The U.S. Culture(s) thread

I'm just going to assume he said the N word. And that no friend was involved

Edited by devak on May 20th 2020 at 11:36:44 AM

I don’t think that’s fair. But also, I too would like to know what this friend did or said.

And like. I can’t speak from experience wrt racism, but I certainly can say that bigotry isn’t something you can just compromise on. If someone calls me a transphobic or antisemitic slur, and nobody calls them out on it, they’re going to keep up that behavior, at the cost of my emotional wellbeing. And its very likely that, with them seeing nobody is upset by their views, they’ll grow more extreme in what they say and do. It starts as casual use of slurs, then grows to bigoted political views, which then grows to outright hatred and violence. But if you snuff it out early, and let them know that its not okay to treat people like that, they might learn from the experience and try to be better in the future.

Several people have asked him what was said and he has replied in the thread but hasn't answered that. Seems to me like a classic case of trying to justify one's own racism via "a friend of mine said"

If you want a tolerant culture, then the one thing that must be stamped out entirely is intolerance. If you allow people to be intolerant in your community (in the spirit of "we don't support this, but we practice tolerance even for views we disagree with"), then eventually the intolerant people will force everyone else out by being assholes to the targets of their intolerance. This is called the paradox of tolerance — that the one thing you cannot tolerate is intolerance — and is the reason for the "so much for the tolerant left" meme.

Time was, not so long ago, when a white man could make a joke at the expense of women, or a black person, or a polish person, and everyone would laugh. It was just humor, the thinking in those days went, and no one was really harmed. After all, people need to have a certain degree of emotional toughness to get by in life, if you can't take a little ribbing, then you are just too sensitive.

Then things changed. Casual sexism or racism in the workplace became uncomfortable, people became more sensitive and less tolerant. Now white men are forced to think things through, they have to acquire the skill to see themselves from other people's perspectives, to calculate the effect of their words and actions on other people, even when they do not intend to cause harm or discomfort. Society decided that casual bigotry is connected to worse forms of harm, that by creating an environment in which people can casually insult each other also allows more extreme forms of abuse—in a workplace where the men make "dumb blonde" jokes, one of them will also touch their female colleagues inappropriately. And this is because the jokes teach people not to defend themselves, not to feel that they are as deserving of respect as other people are, or at the very least that you have to act aggressively to earn the respect of your white male colleagues. And some people felt that they didn't have the social power to get away with that. That if a black women tells a "dumb white guy" joke, she would get fired. So things changed.

A lot of white men are really angry about this. They don't appreciate being forced to think about the consequences of their actions for people who have less social power than they do. It's difficult, annoying, and some white men may not be confident about their ability to adapt to this new cultural environment. They don't like power in conversation being handed over to someone else. They don't like the feeling of being controlled.

Hence the pushback. There is a movement to return to the days in which people who couldn't take a little ribbing were considered oversensitive. But people who have had little social power historically are not going back to those days. They have experienced respect, and wont let go of it. They no longer tolerate intolerance.

So keep working on your ability to see yourself from other people's point of view. That's the world we live in now.

Edited by DeMarquis on May 20th 2020 at 11:07:30 AM

I was going to mention the punching up vs punching down thing but unlike myself, Marquis is actually coherent and smart.

Ah, the plight of the white man. How can they possibly endure in a world where they have to treat others as equals? /sarc

Try working in Detroit for a couple decades, brother, and you learn.

Try working in Boston as a black man.

Like, seriously, what even is that comeback?

It wasn't a comeback. I was expanding on M84's comment. Basically I'm saying white men can in fact learn, except I wanted it to sound a little badass.

IMO, the proper response from white men to changes over social power should be "Eh, fine, whatever. Wonder what's on TV?"

To everyone asking me, all my friend said was he didn't find women of different ethnicity that is not his own attractive. And that what got him in trouble.

Also, I find it troubling how people are talking about lynching, violence, or traumatic experiences. When its clear I'm talking about a specific context, a college context in which its mostly about young people in a highly regulated environment.

Edited by Kratistos on May 21st 2020 at 11:00:29 AM

It all depends on how he expressed his lack of finding women of a particular ethnicity attractive, in what context, and how hard he tried to avoid causing offense. It isn't hard to imagine, in, say, a conversation in which everyone is sharing what they do or do not find physically attractive in potential partners, someone might in all innocence share that particular piece of information. It is also not hard to imagine, say, a woman of color taking offense at overhearing some guy tell the world that he thinks that women like her are unattractive. Or anything in between.

In general, expressing an opinion on the attractiveness of other people is an emotional minefield that few know how to navigate, and is probably best avoided.

I'm laughing at the idea of college being described as a highly regulated environment. First of all, if this was just a casual conversation then there was nothing regulated about it. Like, shit, sure the dorms have rules you have to obey if you're in one, and you have to obey class rules while you're in class, but outside of all those very basic things it is a fucking free for all. Congratulations, young people, you now have to practice being an adult with all your free time!

But yeah, even saying "he doesn't find such and such" attractive is like, the most bland and least informative way to describe the situation (and we still don't know what the response was other than that people didn't like it.)

Like, sure, college kids do and say dumb things when they're learning about social justice and shit. But that is not a sign of extremism. That's just people learning and, like young people do, doing and saying dumb things. And quite frankly, a lot more dumb shit gets said and done by the college kids who like to style themselves as being on the right. (basically there's been a LOT of screaming about leftist indoctrination in colleges in the last few years and quite frankly I'm tired of that overblown bullshit. Fuck's sake people, it's young people being young, and thus inexperienced, with all that involves.)

@nombretomado

It seems I've been misunderstood, I will not continue on this topic any further since I've seen you've also thumbed(I assume that's a warning) my initial comment. It'll best for me to deescalate the situation. I thought I was responding directly to @Aceof Spaces @Kayeka in the contexts of colleges. I did not expect to have a large conversation with the other members of the group.

Edited by Kratistos on May 21st 2020 at 4:53:05 AM

Off-road, off-grid: the modern nomads wandering America's back country

That's fascinating.

So film producer Scott Rudin has been accused of both verbally and physically abusive behavior by ex-staffers.

This is unfortunately unsurprising. It's been well-known that Rudin is a self-proclaimed Jerkass who unfortunately has been a recipient of a Best Picture Oscar win and several other nominations. If I ever get into film writing/directing, I will steer clear of this guy.

I like how every new book on Abraham Lincoln I read feels the need to include a preface justifying its own existence. "Yeah, I know there's 16,000 other books on Lincoln, but this one is different! I swear!"

I bring this up because I am indeed reading a book about Abe Lincoln that's selling itself as the first "cultural biography," which explores the culture of early 19th Century America and how it shaped and was shaped by Abraham Lincoln. We often talk about the Puritan background of the United States, so I found it interesting that early America saw itself as divided heritage-wise as much as geographically. While the north, and New England specifically, was descendant from the Puritans and movements like abolitionism and temperance had direct legacy links to them, the south claimed the Cavaliers who fled England after Oliver Cromwell took over and looked to their attitudes of honor and nobility to shape their society. The slave states outright scorned the Puritans as a "traditionless, rootless race" who promoted anarchic reforms and were altogether fanatics, self-righteous, narrow-minded, and materialistic. This was in contrast to the Cavalier South's traditions of honor, hospitality, and chivalry, and its stable institutions such as slavery.

The book frequently makes reference to early biographies of Lincoln, and it's weird how often they make this borderline eugenics argument to explain Lincoln's unique position in history. That his Puritan (Northern) paternal line and Cavalier (Southern) maternal line bred into him all their best qualities while cancelling out the negative ones. Leaving a perfect specimen.

I've been away from this for so long that I missed the title change. Just out of curiosity, what was the impetus for the change? I assume there was a discussion about the US not really having a singular culture despite its long-standing reputation as a cultural melting pot (in contrast to Canada's strict emphasis that it is multicultural)?

That aside, I have a question: Is there precedent in the US for both the father and the mother agreeing to give the latter's surname to their newborn child instead of the former's, flouting their culture's heavily entrenched tradition of patronymy?

Yeah, people do whatever they want with last names.

Doesn't matter who takes the other's last name. Sometimes nobody changes their name, sometimes they both change their name to an abbreviation of their two maiden names.

It's all good.

You don't even have to be consistent within a family. I have my father's surname, but my brother has our mother's.

As the person who created the thread, I can safely inform you that there was not a thread title change.

As for your question, there really isn't such a tradition - the U.S. is fairly heavy on patronymically handing down surnames, bolstered by the tradition of wives changing their surnames to match those of their husbands. There are obviously exceptions (possibly tied to people descended from immigrants whose original cultures have matronyms as a thing), but there's no broad scale adoption of the practice.