@Wizz said:
@Derp said:
@Wizz said:
I am going to 100% guarantee you that no one has thrown a bottle at your head or screamed a racial slur at you for just trying to buy groceries. Or just for walking down the street. No one has denied you fucking housing, or told you or your partner to leave a public area because you held hands.
I think my partner, Will, would disagree with you. Racial slurs, no, I'll grant you that much, but race isn't the only category that happens in. But sure, let's turn that into a race war, instead of shitty humans being shitty.
Genuinely my bad for assuming. But you're absolutely right, it's not the only category, and you then have the experience to know that. That's what we're talking about here, is that being white and a dude means that you are shielded from so much bullshit. It's crazy to not admit to it, for real
@Derp said:
The whole thrust of your argument is "Affirmative Action is bad!" Yeah, maybe. It's a gray area. You had to struggle a little harder to get into school? Aww man.
And if I were a black person being denied scholarships based on the color of my skin? Would that be outrage-worthy? If we're going to talk equality instead of revenge, then at what point do we actually step up and start saying that it shouldn't happen to anyone?
You weren't "denied" a scholarship for being white, you didn't qualify for the scholarships that exist. That maybe sounds pedantic, but it's an important difference, because (in part) Affirmative Action was a response to systematic denial of service, extreme cultural inequity. And again, I'm not saying that in some senses Affirmative Action has been taken to an extreme in some interpretations, or that it's some sort of permanent solution to the problem. You're not arguing with anyone here, so far anyway.
But you're arguing both sides of it here, which is a relatively common thing in these circles. You can't say 'you don't qualify for X thing based on your race and that's okay' by backing it up with 'being white shields you from so much other bullshit that it just balances'. The same could be said for the other side, in that there are inherent advantages to the color of your skin and things that white people have to deal with that people of other races are legally shielded from.
And that's why this argument bugs the hell out of me. Everyone just assumes that it only goes one way, when it doesn't. It's just that one side isn't allowed to talk about the hardships that they endure based on it because people from our distant past made some bad calls, and now we're forced to live with the stigma of it because society won't tolerate any deviance from the mea culpa routine. We inherited a cross to bear, and any sign of wanting to shrug that off is simply not tolerated, and words like 'racist' get thrown around before anyone even asks 'why?'
We're not equal to each other, sure. I can get behind that. But one side is not universally more disadvantaged than another, either. We're unequal in different ways. In that sense, I guess we are sort-of equal in the sense that we each get handed some bullshit in areas we shouldn't be handed bullshit in, but until the bar is set at a position where everyone can reach it at the same damn level across the board, granting more special stuff to one side is ludicrous, and pretending that whitey has his boot on everyone's neck is shortsighted to the point of lunacy.
(FWIW, this is the same reason that I disagree with Obergefell. Yes, let's create another class of citizens to grant special legal statuses to rather than just saying something as simple as 'marriage as a legal institution makes no sense, so we're going to simply say that any two adults who wish to enter a domestic partnership can, under simple contract law, and leave this term 'marriage' to mean whatever people want it to mean for them'. Because insulating one group never breeds hostility or causes problems, and there's no way we'll be facing any future backlash from that. Right?)
I fall into at least one minority group that's taken a lot of fire, and I have some quesionable political views of my own. I'm used to things getting heated.
