It’s a reminder than people that have always been in a privileged position often don’t realize they do.
Comment on degree in bamf
stoy@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
Funny, but what does the skin color have to do with the situation?
jol@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
charonn0@startrek.website 8 months ago
What privilege applies here?
InappropriateEmote@hexbear.net 8 months ago
It’s not obvious? Because white males as a demographic are the most privileged people on the planet and not coincidentally also the ones most prone to petty, oblivious arrogance, tantrum-throwing, and egotistical man-splaining. The latter was demonstrated by the one in this NASA scientist’s anecdote.
Dra@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
This robs people of their individual context. The UK Prime Ministers wife is Indian and astonishingly privileged. You see suggesting a poor mine worker from Romania is somehow more privileged.
Lumping people into loose categories (particularly based on skin colour) and then prescribing loose values to them is fascist and racist.
DinosaurThussy@hexbear.net 8 months ago
You are suggesting a poor mine worker from Romania is somehow more privileged based on how he looks.
You misunderstand the concept of privilege. It’s not linear. Intersectionality was devised to solve this exact contradiction.
kristina@hexbear.net 8 months ago
youre deliberately misinterpreting the concept of intersectionality.
Dra@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
I’m not deliberately mistinterpreting anything, if I don’t understand something, then explain it to me.
Incredibly privileged of you to assume everyone else has your spoilt middle class educational background
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
This robs people of their individual context.
Is the context not that in STEM women often face sexism?
Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 8 months ago
I honestly have to pretend that sexism in STEM is nowhere near as bad as I know it is for the sake of my own mental health. I’ve heard incredible stories of blatant sexism from colleagues and friends that I just can’t fathom
OftenWrong@startrek.website 7 months ago
Not the “I know of this one poc that’s in a position of power and so white privilege doesn’t exist” argument lol
porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
Being white is a huge risk factor for unearned confidence. So is male. Being both just multiplies the chances.
cosmicrookie@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Wow!
maryjayjay@lemmy.world 8 months ago
That’s such a straw man. You would have no trouble saying that if someone doesn’t have an axe they are less likely to be an axe murderer
cosmicrookie@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Sorry - what do you mean?
The fact that someone owns an axe and garbage bags, does nothing to their likelihood of them being a murder, just like being white and/or a male has nothing to do with the “risk of unearned confidence”.
blindsight@beehaw.org 8 months ago
Did you drop a /s? This is a funny meme, so I’m assuming I just missed a joke.
Right?
(Speaking as a white male, white male entitlement, and privilege for that matter, are incredibly relevant to white men being sexist/racist.)
(You can trust me on this because I’m a white male. Also, I’m used to my opinion being listened to, so I expect you to as well. Just FYI.)
stoy@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
Nope, I wasn’t sarcastic, I was slightly annoyed, annoyed enough to make rhe comment but not to maje a huge deal about it.
UnityDevice@startrek.website 8 months ago
It’s an American thing.
DinosaurThussy@hexbear.net 8 months ago
It’s an American reality. Race still influences much of American life.
Adkml@hexbear.net 8 months ago
All you losers acting like you dont understand why the fact it was a white male that was being the ignorant self righteous asshole just shows you aren’t actually serious with engaging with material realities.
You should all really look up what MLK Jr has to say about you white moderates and make an effort to remind yourself people like MLK Jr and Malcolm X think you’re literally worse than white supremacists.
aaaaaaadjsf@hexbear.net 8 months ago
It’s an American obsession.
Are you just going to pretend that there is no racism anywhere else? It was the Europeans that colonised half the planet and invented the concept of “whiteness”.
stockRot@lemmy.world 8 months ago
You’re right, racism doesn’t exist outside of America
xkforce@lemmy.world 8 months ago
To emphasize the privilege this guy has.
qevlarr@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Exactly.
AOCapitulator@hexbear.net 8 months ago
lemmy.zip
stoy@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
I don’t know what that is supposed to mean…
rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
In the US, it’s all about skin colour
cosmicrookie@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Or even the gender?
Specal@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Male and Female aren’t genders, they’re Sex, Words used to describe biological makeup of a living creature, for example XX Chromosomes are Female, XY Chromosomes are Male, but there are also instances where XXY Chromosomes can happen, and things get a little tricky.
Gender is what we use to tell children how to behave based on their genetalia and cause dysphoria in them when they don’t want to do something but will get ostracized for doing what people with the other genetalia do.
cosmicrookie@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Thanks. Its a bit confusing to me especially as a none English user. But your description of gender sounds negative. I assume a gender can be a neutral description of oneself? I am not sure.
My point here though is, that OP mentioning it was a male, is as irrelevant as their skin color. I dont see why it needs to be there when they dont add other irrelevant characteristics such as nationality, age, hair color etc.
PlainSimpleGarak@lemm.ee 8 months ago
I would encourage you to do your own research regarding sex and gender. In many parts of the world, these terms are interchangeable. As they were in the US for many years, even after the term gender was popularized.
madcaesar@lemmy.world 8 months ago
You know when the right looks at the left and calls us batshit? Your comment is shit they point to…
Specal@lemmy.world 8 months ago
What’s batshit about it? As a society we do exactly that, we tell boys to like blue and girls to like pink.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 8 months ago
There’s a lot more to sex than chromosomes. It’s probably better to say it’s clustering of positions on bimodal curves of traits. And even then you wind up with weird shit because biology really doesn’t like simple classifications. Like seriously there are so fucking many ways to be intersex and intersex people are downright common.
But also grammatically male and female when used to refer to humans are generally just the adjectives for man and woman.
cordlesslamp@lemmy.today 8 months ago
Also the gender?
thorbot@lemmy.world 8 months ago
You can’t be racist against white, duh
NotJustForMe@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
It is just mentioned. Just a description of what happened. What’s wrong about saying it was a white male when it was a white male? Why jump to the opinion that mentioning the gender or complexion has any other purpose than being descriptive?
stoy@lemmy.zip 7 months ago
What’s wrong about just mentioning it was a post doc asking the question?
AOCapitulator@hexbear.net 7 months ago
Good god, no
Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml 7 months ago
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
When a given demographic is a dominant presence in a given area (not necessarily work, it can be anything), there is a tendency for they demographic to start making assumptions about other demographics.
In most places, men are the dominant presence, and in most of the “western” world, they will also be white.
In this case, the individual who a white male was doing what’s called colloquially, “mansplaining”. He was correcting a woman when not only was the woman right, but was the very source he was using to correct her.
This is a consistent and very unpleasant fact of the world that white men will treat anyone of any other demographic as less than equals.
In this specific case, I suspect that the person making that post was pointing to the prejudice and stupidity of the person indirectly insulting her being a systemic issue arising from both gender and sexual entrenchment along with the privilege that allows the dominance of the white male demographic despite their being no quantifiable factor for that group to be dominant other than that privilege.
She, in other words, was pointing out a systemic issue by using an anecdote. Which can be a bit difficult to accept as evidence. Or would be if there wasn’t a good century or so of giant piles of anecdotes from real people pointing to that systemic issue not only existing, but being something that holds everyone back.
Truth? Yes, women and people of color are going to assume they’re right and whoever they’re talking to is wrong just like any humans will. But white dudes have been pulling that crap for multiple generations, and anyone that isn’t both white and male get sick of the bad behavior.
casual_turtle_stew_enjoyer@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Pls stop generalizing this bad behavior upon all white men. It only serves to further the divide, and is completely unfair and uncalled for against those in the demographic who don’t subscribe to those beliefs or patterns of behavior.
I’m not sure if that was your intent, that’s just how it comes across and it makes it hard not to completely write off your argument/viewpoints for being unable to respect your neighbor.
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
I’m a white man. I can absolutely generalize about a well known aspect of reality. It isn’t in question that white men are currently in a position of overall privilege, and that as a group that position of privilege has the effect stated.
I pretty much also said that this is true in the western world where white men are the supposed majority. I said that the same would be the case with any dominant group because humans are just like that.
A generalization can not only be true in general, but it doesn’t inherently mean that the entire group is at fault (beyond any unintentional benefits from the situation, which is what’s called privilege in current discourse on matters of gender and race in specific, but applies to more than those alone).
Here’s the thing. Until and unless we, not just as white men (speaking of the group I’m in) work on calling out and correcting bad behaviors as a group, to the point that it ceases to be a problem for others, we are part of the problem, no matter how little any individual likes that.
Divisions currently exist. They will always exist because any time there is a place of authority/power, there will be those that seek it and use it. Over time, you might see a given demographic shift in and out of that place of power, but it won’t change humans being humans; there will be abuse of power.
That’s the real key. The fact that white men have held dominance over most of the world for centuries (for a given value of most, and a given value of white) is simply fact. One could argue that the position of dominance really covers all the world since anyone wanting to disrupt that has to contend against that hierarchy. There are definitely places where, within a region* white men aren’t the dominant group, kinda impossible to be otherwise. But trying to pretend that the world isn’t the way it is is just silly.
casual_turtle_stew_enjoyer@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Completely agree with your points. But also hope you can see it may be more fruitful to appear as though you’re ready to attack the problem, rather than your fellow man.
I say this because I didn’t read this as an outright attack or denigration of your fellow man, but I very much fear how easily any other man may interpret it and how it could serve to further the divide and make the problem even harder to address. That is my chief concern.
I appreciate you taking the time to clarify your position fellow internet stranger <3
worldofbirths@lemmy.world 8 months ago
I think the generalization isn’t really about white men per se, but about the demographic in power. Give a group unchecked power long enough and they forget how that came to be. I agree that it’s not a rule, and maybe should be expressed as more of a heuristic: if you are speaking to someone that is in power, and you don’t look like them, they might think you are not empowered.
Don’t let the lack of nuance in that statement take away from all the very valid points being made. The plight is real, and hopefully the white men who are enlightened enough to not confuse circumstance with natural order will read and know to not take it personally.
casual_turtle_stew_enjoyer@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Thank you for the civil discussion.
Completely agree about unchecked power and your interpretation of it as a heuristic rather than an ambiguously defined trait.
I most certainly realize the plight is real and wish it never was like I’d hope all of us can say. But the lack of nuance struck me as dangerous. I understand how disenfranchised men will interpret things, and when people willfully neglect the opportunity to be concise it leaves a worrying amount of room for misinterpretation and effectively is ragebait that can serve to further entrench a misguided incel or the like into their toxic niche.
And for anyone who thinks I’m overreacting: see how Reddit powermod awkward_the_turtle intentionally acted to provoke men, then wrote off everyone who took issue with it as inherently being member of the ideology they were allegedly targeting. Reddit, the company, enabled and encouraged this mod and their collaborators to attack users on their platform indiscriminately.
If Lemmy is to serve as only a new platform for abuse, then it deserves to die with the rest of social media. Please, do not let it come to this. Discuss and debate civilly.
stoy@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
I still don’t see why adding the skin color was important, but eh, I have other things to deal with, so I don’t really care, just found it slightly annoying.
h3rm17@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Gender not important also, loads of women “mansplain”, it’s a problem with attitude, not gender or race
stoy@lemmy.zip 8 months ago
Yep, I hate that word as well, but didn’t have the energy to post about it…
JoBo@feddit.uk 8 months ago
Because the 'splaining phenomenon is about perceived but unearned superiority which leads the 'splainer to 'splain to someone who knows a great deal more than they do and, crucially, someone who the 'splainer ought to realise knows more than they do but doesn’t because of the illusion created by the society they live in.
I’d have added “(born) middle-class” because that’s an important part of it too.
ashenblood@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Citation needed.
In all seriousness, I understand your point and respect you for trying to deconstruct the mechanics of privilege.
But I just factually disagree with your assertion. I would argue that every human being has an inherent preference for people that they perceive as similar to themselves in some way, and this can result in bias along racial or gender lines. However, this arguably applies less to white men than any other demographic, because such behavior is so consistently condemned and shamed when exhibited by white men.
In contrast, people of other demographics are less frequently made aware of their own biases, because calling it out has not been construed as some kind of ethical imperative, as it has with white men.
It’s also well documented that women have a much stronger in-group bias compared to men.
…weebly.com/…/rudmangoodwin2004jpsp.pdf
Stoneykins@mander.xyz 8 months ago
Your barely-in-context paper is not support for your main argument :
Do you have any citations that actually support your claim? Because it sound like vibes “please don’t say mean things about my group” bullshit.
ashenblood@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
That’s not my main argument, it’s merely a supporting clause.
OP asserted that
I countered that by pointing out that it’s obvious that any human being tends to prefer people who they consider similar to themselves. That’s my main argument.
And if that is true, than attempting to frame such behavior as particular to white men is just silly and unproductive.
I obviously can’t definitively measure the amount of social stigma around white male prejudice, but I don’t need to. I’m not saying that white men are definitely less biased than other demographics, I’m merely pointing out that it’s a distinct possibility, even as you all indicate that they are the demographic most deserving of condemnation for such behavior.
Now, one could make the argument that even though white men may not be especially biased, the effects of their bias may have greater impacts on other demographics due to the disproportionate amount of power they collectively wield. I think that’s a fair point, but it doesn’t really hold any ethical implications, it’s simply a description of a material reality.
Squirrelanna@lemmynsfw.com 8 months ago
This is news to me because I have been condescended to exponentially more as a decently passing white trans woman by cis white men in particular than I ever was before transition by ANYONE. Worst I ever got from black men was one calling me a “pretty thing” riding past on his bike. White men are getting the most push back as of late because they have historically been the worst offenders. And that hasn’t changed yet. That doesn’t mean the rest of us are free of guilt, but there is a very obvious frontrunner when it comes to unearned perceived self superiority, conscious or not.
ashenblood@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
I’m sorry that happened to you.
However, your anecdotal experience is just that. I have been subject to exponentially more racist abuse from black individuals than from individuals of any other race. Does that indicate to you that we should be “pushing back” against black racists? Obviously not, because my personal experience is not enough to draw any conclusions about society as a whole.
In fact, you’re condescending me right now. You’re implying that your personal judgment supercedes my rational argument. I provide sources and construct an argument, and you respond “this is news to me” (condescending and dismissing my argument) and proceed to explain that what I’m saying can’t possibly be true, because it contradicts your personal viewpoint. Talk about unearned self superiority.
OftenWrong@startrek.website 7 months ago
Privilege is writing off your own privilege as inherent in nature and then pointing at other groups of people going “but they’re allowed it’s not fair!!!”
HopFlop@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
If the post said “a Black trans women interrupted me”, would that be also fine, in your eyes?
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 8 months ago
Are Black trans women known for this kind of behaviour? Are there apologists for Black trans women who make every effort to miss the fucking point that there are people who think this isn’t a thing that happens?
HopFlop@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
Nonody is “known” for that behaviour. You really just seem to ascribe personality traits to people based on their skin color. I thought we were long past that.
summerof69@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Oh, don’t blame people. Don’t bring irrelevant details if you don’t want to distract them from the fucking point.
charonn0@startrek.website 8 months ago
The question suggests that Black trans women are all alike. It’s exactly that kind of generalization that’s being criticized.
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
It would surprise me, but it would still be fine.
How many black trans women are in positions of authority? To not remark on that would be unusual. Mind you, the chances of a black trans woman making it to that kind of position and holding on to the kind of stupidity in the original post is pretty damn slim, hence the surprise.
psud@aussie.zone 8 months ago
By calling out dominant race they imply that those silent on race are talking about a minority
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
Only if you ignore reality.
charonn0@startrek.website 8 months ago
Isn’t she the one making assumptions, though? Specifically, the “prejudice and stupidity of the person indirectly insulting her” part? I mean, is that really the only possible explanation?
OftenWrong@startrek.website 7 months ago
What other reason would you suggest as to why he would assume that he knows more than her or that she couldn’t be the person that he’s referring to? Clearly he didn’t even know her name yet so what did he have to go by to draw those conclusions?
charonn0@startrek.website 7 months ago
Clearly he knew her name, though. He just didn’t know the woman he was speaking to was the woman whose work he was recommending.