I think your comment assumes bad faith. You assume that the right hand will beat down the black man. That is wrong and discourteous.
You also ignore the point about the direction of travel: we should move toward a world where race is less important, not toward a world where race is more important. We already know what happens if you go the other way. There are places which have entrenched politics based on each racial group getting an entitlement, like Malaysia and Lebanon (the Lebanese system has religious groups instead). It’s a stable equilibrium and it’s a bad equilibrium. Those are not happy countries. The USA doesn’t want to end up like them.
>You also ignore the point about the direction of travel
I wrote:
> The aspiration is good, but it’s still correct to see color if other people are already aggressively seeing color.
That is me agreeing about the direction of travel, and making the point that it’s a mistake to unilaterally “go all the way” while a bunch of other people haven’t gotten on the way. Does this make sense? I don’t see anything in your comment responding to what I said, other than you saying my comment assumes bad faith. Which is true, except I’m not “assuming” bad faith, I’m trying to further explain the hypothesis that’s being presented, namely that you / the context you’re embedded in contains a substrate of bad faith.
As of August 2021 in the USA, “the right hand is beating down the black man” is an accurate (if metaphorical) statement about the territory.
What White Fragility (and many other sources) are saying is that the people who have power need to first use that power to stop the beatings. And it helps to note who the victims are, because it is ~5x more efficient to focus on the ~20% of the population that is being “beaten down” than to make race-neutral changes.
I think your comment assumes bad faith. You assume that the right hand will beat down the black man. That is wrong and discourteous.
You also ignore the point about the direction of travel: we should move toward a world where race is less important, not toward a world where race is more important. We already know what happens if you go the other way. There are places which have entrenched politics based on each racial group getting an entitlement, like Malaysia and Lebanon (the Lebanese system has religious groups instead). It’s a stable equilibrium and it’s a bad equilibrium. Those are not happy countries. The USA doesn’t want to end up like them.
>You also ignore the point about the direction of travel
I wrote:
> The aspiration is good, but it’s still correct to see color if other people are already aggressively seeing color.
That is me agreeing about the direction of travel, and making the point that it’s a mistake to unilaterally “go all the way” while a bunch of other people haven’t gotten on the way. Does this make sense? I don’t see anything in your comment responding to what I said, other than you saying my comment assumes bad faith. Which is true, except I’m not “assuming” bad faith, I’m trying to further explain the hypothesis that’s being presented, namely that you / the context you’re embedded in contains a substrate of bad faith.
As of August 2021 in the USA, “the right hand is beating down the black man” is an accurate (if metaphorical) statement about the territory.
What White Fragility (and many other sources) are saying is that the people who have power need to first use that power to stop the beatings. And it helps to note who the victims are, because it is ~5x more efficient to focus on the ~20% of the population that is being “beaten down” than to make race-neutral changes.
This strikes me as omitting relevant variables.
Is it not true that the right hand is also beating the poor, for example?
Is the right hand beating orphans?
Is the right hand beating the mentally ill?
Why are we treating race as the ur-conflict. I believe it’s one of many.