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For some reason I made the really worthwhile decision to engage in a discussion about race and white guilt on a comment thread on the internet here.
Being proud of your race, no matter [what] it is, or your city, or your country, is ridiculous. I understand using it as coping mechanism to deal with the fact that you’ve been shit on by other races/countries, etc… though. Doing it while white is still worse. Sorry, we’ll just have to deal with that...I’ll just go ahead and guess that my very sincere belief in white privilege is unlikely to be a popular one around here. A person in power whining about how they don’t get to play the victim role is a very ugly thing to witness.
A colleague of mine, who wanted to remain nameless, but let's say he's an Italian American guy, didn't exactly agree. The following is our 100% engaging, and really TLDR political discussion that will certainly end the question of white privilege once and for all.
GUY: Yeah Luke, "being proud of being white is worse." White people SUCK SHIT. Seriously though, what is it about our race where we feel the need to extinguish ourselves. No other race has this trait. You don't hear Japanese or blacks saying, "We need to be ashamed of ourselves. We need to be overrun and out-populated, we blow."
LUKE: I think being proud of being anything that you didn't do yourself is stupid, be it black or white or Japanese or whatever. I do, however, understand the impulse to over-exaggerate your minority identity if it's something people have traditionally been made to feel ashamed of or alienated by, or fucking dead because of what they are. Gay pride, for example.
By the way, are you sure there is no such thing as the Japenese version of white guilt? They've done some pretty oppressive, colonialist military shit in their day. I imagine there's a dude sitting over there right now like me who thinks his nationalist dad is a prick for being so proud of his country.
You think we shouldn't be ashamed of things we had nothing to do with, like why should I feel bad about my white slave owning great great grandparents? That's a valid point. But then why should I be proud of my country-building great great grandparents who made America what it is then? I didn't have anything to do with that either.
GUY: You said: “Also, what do I care if there is no more 'white race?' What is my vested interest in that?"
This is a very unique white trait that I find bizarre. It's also ironic because you're claiming you have nothing in common with whites yet you share this bizarre need for self destruction only whites have.
You can be proud of being white because you have white traits. IQ tests supersede class and environment. Southeast Asians in rice paddies score about the same as Japanese elites and dirt poor Polaks do about the same as New England snobs. There are things we have in common.
If nothing else, why not be proud that you, like all whites, are looking forward to extinction?
LUKE: I'm not looking forward to the extinction of my race, I'm just indifferent to it. Anyway, I don't really spend my day thinking of myself as being a white dude all the time. I identify more with my socio-political class I suppose.
And IQ tests? What kind of thing is that to spend your time worrying about? That's what your deep, abiding connection to another white dude from across the world is? Your ability to answer test questions in a similar fashion?
And IQ tests? What kind of thing is that to spend your time worrying about? That's what your deep, abiding connection to another white dude from across the world is? Your ability to answer test questions in a similar fashion?
Obviously we're "arguing" so it's natural for me to lean toward the more dramatic side of my response, but I am a reasonable person. I understand that there are benefits to preserving certain parts of a cultural identity, and I don't think it will be beneficial for all people around the world, or around a country, or even a city, to end up being the same because that would be boring and bland. I just don't like the idea of establishing supposed qualitative differences that people can wield to point out why x is better than y.
I have no problem taking a few lumps as a white person either. I've got enough victories in the win column that I can afford to throw a few games. Aggressive competition is ugly to me. It's like when you're in an argument in a bar with some loud mouth, and you finally just concede because you don't want to be the type of person who worries too much about winning.
I have no problem taking a few lumps as a white person either. I've got enough victories in the win column that I can afford to throw a few games. Aggressive competition is ugly to me. It's like when you're in an argument in a bar with some loud mouth, and you finally just concede because you don't want to be the type of person who worries too much about winning.
GUY: Dude, we invented the MODERN WORLD. Nearly everything you (and all races) enjoy was created by whites. We didn't invent slavery, we ended it. We separated church and state. Would you prefer living in Asia? In China people happily stroll past Mao statues totally unimpressed with the fact that he murdered 50m of them. In Russia people are just as apathetic about Stalin's 30m.
America was built on white culture and Christian values. You can scoff at both all you want (I don't believe in God either) but it's about the best the world has to offer.
[Culture/race pride] is not something I'm pushing. It's something your DNA is pushing. All races, peoples, tribes have a NATURAL inclination to feel more sympathy for each other than strangers. That's why, when they report a plane crash in New Guinea, they mention the 4 Americans on board.
I'm not saying "Go do it, be proud." I'm saying "Stop denying this inclination to be proud and forcing yourself to replace this natural feeling with some kind of manufactured guilt."
I'm not saying "Go do it, be proud." I'm saying "Stop denying this inclination to be proud and forcing yourself to replace this natural feeling with some kind of manufactured guilt."
LUKE: Right, but like I said, if I'm going to be proud of any of that shit I had nothing to do with, isn't it logically consistent for me to feel a little shame about all the bad stuff too?
GUY: This is haunting: Whites have enough wins in the Shame column. We can afford to throw a few games.
What is haunting? Do I care more about my friends and family? Yes. Would I rather a thousand people that I don't know in some other country died than everyone I know and love? Probably. Do I get a little civic pride about Boston when it's on the national or international news for something good? Yes. I think it's illogical, but I do have that emotional impulse.
But I think resisting that tribal shit is what makes us human, not giving into it. Otherwise I would be murdering and raping my way across the country.
But I think resisting that tribal shit is what makes us human, not giving into it. Otherwise I would be murdering and raping my way across the country.
I am not actively promoting a shame culture for whites. I'm not even sure affirmative action is a good idea the way it has turned out. We can live in peace and go about our business, but every now and again it doesn't hurt to acknowledge that we've had it pretty good comparatively. There is no shame in that.
GUY: My God. I feel like I hacked into the nucleus of the liberal brain.
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Being just as proud of your race and culture as the rest of the world doesn't make you inhuman. It makes you like the rest of the world. In fact, to do otherwise is to assume you are better than the rest of the world and that is called White Supremacism.
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Pride, or at least lack of shame, does not lead to murder. When someone roots for the Dallas Cowboys they do not want every other team to be wiped out. When you buy a mug that says "World's Greatest Grandma" you don't really think the other grandmas are shitty.
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Why are you "throwing games"? Because whites were unfairly promoted into positions of power? Everyone wanted this position. Hannibal did his best to take his elephants across Europe and colonize the entire continent. He was successful for many years, but ultimately he was outmatched. The Indians weren't having a hippie love-fest when we got here. They were fighting. It took hundreds of years but eventually we beat them. We win.
The West is the Best. We didn't steal our position. We fought hard for it and won. We will lose it soon however, and a lot of that has to do with our own self-hatred. "Throwing games" will be the end of us.
LUKE: You said: "Being just as proud of your race and culture as the rest of the world doesn't make you inhuman. It makes you like the rest of the world."
Right, it makes one normal I suppose. I am suggesting that maybe we should try to transcend that biological caveman shit? Maybe it won't work, but it's worth considering anyway.
People everywhere are probably just as likely to be able to tell you why their city/country/race/ethnicity/sports team/local yokels/snobby elites are examples of the worst in the world too. You make jokes about your hometown and people being shitty just as much, if not more, than you talk about the things about them you are proud of. Which one is the 'just kidding' and which is the 'for reals'?
People everywhere are probably just as likely to be able to tell you why their city/country/race/ethnicity/sports team/local yokels/snobby elites are examples of the worst in the world too. You make jokes about your hometown and people being shitty just as much, if not more, than you talk about the things about them you are proud of. Which one is the 'just kidding' and which is the 'for reals'?
You said: "My God. I feel like I hacked into the nucleus of the liberal brain."
I am not saying this necessarily applies to you, but the conservative brain is one that goes around shitting its brain pants all day about imagined scares. "The whites will be wiped out" "The terrorists want to eradicate Western culture." "Homeless black Mexicans are raping our women and taking our jobs."
The argument I'm hearing from you here, and it's one I hear from other conservative/libertarian friends, is that this is a very real and serious threat we all need to be vigilant about, this inevitable extinction. I don't believe it any more than I think Chinese Al Qaeda is going to storm the streets of Boston. My mom is pretty scared that Osama bin Laden's zombie is going to plant a bomb in her local CVS in suburban Massachusetts too.
"Why are you 'throwing games'?"
Good point, the history of the human race has been one of competition for resources.
"Why are you 'throwing games'?"
Good point, the history of the human race has been one of competition for resources.
GUY: Please explain? You mean the white American nuclear family post WWII? The Don Draper types? That was a holiday after fighting the two worst wars the world will ever see. Well over 100m whites died in those wars. Sorry if we had some down time afterward.
And yes, blacks were segregated during those years but you take the worst black American life and hold it up to his relatives in Africa and they'd be drooling with envy.
And yes, blacks were segregated during those years but you take the worst black American life and hold it up to his relatives in Africa and they'd be drooling with envy.
Using the steam engine to begin the industrial revolution and modernize the entire world was not exactly a cake walk.
Yes, I am glad that the white people did that. All by themselves and with no help from any other race.
GUY: Required reading
Only when you're good and ready:
I'm offering $500 for any factual error in any one of these books.
LUKE: Ok, I guess we'll pick this back up and I'll get back to you in a million years when I read a book by Pat Buchanan.
GUY: Re your "I have no problem taking a few lumps as a white person either. I've got enough victories in the win column that I can afford to throw a few games" quote:
My [one respected conservative writer friend] said, "For how long is he going to continue feeling that way? Until we are reduced to a despised minority? What a fool."
Another simply asked "Why?"
LUKE: Why? Because I don't feel beset upon by the conquering hordes. Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but it's just not something I'm concerned about.
I'm not even sure I'm playing on the team that you guys want me to be on, or that there's even a competition in the first place.
I have no problem with those guys thinking me naive.
I'm not even sure I'm playing on the team that you guys want me to be on, or that there's even a competition in the first place.
I have no problem with those guys thinking me naive.
I shared some of your points with my friend Mint E. Fresh, who generally shares your outlook, and whom I have these same types of arguments with a lot. Here's what he had to say.
MINT E. FRESH:
One problem with “white pride” is that the very term cedes half the battle to the Left. Through all of American history it was understood what “American” meant.
It was understood, for instance, that Daniel Webster was an American by ethnicity, in the same way Paul Hogan (only one I can think of) is an Australian. Newcomers to America were called other things, Italian-American, Irish-American etc, because their culture and identity were distinct and different than the American culture and identity, which was British in extraction and culture.
Those newcomers came to be absorbed into the American people and ceased having distinct identities, and became American (in precisely the same way that Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Vikings and Normans became “Englishmen”, or Irishmen, Englishmen and Scots became “Australian”). But once the battle to eradicate the American people was joined, “whites” or “white people” came to replace “American” to describe Americans, while the term “American” came to mean “anyone alive between Mexico and Canada, regardless of what language they speak or where they were born." Which is to say it came to mean nothing, really.
By accepting the term “whites”, ethnic Americans have already lost. Race alone is not sufficient to base any sort of “pride” on. It is also inaccurate. Americans who look to pursue the group interests of “whites” are not pursuing the group interests of Serbs, Estonians and Basques. They are pursuing the group interests of Americans. It is useful for the Left, when the right uses “whites” to mean “Americans”, because if someone is pursuing the group interests of whites, i.e. the “white race”, it is extremely easy to paint that as “racist”. But the fact – and I mean fact literally, as it’s a literal truth – the fact is that they are pursuing the group interests of a specific and particular people that used to be called the American people. They are not pursuing those interests because those other people have the same skin color, but because they are of the same people, and actually have group interests. “Whites” do not have group interests, really. The French have group interests, for instance. So do unhyphenated Americans, and that’s the point.
Race is only one component of a cultural identity, but by allowing that entire identity to be defined only by race (“whites”), the right unwittingly allows a perfectly legitimate, moral, healthy and noble instinct (to advance the interests of one’s people) to become a race-based one, or to be perceived as one, thus making it instantly illegitimate.
Englishman/England = American/America
Here is something you need to address though. You write:
I am not saying this necessarily applies to you, but the conservative brain is one that goes around shitting its brain pants all day about imagined scares. "The whites will be wiped out" "The terrorists want to eradicate Western culture." "Homeless black Mexicans are raping our women and taking our jobs."
This is problematic for multiple reasons:
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The liberal brain is equally as guilty (“The right wing is motivated by 'hate'”; if the government doesn’t continue doing X, Y and Z then all the blacks will start getting lynched again; “Right wing extremism is on the rise”; it is “hate”-fueled evil white supremacism that leads conservatives to argue that our people should be allowed to continue to exist, it is “hate” that fuels efforts in Arizona to enforce federal laws already on the books, etc.)
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You are equating different issues and concerns, and each of them is literally true in an objective sense:
A)Terrorists do want to eradicate Western culture. That’s a fact. What’s wrong with that concern is that they can’t do it. We need to be protected against terrorists, but it’s not an existential threat, unlike third world immigration.
B) It’s not that “the whites will be wiped out”, it’s that Western Civilization will be wiped out. Western Civilization is the civilization of the Western European peoples. Liberalism ends with the extinction of Western Civilization, as open borders will flood Western nations with non-Westerners. Once England becomes majority-Arab (or non-English), it ceases to be “England”, i.e. the Land of the Eng(lish), and once the English cease being a majority, the English nation loses self determination. It is not just America where this is happening, it is happening all over Europe, and once all Western nations have primarily non-Western populations, they cease being Western nations. That matters for all the obvious reasons. You don’t want to live in Mexico because Mexico is a shit hole, and because you’re not Mexican. But you’d be happy if where you lived turned into Mexico? It’s nonsensical.
C) It is also an objective fact that if X immigrants arrive in America and find employment, X jobs are no longer available to Americans. Although I don’t think the economic argument is altogether that important, apart from it being effective, even if Mexican immigration made us all richer instead of poorer (and it doesn’t), it would still be objectionable for all the obvious reasons.
Your philosophy ends with a world in which every country is predominantly non-Western. Which is to say, it ends with a world profoundly (and terrifyingly) less diverse than it is now. The conservative philosophy (I don’t mean the philosophy of political conservatives, but philosophical conservatism, which most Republicans have never heard of) ends with a world in which all the different peoples have their own place to develop and enhance their own cultures.
I mean, you have to understand that it’s unhealthy to not care whether or not your people continues to exist, or whether your people loses control of its destiny by being relegated to a minority. And you have to understand that, if the reverse were true, if whites from somewhere flooding into a non-white country against the wishes AND laws of those non-white people, you would object, and the entire Left would shriek in unison, in outrage.
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15 comments:
Put this post on the list, then put it on a boat, sail it out to a rocketship, then blast it into the sun
^haha.
THIS IS A SERIOUS MATTER NANCY
I didn't read the whole thing but I'm pretty sure the guy is Jim Goad. The IQ test thing gave it away.
when isn't it jim goad?
I know that that's racist has gone through deflation around here...but that's racist.
I love racial slurs and white pussy. Boy pussy.
Girl dick, boy dick.
Comments are comments, I suppose.
Everyone go (re)watch COSMOS with Carl Sagan or end up like this ignorant racist dude.
Interesting how the two conservative people don't use their real names here.
...said "Anonymous"
I disagree with most of "Guy's" points, but he is correct when he says The Redneck Manifesto is required reading.
Luke:
Why wouldn't you read anything by Buchanan? He's been the most prescient American commentator for the past two decades and has warned and has been proven true about things like globalization, national sovereignty, and the encroaching state. He's reviled by the majority of Republicans because he has their number.
I like Gavin, and he usually isn't kind to "our kind." He made a comment that rubbed some "lefties" the wrong way during his SXSW comedy appearance, but he has every right to. And I used to collect Answer Me! as well.
People are going to have their political ideals no matter what. Gavin can't be that hateful, he married a Native American! The real Americans. ]Bad jokes aside, they have the right to hate and keep on prejudicin'.
Trash comes in each race or ethnicity. It's unavoidable.
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