(05-16-2019 08:15 AM)georgewebb Wrote:  

(05-16-2019 07:37 AM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  

(05-16-2019 07:14 AM)georgewebb Wrote:  

(05-16-2019 06:12 AM)RiceLad15 Wrote:  

(05-15-2019 05:35 PM)georgewebb Wrote:  The most common formulation seems to be "If you don't support X, it's because he/she is Y, and therefore you are Y-ist" -- which is identity politics in condescending and divisive form.

Well, based on comments from Owl#s and OO, it seems that both have experience suggesting that this formulation does exist. So if we admit that people do act against others because they are Y, how do we go about talking about that and combatting it? Or do we not for fear that someone might feel that someone is being condescending to them?

It seems to be a rather difficult issue, rife with problems, that doesn’t lend itself to generating any productive conversations.

Certainly not with that attitude. :(

In my experience — specifically including interactions with Rice faculty — difficulties in having useful conversation are mostly driven not by alleged racists, but by racism-baiters, who are hardly paralyzed by any reluctance to condescend. Almost as a rule, they do not even want conversation. They want to scold; whether their target deserves scolding is mostly irrelevant.

I see what you’re saying on an individual, one-on-one conversation, and jumping the gun in terms of someone’s rationale, but do we not think sexism is still influencing a portion of the population’s decision making?

It is clear that in 2016 a great many Clinton voters (though perhaps not a majority) supported her for sexist reasons. On the other hand, if Margaret Thatcher had been American, she would have won the White House thirty years ago. So yes, sexism seems to influence a portion of the population's decision-making. But only a portion.

You mentioned conversations. I can't have a conversation with the US population; I can only converse with people I interact with. And I've tried to do that -- tried quite hard. In that experience, the difficulties in having useful conversation about -isms have come almost entirely from the ism-baiters, not from the accused or presumed -ists.

To give a couple of examples of my attempts:
- During the campus debate about the College Master title (which never really was a debate), a Rice professor told me that since I didn't agree with him that the title Master was intolerable, I wanted Rice to go back to being a segregated campus.

- During a discussion of NFL players kneeling during the National Anthem, I suggested that opposition to the gesture is not necessarily racist, or even necessarily based on opposition to Black Lives Matter itself: one can reasonably believe that the National Anthem should not be used as a vehicle to call attention to ANY personal cause, no matter how important. That's an entirely neutral view: it does not matter what skin color the advocate has, or whether the cause is "Black Lives Matter" or "Abortion Is Murder" or "God Hates Fags". In response, I was called racist. And for good measure, since one of the people who disagreed with me was female, I was called sexist too. As you know, I am neither.

Of the roadblocks to productive conversation, skittishness on the part of ism-baiters seems to be pretty far down the list.

This is a big problem. If we can't have reasonable discussions when we have different viewpoints then we are just going to widen the already-too-wide divide in our nation.