Micro-aggressions.
If Democrats make people uncomfortable enough, voters will choose a crazy narcissist rather than endure the shaming and guilt-trip the Democrats serve up.
Many Americans are a little bit racist, and don't know it.
Whether they know it or not, they resent being called racist.
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| Billionaire progressive. Not credible. |
Nothing is more common than ethnic profiling, which can be called race-consciousness. Or maybe racism.
Who exhibits race consciousness? Whites of multiple European ethnicities. Blacks of various ethnicities and skin hues. Asians of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Mongolian, Indian, Pakistani, Arabic, and Russian background. Jews. Native Americans.
Everyone.
Regular readers of this blog recognize an on-going theme here: Recognition that humans make snap judgements about a people in politics based on first impressions and body language. People hear tone, observe posture, absorb the overall "look," and decide how they think that person fits into their political interests and orientation. The denoted content of their policies is less important, especially since what they say is filtered through the impression of who that person really is. Words voiced by a person for whom the words "make sense" might be persuasive and credible, but the same words are considered phony when voiced by "the wrong person."
Tom Steyer, billionaire investor and political activist, voiced policies similar to those of Elizabeth Warren's. No one believed a rich, White, Yalie saying he would take on the wealthy and distribute wealth down.
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| Buttigieg |
We take a quick look, absorb what we think we see, and then make inferences. We profile. Then we fit that profile into categories we think we understand. At a grocery we see a frail old guy, a young mother with toddler, a middle-aged businessman in dress suit. The information that is instantly available to us is appearance: age, gender, clothes.
Plus race. We notice that, too.
In real life the glancing impression of the person in the grocery store would more likely be "frail old White guy dressed like a golfer" or "young Latina mother in jogging outfit with Latina daughter." I don't consider this prejudice. I consider it cultural competence, absorbing the information readily available, a signal of the person's overall place in the world. Were the frail old man to add a single item, a blue vest with the word "SAFEWAY" on it, it would immediately signal something important about his role. He would be an at-work store clerk not a retiree shopping.
I consider the instant profiling of other humans natural and inevitable so I do not ascribe guilt or shame to it, nor do I think it possible to change it. It is as natural as breathing or urinating, so there is no purpose in saying one is good and the other a private sin. Or deplorable.
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| Example of a brief training module |
Heads up to Democrats. People don't want to "do the work." They don't consider themselves racist and they don't want to be accused of it. Sigmund Freud, asked about the phallic meaning of a cigar, is said to have quipped, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." They don't want malice and racism inferred from something they consider innocuous.
Trainings warn people of micro-aggressions and micro-assaults that are not intentional but "typically occur due to underlying biases and prejudices outside
of awareness." Asking if one can help a disabled person open a door is not common courtesy, it is an implied insult that the person cannot function independently. Oh.
A person observing that a Black person is articulate is neither a neutral observation nor a compliment. It is an insult, because underlying the thought must surely be the premise that the person might not be articulate, perhaps because of his race. Oh.
This one tripped up Joe Biden in the 2008 campaign for president when Biden made that observation about Barack Obama. Biden was called out as a poorly-closeted racist. There is, of course, another potential explanation. Barack Obama is, objectively, unusually articulate. Obama is in the same league as Bill Clinton and Pete Buttigieg on the scale of putting ideas into words extemporaneously and persuasively. Possibly Biden's comment was just a cigar.
The premise underlying DEI and micro-aggression training is the presence of malice, even if unintentional and unacknowledged, because it comes out of known or unknown prejudice. Properly understood, the dumb questions one asks or the dumb efforts to be empathetic are insults, not courtesies. Oh.
This is a bigger deal than Democrats seem to recognize. Leading Democratic politicians dare not signal that they are aware of the political damage cultural warriors are creating for them. It is a "Catch-22" situation, similar to the ones that confounded 17th century puritans attempting to prove their godliness in examinations for church membership. Assertion that one was godly showed the sin of pride, proof that one was still outside the state of grace. Admission of imperfection was confession. Lose-lose. It starts with a presumption: You are bad, whether you know it or not.
Therefore, Democrats are doing a version of what office-holding Republicans are doing as regards the Big Steal lie. They are keeping their heads down. They know the party line is damaging, but they cannot speak up. Activists in their party won't allow it.
It seems obvious, but it needs to be said: People do not like to be told they are deplorable. who insist on telling people they are deep down bad--or are silent when other Democrats do it--lose elections.
6 comments:
Dinosaur: "What was that?"
In a society that is moving, often imperceptibly, towards social justice it isn't enough just to recognize that perceived differences are detrimental to progress. If nothing was done to change the behavior of men, women would never have gotten the vote. Slavery? Yeah, not really that great, but what can you do?
Resistance to change is a reality of change. Entropy governs the Universe.
James Carville recently made news by speaking out about "woke", and by doing so identified himself as obsolete. He's not likely to change his view, nor are any of the others who chafe against modifying their prejudices. It doesn't matter.
Change is coming, change is here, change will prevail...woke.
What makes people change an assumption or behavior when they're an adult? Almost nothing! That's why advertisers, knowledgeable of branding, want to get the very youngest consumer using and identifying with their product. The ethical underpinnings of all adults were formed early at the hands of those individuals that raised them be it parents, guardians, or institutions. Once formed their way of sensing the world is baked in. What shakes the core ethical code and biases is an event that imposes a deep emotional impact. One tragic example is a person that grew up with guns around the house has is only son killed at age 7 by the neighbor boy when they played with daddies gun. The idea of a loaded gun around the house brings a feeling of dread and a entirely different attitude about gun ownership. With regards to race a person raised to be suspicious of a person of another race falls in love with an individual of that race and learns that what they had thought to be true was false. We can also aside our biases and prejudice in times of national emergency but like going to war we form a team of all able-bodied people to win but, in many cases, return to our biases and prejudices as soon as the war is over. In the case of Republican Trump almost what ever he said engendered a feeling of disgust in Democrats. But when Bill Clinton said similar things about his extramarital relationships Democrats were willing to forgive him or overlook what he said and did because he was "one of them". That was my reaction to Clinton and it was the wrong reaction. Wise up Dems or the country will lose big time.
I looked through the training module for which you posted the link. It strikes me as not interested in laying guilt or shame on anyone but educating those who take the training. I would find it useful. For me, however, the far greater need, if we are to become a more just society, is to modify the way the "American" story is told, especially in our schools. The history all of us learned was a literal as well as a figurative whitewash. I'm very pleased that significant changes are now being made. In that regard, there is a bill in the Oregon legislature this session to mandate the inclusion of the state's history of racism in the school curriculum. I don't know where it currently stands in the legislative process, but I hope it passes.
while we are amending American history curriculum to include racism, why not also include the history of forestry companies and railroads and Nike (while we are at it) controlling state legislatures in ways that have hurt the natural environment, kept corporate taxes low thus depressing the ability of the State to address poverty, the income gap, fund education, etc. That information would be useful to children of the white working class as well. But that would be deemed socialism, and would never occur.
Liberalism is winning slowly because it is on the right side of fair, good, but it is hard to see it happening. I want things to change for the better, but not too much. Your prior posts Peter about people fighting in the civil war not being woke, make the point. But we do have children not working, black people are not slaves, women do have the vote, there is a semblance of law in which the rich do not decide everything. It is getting better, it’s just hard to see.
Profiling other humans may be natural and inevitable, but xenophobia is not. Hate crimes surged under Trump, thanks to his white nationalist rhetoric and policies. It doesn’t matter what you call or don’t call people who share his views because they can’t be reasoned with. They still claim he won the election and that it was “stolen.” What we have here isn’t a partisan divide but alternate realities.
Whether through shame, micro-aggression training or legislation, we need to do whatever it takes to make white supremacy crawl back under its rock.
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