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> Talking about racism makes white people uncomfortable.

When the basic premise of the argument is that white Americans are born irredeemably flawed[1], you're unlikely to win many white supporters other than the most guilt-ridden.

I suppose the tactic is to impart as much guilt as possible. But that doesn't make the argument a good one.

[1] https://twitter.com/DisrnNews/status/1266857347567190016

That is not the starting premise of all who oppose racism. It's not even the starting premise of the majority. It's the starting premise of a few loudmouths who unfortunately were given a microphone. They're doing their cause more harm than good by saying stuff like that.

Why are they doing more harm than good? Because, after a claim like that, the conversation is over. There's absolutely no point in talking to someone who makes claims like that. And it makes you less likely to be willing to talk to the next person, either. So the net amount of whites willing to learn and talk about race and racism goes down when people say stuff like this.

(It's also factually untrue, blatantly unfair, and bigoted...)

Van Jones was right (even the best intentioned are conditioned by forces beyond their control), and you added the word "irredeemable". No one said there isn't a fix. Culture racism is learned, it can be unlearned.

I think just about all white people would do well to look around the neighborhood that they grew up in and think about the politics of how it got to be that way. I went to a high school of 1400, and in 4 years there were all of 3 black kids. Turns out this is because no black family was allowed by any bank to get a loan for a mortgage in the area until 1974. White blindness to their privilege is a huge impediment to change - people have literally no idea how different people are treated when there's a different skin color.

The tactic is to get people to actually listen so that they might agree its an actual problem and then actually do something about it.

You identified a legitimate issue that was corrected in your area in 1974. That's good. However that does not impose decades or centuries of penance on an entire race of people, the vast majority of which had nothing to do with it.

To do so is scapegoating and white Americans have every right to resist it.

Imagine playing monopoly for 400 years with someone, and they got to go around the board for the first 300 years without you making a move, buying up all the property. Then for the next 50 they allowed you to start to make moves, but every time you started to gain just about any money they would push you over and rob you (see: sundown towns, lynching, the tulsa massacre, segregation, jim crow, redlining, police brutality, poor neighborhoods and absolutely awful schools).

There's been no penance. There's been no justice. And people aren't even asking for that, they're asking for a seat at the table and a chance to play the game, which is STILL constantly being denied. Its not scapegoating, its fighting against systematic oppression that you yourself continue to support.

What do you mean win over? I see proponents as an educational mistake.

Making white people uncomfortable, by itself, does nothing to improve anything for black people.

Hiring more black people, funding more black people, buying from black owned businesses, providing education opportunities to black people, making police accountable for how they treat black people, are all ways we can help black people.

The only thing that "making white people uncomfortable" accomplishes is making more money for white women like Robin DiAngelo selling their books and consulting services.

Unfortunately, many white people feel uncomfortable about hiring more black people, funding more black people, buying from black owned businesses, providing education opportunities to black people, and making police accountable for how they treat black people.

Buying some books can feel like the lower friction option.

3: I think proponents are full of themselves and at some point I would tell them.

I am white for most people aside from some racists. The real ones that think skin color to be indicative of quality.

If that comment makes you feel anything, it was probably directed at you.

> we can't make progress as a society until we own that discomfort and are willing to have frank conversations about racism.

I am all for having frank conversations, but I think the topic needs to be broader than "racism". It needs to be "systematic inequality of treatment". Or even better, "systematic violations of basic human rights". Then we can focus on why our society, which is supposed to be based on everybody having the same basic human rights, is not achieving that in practice, and how to fix it. Focusing on one particular group of people whose rights are being violated only distracts from that overall objective.

Why do we have to talk about everything bad before we talk about one thing that's bad, especially when it comes to black people? Why, when the aftereffects of American slavery are being discussed, is there always somebody who says that we have to talk about Middle Eastern and African slavery first?

Are the only important problems universal ones?

No but it comes off as disingenuous because people talk about a lot of ill in the US without getting the level of outrage that this topic brings, rampant inequality, corporate stranglehold of the government and horrible work conditions for many people, regardless of the color of their skin. So when someone says, lets talk about more than this problem, they get sidelined and everything else is pushed further to the back burner.

> Why do we have to talk about everything bad before we talk about one thing that's bad

You're misunderstanding my point. I'm not saying we have to fix everything at once. I'm saying that the "one thing that's bad" is not racism; racism is just one particular way the root problem manifests itself. The root of the problem is corruption: people in positions of public trust misusing the power they are granted to indulge their personal prejudices, whatever they are, instead of serving the public. Even if you could wave a magic wand and remove all racism from the world forever, that wouldn't fix the corruption problem; corrupt people in power would just find different excuses for violating people's rights. You have to fix the corruption.

And you won't fix corruption by focusing on one particular prejudice that the corrupt people happen to have, even if historically it has been the most common one (which, btw, I'm not sure is actually true--I think religious prejudice is at least as common historically if not more so--but I'm willing to assume it is for the sake of this discussion). The problem is not the particular prejudice the corrupt people have; the problem is that corrupt people are in power in the first place.

>...Why do we have to talk about everything bad before we talk about one thing that's bad, especially when it comes to black people?

Sanitizing discussions of race is something people have always done when it comes to Afrian-Americans. Notice the progression goes from African-Americans -> Systematic Inequality of Treatment -> Systematic Violations of Basic Human Rights -> Everybody. The intersection between race and power in this country is textbook White Fragility, so the go-to move is to "All-Lives-Matter" it

> the go-to move is to "All-Lives-Matter" it

No the "go-to move" is to refuse to realize that we as a society have been trying to "fix" racism for decades now (arguably centuries), and it's not helping. The very people all the landmark civil rights laws and court decisions were supposed to help are worse off now than they were in the 1960s when those laws were passed.

So instead of continuing to do this not-working thing, maybe we should ask whether the root problem is something else, and work on fixing that instead.

Because it is the correct approach. There is no white fragility.

But isn’t it also important to appropriately identify and address the most disenfranchised group when we want to talk about how to help systemic violations of human rights? I mean, if I was debugging something and ignored the segfault because it only happened in one piece of the code, and I only solve bugs that apply to the entire codebase, I’d be a shit engineer

> isn’t it also important to appropriately identify and address the most disenfranchised group when we want to talk about how to help systemic violations of human rights?

Back in the 1960s, yes, that was a reasonable approach, and we took it. In your coding analogy, we believed there was a specific bug and started applying patches to address it.

But we've been doing that for more than half a century now and it hasn't helped. So now maybe we should consider whether the actual bug might be something else, requiring different patches to fix.

I think you have both generic problems and module specific problems.

Arguably, no we haven’t been doing that for more than half a century now. There was a backlash after the initial push in the 1970s that clawed back a lot of gains and several places (Eg New York City) are still highly segregated in its schooling (and gotten more segregated over time).

> There was a backlash after the initial push in the 1970s

That doesn't mean we haven't been trying to fix racism for more than half a century. It just means the "fix" hasn't been working.

Fixing racism hasn’t garnered significant traction with significant capital support for a while. Additionally, I would argue that attempting a 50 fix for systems that are multiple centuries old (and have had that much time to work their way into every part of society) seems short sighted.

We can't solve systematic inequality until we solve the inequality black people face.

You want to broaden the topic but by doing so, you're erasing all nuance and approaches for solving a problem.

> We can't solve systematic inequality until we solve the inequality black people face.

You're looking at it backwards. The inequality black people face is systematic inequality. (I would argue that it's actually as much based on culture and poverty as on race.) But you can't fix it by focusing on the racial aspect of it. You have to focus on the systematic aspect, because that's the root problem.

> You want to broaden the topic but by doing so, you're erasing all nuance and approaches for solving a problem.

We've been trying "all nuance and approaches" based on the racial aspect for decades, if not longer, and it hasn't helped. The systematic problems, if anything, are worse now than they were in the 1960s when the landmark civil rights laws were passed. If those laws, plus the huge structure of regulations, affirmative action, and so on that has grown up around them, hasn't fixed the problem in more than half a century, maybe it's time to consider the possibility that the root problem is something else, like the system as a whole being corrupt, and try to fix that instead.

I hear that a lot, were blacks really better off living under Jim Crow than they are today?

Talking about racism makes white people uncomfortable because whether it's talking about a specific individual or not, there's an implicit undertone that they're also white and part of the problem.

This is particularly grating when considering that white people are a very diverse group and the experience of a white male in Iran is completely different to the one of a white upper-class female in the US or a lower-income white male in the US.

The US media and social-media have infected Europe with this us-vs-them attitude and are ironically fueling racism against white people.

Racism against white people? Definetly notin the wstern world.

And if you really want to put a strawman for anti-white-racism up there, use some of the actually happened atrocities against white land owners in some Africna countries after de-colonisation. Obviously without the historic context, because it wouldn't work otherwise. Don't pick Iran, besides being the current boogey man for conservative circles, it really is a bad example for racism. Unless you want to go deep into the shiit-suunit conflict in the Arab World. Which would obviously totally off-topic for this thread.

"Racism against white people? Definetly notin the wstern world."

Iirc, in the UK, around half of victims of race hate crimes are white.

Official government numbers (the full report can be found here: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-..., race starts at page 15 of the PDF):

- Percentage of adults affected by hate crime by ethnicity 2015/16 to 2017/18: White 0.1, Mixed 0.5, Asian 1.1, Black/African/Caribean/Black British 0.6 and other 1.0

- Same, by religion: Chistian 0.1, Buddhist 0.1, Hindu 0.7, Muslim 1.5, other 0.5, none 0.1

All adults: 0.2

Conclusion: White christian are by any number underaffected by hate crime in the UK

Additonal numbers form London's MOPAC for victims of racist hate cimes in the 12 months up to June 2017: 56% male, 30% black, Asian 25%, White-North European 25%. Obviously, percentages cannot be summed up here. Again, whites are underaffected. perosnal view: Numbers in London might be higher than elsewhere for whites, I don't have a source for that, so.

Anyway, both numbers are an order of magnitude away from the 50% you mentioned.

The figures you quote are the percentage of victims by ethnicity. So, for example, the number of black people who have been victims of hate crime. I was referring to the total number of victims by race. I suspect the latter number was in my memory because of how these, and similar, figures have been reported in the past. E.g. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/oct/22/ukcrime.race.

Some back of the envelope calculations suggest that my 'roughly half' is correct given the figures you provide. Of 1000 people in the UK, 920 will be white, and 80 non-white. Given the rate of white hate crime victimisation you gave, .92 white people in that 1000 will be a victim of hate crime. If we lump all the non-white people together and use the highest rate of victimisation (Asian:1.1%) that gives us .88 non-white victims.

The comment I replied to claimed that racism against white people does not exist in the western world. That claim does not appear to be true.

Murder =/= hate crime, so murder has nothing to do with racism against white people. by the way, the comment was mine.

Forget back-off-envelop calculations, take official numbers. And that is 25% for London.

Racially motivated murders, which the article is about, are hate crimes. As such, they are prosecuted as hate crimes in the UK.

The calculation I made was from official figures. A smaller percentage of a larger demographic can make up a large percentage of the total.

Even if you want to ignore every number except your 25%, those white victims of racially motivated hate crimes presumably exist, do they not?

I go with official government numbers first in cases like that. period. And what makes you think police forgot to include the murders you mentioned in the official numbers?

Not some calculation I cannot follw. Not press reports. And unless you go and read the official report (there is even a spreadsheet, so you can use prime sources directly), I gonna stop now.

The police did include the murders in the official statistics . I think the problem here is that you don't understand the data you quoted and how it relates to the demographics of the UK.

Attacking people because of their skin color (even verbally) is the very definition of racism.

This is exactly what's happening these days as white people are all put into one bucket and blamed for all the injustice in the US.

Iran is a good example. Turkey too or any country that has a different religion/political system but where a part of the population is in fact "white".

Mexico's another good example.