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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32146 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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tyre nichols, a 29 year old black man in memphis, was beaten up by several cops on jan 7th and died three days later. all five of the cops, who are black, were fired, arrested, and charged; the police chief denounced their actions as 'inhumane'. the bodycam video will be released about 3 hours after this post at 7pm EST. hopefully we won't see a recurrence of the floyd riots, although several cities, including atlanta which is dealing with its own controversial cop shooting incident, are preparing for an eventful evening. the police reform movement, which has stalled, may also be pushed back into the forefront of public consciousness.

4 videos have been released on the city of memphis vimeo account: https://vimeo.com/cityofmemphis

I'm kind of unsettled by the fresh new wave of Twitter excitementspew that it doesn't matter if you have black cops, black chiefs of police, black prosecutors, black judges, black city councils, black mayors, black members of Congress, black Presidents: systemic white supremacy makes them all racist too. Just going to chuckle nervously and assume that all of these online people aren't real.

Hard not to wonder if 100 years from now, white people could be only 5% of the population of the US but every bad thing that's done is considered latent white supremacy.

They have defined "whiteness" as a set of cultural norms. That Smithsonian museum infographic made the mistake of plainly stating the claims of academics in an easy to read format. Plenty of serious academics claim the same things, but that's not easily viewed by the general public so they aren't subjected to the same public derision.

That’s the motte. The Bailey is tons of unjustified racial hatred.

As a white skinned person I kinda wish I had some of those attributes.

It is still absolutely unbelievable to me that this infographic got published.

Yeah, me too. It's hard to envision how nobody at any point said "man it's kind of racist to say that black people don't have these positive traits". Horseshoe theory wins again, I guess.

I'm pretty sure they think those are negative traits, at least most of them.

Some of them clearly seem negative, at least the way they're been portrayed. Some are mentioned in the way that hints white people don't have some other positive trait.

It would be more accurate to say that in the minds of the authors, the positive traits are held to be positive largely because they correlate more strongly with having white skin. That if non-whites had a greater say in the culture, other attributes (not necessarily the opposite of the “white” traits) would be held as markers of good character.

Fair enough. It's hard for me to comprehend how someone could view "shows up on time" and "takes responsibility" as negative traits, but if someone does so then I guess there's no cognitive dissonance there.

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