I get that you're trying to be charitable but there really isn't a valid defence for an ideology that tries to slap a label onto heterogeneous groups of people with nothing in common beyond their skin tone. It is a racist way of thinking and should be called out as such.
I understand that this is an extremely sensitive topic that can make it hard to reason about. People never feel good when accusations—false or not!—start flying. And once those kind of intense feelings get involved, it's hard to lower your defenses and try to read what people say charitably.
The point of my comment was entirely that it is not about guilt. None of us living today bear responsibility for historical slavery in the US, even those whose ancestors owned slaves. How can I be considered at fault for something that happened literally before I existed? How could I have caused that?
(Edit: I realize now that my analogy where the house is inherited obscures that. I think the analogy would work better if I said you won the house in a lottery.)
What we carry is not guilt from the past but responsibility for today. Because of that history of slavery, many institutions today still unfairly benefit white people. (In my analogy, the pipe continues to deliver water long after the person who unfairly plumbed it has died.) Because of those benefits, white people today have more power as a group generally than Black people do.
It is today's unearned benefits and the greater capacity to remedy them that places responsibility on white people in the US, not any bloodline that traces back to slaveowners.
We should fix racism today because it's wrong and because we can. We bear a moral obligation to people living today to give them the more just world they deserve.
"many institutions today still unfairly benefit white people."
Beyond that, I struggle to believe it, but perhaps you can fill me in if I'm missing something.
As an example, in what way are institutions biased in favor of poor rural white people?
Their entire culture hates them (music, movies, media) and they are quotad out of universities and flashy career paths. To add salt on the wound their manufacturing jobs are shipped overseas.
This reality on the ground is the near opposite of any kind of institutional privilege of the sort you're talking about. In some cases (e.g soft quotas) this is demonstrable institutional racism working against white people.
I think it's both pro-white and anti-black. When you dig back through US history, you see plenty of evidence of both a belief system that whites are the best (and thus deserve to have power over other races) as well as that blacks are particularly deserving of their lowest status. Other races and ethnicities form a more complex middle ground. In many places and times there simply weren't a great enough quantity of those members of those groups for any well-defined cultural claim to be made.
I don't think your average 19th century Virginia farmer had a strong opinion one way or the other about the relatively inferiority of, say, the Sami people because they'd never even heard of one. Whites in almost all parts of the US by necessity had to incorporate blackness into their culture because—thanks almost entirely to the slave trade—blacks were so present in much of the country and were enshrined in its laws and institutions.
> As an example, in what way are institutions biased in favor of poor rural white people?
"Poor", "rural", and "white" are three ways to slice demographics and the way they interact can sometimes illuminate and sometimes obscure.
I think most of what you're seeing is that it generally sucks to be poor and rural, full stop. In 1910, there were about 13 million US farm workers. Today there are about 3 million. In 1979, there were close to 20 million manufacturing jobs. Today it's around 12 million.
This disproportionally hurts whites because black people have historically concentrated in urban areas (often driven by trying to escape anti-black racism). So it's easy to have a vivid image of how much it sucks for some opioid addicted country-music blaring coal-rolling white dude living in a trailer in Appalachia compared to some hip black guy riding the subway in NYC listening to billionaire Kanye's latest album.
But that's comparing different cohorts. The real question is what is it like for a poor, rural, black person? Black people make up only 3% of the population of West Virginia, but 28% of its prison population. (Whites are 93% of the state, but 65% of prisoners.)
Meanwhile in NYC, black people are 16% of the state population but 53% of its prison population. The median household income for white people is $80,300, for black people it's $42,600.
So, yes, I agree that poor rural folks have gotten the short end of the stick since neoliberalism took over. And their perception of relative worsening is something that we should look at. (I think it's one of the primary drivers of the Tea Party, Trumpism, the alt-right, etc.) While their anger at black people is misplaced and wrong, I can empathize with where it's coming from. It hurts to feel that others are moving ahead while you yourself are not.
But at the same time, it has always been hard to be black in the US and it's still hard. Here's a fun (spoiler: not fucking fun at all) guessing game to play if you don't already know the answer: When was the last lynching in the United States?
If you were naive, you might guess the late 1800s when Jim Crow laws were rife and the country was still coming to grips with emancipation. Maybe you'd guess the 1930s when the KKK was flourishing. You would hope it wasn't the 1950s when economic prosperity and blacks and whites fighting together in WWII should have brought us together. Hopefully no later than the 1960s when the Civil Rights Act was signed.
Actually, it was 1981. His name was Michael Donald. He was 19 years old and was chosen at random by KKK members angry about an unrelated murder trial "to show Klan strength in Alabama".
He was killed by poor rural whites who were this close to getting away with it completely until the FBI got involved.
"When you dig back through US history, you see plenty of evidence of both a belief system that whites are the best"
I only see evidence that the system today is anti-Black and anti-poor.
I accept the historical examples you've given of pro-white attitudes, but I'm hoping to discuss today's reality since that's the point of contention.
"I think most of what you're seeing is that it generally sucks to be poor and rural, full stop"
The soft quota they face in employment and education and the hatred and derision uniquely directed towards them in particular (and towards no other group) from all cultural institutions.
The white quota in the workforce, for example, is there to be filled by inner city whites with the right pedigree and right social values. The white quota in higher education makes it difficult for rural whites without the same early educational opportunities to have a chance, whereas a black rural person (even if they're a recent immigrant) will have an easier time, all else equal, for no other reason than they have the right skin color.
From my perspective, this is evidence of institutional discrimination, but it runs in the opposite direction to what's claimed.
"Meanwhile in NYC, black people are 16% of the state population but 53% of its prison population."
Hindus do better than Whites in general. Is the system pro-Hindu?
Nigerians immigrants do well. Is the system pro-Nigerian?
Differential outcomes are not evidence that today's system is pro-white.
There's certainly a historical legacy of slavery and discrimination that helped to create these inequalities. But it's not evidence for much beyond that if we're discussing the institutions of today.
I don't know what to tell you, man. I pointed out that the incarceration rate of blacks is dramatically higher in the US state that likely has the greatest concentration of poor white people.
> derision uniquely directed towards them in particular (and towards no other group) from all cultural institutions.
Sure, Hollywood makes fun of them, but I don't think that has a particularly significant material effect on the quality of their lives. (Though it does make them really angry and more politically active.)
> Hindus do better than Whites in general. Is the system pro-Hindu? Nigerians immigrants do well. Is the system pro-Nigerian?
There is significant selection bias here in that immigrants are not a uniform sample from their ethnicities.
"pointed out that the incarceration rate of blacks"
And again, disparate outcomes aren't evidence of current discrimination or bias for or against any group.
You could be right that Hindus do well in the criminal justice system because of selection bias, and whites do well because of specific pro-white bias that Hindus don't benefit from. But the burden of proof is on you to show that that's true. Do poor Hindus or poor Asians do worse than equally poor Whites? If you could show something like this, then you will have convinced me that the criminal justice system is pro-white.
The only actual evidence I've seen is that the criminal justice system is anti-Black, and that evidence has nothing to do with disparate outcomes. Beyond that I haven't seen any evidence.
Would you say that it's impossible to fix climate change until people stop profitinng from trying to fix climate change? Is it impossible to fix infant mortality while doctors profit from saving infants' lives?
There is something to what you're saying. There's a process that goes like:
1. People who dislike X want to fix X.
2. In order to put a lot of time into fixing X, they seek out work that pays them to do it.
3. In the process of that work, they build up a lot of expertise.
4. Now they have a natural incentive for X not to be fixed so that they can continue to make money from their expertise.
This is a real thing. A perverse incentive that arises basically in all cases where bad things require deep expertise to fix.
I see very little evidence that this incentive is powerful enough to dwarf the massive desire to fix X for most problems.
Most oncologists are not out there blowing cigarette smoke into people's faces to ensure their job security. Dentists are not plying kids with candy. Most people fighting against racism are not so callous as to completely undermine their own deeply held convictions just to keep themselves employed.
> in fact, it sure seems like things just get worse.
Things looking worse is often a sign of them getting better. You never saw news articles about the environment in the mid-1900s when pollution and industrialization was at its worth. It didn't become visible until people cared enough and had enough power to make it visible.
The "me too" movement isn't about sexual abuse becoming more prevalent, it's about victims finally having enough power to be able to shine a light on it. If we weren't hearing about Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, and Bill Cosby, that wouldn't mean they weren't still abusing. It would mean they were continuing to abuse with inpunity.
Maybe the Irish person is the first guy's roommate or spouse - they didn't directly inherit the free water from their direct ancestors, but they're still getting free water from next door.