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Progressives: Are Caucasians inherently more oppressive than other races?

ModerationNow! said:
I've always been well aware of America's history, both bad, and good. I don't buy into the revisionist version where America is overwhelmingly an evil, oppressive society. Obviously, over 150 years ago(a very long time BTW), there was slavery, followed by segregation. In this country, slavery involved black Africans. Its unfathomable to me that some people accepted it back then, and I'm from NC. But I also see the other side(which is generally ignored or minimized by revisionists), where slave owners only consisted of a small percentage of wealthy people, and MOST importantly, hundreds of thousands of WHITE soldiers gave their lives and/or limbs to free black slaves. That last fact has largely been ommitted.

But slavery and oppression are NOT Caucasian institutions. Racism, slavery, oppression and conquest are human inventions carried out by EVERY race. Native Americans stole land and people from each other. Latin Americans stole land in America from native Americans and oppressed them. Latino tribes like the Aztecs conquered lands from other Latinos, and then ripped out the still-beating hearts of their victims, and Muslims of N. Africa captured millions of white Europeans and forced them into slavery.

But over the past 12-15 years, I've heard many leftists attempt to condition Americans of all races into believing that white people are somehow more inherently evil in those sins, while the supposed "minority" races are somehow more justified, and essentially blameless for their actions. It seems to me that evil is evil, and skin color has nothing to do with it.....

What's your honest opinion, regardless of political correctness?
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Is oppression a white-only problem? Well, the only people who would argue for that are those that haven't picked up a history textbook. As far as oppression, it exists in all cultures and towards many different ethnicities/religions/etc.

You seem to be misconstruing genuine leftist critique with the poorly thought-out leftist critiques. A few irrelevant, unthoughtful people would argue that white people are more prejudicial than groups. The more thoughtful commentary, however, is that in America, it's clear that rich, heterosexual, white, Christian men hold a special seat of power, and if this is the context that you live in, there's something you can do about it and thus you should focus your efforts on these issues. That doesn't mean that these people don't face problems, it doesn't mean that they are the only ones who perpetrate the oppression, and it doesn't mean that all rich white, Christian men are doing the oppressing. For instance, I've heard plenty of horribly sexist comments from both women and women of color. I've heard racist and sexist things from LGBT individuals. There is institutionalized, enculturated views that exist in enough humans, however, that there are clear and undeniable burdens added to people of color, women, LGBT, religious minorities, disabled, etc. It varies quite a bit person to person, it can depend on the context that you live in, but they are real effects and they have real consequences.

As for your final claim that leftists are arguing for carte blanche freedom for people in discriminated communities --well, maybe some are. Most are not. Most are asking for equal treatment under the law. Most are asking for equal treatment when applying for a job, equal treatment while performing the job, and equal treatment in getting paid for the job. Most are asking for equal treatment in how they are prosecuted by the law or dealt with by the law. That's notably different than asking for new or extra rights.
 
ModerationNow! said:
I've always been well aware of America's history, both bad, and good. I don't buy into the revisionist version where America is overwhelmingly an evil, oppressive society. Obviously, over 150 years ago(a very long time BTW), there was slavery, followed by segregation. In this country, slavery involved black Africans. Its unfathomable to me that some people accepted it back then, and I'm from NC. But I also see the other side(which is generally ignored or minimized by revisionists), where slave owners only consisted of a small percentage of wealthy people, and MOST importantly, hundreds of thousands of WHITE soldiers gave their lives and/or limbs to free black slaves. That last fact has largely been ommitted.

But slavery and oppression are NOT Caucasian institutions. Racism, slavery, oppression and conquest are human inventions carried out by EVERY race. Native Americans stole land and people from each other. Latin Americans stole land in America from native Americans and oppressed them. Latino tribes like the Aztecs conquered lands from other Latinos, and then ripped out the still-beating hearts of their victims, and Muslims of N. Africa captured millions of white Europeans and forced them into slavery.

But over the past 12-15 years, I've heard many leftists attempt to condition Americans of all races into believing that white people are somehow more inherently evil in those sins, while the supposed "minority" races are somehow more justified, and essentially blameless for their actions. It seems to me that evil is evil, and skin color has nothing to do with it.....

What's your honest opinion, regardless of political correctness?
Click to expand...

White people? No. Europeans? Yes. Ok. Just being a little facetious, but given what we know...slave trade being started by the Europeans? And how they did everything they could to steal and destroy the lands and lives of people who had the misfortune to be on their land before they got there? Especially land good for sugar cane.

Culturally? Europeans were brutal until the 1800s...and then one could argue that they continued their brutality until 1945. And something occurred that made them change their minds. And I know...ironic coming from a savage American. But I have a nugget of a point and that it is ultimately greed and politics are what are inherently oppressive.


Sent from my grapefruit using smoke signals.
 
blackjack50 said:
but given what we know...slave trade being started by the Europeans?
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There is a question mark there but it doesn't read like a question.
Just in case.
No, Europeans did not start the slave trade. The slave trade was alive and well in Africa and the Middle East long before Portugal got involved in it.
 
SmokeAndMirrors said:
No. However, I am really tired of people trying to distract from the issue by pointing out that any class of people can be oppressive.

The fact is, in our culture, white people are the oppressive group.

And secondly, not every incident of human violence is oppressive. In, for example, historically competing Native tribes, they're just fighting over land, like pretty much every society does with its neighbors.

Systems of oppression are a lot more than that. Other slavery comparisons are much more accurate than just comparing all tribal warfare ever. And yes, every society and race has done it at some point in history.

In this one, it's white people. So why the hell do people keep wanting to talk about some other culture, 2,000 years ago, when we are trying to talk about what's happening right now?

I have been in activism for over a decade, and I have never in my life heard anyone say white people are "inherently evil." I think you just made that up because you don't like having to admit that your culture clade might be problematic.
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I would be more sympathetic to this point if so many people didn't act as if whites are the only ones who are, or have ever been, oppressive. Sorry, but the implication is left hanging out there in current social discussion.
 
radcen said:
I would be more sympathetic to this point if so many people didn't act as if whites are the only ones who are, or have ever been, oppressive. Sorry, but the implication is left hanging out there in current social discussion.
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They don't. They're just talking about what oppression there is TODAY, because they're activists working on issues that exist TODAY. And for some reason, white people get all butt-hurt when people want to talk about that.

That is simply not even slightly true. It's just that for some reason, you don't want to hear about it unless they spend 3,000 words apologizing for bringing up the issue and giving a complete sermon on every oppressive culture that's ever existed from their own race.

That's ridiculous, and I see no reason anyone should waste precious moments of their life doing that when the real issue is that some white people just don't like to hear anyone talking about the racism in their own culture, because then they might be forced to feel something. Oh no.
 
Tigerace117 said:
Mauritania keeps banning slavery every few years, because apparently it's the kind of thing you can't ban too much.

Difference, though, is that slavery isn't legal in America and the human traffickers go to jail for conducting it.
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Slavery is a scoff law in Islamic countries ruled by Sharia based laws.
 
SmokeAndMirrors said:
They don't. They're just talking about what oppression there is TODAY, because they're activists working on issues that exist TODAY. And for some reason, white people get all butt-hurt when people want to talk about that.

That is simply not even slightly true. It's just that for some reason, you don't want to hear about it unless they spend 3,000 words apologizing for bringing up the issue and giving a complete sermon on every oppressive culture that's ever existed from their own race.

That's ridiculous, and I see no reason anyone should waste precious moments of their life doing that when the real issue is that some white people just don't like to hear anyone talking about the racism in their own culture, because then they might be forced to feel something. Oh no.
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You are incorrect. You don't see it because you don't want to see it. When people say things like, "Racism is a white people problem, and it is up to white people to fix it."*, the unstated implication of course is that no one else is responsible, is pretty straight forward and definitive... it's ALL solely one-sided. Disclaimers and/or inclusive language is pretty much never offered any more.

*- An actual quote that I posted here awhile back... and said sentiment is NOT uncommon at all.
 
SmokeAndMirrors said:
Oppression is not about individual actions. We live in societies of millions. This is the thing people don't seem to understand...

I am a white person who is abundantly aware of oppression affecting racial minorities, who has had very fruitful and productive dialogue with said minorities, and who has had a lot of success scrubbing my head of as much social racial dogma as is realistically possible.

But I went to a nice school and therefore I am highly literate. Our school was 98% white. The ghettos black people have been pretty much forced into for a plethora of reasons both historical and current don't have that advantage. Some can't even run 5 days a week, can't afford books, can't have science labs. I tutored some of these kids -- very motivated people -- and many of them couldn't even read at a middle school level. Trying to get them college-ready was all but hopeless in many cases, due to financial and educational barriers. Virtually none of these extremely disadvantaged students were white. You think that's a coincidence?

I have done literally nothing to personally participate in oppression. And I am still inherently privileged in respect to race. It's just how society works. Because I am privileged in that respect, I am part of the hydra-headed infrastructure. On the whole, I am doing a lot better than most black people -- simply because of a bunch of accidents of my birth. In the context of society, my life is put on a higher tier.

Yes, my life as a whole is currently oppressing others. I as an individual am doing everything in my power to destroy the system that made it that way, and no black person ever has begrudged me because of the accidents of my birth. Nor do I begrudge myself. Why should I? I'm a good person who's done a wide array of advocacy in my life, both for things that help me personally and things that don't. If I'm going to be given certain privileges and tools just for being born the way I am, then I'm going to use them to take down the system that denied those tools to others. That feels pretty badass, actually. I like being a turncoat.

Most of us are both privileged and oppressed in some form. What actually matters is what we choose to do with it. I don't know of any activist at any position in the kyriarchy who hates people for their accidents of birth. This is just more made-up demonizing by the knuck-draggers of society who are afraid of losing their pedestal.

What matters isn't now how you were born. What matters is what you do. Whining about people pointing out the flaws in your culture, pretending it doesn't exist, pretending you somehow "deserve" those privileges more than others, putting up a bunch of nonsense strawmen ("But this other culture from a thousand years ago did it tooooo") and therefore passing it onto your children is just perpetuating it.

Talking about oppressive systems is not about whether you yourself have ever lynched a black person. It's about attacking the system that decided you got to learn how to read, and the black kid from the town over didn't.
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I'm sorry but.... horse ****.


I learned to read at home before I ever started school. The school I went to was about 25% black. We weren't exactly overfunded but we were adequately supplied. The teachers varied from useless to awesome... that is not a function of money spent. Classes were not divided by race, even in the 70s. We were fully integrated, and the "smart kid classes" had their fair share of black students.

I visited the local branch of state university recently. Eyeball survey said 50% of the student body was minorities, with black women apparently a plurality. Not many white males. Downtown, about a third of the people I see coming out of the big office buildings are minorities of some sort.... lots of Indians, lots of black women again. This is in a very modest sized southern town btw, barely 50,000 people.

If you're a minority today, you have potential access to lots of earmarked resources for getting an advanced education that are not available to Caucasians. I'd know, got a son going to tech.


If you're still "oppressed" today, it is pretty much self-inflicted, or a product of your OWN culture.


Me being able to read takes nothing away from anyone else. Me being educated takes nothing away from anyone else. Me having a piece of the pie doesn't prevent someone else from having pie, because there is always more pie... and some organization willing to help you get pie if you're not white.


I am SO done with "white guilt".
 
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SmokeAndMirrors said:
They don't. They're just talking about what oppression there is TODAY, because they're activists working on issues that exist TODAY. And for some reason, white people get all butt-hurt when people want to talk about that.

That is simply not even slightly true. It's just that for some reason, you don't want to hear about it unless they spend 3,000 words apologizing for bringing up the issue and giving a complete sermon on every oppressive culture that's ever existed from their own race.

That's ridiculous, and I see no reason anyone should waste precious moments of their life doing that when the real issue is that some white people just don't like to hear anyone talking about the racism in their own culture, because then they might be forced to feel something. Oh no.
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Nobody gets "butt hurt" when moronic libs claim "white oppression", it's just that thinking people are prone to point out how utterly nonsensical the notion is. No black person alive today in the United States of America failed to learn to read because of "white oppression". To suggest so is the height of idiocy.
 
Goshin said:
I'm sorry but.... horse ****.


I learned to read at home before I ever started school. The school I went to was about 25% black. We weren't exactly overfunded but we were adequately supplied. The teachers varied from useless to awesome... that is not a function of money spent. Classes were not divided by race, even in the 70s. We were fully integrated, and the "smart kid classes" had their fair share of black students.

I visited the local branch of state university recently. Eyeball survey said 50% of the student body was minorities, with black women apparently a plurality. Not many white males. Downtown, about a third of the people I see coming out of the big office buildings are minorities of some sort.... lots of Indians, lots of black women again. This is in a very modest sized southern town btw, barely 50,000 people.

If you're a minority today, you have potential access to lots of earmarked resources for getting an advanced education that are not available to Caucasians. I'd know, got a son going to tech.


If you're still "oppressed" today, it is pretty much self-inflicted, or a product of your OWN culture.

Me being able to read takes nothing away from anyone else. Me being educated takes nothing away from anyone else. Me having a piece of the pie doesn't prevent someone else from having pie, because there is always more pie... and some organization willing to help you get pie if you're not white.

I am SO done with "white guilt".
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Pretty much spot-on. Interestingly, many of the same decision-trends that conservatives have warned lead to reduced performance among minorities are increasingly showing up in lower-class white culture, and the results are the same.
 
Excon said:
There is a question mark there but it doesn't read like a question.
Just in case.
No, Europeans did not start the slave trade. The slave trade was alive and well in Africa and the Middle East long before Portugal got involved in it.
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Was mainly talking about the African Slave trade in the new world after they essentially committed mass genocide by forced labor of the locals. Yes. The Europeans didn't "start it" but they damn sure made it worse. A lot worse.


Sent from my grapefruit using smoke signals.
 
blackjack50 said:
Was mainly talking about the African Slave trade in the new world after they essentially committed mass genocide by forced labor of the locals. Yes. The Europeans didn't "start it" but they damn sure made it worse. A lot worse.
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Oh gawd! Not this bs. Forget I asked.
 
iguanaman said:
All we can say is that in this country the white man has been the oppressor. What is so important about the other countries and races that did the same thing? I does not make it any less wrong does it? All we can do is be honest about it like the Germans are about the Holocaust. They spend a lot of classroom time teaching their children all about the Nazi's and what they did. Why? Because it is the best way to be sure it never happens again. We can't apologize for our ancestors but we can make sure that we are better than them in our treatment of our fellow man.
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If only it ended at education, and not an endless parade of restitution.
 
TheGoverness said:
What are you talking about?

Black people aren't being prevented to learn how to read.

In fact, a lot still don't bother to learn how to read.

Example, 47% of adults in Detroit are functionally illiterate, and the city itself is 82% black.

Whitey didn't go around and start grapping the books out of their hands so they couldn't learn how to read, they just didn't give a **** about reading to begin with.
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Did you ever think that the schools in Detroit might share some of the blame for the shocking rate of illiteracy or is it entirely the fault of blacks?
 
iguanaman said:
Did you ever think that the schools in Detroit might share some of the blame for the shocking rate of illiteracy or is it entirely the fault of blacks?
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There's blame to go around on both sides. They/we can provide better opportunities, you bet. There is equal responsibility to accept said opportunities and make use of them, too. And as far as the basics go, simply learning to read and think does not require the latest and greatest in the way of technology.
 
Excon said:
Oh gawd! Not this bs. Forget I asked.
Click to expand...

Dude. What do you mean BS? This is verifiable FACT. Never mind that I studied hundreds of different texts on this getting my worthless History degree. All you have to do is read about the arrival of Europeans to the new world...and SPECIFICALLY about the sugar plantations.

Why do you think so many Caribbean nations are populated by African descendants? The French were amongst the worst too. Take a look at Haiti. The island habitat SHOULD resemble the Dominican Republic given that they occupy the same island, but:

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The French brought in 500,000 slaves to the island. The Spanish did not. Look man. I'm not some bleeding heart liberal anti American anti white social justice warrior trying to rewrite history to favor the vote. I took the classes. I studied the first hand accounts written by slavers and plantation owners and freedmen.

The slave trade for the Romans and the Arabs and all that? NOTHING compared to what happened when the Portuguese started shipping them over. We are talking about roughly 10 million people being shipped. This is fact man. Not fiction. And it was God awful.


Sent from my grapefruit using smoke signals.
 
SmokeAndMirrors said:
And how am I insulting myself? Like I said, I like being a turncoat. All I'm doing is recognizing the stupidly obvious, which is that I got to learn to read while some black kid didn't, for absolutely no good reason.
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What are you talking about? Black people aren't being prevented from learning how to read.

In fact, a lot still don't care to learn how.

For a example, 47% of adults in Detroit are functionally illiterate. The population of Detroit is 82% black.

Whitey didn't go around trying to rip books out of their hands to prevent them from reading.

They just didn't care about reading.
 
ModerationNow! said:
I've always been well aware of America's history, both bad, and good. I don't buy into the revisionist version where America is overwhelmingly an evil, oppressive society. Obviously, over 150 years ago(a very long time BTW), there was slavery, followed by segregation. In this country, slavery involved black Africans. Its unfathomable to me that some people accepted it back then, and I'm from NC. But I also see the other side(which is generally ignored or minimized by revisionists), where slave owners only consisted of a small percentage of wealthy people, and MOST importantly, hundreds of thousands of WHITE soldiers gave their lives and/or limbs to free black slaves. That last fact has largely been ommitted.

But slavery and oppression are NOT Caucasian institutions. Racism, slavery, oppression and conquest are human inventions carried out by EVERY race. Native Americans stole land and people from each other. Latin Americans stole land in America from native Americans and oppressed them. Latino tribes like the Aztecs conquered lands from other Latinos, and then ripped out the still-beating hearts of their victims, and Muslims of N. Africa captured millions of white Europeans and forced them into slavery.

But over the past 12-15 years, I've heard many leftists attempt to condition Americans of all races into believing that white people are somehow more inherently evil in those sins, while the supposed "minority" races are somehow more justified, and essentially blameless for their actions. It seems to me that evil is evil, and skin color has nothing to do with it.....

What's your honest opinion, regardless of political correctness?
Click to expand...

Empirically, whites have been most successful at exploiting others. Of course, exploitation is by no means unique to whites.

There are both intrinsic (aspirations of power) and extrinsic (national resources) explanations for the success of western imperialism.

The problem i see is that there's no meaningful way to apply that data. Hell, there isn't even a biological way to tell if someone is "white"- races are more of a cultural construct than a biological one.
 
radcen said:
You are incorrect. You don't see it because you don't want to see it. When people say things like, "Racism is a white people problem, and it is up to white people to fix it."*, the unstated implication of course is that no one else is responsible, is pretty straight forward and definitive... it's ALL solely one-sided. Disclaimers and/or inclusive language is pretty much never offered any more.

*- An actual quote that I posted here awhile back... and said sentiment is NOT uncommon at all.
Click to expand...

I hate that **** so much, when people say "Racism is a problem for white people to fix"

Acting like racism is a soley white issue.
 
Absentglare said:
Empirically, whites have been most successful at exploiting others. Of course, exploitation is by no means unique to whites.

There are both intrinsic (aspirations of power) and extrinsic (national resources) explanations for the success of western imperialism.

The problem i see is that there's no meaningful way to apply that data. Hell, there isn't even a biological way to tell if someone is "white"- races are more of a cultural construct than a biological one.
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You don't know that. You're allowing the ease of modern access to news and information to cloud your reference.
 
The fact is it takes a degree of power in some form to be able to oppress anyone and historically whites have had more power than other races. The more interesting question is what would happen if the distribution of power were to change?
 
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