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RE: Pride: Which of these does not belong?
It's certainly not my attitude.
I think in the real world we notice skin color along with other physical attributes, which is fine unless it's linked to judgments about that. And there is nothing wrong with being proud of your heritage, unless it leads to disrepecting others.
Basically I operate on the principle of "You be nice to me and I'll be nice to you." And I'll start it off with being nice to you, and keep on being nice to you, until you want to change that!
That's been my experience as well; I just had it pointed out to me that all racial pride is viewed as a positive if you were to look up the terms. EXCEPT for white people, for white people pride = racism.... and while there are racists, I'm not a fool, that's closer to an exception than a norm.
I'm not sure how that came about but I know "reverse discrimination" was going on in the early 1970s. Especially for government jobs, you were given extra points for being a military veteran and for being a minority, effectively lowering the chances of a white person being hired. I heard it was because white people had been given an unfair advantage for over a hundred years and this was meant to correct that. And it was true that discrimination against people of color was an ongoing bad thing, the whole Civil Rights movement arising from that.
Then add in that white supremacist groups did use "white power" as one of their slogans and that gave the term a very bad smell. And they did very bad things, terrible things, in the name of white power.
People in power mistreating powerless minorities has been going on for all of human history. It is still going on in many parts of the world. I don't have any answers, just a perspective that it is a bad side of human nature.
Thanks for the thought out response... When I was growing up and starting to look for work was told that when a job posting mentions a priority for women and visible minorities should be taken as "white men need not apply".
The main point I was hoping to raise was that, while you are not wrong about racism, especially in the not so distant past, the trend has been turning to the opposite. Where now it is acceptable to engage in racism against white people, just like sexist attitudes are generally acceptable against men.
The point: it can be a time to bring about a just society for all, or simply allow the pendulum to swing to the opposite extreme.
I think that's why it was called reverse-discrimination, the pendulum swinging the other way. Which is a good way to describe it.
But like I said it began in the early 1970s - going on 50 years now, nearly two generations. That's a long time for a pendulum to swing in one direction. Do you think it will swing back? Come to a more equal ground? Where it doesn't matter one bit what you look like, just on how well you do your job? Maybe that was the hope at the time. And maybe one day it will be true. But how many generations will it take?
Ideally, I would like to see things brought and kept near a balance.
The situation is in such a state of flux right now, with so many competing agendas and interests (some of them desire the strategy of tension because that allows groups to be played off against each other), that it's tough to predict.