It always makes me cringe when people assert they are not racist. Association among peoples can smooth the rough edges of prejudice or sharpen them even more. It depends on how needy a person is in feeling secure about themselves. Context can be extremely powerful in both directions. One of the high points in my experience as I recounted above was concluding the two founders of the Black Students' Association on our campus were racists and they agreed with, "duh?" Of course we are all racists. Whether or not we are aware of it we at least think in terms of color.
In the earliest pages of this thread I drew a distinction between racial pride which was sufficient to itself and racial pride that was dependent on superiority over others. As Camus has said, "The Nazis defined themselves in terms of their enemies." So it is with all terms of disparagement. And we see this in culture sometimes as well.
Culture is created by the weak as a defense against the strong. Culture is sustained by the strong as a defense against the weak. The strong to begin with is nature. Successful cultures must always be open to change. Like it or not there are always fluctuations so important to change (Prigogine again). When the powerful are threatened by science or nature now, they react progressively by seeking ways to mitigate entropy increase—what Musk does—or just adding to it by changing the subject. How do they change the subject? By blaming a scapegoat. It's all the Jews fault, we really won the war. It's all the yellow hordes of immigration, we don't need them now the railroad is built. Remember Pearl Harbor, seize that successful farm or small business so well run by someone who does not even speak Japanese. Slaughter the Rohingya, they are not Buddhist. Be God and feel like a god, kill all apostates.
The motto of the Great Seal of the United States was created in 1782 and served us well until 1956 when we substituted a proper motto for the nation formally by statute. With "In God We Trust" we differentiated ourselves from the godless, atheistic Commies. To quell that religious fervor recently whipped up in the new McCarthyism, we should return to the makeshift "E Pluribus Unum." That should also be a motto for the world and guide to our foreign policy. Likely to happen? What do you get crossing an elephant and a rhino? Is it to be the survival of all humanity or only of the powerful whether unworthy or fit? Who will bathe the king if he is the only survivor?
"And so it goes."
This tangentially reminded me of something I saw on the daily Show last week. Jennifer Eberhardt was the guest. She's an African American Stanford professor who has written about hidden racism. She related a story when she was flying somewhere with her toddler son. A black man with dreadlocks came aboard and her son told her that he looked like Daddy. She being a Psychologist asked her kid to elaborate, but while the kid could tell that it wasn't her husband, he just said the guy reminded him of his father. Then he said, "I hope he doesn't rob the plane."
Here is a kid who is African American with two African American parents (her husband is a law professor at Stanford) and he associates seeing another black man with a potential criminal. The kid was only two, and his parents didn't teach him that, he absorbed it from the background culture he's been exposed to.
This addresses a very different type of racial bias/racial profiling/racism than the type we saw on display in Charlottesville with the tiki torches. Her son couldn't be called a racist of a self hating African American, he was 2 at the time, but he had picked up those messages.
I can't quite articulate it, but we're doing a very bad job of addressing these memes that are seeping and have seeped into our unconscious. The left likes to label and dismiss people who display behavior they don't like: misogynists, racists, bigots, white privilege, etc. Anyone outside the left bubble gets deeply insulted and quits listening.
There are advantages to being white in this country. For one thing white people get shot by police a lot less often (though there have been some questionable police shootings of white people too) and studies have shown that incarceration rates for whites and blacks are very different even when, the studies show the same illegal activity (such as cannabis use in states where it's still illegal) is almost identical.
That is flat out wrong. But when lefties go around saying it's "white privilege" the white people living in drug infested trailer parks making minimum wage stocking shelves at Walmart have some things to say that is usually not fit for a forum like this.
A large percentage of Donald Trump's base are white people the modern world has left behind. JD Vance's book
Hillbilly Eulogy is about growing up in Appalachia. He said when he started trying to figure out what's wrong with his culture and why they are behind much of the rest of the country, he found that sociology books that went into the Psychology and pain of inner city African Americans is what resonated with him the most. Same wounds, different place with different color skin.
Many of the original settlers of Appalachia were Scots and Irish being driven from their homes by the British. Some came to the New World as indentured servants and won their freedom after spending time in slavery. Most of the Europeans who did come here left Europe due to some hardship at home, but the Scots-Irish had a particularly tough time in the old country.
The mostly white Appalachians were allowed to live their lives freely while most of the African Americans' ancestors came here in chains and it took hundreds of years to gain their freedom. Than after they were freed the whites in the South did everything they could to keep the African Americans "in their place".
But both cultures find themselves in similar situations now. And in this century both have overwhelmingly gone for presidential candidates they thought would save them. In honorability, intelligence, and many other things Barack Obama is in a completely different league from Donald Trump, but they both have/had fervent bases who would vote for them regardless of what they did.
More of it has to do with middle and upper class privilege than white privilege. Asians aren't white and generally enjoy more "privilege" than white people. About 30% of native born white people have a college degree in the US, but almost 50% of native born Asians do.
IMO calling it "white privilege" is both a cop out and could be called racist in itself. It's completely missing the problem. There are some sub-cultures that have endured many generations of poverty who are increasingly being left behind as the world evolves. These people's families got by with hard labor jobs, but the market for that is going away. Automation is cheaper and far more efficient.
The future belongs to those who make the machines and maintain them. Both require at least some education the disaffected poor don't have.
Instead of blaming someone, we should be looking at the people who are suffering, regardless of skin color, and figure out where we go from here.
For these communities, they often do nucleate around racial identity in part because almost everyone they know in the same boat has the same skin color and the outside narratives they hear encourage these identities. And there is some group who talks in racial trash talking terms about those sub-cultures too. Even whites identify the poor whites as a separate group: white trash, redneck, cracker, etc.
Monday's news was dominated with stories of Joe Biden inappropriately touching women. There have been people noticing that most Democratic candidates have been running around apologizing for all their past sins. The only one who has something to apologize for who hasn't is Amy Klobachar and if the stories about her are true, I don't think she is temperamentally suited to the office. (Not that the current resident is.)
But all the bowing and scraping to please the hypersensitive looks weak to the rest of the population.
I've mentioned I've been reading Utopia for Realists. There is quite a bit in there about universal basic income and all the studies done on it were quite successful. The idea is that everyone has a certain minimum income, no strings attached. If you make more than that, fine, you pay your income tax and go on with your life, but if your income is below that level, you get money every month. The critics say people will just get lazy, but the studies done showed that if you don't have social workers staring down people's neck about how they're spending the money, the vast majority of people spend it on necessities and it reduces stress which both reduces health problems and helps people be better parents. Ultimately the entire community comes out ahead.
At the root the reparations discussion is really about the higher level of poverty among African Americans. Michelle Obama or Oprah Winfrey might appreciate the gesture, but they don't need it. And there are plenty of Hispanic, white, and even a few Asians who need a boost to get into the 21st century economy too.
Mod-on-iPhone (no color):
First time I let it slide...Mods definitely aren’t here to correct grammar or misspelling. BUT...to get wrong the name of a book you understandably like to draw from...that’s just not right!
So, in public: it’s not eulogy. It’s Hillbilly Elegy.
Carry on. 
