy makers had defunding the cops on the agenda. Reform, yes. But the message from the āinsignificantā portion of the left is now dictating policy that affects people. Not just people, but a people they are not even a part of.
BLM was not founded by poor blacks. Colin K was never in poverty (nor was his white girlfriend who is the ābrainsā of the identity politics operation). None of those white Antifa members are from the ghetto. But somehow they are telling us what should be done.
Iām also not too keen about the brazen lying by major media outlets in support of Marxist organizations, goals and rhetoric. The mask is off, thereās no pretending that the NYT, CNN, MSNBC and many others are anything but propaganda extensions of the Democratic party. Their mission is to sell ads and shitty ideas, and lying by omission, misleading people and presenting opinion and activism as journalism or even fact is how they do it. Informing the public is nowhere near the top of their list of concerns. Quite the opposite, in fact.
The slope is here. Now. Weāre on it. I often wonder, whatās the guiding principle of the Democratic party? The voters are generally easy to understand, theyāre compassionate people who believe in governmentās ability to translate their good intentions into real-world outcomes via policy. I think thatās a fair assessment. Thatās more or less how I saw it when I voted D.
Those people arenāt the ones driving Democrat policy right now, nor have they been for at least the last 10-20 years now. The reckless social experiments need to stop. If thereās a common, unifying principle I can see for the policy goals and outcomes of the Democrats for most of my adult life, along with the last 200 years, it seems to be long-term destabilization of the country.
Again, to be crystal-clear, Iām not saying thatās the goal of most Democrat voters. Or even many at all. Iām saying that is the clear outcome of the policies you support, even if you are ignorant of the policies you support.