When I just avoid the topic, everything stays OK and everyone remains friendly.
It's unsurprising white male suicide is up, when society is telling everyone white male opinions don't matter and that it's okay to discriminate against them.
(Oh, and the same people who discriminate against white males are usually the people ignoring the fact that most of the gun violence they're complaining about is mostly white male suicide. I agree with a lot of liberal views, but liberals can be funny sometimes too. Maybe instead of trying to ban guns we should just stop telling white males their voices aren't important because they're white males.)
A) They weren't friends, obviously
B) They are crazy on the margins.
This kind of stuff is why I stopped identifying with progressive causes. Sure - I might support a lot of it, but it's off the deep end. And the 'group think' and oppressive and stifling situations were just too much.
To think that you could possibly 'lose friends' over such an issue is the insanity that is 2016.
Hundreds of millions in federal funding is awarded for professors to talk about how we need to "abolish whiteness"; it's the dominant belief system in academics.
It was toungue-in-cheeck support for Hillary, but it's also just prejudiced, 2K up-votes, and a lot of people will buy into the casual bigotry of it. She can get away with it because she's a girl - and she knows she can - which makes it that much more cheeky, which is a Dunham thing - but still.
They lost my support about 10 years ago.
Now I pick and chose the issues.
Talk about coded language.
zeitgeist: Focusing on diversity is just a temporary fad, I'm thinking ahead by sitting this one out
domesticated: Changing my opinion is akin to renouncing my freedom and autonomy
"ally": People like me don't really agree with those crazy diversity people, we just need reasonable cover
mindless pet: Those who don't agree with me have freed themselves from the perils of rational, enlightened thought. Like dogs! Or pigs, being fattened for the slaughter
I do agree with your premise (talking about diversity as a cis-straight-white-male can be a minefield), but there has to be some recognition that one's race (among other factors, even!) can color your experience on the job or in an interview. You may argue that social class or cultural upbringing have more of an impact, but those variables have an undeniable connection to race/ethnicity as well.
Some people saw allies in a positive light while other saw them as being merely neutral -- "it's the least they can do after oppressing us for so long!"
The "allies are merely neutral" attitude was painful to deal with since it 1.) implied that straight people are bad by default and must prove otherwise and 2.) that straight people can never do enough to gain equal moral footing with LGBT people.
I can see how allies who dealt with that sort of attitude might have felt used.
Even a quick skim shows several references to shutting up as well as how it's not an ally's place to discuss racism. I frequently see similar idea whenever a discussion of what being an ally is, comes up. I'd say that being an ally is being asked/told to be silent
Note: I was just saying on another forum that the liberals would often reject that whites in minority-dominated areas deserved any help for structural racism they face but then demand with straight face that same whites needed to fight racism minorities face every day. The feedback indicated people didn't buy that or care to respond. See last paragraphs of No 4 on this list.
In mostly black schools, whites aren't given a turn to speak on this. They shout over us in unison with some beating the shit out of the white people that disagreed with them. That was common for years in all of the ones my brothers and I went to. On public media, they just tell us we don't understand, can't understand, are the oppressors, etc and we need to stfu on permanent basis. Also, we need to promote their message, support their pro-minority programs, and step aside in their ensuing rise.
This isn't about turns. It's about them dominating people they disagree with much like others dominated them. Group vs group politics. They neither care what we have to say nor want us to be able to get our message across. Personally, I listen to and try to help them but not vice versa. They're clear we don't count.
Note: There's certainly exceptions to the above rule as always. I'm not talking about them.
He described that he constantly feels "guilty" about his privilege, like being born a white male meant he had to atone for the misdeeds of other white men in history. I found this concept... somewhat abhorrent, because it's not like he chose to be a white man. People shouldn't feel guilty for their gender, the color of their skin, or any other factor of their life entirely outside their control.
It seems like most men who end up in the social justice circles have a similar attitude, or at least, won't question the opinion of a woman or person of color. If you internalize the idea that being a white male makes your opinion invalid because of your privilege, you just assume you must always be wrong if you disagree.
The other type I've seen, of course, is men who claim to be feminists or social justice allies or what have you to exploit women, and there are a few high profile examples of that in recent history.
The position that is gaining in popularity on the left is no, you can't argue that social class or culture have any impact on a whole number of classic civilizational ills the world has been dealing with for thousands of years.
They argue that social disparity and many other things can be explained by race exclusively. Race is an intractable division and so as a member of an oppressive race you simply can not have a seat at the table of the 'oppressed'.
It gives the groups that espouse it an immense sense of unquestionable power. Its a regressive and fairly totalitarian ideology.
He figured he might have said or done something wrong. I tried to calm him down explaining that they simply don't allow whites to have opinions on topics like this. They become a mob that can gets louder, angrier, and more dangerous as you resist. Mob-behavior is irrational and dangerous in all races. Best just to avoid talking to them until they calm down. They got along better a while after since they just wrote it off as white ignorance that they put in its place far as I can tell. That's how they describe those moments to me in the past.
I told him the real problem was that they ganged up on his ass to intimidate him into silence. We can't get any consensus or improvements if either side uses tactics like that. They all need to knock it off.
I saw same pattern on many online discussions at the time. Heabily polarized with info on each side from biased sources. Any opposing comment, small or large, got same effect of dismissal and/or attacks by large number of people. In this case, there were many of them and one of him. And he probably looked really nervous after initial exchange. Often creates a Pirhana-like effect where whole group jumps in.
I care about this topic because I don't want to be discriminated based on my race or gender.
It is a zero sum game. Companies will require the same head count regardless of its racial/gender composition.
At best, companies right now are lowering the bar on who they give interviews to when an under represented minority is involved (who ends up being upper middle class and privileged anyway, just like how AA works). Organizations are also providing resources and networking that I do not have access to.
On average, I suspect that some companies actually discriminate based on race/gender against white/asian/indian males when comparing interview performance with minorities.
At worst, the equal opportunity act is abolished and corporate affirmative action is allowed. This sound crazy but colleges are still able to discriminate based on race/gender so it's not that far fetched.