Personally, I worked very hard to get into a good school, and then very hard to get into a good university, and then very hard to get into a good PhD and then very hard to get a good job.
Yea, see, I didn't. I'm not of that class, so I don't see what you're talking about. It's been a unified front of multiracial peons railing against a multiracial management my whole life, in jobs that are easy to get, for anyone, and easy to dispose of. Or put it another way: the generalized shitty, Kafkaesque labor experience from behind a colorblind Rawlsian veil is far, far more salient for me as I suspect is for most.
Pongalh
5d ago
Perhaps not. I'm a small man, and I keep my identity small. I only think in terms of very direct and overt discrimination, of the everyman sort, hence "dad won't let my black girlfriend come to dinner."
Pongalh
5d ago
"Massive discrimination at all levels."
But it's not all levels. I don't think that for the vast majority of people these troubles do exist. And it certainly doesn't involve MURDER per your examples, where it does. Most of us are exposed to non-prestigious jobs where actual merit does in fact apply. Got a clean driving record? Voila, you're a pizza dude. It's a big, complicated, growing, non-zero sum economy where there's lots of opportunity.
I think my lack of professional success - or even much caring about it - is why I'm less bitter than the software engineers on this site who feel hectored by women of color with soft degrees.
Pongalh
5d ago
It's generalising massively, but I think the right is more predisposed to 'police down', considering crimes by the poor and marginalised to be the worst, but instinctively believing that power and wealth confers the right to break norms. Whereas the left is the other way around, sometimes being overly tolerant of crimes done by those at the bottom of society.
Yes. The barbarism for the left flows from seemingly genteel people at the top. Think the wholesome family at the center of Zone of Interest, for an extreme example.
Pongalh
5d ago
Sure. Here's an example: I bring home a non-white girlfriend, dad is apoplectic. I say chill out, race doesn't matter.
There goes "any context"
Pongalh
5d ago
I'm surely less successful than almost everyone here. I make 16 an hour part time (and even that's going away in two weeks), childless, single, in my 40s. And yet I'm less doomer than the lot o' ya
I like seeing what others are talking about just for my own curiosity's sake. In fact I'm interested in politics more broadly but with no desire whatsoever to do anything about perceived problems. I don't get out of bed for systemic discrimination against any particular racial group, mine or otherwise. (As said, me and the rest of whatever racial group one believes I'm part of are not some contiguous massive organism; I exist marginally.) And it's hardly like that topic exhausts this whole site.
I'm like one of those original anthropologists interested in examining societies purely descriptively. I'm not there to preserve or rescue anything. I'm not advocate. I would think believing you can "sort the big problems out" would be a source of incredible frustration, in any case.
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