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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27749 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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The values you consider 'benefits of whiteness' here, I would maybe describe as 'benefits of western civilization'? I have no problem thinking of myself as a beneficiary of, product of, and cultural heir to, western civilization. (That terminology is complicated by the fact that I can point to non-western cultures who also can claim many or all of these virtues as a people, but I still think 'western' is at least a better proxy for what you're pointing at than 'white' to me.)

To reiterate, I don't think any of the virtues that you associate with 'white' here are in any way not available to me, and I hold and value the majority of them exactly as I would if I had two white parents. It's the specific racial category 'white' that I don't seem to fall within the accepted bounding conditions of, not any of the positive, neutral or negative values I can associate with white societies and cultures.

I want to be absolutely clear. I do not consider those values "white", but I was pointing out the framing activist use. I hate everything about it. I hate how much it increasingly dominates the terms of the argument, and even institutional policy. And I hate how it confuses what exactly you mean when you say you identify as "black" despite having a "white" mother.

I don't even consider those prosocial values inherently western. At least most of them, save Christianity. Asian cultures and Indian culture has a lot of the same values, with many of the same, and a few unique, foibles that we in the west have towards them as well. Nobody is perfect, but at least these cultures appear to acknowledge there are prosocial and antisocial behaviors, and you should encourage prosocial behavior. It's hard to say the same about the current state of the art crop of racial activist.

I'm glad to you hear you are older and haven't been sucked into the self inflicted systemic dysfunction of the modern "black" identifying community.

Understood, I wasn't sure initially if you were saying that yes, these are white values, but they're obviously good instead of bad.

It's probably clear from my indecisive wording that I also don't really think of them as inherently western values any more than I think of them as white values, so I think we're actually totally on the same page here.

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