What counts as “horrible hateful speech?” The media has been publishing articles recently with outright racist slurs against white people (using phrases like “unbearable whiteness”). Is that hateful speech? (I think so but then again I’m an elder Millennial.) And does the fact that it’s the President saying something warrant giving him more or less latitude?
The right and moral thing to do was to give the duly elected President latitude until it was massive in scope and objectively false. In my mind, that didn’t happen until last month when he continued to claim the election was stolen after the rejection of his lawsuits.
I'm surprised you keep bringing this up, because you know the counterargument here. "Whiteness" is in fact a problematic term. Italians, Jewish people, and the Irish have all been excluded from "whiteness" at times. The term expands as needed to provide solidarity against Black people. "Black", on the other hand, is an actual ethnicity --- the one we created when we kidnapped millions of people in Africa and stripped them of their original culture.
Anti-whiteness crusaders can and frequently do go too far, but I object, strenuously, to the idea that mainstream articles about problematic whiteness are somehow comparable to anti-Black racism. That isn't true, and I think you know that.
I agree with your comment for the most part. But this line is pretty misleading:
> the one we created when we kidnapped millions of people in Africa and stripped them of their original culture
Nobody was kidnapped. Individuals were bought from already-existing African slave trade markets(markets which had been run by and for Africans (and Arabs), preceding any European commercial relationship.)
Although you may have used the term kidnapping liberally (& with some artistic license), it is fundamentally not true & very misleading.
In Africa, buying and selling slaves was widespread at the time.
I think the treatment of African slaves(& their descendants) in America is bad enough without having to exaggerate the origin.
So I guess I don’t understand the counter-argument. I assumed you agreed using “whiteness” as a pejorative is a problem.
I agree anti-Black racism is far more destructive. But I’m not trying to establish a hierarchy of the kinds of racism. I think anti-Black racism is far more destructive than anti-Asian racism, but as an Asian I’m pretty happy to see both kinds be deemed taboo in polite society.
We can’t have someone’s skin color being used in pejorative terms, and insofar as there are many people who think it’s acceptable, that only underscores why I’m tremendously skeptical of private sector censorship, where those people will disproportionately be in charge of shaping debate.
Thanks for the response. We are probably closer than I thought we were one RTT ago.
I think pejorative anti-whiteness is problematic as a communication strategy; it's counterproductive and you have to be steeped in a national conversation that only a couple hundred thousand people are having to understand how to take it (and I do not think that's true of anti-Black racism).
I also think that a lot of people selling anti-whiteness as an important doctrine are grifters.
But I also think it would be better for everyone if the term died out. I know it won't; Irish/Czech/Spanish people intermarry with German/Scottish people and their kids have no better term, I guess? But there's a notion that "if Black pride is positive, it should be positive to have White pride as well" which I think is deeply wrong. Maybe it was growing up along the South Side Irish parade route in Chicago that programmed me this way, but I see no evidence of European ethnic heritage being suppressed in the US.
I do not trust Twitter, Facebook, or Amazon to censor appropriately in the least. But that doesn't make it hard for me to evaluate these most recent decisions to cut off violent extremists! I'm fine with them booting Parler and DJT even though I'm less than fine with the idea of them evaluating all speech --- of course, that's one of the reasons 1A advocates so strongly support CDA S230.
It was massive in scope and objectively false when he claimed Covid-19 was completely under control, compared favorably to the flu, was just misdiagnosed sniffles/flu, that it was going to miraculously disappear, etc
The right and moral thing to do was to give the duly elected President latitude until it was massive in scope and objectively false. In my mind, that didn’t happen until last month when he continued to claim the election was stolen after the rejection of his lawsuits.