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Why People Feel Like Victims

nautil.us

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Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#371

Post by rayiner »

michaelmrose wrote: post #303
wsc981 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do you think about Affirmative Action? Is it systemic racism or systemic antiracism? Racism of course. Since it’s selecting people based on race. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

In theory but there is effectively already in many cases greater affirmative action for white people already. Lets look at Harvard as a case study. 43% of white students at Harvard are legacies, athletes, or related to staff and 75% of these 43% wouldn't have been admitted on merits. Around 1/3 of white people at Harvard are there because of effectively white affirmative action. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/s…

So explain the drive to eliminate test based admissions at heavily Asian NYC and VA public high schools

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#372

Post by rayiner »

michaelmrose wrote: post #309
prestigious wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Systemic racism no longer exists or at least I’m completely unaware of it. I find proponents of this theory like people who believe in big foot. Somehow he’s out there but they have zero evidence for it

11% of Americans openly believe in white supremacy and half of republicans think immigration weakens us as a nation despite centuries of America benefiting profoundly from immigration. https://www.vox.com/2018/8/10/17670992/study-white-americans...

The study says 5.6%, and how you’re defining “white supremacy” is extremely dishonest:

> Respondents were asked how important their race was to their identity on a five-point scale ranging from “not at all important” to “extremely important.” They were also asked a question measuring their feelings of white solidarity: “How important is it that whites work together to change laws that are unfair to whites?” This followed the same five-point scale. Finally, we can assess survey respondents’ feelings of white victimization from their answers to the question of how much discrimination whites face in the U.S., also on a five-point scale, ranging from “none at all” to a “great deal.”

These people are opposed to affirmative action. The Biden administration is literally excluding white people from things like farm loan forgiveness and SBA loans. Cities are excluding them from things like mortgage subsidies. Companies are openly talking about quota systems. “White men” is used as a pejorative.

Maybe these people are like the “war on Christmas” folks and are blowing this stuff out of proportion. But when there is literal discrimination against white people being baked into our laws, calling them “white supremacist” for saying in a survey that white people should try to get those laws overturned is totally psychotic.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#373

Post by Proziam »

refurb wrote: post #338
tpxl wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it not racist if it discriminates against people based on race? Sure it increases equality of outcome, but it decreases the equality of opportunity.

It’s not based on race but country of origin. If you’re a white person who was born in China you’re subject to the limits as well.

So it's not based on race, it's based on something that is nearly a 1:1 approximation for race in many instances?

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#374

Post by bingbong70 »

rayiner wrote: post #30

> So victimhood is a learned behavior after a certain age. As a brown guy with kids in the school system, that's why recent trends in education alarm me. I don't want my kids to be taught that there's this amorphous but pervasive "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" out to get people who look like them, but which they can't do anything about. It's dangerous experimentation with kids' psychology. Growing up as one…

>I don't want my kids to be taught that there's this amorphous but pervasive "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" out to get people who look like them, but which they can't do anything about.

Learning this history is the first step of "doing something about it".

Brown/black people should know their history too, we can't just paper over the historic criminality of certain groups of people because it feels uncomfortable or somehow may make people unpatriotic. Everyone has a right to their history and black/brown people have been denied it in certain parts of the world, thanks in many cases to censorship and/or propaganda sucking the air out of the room.

I do find it interesting when new immigrants come to the US and "model-minority-explain" to the people (African Americans and others) that built this country for free and are actually the only reason non-white immigrants are even allowed into the country, that they should just move on or not pursue a better understanding of the history it was illegal for them to learn.

Sucking up to the majority for better standing at the expense of the purposely created minority underclass is a huge disservice to the people of this country/planet.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#375

Post by Anthony-G »

neartheplain wrote: post #141
neartheplain wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>IMO one of the big civil rights achievements was to get rid of that divide. >This never happened. Speaking as an American raised in the 1990s, the cultural programming of my childhood at least made progress in that direction. I was raised on popular TV shows like Sesame Street, Captain Planet, and Power Rangers, which showed people of all races coexisting in settings where race did not divide them. When the issue o…

Off-topic, but I opened the above comment in a new tab (to read replies later) and got this: https://imgur.com/a/pxz1qCS Completely bizarre. Looks like a bunch of 0's got written into memory at random intervals. Is it flaky RAM on the HN server? Has anyone else seen HN content render like this? Reloaded the page, and now everything looks normal. Running memcheck on my laptop as a next step...

I’d suspect that the problem with low-level client-side libraries – not necessarily hardware-related. I’ve had corrupted rendering/display of web pages when I had a couple of hundred tabs open while running Firefox (GNU/Linux) on my old computer with 4GB RAM. Sometimes pressing “refresh” would resolve it or switching to another application and then switching back.

Memcheck never reported any problems with the RAM itself. I haven’t experienced any such problems after installing the Auto Tab Discard extension which allows me to have lots of tabs opens without suffering excessive memory pressure.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#376

Post by collyw »

rayiner wrote: post #30

> So victimhood is a learned behavior after a certain age. As a brown guy with kids in the school system, that's why recent trends in education alarm me. I don't want my kids to be taught that there's this amorphous but pervasive "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" out to get people who look like them, but which they can't do anything about. It's dangerous experimentation with kids' psychology. Growing up as one…

It does seem like a dangerous way to get your kids to grow up expecting never to be able to achieve anything in life, so why bother.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#377

Post by collyw »

indigochill wrote: post #313
erulabs wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I value what you've written, and I agree although my experience was (possibly?) the inverse. I was a poor white kid in a wealthy white area. While I lived in that area, I only got to briefly attend a private school because of my mothers boyfriend. Everyone knew I was the "poor kid", and my mother, who did her best, was _obsessed_ with the fact that everyone knew we were "imposters" - not wealthy, not married, from a…

I grew up a middle-class white kid in a good family in California so was pretty much oblivious to victimhood until I went to college in Missouri where the notion of racial inequality was drilled into me to the point I actually learned to fear people of other races held a grudge against me. Although I've been aware of this learned fear and done what I can to mitigate it, this means I might sometimes fear interracial i…

I grew up as a white kid in a good middle class family in the UK. I still got bullied by (white) kids at schools. The idea that all bullying is race related seems nonsense to me. Maybe it's different in the US.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#378

Post by refurb »

Proziam wrote: post #373
refurb wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not based on race but country of origin. If you’re a white person who was born in China you’re subject to the limits as well.

So it's not based on race, it's based on something that is nearly a 1:1 approximation for race in many instances?

That’s kind of racist to assume that everyone is a country is the same race, no?

Must be systemic racism.

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#379

Post by [deleted] »

collyw wrote: post #377
indigochill wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up a middle-class white kid in a good family in California so was pretty much oblivious to victimhood until I went to college in Missouri where the notion of racial inequality was drilled into me to the point I actually learned to fear people of other races held a grudge against me. Although I've been aware of this learned fear and done what I can to mitigate it, this means I might sometimes fear interracial i…

I grew up as a white kid in a good middle class family in the UK. I still got bullied by (white) kids at schools. The idea that all bullying is race related seems nonsense to me. Maybe it's different in the US.

[deleted]

Re: Why People Feel Like Victims

#380

Post by username90 »

addicted wrote: post #238
roflc0ptic wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're overgeneralizing. The data showed that it can be learned through trauma or PTSD experiences, but to claim "It is not learned by simple teaching and seeing others attitudes" is not defensible. Based on the researcher's comments about kindergarteners, they seem to think it can be learned through simple teaching.

Except they have no evidence for it, so I’m not sure why we should be bothered what they might “think”. There’s also little a priori reason to believe that might be true.

> There’s also little a priori reason to believe that might be true.

What? You don't believe that constantly telling someone they are a victim during their entire childhood can make them feel like a victim? There are really no a priori reasons to believe that such a thing could be true?

You could argue that there are little evidence for it, but you can't argue there are no a priori reasons for it being true. If I take a white kid and tell that white kid that he is a victim of black oppression, do you think that the kid will be more or less likely to feel like a victim of black oppression?

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