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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsShould we coddle angry white men or tell them the truth?
Much of today's talk is about angry white men who believe that they are getting the short end of the stick. But should we appease them or should we stop lying to them?
It is too easy to coddle newly aggrieved angry white men when the premise of their grievance is false and misleading. Once again a scholar wrote an article that gets much right but fails to provide the only advice that makes sense.
PLEASE READ in the intended context and comment constructively.
https://egbertowillies.com/2017/08/30/coddle-angry-white-men-tell-truth/
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Hoyt
(54,770 posts)that they have it better than any other group in this country. White wingers are a whiny, greedy bunch.
Personally, I'd also take their damn gunz away. But I guess most think that would be kicking them while they are down.
Marengo
(3,477 posts)
GulfCoast66
(11,949 posts)But he does not discriminate. He hates all guns.
Hoyt
(54,770 posts)hunting and self-defense (if they are irrationally afraid). But toting in public, amassing a cache of guns and accessories like body armor that even some of our Gungeoneers seem to need, is kind of out there and a danger to society. Don't you think?
This kind of crap needs to end --
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Hoyt
(54,770 posts)country. I know, there are some who supposedly aren't Klansmen but they do need a gun to walk out the door and are fine with mass murders, armed Klansmen, dead babies, intimidation of people with guns, etc., as long as they have access to more guns.
If the tough Australians can bite the bullet, as they did in 1996, surely "the good" gun fanciers that supposedly exist can give up their bad habit for the good of society. At least that is what I keep telling myself.
Marengo
(3,477 posts)Hoyt
(54,770 posts)Quit trying to minimize the impact of white wing gun fanciers on our society.
Marengo
(3,477 posts)LanternWaste
(37,748 posts)"Try again, yes or no only please..."
It can be frustrating when context and nuance deny one the mental simplicity of only yes or no.
I can certainly empathize with your desire to desire to maintain a false dilemma as the only answer, as a complex answer can simply overwhelm a bias.
Marengo
(3,477 posts)Concerned what your answer may reveal?
Aristus
(66,286 posts)
MosheFeingold
(3,051 posts)I am loathe to judge any person by the actions of a group in which he is in.
I struck a life-long friendship with a fellow immigrant in the 1960s who became my neighbor. He was German, member of the Hitler Youth, and soldier for the Germans in the waning days of WWII. Lost his foot to disease somewhere in Russia.
When we met, I immediately hated him. He was unfailingly polite and gentle. We traded German-language books. And just a good guy, in general. His kids went to my kids' bar/bat-mitzvahs. My son was one of his son's groomsmen. Etc. He died about 1988, too young, of a heart attack. I spoke at his funeral about what a nice man he was.
I look at "white men" the same way. Yes, a lot of white guys get certain advantages. A lot of white guys get lots of disadvantages, notably the working poor and uneducated. They have been very much been left behind in a post-industrial USA. A strong back and a work ethic no longer means a good job when a robot can do it or the coal mine is closed. That's why meth is the only booming industry in certain parts of the USA. Hope is lost, and people are angry.
I think the problem is our human tendency to group people and blame individuals for the faults of whatever group we created.
It's so often racist or sexist. For example, if one treated a given black man unfairly because you looked at various socioeconomic data and decided that that given black guy was much more likely to be a criminal, it would be racist and unfair to that given black guy.
Same with white guys. Or any group we make up. Individuals are not groups. Individuals are individuals, and each person should be judged as such.
Even German males aged 16-39 sometime between 1939-1947.
Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)No "coddling", ever... Especially since as a black male I'm in the crosshairs as one of their scapegoats for everything wrong with this country...
And I don't care how legitimate their mythical "economic concerns" were... Voting for an inexperienced unqualified Manhattan billionaire celeb personality (Newsflash: This is a textbook example of those "Establishment Coastal Elites" they despise so much) who literally defecates on a gold-plated toilet because they think he's a man of the people and a Christian completely discredits whatever bullshit point they were trying to prove...
brush
(53,743 posts)The whole of society favors straight, white males and has for centuries. There are opportunities out there for them that others don't even get a whiff of.
If they're having problems, think of what black males, Latino males, and especially double minorities like black women and Latino women have to go through.
maxsolomon
(33,244 posts)Because they won't listen and they won't change.
cwydro
(51,308 posts)Is this what we're doing now? Finding someone more socially acceptable to pick on?
Baitball Blogger
(46,684 posts)We would have to question everything about the passes we give white males in our society before we can begin to break a pattern that allows them to game the system.
Be prepared to question why we set up sacred cows through military service and religious preference; or how police patterns of behavior apply undue attention to certain members of society, and not others.
It is not going to be pretty, nor well received.
MosheFeingold
(3,051 posts)"Everything about our society's status quo has been established to coddle white males"
No, certain white males. Others are left behind.
It's an imperfect grouping, so those that were not coddled are doubly screwed by being blamed for the sins of persons in their assigned group.
Again, I refer to my own lazy thinking about German males, aged 16-39 or so during WWII. German males, aged 16-39 or so, killed pretty much all of my extended family. I fought them ("fought" is perhaps too strong a word; I was an MP and certainly avoided most direct combat). I did not like them, as a group. They hurt me, as a group.
And yet, one of them, ended up being perhaps my best friend, after my wife.
People are individuals. Not groups. One does not solve racism or sexism or any ism with more of the same.
Baitball Blogger
(46,684 posts)to be broader in definition when we talk about white males. It comes down to enjoying privileges that many of us will never see, unless we are willing to contort ourselves in ways that will make the dominant culture in our society feel "safe." We have to prove that we're one of the "good ones." The ones that will accept a submissive role and not give them any trouble as they continue to skirt the rules for their own advancement.
Of course, I can see your complaint as well, based on religious differences. Certainly, Germany provided the prime example, which is why we're all more than concerned since there are signs that the situation may be repeating itself.
MrScorpio
(73,630 posts)GulfCoast66
(11,949 posts)Upper middle class, white, male, over 50 and raised religious, I say fuck 'em.
For 500 year my ancestors exploited others not like them for economic gain. The only reason our(USA) type of racism developed was to help further the ruling class exploit labor from Africans and African Americans. And harkening back to what LBJ said, the whole time the rich were telling the poor whites how good they had it because they were better off than the blacks, both before and after slavery.
Hell, women too. Why are Teachers, Nurses and admin assistants paid less here than other parts of the world? Because rich whites figured they could get single or non married women to do it for pennies on the dollar and that still goes on.
So along comes Reagan and the upper class figure out that they can start doing to white what they have always done to minorities...exploiting their labor for great economic gain. They bet that if they doubled down on the racism they could get away with it.
Trump if proof that they pretty much have.
Rather than pandering to increasingly poor whites, the Democratic party needs to tell them that the upper class are doing the same thing to them that they have done to minorities forever. We need to be screaming that the percent of the GNP that labor has lost has more than been made up by corporate profits. And if they do not listen, they we take comfort that with folks under 30 less than 25% support Trump. Everyday, more and more of his supporters are buried. And we need to tell them with it does not mean reinventing the wheel, go back to liberal economic policy that FDR brought in and their grandparents loved.
But if we soft pedal our commitment to the social justice commitments our party has we are playing into their hands.
brush
(53,743 posts)Problem is, and we all know this, the divide-and-conquer racism that the white elite use to get poor whites on their side works well on low info people, thus the sustained effort to diminish our education system.
BainsBane
(53,012 posts)And not just Trump supporters. The most egregious example comes from the Tiki torch wielding Nazis, but that sense of aggrievement is not unique to them; nor is the politics of entitlement, which dominates political discourse today.
Pronouncing race a fiction is easy for those whose lives aren't dominated by racial discrimination. Race was not constructed to "divide" the middle and upper-middle class from the non-white (or even the white) poor. The relative affluence of the white bourgeoisie, and their determination that their own privilege is what matters most achieves that. Race was constructed to justify SLAVERY, an institution in which white men owned and profited from the labor of other human beings. Liberty for white men was made possible by slavery. The two were integrally connected, as historian Edmund Morgan demonstrated 45 yrs ago. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1888384?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents The prosperity for the white bourgeoisie that some insist we must return to was paid for by the enslavement, subjugation, and oppression of everyone but them. In the 20th century, that white middle-class prosperity as propped up through empire, through regime change, plunder and the enforcement of neoliberal economic policies. And that was during the days those who now use the term neoliberal as an insult want to return to. And it hasn't exactly gone unnoticed that many of those insulted as neoliberal and establishment are less affluent, less privileged, and more likely to be people of color than those doing the insulting.
We see a vision of politics advanced that is all about white bourgeois prosperity. We see concerns of the poor and marginalized treated with contempt, rhetorical divisions of "progressives" vs. "centrist" or establishment, with the former disproportionately represented by middle-to upper-middle class, or even rich, white men and the latter disproportionately comprised of the poor, women, and people of color. We see historical mythology--like "the party of FDR"--repeatedly invoked, ignoring what is now years of critiques pointing out that the history they invoke was also one of Jim Crow and lynchings, with a president who enforced the former and refused to act on the later out of deference to, and a priority on, the feelings of white Southerners. When that mythology is repeated after having the dark side of that history pointed out hundreds of times, it can no longer be dismissed as mere ignorance.
The rhetoric about "establishment" only came to dominate during the presidency of a black man, whose successor might have been a woman. The mantra of "corporatist" is used very selectively, almost always directed toward women and people of color, while people's whose incomes are far in excess of the national median think nothing of insulting the poorest and most marginalized citizens as "corporatists" and "establishment." Catering to corporate interests of huge swaths of the economy is defended by those claiming to be anti-corporatist. Great wealth in the hands of certain people are justified while others are vilified. There is no standard or principle, only pretext. Immunity for gun corporations is treated as a positive good. Hundreds of billions for Lockheed-Martin for the F-25, no problem. But if profits come from finance rather than murder, war, and genocide, then they're bad. Yet despite the way "corporatist" was invoked during the election, as a justification for failing to stand up to the rise of fascism, since then we haven't seen a single action, proposal, or initiative that focuses on corporations or banking. What we have seen is systematic attacks on politicians of color. We see demands that women and people of color be removed from party leadership, for reasons they refuse to apply to men they believe are owed power. Such rhetoric has NOTHING to do with a critique of capital. The extensive exemptions for merchants of deaths and certain rich people--including the mythologizing of a president born into the aristocracy who worked as a Wall Street financier--prove as much. Corporatist and establishment are insults used to in pursuit of power, designed to justify efforts to restore the social order that those people hurling the insults are explicit about wanting to return to.
When political consciousness is built entirely around the white, male bourgeois self, people pretend race doesn't matter. When those making that argument repeatedly refuse to respect or even consider the concerns of those from other demographics (like the black men and women regularly insulted on Twitter as "neoliberal," it becomes clear that something quite deliberate is at work.
And it isn't just about race. It's also about gender and class. It's a class project designed to promote the interests of a particular demographic, the white, largely male, bourgeoisie. There is nothing wrong with that in and of itself. It becomes problematic when it is presented as the ONLY approach, when the interests of that narrow demographic are treated as universal, and the concerns of those who lack their privilege--whether racial, gender, or class, are dismissed and insulted.
What that bourgeoisie fails to acknowledge is that it sits at the center of the global capitalist system, right near the very top. Those with household incomes of $100k a year, one of the lower demographics that Trump won, are in the top 0.3% of richest people in the world and twice the median US income. An income of just $33k puts a household in the top 5% globally. http://www.worldwealthcalculator.org/resultsWhite men are upset about their relative decline compared to the rest of the population, and that decline is relative to the Global South and people of color and single women in the US, people who don't exist in a political discourse that claims that wages have dropped since the 50s or 70s. That is only true for one group: white men in the US. Any honest critique of capital has to include the relationship between core and periphery, between the affluent Western Empires and the Global South. Nationalist critiques may convey grievances within a given nation, like the US, but they do not constitute a challenge to or understanding of capitalism.
The plutocracy doesn't keep all white men from establishing unity with people of color, and it doesn't keep the bourgeoisie from establishing unity with the poor. That is something some of those white men choose to perpetuate by refusing to listen, respect, or consider the concerns, or the lives, of anyone but themselves. People can choose to stop it, to bridge divides, but that requires a willingness to listen and understand, and focus on something larger than their own sense of persecution.
ProfessorGAC
(64,852 posts)Excellent on every level.
And, i'm one of the angry old white men. But, i'm angry at those white guys this thread is really about.
KitSileya
(4,035 posts)I like RBG's answer to the question of when there will be enough women on the Supreme Court: "When there are nine."
When will we stop coddling white men? When there is not one white man in Congress or in any position of power - preferably when there's no white people in positions of power, even, and I say that as a white woman.
(White men who protest this needs to shut up and listen and realize that things have been so biased for so long, we need bias the other way for a while before we get equilibrium.)
Maeve
(42,271 posts)You 'coddle' infants and dumb animals who can't think; you help and educate adult humans. Yeah, some of them need to be (figuratively) slapped upside the head, and that is what the Crying Nazi is having done to him (https://www.democraticunderground.com/10029535405). And that lesson is most effectively given by people he would otherwise expect to get praise from for his views.
But no one gives up hateful thoughts just because they get bopped in the nose. They have to find out that the people they have demonized are really nice folk, too. Compassion isn't 'coddling'; it's patience and thoughtfulness and a willingness to listen one-on-one. See people as people first and treat them that way. Sorta like how we want to be treated...
ProudLib72
(17,984 posts)White man and black man discussing racism. The white man disbelieved the black man's list of grievances, simply would not admit that racism existed to the extent the black man made out it did. Finally, the black man stood up and was basically yelling at the white man "Can you accept that my experience is different from yours?" In that moment it became clear to me: white men cannot understand the experience of minorities. It is beyond the scope of their imagination.
I'm not saying that these people are stupid or willfully ignorant. I'm saying that there is no way to appreciate the minority experience from within a dominant white culture. Their misconception is that dominant white culture is being "destroyed" by minorities. What they are really feeling is culture shock, being exposed to new possibilities and the fact of the minority experience. When someone's values and beliefs are challenged, the natural reaction is to strike out. But at whom does one strike out when it isn't a person but a shift in cultural values that is doing the challenging?
To answer the question, the only way to appease angry white men is to reverse the shift in cultural values. Go back to the 50s when people knew their place as based on skin tone and were careful not to rock the boat. In other words, it is a losing strategy to try and appease the angry white males.
Motley13
(3,867 posts)
Orsino
(37,428 posts)...they might not be so stereotypically white and angry.
But what we do is probably less important than what the bullshit media they consume 24/7 tells them.
