Split Thread: "White Supremacist" really has no meaning anymore.

[Planigale]

Originally Posted by mumblethrax

It’s not your point that eludes me, but the point of your point. How does the possibility of oppression along other axes inform this debate at all?


How often do you think an 8th century Briton came into contact with people from Africa or Asia? Nationalism didn’t even develop until the 18th century—the idea that there was extensive commonality among the peoples of France, let alone white people, would have struck the people of the day as somewhat peculiar prior to that. Unless you think Enlightenment Europe was taking its intellectual cues from its backwater colonies, the idea that “Americans” came up with these racial hierarchies is fairly absurd. Took to them like ducks to water, sure.

It is also worth remembering that the idea of a slave would have been a christian european captured by Muslim Africans and sold into slavery. that is why the term slave and slav were synonymous. Slave raiding of the European coast by African slavers devastated the mediterranean economy, and extended to Britain Ireland and Iceland. Slavery was not an 'internal' west European phenomena it was something that Europeans were subject to. Slaving raids into the Slavic countries continued until the eighteenth century, after the trans Atlantic slave trade had been abolished (depending on countries - it was illegal to have an african slave in Russia before it was illegal to have a slave slav.).

The Africans most Europeans would have been familiar with would have been in the relatively sophisticated North African Islamic states. They also 9the Barbary staes had an extensive trans saharan trade in black slaves from sub Sahara. Slavery was common in sub-saharan African cultures pre-European contact.

My guess is that white supremacism really began with the contact of the Spanish with the stone age cultures of meso and south America. The trans Atlantic slave trade required white supremacism to justify its existence, white supremacism was not the cause of the trans atlantic slave trade. The slave trade* existed before the Europeans arrived, Europeans just magnified it hugely.

*That is trade in slave, not trans atlantic slave trade.

[JoeMorgue]

Originally Posted by jt512

Yes, you will.

Mask is slipping.

[gnome]

Originally Posted by jt512

Yes, you will.

It just sounds like you don't really have the courage of your convictions, that you don't want to respond to what you expect to hear if you add clarity.

You can back out, nobody's forcing you to continue the argument. But realize that the credibility of whatever point you were making is shot.

[jt512]

Originally Posted by sir drinks-a-lot

I think you can almost define "woke" as someone who asks the definition of the word woke. Since asking is seen as such a "gotcha" in woke circles.

That’s actually a good point. The woke like to ask because they like to deny that woke exists entirely or that is just a term that conservatives use to label “anything they don’t like.” The latter narrative has become so pervasive that googling “woke” turns up nothing other than websites parroting that lie. To find an honest discussion of what woke is, I had to use google.de, which at the top of the search returned an article in Der Spiegel that explained the post-modernist origins of wokism. This was not the case even six months or so ago, when a simple Google search easily found similar honest historical and philosophical explanations.

The Der Spiegel article included the following line (translating from memory): Hardly anybody today wants to be known as woke. But that in no way means that the phenomenon is a Chimera. The fact that hardly anybody today would self-identify as an antisemite hardly means that nobody is one.

[Shalamar]

woke [ wohk ]

verb

a simple past tense of wake

adjective

used as an epithet in a similar meaning to liberal, democrat, progressive, empathic or black by those right leaning on the political spectrum.
That stupid idiot over there is so woke/liberal/democratic/progressive/empathic/black.


undefined

used by racists and white supremacists to throw back at their opponents in such a way that the word cannot be easily defined.
You and everybody else knows what it[woke] means.

[jt512]

Originally Posted by gnome

It just sounds like you don't really have the courage of your convictions….

I’ve published peer reviewed articles criticizing wokism under—obviously—my real name, so it is not the case that I don’t have the courage of my convictions. However, I have learned (the hard way) the futility of engaging in these matters on this website.

[mumblethrax]

Originally Posted by jt512

The Der Spiegel article included the following line (translating from memory): Hardly anybody today wants to be known as woke. But that in no way means that the phenomenon is a Chimera. The fact that hardly anybody today would self-identify as an antisemite hardly means that nobody is one.

That doesn't particularly seem to be true.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...l/11417394002/

The non-pejorative sense of the word looks like it might be more resilient than many are imagining it to be.

[jt512]

Originally Posted by Shalamar

woke [ wohk ]

verb

a simple past tense of wake

adjective

used as an epithet in a similar meaning to liberal, democrat, progressive, empathic or black by those right leaning on the political spectrum.
That stupid idiot over there is so woke/liberal/democratic/progressive/empathic/black.


undefined

used by racists and white supremacists to throw back at their opponents in such a way that the word cannot be easily defined.
You and everybody else knows what it[woke] means.

Thank you for illustrating precisely the disingenuous that makes it futile to discuss this topic on this forum.

[JoeMorgue]

The fact that we're arguing "wokeism" in a thread about White Supremacy is all you need to know.

It's all the same ********. "It's not my fault, the Left is just too woke so you see I have no choice but to be a Nazi!"

Even if "woke" was as bad as people are... well not talking about since it's still nothing they refuse to define, and you amplified that times a million, the "I get to be racist to counter it to keep everything fair and balanced" argument would still be stupid.

As always they have us arguing a point that would make them right even if we agreed with it.

The mythology they have to keep going is "The Left has made not being racist so hard to do you might as well even try."

And a bunch of people are going to get huffy and butt hurt in this thread that I said that and then go and do exactly that in every thread about racism.

[JoeMorgue]

Originally Posted by jt512

Thank you for illustrating precisely the disingenuous that makes it futile to discuss this topic on this forum.

And yet you're going to keep doing it. Funny that.

[tyr_13]

Originally Posted by mumblethrax

When challenged on the relevance non-racialized systems of oppression in ancient Rome, you compound the error with another irrelevant digression.


If you're making broad claims about Europeans, you're making claims about Britons, Britons being European. Europeans had little use for racial categories prior to the beginning of their wretched colonial projects, so there's no surprise in the fact that they didn't come up with them until then. (Arguably, Jews at least in some places and at some times, had been racialized prior to this.)


Well, no, that doesn't follow. Any racial categorization at all would be sufficient to demonstrate a racialized worldview.

But here's an example from 1613: https://aeon.co/ideas/how-white-peop...wright-in-1613

He's already hand-waved explicit racial categorization as 'counting' as the idea of 'whiteness' or racialization growing because it wasn't also explicitly white-supremacists and didn't map close enough to modern ideas of 'whiteness'. This ignores that even today what constitutes 'whiteness' is both in flux and has slightly different meanings in different groups. 'Do Italians and Indians count as white' shouldn't be enough to dismiss the explicit category of a 'white race', but here we are.

It's just the line drawing fallacy as a filibuster. It will never be a definitive enough 'line' to match, even if that takes rampant goalpost moving.

[Venom]

So we're in rough agreement that white supremacism is a thing, both meanings?
And it began sometime shortly after the age of European colonialism?

So this means white supremacy does have meaning, to answer the OP. I think it is telling that acts committed by people described as white supremacist or similar (or terrorists who happen to be white for that matter) are not given the same airtime on the 24/7 fearmonger outlets as acts by people not considered white or acts committed against their white saviors in media and government.

[JoeMorgue]

Oddly "The darkies are really the evil ones but the lamestream media is just lying for... reasons" is the argument you hear the most from the other side.

[Trausti]

Originally Posted by uke2se

"It's hard for white men to get hired in academia" is such a wild claim. It rather betrays a right wing echo-chamber diet of media.

Not really. Many universities now require DEI statements to even be considered for facutly positions. If you feel that everyone should be treated equally, you're not likely be to be hired.

[lomiller]

Originally Posted by jt512

Thank you for illustrating precisely the disingenuous that makes it futile to discuss this topic on this forum.

How so? The fact that you won't tell us how you are defining a word gives us every right to define that word for you.

[JoeMorgue]

Originally Posted by Trausti

Not really. Many universities now require DEI statements to even be considered for facutly positions. If you feel that everyone should be treated equally, you're not likely be to be hired.

How many pages of "Everybody should be treated equally... starting at the point where some people have already been treated unequally" are we going to have to put up with?

"I don't see race... ergo I can't see that one race HAS been treated worse and is starting at a disadvantage" isn't the flex everyone who uses that argument thinks it is.

[JoeMorgue]

Originally Posted by lomiller

How so? The fact that you won't tell us how you are defining a word gives us every right to define that word for you.

I've decided "Woke" is a new diet Cola that won't let us down in the flavor department like so many before and will be going forward in this argument under that assumption.

[LSSBB]

Originally Posted by jt512

I’ve published peer reviewed articles criticizing wokism under—obviously—my real name, so it is not the case that I don’t have the courage of my convictions. However, I have learned (the hard way) the futility of engaging in these matters on this website.

References please.

[LSSBB]

Originally Posted by Trausti

Not really. Many universities now require DEI statements to even be considered for facutly positions. If you feel that everyone should be treated equally, you're not likely be to be hired.

"Likely" does not proceed from "many".

[Trausti]

Originally Posted by Shalamar

woke [ wohk ]

verb

a simple past tense of wake

adjective

used as an epithet in a similar meaning to liberal, democrat, progressive, empathic or black by those right leaning on the political spectrum.
That stupid idiot over there is so woke/liberal/democratic/progressive/empathic/black.


undefined

used by racists and white supremacists to throw back at their opponents in such a way that the word cannot be easily defined.
You and everybody else knows what it[woke] means.

Woke is certainly one of those things that people have difficutly defining but know it when the see it. To me, one of the chief elements of Woke is the denial of objective reality, e.g., men can have babies. But it's also clearly an anti-impericial philosophy. Any disparty among groups can only be due to discrimiation - unless the disparity is against straight White males, then it's good. Things like "structural racism" are assumed to be true without evidence, and the call for evidence is used as proof of "structual racism."

[jt512]

Originally Posted by LSSBB

References please.

.

Sorry, “LSSBB,” whoever you are IRL, but no.

That said, the pertinent articles are open source.

[Trausti]

Originally Posted by LSSBB

"Likely" does not proceed from "many".

Well . . .



DEI Statements Stir Debate

[JoeMorgue]

White people rejected 100% of black people applying for that job for about a century.

Was that "woke?"

Or is this like "cancel culture" in that it's only a problem when the disenfranchised group does to the oppressing group what the oppressing group has been doing to it forever?

*It's that, that's what it is, that's totally what it is*

[Trausti]

Originally Posted by JoeMorgue

White people rejected 100% of black people applying for that job for about a century.

Was that "woke?"

Or is this like "cancel culture" in that it's only a problem when the disenfranchised group does to the oppressing group what the oppressing group has been doing to it forever?

*It's that, that's what it is, that's totally what it is*

There's a central tenet of Woke: past discrimination makes present and future discrimination okay. Thanks, Kendi!

[JoeMorgue]

Originally Posted by Trausti

There's a central tenent of Woke: past discrimination makes present and future discrimination okay. Thanks, Kendi!

Yeah if describe literally any and all help given to the oppressed group as "discrimination" against the oppressing group like an utter wrong madman, sure that tracks.

Oh so this is game. Everything done to help groups you once oppressed or are currently oppressing is just discriminating against you, insert "I'm in a pickup truck wearing wraparound sunglasses, here's 10 reasons white men are the most oppressed people in the world" Youtube video here.

Having something taken away because you had an unfair advantage is not discrimination.

[Trausti]

Originally Posted by JoeMorgue

Yeah if describe literally any and all help given to the oppressed group as "discrimination" against the oppressing group like an utter wrong madman, sure that tracks.

Oh so this is game. Everything done to help groups you once oppressed or are currently oppressing is just discriminating against you, insert "I'm in a pickup truck wearing wraparound sunglasses, here's 10 reasons white men are the most oppressed people in the world" Youtube video here.

Having something taken away because you had an unfair advantage is not discrimination.

So in your estimation, absolutely nothing has happened in the last 60 years? I guess we can add that to the Woke list: as we progress further into the future the Woke acolyte becomes more antiquarian.

[LSSBB]

Originally Posted by Trausti

Well . . .

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F5wX2EJX...jpg&name=small

DEI Statements Stir Debate

Cool, you reduced "Many" to a single example. Doesn't quite support "likely".

[Venom]

Originally Posted by Trausti

Woke is certainly one of those things that people have difficutly defining but know it when the see it. To me, one of the chief elements of Woke is the denial of objective reality, e.g., men can have babies. But it's also clearly an anti-impericial philosophy. Any disparty among groups can only be due to discrimiation - unless the disparity is against straight White males, then it's good. Things like "structural racism" are assumed to be true without evidence, and the call for evidence is used as proof of "structual racism."

"know it when you see it" is a cop-out.

It's a term that's simply been reappropriated from it's original usage among African-Americans to describe awareness of their situation in the system, redpilled, whatever you want to call it. It's just a pathetic way to sneer at anything perceived as socially liberal now. But it's just repackaged old slurs.

"Political correctness" has become "woke". "SJWs" have become "wokescolds". The American Right's vocabulary is ******. It's best to avoid using their terminology if you want to be taken seriously.

[Trausti]

Originally Posted by LSSBB

Cool, you reduced "Many" to a single example. Doesn't quite support "likely".

LOL, my brother. You think this is limited to Berkely?

[Trausti]

Originally Posted by Venom

"know it when you see it" is a cop-out.

It's a term that's simply been reappropriated from it's original usage among African-Americans to describe awareness of their situation in the system, redpilled, whatever you want to call it. It's just a pathetic way to sneer at anything perceived as socially liberal now. But it's just repackaged old slurs.

"Political correctness" has become "woke". "SJWs" have become "wokescolds". The American Right's vocabulary is ******. It's best to avoid using their terminology if you want to be taken seriously.

I did provide examples: rejection of objective reality; anti-impirical. It's very much like a religion in that way. Belief is far more important than evidence. And the heretics and apostates are ritually smitted.

[JoeMorgue]

//Slight hijack//

Didn't conspiracy theorists co-op "Woke" for a while or did I imagine that and/or conflate it with "Wake up!"?

I could be wrong but I remember it:

1. Vaguely aware that "woke" was a term used academically and in the African American culture to mean "to be aware of social issues" but it was pretty niche and you didn't encounter if "mainstream" a lot
2. Conspiracy talk as basically a noun-form of "Wake up Sheeple!"
3. Honest use of "Woke" by liberals, taken from meaning 1 that didn't last long because almost immediately it turned into
4. Snarkily and passively used by Conservatives to dismiss any suggestion they be better people or the world could be a better place.

[jt512]

Originally Posted by Trausti

There's a central tenet of Woke: past discrimination makes present and future discrimination okay. Thanks, Kendi!

Actually, Kendi’s statement was much stronger. He wrote, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

[JoeMorgue]

Originally Posted by Trausti

I did provide examples: rejection of objective reality; anti-impirical. It's very much like a religion in that way. Belief is far more important than evidence. And the heretics and apostates are ritually smitted.

Funny how only rejecting objective reality when it's used to treat people better is the problem.

I don't see religion being called woke by conservatives.

[Trausti]

Originally Posted by JoeMorgue

Funny how only rejecting objective reality when it's used to treat people better is the problem.

I don't see religion being called woke by conservatives.

Joe, how do you "treat people better" by advocating they be discrimninated against due to their race or birth sex?

[Trausti]

This is with Woke equivalent of lying for Jesus.

[JoeMorgue]

Originally Posted by Trausti

Joe, how do you "treat people better" by advocating they be discrimninated against due to their race or birth sex?

So basically in your world who ever discriminates "first" gets to keep discriminating forever because of a vague, glib "LOL you can't fight discrimination with discrimination" thought terminating cliche?

ETA: Why the hell do I keep wanting to spell discriminate with an e? It's not descriminate Joe.

[d4m10n]

Originally Posted by mumblethrax

When challenged on the relevance non-racialized systems of oppression in ancient Rome, you compound the error with another irrelevant digression.

If Gerbner's thesis is correct, the invention of whiteness was contingent upon existing religious oppression rather than irrelevant thereto, at least in North America.

Originally Posted by mumblethrax

If you're making broad claims about Europeans, you're making claims about Britons, Britons being European.

No; when someone says "Europeans had little trouble oppressing...non-Europeans in North Africa and the Middle East" they are not making the claim that Europeans from every single European tribe were doing the oppression, nor that every single European individual was personally getting in on the oppressive action.

Originally Posted by mumblethrax

Europeans had little use for racial categories prior to the beginning of their wretched colonial projects, so there's no surprise in the fact that they didn't come up with them until then.

Agreed.

Originally Posted by mumblethrax

Any racial categorization at all would be sufficient to demonstrate a racialized worldview.

Among those affirming the validity of the categorization, yes, but merely having the idea of race doesn't imply the idea of whiteness. We've already seen at least one or two examples of European scientists who categorized humans into several races without inventing something resembling a "white race" composed solely of individuals of European (or at least near-European) origin.

Originally Posted by mumblethrax

But here's an example from 1613

It is an excellent example, but hard to tell from context if Middleton thought of "white people" as a "race" rather than just people of a strikingly light color from the perspective of the character who speaks the line.

Middleton alone didn’t invent the idea of whiteness, but the fact that anyone could definitely be the author of such a phrase, one that seems so obvious from a modern perspective, underscores Painter’s point. By examining how and when racial concepts became hardened, we can see how historically conditional these concepts are. There’s nothing essential about them.

I don't think that Middleton's coinage of "white people" settles the question of when whiteness began to be seen as essential rather than incidental (i.e. just another adjective like green for eye color) but the author of the article also affirms that "the colour line was already beginning to harden" by 1613, so presumably there is more evidence to be had on point.

[Donal]

Originally Posted by jt512

That’s actually a good point. The woke like to ask because they like to deny that woke exists entirely or that is just a term that conservatives use to label “anything they don’t like.” The latter narrative has become so pervasive that googling “woke” turns up nothing other than websites parroting that lie. To find an honest discussion of what woke is, I had to use google.de, which at the top of the search returned an article in Der Spiegel that explained the post-modernist origins of wokism. This was not the case even six months or so ago, when a simple Google search easily found similar honest historical and philosophical explanations.

The Der Spiegel article included the following line (translating from memory): Hardly anybody today wants to be known as woke. But that in no way means that the phenomenon is a Chimera. The fact that hardly anybody today would self-identify as an antisemite hardly means that nobody is one.

Ya, that is crap. I just plugged "woke" into Google and got this in the snippet on the sidebar

Quote:

Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination". Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism and LGBT rights. Wikipedia

Also, after the traditional definition of "past tense of wake" you get the Merriam-Webster entry

Quote:

The meaning of WOKE is aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice) —often used ...

So ya, you're full of it

[Shalamar]

"We've successfully forced a subset of the population into abject poverty by bombing their towns, and denying them jobs. That means it's their fault they're now poor, but we can't help them now because white people might feel bad. Also it's woke, and thus a bad thing."

[Trausti]

Originally Posted by JoeMorgue

So basically in your world who ever discriminates "first" gets to keep discriminating forever because of a vague, glib "LOL you can't fight discrimination with discrimination" thought terminating cliche?

ETA: Why the hell do I keep wanting to spell discriminate with an e? It's not descriminate Joe.

What do you mean by "who"? A child born today inherits original sin? That sort of thing?