Response to "If you are a white person... "

Post Reply New Topic

They call those buildings "the projects" because they were part of a "project," wherein they bulldozed and otherwise razed a previous slum, and built those buildings as a replacement.

Yes the names are different but their purpose is the same.

There was an attempt to make the lives of slum dwellers easier. That was the original idea behind the building of "projects."

Unfortunately, it mostly didn't turn out that way.

yes good intentions....mixed outcomes

Slum removing is never an easy thing to do. As long as the original causes for forming the slum aren't being adressed - and these are usually complex and multi-dimensional - neither bulldozing nor upgrading really works.

There's a famous slum near Bratislava, Slovakia, which was originally an set of "apartment blocks."

The "apartment blocks" still stand, but are disheveled. But a slum was built around those "apartment blocks."

Roma communities are a topic on its own... balancing between recognizing and respecting cultural identity and requiring certain level of public order can be quite a delicate thing. It's relatively easy in mixed, multi-cultural communities but once ghettos form, it becomes a lot harder. First of all, segregation fuels distrust, both directions, so any interventions have way lower chance of success.

Indeed, there's lots of discrimination against the Roma. In part, it might be caused by the Roma being reluctant to assimilate into the "greater culture."

Not to excuse the discrimination, just giving a possible reason for it. Prejudice against people who are misunderstood partially because they don't desire to be understood by "outsiders."

Saying this, every person has the right to be treated with at least basic human decency.

When Roma families are well-off enough to build regular homes, they tend to build very picturesque nano-palaces
They have very rich culture, often exotic and contrasting with somehow bleak regular Eastern Europe - but once whole communities end up in slums, they become slum communities, with all the problems arising from that.

*sigh* this will come from a US-centric perspective because that's where I'm from and where most of the critical theorists I've read are from. apologies in advance, this can definitely shift/change at least a bit on the global level.

white privilege =/= "your life is easy."

white privilege = "your life is not more difficult on the national level because you are white"

Being disabled does make your life Hell, and most of us suffer from something making our lives Hell, that doesn't mean we don't have certain legs up in other areas.

I'll grant that a lot of the time, people do often act like/assume that cishet white people all have an easy life, which doesn't do critical theory itself any favors. But I can't find fault with the rationale itself that being white is on the whole easier than being PoC (at least in the USA).

In very general terms, it's probably easier to be white than be a POC in the United States, and in many other places.

However, it's very general, and very simplistic, to assume that an individual white person, by virtue of being white, inevitably has it "easier" than a POC.

I believe in taking things on an individual, rather than on a group, level.

Personally, I have it easier than other folks because I'm a civil servant and I have job security. I didn't lose my job during the Pandemic because of this. However, my being "white" had nothing to me with me getting the job.

I agree, though there are times when I think it's important to remember that there are broader inequalities present among us. Emma Dabiri wrote a book called "What White People Can Do Next" that touches on some of the nuances of not letting the individual scale blind you to the macro scale, but yes, also not letting the macro scale blind you to the individual scale.

When people base an assessment of another person on something "macro," it often results in a false assessment.

We do have to acknowledge history, and the fact that POC were discriminated against severely in the past, and are still sometimes discriminated against in this day and age. The "discrimination" is much more subtle than it was in the past.

That's an excellent observation, and one that I think applies to a lot of soc/jus stuff, in that the original academic ideas behind some of it had some merit, but when they escaped from academia they were adopted by people who used them as rhetorical cudgels without any of the nuance of the original ideas, which turned a lot of people off of the whole project. Now, I happen to think that critical theory itself is warmed over pseudo Marxist garbage, crudely substituting identity characteristics for class in ways that often don't quite work, but I'd be more willing to engage with its handful of useful observations if they weren't so quickly weaponized by people who often don't even understand the theory in the first place.

To be fair, it's an issue where a lot of people regardless of being for or against don't seem to make an effort to understand what it is before getting angry about it.

Most of the people freaking out at school board meetings aren't even complaining about actual CRT, they're just worried their kids might hear less than flattering parts of American history discussed and that's what the talking heads in their echo chambers have told them CRT is.

Eh, I think that's a bit of a dodge, Chris Rufo (the guy who started the anti CRT thing) has been pretty clear that he's using the term as a sort of catch all for leftish race stuff rather than the formal theory, and what people are objecting to is not kids being taught about the less savory aspects of American history (as has been taught for decades), it's the newer "anti racist", all white people are born racist and must forever struggle to redeem themselves style that is in fact CRT influenced that's drawing the objections.