Category: Let's talk
All right, I'm going to tackle an issue that's been the pet subject of the third wave feminists since the 90s, as well as religious people in some forms: Collective responsibility.
I'm going to set forth to demonstrate how absurd it is. Cody, I'm picking on you for a bit, since you're apparently going into the social sciences, even though you've got the brains and the wherewithal to invent shit or be a rocket scientist.
When Cody was just a tyke, or perhaps before Cody was thought of, I was a dumb-ass punk. Not a homophobe, a punk. I got picked on, so I proverbially kicked the dog, e.g. picked on gay people. Not an excuse, just an explanation. There is no excuse. It was not a phobia, it was a case of not having learned anything and just repeated what was done to me onto someone else. And yes, I knew better. Don't listen to people who claim in the 1980s we didn't know better. Of course we did.
Now, Cody as a straight white cisgendered male could be said by some of these fools to be part of a collective who is responsible for this. The fuck? Cody isn't responsible, I am, and so are people who were alive then.
Now, if you're one of these new social justice types, you can take from the 1920s Southern playbook and just randomly point at someone in the target group -- instead of black let's say cisgendered white male, point and shoot / burn / doxx / whatever. And a random Cody takes the hit for something that happened in the 1980s. Does that make any practical sense to anyone anywhere?
Oh and news flash, it's not the gay people doing this. I'm actually more than a bit humbled by the gays' reaction to those of us who have come clean and taken total and personal responsibility for our actions back then. I was wrong. Cody either wasn't yet thought of, or was being taught not to put toys in his mouth. I did it, Cody didn't do it. In fact, it'd be a crime for Cody to assume some guilt over something he's had no part of. Even further, if I go and take the coward's way out, claiming it's a collective thing, I'd never have made the proper changes internally back in the mid to late 90s to be different.
In short, there is no collective, and assigning collective responsibility is precisely how bad things happen, like random Codys get burned at the stake for activities that happened before they were born, or random black men get tied to poles, burned alive and postcards sent to relatives of the burners saying, "Wish you were here!"
Collective responsibility is one of the most morally repugnant things I can think of. I've "repented," if you will, to borrow a Christian word, of a ton of things in life. Not because I'm steeped in sin because someone ate an apple or for being born white cisgendered male, but because of specific actions I took. Actions, not thoughts. Unless you're a tinfoil hatter, thoughts don't impact you. Actions do.
Here's another thing collective responsibility does: I knew a delinquent dad back in the late 90s. You know what he said when I talked to him about it? "There's no practical difference between you and me, Leo. We both know we're perceived the same. We're all said to be scum anyhow." Technically, he's right, at least in the eyes of anyone intellectually lazy enough to follow some notion of original sin / collective responsibility.
I have never once seen any practical improvement to anyone as a result of this collective responsibility business. It's usualy based on black-and-white thinking, and fails to address real problems. Now if an individual takes a look at their actions, (not being so callous as to equate thoughts with actions), admits *they* were wrong, and figures out how to do differently? You can see real improvement.
But with this collective responsibility? real justice gets muddied while everyone within a target demographic gets painted with the brush, making no clear distinction between wrongdoer and the rest.
So go ahead, anyone, show me how Cody could possibly be collectively responsible for the punk behaviors against the gays back in the 80s, what some call phobia, a term I quite soundly reject for some pretty obvious reasons. We don't call people who shove firecrackers up a cat's ass "felinephobes".
The truth is, can't be done. Individual responsibility for individual actions is where it's at. And when we stuff everyone in a demographic into a particular mold / collective of bad behavior, the real deviants are not properly separated and called out. In other words, collective responsibility is counter to everything we've been granted by the evolution of human behavior controls.
Okay, maybe I missed the part where Cody was blamed for what gay people have gone through. Gays are one blanket group he hasn't harped on. Anyway, I mostly agree with what you're saying Leo. You and I can't be held responsible for the way people in previous generations act. We are responsible however for how we act today. I and my church do not prescribe to the idea of original sin, nor are we responsible for the "sins" of our fathers, so to speak. Adam and Eve transgressed, and that transgression paved the way for us to be born into the world. But we are not held responsible for that. But we are responsible for our own thoughts and actions. Unfortunately many people are influenced by the thoughts and actions of their parents. Do you think most kids grow up hating blacks, gays etc? No. Those feelings are learned, taught by others around them. Parents are responsible for teaching their children. Unfortunately if you're raised a certain way it can shape the way you see the world. Treditions are wonderful things at times, but relying too heavily on treditions can be very dangerous. And it takes will to break free of such teachings. There's also the issue of one's past experiences. In my personal experience, people who have a burning hatred of religion for instance usually have it, not necessarily only because they think it's all bollocks, but because of what they have suffered, or what they have seen others suffer, at the hands of religious people. Maybe I'm mis-understanding what you mean by collective responsibility Leo, but I do think we are all responsible for how we shape our world and the coming generations. In my religion, I may not be held responsible for Adam and Eve's transgressions, but I certainly will be held responsible for how I treat others, as well as what I teach my daughter. It's up to me to do my best to ensure she grows up in a home where all colors, genders and sexual orientations are of equal value. And it's up to her to cary those beliefs, or to reject them.
Yes indeed, we cannot blame others for our own actions. That would be stupid.
No but here's what, guys. You think it's absurd and so do I. But all around you you see people assigning collective responsibility to whole groups of people who had nothing to do with the oppression of other people. By way of example, Cody had nothing to do with the oppression of gay people back in the 80s. Nothing at all. Watching Raffie and playing in the sandbox, even if he was alive to do so then, does not constitute oppression of gay people.
I took gays as the example because it's the forefront issue being talked about now, and I took Cody since I know for a fact he can't have done anything against gays back in the 80s. Hence, this notion of collective responsibility of all cisgendered whiteys can be proven to come up totally empty. Not only that, totally morally repugnant, since if I had actually bought into that, I would never have taken personal responsibility for my own actions. I and several others I know who have done just that. All of us in the hard sciences, by the way. A place where we don't randomly associate all software responsible for the actions of a solitary virus or wormware.
I agree. It's just like me being blamed for the spanish inquisition or any other human-made atrocity perpetrated by men of ill intent because I just happen to belong to the same blanket whose members call itself Christian. I didn't know there was still that sort of blame being thrown around on a regular basis though.
BG look up any concept called privilege or "teach men not to rape" or anything else and yes, exactly that concept is thrown around and funded by your tax dollars to support people who are too lazy to do science, so they do soft science where they can write long lists of dos and don'ts, more don'ts than dos, and ascribe all collective responsibility for the behavior of some onto an entire demographic.
It's a thing It's intellectually and morally embarrassing that it even is a thing, but yes. It's a thing. People who are too lazy to ascribe blame to the person who committed the action are more than willing to ascribe it to an entire collective. Including but not limited to people who weren't even born yet when the atrocities were committed.
I was guilty as hell of that years ago by ascribing collective responsibility to all Southern-raised folk for the actions of some people. In some cases some people who were dead before many Southerners living now were even thought of, let alone born yet.
It's judicially lazy, and negates the effect of ostracizing the offender, negates the motivation to do better for some people, and creates a constant state of unworthiness in the minds of the collective.
It's not a white thing: black people have been held collectively responsible for things, and if you read Maya Angelou's book "I know Why The Caged Bird Sings," in particular read the graduation scene. She describes how it felt to have that litany of inferiority laid upon her and the whole class, how there was no escape. Because it's designed to keep a mass of people under the heel.
Personally I abstain from as much ideology as possible, and this is one major reason why. Human beings are sacrificed to Incan proportions for the sake of the "betters" in the Church, State and Acdemia, a rather unholy trinity in my opinion.
It's funny though, BG, because not only were you not born during the Inquisition, but Mormonism didn't exist yet, and in point of fact, Mormon structure doesn't have the means or the wherewithal to conduct such an inquisition. The Inquisition is a testament to what a theocracy can produce, where Church and State are one flesh as it were. It's pretty terrifying, and there are modern examples of that very thing. But you're not part of that.
Leo what you are describing is a dark blot on society indeed. Embarrassing too when you think about it. The whole idea of this order of blame is not something I ever wish to be guilty of. It's interesting that you bring up issues of rape, because far too many women are blamed for their own rapes. All of this just goes to show that despite our technological and social innovations society's baser side hasn't really changaed much.
Yeah, then you have the stupid theory that all men not only can, but will rape if given the chance. I shutter at this.
That hypothesis is not backed up by hard evidence, Margorp. In fact the male erection is pretty primitively located in the brain. Which is why one negative response can be a "boner killer" for most males. Even hearing the baby cry in the next room is enough for the flag to cease being flown at full mast.
There are some really good evolutionary reasons for this. But a rapist is a particular type of individual who either doesn't have the empathy most of us have, or some other situation. Some people who ascribe to this ideology about all men raping are smart enough to know better. Scientifically literate enough to know better. I know some are just plain silly, ignorant, wanting to be in a gang and belong to an ideology, like the little girl I recently unfollows on Tweeter. But that's a gang mentality and a need to belong, and those espousing that shouldn't ever be called science, not even soft science.
I get a real thrill out of seeing younger people whatever gender or lack thereof turn their back on the gangland projects known as the soft sciences, and turn into something applied, some creative technical or otherwise inventive outlet where they can make things that help people, instead of destroying everything they see.
Margorp, you and I know what it's like to make technical changes to something which has a practical benefit to people -- making someone's life or work a little easier, a little better, maybe now they can spend more time with the kids, etc. What's sad is the hellhole these little twits in the soft sciences make for themselves, they're just shouting, doxxing, getting people fired from places so their little kids can't get medical coverage for their ear infections, tipping over and tearing into everything they see.
And some of these are really smart people. I remember having conversations with some of these gender inclusive language people from the early 90s. I was the sexist pig who suggested they engage with linguists and innovate ways to circumvent what they perceive to be a problem. A sexist pig for suggesting they invent something, rather than shout and scream and carry on about it. I'm not sure what they call women who feel the same way I do about such things, but I'm sure they can come up with a name. A lot easier to do that than to sit down, design a concept, have the technical follow-through of your average sugar ant and see the project to completion.
I wish that allure towards those types of professions wasn't there, it's like crack: an empty rush that requires more and more and more and destroys everything it comes in contact with. But you see people turn away from that, and in to some field, even service-oriented, which involves innovation. There's a lot of social stuff that involves innovation. Lots of us engineering types are involved in volunteering for community emergency preparedness organizations, for example.
The only exception to the soft sciences I'd say is the anthropologists. Theirs is a very respectable lot, extremely innovative people who find ways and means for cultural interactions. But those people are pretty hard to distinguish from hard science / engineering types.
You'll have few thrills like the one where you see someone from the collectivist scream-and-shout crowd turn their back on that stuff, leave the endless lists of rules and regulations behind, and innovate for the first time in their little lives. For the first time experience what it's like to actually do something constructive, instead of leaving others with a list of impossible things to do, and engage themselves in a new way with new eyes, creating and inventing. The humbling part is, you know deep down where nobody can see you, that you had little to nothing to do with it, even if they think you did. It's an awful lot like watching a young person turn away from teenage drama and start looking at their world and universe with the newer better eyes of actual curiosity, innovation, and interest.
Being an innovator is so much better than either playing the victim or self-flagellating for offenses real and imagined performed by others born before you, or geographically distant from you. Innovatin is for everyone, not the select few. And it's fun to watch people discover that one for themselves.
First, thanks Leo, I'm touched that you think I'm smart enough to be a rocket
scientist. But, I love history more than I can describe, so I'm gonna stick with
that. I appreciate the complement though.
Now, here's where I think you made your mistake. You're equating privilege
with responsibility. When people say that you have white privilege because of all
the things whites have done to blacks in the past, they're not saying that you
owned slaves personally and beat them. Or even that you are personally a
racist. They're not even saying you've ever met a black person. What they're
saying is that, because whites have run this country for so long, and in such a
brutal way, you automatically get privileges.
ask most black people, and they will be able to tell you stories of being
randomly stopped by police for driving in the wrong neighborhood. By wrong, I
mean rich and white. Its known as driving while black. And its a common
complaint. Black people get randomly stopped by the cops for walking wear the
cop thinks they shouldn't, for wearing certain colors, and the list goes on and
on.
But, I know you like science, and science is based on data. So I'm sure you're
saying, but those are just isolated cases, give me some studies Cody. Here's
what I want you to do Leo, look up the comparison of punishments for black
people arrested with drugs, and the punishment for white people arrested with
drugs. Look up the incarceration rates for both races. Look up the amounts of
wrongful arrests. Look up the number of housing lawsuits where a landlord
kicked out black people for simply being black.
That's what white privilege is Leo. Its not that you held a whip back in
Georgia in the 1840s. Its that you are still benefiting from the system that has
been set up in this country.
Perfect example. If you and your wife got the same exact job, she would
almost be guaranteed to be payed less than you. Not for doing any more work,
not for doing it better. The work could be sorting buttons, and she would get
paid less than you do. This is male privilege. Men have run this country for so
long, and so strongly, that women get paid less now for simply being women.
You get a higher paycheck, not because you're doing the job better, faster or
longer but because the bits between your legs are an outie and not an innie.
So that's your mistake, and its one I used to make myself all the time. I used
to hate the idea of white privilege. I thought the exact same thing you did, until
I saw it for myself. So, do some research and reconsider Leo. Remember, its not
an insult against you, its simply a fact of your existence that you should try and
help fix.
I do know about the black incarceration and sentencing rates, amonmg quite a few other things. One reason I think we need as a society to revamp sentencing laws, do away with all zero-tolerance anti-judicial proceedings, and have all cops wearing cameras when on duty. In jurisdictions where interrogations are videotaped, we see a lot fewer problems.
I'll admit, I'm on board with any and all solutions-centric innovations, liberal or otherwise, that address these types of issues. Admittedly, I'm much more disposed towards upwards equalization tactics than downwards.
Example of upwards equalization: Gay marriage rights. Nothing got taken away, something was added. Rest room and other spaces for transgendered folks. Again, nothing's taken away, stuff gets added.
The problem with moves that take things away from people is that the people taken from are most often those who can least afford it. So a woman telling me making $50,000 a year, that I should give up some privilege financially for her, making $200,000 a year, $50K per year just doesn't stretch real far for 3 people one in college and another recently diagnosed with cancer.
And yet in my own field for a couple decades I see a hell of a lot of stars, women who make a ton more money than I do because they're stars. I've also had the very bad fortune personally to take the shaft for alleged inequities against a woman pay wise, when she already made more than I did, did far worse work and ultimately women paid the price. Women who depend on my income, that is. That's a perfect example of downward equalization, rather than upward. It's not a gendered issue it's the lack of innovation when it comes to equalization.
There are a lot of ways to upwardly equalize things, including for people like my Wife who works in a field where nobody but the execs at the top gets paid very well. Societally, we need to innovate and change that.
It's been my experience that people involving themselves in upwards equalization tend to be far more innovative. If someone can do the math and somehow turn soft sciences people on to the notion of innovation, I think we'd see a lot more flat out growth of opportunity. Imagine being the innovator who figures out how to best provide body camera technology and instant upload / server side implementation, arguably geeky but not out of a lot of kids' league, and thereby taking enormous steps against racial inequalities.
Or adding some sort of artificial intelligence into sentencing proceedings, because a program is likely to catch tactical errors like a black boy sentenced to 25 years for having less than a thimbleful of weed.
Once a person starts innovating and carrying out solutions, you can't put that genie back in the bottle.
Look at the brain science now behind transgendered issues. Someone invented the functional MRI scans which ultimately turns into now we understand there is a male and female brain, something totally freign to us back in the 80s, even. It's not what they call roles, it's a function of the brain. So they're not "feeling like they are in the wrong body," ... they technicaly *are* in the wrong body.
And again that has led to upward equalization. The travesty of downward equalization taqctics, like I said, is you never take from the really powerful. You just take from people who don't have it to give. It's a war on working people, and frankly some of us just can't do much more. And I don't care what color you are, if you don't have any money you have no real ability to protect your interests.
Interesting about the whole black vs. white division? White wasn't even a "thing" until the 1600s, when the upper eschelons separated Euro-based workers from Afro-based workers and gave the euro ones a bit of a status upgrade, mainly in name only, divide and conquer. You work with people, pass out food to those lower income folks that fall through the cracks in society, working people who can't get benefits but still go hungry (1 in six in this country) and don't have health care? They all look the same in that regard. Faux Snooze and other outlets tend to try and stir the white ones against the black ones just to keep the divisions going.
Any liberal really wanting to fix that problem would innovate an upgrade to all partipiants in that strata, which would send Glenn Beck crying (for real this time) to his pillows never to return. The Conservatives then would experience the freedom to fail they so constantly carry on about.
A very interesting and instructive thing I saw recently on a Center for Inquiry podcast:
Some of us remember those "experiments" (in quotes) from the 1980s where they put rats in cages, exposed them to Cocaine and found they'd go only for the Cocaine, not food, not sex, not even water.
Well recently they retooled this experiment. They put them in an idyllic rat environment: environmental enrichment activities, toys, earth, greens, etc. They introduced drugs into the environment and the rats could basically take it or leave it. The violence against one another was in sharp decline, and radically nonexistent compared to what was seen in those Spartan projects environments from the 1980s,
Now, as an aside, in building a better world for these rats, they didn't need to take milk and health care away from other baby rats, or food away from other adult rats, or kick other rats out of house and home. They instead "built a better world" for these new ones.
It's also true of chimpanzees vs. Bonobonos, and to the other extreme baboons. Chimps and bonobonos are very much alike, to the point they could cross-reproduce if in that environment. The differences between one being warlike and the other quite passive has everything to do with environment.
It's my hope that all of us in the lower, persona-non-grata strata of society can unanimously resist the caged environments we're all placed into. Because it sure seems to me that upwards-equalization can resolve a lot more problems than what either ideology tends to produce. Said ideologies tend to produce the trugged caged rats of the wretched experiments from the 1980s.
So the question is, should we work to reject white privledge or male privilege? Is this something we should learn to be ashamed of simply because we fall into a category? After all, we can't help who we are.
Well, if you ask me, don't break your leg because you see someone else has a broken leg. Help them carry their gear instead: they'll appreciate you. If you break your leg, all we've got is two people with broken legs now, one by accident and now one on purpose foolishly thinking they're helping by having deliberately broken themselves.
Now as to history, my favorite commentator in recent years has been Dan Carlin. You can find his work on iTunes or any of your podcatcher software, Hard Core History, Common Sense Pdcast, both are really good. The former dealing with history and the latter with current events. He's a Democrat who cut his teeth during the Reagan administration / around my age. What I really like is he's clearly cognizant of the nuanced nature of things. Far too often people get put into slots based on birth origin or what have you. He approached history and current events both, with a far more nuanced attitude. I know my thinking's been challenged more often than not by his perspective on either historical or modern events. Not just because he's a liberal and I an independent with non-statist anti-corporatocracy leanings.
If you use an app like KNFB Reader, you access a lot more print than you used to, and a lot more on the fly. Nobody's ability to see and read print had to be lessened to make you equal to them. In fact if we went around doing that as a response, you would not have had access to more print. The answer was to build a better world. It always is.
But think about what you're saying there. You're not complaining about the
existence of the difference anymore. You've basically just agreed that privilege
exists. What you're arguing against is the response to the privilege. You don't
think anything should be taken away from you, but you do think people should
be equal, and that's perfectly valid. So you're problem isn't with the privilege,
its with the solution to the problem. You pretty much just made this entire
board post moot Leo.
I'm a white male, as most of you know. And Leo is absolutely right.
We need to focus on upward equalization. Instead of somehow kicking me because I experience white privilege or male privilege (or both), help the people who are getting the negative backlash (blacks, women, etc) stop getting said backlash. Rather than blame or blackball the people who are currently benefiting (inn many cases rather passively) from a system hundreds of years in the making, revamp the system so that it gives more to others, and thus the gap is lessened. Simple as that.
I'm not going to apologize for being white or being a man. I have nothing to apologize for. I'm going to feel bad when a white man does something he shouldn't, but not guilty. There's a difference. I wish he wouldn't do it, and that's as far as it goes. If he breaks the law, punish him for it. If he hurts someone, he shouldn't have hurt them. If he's acting prejudicially, getting preferential treatment, well, preferential treatment and prejudice only exist when one or more people or groups are actually being negatively impacted. Get rid of that, and prejudice essentially ceases to hold any power.
And I don't know anyone who would disagree with that, at least not anyone
reasonable who you should be listening to. I don't know anyone who wants to
take rights away from anyone, they just want everyone to be equal. You
shouldn't feel bad for being who you are. You should, however, realize that
being white and male comes with some persk, and act accordingly.
I got booted last time I tried to post.
No, it doesn't make this board moot; because how we solve problems really does matter. Again, I say: If your neighbor falls on the ice and breaks their leg, don't be a social justice warrior and break your leg so you know how it feels. Be an empathetic innovator and figure out how best to help them instead.
Also, pluses and minuses of one situation or another aren't always the fault of the person who seems to have a particular advantage in any particular situation. It would be oversimplistic and weird if we all started castigating or labeling everyone under 25, since most person-on-person violent crime comes from that demographic, and even ideologically-inspired violence comes from that age range. Because, of course, there are a whole lot of other factors. Not the least of which a majority of individuals in that age demographic aren't participating in those behaviors.
And I'll never get behind sacrificing the individual for the sake of an ideology. One reason, one of many, I found myself on the outside of religion. I guess, inadvertently, I found myself on the outside of ideiology of any kind at the same time.
Better to bring people up than to knock people down.
Unfortunately, social scientists dominate politics, education and justice. They divide us all into groups which are all labeled, then make generalisations about those groups. They encourage the groups they consider to be oppressed to hate the groups they consider to be privileged. This is so effective that people from a group that is privileged will pretend to be from an oppressed group. The usual example of this is middle-class people pretending to be working-class, but there was an example in the US recently of a white woman pretending to be black.
Sometimes different groups considered oppressed clash. When they do, they try to win the argument by arguing the other side is more privileged.
The reason this way of thinking is wrong, is that people are usually born into one of the groups. They are not given a choice at birth. Which ever group you're born into, no matter what happened before you were born, you can do good or bad things towards people from other groups. It is an individual's choice. The group is no more responsible when an individual makes a bad choice than they are if another individual makes a good choice.
It's just like when people say that what one blind person does affects all blind people. Rediculous.
Haven't we basically already had this debate/discussion on the topic called "White Girl Rant?" I can't really say much more than I said on that board. Leo, Kevin, and Cody all make good points. No, an entire privileged group is not responsible for the oppressive actions of the bigots within it. No, a person cannot help being born into a privileged group. But yes, privilege does exist, and those of us within the privileged group do have a responsibility to, at the very least, not deny that privilege exists. Denying the existence of privilege is equal to denying the existence of oppression, and the more prevalent this denial, the worse and more prolonged the oppression. It's as simple as that.
I will add, Leo, that while I admire your awareness of the disparities within the criminal justice system as they pertain to race, as well as your search for a solution, the problems go much deeper than that, and technological improvements alone will not fix them. In fact, most of the issues revolve around rigid sentencing guidelines that do not account for mitigating circumstances, along with a lack of community-based counseling and rehabilitation programs for current and potential offenders. So while sentencing guidelines certainly need to be overhauled, and racial inequality definitely needs to be taken into account, there is so much more that needs to be done on an individual, human level.
As for one blind person's actions reflecting on the entire blind population, the whole dynamic of the prejudices toward people with disabilities in general is different than any other minority group, and the approach we should take to fix those problems should be adjusted accordingly. But that's a topic for another board and another day. I'm already running late on account of this site. Haha.
Becky
Responsibility to not deny?
Responsible to whom? And how to prove it? Sounds like a religious type responsibility.
If one says responsibility to see that the disenfranchised in one's neighborhood are taken care of, I can get behind that. That's provable, demonstrable, and can contain action items. Help the homeless guy get some food. Help the ridiculous helpless rabbit of a hipster when her water starts leaking and she can't seem to think straight enough to get pots and pans under the drips. Assist people and businesses be disaster-ready? I'm all in. If my skills were in the areas where I could work on issues related to arrests, sure. I know lawyers working on the Innocence project, etc. Great work. Not every person can do every thing.
But here's something to wander and ponder with, although it's a blasphemy against the Faithful in the academic religion of social justice:
So Jewish and Asian people are arrested less often than whites. Asian and Jewish people are less likely to have poverty and other challenges than whites or other groups. Now, it would be hypocritical as someone who doesn't believe in calling out others' privilege to go around telling Asians to check theirs.
But for those in the religious elite on this one, why is it only white? One would think, for those that have an elementary education or better in something akin to the hard sciences, that they'd know about graduated levels. I get itl, understanding nuance is a bit much to ask of the black-and-white thinkers, but graduated levels. If blacks treated worse than or having less financial advantage than whites, then logically whites encountering a similar graduated difference with Asians would equate to Asian privilege.
That won't happen because it violates the basic faith tenants.
Senior has it right. These new social justice movements are just as bad as the 17th-century German nobleman who came up with the term white, as a means to divide and conquer, creating two groups of laborers.
Ironically, when unions were young in this country and greatly needed, you saw a lot of solidarity between racial groups. Not so ironically perhaps, it's the upper middle class kids on Daddy's dime coming up with all these divide-and-conquer constructs.
But here's a question for you if you're on the fence. Don't as a social justice theorist: you're like to get as far as I did asking a Creationist why plants got created before the Sun. But here's your question: If race and gender are only social constructs, then by the same thinking wouldn't it be backwards to already prefab / mark someone as an inny or an outy for privilege, based on a few accidents of birth?
That doesn't mean there aren't disparities. Of course there are. Why the disparities exist might be another issue. Poverty and lack of education are certainly very plausible answers. Lack of accountability (with all the police shootings for instance) is another. Sloppy jurisprudence is another -- see how the Innocence Project has worked to rectify those types of discrepancies.
But if factor x is a social construct, person y can't enefit from it until socialized, and it can only be the factors of socialization, not by birth. This sort of doublethink going on is why so many of us think the social justice crowd is just another religion full of Ken Ham-style apologetics. Not that problems don't exist. Just that one of the major problems is the proverbial spin cycle required to keep up with the cognitive dissonance.