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intertribalmy friends' list has exploded over something.
Good thing I wasn't checking LJ, cuz I wouldn't have gotten any of my many tasks done today. I'm not going to comment on the TOC thing itself, because it's all the stuff that comes out of the woodwork once the TOC red-herring has been beaten to death that I find more noteworthy. I've put my thoughts on "PC" as a slur on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cucumberseed's LJ, so this is what I have left. It's a little angry, but I'm a little angry. I usually confine this type of thing to other people's LJs, but I feel the need to say something this time. Particularly over things like "Most modern people are color-blind and gender blind and don’t care whether you’re a WASP or some dude from Argentina or a girl from that village in Togo." That is not true of most people in Lincoln, Nebraska and it's not true of most people at Columbia University and it's not true of most people in Jakarta, Indonesia. My own mother says she isn't color-blind, and she married "out of' her race and religion.
Bondoni's argument advocating that we stop being oppressed by the PC parrots reminds me of a chain letter I got in middle school from an LDS friend, saying "75% of Americans believe in God. Why can't we just tell the other 25% to sit down and shut up!!!"* I responded with a long-ass convoluted email about how horrified this made me, and one of the reasons I gave was basically "Dude. Are you seriously claiming that religious people in America are more persecuted than non-believers?" But then the term "reverse racism" was born, and it seemed like every little inch, every little sign that maybe the demographics of power would shift to reflect the demographics of the country, that maybe the same people wouldn't have all the power all the time, was taken to be a sign that those people who never had power were going to rule, iron-fisted, over the people they "usurped."
[This paranoid push/pull and desperate grip on diminishing power is true in other countries too, cuz humans love power and security, although it's a lot more complicated in places where the now-majority is descended from people who were enslaved by the now-minority, and the now-minority still has a lot of the country's wealth - that is, post-colonial countries. So I'm not going to touch that.]
I don't think the majority social group in America is in any danger of being guillotined. I really, truly don't. Even if minorities wanted that (which they don't - I'm going to give everybody the benefit of the doubt here and say no one wants genocide), the reason they are called "minorities" is because there just aren't enough of them to overrun the majority group. But I would like the majority social group to remember that these people who are suddenly "threatening to take your shit" - your job, your seat in the lecture hall, your place on that science fiction TOC - they didn't just fall out of the sky. Or to keep with the SF theme, out of a spaceship. They've been here the whole time. In the ditches, in the fields. In the shadows. Taking the dirty jobs - or being forced to take them. Does this mean your life's been roses? Nope. Civilization's a bitch, ain't it? And if you want to start some kind of anti-capitalist revolution, you can count me in.
The End. Shelly still loves you, she's just pissed. We didn't start the fire - no we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it.
*: might not be 75. It was somewhere in the 70s, so I just went for the median. Also, I am well aware that LDS people have been discriminated against, but this was not LDS vs. the rest-of-the-world. In fact, I'm sure if the statistic was reversed, and the conclusion was "why don't we just tell those Mormons to sit down and shut up!!!", she wouldn't have forwarded it to me.
Good thing I wasn't checking LJ, cuz I wouldn't have gotten any of my many tasks done today. I'm not going to comment on the TOC thing itself, because it's all the stuff that comes out of the woodwork once the TOC red-herring has been beaten to death that I find more noteworthy. I've put my thoughts on "PC" as a slur on
cucumberseed's LJ, so this is what I have left. It's a little angry, but I'm a little angry. I usually confine this type of thing to other people's LJs, but I feel the need to say something this time. Particularly over things like "Most modern people are color-blind and gender blind and don’t care whether you’re a WASP or some dude from Argentina or a girl from that village in Togo." That is not true of most people in Lincoln, Nebraska and it's not true of most people at Columbia University and it's not true of most people in Jakarta, Indonesia. My own mother says she isn't color-blind, and she married "out of' her race and religion. Bondoni's argument advocating that we stop being oppressed by the PC parrots reminds me of a chain letter I got in middle school from an LDS friend, saying "75% of Americans believe in God. Why can't we just tell the other 25% to sit down and shut up!!!"* I responded with a long-ass convoluted email about how horrified this made me, and one of the reasons I gave was basically "Dude. Are you seriously claiming that religious people in America are more persecuted than non-believers?" But then the term "reverse racism" was born, and it seemed like every little inch, every little sign that maybe the demographics of power would shift to reflect the demographics of the country, that maybe the same people wouldn't have all the power all the time, was taken to be a sign that those people who never had power were going to rule, iron-fisted, over the people they "usurped."
[This paranoid push/pull and desperate grip on diminishing power is true in other countries too, cuz humans love power and security, although it's a lot more complicated in places where the now-majority is descended from people who were enslaved by the now-minority, and the now-minority still has a lot of the country's wealth - that is, post-colonial countries. So I'm not going to touch that.]
I don't think the majority social group in America is in any danger of being guillotined. I really, truly don't. Even if minorities wanted that (which they don't - I'm going to give everybody the benefit of the doubt here and say no one wants genocide), the reason they are called "minorities" is because there just aren't enough of them to overrun the majority group. But I would like the majority social group to remember that these people who are suddenly "threatening to take your shit" - your job, your seat in the lecture hall, your place on that science fiction TOC - they didn't just fall out of the sky. Or to keep with the SF theme, out of a spaceship. They've been here the whole time. In the ditches, in the fields. In the shadows. Taking the dirty jobs - or being forced to take them. Does this mean your life's been roses? Nope. Civilization's a bitch, ain't it? And if you want to start some kind of anti-capitalist revolution, you can count me in.
The End. Shelly still loves you, she's just pissed. We didn't start the fire - no we didn't light it, but we tried to fight it.
*: might not be 75. It was somewhere in the 70s, so I just went for the median. Also, I am well aware that LDS people have been discriminated against, but this was not LDS vs. the rest-of-the-world. In fact, I'm sure if the statistic was reversed, and the conclusion was "why don't we just tell those Mormons to sit down and shut up!!!", she wouldn't have forwarded it to me.
