Bay 12 Games Forum

New WTF: one of my favourite GMs turns out to be... kind of a massive twat.

You think you know a person and then they just turn around and get all problematic on ya.

I consider Obama to be the first of many black presidents.  Not a "Token black man."
(I mean, seriously--the country elected him TWICE. With a HUGE turnout at his inauguration. The country is ready for black presidents. )

Kinda like Jackie Robinson was the first of many black baseball stars. Not a token black man.

I resent that you decry Obama as a token black man.

Oh, don't get me wrong, Obama being a black president of the US some time ago is pretty cool and unequivocally a Very Good Thing, but absolutely not a broader indication that things are good. In a by now very long and storied history of US Presidents he's the one black dude that's made it up to this august company that notably includes a whole bunch of slavers and a shitton of racists among which a fucking ethnic Dutchman is an aberration, flanked by Bush on one end and Trump on the other, and this I feel to not be a picture that inspires immediate confidence.

Diversification, broadly speaking, tends to be a good thing indeed, but a culture should strive to do even better rather than risk becoming complacent, no?

Your major error, is asserting that I think there is nothing wrong with that laundry list of things you just rattled off, because I happen to be white. Or that I turn a blind eye to those kinds of things--- because I happen to be white.

If anything, I find that *VERY* offensive.

It'd be very troubling if you didn't find something wrong about them, I was just clarifying which direction the endpoint of the reparations needed was pointing since you did appear to genuinely ask (and we obviously have very different opinions of what "reparations" should entail). It's not enough to provide a notional equality of opportunity going forward when said equality of opportunity is tainted by a deep preexisting inequality, not to mention one directly traceable to particular human greed, malice and apathy.

So, at what point does the reparation end, the repair completed?

I ask with absolute sincerity there.  Because basing the condition of "debt" on an unchangable past, and not on a current status, or a trend toward a better future for all, repairs nothing.

That's probably a question to ask after people in the US stop getting bent out of shape about people wanting to tear down Confederate monuments erected almost a century after the Confederacy specifically to remind black people about their place in the southern states, for example, or the housing inequality is rectified, or the black conviction rate doesn't massively exceed the white conviction rate, or the ICE is abolished and its members tried for their many, many crimes, or when any civil reform to do any of the former isn't hamstrung by more or less openly racist initiatives against it, and quite possibly a million other things beyond literally a token representation in the US presidency and neoliberal overtures toward diversification in the highest echelons of power. Or, to be more precise, it's not a question of when it'll end but when it'll actually start in earnest, if it ever will at all. And to tie it back in, it seems a more holistic understanding of racism may well be critical to beginning to make such reparations.

I will acknowledge that we are not QUITE there yet.  However, arguments like "black people cant be racist" work against that outcome, not for it.

The same is true for sexism, or arguments about religion.

At the end of the day, NOBODY is fucking special.  Thats the point.

The real point though is that "nuh-uh, black people can be racist too!" is fundamentally a dumb thing to get worked up about because black people hating white people is not a sentiment born in a vacuum, but as much a fruit of the completely fucked power dynamic passed down through history (and the culture that's unable to address and fix this) as white people hating black people. Atomizing these things and examining them individually prevents you from seeing the important context of things, such as black mistrust of white people being nowhere near as damaging on the whole as the systemic racism they receive in turn. It's more clearly visible for sexism, even, in that separating it into sexism against men specifically without taking into account the culture and relationship it originates from mangles the concept and does the actual suffering of men very little justice.

How was I doing a rhetorical whataboutist trick? I was just noting that she said she said something sexist, and ironic at that.
And then I noted the flaws in her statement.
How was that wrong? I am not "just asking questions", I seriously want to know how it was a rhetorical whataboutist trick.

"But what about the oppression of men" is by now an all-time classic, is all, for reasons already mentioned and elaborated upon with relation to race, some of them in this very post!

C! Big sister Methiant to the rescue!

The idea of the statement is that sexism, like racism, doesn't just involve a single group being shat on but instead a set of groups that have a very particular kind of relationship. You don't just discriminate against one group but also in favor of another. There's no sexism against men because both men and women are covered by the term "sexism", and people who go on about sexism against men usually do so as a rhetorical whataboutist trick, much like you do in that very post. If you're looking for the specific culturally enforced norms and habits arising from male cultural domination that ultimately motivate men to lead highly dysfunctional emotional and social lives, the more precise term for that would be toxic masculinity. If you're looking for genuine man-hating, that's misandry. Woman-hating, you know that one already.

So calm your tits, bud, the Dark Mother's not gonna cut your nuts off or anything. That's for after the revolution comes.

B!