Racism Part two

[bickster]

1 hour ago, tonyh29 said:

stereotyping but nobody cares that average white van man is then stereotyped as racist  .

You've just created a stereotype that hasn't been discussed in this topic as far as I can tell /irony

[HanoiVillan]

Since he came up recently on the forum, people might like to know that post-breakdown Jordan Peterson has developed some 'interesting' views about World War 2:

 

[lapal_fan]

37 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

Without commenting directly on the etymology of the word 'beast' as applied to sports talk and sports commentary (because I don't know where or how it began, or what the intention was) and just making a general point - just because something was first said/adopted/embraced by a black person (or any other group), doesn't mean that other members of that group cannot find it offensive or argue that it is later.

That could be said about anything referring to any group. 

If one person of any given group is upset by something, what then?  We stop it? 

Stereotyping isn't something people choose to do (caveat inserted here), it's something humans do on an basic level.  You identify patterns and create labels in order to create order to life.  Be it survival (safe/not safe), identifying potential sexual partners etc etc.  

Of course I get your point was a general one, and obviously it's fine to discuss whether that stereotype is right/wrong - but in the majority of cases, like I believe calling someone a beast has very little racial connotations despite there being a link, it's a bit pointless.  And where does the analysis stop?  As @tonyh29 said, why is it ok to call someone a "white van man" or "asian drivers a shit", jews are tight or ginger kids should be disowned, or people with glasses are speccy nerds who need wedgies, or tall kids are lanky idiots who are shit a football etc etc 

Oh yea, it's not.  Just seems like the line of acceptance is very narrow now as to what is fine and what isn't.  What is "in jest" and what is outrageous. etc. 

Just makes life a bit beige I guess.  Cartoons will never be the same!  Cleveland's voice actor from Family Guy has quit (to much disappointment from the black community according to twitter) for a start! 

[mjmooney]

22 minutes ago, bickster said:

You've just created a stereotype that hasn't been discussed in this topic as far as I can tell /irony

I used 'white van man' a couple of posts back, when mentioning the 3M HK Chinese. 

Yeah, it's a stereotype for 'uneducated right wing racist', much like 'Essex man', 'Mondeo man', etc. Personally, I don't really care about offending them - despite their protestations to the contrary, they are not an oppressed minority, with centuries of slavery and abuse in their history. And, yes, I'm well aware that there are those who don't fit the stereotype - the local builder I use is a working class Leeds bloke who does indeed drive a white van. He's a Labour Party activist, vehemently anti-racist, and a supporter of BLM. 

[Stevo985]

1 hour ago, tonyh29 said:

Pages of debate about if describing someone as a beast is racist , lazy , stereotyping but nobody cares that average white van man is then stereotyped as racist  .

To be clear this isn't me doing a  White lives matter post  and my posting history in this thread is open for scrutiny to show I've made no such support of such posts  ....  

I just think yet again VT has let itself down , if you want to educate people about lazy stereotypes , using a lazy stereotype to make a point isn't the way to do it imo  .. yeah, there will be the usual " but nobody did"  and "that's not what was said"   , but its there as a theme through this thread , the so called "sneering"  if you like ...

If someone posts an ignorant comment , then its fair game to reply to it and discuss and even try to educate that poster  , generic Emily Thornberry type posts  , nah VT is smarter than that

I don’t think you’ve read all the posts. As mine specifically said that the people using those terms were NOT racist. Just that they were racial stereotypes 

 

edit: I may have misinterpreted what you meant here. Apologies

Edited July 2, 2020 by Stevo985

[lapal_fan]

Just now, Stevo985 said:

I don’t think you’ve read all the posts. As mine specifically said that the people using those terms were NOT racist. Just that they were racial stereotypes 

Is racial stereotyping not a form of racism then? 

Genuine question. 

[Stevo985]

2 hours ago, lapal_fan said:

 

I'm also not saying Akinfenwa invented that label either (why I mentioned Shearer), but as a power lifting footballer, the word became much more publicly used to describe strong players on the back of it. 

 

I don’t agree but it’s beside the point really. 
 

2 hours ago, lapal_fan said:

 

And just on this one, I really don't like it as an example because I myself have personally beat myself up over it, but I think most sensible people would cross a road if they came upon a group of *any* people.  I really don't think the colour of skin has anything to do with this kind of stuff.  It's just as a solo person approaching a group, survivability tells you, you have to give groups space - skin colour doesn't matter one bit.  Or at least I'd hope not.  But would a person approaching a group of black people think "I'm in danger because they are black", really? 

 

That was my entire point

[Stevo985]

8 minutes ago, lapal_fan said:

Is racial stereotyping not a form of racism then? 

Genuine question. 

It is. But it’s different than explicit racism. 

Using or acting on a racial stereotype that you don’t know or realise is offensive isn’t the same as deliberately discriminating against someone because of their race. 

Edited July 2, 2020 by Stevo985

[lapal_fan]

28 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

Since he came up recently on the forum, people might like to know that post-breakdown Jordan Peterson has developed some 'interesting' views about World War 2:

 

Be interesting to see his reply to that is because I have seen some of his stuff (not loads, there's **** tonnes of it online) and some of that has been taken out of context.  It does seem like a bit of a slander piece, but I've no doubt the writer knows his onions and Peterson does tend to use analogies which are a stretch to say the least sometimes. 

I agree with Jordan on somethings (like people need to take responsibility/there are some limitations to some people (we're not all the same) etc), others (lobsters/religion etc) - hell naw. 

What I absolutely don't think is however, is that he's some far-right sympathiser (as is painted on here whenever he's mentioned).  He does often attack the far left, but I don't believe he's "far" right either.  He's a liberal conservative, or somewhere around there. 

[lapal_fan]

10 minutes ago, Stevo985 said:

I guess. But it’s different than explicit racism. 

Using a racial stereotype that you don’t know or realise is offensive isn’t the same as deliberately discriminating against someone because of their race. 

**** me the lines are blurry. 

[HanoiVillan]

11 minutes ago, lapal_fan said:

If one person of any given group is upset by something, what then?  We stop it?

They make a case as to why they find it wrong, or offensive, and as a society we either end up agreeing or disagreeing, and if we decide to agree, eventually we do something about it. If there is something that is widely agreed to be offensive now, but was widely done in the past, then at some point or other there were only a handful of people objecting to that thing. If we take as an example pulling your eyes in imitation of an East Asian person, that used to be a common thing that people did to take the piss or be rude. It's not like everybody in the country woke up one morning with a sudden-but-complete understanding that doing that was offensive; an initially small group of people argued the point, and gradually we agreed as a society that doing that is 'off'.

18 minutes ago, lapal_fan said:

Of course I get your point was a general one, and obviously it's fine to discuss whether that stereotype is right/wrong - but in the majority of cases, like I believe calling someone a beast has very little racial connotations despite there being a link, it's a bit pointless.  And where does the analysis stop?  As @tonyh29 said, why is it ok to call someone a "white van man" or "asian drivers a shit", jews are tight or ginger kids should be disowned, or people with glasses are speccy nerds who need wedgies, or tall kids are lanky idiots who are shit a football etc etc 

Oh yea, it's not. 

The serious answer to 'where does the analysis stop' is:

- In the case of individual claimed offences, it stops when people largely agree that the thing in question that people are doing is not problematic. I have seen people online make, in all seriousness, the argument that white people eating curry or doing yoga is 'cultural appropriation'. Most people would regard that claim as ridiculous (and I would agree), and it hasn't 'caught on' and become widespread.

- In the case of society, it never stops. There will never be a point at which people stop questioning the assumptions of the culture they live in, and nor should there be.

I'm not quite following your argument with the other examples. They all seem like things that are either deeply offensive or unkind to say, with the exception of 'white van man', which was originally a marketing segmentation classification (used for targeting newspaper sales, amongst other things). Some people choose to self-identify as a 'white van man', and there may be some things they do as part of that self-identity that they shouldn't, but obviously the mere fact of owning a white van doesn't make someone a bad person or whatever. I may have misunderstood what you're trying to say here though, I admit.

32 minutes ago, lapal_fan said:

Just makes life a bit beige I guess.  Cartoons will never be the same!  Cleveland's voice actor from Family Guy has quit (to much disappointment from the black community according to twitter) for a start! 

I think something a lot of people are unprepared for - and this is not targeted at you personally, I also experience this a lot - is that fashions change about what is considered funny. It's easy to think that what we found funny when we were growing up will always be considered hilarious, but it won't, and people younger than us will reevaluate it with a critical eye, just as we did about the stuff our parents found funny.

[tonyh29]

10 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

I used 'white van man' a couple of posts back, when mentioning the 3M HK Chinese. 

Yeah, it's a stereotype for 'uneducated right wing racist', much like 'Essex man', 'Mondeo man', etc. Personally, I don't really care about offending them - despite their protestations to the contrary, they are not an oppressed minority, with centuries of slavery and abuse in their history. And, yes, I'm well aware that there are those who don't fit the stereotype - the local builder I use is a working class Leeds bloke who does indeed drive a white van. He's a Labour Party activist, vehemently anti-racist, and a supporter of BLM. 

With regard to not caring for "uneducated right wing racists"  , I'm sure everyone on VT agrees with you there  , thats not the point I made .... 

Unless we are going the Will Self type line of reasoning that every racist and anti Semite in the country pretty much probably drives a white van  , I just think it was a line unbecoming of the level of discussion the forum is capable of .

 

Also , I'm not seeing anyone arguing white van man are an oppressed minority so I guess Bicks will be along shortly to tell us that you are talking about something that hasn't been discussed in this topic  

[Stevo985]

12 minutes ago, lapal_fan said:

**** me the lines are blurry. 

Absolutely

[Sam-AVFC]

21 minutes ago, lapal_fan said:

and some of that has been taken out of context. 

Which statements were taken out of context and what is the mitigating context? 

Edited July 2, 2020 by Sam-AVFC

[tonyh29]

26 minutes ago, Stevo985 said:

I don’t think you’ve read all the posts. As mine specifically said that the people using those terms were NOT racist. Just that they were racial stereotypes 

 I wasn't really specifically answering any individual posts  ,but with regard to not reading posts , are you sure you read mine

I referred to  " racist , lazy , stereotyping "  and stereotyping in general 

reading it back , bad placements of commas possibly changed the meaning on mine , but we were talking about the same thing , i just added a lazy for good measure

 

[tonyh29]

24 minutes ago, lapal_fan said:

**** me the lines are blurry. 

[lapal_fan]

8 minutes ago, Sam-AVFC said:

Which statements were taken out of context and what is the mitigating context for the stuff that was? 

"You have to admire Hitler! […] Because he was an organizational genius!" - 1st sentence. 

He said that not because he "admires him", but because whatever you think of him or his politics (I'd hope that would be negative) but because he got an entire country ready for war in a few years.  

What that sentence implies is "ha, look at this Jordan fella, admiring Hitler" - that's just not true.  It's just a by product of something in Pshycology lectures, whereby Hitler comes up shit loads as "the most extreme example" of something. 

 

There's more Sam, but I don't have the time to provide the evidence as it would mean I'd ave to re-watch the videos I've seen etc. 

[Stevo985]

1 minute ago, tonyh29 said:

 I wasn't really specifically answering any individual posts  ,but with regard to not reading posts , are you sure you read mine

I referred to  " racist , lazy , stereotyping "  and stereotyping in general 

reading it back , bad placements of commas possibly changed the meaning on mine , but we were talking about the same thing , i just added a lazy for good measure

 

Nope! My edit said I thik I misinterpreted yours

 

I thought you were saying that suggesting calling a black player lazy or a beast was in turn calling "the average white van man" a racist. i.e. anyone who says that is racist.

I realise now that's not what you meant, apologies.

[lapal_fan]

17 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

They make a case as to why they find it wrong, or offensive, and as a society we either end up agreeing or disagreeing, and if we decide to agree, eventually we do something about it. If there is something that is widely agreed to be offensive now, but was widely done in the past, then at some point or other there were only a handful of people objecting to that thing. If we take as an example pulling your eyes in imitation of an East Asian person, that used to be a common thing that people did to take the piss or be rude. It's not like everybody in the country woke up one morning with a sudden-but-complete understanding that doing that was offensive; an initially small group of people argued the point, and gradually we agreed as a society that doing that is 'off'.

The serious answer to 'where does the analysis stop' is:

- In the case of individual claimed offences, it stops when people largely agree that the thing in question that people are doing is not problematic. I have seen people online make, in all seriousness, the argument that white people eating curry or doing yoga is 'cultural appropriation'. Most people would regard that claim as ridiculous (and I would agree), and it hasn't 'caught on' and become widespread.

- In the case of society, it never stops. There will never be a point at which people stop questioning the assumptions of the culture they live in, and nor should there be.

I'm not quite following your argument with the other examples. They all seem like things that are either deeply offensive or unkind to say, with the exception of 'white van man', which was originally a marketing segmentation classification (used for targeting newspaper sales, amongst other things). Some people choose to self-identify as a 'white van man', and there may be some things they do as part of that self-identity that they shouldn't, but obviously the mere fact of owning a white van doesn't make someone a bad person or whatever. I may have misunderstood what you're trying to say here though, I admit.

I think something a lot of people are unprepared for - and this is not targeted at you personally, I also experience this a lot - is that fashions change about what is considered funny. It's easy to think that what we found funny when we were growing up will always be considered hilarious, but it won't, and people younger than us will reevaluate it with a critical eye, just as we did about the stuff our parents found funny.

FWIW I agree with all of that, particularly the last few sentences. 

Thanks for providing more detail on what I quoted  

[HanoiVillan]

9 minutes ago, lapal_fan said:

FWIW I agree with all of that, particularly the last few sentences. 

Thanks for providing more detail on what I quoted  

No worries!