Faceplanting on our privilege! …it tastes like a foot.
butts
Yeah, I don’t really know how Walky even gets around with that thing in his mouth all the damn time.
achallenger
thats why he has so much trouble just walkying away
Reltzik
Okay, now I’ve got an image of Walky sucking on the little toes of both feet simultaneously (in something like a butterfly stretch position) because he wondered to himself, “Hey, I wonder if I can suck on the little toes of both my feet simultaneously.”
Bro, I feel you bro. Honestly every time a marginalized group member like, exists, at like, y’know, normal people, it’s like a direct attack. Like, trying to make bros feel guilty and awful about shit.
It’s why my subreddit rants about the secret conspiracy of all those others out there trying to attack us with their guilt-inducing feelings and make us care about people who aren’t in the Honorary Bro Nation.
Look, we’re not saying they can’t exist. We’re saying we shouldn’t need to NOTICE they exist!
#IgnoranceIsBliss
Pat
Welp, that stopped being parody somewhere in there.
Gordon
This just makes me think of that time I was watching a YouTube video parodying a particular type of commercial. The video used the word diversity. And there was a gem in the comment cesspool that said :
“Yeah, diversity. You mean the genocide of the straight white male.”
And then my brain hemorrhaged and I had to go lie down.
Skizz
Seriously? That is all kinds of stupid. As a straight white male, I am not feeling at all endangered.
Dark
Wow! It’s almost like Tumblr in here!
Just Saying
Because people are discussing serious issues? Did that make you feel uncomfortable so you had to say something that (frankly) isn’t really an insult?
This comments section almost always has a very straight-forward and detailed discussion of the issues contained in the comic and if you’re not interested in reading it I recommend that you steer clear of the comments section.
But there’s really no need to come down here flinging poop like a stressed out lil critter.
trlkly
No, because you’re making posts pretending to be your opponents in order to make fun of them, complete with fake tags. Both sides do this on tumblr.
No need to assume the guy is being a jerk. He can just be making a joke the same way the rest of you are.
And, BTW, you aren’t having a serious discussion in this particular section. There are some, and those are great. But this is people poking fun.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but don’t try to make it sound like you’re doing something great and wonderful and the other guy is some evil man who is trying to stop you.
For the record, I never make fun and never say anything sarcastic.
Pat
trlkly, hunny, are you aware that “both sides” here aren’t, like, sports teams?
Because “victims of oppression” and “people who want to hurt victims of oppression” aren’t equivalent.
Gigafreak
At my bus stop, there is one of those free newspaper dispensers. This one happens to be in Spanish (I can read a little bit of Spanish, so sometimes I try to read the headlines while waiting for the bus). One day, I got there to see a large bumper sticker posted on the side of that dispenser:
“DIVERSITY is a code word for #WHITEGENOCIDE”
I’m not white, and the neighborhood has a considerable Korean population. So a few days later, I brought a roll of duct tape and neatly taped over the text on the sticker. (Clever use of duct tape can solve SO MANY PROBLEMS, you guys.) A few months after that, the sticker (and the tape on it) had mysteriously vanished. Good riddance.
Neo-nazis and white supremacists are a pain in the ass. In Denmark, I lived in a refugee immigrant heavy part of the city (I think at the time it was mostly Kurdish, Syrian, and Indonesian) and so sometimes there’d be some neo-nazi graffiti about the usual BS (death to immigrants, that sort of thing). And just like you there was a troupe of individuals countering it when it cropped up either by covering it up or defacing it (over there, the anarchists’ main activism was scouring for neo-nazi graffiti and quickly editing it to make it about the nazis instead (so instead of “X, get out of the country” it was “nazis, get out of the country”).
I remember that mattering a lot to my neighbors as it made them feel like at least someone had their back against that kind of hate.
Skilltagz
You are endangered, soon all people will be a generic beige like us half bloods muwhahahahaha >:)
Pat
You’re committing genocide by just waiting for us all to die without actually doing anything evil?
I don’t have a counter-plan for that!
MindLink
I never understood why people talk about “white genocide” as something that is inherently bad.
As long as a genocide doesn’t involve actively killing a race, then who cares ? Even if a World Dictator were to suddenly demand forced castration of all members of my own race, I wouldn’t care, since having kids is not a right and it wouldn’t affect my life or anyone elses.
In a couple of centuries we might all become orange anyway, that doesn’t mean that I will turn orange myself.
EvilWriter
No fair! I was totally going to shed a single manly tear, but now Cerberus said it like it was a white male privilege thing, so now it’ll just look stupid!
Except MAYBE when you’re so jaded to it that any semblance of filial love is dead, gone, and forgotten, and it’s more like getting more junk mail from the Mormon church trying to get you to come back 10 years after you left.
… oh wait there’s a website to fix that now nm.
Gigafreak
Want petty revenge on someone? Put their address into that site! THE INTERNET ALLOWS YOU TO BEAM MORMONS AT PEOPLE!
Yeah, it is kind of is much suckier when you have to realise that being the ‘favourite’ has seriously screwed over your sibling for years. But it is a good thing Walky is noticing now, even though he might prefer to be blissfully ignorant because it might take a lot of effort to resolve this.
NotPiffany
I don’t know how much more Walky can do to “resolve” the situation. He can acknowledge that he’s the favorite, and he can agree with Sal that the situation sucks and is unfair, but he can’t make Linda like her daughter.
NelC
He could share his stuff. Maybe Sal would like a dead rat?
Sam
Resolved in this case doesn’t have to mean ‘oh, they’re all a happy family now’, because it is true that he can’t make Linda like Sal, but he can actually stand up for his sister and just be there in her corner as someone who isn’t going to tolerate his parents treating her as lesser than him.
I dunno. I often think about the fact that I NEVER have to feel guilty about my ancestors leading to subjugation and death’s of most of the Native Americans. Ain’t nothin’ better!
A lot of white people get that, too, though. My ancestors were Jews who arrived in the early 20th century, for example, and set up in New England. The genocides and subjugation was pretty much done by that point around here.
Marisa Mockery
Yeah and Jews were still treated like shit until WW2. After that it became frowned upon. BECAUSE RACISM IS FUN
Yotomoe
I’m sure it’s more fun when you’re on the racist end of it. Like how fighting games are fun, until that one guy puts you in the combo you can’t escape from. I’m sure that guy’s having a blast!
modulusshift
tbh it’s kinda meh. If it’s even noticeable, it’s a slight feeling of outrage that things aren’t how they “should” be, or how they were perceived to be. Usually that feeling of outrage is just enough to provoke enough privilege to get people to shut up and acquiesce with what you thought so that you don’t cause problems. (I guess some people get satisfaction out of that? For me, it’s always been bewildered confusion, which fades to no consequence.) Other times, the racee manages to display enough annoyance that your perceptions are supposed to be their reality that the more intelligent racers understand how dumb they’re being. (assuming that doesn’t backfire and ruin the racee’s day/life.) And in the third case, where reality obstinately ignores you and your perceptions, and you don’t adjust your perceptions as a result, it fuels the rage (and delusional confusion) that many people know white men for.
So yeah, it’s not great. The only good parts are when you (very very) occasionally realize how it benefited you after the fact, and that’s only good if you have no sense of guilt or compassion about it. Which most of us don’t have much of, not because we don’t care, but because there’d be a lot more to regret if we all included things we unknowingly did as well as the things we knowingly did. That’s a distinction we get to make due to some privilege, too, so this is kinda recursive…
/confessions of a modern young white male
Torra
I don’t think I understood anything you just said here
This. Hell, it didn’t even become unacceptable to be obvious about being anti-semitic in much of culture until around the 70s thanks to a huge amount of Jewish artists pushing back against anti-semitism in the 60s.
Oberon
But not too long before that the entire US government was able to be vocally anti-semitic with zero backlash from the voters. And quite possibly with the actual approval of the majority of the voters.
I recall transcripts from the McCarty hearings where he would refer to Jewish witnesses as “the Jewish gentleman.” Which while it isn’t quite on the level of dropping the N-word it still serves to constantly remind everyone listening that the person being questioned is a second class citizen, is in some way lesser than a ‘normal’ person. If someone today were to refer to an African American witness as “the black gentleman” or “the African American gentleman”, or a Jewish witness as “the Jewish gentleman” there would be a huge uproar, and rightly so.
Leorale
OTOH, a lot of Jews ‘pass’ as White nowadays, and we benefit from that privilege — it’s not at all the same as being visibly non-white (for example, with cops).
I have lots of thoughts about whether Jews are White, and whether Whiteness exists.
Also, sad to say, there was still (and is currently) subjugation going on after we landed in the US. (First things that come to mind: internment camps, the rise of the diamond trade, and our current jail system.) We did get murdered a lot this century, but we also partially benefit from recent oppressions. 🙁
Harvey Janus
So I’m trying to figure out when the Irish started being considered White, because you have the years after the potato famine… And then I can’t find anything that precipitated that stopping. It obviously stopped, but when?
Harvey Janus
Aw man my gravatar changed to.. Some form of Joe
not someone else
IIRC it had something to do with events in New England after the Civil War, and the way a lot of Irish folk allied themselves explicitly against black folks, politically.
I have no idea why some of it started applying to non-American Irish folks, though, but in Ireland proper there are still tensions, albeit not like it was during the “let’s actively try to murder everyone in this country” era.
Joseph
There’s a book called “How The Irish Became White” by… Ignatius Loyola (I think) which covers this exact topic, and its a mix of new white non-English speaking migrants (Italian, Polish, Russian, etc) and the movement of black Americans north, and the Irish became the acceptable face of non-WASP white people.
Basically it just got too hard to tell the difference between the Irish and the general population. Prejudice isn’t any fun if you have to work at it.
Harvey Janus
Thanks for the explanations.
Bruceski
I had that discussion with my mom recently, and what we settled on (other people’s mileage may vary based on their mindset and experience) was that I have grown up white, my mom is white now but didn’t used to be, and Grandpa had been through enough stuff that he was never white despite the overlap between his life and mine. Mom remembers when he moved to live near us after Grandma died, just looking for a job to keep himself busy, he was terrified that employers would find out he was Russian. He worked for the mob in Chicago after WWII because when you’re a Russian Jewish immigrant, that’s three reasons nobody else will hire you.
Reltzik
Family story (with identity of family member redacted — though she probably wouldn’t care either way). Jewish girl growing up in NYC in the late 40s, after the war ended… but well before Vatican 2. For some odd reason the Bronx is laid out with alternating blocks of East European Jew and Irish Catholic.
Most of the Catholic kids went to the private Catholic school, where (even after WW2) the priests stirred them up against the Jews with the doctrine of blood libel. (This is the doctrine that Jews accepted the blood guilt for Jesus’s crucifixion upon their heads and the heads of all their children.)
This resulted in her being cornered and gang-raped by four boys from the Catholic high school, to punish her for killing Christ. I forget exactly how old she was, but it was in the range of 8-10.
The cops came, took a statement, said no crime had been committed, and left. They were Irish cops.
No, hatred of Jews did not magically vanish once Nazi Germany was defeated.
Every time conservative Catholic cardinals talk about undoing Vatican 2, I vomit in my mouth a little.
Ruhrow
I…but…I…the sense, there is none. Not that rape ever makes *sense* or anything, but something about the juxtaposition of such a horrible, horrible thing with “we’re doing it for Christ,” especially with everyone that young…it’s downright terrifying. Humans are strange creatures.
Reltzik
That girl’s ancestors came from Poland or Russia (which it was depended on where the border had been drawn after each war ended). For the local nobles and otherwise-well-to-do, Christmas was a time to get not-quite fall-down drunk and raucous. The “not-quite” was important, because the festivities usually involved partaking in armed mob assaults on the Jewish part of town, or at least assailing and killing a few Jews foolish enough to get caught alone. Most of these celebrations never rose to the level of a pogrom, but it definitely was not a safe day to be a Jew in that corner of the world… even less so than normal. For them Christmas was a day of terror and brutality.
The other side of my family was traditional white Protestant non-nasty Christian and its Christmas traditions involve decorated evergreens, colorfully wrapped presents, carols, and everything everyone else thinks of about Christmas.
My own view of Christmas is… nuanced.
Who said religion needs to make sense?
Sure there are many goodly Christians are out there — large swathes of them, including some whose goodness in large parts arises from their articles of faith, or at least expresses itself through that faith. And it is easy to interpret, with a little cherry-picking, the Jesus of the Bible as preaching kindness and love towards all the world, to the point where it is natural to argue in principle that true Christians would not do this sort of thing.
But neither of those in-principle points change the unfortunate fact of history that “for Christ” was the rallying cry of the Inquisitions, of the Crusades, of much of the genocide of native populations around the world under Western colonialism, of the Nazi Holocaust, and far more besides. Not just that these actions occurred DESPITE the perpetrators’ beliefs, but BECAUSE of them.
Is any of this logical? Of course not. But it doesn’t need to be logical. It does need to make sense. People just need to have faith and not lean on their worldly understanding, and then not making sense ceases to be an obstacle.
It is very, very, very, very terrifying. It is fractal terror. Zoom in to examine any piece of it at any level of detail and that piece is just as terrifying as its neighbors or as the whole. The only thing that I could imagine would make it more terrifying would be if I was a believer, wondering if I was caught up in the faith and thus unable to recognize and identify the evil I was doing in its name, and compelled by promise of heaven and threat of hell… or just threat of ostracism by community, friends, and family… not to ask the deep questions which would be necessary to achieve that recognition.
And yes, there are large swathes of Christianity that aren’t that sort of intellectually restrictive. And there are large swathes that are.
This is where people like Mary and Carol and Toedad come from. However awful they are, in the context of this discussion they’re small potatoes. But the smaller evils they do spring from the same root as the larger evils mentioned above, and so they are the same in kind if not in degree. They come from the same doctrines, the same readiness to faith, the same self-confidence that they have The Truth and that they are on the side of the good, and the same lack of questions.
Reltzik
*But it doesn’t need to be logical. It does NOT need to make sense.
Grr, I work hard to deliver a point and screw it up with a typo.
Please do not put Christianity too centrally in the Nazi mix. The churches tended to do nothing against Nazis for a long time, but the Hitlerites actually tried to invoke the Norse Gods – probably because the Christian concept of monogamy didn’t match with their ideas of producing as many blond blue-eyed Arians as possible. They wanted blond blue- eyed women to bear children for any blond and blue-eyed soldier, marriage be damned. Look up Lebensborn.
Also, any god promoting revenge was far more in their line as Christianity (not saying that Christians haven’t done horrible things in the name of Christianity, they did and some still do).
And, as haters do, they just took up any old argument that supported their accusations agains the Jews, no matter if they were contradictory or not.
(kind of reminds me of those people who claim the ‘Bundespublik Deutschland’ is not actually a state and therefore, it’s laws, executive powers and judges have no legitimate power over them – but the same non-existent entity should provide money for them to live on).
Btw: Where would Christianity be if Jesus hadn’t died?
“Gott mit uns”, iron cross, war dead under the Christian cross, heavy usage of Christian symbology in arguments and actions, justifications wrapped heavily in Martin Luther’s writing on jews and his encouragements to violence against them, justifications wrapped in the long standing tradition of blaming jews in towns and purging them throughout the middle ages, modern style Christian oppression of women and sexual minorities including stating that the role of a “good German” woman is at home serving her man like “it says in the Bible” and throwing gay people in concentration camps and burning their libraries, churches alliance for the longest time looking the other way or encouraging the purges, and religious themes and justifications for bigotry woven through Mein Kampf.
It does not reflect on Christianity in general and definitely sprung from a warped form of it that emphasized a more brutal, hateful type of far-right ideology in much the same way as Christian Dominionism or the KKK in the States. And which was reflected by a number of contemporary far-right movements of the time.
But Christian arguments were very central to the rise and justification of the Third Reich and the similar fragments of that have been used to justify religious crimes similar to what Reltzik was talking about. And that is still seen today in anti-semitic religious works and traditions, such as the popularity of “The Passion of the Christ” or in the mythologies of Pre-Millennial Dispensationalist Rapture believing fundies who have all sorts of views of playing Jews like pawns so that God will destroy them all, leaving only a few to be “perfected” into Christianity.
Reltzik
Eh, it’s a big kerfluffle. Yes, Catholicism and the major Protestantisms spent centuries creating the huge well of antisemitism which Hitler tapped into, but it had also spread into society in general and even some of the explicitly secular corners of society by then (including Marx when he wrote on Communism, and boy, that caused its own problems).
Yes, the Nazis had a really weird take on Christianity, including the idea that the “virgin” birth had been because a pure white Aryan from the Germanies in the Legions had knocked Mary up (because Jesus couldn’t actually have been Jewish, apparently) and that the Jew Paul had severely corrupted the original gospel of Jesus.
And his religious views evolved throughout his life, and were influenced by competing with religions for political power, and of course Nazi Germany was more than just Hitler.
No, it’s not reflective on Christianity at large, save to note the kind of monstrosities that can be spawned under that much larger umbrella. But it’s a bit hard to get past his repeated and explicit statements of faith, from his rise to power to his dying day, including repeated statements that he was emulating a Christ that he saw as a warrior and a fighter against the Jews. So say that they got the religion badly wrong if you will — I won’t argue — but it was still done, at least in large part, “for Christ”. The faith was a motivator, not a deterrent, and the Nazis were by and large convinced of their “Gott Mit Uns” slogan.
And of course everyone (save the Communist Russians) who fought against Nazi Germany was convinced that God was on THEIR side as well.
As for where Christianity would be if Jesus hadn’t died? I’m not entirely convinced that there was even a historical Jesus… but if he hadn’t died, he would presumably still be around giving some sort of preaching or another. Maybe he would have tried to retire after the first few centuries of not dying, but I don’t know if his followers would have let him.
Oberon
Make sense? That’s the whole point. When a person can justify to themselves, no matter how twisted that justification seems to the average person or even another person who shares their same faith, that their acts are endorsed by God or a god, then they absolve themselves of any wrong doing.
Any act, no matter how heinous, is justified because they can point to some sentence in their holy book and claim that some deity says this is an ok thing to do. Kill a Jew, rape a child, murder a doctor. And forget about all the parts which say things like turn the other cheek or act only if you yourself are sinless or love your enemy, those are conveniently forgotten in the fixation on those parts which say stone people to death or killing is justified or owning slaves is proper as long as your treatment of them is codified in the holy book, etc.
Humanity will never escape our primitive natures until we eradicate the pestilence which is religion. Because none of the major religions are excluded from having their holy book filled with horrors and crimes which are entirely endorsed by their deity.
Sadly, that wouldn’t even solve things. In the modern day, we’ve seen all manner of awful justified areligiously by atheist folk under the vague justifications of biological determinism, fake ideas about what cavepeople were like, and all manner of nonsense.
The rot is in us and the only way out is through, no shortcuts.
pumpkincat
Sadly, the nonsensicalness has continued in some parts of the country. In the mid-1980s, as a young Jewish girl living in a rural part of a state generally known for its Jewish population (New York), I was bullied and picked on for being Jewish, specifically because of Catholic blood libel.
I wasn’t raped, thankfully, but I was yelled at and told that I was to blame for Christ’s death because ‘the Jews killed Jesus’. And that that sin falls upon me as a Jew. My mother, growing up in the 1950s and 60s, went through much the same, except that she was in NYC proper.
NotPiffany
Crap (actually, a stronger expletive, but I’m not sure if Willis is cool with that sort of thing), that sucks for your anonymous female relative, Reltzik.
…Learning that some people actually take that “blood libel” crap seriously was so weird. My response to that “Pontius Pilate washes his hands” nonsense as a kid was “yeah, right. Hygiene doesn’t get you out of deicide, nitwit.”
fizbin
Technicality quibbling: that’s not the doctrine of blood libel, it’s the doctrine of Jewish Deicide. I wouldn’t break into someone else’s family history, except the Blood Libel is also a thing and much, much worse than that.
The Blood Libel is essentially the story that some disfavored group kills and eats babies. (The original anti-Semitic Blood Libel gets into more details that I won’t repeat here, but I’m sure Wikipedia or somewhere else has those details if you want to look for it) It was applied to Jews in the 12th century originally, but you see variations used in anti-Catholic rhetoric in the nineteenth century, and you can see echoes in the Satanic Panics of the 1980s. (Which somewhat feeds into the rumors that fly through anti-abortion groups about what happens at abortion clinics) Contrast with the doctrine of Jewish Deicide, which the Romans made heretical at Vatican II, and which never caught on outside the Roman Catholic church the way the Blood Libel did. (There were members of the Russian Duma as recently as ten years ago repeating variations of the Blood Libel as reasons to ban all Jewish organizations)
512 thoughts on “Angrier”
Ana Chronistic
“REVERSE PRIVILEGE”
“what is that even”
“You know, where privileged folk have to suffer the burden of guilt of being privileged”
“STFU WALKY”
Ana Chronistic
now if Billie’s box does indeed contain alcohol, well
butts
Either Linda is passive-aggressive to Billie just like she is towards her actual children, or she just knows Billie really, really well.
Dean
Why do you think Ruth stayed with her so long?
neeks
well played.
Dana
Where privileged people suffer the burden of saying things that make them looks stupid?
Leorale
Faceplanting on our privilege! …it tastes like a foot.
butts
Yeah, I don’t really know how Walky even gets around with that thing in his mouth all the damn time.
achallenger
thats why he has so much trouble just walkying away
Reltzik
Okay, now I’ve got an image of Walky sucking on the little toes of both feet simultaneously (in something like a butterfly stretch position) because he wondered to himself, “Hey, I wonder if I can suck on the little toes of both my feet simultaneously.”
Spencer
I’ll have you know that, as a middle class white man, this post is super insensitive.
#stopthehate #truvictims #whyisntthereawhitehistorymonth
Rheinman
1, 2, 3, 4, I predict a flame war. 😉
Cerberus
Bro, I feel you bro. Honestly every time a marginalized group member like, exists, at like, y’know, normal people, it’s like a direct attack. Like, trying to make bros feel guilty and awful about shit.
It’s why my subreddit rants about the secret conspiracy of all those others out there trying to attack us with their guilt-inducing feelings and make us care about people who aren’t in the Honorary Bro Nation.
#solidarityfortherealvictims #feelingguiltyisworsethanactualoppression #singlemanlytear
Reltzik
Look, we’re not saying they can’t exist. We’re saying we shouldn’t need to NOTICE they exist!
#IgnoranceIsBliss
Pat
Welp, that stopped being parody somewhere in there.
Gordon
This just makes me think of that time I was watching a YouTube video parodying a particular type of commercial. The video used the word diversity. And there was a gem in the comment cesspool that said :
“Yeah, diversity. You mean the genocide of the straight white male.”
And then my brain hemorrhaged and I had to go lie down.
Skizz
Seriously? That is all kinds of stupid. As a straight white male, I am not feeling at all endangered.
Dark
Wow! It’s almost like Tumblr in here!
Just Saying
Because people are discussing serious issues? Did that make you feel uncomfortable so you had to say something that (frankly) isn’t really an insult?
This comments section almost always has a very straight-forward and detailed discussion of the issues contained in the comic and if you’re not interested in reading it I recommend that you steer clear of the comments section.
But there’s really no need to come down here flinging poop like a stressed out lil critter.
trlkly
No, because you’re making posts pretending to be your opponents in order to make fun of them, complete with fake tags. Both sides do this on tumblr.
No need to assume the guy is being a jerk. He can just be making a joke the same way the rest of you are.
And, BTW, you aren’t having a serious discussion in this particular section. There are some, and those are great. But this is people poking fun.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but don’t try to make it sound like you’re doing something great and wonderful and the other guy is some evil man who is trying to stop you.
Clif
For the record, I never make fun and never say anything sarcastic.
Pat
trlkly, hunny, are you aware that “both sides” here aren’t, like, sports teams?
Because “victims of oppression” and “people who want to hurt victims of oppression” aren’t equivalent.
Gigafreak
At my bus stop, there is one of those free newspaper dispensers. This one happens to be in Spanish (I can read a little bit of Spanish, so sometimes I try to read the headlines while waiting for the bus). One day, I got there to see a large bumper sticker posted on the side of that dispenser:
“DIVERSITY is a code word for #WHITEGENOCIDE”
I’m not white, and the neighborhood has a considerable Korean population. So a few days later, I brought a roll of duct tape and neatly taped over the text on the sticker. (Clever use of duct tape can solve SO MANY PROBLEMS, you guys.) A few months after that, the sticker (and the tape on it) had mysteriously vanished. Good riddance.
Cerberus
Neo-nazis and white supremacists are a pain in the ass. In Denmark, I lived in a refugee immigrant heavy part of the city (I think at the time it was mostly Kurdish, Syrian, and Indonesian) and so sometimes there’d be some neo-nazi graffiti about the usual BS (death to immigrants, that sort of thing). And just like you there was a troupe of individuals countering it when it cropped up either by covering it up or defacing it (over there, the anarchists’ main activism was scouring for neo-nazi graffiti and quickly editing it to make it about the nazis instead (so instead of “X, get out of the country” it was “nazis, get out of the country”).
I remember that mattering a lot to my neighbors as it made them feel like at least someone had their back against that kind of hate.
Skilltagz
You are endangered, soon all people will be a generic beige like us half bloods muwhahahahaha >:)
Pat
You’re committing genocide by just waiting for us all to die without actually doing anything evil?
I don’t have a counter-plan for that!
MindLink
I never understood why people talk about “white genocide” as something that is inherently bad.
As long as a genocide doesn’t involve actively killing a race, then who cares ? Even if a World Dictator were to suddenly demand forced castration of all members of my own race, I wouldn’t care, since having kids is not a right and it wouldn’t affect my life or anyone elses.
In a couple of centuries we might all become orange anyway, that doesn’t mean that I will turn orange myself.
EvilWriter
No fair! I was totally going to shed a single manly tear, but now Cerberus said it like it was a white male privilege thing, so now it’ll just look stupid!
#misandry
#itisso
#ITISSO
Kryss LaBryn
#TASSIMO
saltchocolate
Spencer and Cerberus for the hashtag-win.
#i<3unmistakablyironicirony
Plasma Mongoose
It’s a tad different when the privilege giver(or taker) is your parents.
Uniqueantique
That’s the whole point here. Have to agree.
Reltzik
Except MAYBE when you’re so jaded to it that any semblance of filial love is dead, gone, and forgotten, and it’s more like getting more junk mail from the Mormon church trying to get you to come back 10 years after you left.
… oh wait there’s a website to fix that now nm.
Gigafreak
Want petty revenge on someone? Put their address into that site! THE INTERNET ALLOWS YOU TO BEAM MORMONS AT PEOPLE!
Clif
Truly, technology is wonderful.
Reltzik
…. I think the Geneva Convention needs updating.
Sam
Yeah, it is kind of is much suckier when you have to realise that being the ‘favourite’ has seriously screwed over your sibling for years. But it is a good thing Walky is noticing now, even though he might prefer to be blissfully ignorant because it might take a lot of effort to resolve this.
NotPiffany
I don’t know how much more Walky can do to “resolve” the situation. He can acknowledge that he’s the favorite, and he can agree with Sal that the situation sucks and is unfair, but he can’t make Linda like her daughter.
NelC
He could share his stuff. Maybe Sal would like a dead rat?
Sam
Resolved in this case doesn’t have to mean ‘oh, they’re all a happy family now’, because it is true that he can’t make Linda like Sal, but he can actually stand up for his sister and just be there in her corner as someone who isn’t going to tolerate his parents treating her as lesser than him.
Yotomoe
I dunno. I often think about the fact that I NEVER have to feel guilty about my ancestors leading to subjugation and death’s of most of the Native Americans. Ain’t nothin’ better!
Leorale
I do love the smell of Cossacks and cultural trauma in the morning.
Plasma Mongoose
I have to think about the fact that my ancestors oppressed Anglo-Saxons for centuries, which makes me some kind of Privileged Shit-Overlord.
Rukduk
Norman or Viking?
Betty Anne
Both, in my case. 😀 ( D: )
Jon Rich
A lot of white people get that, too, though. My ancestors were Jews who arrived in the early 20th century, for example, and set up in New England. The genocides and subjugation was pretty much done by that point around here.
Marisa Mockery
Yeah and Jews were still treated like shit until WW2. After that it became frowned upon. BECAUSE RACISM IS FUN
Yotomoe
I’m sure it’s more fun when you’re on the racist end of it. Like how fighting games are fun, until that one guy puts you in the combo you can’t escape from. I’m sure that guy’s having a blast!
modulusshift
tbh it’s kinda meh. If it’s even noticeable, it’s a slight feeling of outrage that things aren’t how they “should” be, or how they were perceived to be. Usually that feeling of outrage is just enough to provoke enough privilege to get people to shut up and acquiesce with what you thought so that you don’t cause problems. (I guess some people get satisfaction out of that? For me, it’s always been bewildered confusion, which fades to no consequence.) Other times, the racee manages to display enough annoyance that your perceptions are supposed to be their reality that the more intelligent racers understand how dumb they’re being. (assuming that doesn’t backfire and ruin the racee’s day/life.) And in the third case, where reality obstinately ignores you and your perceptions, and you don’t adjust your perceptions as a result, it fuels the rage (and delusional confusion) that many people know white men for.
So yeah, it’s not great. The only good parts are when you (very very) occasionally realize how it benefited you after the fact, and that’s only good if you have no sense of guilt or compassion about it. Which most of us don’t have much of, not because we don’t care, but because there’d be a lot more to regret if we all included things we unknowingly did as well as the things we knowingly did. That’s a distinction we get to make due to some privilege, too, so this is kinda recursive…
/confessions of a modern young white male
Torra
I don’t think I understood anything you just said here
Clif
You weren’t listening between the lines.
Leorale
Antisemitism didn’t stop during WW2. All the people today who hate on Blacks hate on Jews in their next paragraph, too.
Cerberus
This. Hell, it didn’t even become unacceptable to be obvious about being anti-semitic in much of culture until around the 70s thanks to a huge amount of Jewish artists pushing back against anti-semitism in the 60s.
Oberon
But not too long before that the entire US government was able to be vocally anti-semitic with zero backlash from the voters. And quite possibly with the actual approval of the majority of the voters.
I recall transcripts from the McCarty hearings where he would refer to Jewish witnesses as “the Jewish gentleman.” Which while it isn’t quite on the level of dropping the N-word it still serves to constantly remind everyone listening that the person being questioned is a second class citizen, is in some way lesser than a ‘normal’ person. If someone today were to refer to an African American witness as “the black gentleman” or “the African American gentleman”, or a Jewish witness as “the Jewish gentleman” there would be a huge uproar, and rightly so.
Leorale
OTOH, a lot of Jews ‘pass’ as White nowadays, and we benefit from that privilege — it’s not at all the same as being visibly non-white (for example, with cops).
I have lots of thoughts about whether Jews are White, and whether Whiteness exists.
Also, sad to say, there was still (and is currently) subjugation going on after we landed in the US. (First things that come to mind: internment camps, the rise of the diamond trade, and our current jail system.) We did get murdered a lot this century, but we also partially benefit from recent oppressions. 🙁
Harvey Janus
So I’m trying to figure out when the Irish started being considered White, because you have the years after the potato famine… And then I can’t find anything that precipitated that stopping. It obviously stopped, but when?
Harvey Janus
Aw man my gravatar changed to.. Some form of Joe
not someone else
IIRC it had something to do with events in New England after the Civil War, and the way a lot of Irish folk allied themselves explicitly against black folks, politically.
I have no idea why some of it started applying to non-American Irish folks, though, but in Ireland proper there are still tensions, albeit not like it was during the “let’s actively try to murder everyone in this country” era.
Joseph
There’s a book called “How The Irish Became White” by… Ignatius Loyola (I think) which covers this exact topic, and its a mix of new white non-English speaking migrants (Italian, Polish, Russian, etc) and the movement of black Americans north, and the Irish became the acceptable face of non-WASP white people.
saltchocolate
By David Roediger. Great book.
Clif
Basically it just got too hard to tell the difference between the Irish and the general population. Prejudice isn’t any fun if you have to work at it.
Harvey Janus
Thanks for the explanations.
Bruceski
I had that discussion with my mom recently, and what we settled on (other people’s mileage may vary based on their mindset and experience) was that I have grown up white, my mom is white now but didn’t used to be, and Grandpa had been through enough stuff that he was never white despite the overlap between his life and mine. Mom remembers when he moved to live near us after Grandma died, just looking for a job to keep himself busy, he was terrified that employers would find out he was Russian. He worked for the mob in Chicago after WWII because when you’re a Russian Jewish immigrant, that’s three reasons nobody else will hire you.
Reltzik
Family story (with identity of family member redacted — though she probably wouldn’t care either way). Jewish girl growing up in NYC in the late 40s, after the war ended… but well before Vatican 2. For some odd reason the Bronx is laid out with alternating blocks of East European Jew and Irish Catholic.
Most of the Catholic kids went to the private Catholic school, where (even after WW2) the priests stirred them up against the Jews with the doctrine of blood libel. (This is the doctrine that Jews accepted the blood guilt for Jesus’s crucifixion upon their heads and the heads of all their children.)
This resulted in her being cornered and gang-raped by four boys from the Catholic high school, to punish her for killing Christ. I forget exactly how old she was, but it was in the range of 8-10.
The cops came, took a statement, said no crime had been committed, and left. They were Irish cops.
No, hatred of Jews did not magically vanish once Nazi Germany was defeated.
Every time conservative Catholic cardinals talk about undoing Vatican 2, I vomit in my mouth a little.
Ruhrow
I…but…I…the sense, there is none. Not that rape ever makes *sense* or anything, but something about the juxtaposition of such a horrible, horrible thing with “we’re doing it for Christ,” especially with everyone that young…it’s downright terrifying. Humans are strange creatures.
Reltzik
That girl’s ancestors came from Poland or Russia (which it was depended on where the border had been drawn after each war ended). For the local nobles and otherwise-well-to-do, Christmas was a time to get not-quite fall-down drunk and raucous. The “not-quite” was important, because the festivities usually involved partaking in armed mob assaults on the Jewish part of town, or at least assailing and killing a few Jews foolish enough to get caught alone. Most of these celebrations never rose to the level of a pogrom, but it definitely was not a safe day to be a Jew in that corner of the world… even less so than normal. For them Christmas was a day of terror and brutality.
The other side of my family was traditional white Protestant non-nasty Christian and its Christmas traditions involve decorated evergreens, colorfully wrapped presents, carols, and everything everyone else thinks of about Christmas.
My own view of Christmas is… nuanced.
Who said religion needs to make sense?
Sure there are many goodly Christians are out there — large swathes of them, including some whose goodness in large parts arises from their articles of faith, or at least expresses itself through that faith. And it is easy to interpret, with a little cherry-picking, the Jesus of the Bible as preaching kindness and love towards all the world, to the point where it is natural to argue in principle that true Christians would not do this sort of thing.
But neither of those in-principle points change the unfortunate fact of history that “for Christ” was the rallying cry of the Inquisitions, of the Crusades, of much of the genocide of native populations around the world under Western colonialism, of the Nazi Holocaust, and far more besides. Not just that these actions occurred DESPITE the perpetrators’ beliefs, but BECAUSE of them.
Is any of this logical? Of course not. But it doesn’t need to be logical. It does need to make sense. People just need to have faith and not lean on their worldly understanding, and then not making sense ceases to be an obstacle.
It is very, very, very, very terrifying. It is fractal terror. Zoom in to examine any piece of it at any level of detail and that piece is just as terrifying as its neighbors or as the whole. The only thing that I could imagine would make it more terrifying would be if I was a believer, wondering if I was caught up in the faith and thus unable to recognize and identify the evil I was doing in its name, and compelled by promise of heaven and threat of hell… or just threat of ostracism by community, friends, and family… not to ask the deep questions which would be necessary to achieve that recognition.
And yes, there are large swathes of Christianity that aren’t that sort of intellectually restrictive. And there are large swathes that are.
This is where people like Mary and Carol and Toedad come from. However awful they are, in the context of this discussion they’re small potatoes. But the smaller evils they do spring from the same root as the larger evils mentioned above, and so they are the same in kind if not in degree. They come from the same doctrines, the same readiness to faith, the same self-confidence that they have The Truth and that they are on the side of the good, and the same lack of questions.
Reltzik
*But it doesn’t need to be logical. It does NOT need to make sense.
Grr, I work hard to deliver a point and screw it up with a typo.
Cerberus
Well said.
CJ
Please do not put Christianity too centrally in the Nazi mix. The churches tended to do nothing against Nazis for a long time, but the Hitlerites actually tried to invoke the Norse Gods – probably because the Christian concept of monogamy didn’t match with their ideas of producing as many blond blue-eyed Arians as possible. They wanted blond blue- eyed women to bear children for any blond and blue-eyed soldier, marriage be damned. Look up Lebensborn.
Also, any god promoting revenge was far more in their line as Christianity (not saying that Christians haven’t done horrible things in the name of Christianity, they did and some still do).
And, as haters do, they just took up any old argument that supported their accusations agains the Jews, no matter if they were contradictory or not.
(kind of reminds me of those people who claim the ‘Bundespublik Deutschland’ is not actually a state and therefore, it’s laws, executive powers and judges have no legitimate power over them – but the same non-existent entity should provide money for them to live on).
Btw: Where would Christianity be if Jesus hadn’t died?
Cerberus
http://www.historytoday.com/robert-carr/nazism-and-christian-heritage
“Gott mit uns”, iron cross, war dead under the Christian cross, heavy usage of Christian symbology in arguments and actions, justifications wrapped heavily in Martin Luther’s writing on jews and his encouragements to violence against them, justifications wrapped in the long standing tradition of blaming jews in towns and purging them throughout the middle ages, modern style Christian oppression of women and sexual minorities including stating that the role of a “good German” woman is at home serving her man like “it says in the Bible” and throwing gay people in concentration camps and burning their libraries, churches alliance for the longest time looking the other way or encouraging the purges, and religious themes and justifications for bigotry woven through Mein Kampf.
It does not reflect on Christianity in general and definitely sprung from a warped form of it that emphasized a more brutal, hateful type of far-right ideology in much the same way as Christian Dominionism or the KKK in the States. And which was reflected by a number of contemporary far-right movements of the time.
But Christian arguments were very central to the rise and justification of the Third Reich and the similar fragments of that have been used to justify religious crimes similar to what Reltzik was talking about. And that is still seen today in anti-semitic religious works and traditions, such as the popularity of “The Passion of the Christ” or in the mythologies of Pre-Millennial Dispensationalist Rapture believing fundies who have all sorts of views of playing Jews like pawns so that God will destroy them all, leaving only a few to be “perfected” into Christianity.
Reltzik
Eh, it’s a big kerfluffle. Yes, Catholicism and the major Protestantisms spent centuries creating the huge well of antisemitism which Hitler tapped into, but it had also spread into society in general and even some of the explicitly secular corners of society by then (including Marx when he wrote on Communism, and boy, that caused its own problems).
Yes, the Nazis had a really weird take on Christianity, including the idea that the “virgin” birth had been because a pure white Aryan from the Germanies in the Legions had knocked Mary up (because Jesus couldn’t actually have been Jewish, apparently) and that the Jew Paul had severely corrupted the original gospel of Jesus.
And his religious views evolved throughout his life, and were influenced by competing with religions for political power, and of course Nazi Germany was more than just Hitler.
No, it’s not reflective on Christianity at large, save to note the kind of monstrosities that can be spawned under that much larger umbrella. But it’s a bit hard to get past his repeated and explicit statements of faith, from his rise to power to his dying day, including repeated statements that he was emulating a Christ that he saw as a warrior and a fighter against the Jews. So say that they got the religion badly wrong if you will — I won’t argue — but it was still done, at least in large part, “for Christ”. The faith was a motivator, not a deterrent, and the Nazis were by and large convinced of their “Gott Mit Uns” slogan.
And of course everyone (save the Communist Russians) who fought against Nazi Germany was convinced that God was on THEIR side as well.
As for where Christianity would be if Jesus hadn’t died? I’m not entirely convinced that there was even a historical Jesus… but if he hadn’t died, he would presumably still be around giving some sort of preaching or another. Maybe he would have tried to retire after the first few centuries of not dying, but I don’t know if his followers would have let him.
Oberon
Make sense? That’s the whole point. When a person can justify to themselves, no matter how twisted that justification seems to the average person or even another person who shares their same faith, that their acts are endorsed by God or a god, then they absolve themselves of any wrong doing.
Any act, no matter how heinous, is justified because they can point to some sentence in their holy book and claim that some deity says this is an ok thing to do. Kill a Jew, rape a child, murder a doctor. And forget about all the parts which say things like turn the other cheek or act only if you yourself are sinless or love your enemy, those are conveniently forgotten in the fixation on those parts which say stone people to death or killing is justified or owning slaves is proper as long as your treatment of them is codified in the holy book, etc.
Humanity will never escape our primitive natures until we eradicate the pestilence which is religion. Because none of the major religions are excluded from having their holy book filled with horrors and crimes which are entirely endorsed by their deity.
And this is why humanity will never
Cerberus
Sadly, that wouldn’t even solve things. In the modern day, we’ve seen all manner of awful justified areligiously by atheist folk under the vague justifications of biological determinism, fake ideas about what cavepeople were like, and all manner of nonsense.
The rot is in us and the only way out is through, no shortcuts.
pumpkincat
Sadly, the nonsensicalness has continued in some parts of the country. In the mid-1980s, as a young Jewish girl living in a rural part of a state generally known for its Jewish population (New York), I was bullied and picked on for being Jewish, specifically because of Catholic blood libel.
I wasn’t raped, thankfully, but I was yelled at and told that I was to blame for Christ’s death because ‘the Jews killed Jesus’. And that that sin falls upon me as a Jew. My mother, growing up in the 1950s and 60s, went through much the same, except that she was in NYC proper.
NotPiffany
Crap (actually, a stronger expletive, but I’m not sure if Willis is cool with that sort of thing), that sucks for your anonymous female relative, Reltzik.
…Learning that some people actually take that “blood libel” crap seriously was so weird. My response to that “Pontius Pilate washes his hands” nonsense as a kid was “yeah, right. Hygiene doesn’t get you out of deicide, nitwit.”
fizbin
Technicality quibbling: that’s not the doctrine of blood libel, it’s the doctrine of Jewish Deicide. I wouldn’t break into someone else’s family history, except the Blood Libel is also a thing and much, much worse than that.
The Blood Libel is essentially the story that some disfavored group kills and eats babies. (The original anti-Semitic Blood Libel gets into more details that I won’t repeat here, but I’m sure Wikipedia or somewhere else has those details if you want to look for it) It was applied to Jews in the 12th century originally, but you see variations used in anti-Catholic rhetoric in the nineteenth century, and you can see echoes in the Satanic Panics of the 1980s. (Which somewhat feeds into the rumors that fly through anti-abortion groups about what happens at abortion clinics) Contrast with the doctrine of Jewish Deicide, which the Romans made heretical at Vatican II, and which never caught on outside the Roman Catholic church the way the Blood Libel did. (There were members of the Russian Duma as recently as ten years ago repeating variations of the Blood Libel as reasons to ban all Jewish organizations)