Stuff white people do

[Cypress]

Having thought about the endless looping of Pastor Wright's video on Fox News, and having endured the endless and irrational hand-wringing by those who don't understand historical and contextual underpinnings of some of the life experiences and rhetoric that exists in (parts) of the african-american community, I thought this piece nailed it.

To be clear: I don't really think this kind of stuff is limited to a racial context. It's tied to oppression and inequality; not neccessarily to skin color. I'm sure the same principles outlined here, would apply to socio-economic stratifications; e.g., the labor movement - at least as it existed half a century ago. If plutocrats, say like John Rockefeller (or Topspin), had attended or seen a racous labor union meeting half a century ago; they would have been horrified, feeling they had entered an alien world. They might have been frightened by what they might have percieved as radical, even "divisive" language. They would probably not understand the context, the history, nor even have had the motivation to try to understand the foundation underlying the rhetoric.

Refuse to Listen to Black Anger

Because black people have long had to study white people if they want to be safe and successful, and because white people rarely have to study black people if they want to be safe and successful, whites have a harder time understanding blacks than blacks have understanding whites.

White people also usually have a hard time realizing that black people don't see the world the same ways that they do, so white people often get confused, dismissive, or frustrated when black people insist that they experience the world differently, and therefore see it differently.

When black people also insist that a historical legacy of mistreatment at the hands of whites also has a lingering effect on how they see the world, things get so far beyond the range of white ways of seeing the world that they usually change the subject, or throw their hands up and turn away, or even leave the room.

As they do so, over these and other racial disagreements, these white people often say something like, "If you're going to get emotional, then I can't discuss this with you." For white people, anger is a dangerous force that blows out the light of reason. They may not realize it (middle-class ones, especially), but white people often insist that discussions be conducted in their way, and not in someone else's way. Their calm, rational way, that is, and not another group or culture's more emotionally engaged way. (And guess who's automatically at an advantage in calm, rational discussions?)

So white people can get confused or fed up in discussions about things that make black people angry, which is understandable, really, when you realize that whites have been trained to think that the way they see the world is pretty much the normal way--the way everyone else does, unless there's something wrong with them. Unless they're "biased," or "subjective," something that being white supposedly doesn't do to a person, and something that being black supposedly does do to a person.

This unconscious presumption of white objectivity is also why white people who talk about racial issues get a lot more attention and credit from white listeners than people of color who say the same damn thing. This is the kind of blindly applied double standard that also happens with supposedly objective male speakers or discussants and supposedly subjective female speakers or discussants.

So because whites tend to be wrapped up this way--in their supposedly objective, ironically racialized perspective--one of the things that they never seem to get is collective black anger. This common white obstinacy became openly apparent when Barack Obama's pastor, Reverend Wright, expressed anger at America, and made an emotional call to God to damn America unless it started treating black people better.

Reverend Wright later said things that struck nearly everyone as so outlandish that Obama finally had to repudiate both the words and the man. The supposedly important connection between Wright and Obama is old news by now (not that white people are going to let Wright and his words go away), but many white people still wonder—if Wright said things like that in church, then why did Obama attend that church for twenty years? I think it's probably because in that church, Obama cut Reverend Wright some slack.

I think that if Obama was in church on that particular day, he and the other people there would've understood that Wright wasn't actually asking God to damn America. Instead, one of a black reverend's functions in such moments, in many black churches, where people aren't so pent up and repressed that they've pretty much separated their emotional life from their religious life (if they have a religious life)--in those kinds of moments, what Wright was doing was helping his congregation vent some of its anger.

And yes, black people still do have a lot to feel angry about, and no, they won’t just bury or try to forget that anger like white people wish they would. Sometimes they let it out, which is probably healthy, and sometimes when they do so, they say things they wouldn’t say at other times.

White people often forgive their own friends or family members for saying things in anger that they wouldn't say otherwise. Why can't they do the same for black people?

I think they can't because it is "black anger," which as I wrote above, white people don’t understand, and sometimes don’t want to face up to. But white people also find it difficult to overlook black anger in a collective sense because white anger, when it's expressed, is more contained, more localized.

White people don't have a collective sense of themselves as a group as much as black people do (thanks largely to whites grouping blacks together for several centuries now, in order to treat them accordingly). So while white people get angry at work, or on the road, or in their homes or during a baseball game, they rarely get angry together as a racial group. That's because white solidarity has been atomized into supposedly non-white individuality. And also, after all, what do whites really have to get angry together over, as a racial group?

Again, black people understand white people better than the other way around, and one of the things they usually know is what I'm basically saying here--that whites don't understand collective black anger. White people don't understand the causes that justify it, so they don't understand most of what gets said, nor the ways in which it gets said. Nor do they understand its occasionally cathartic, venting function, and thus that not everything that gets said is necessarily meant to be taken literally.



http://stuffwhitepeopledo.blogspot.com/

[TBT]

Did you study in the old USSR? This is texbook KGB mis-information!

[NOVA]

That article goes well with a gallon or two of chilled Koolade...otherwise it tends to make most open minded people puke, or at least gag....
"Wright wasn't actually asking God to damn America"...really?...thats such a freekin' joke it doesn't reserve a reply....

"black people still do have a lot to feel angry about"...yeah, we all do...if I was being told lies like the US gov. was giving HIV to black people, I be pissed....but only the truely brainless believe that shit....

[Dilloduck]

There aren't enough words to describe that idiotic blog, Cypress. Claiming blacks understand whites better than whites understand blacks

[Cypress]

That article goes well with a gallon or two of chilled Koolade...otherwise it tends to make most open minded people puke, or at least gag....
"Wright wasn't actually asking God to damn America"...really?...thats such a freekin' joke it doesn't reserve a reply....

"black people still do have a lot to feel angry about"...yeah, we all do...if I was being told lies like the US gov. was giving HIV to black people, I be pissed....but only the truely brainless believe that shit....

You thought Iraq was a dangerous and imminent threat to the U.S. An ally of al qaeda, who was desperate to pass on WMD to them.

Who's the idiot now? Your delusions were far worse to the United States, than any harmless delusions Wright has about HIV.

[KingRaw!]

Stuff non-bitter white people do

Vote for Obama

[tinfoil]

[BRUTALITOPS]

that's the stupidest article ever. I shall post a more coherent response when im done watching tv.

[KingCondanomation]

that's the stupidest article ever. I shall post a more coherent response when im done watching tv.

Is the program over yet?

[Topspin]

White people like coffee and religions there parents don't belong to.

[Cancel 2018. 3]

White people like coffee and religions there parents don't belong to.

yeah, cuz no black people or any other people like coffee or belong to religions their parents didn't....

[Topspin]

White people like to pay higher prices for food labeled organic, and the like to make you feel guilty for not going outside.

[/MSG/]

White people like to pay higher prices for food labeled organic, and the like to make you feel guilty for not going outside.

Yeah, that first one is pretty dumb. Organic foods are a scam.

[Topspin]

White people like knowing what's best for poor people and they like standing still at concerts.

[/MSG/]

White people like knowing what's best for poor people and they like standing still at concerts.

Clearly you've never been to a metal or rock concert. Or a hardcore show.