airmangataosenai said:

When I talk with other white people about race, I often am left with the impression that they resent POC and are jealous of the concept of having a racial identity where they can take pride in. In other words, they may say they wish no one talked about race but in reality, what they really want is a way to posotively self-actualize as something greater than themselves, which would also explain the over the top reaction to the flag protests, at least in part.

I often wonder what if anything could be done to accommodate this. I really feel like this existential crisis plays a larger role in a lot of the problems we face than many realize. I cant think of a solution though given how easily any effort would almost inevitably lead to aiding white nationalism.

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airmangataosenai said:

When I talk with other white people about race, I often am left with the impression that they resent POC and are jealous of the concept of having a racial identity where they can take pride in. In other words, they may say they wish no one talked about race but in reality, what they really want is a way to posotively self-actualize as something greater than themselves, which would also explain the over the top reaction to the flag protests, at least in part.

I often wonder what if anything could be done to accommodate this. I really feel like this existential crisis plays a larger role in a lot of the problems we face than many realize. I cant think of a solution though given how easily any effort would almost inevitably lead to aiding white nationalism.

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Hollywood Duo said:

I don't buy it, we have St. Patrick's Day, we have Oktoberfests, we have Columbus Day, etc. There are multiple white ethnic halls in my area. People celebrate their cultural heritage constantly.

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airmangataosenai said:

Those are specific ethnicities though, most white people in America do not have recent European ancestry and are mutts and there is a general taboo of tying specific ethnic pride to racial identity. Moreover there is definitely movement recently against Colombus Day, although I support that.

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Hollywood Duo said:

I don't buy it, we have St. Patrick's Day, we have Oktoberfests, we have Columbus Day, etc. There are multiple white ethnic halls in my area. People celebrate their cultural heritage constantly.

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airmangataosenai said:

Those are specific ethnicities though, most white people in America do not have recent European ancestry and are mutts and there is a general taboo of tying specific ethnic pride to racial identity. Moreover there is definitely movement recently against Colombus Day, although I support that.

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airmangataosenai said:

Those are specific ethnicities though, most white people in America do not have recent European ancestry and are mutts and there is a general taboo of tying specific ethnic pride to racial identity. Moreover there is definitely movement recently against Colombus Day, although I support that.

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CrocMother said:

I can walk around pretty much anywhere and people assume I belong there.

I was sleeping outside in Malibu and the neighbors were smiling and waving. I walk into incredibly fancy residential buildings in NYC where I do some dog sitting on the side and the concierges don't give me a second look. Shop owners are happy to see me.

If you're enclosed within a white bubble and never bother to educate yourself, you may live your entire life and not see these things.

This ignorance fuels so much racial strife in this country. That's why Pop's statement is so powerful. White privilege has to be out in the open and discussed.

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CrocMother said:

I can walk around pretty much anywhere and people assume I belong there.

I was sleeping outside in Malibu and the neighbors were smiling and waving. I walk into incredibly fancy residential buildings in NYC where I do some dog sitting on the side and the concierges don't give me a second look. Shop owners are happy to see me.

If you're enclosed within a white bubble and never bother to educate yourself, you may live your entire life and not see these things.

This ignorance fuels so much racial strife in this country. That's why Pop's statement is so powerful. White privilege has to be out in the open and discussed.

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DietRob said:

What she said about segregation really stuck with me. If white people follow the lives that are often laid out, going to the good school, in the good neighborhood, getting into the good college, and la d the good job, a whole life can pass by without meaningful interaction and relationships with POC and there would be no sense of loss.

That is very profound to think about.

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Sunster said:

this feeling becomes greatly magnified if you are doing business in an area where most people are not white. You can compare the treatment of others to yourself. If you pay attention you'll see many differences.

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SyenceLabb said:

So how do we explain the Asian anomaly? I mean, they have to be an anomaly if all of our institutions are born out of whites privilege. Last I checked, the average Asian family makes more than the average white family. Does Dr. DiAngelo have anything to say on this?

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SyenceLabb said:

So how do we explain the Asian anomaly? I mean, they have to be an anomaly if all of our institutions are born out of whites privilege. Last I checked, the average Asian family makes more than the average white family. Does Dr. DiAngelo have anything to say on this?

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Sunster said:

Layman here correct me if wrong please.. They didn't start off as slaves for one. They came here as laborers and merchants. So while they faced/face oppression and racism they had less mud to trek through. Mud like, cycles of poverty, state sanctioned violence, incarceration and numerous other things that are part of the black experience here.

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Harrison Bergeron said:

It was a soft slavery for sure, but they were never absolutely ripped from their cultures and traditional identities. That said, all of Asia was also various groups conquered by white people as well. I mean, the African American identity is such a uniquely violent thing though. Groups of people taken from various origins, put in bondage, stripped of their identities and bred by other humans to become labor drones.

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Sunster said:

not all. but I get what you're saying and agree.

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Sunster said:

Accepting I have implicit bias and I need to unlearn racism wasn't very hard for me but it was a little shocking. I imagine that is the hardest thing to accept for white people overall. We see racism as black and white. You are either a good person who is not racist or a terrible person who is. That is what will stop most white people from even considering their role in this racist system. "I'm not racist! My crazy uncle is!"

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SyenceLabb said:

So how do we explain the Asian anomaly? I mean, they have to be an anomaly if all of our institutions are born out of whites privilege. Last I checked, the average Asian family makes more than the average white family. Does Dr. DiAngelo have anything to say on this?

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Harrison Bergeron said:

You're right, not all. It was an over-simplification on my part. The oppression wrought by European colonialism was certainly diverse and complex though.

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Sunster said:

Layman here correct me if wrong please.. They didn't start off as slaves for one. They came here as laborers and merchants. So while they faced/face oppression and racism they had less mud to trek through. Mud like, cycles of poverty, state sanctioned violence, incarceration and numerous other things that are part of the black experience here.

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Slate said:

As historian Ellen Wu explains of these historical realities in The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority, ”The United States' battles against fascism and then Communism meant that Asiatic Exclusion, like Jim Crow, was no longer tenable." The result, she argues, was the ”entrance of Asian Americans into the national fold" and, in the 1960s, a ”profound metamorphosis [of Asian Americans] into the model minority: the Asiatic who was at once a model citizen and definitely not-black." Japanese and Chinese in the United States became ”living examples of achievement in spite of the persistent color line and because of their racial (often coded as cultural) differences." And this reasoning, in turn, ”undergirded contentions that African Americans' cultural deficiencies was the cause of their poverty—assertions that delegitimized blacks' demands for structural changes in the political economy and stigmatized their utilization of welfare state entitlements."

Even as he avoids the words black or African American, that charge—that black deficiency (or even pathology) drives black disadvantage—is the core of Sullivan's inquiry. And his argument, unstated but clear as the blue sky, is that black Americans have only themselves and their culture to blame for continued racial inequality. That this flies in the face of what we know about structural and institutional disadvantage—of ongoing discrimination in jobs and housing, of the long and enduring effects of past discrimination and bias, of racial disadvantage among well-educated, two-parent black families, of the half-hearted efforts to remedy those accumulated burdens—is, at most, a minor obstacle in Sullivan's narrative. It also flies in the face of what we know about Asian American gains, which followed that aforementioned—often politically motivated—mid-century decline in anti-Asian racism. Even still, Asian Americans face continued discrimination; among the highly educated, for instance, Asian men earned significantly less than their white counterparts.

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Washington Post said:

For those who doubt that racial resentment lingers in this nation, Asian Americans are a favorite talking point. The argument goes something like this: If ”white privilege" is so oppressive — if the United States is so hostile toward its minorities — why do census figures show that Asian Americans out-earn everyone?

In a 2014 editorial, conservative commentator Bill O'Reilly pointed out that Asian household incomes were 20 percent higher than white household incomes on average. ”So, do we have Asian privilege in America?" he asked. Of course not, he said. The real reason that Asians are ”succeeding far more than African-Americans and even more than white Americans" is that ”their families are intact and education is paramount," he said.

This claim has been with us since at least the 1960s, when it served as a popular rejoinder to the challenges issued by the civil rights movement. Many newspapers printed flattering portraits of Asian Americans to cast skepticism on the people marching for economic and social justice.
...
This is one of several problems with the model minority myth. (Here's another.) Many people hold up Asian Americans as proof that hard work and education leads to success no matter your skin color. On the contrary, these statistics show that being a minority in the United States often means working harder to earn less.

More education will help close racial wage gaps somewhat, but it will not resolve problems of denied opportunity. In fact, recent studies suggest that income disparities are growing at the very top between blacks and whites. According to an Economic Policy Institute report from September, the difference between what a white college graduate earns and what a black college graduate earns has widened since the 1980s.

Emphasizing the power of educational attainment also obscures the barriers that remain. Despite the complaints of Stephen K. Bannon, President-elect Donald Trump's alt-right adviser who's a darling of white supremacy groups, it is simply false that ”two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia." Even among technology companies, which hire a disproportionate number of Asian workers, Asians are vastly underrepresented in upper management. Yet, the model minority myth makes a statement like Bannon's feel true to many.

Asian Americans — some of them at least — have made tremendous progress in the United States. But the greatest thing that ever happened to them wasn't that they studied hard, or that they benefited from tiger moms or Confucian values. It's that other Americans started treating them with a little more respect.

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VICE said:

My students of color often come in engaged with issues in their communities, but it is harder to convince them that their issues connect to issues in other communities. Their knowledge of how race and difference affect them directly far exceeds their knowledge of why these problems exist. The question of why racism exists links Asian Americans to other minority groups, because it leads to white supremacy. The question of how Asian Americans are different sometimes ends up with students blaming their parents for the model minority stereotype, something that comes with a much more complex and systemic history.

"Model minority" is a term that came into use during the civil rights movement, first put forth by sociologist William Peterson to frame a comparison of "ethnic minorities," to divide and conquer. Asian Americans, it was said, kept their mouths shut, worked hard, and eventually succeeded, so why couldn't African Americans do so? Why did they have to keep fighting and bringing the focus back to race?

If Frank Chin has gotten one thing right, it's that Asian Americans themselves have internalized these claims. They are loath to get into the issue of race unless it affects their own community. Then they might turn out for their community alone, and directly or indirectly side against other communities of color—note the Peter Liang protests, where Asian Americans rallied for an Asian American police officer who killed an innocent, unarmed black man instead of seeing that the privileges police officers get are part of the same system of power that views black people as dangerous threats without privileges and creates the overarching racial hierarchy.

There is an advantage to keeping our heads down. There is an advantage to working hard, ignoring other people's problems, fighting only for our own rights. But it's the same advantage that makes Asian Americans white supremacy's one success. It's the advantage conceded in the dividing that enables conquering. It's advantage without equality. It's an A that's really an F. Asian Americans need to get more involved in the fight against disempowerment. Our disempowerment is not free or protected from the disempowerment of black lives—the link is white supremacy and our empowerment won't come by meeting white supremacy's demands. We must stand with the larger civil rights community that has fought for many of the rights we enjoy in the first place. Participation is mandatory.

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SyenceLabb said:

So how do we explain the Asian anomaly? I mean, they have to be an anomaly if all of our institutions are born out of whites privilege. Last I checked, the average Asian family makes more than the average white family. Does Dr. DiAngelo have anything to say on this?

Click to expand...

CrocMother said:

I can walk around pretty much anywhere and people assume I belong there.

I was sleeping outside in Malibu and the neighbors were smiling and waving. I walk into incredibly fancy residential buildings in NYC where I do some dog sitting on the side and the concierges don't give me a second look. Shop owners are happy to see me.

If you're enclosed within a white bubble and never bother to educate yourself, you may live your entire life and not see these things.

This ignorance fuels so much racial strife in this country. That's why Pop's statement is so powerful. White privilege has to be out in the open and discussed.

Click to expand...

Harrison Bergeron said:

It was a soft slavery for sure, but they were never absolutely ripped from their cultures and traditional identities. That said, all of Asia was also various groups conquered by white people as well. I mean, the African American identity is such a uniquely violent thing though. Groups of people taken from various origins, put in bondage, stripped of their identities and bred by other humans to become labor drones.

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Sunster said:

yes and I believe it's had a direct and negative impact on the development of countries who were colonized. Imagine a world where European explorers traded ideas and goods with these countries on equal terms instead of colonizing and exploiting them. Imagine how different countries rich with natural resources would be.

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Harrison Bergeron said:

Well, to be fair, Europeans were at war with each other, and still are. The players have shifted over time, but it's all part of that chain.

Absolutely it negatively impacted development in these countries though. They consumed them as resources. Robbed societies of able bodied, working age men and women, mono cropped the best farm land, purposefully under-developed infrastructure to maintain control and order, sold back the finished, higher end products to colonial markets cementing massively disparate terms of trade, and when colonial administration became too expensive, or their inputs obsolete they up and left, and when things don't go so well in these former colonies they keep coming back with new deals and ideas of how to fix it. A dictator who stole from the people and destroyed the country was just fine for the West, as long as it meant they rejected the Soviets' deal.

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airmangataosenai said:

When I talk with other white people about race, I often am left with the impression that they resent POC and are jealous of the concept of having a racial identity where they can take pride in. In other words, they may say they wish no one talked about race but in reality, what they really want is a way to posotively self-actualize as something greater than themselves, which would also explain the over the top reaction to the flag protests, at least in part.

I often wonder what if anything could be done to accommodate this. I really feel like this existential crisis plays a larger role in a lot of the problems we face than many realize. I cant think of a solution though given how easily any effort would almost inevitably lead to aiding white nationalism.

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ZealousD said:

Yeah. I was able to watch this video and didn't really feel like it challenged any of my beliefs to any extent. But personally, I get hung up on understanding what it means to be "white" or "whiteness" outside of systematic racism. As she points out, white people often don't feel like they "possess" race. Race is an attribute that other people have. And I think this attitude isn't just a white problem, but that non-whites have internalized this as well. That's why there's a strong sense of "black culture" that can be appropriated but nobody ever talks about a "white culture" that is appropriated. Not that white culture doesn't exist (ain't nobody but white people drinking craft beer, golfing, or going on nature walks) but nobody recognizes white culture as being white culture.

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