Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
The hot Liberal phrase is “Check Your Privilege.” They’re even making it amandatory grad school course.
Glib; but useless . . . except as an insult. And it’s a perfect phrase for a Liberal, as it has no set meaning.
If it means “all White men automatically succeed” it’s plainly wrong: see all the White men who don’t succeed.
If it means “all White men have a leg up and that helps them succeed” it’s plainly wrong: see above, and also see successful non-Whites.
If it means “some White men have a leg up, depending on their birth order, intelligence, athletic ability, parents’ finances, or other factors” it’s so broad as to be useless as an analytical tool to measure societal bias as a component of success.
A phrase that has no set meaning is useless, except for shutting down conversation. “Check Your Privilege” implies that as a White man, I enjoyed privileges that others did not. That means I didn’t earn my success, it was handed to me. As the beneficiary of largess distributed solely by skin color and not by individual effort, I lack the moral authority to tell others how to live their lives to succeed. It’s akin to “You didn’t build that” with the same implied insult.
In other words, “Check Your Privilege” means “Shut Up, Honky” which ends the conversation and destroys the opportunity for learning.
The worst part? We should engage in self-examination, for our own good. “There, but for the grace of God, go I” is an acknowledgment that we all have a leg up on somebody and it’s generally nothing we earned, it’s some advantage we were given by God.
Aborting my endeavor to understand my place in the universe by shaming me for what I can’t control – my skin color – is perverse.
Joe Doakes
It’s distressing to see the extent to which “education” has become “learning how to shut down inquiry”.
When a liberal jack-ass says something as ridiculous & insulting as ‘Check your privilege’, I say….
‘Go back to the kid’s table. Us adults are having a discussion.’
Systems that rely on who you know rather than what you know are profoundly conservative and slow to change, as it can take generations to alter the status quo. With today’s system of hierarchy and promotion, it will take generations for women to assume the positions that merit would dictate. The same is true for various types of minorities, and even for white men who don’t fit a certain personality profile.
Another fortune cookie response from “Emery”.
Why so much fear, PM? And how white do you have to be to be in the white race? I’m pretty pale in the winter, but sometimes I darken up in in the summer. Just how white is your race, PM?
There’s no White genocide, PM. You’ll live a long life, and die a crabby old SOB with those ‘folks’ paying for your Medicare, and you’ll hate them for it. Good luck with that.
Typical – factually inaccurate, and whiney.
Conservatives believe things which are not true or factually inaccurate, and they pretend to be victims when they are not.
Mitch McConnell is just the latest to acknowledge racsim exists, and that it is endemic among conservatives, especially the Tea Party. Imho, that demonstrates to me that the further to the right one goes, the greater the problem with racism and sexism/misogyny.
http://nationalreport.net/secret-mcconnell-recording-tea-party-lost-primaries-hasnt-learned-conceal-racism/
Secret McConnell Recording: Tea Party Lost Primaries Because It “hasn’t learned to conceal its racism”
“They have their strong base, their core. But, they don’t have success courting the middle. You know why? It’s their overt racism. The Tea Party hasn’t learned to conceal its racism. That’s where they fail. The Republican party knows better. Want to keep minority voters from the polls? Fine, set up hindrances to “prevent voter fraud”. Want to cut social services? Fine, but do it for “fiscal conservatism”. These Tea Party idiots and their supporters are out hollering the N word, calling Obama an ape, suggest Michelle is a transvestite. That alienates the middle. That’s what costs them. You want to think those things? Think them to yourselves. You want to legislate against that them? Come up with an excuse. The Tea Party will remain an also ran unless they work on their poker face a bit more”.
That, along with assumptions about privilege by economic demographic, is the “check your privilege” in question. That privilege is real, and not just by race or ethnicity, but also by gender, without regard to merit:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/23/gpa-income_n_5373078.html
Female ‘A+’ Students End Up Making As Much As Male ‘C’ Students
“If you want to make more money, it helps to do well in school, but it helps even more to be a white man.
The better your grades in high school, the more money you are likely to make later in life, according to a study by researchers at the University of Miami and Nova Southeastern University. But gender apparently matters more than grades: A woman with a 4.0 high-school GPA still makes less, on average, than a man with a 2.5 GPA, the study found.
The study also found that minorities tend to benefit less dollar-wise from getting good grades than their white counterparts, even though African-American and Latino high-school students with high GPAs are more likely to continue their schooling than white students with good grades.
The chart below, from the study, shows the difference in earnings for men and women based on high school GPA. Men are in red, women are in green. These are average salary figures for people aged 24-34.”
You seem to be in heavy denial while at the same time effectively defending your actual privilege.
Which proves my other contention; conservatives tend inherently to be hypocrites.
DG,
I’m not going to address the “racism” bit, because frankly it deserves no response.
As to the bit about womens’ grades – can you notice a key problem with the “study?”
It doesn’t distinguish by *how* people earn their money.
A “Social Work” or education major (fields dominated by women) with an “A+” is going to earn less than a mechanical engineer, a Java programmer, a Petroleum engineer, or an accountant (all dominated by men) with “B” averages.
As always, “DG”, your fact-checking relies on three things:
You used to do better, DG. Think about it.
The racist comments to this post are by Dog Gone and “Emery”. DG throws in sexism, to boot.
This statement by “Emery” is both cliche’d and a trivial truth.
Systems that rely on who you know rather than what you know are profoundly conservative and slow to change, as it can take generations to alter the status quo.
I believe that Emery only posted a concise definition of a “culture.” Unless he specifically limited it to our country and only to White people, it is hard to find fault with the post.
A White man moving to Kenya and expecting to fully participate in it’s society as an equal would be sorely disappointed. And vice versa (although some might disagree and point to the White House …).
I took Mr. Doake’s post and went in another direction: Equality of opportunity is both a conservative and liberal value. Affirmative action is about remedying the effects of unequal opportunity. Which is obviously a very poor solution, with many poor side effects. In an equal opportunity society, children of the poor would be equally prepared for life when they reached adulthood. No outcome based forced equalization can address that. We have affirmative action because we have failed to otherwise provide equality of opportunity. Fix the one, and the need for the other disappears.
Equality of opportunity is both a conservative and liberal value. Affirmative action is about remedying the effects of unequal opportunity.
I am afraid that this is wrong. AA is about the state attempting to privilege some groups while de-privileging others. The groups themselves are arbitrary. That is all it about.
Family wealth and family status are far greater indicators of “privilege” and opportunity than “race” or “sex”.
/”The racist comments to this post are by Dog Gone and “Emery”…”/
I’m shocked that you didn’t find a way to incorporate Nazi into your comment. ;^)
”The racist comments to this post are by Dog Gone and “Emery”
That’s the truth, isn’t it?
I know that liberals don’t believe this, but when conservatives talk policy, even in private, race and “racial codewords” are rarely, if ever mentioned. Conservatives tend to look at people as freely-choosing economic or cultural actors, not as instances of “types” doomed to act out historically determined roles.
It is liberals, not conservatives, who view individual humans as being doomed to behave in certain ways — look at the way they treat gays, for God’s sake. It is conservatives who say that sexual behavior is a choice, it is liberals who say sexual behavior is inborn and can’t be altered by individual choice.
Emery pointed out ” . . . fix the one, the other disappears.” Agreed. How?
Did I enjoy privileged opportunities not available to others? I checked my “privilege” in a post on May 16. Of the factors that contributed to my success, none were race or sex; all were lifestyle choices made by my parents and later by me.
Every woman and every Person of Color has an equal opportunity to make the lifestyle choices that lead to success. Until they make those choices, they won’t succeed by merit, only by legislation. People who make bad choices fail. That’s not racist sexist paternalistic hegemony. That’s natural selection.
We need address the actual problem, namely that poor children finish high school substantially less well prepared for college, and thus much less likely to succeed, even if they are admitted to programs preferentially. In an equal opportunity society, children of the poor would be equally prepared for life when they reached adulthood.
We need address the actual problem, namely that poor children finish high school substantially less well prepared for college
Which is actually several problems:
Let me clarify my comment, Emery: “People who make bad choices fail, and so do their children.”
Society could force those people to make better choices For The Sake Of The Children by prohibiting and vigorously prosecuting failing choices. We won’t, because America is run by the ME generation which doesn’t care about the damage in its wake.
And all of that is irrelevent to the conversation anyway. “Check Your Privilege” as the phrase is used by Liberals doesn’t mean “Smaller Class Sizes,” it means “White Males Cheat.” No amount of educational reform can cure their obsessive delusion.
.
“We need address the actual problem, namely that poor children finish high school substantially less well prepared for college”
This is seldom true for poor east Asian children.
Some of the most unintelligent women you’ll ever meet have the biggest mouths, vis. Betty! McCollum, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer and mongrel cur. They have turned the public display of low IQ’s into an art form
And every time one of their gems is published, it sets back the 98% that are perfectly capable of handling most any job.
Meanwhile, dim wits like Emery, being too stupid to even come up with original mummery, not only get caught plagiarizing everything they write, but choose the most idiotic twaddle to be found as fodder, and everyone immediately assumes he’s just an old drunk.
Sexism I tells ya!
I believe that these issues can be accurately summed up with two old and well- but over-used platitudes. “You can’t un-ring a bell” and “You can lead a horse to water … etc.”. Any wrongs perpetrated on minority groups by majority groups cannot be remedied by perpetrating similar “wrongs” on the majority. At best the “wrongs” should be discontinued and the minority groups be allowed to proceed with equal access.
Equal opportunity solutions are hardly equal. Preferential treatment without foundation is like teaching in a foreign language that is unspoken by the students. The audience needs to be brought up to speed, or rather, they need to bring themselves up to speed. Those who may sit back and just wait for what will be given them will get little benefit from much of it unless they motivate themselves to learn how to use it. An admissions officer at a fairly high-priced college once lamented to me of all the free-ride “scholarships” intended for students “from the neighborhood” – code word – that went unfilled due to lack of interest from the target audience.
Kel says: “This is seldom true for poor east Asian children.”
Asians are more willing to insist that their children learn and practice what their parents regard as correct social norms. As these norms are common throughout society, all know them from late childhood. Because all practice them and nobody challenges them, the norms change little and wisdom neither increases or decreases.
Americans, in contrast, allow their children to think freely, act rudely, disrespect all forms of authority and make mistakes with a great deal of impunity. They view insistence on adhesion to established social norms as repressive, and are much more willing to believe that social norms are adaptive and can improve over time through a process of change. So young Americans, deeply flawed and ignorant, learn wisdom not from their elders but from trying and seeing different forms of interaction, failing often, and eventually finding a solution through experience. That this painful process of discovery eventually leads to greater wisdom amongst older Americans is perhaps not surprising. This greater wisdom, of course, is not for the most part passed on to their children.
A more Confucian society teaches wisdom through adherence to existing norms and tradition. An individualistic freedom-loving society learns through making the same mistakes repeatedly, generation after generation. I suspect the American system produces a wider spectrum of wisdom, and a collective wisdom that is more adaptive. The Asian system will produce a more harmonious, but more oppressive, society.
emery,
what a stunning mélange of ethnic stereotyping and magical thinking!
Not a very convincing argument kel.
ok emery ,
cite the study that shows how poor east asian children in america “finish high school substantially less well prepared for college”, presumably on a par with poor black children in america. This study you will cite will run counter to the statistics published at regular intervals by the US Dept Of Education.
While Confucianism is relevant to the Han the other major east asian ethnicities are not as easily stereotyped with that very broad and, as you describe it, fanciful brush.
I live in Hawaii. The state bureaucracy, legislature, and public employee unions (very powerful here), are dominated by third generation Japanese immigrants. They aren’t any smarter than anyone else.
The Pacific region has some really interesting cultural divisions. They should not be over-simplified.
Check Emery out; going all Otto Fenichel on us. Been reading the magazines in the shrink’s waiting room again, haven’t ya little guy?
Oh, Otto Fenichel. For a moment there, Swiftee, I thought you were comparing Emery to Otto from “A Fish Called Wanda”:
Otto West: Don’t call me stupid.
Wanda: Oh, right! To call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people! I’ve known sheep that could outwit you. I’ve worn dresses with higher IQs. But you think you’re an intellectual, don’t you, ape?
Otto West: Apes don’t read philosophy.
Wanda: Yes they do, Otto. They just don’t understand it. Now let me correct you on a couple of things, OK? Aristotle was not Belgian. The central message of Buddhism is not “Every man for himself.” And the London Underground is not a political movement. Those are all mistakes, Otto. I looked them up.