The goal of this obscene drama is not to fix things, it's to provide yet another shibboleth to distinguish "us" from "them".
One way in which it does this is by tending to exclude people on the autistic spectrum, who often didn't internalize "correct" racial attitudes in the first place(*), and equally often lack the social instincts to spot a change in requirements and shift to the new ones smoothly. (Whereas normal people often shift so smoothly that they forget that the requirements were ever different.)
As an autistic person, I found this switchover extremely threatening. I could all too easily lose promotion possibilities, or even my job, for failing to switch in sync with the latest in shibboleths. So I put a lot of effort into figuring out the new rules.
There probably are people - mostly young, naive ones - who believe that this is actually helping. And at the margins, it might be helping a few black people, though like as not at the expense of others. But IMNSHO, that's pretty much not the point.
Note that this analysis, for me, is entirely separate from any attention to avoiding harming people who don't deserve it, particularly those already disadvantaged. That's a whole different thread, though with a bit of overlap.
(*) I, as an example, had to have my misunderstanding of who "looked black" corrected in both directions when I was in my late teens. I cared that little about knowing how to correctly assign people to categories the normals had all incorrectly internalized as being innate and obvious. Of course by that time I'd already read enough to know that "Jewish" or "Semitic" had been a "race" even in my parents' lifetime.
I also recall finding (some) black people beautiful, a a child, and envying them their appearance. I.e. some of the normal programming sailed over my autistic head, and more was directly challenged contradicted by my left wing intellectual parents.
It wasn't until I was in college, when every American-born black person I met treated me as someone to be shunned, except one social climber who treated me with normal non-autistic condescension, that I began to even find the category salient. And even then, I formed a friendship with a black girl "from the islands", who hadn't picked up normal US black socialization in spite of being raised at least partly in New York.
Eventually my attitudes normalized, at least somewhat. I'm not trying to declare myself guiltless of all racist attitudes and associations. And I certainly believed a lot of the nonsense I read, including racist nonsense, when I was at the life stage of primarily absorbing new knowledge. But the whole area has been one of the many where I never was "normal".
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dancing_serpent
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2021-12-02 05:59 pm (UTC)The goal of this obscene drama is not to fix things, it's to provide yet another shibboleth to distinguish "us" from "them".
One way in which it does this is by tending to exclude people on the autistic spectrum, who often didn't internalize "correct" racial attitudes in the first place(*), and equally often lack the social instincts to spot a change in requirements and shift to the new ones smoothly. (Whereas normal people often shift so smoothly that they forget that the requirements were ever different.)
As an autistic person, I found this switchover extremely threatening. I could all too easily lose promotion possibilities, or even my job, for failing to switch in sync with the latest in shibboleths. So I put a lot of effort into figuring out the new rules.
There probably are people - mostly young, naive ones - who believe that this is actually helping. And at the margins, it might be helping a few black people, though like as not at the expense of others. But IMNSHO, that's pretty much not the point.
Note that this analysis, for me, is entirely separate from any attention to avoiding harming people who don't deserve it, particularly those already disadvantaged. That's a whole different thread, though with a bit of overlap.
(*) I, as an example, had to have my misunderstanding of who "looked black" corrected in both directions when I was in my late teens. I cared that little about knowing how to correctly assign people to categories the normals had all incorrectly internalized as being innate and obvious. Of course by that time I'd already read enough to know that "Jewish" or "Semitic" had been a "race" even in my parents' lifetime.
I also recall finding (some) black people beautiful, a a child, and envying them their appearance. I.e. some of the normal programming sailed over my autistic head, and more was directly challenged contradicted by my left wing intellectual parents.
It wasn't until I was in college, when every American-born black person I met treated me as someone to be shunned, except one social climber who treated me with normal non-autistic condescension, that I began to even find the category salient. And even then, I formed a friendship with a black girl "from the islands", who hadn't picked up normal US black socialization in spite of being raised at least partly in New York.
Eventually my attitudes normalized, at least somewhat. I'm not trying to declare myself guiltless of all racist attitudes and associations. And I certainly believed a lot of the nonsense I read, including racist nonsense, when I was at the life stage of primarily absorbing new knowledge. But the whole area has been one of the many where I never was "normal".