Jacques (fl. 2016) is a French person, a teacher, and a commenter on this blog. On the Haymarket Massacre thread he said:
“This is off topic, but my dear Agabond, you are symptomatic to me of a backwards movement going around the world at the moment.
“Thinking of yourself as a kind of Joan of Arc fightig racism (cf banner picture [of Ieshia Evans pictured above]), you seem to spend your time spreading obsessively racist comments about everything. I am a French person, a teacher, I never believed in races in mankind (the biological definition of races implies impossibility to interbreed), but I do believe in the extreme dangerousness of communautarism, closed-mindedness, lack of ability to self-reflect and intellectual dishonesty.
“Funny how so many of the people who feel self-confident enough to publish and broadcast their thoughts as if it could be of some interest to mankind turn out to be affected by these flaws.
“I was given to observe how the US society as a whole seems to be ill with armed violence, communautarism, racism, bigotry, social darwinism, greed and hypocrisy (I am not suggesting in any way that this is the only country in the world where these manifest, or that nothing is good in the US), and therefore I fully understand your need for revolt against these affections; but please, if you are going to pretend to be of any positive influence in society, give up using all the crap techniques and arguments you spend your time denouncing in your very ‘enemies’. You seem to think of yourself as an educated and fairly well-read person, so stand to your principles and give up intellectual complacency. If I may, raise the bar a bit.”
He lists the techniques as:
“simplification, pretend candidness, categorization, generalizations… In a nutshell: racism. Yes, you got it, Agabond: you should stop being a racist yourself. I reckon you know better. Don’t become your enemy.”
Examples of posts where I do this:
On Martin Luther King, Jr:
“I am a true admirer of MLK, precisely for demonstrating such immense moral strength and intellectual integrity in spite of the noxious context of US society in the 60’s: he fought hatred and racism without ever degrading himself or his cause to use the same weapons as his enemies.
“Maybe you should go back to reading him. Despite what Bush junior said, in life it’s rarely only ‘with us or against us’. I believe (and I seem to understand MLK also believed it) that people have a duty to think for themselves and with a minimum of moral and intellectual integrity. Obviously, this is a much more complex and demanding process than lazy, binary thinking that can push people to react to ‘These negroes need putting back into place’ by ‘All these white crackers are crazy mofos’…”
Of his niece:
“My young niece is a French-Rwandese ‘mix’. God forbid she inherits the flaws of both ‘sides’ [emoticon]”
See also:
- Other posts on commenters
- apparent tropes
- Not all Whites
- It is racist to talk about racism
- Quoting MLK
- Some of my best friends are Black
- cracker
- This blog is not anti-White
- I am racist
- Grada Kilomba on racism in Europe
Wow! Jacques has been here less than two full days and already rates his very own thread?! That must be a record!
Takes a special kind of special 😉
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It seems to me that he is accusing Abagond of dichotomous thinking while simultaneously utilizing dichotomous thinking to make his argument.
Race is just a biological reality therfore racism is not
real. The U.S. got past that with MLK and Abagond is just dredging up content to be devisive. That makes Abagond the racist.
The world is really much more a complex place and simpleton blogs like this just make Abagond, the creator, his worst enemy.
If only Abagond had been born a French teacher he would have had the intellectual superiority to handle the demanding process needed to avoid complacency.
I like the picture with glasses. lol
I for one think communautarism is a good thing.
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Solitaire
Yeah and a thread was not worth it to respond to that nonsense.
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@ Sharina
Agreed. But jacques whined about being banished to the Open Thread where his comments would get lost in the crowd. And voila! His very own thread!!
The power of white men’s tears….
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Jacques comments from the open thread.
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The problem with jacques is he says to stop being racist or using racist techniques, but dances around what is actually suppose to be racist. Even in his open thread response he dances around the issue never really addressing them in a realistic manner.
Frankly none of the two mentioned threads are racist, but as solitaire points out…they seem to just hurt his feelings.
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@Solitaire
The creation of the post is an object lesson he’ll probably miss…
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I think Jacques was reading while “white” and like Solitare said got his feelings hurt. Jacques is typical of many of the drive by racist trolls.
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@Origin: “The power of white men’s tears.” I cackled.😂😆😅
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From Abagond’s Dichotomous Thinking thread.
“Different is not just different: different is bad!”
“It also determines how whites think about racism itself:”
“Since racism is “bad” and since “white is right”, mainstream White American culture cannot possibly be racist – just maybe whites in the South or in the working-class or in the 1950s or in the Klan.
Most whites seem to think the answer to racism is to “not see colour”, to not see any differences. But it is this different-is-bad thinking that led to racism in the first place! And which colour-blindness leaves untouched.”
Jacques touches on all these points but from.a European perspective.
To be color blind is to not be a racist. To call out the racism of whites is to be a racist.
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@ Origin
“The creation of the post is an object lesson he’ll probably miss…”
Absolutely over his head. I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets his panties in a bunch about how it is so racist to single him out this way. Boo Hoo!!
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Jacquot, Jacquot, why do you refuse to pick up the gauntlet? Now that you have your post, do a non-racist write up of “Agabond’s(sic)” posts that you didn’t like.
What kind of teacher are you? You come here like Moses coming down Mount Sinai with the updated version of the ten commandments, yet you have the audacity to claim that my question about Napoleonic France’s turn toward racism is irrelevant? Au contraire, Napoleon did not kill Jacques Maurepas and his family(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Maurepas) or massacre the free people of Guadeloupe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Delgr%C3%A8s), ordinary Frenchmen did these deeds, true, some complained, but the deeds got done all the same. We know of the ‘glorious’ French empire in Indochina and Africa, so blaming Bony for French savagery just won’t do here. To his credit, he did anticipate the Dred Scott decision by fifty years. What, pray tell, you might ask, is this decision? In a nutshell, Blacks can claim no rights that Whites are bound to respect. You see my dear Jacquot, France and the USA aren’t that different.
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@ jacques
“This blog does not hurt my feelings. … I am no teacher here but being the victim of categorization by the blog’s author…”
Exactly how are you being victimized? Has anything bad happened to you besides having your feelings hurt or your assumptions challenged?
“… does make me feel like taking the mick a bit.”
Ah, now you’ve gone and done it. If you think Abagond is a big old meanie, wait until our resident Defender of All Things Irish sees that little slur you tossed out so nonchalantly.
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@Lord of Mirkwood
Except the same premise he is lecturing on is the very one he is actually using.
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Oops, cross-post!
Seriously, LoM? You’re going to let him get away with that?
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@Solitaire
The power of White men’s tears…indeed!
That is an appropriate name for this thread.
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Lordy, come clean, Jacquot is a Canadian buddy of yours that you put up to this. Tell him I’ll be impressed when he rewrites Abagond’s posts in his non-racist argot. I’m still waiting to label him a genius or a fraud and clown.
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Lordy, in your quest to be the next Samuel Beckett, how is your ‘masterpiece’ “Waiting For Gro Jo” coming along?
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Isn’t the word “mick” a slur? Mirkwood what are you going to do about that?
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@ Lord of Mirkwood
You’re trying to skate around the English Only policy, but I doubt Abagond is going to let your comments stand without a word-for-word translation.
Many of us never studied French. I remember enough Latin to get about half of what you wrote.
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Lordy, as soon as Sanders is elected president, I hope he’ll pay for you to get a humor transplant.
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@ Lord of Mirkwood
T’isnt my rule. Take it up with the Lord of the Blog.
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Sharinalr: He doesn’t just dance, he does a Swan Lake around it.
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@ Lord of Mirkwood
I deleted three of your comments for using French. English only!
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@ Lord of Mirkwood
The English-only rules keeps everything above board and avoids moderation nightmares. My comment policy was learned the hard way.
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Lordy, you. are. funny. Bernie did what he said he’d do from the get go and you cried?
“Who knows, maybe in a few years I can let in Irish?” We already exchanged pleasantries in Irish on your blog.
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@ Lord of Mirkwood
I only edit comments for clarity – adding blank-line paragraph breaks, quote marks, etc. I also put parentheses around YouTube links. I do not add, delete or change any of the words unless requested by the commenter.
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@ Lord of Mirkwood
“Because the language was beaten out of by ancestors by the despicable British Empire”
Yours and mine both, son. Seems to me we’ve discussed this point before.
Good luck. Remembering how all the silent letters work is the hard part, at least at the beginning.
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@ Lord of Mirkwood
Restored without the French.
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@ Lord of Mirkwood
If you hope to be able to converse someday, learn the rules now before you get a bunch of wildly incorrect pronunciations in your head (e.g., the ubiquitous Sam Hane for Samhain). A lot harder to unlearn those than learning it right the first time.
I wish they’d used diacritics instead, but it is what it is.
Ok, this is the last O/T for me on this topic.
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I’ve seen this before. People telling black people how to act or what to say when it comes to issues that affect them way more often than they go after the very people responsible, that is if they ever do tell them anything. To people like Jacques, how we fight racism deserves more criticism as opposed to those who practice actual racism. It’s just another way of accusing that blacks are racist against whites for pointing out white racism. Neither of which makes any sense.
I wonder if Jacques goes to blogs that promote racism and lecture them the way he saw fit to lecture blogs like this one discusses and is against racism. My guess is no. If not, he is merely part of the problem.
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Interesting. Jacques seems to have had nothing to say since his long dribble on open thread.
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@Jacques
What a load of sh*t. Agent/troll
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Two white men crying: enough to make you sick.
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@ Afrofem
@ taotesan
Pretty much sums up this thread so far….
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@ Solitare
Indeed. Giving this guy his own thread was a mistake. It’s only inflated his perceived sense of self-importance.
@ Brothawolf
In the end, it’s all about silencing the black voice without engaging in the same dead-end rhetoric as the bigots.
@ sharinalr
He’s left his mark. Even got his own thread. I imagine he’s quite content, now.
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Utopian thought. Certainly a world of peace and harmony seems like a nice dream. Alas, it doesn’t exist. The word comes from the Greek: οὐ (“not”) and τόπος (“place”). Literally, it means “no-place”.
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OMG, that was 3 years ago already.
Anyhow, I really would like to see Jacques quote some of the stuff that Abagond wrote and explain how he would rewrite it so that it would be more “reasonable”. Abagond has rewritten a couple of ones that had “cringetastic” parts.
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I’m still waiting to label him a genius or a fraud and clown.
You may not have to wait that long.
Lordy, as soon as Sanders is elected president, I hope he’ll pay for you to get a humor transplant.
Maybe he’ll deport him to Ireland.
I wonder if Jacques goes to blogs that promote racism and lecture them the way he saw fit to lecture blogs like this one discusses and is against racism
Probably not, less entertaining. He probably gets an ego boost lecturing and condescending to the Negroes anyway.
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Wow, Abagond
you really gave this person their own post just because he was drive-by trolling and called you a hypocrite!
if that’s all it takes, then you need to do one on Kiwi
because something serious happened to that boy on this very blog:
he went from being an intellectually solid commenter to
a whiny child who is acting like a white troll, who keeps screaming “blacks are racists” in every post, no matter the topic
a few arguments and now Kiwi has done some weird psychological leap into the abyss
some serious “mind-f’k” took place (and I blame GroJo) but it sure could use some examining.
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@Solitaire
#AllCommentersMatter
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Lordy, are you Jacquot’s lawyer now? The man is quite articulate, let him make his own case. Let him rewrite the offending posts in his non-racist, industrious and non-binary thinking style.
“When Socialist president François Hollande (still the incumbent) formed his cabinet in 2012, it included three black people (one of whom was the Minister of Justice) and three Arabs. (This is out of 32 total.) If it had been the U.S., the media would have been all over it, asking these folks for their personal experiences with racism, how race would influence their decision-making, how it felt to represent their communities, etc. The French media said not a word.”
Yawn, Blacks were represented at the highest levels of the French government since, at least 1794, when slavery was abolished by France under the influence of the budding Haitian Revolution. Jean-Baptiste Belley was elected député to the French National Convention for the north of St-Domingue in 1793 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Belley). Étienne Victor Mentor, also a député from St-Domingue, was a member of the Council of Five Hundred, the lower house of the legislature of France during the period commonly known (from the name of the executive branch during this time) as the Directory (Directoire), from 22 August 1795 until 9 November 1799, roughly the second half of the period generally referred to as the French Revolution.
He became Jean-Jacques Dessalines’ Aide during the eviction of the French for trying to restore slavery.The man in charge of the aerial defense of Paris during WWI was a black officer(https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_Mortenol). The man who presided over the French Senate from 1962 to 1968 was a black man named Gaston Monnerville (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaston_Monnerville), who missed on being the first black president of France by about a year.
You offend me with your claptrap: “So, when Jacques rails against “lazy, binary thinking” and says he never believed in the existence of human races, it would behoove us all to consider his background, rather than dismiss him out of hand based on our American perceptions.”
I’m aware that France was way ahead of say, the USA, but you also need to take into account the fact that Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau was French and the fact that the French did re-enslave the free people of Guadeloupe and would have done the same to the people of St-Domingue. They didn’t free them until 1849, 15 years after the Brits did so. Do you want to deal with the racist policies of France in Asia, and Africa?
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Blame me all you want. Not my fault you weren’t observant enough to see through his charade. He was a whiny child way before he met me, but since he penned some suitably anti white diatribes, mostly about how unfair it is that white men have access to Asian women, but Asian men aren’t all that in demand by white women, you gave him a pass. Now you’re saddened to deal with the real Kiwi. Too bad. Note that most of my arguments are fact based.
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Note that any personal attacks by me were for comic effect and to wound any heel who had the misfortune to cross me. Your boy Kiwi had it coming.
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Does he have a history of defending black people rights anywhere in the world; if he does not then he should sit down because he also doesn’t have the right to criticize those who fight for black rights (Jessie Williams). I feel sorry for his French-Rwandese niece; thank goodness Rwanda changed their official language from French to English.
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“some serious “mind-f’k” took place (and I blame GroJo) but it sure could use some examining.”
@ Linda
Some of us have long memories.
I saw Kiwi demonstrating his true colors, for the first time, long ago on a reparations thread when he weighed in with some fantastical (very questionable) ideas regarding how non Black people would regard Black people if Black reparations were received… and that he insisted HOW reparations should be paid (as if he had a seat at that table) to descendants of slaves/victims of Jim Crow, etc. He spoke as if he was every Black person’s father, and innately knew what was best for Black people, better than they knew what was best for themselves.
Just because a person is a learned/opinionated arguer, this in and of itself does not make him a decent human or of moral character. Something in Kiwi is very broken… and it didn’t just happen because gro jo, or anyone else here, slapped him and his nonsense around!
What’s the point of giving this azz his own thread? What will that accomplish? Virtually everyone here already knows what a creep he can be! IMO he’s only good for one thing now. Humor.
Via his blatant disrespect for Black people, he has lost his right to be taken judiciously.
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Having a half-black niece does not magically make you an expert on black issues. You need to experience discrimination as a black person first before you know what its all about. Abagond is already putting his life at risk like any other writer that fights for human rights. Just by writing he is standing against the defenders of the status quo and they have already marked him as a target. He has no time to wipe your crocodile tears.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3hhoyTbP6A)
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Well, its funny he should mention MLK, and his alleged “anti-with-us-or-against-us” attitude, considering that King came to the “regrettable” conclusion that the most dangerous element against black progress was the “white moderate”.
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@ Lord of Mirkwood
Those are some industrial-strength blinders you’re wearing. You seem to think it’s fine if white Québécois wear blackface in order to thumb their noses at white Anglo-Canadians. Has it not dawned on you that this isn’t about white people? The people whose opinions most matter here are black Canadians, Afro-Canadians.
You’ve obviously never heard any First Nations people discuss the racism they encounter from the Québécois, either.
Surely you know the reputation of the Québécois in Canada of being virulent racists, along the exact same lines as the reputation of U.S. southerners. Now, this is a stereotype, and I’m not saying it holds true for all Québécois. But I find it very telling that you embrace one stereotype wholeheartedly yet reject the other out of hand.
The French have their own very serious problems with racism and the legacy of their imperialistic colonial past. They are trying to use the colorblind approach, but it isn’t working there any better than it does here.
Speaking of binary thinking, you seem unable to accept that any peoples you admire might have any flaws. It’s all Irish good, English bad. And that informs your perspective on France and Canada, too.
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I took the gro jo blame as a joke, but I could be wrong.
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@ all 🙂 Indeed, I find this post thing funny. And interesting. Taking somebody’s comments out of their context to create a (derogatory) post on this person, without asking their permission first, does tells me something about the intellectual honesty and ethics of the blog’s author. Apart from that, I do believe in learning through conversing with people of different opinions, and if anything, I guess this space might allow a bit of this to happen…
Oh, and @Agabond: the part on my niece seems to have gone slightly above your line of sight: I was being ironic about all the blanket statements you proudly make about ‘the Whites’ (and I am sure you realise it, by mechanical effect, about ‘the Blacks’ too) in your blog and their potentially catastrophic implications in the mind of a mixed-ethnicity person, if these statements were to be of any value. 🙂
Then again, I might just be counting on the sanity of your judgement a tad too much here: you may well actually believe the reality of these blanket statements to be the cause of perpetual torment in such ‘hybrids’ 😀
@ Brothawolf: “To people like Jacques, how we fight racism deserves more criticism as opposed to those who practice actual racism.”
No, my mate, and thanks for summarizing many commenters’ reactions in a nutshell here: but actually, writing in the way the blog’s author does about the ‘Whites’, as a monolithic bunch of perverted jerks, or supporting this way of reasoning, IS ‘practising’ racism, and as such, couldn’t be further away from fighting racism.
Also, a fundamental difference between your ways of reasoning and mine is that you seem to see a White racism and a Black racism where all I can see is Racism:
Racism of some among the ‘white community’ (if we decide that such a thing should exist) against black people, brown people, yellow people, jew people, muslim people, French people, Romanian people, mixed-race people, ‘untouchable’ people, etc, etc; but also racism of some among the ‘black community’ (if we decide that such a thing should exist) against white people, brown people, yellow people, jew people, muslim people, French people, Romanian people, mixed-race people, ‘untouchable’ people, etc, etc. Oh, and I forgot to mention the racism of some in the indian community (you get my drift by now) against white people, black people, brown people, yellow people, jew people, muslim people, French people, Romanian people, mixed-race people, ‘untouchable’ people, etc, etc. Shall I carry on with my list?
@ GroJo: I don’t think of myself as being that articulated actually, I reckon I am rather clumsy and sometimes awkward and convoluted in the way I express myself. I might have started a blog of my own by now, had I believed otherwise. That said, as was pointed out many a time before to Agabond, the rewriting of a few of his/her posts in a less racist manner would not have taken much of a genius: ‘How the White think’ // ‘My theory as to how too many white middle-class people seem to think of Black people in the US’.
Man, I couldn’t forgive myself for being such a monstrously arrogant and racist jerk as to pretend to write a piece explaining the world “How the Black think”, regardless of how positive or negative its content would be.
@ GroJo: “ordinary Frenchmen did these deeds, true, some complained, but the deeds got done all the same. ”
What is your point here? Is it to tell me that, as a French person, I cannot speak of racism / be of any relevance in the fight against it because France was once governed by a cynical dictator? Or because, according to you, two centuries ago the French people wanted black people to be slaves? Or even, because you reckon most French citizens are racist morons these days? I fail to understand the logic behind your reasoning. But then it’s quite obvious from what I read that although I wish I did, I still don’t quite reach your level of mastery of the art of rhetoric.
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And you know what? The French really have no room to complain about English words sneaking into their language when they are the ones who conquered Anglo-Saxon England and forced changes that irrevocably transformed the language’s vocabulary, grammar, structure, phonology, etc.
Modern English is nowhere near the original language thanks to the French invaders.
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@ Linda @ Mack Lyons, etc
Maybe making this post is a mistake. We shall see.
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Grojo@ He was a whiny child way before he met me, but since he penned some suitably anti white diatribes, mostly about how unfair it is that white men have access to Asian women, but Asian men aren’t all that in demand by white women, you gave him a pass.
Linda says,
I didn’t give him a pass, a hail Mary, or even a sign
lots of people on here say things that I don’t agree with or even feel strongly about (for or against)
people are free to express their views or opinions on whatever they want….I don’t need to give my opinion on every topic brought up for discussion…I’m not a hall monitor
and of course you are responsible for the metamorphosis… it all started with the constant back and forth you 2 had. It was funny at first but then turned strange
Kiwi couldn’t handle it anymore, lost his mind in the Peter Liang post and went rogue… you somehow let the beast out the cage.
take your crown and wear it proud, amigo… you earned it
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@ villagewriter: did I ever say I was an expert on anything? If you ask me, barely on myself! But, in the perspective on my ‘colourless, areligious, stateless’ idea of racism, I can still tell you that it is quite naive to think that I have too little experience of it to talk about it/ recognise it when I see it. And that’s the point: I see it right here, in the middle of a blog which pretends to (and often does) elevate the debate.
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Grojo,
in all seriousness
I’m not really blaming you for whatever happened to Kiwi.
you were just the catalyst that brought forth a change in Kiwi…
but unlike you and Fan, I’m not so sure that he is expressing something that was always there, I don’t believe that Kiwi is anti-black
My opinion (2 bit psychoanalysis for what it’s worth)…. I think his feelings got seriously hurt by the exchanges he had with you, Fan and other people
and he is now lashing out because he probably feels like no one here can see his side
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@ Linda
I do not know what is going on with Kiwi.
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… And just to make things clear, if I have to get in the street and physically protect people from racist herds (I sometimes think it might happen at some point given the context), I will. Be it White people, Black people, ‘Foreign people’, whatever. I am no hiding promoter of racism.
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@Jacques
I really wish you went through each post made by Abagond and told us exactly what you disagree with in a particular blog post. But you rushed in arrogantly with volleys of meaningless words that made it seem like you had just sat down with Abagond and psychoanalyzed him and deduced his whole character. What exactly do you disagree with? What point has he made that you think is incomplete or wrong?
As far African American experience is concerned, you have little or no experience-unless you are African American (I am not). When Abagond writes about how ‘white people think’ we know the white people he is talking about. We know he is not talking about all white people. We know he is not calling on us to hate but to be ‘woke’ or vigilant. He can easily take us through history and point at different events that happened then and that happen now and show us the similarities between them.
This is not about intellectualizing racism or ruminating about racism in our mind. We are not studying the skies and wondering how many galaxies are out there- we are not making mathematical calculation on the breath and length of racism. Abagond is dealing with reality not idealism about colorblindness.
“And that’s the point: I see it right here, in the middle of a blog which pretends to (and often does) elevate the debate.”
What have you added to the debate? Apart from your arrogance, I mean.
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@Jacques
Abagond was polite enough to give you your own post to express your skeptisim since derailing other threads was a distraction and you didn’t wish to converse on the open thread.
You interpreting it as derogatory and intellectually dishonest is a deflection on your part. Your long winded answer doesn’t really say to much other then affirm your belief that color blindness is the proper approach to discussing racism.
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Abagond,
you truly haven’t noticed that Kiwi fell off the rails!
how he is leaving troll-like comments in almost every post
how he is attacking everyone that disagrees with him and calls them “anti-Asian”
He is attempting to sell the drama by saying that “black people are just as racist as white people because….”
and this all came about after the Peter Liang post
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@ Jacques
Is there a reason you consistently misspell Abagond’s name?
Do you have any idea how many of the people posting here are white (American and other) and have no problem with Abagond’s writing style?
“And just to make things clear, if I have to get in the street and physically protect people from racist herds (I sometimes think it might happen at some point given the context), I will. Be it White people, Black people, ‘Foreign people’, whatever. I am no hiding promoter of racism.”
Oh, sure. If racist mobs take to the street, you’ll be out there protecting the innocents. But what are you doing now to counter racism and prejudice where it exists? Do you speak up when white coworkers, friends, family members say offensive things? Are you cognizant of the various types of micro-aggressions that people like your niece encounter every day? Because racism is often slow death by a million papercuts, not one knife stab in a rioting mob.
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@ Villagewriter: Well, you and Agabond and some others will have to get your head around the fact that in reality, more people than you think are truly ‘colour-blind’, as you put it. And I reckon (that’s only me, obviously) that colour-blindness when judging people and their ideas/behaviour is the most direct and efficient way of fighting racism. What, do you not precisely wish that more police in the US did their job in a sensible and self-restrained way regardless of the colour of ‘suspects’?
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Taking somebody’s comments out of their context to create a (derogatory) post on this person, without asking their permission first, does tells me something about the intellectual honesty and ethics of the blog’s author.
= panties in a bunch
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Fan,
I remember the Reparations thread and like I mentioned previously to Sharina, what Kiwi said, is not that crazy
sad to say, but I’ve heard those same sentiments about “reparations not being fair” from other non-white people – they are just ignorant and need a history lesson.
I won’t hold that thread against Kiwi either because alot of words and accusations got tossed out based on misunderstandings and hurt feelings (started by the argument between Kiwi and Matari)
I personally believe that black Americans should get Reparations (cash, money order, check in hand)
but I also believe people should be able to express their feelings against it without being painted a racist, anti-black, uncle Tom, etc
Here is a comment made by Legion that sums up the whole situation as far as I’m concerned:
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@ Abagond
FWIW, I said not long ago on another thread that I mostly agreed with Linda’s assessment of the Kiwi situation. I might change my mind down the road with further developments, but right now that’s where I’m at.
I don’t know if devoting a thread to Kiwi would help or hurt. I can’t recommend one way or the other. But I agree with Linda that it is definitely more deserving of a dedicated thread than this stroll-by troll.
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Also, p*nties is a moderated word? Really??
This is Bobby M’s fault, isn’t it?
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I’m not sure what positive learning excersize a thread dedicated to Kiwi would produce. It would likely break down to a bunch of toxic comments.
He believes that Blacks can be racist and do not own up too it. And he attempts to point that out amongst commenters. He has problems with white men and Asian women. But beyond that what’s the point ?
He views racial issues differently then myself. I can agree to disagree. I parse commenters opinions and towards Kiwi I am neutral.
The key to coexistence is mutual respect even if you disagree.
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Some understanding of French conceptions of race might be helpful. It is an act of Anglo-Saxon imperialism to assume that French people automatically think the same way about things, especially huge cultural issues such as this.
You’re right, the French were among the most vicious and racist colonialists.
So, when Jacques rails against “lazy, binary thinking” and says he never believed in the existence of human races, it would behoove us all to consider his background, rather than dismiss him out of hand based on our American perceptions
It is precisely his background that I am considering. Nice try defending him, though. I bet those French were traumatized by the nazis since many collaborated with them.
because something serious happened to that boy on this very blog:
Maybe a Black woman turned him down.
Humor.
Let the jocularity commence!
Having a half-black niece does not magically make you an expert on black issues.
It does if you are a superior white man.
The people whose opinions most matter here are black Canadians, Afro-Canadians.
Thank you Soltaire. Seriously the White Quebecoise are some of the most racist in Canada against Black folk.
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/yvonne-sam/quebec-systemic-racism_b_9904016.html
Maybe making this post is a mistake. We shall see.
Oh no, we could all use some comical relief given the current times!
… And just to make things clear, if I have to get in the street and physically protect people from racist herds (I sometimes think it might happen at some point given the context), I will. Be it White people, Black people, ‘Foreign people’, whatever. I am no hiding promoter of racism.
Well aren’t you special dear.
Is there a reason you consistently misspell Abagond’s name?
He’s a negro, a white man doesn’t have to use his correct name.
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@ Solitaire: “Do you have any idea how many of the people posting here are white (American and other) and have no problem with Abagond’s writing style?”
Well, I was never a big fan of gregarious thinking, as I thought you might have gathered by now.
“But what are you doing now to counter racism and prejudice where it exists? Do you speak up when white coworkers, friends, family members say offensive things? Are you cognizant of the various types of micro-aggressions that people like your niece encounter every day? Because racism is often slow death by a million papercuts, not one knife stab in a rioting mob.”
Yes, I am ‘cognizant’ of it, as I witness it and am subjected to it on a very regular basis. I don’t ” […] speak up when white coworkers, friends, family members say offensive things?”, I speak up when people of whatever colour say offensive things. I am doing my best as a teacher to counter racism and prejudice where I see it perniciously making its way into many a kids minds, on a daily basis and often against the ambient ‘political correctness’ that would prompt me to avoid any sensitive topic. I also do it in spite of very concrete risks for my career and sometimes physical integrity (I was already given to experience the manifestation of both these categories of risks first hand).
And sorry Abagond for mispelling your name, on this blog you can’t edit your own comments once posted I think.
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“Did you extract anything from my two long posts?”
Another delicious carafe of white men’s tears.
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@ jacques
“I am doing my best as a teacher to counter racism and prejudice where I see it”
And you trust in yourself to see racism and prejudice equally wherever it occurs and whatever form it takes? Whomever it is directed against and by whom?
Because so far here at this blog, you’ve only demonstrated sensitivity in seeing racism directed against white people.
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“No, my mate, and thanks for summarizing many commenters’ reactions in a nutshell here: but actually, writing in the way the blog’s author does about the ‘Whites’, as a monolithic bunch of perverted jerks, or supporting this way of reasoning, IS ‘practising’ racism, and as such, couldn’t be further away from fighting racism.”
No “mate”. I was summarizing YOUR comments and YOUR comments alone. And besides, this blog is about, among other things, examining racism and taking apart white supremacist beliefs held by many, if not most, whites.
“Also, a fundamental difference between your ways of reasoning and mine is that you seem to see a White racism and a Black racism where all I can see is Racism:”
I see you have a thing about telling people what they think according to you.
I only see white racism, because white racism not only exists but can be harmful and fatal to people like me. White racism can oppress, enslave, imprison, fire, miseducate, maintain unemployment, harass, expel, create lies, assault and even kill my people without any serious consequences. And it already has immensely and is STILL going on.
What has black racism, which is assume you mean is racism against whites by blacks, done that has oppressed white people in general that is in any way equal or worse than what white racism has done to us?
“Racism of some among the ‘white community’ (if we decide that such a thing should exist) against black people, brown people, yellow people, jew people, muslim people, French people, Romanian people, mixed-race people, ‘untouchable’ people, etc, etc; but also racism of some among the ‘black community’ (if we decide that such a thing should exist) against white people, brown people, yellow people, jew people, muslim people, French people, Romanian people, mixed-race people, ‘untouchable’ people, etc, etc. Oh, and I forgot to mention the racism of some in the indian community (you get my drift by now) against white people, black people, brown people, yellow people, jew people, muslim people, French people, Romanian people, mixed-race people, ‘untouchable’ people, etc, etc. Shall I carry on with my list?”
WHITE PEOPLE INVENTED RACISM. What you’re describing sounds more like prejudice which is completely different. People of color can have prejudices against other people, including other people of color, but only white people are racists, because they created a global machine where white skin is considered the dominant color while other skin colors are deemed inferior, strange or worthless and have created a history and a system to make sure nonwhites stay beneath whiteness.
In the end, you are in NO position to tell black people how to fight racism when you don’t even have a clear understanding as to what racism is, and have no desire to learn. And you wonder why many commenters here are frustrated with you. Whether you like it or not, you are part of what’s wrong.
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“I remember the Reparations thread and like I mentioned previously to Sharina, what Kiwi said, is not that crazy ”
@ Linda
Okay.
I suppose the thing that I found crazy in that thread was Kiwi’s unsubstantiated insistence that any reparations doled to Black people would cause undo-able harm to the bonds/relations between Black and other downtrodden non-white people.
There was another thread, where he his apparent condescension toward Black people was visible for all to see. I don’t recall the name of thread. It was about a day (or week?) of celebrating Black people via social media… a sort of new holiday/social media idea for Black people. I don’t remember the details exactly.
What I do remember was that Kiwi weighed in with some inane and tremendous negativity about: How would Black people determine who was genuinely Black? In other words, Kiwi shows up, again, to disparage a positive movement in a community that is in need of positive movements. Throwing monkey-wrenches? He excels at that!
Simply put, just as Matari did, I see him as a hater.
Those two episode, alone, caused me to see Kiwi stepping in places, where he ought not be, behaving as a screaming banshee!
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@ Lord of Mirkwood
Believe it or not, I don’t need lessons about Anglophone discrimination against the Francophones in Canada. What I meant about binary thinking is this: I can see the Québécois as both oppressed and oppressor, simultaneously, without any cognitive dissonance. You apparently cannot.
This is exactly the same issue that you and I are always butting heads over, whether it’s Northerners and Southerners, English and French, Canadian Anglophones and Québécois. You want to divide up white people into two specific groups, labelled Racist and Not-Racist, based on their ethnic origins, their nationality, their regionality, their political leanings, their religion. The sheep and the goats, the saved and the damned.
Only problem is, white racism doesn’t fit into your neat little boxes.
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@Frereloup; Mmm… Well, I reckon even among the strongest supporters of Abagond’s blog, very few would be supporting such statements as “WHITE PEOPLE INVENTED RACISM”. I would go as far as suggesting that even you don’t believe in such enormity. Then again, I can foresee a readymade answer to that, pointing at how much of a racist and white supremacist I must be to pretend to know better than yourself what you believe. So to avoid any confusion, let’s just say instead that I HOPE you don’t actually believe in such an enormity (cf worldwide history of mankind: India and its millenary cast system, China, slavery in the Arab world, African inter ethnic relations, etc. etc.) Also see: etymology of ‘slave’. What I reckon is true is that the extend to which european predatory capitalists used racist theories as a justification for the unjustifiable (triangular trade) is indeed unprecedented and unrivalled.
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@jacques
Nice play on words to avoid the unpleasant truth.
Indian cast systems, Arab slavery, and even African inter ethnic relations did not discriminate simply on race (race being white, black, and Asian). White supremacy conveniently made black at the bottom and most of the world followed that logic. I get that you are trying to point to caste systems, which saw dark skin as a problem or lower, but do tell if those caste system kept those darker people from achieving or advancing. From my understanding of African societies (which do not have caste but inter ethnic issues) that did not.
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Why do a post on Kiwi? What is the point of that? I don’t think it’s necessary. Just my two cents.
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@Fan: It was the Blackout Day post. Kiwi posted what I thought was a snarky comment. Black people were just celebrating their “Blackness.” And Kiwi wanted to throw in the monkey wrench.
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@Mary
I agree. A post is not needed on him. If gro Jo is the reason he acts this way, then he is no better than the whites who hate blacks because a black guy punched him in the face.
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@Sharina: I agree it’s crazy.
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@ Linda
I noticed he started changing about a year ago, sometime last summer. I do not know why.
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@ Abagond
The fact that a random white person can waltz into a black blog and yank it around by the nose with little effort is especially troubling. But you live and you learn. And you decide whether or not to take steps to prevent it from happening again.
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@ Lord of Mirkwood
So you are defending blackface in the name of cultural sensitivity?
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I moderate misspellings of my name. It makes it easier to spot the douchebags.
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@ Herneith
LOL. Right you are.
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I can’t stand these aholes parading around as being anti-racist. They are not your friends or allies(I hate that term).
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@ Lord of Mirkwood
Stop. You are making yourself look like an idiot. The French are among the most evil, racist people in history. They worked Black people to death in Haiti on a scale unimagined by the Anglo-Saxons of the Thirteen Colonies.
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@ Jacques
If you are truly as anti-racist as you say you are, then maybe you can give some specifics. At least three commenters have asked you to give concrete examples: take something I wrote and write it as you would in your colour-blind yet not politically correct way.
This is why I gave you your own thread: so you can put up or shut up. So far you have been all song and dance.
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jacques,
I’m not fluent in French, but I know that ‘Frereloup’ is French for ‘Brother’ and ‘Wolf’ as one name. So, I’m assuming that comment was directed at me. Address me as ‘BrothaWolf’ please, as I address you as ‘jacques’. If you can’t show me that little bit of respect, I won’t do the same with you.
Now, your comment was:
“Mmm… Well, I reckon even among the strongest supporters of Abagond’s blog, very few would be supporting such statements as “WHITE PEOPLE INVENTED RACISM”. I would go as far as suggesting that even you don’t believe in such enormity. Then again, I can foresee a readymade answer to that, pointing at how much of a racist and white supremacist I must be to pretend to know better than yourself what you believe. So to avoid any confusion, let’s just say instead that I HOPE you don’t actually believe in such an enormity (cf worldwide history of mankind: India and its millenary cast system, China, slavery in the Arab world, African inter ethnic relations, etc. etc.) Also see: etymology of ‘slave’. What I reckon is true is that the extend to which european predatory capitalists used racist theories as a justification for the unjustifiable (triangular trade) is indeed unprecedented and unrivalled.”
Here’s what I hear from you. Everyone practiced or practiced racism. Not just whites.
Here’s some history I got from Orchestrated Pulse:
“Eduardo Bonilla-Silva describes the merging of racial ideology and social power as creating “racialized social systems” — social systems which are not naturally occurring, but are instead a continuous and “highly political act” — most notably colonialism.
The intimate link between colonialism and racial hierarchy has been present from the start. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, traces the earliest vestiges of race and racial hierarchy (Bonilla-Silva’s “racialized social systems”) to the 16th century and the Spanish Inquisition following the expulsion of the Jews and Muslims in 1492 and 1502 respectively.
It’s no coincidence that as the Inquisition was occurring, and Spain’s proto-racial concepts were first forming, property stolen from Spain’s expelled Jews would partially finance Colombus’ voyage across the Atlantic. Though racism’s conceptual seeds were planted during the Spanish inquisition, it was the nurturing waters of transatlantic colonialism that truly brought racial hierarchy to bloom.
Racism’s colonial roots are even more apparent in the United States. In the U.S. the social meaning of race coalesced in the late 17th century, which marked the beginning of racial slavery — a racialized social system that gave birth not only to modern racism, but to “Black” and “White” identity itself. Michael Omi and Howard Winant call this process “racial formation”.
Due to European colonialism, racial hierarchy became a defining element of social, economic, and political life throughout the globe — the concept White supremacy attempts to capture that process. According to Ania Loomba’s Colonialism and Postcolonialism, though the particular content of racial ideology is always contested, and changes to the prevailing racial logics occur over time, “the race relations put into place during colonialism survive long after many of the economic structures underlying them have changed“.
In fact, colonial era configurations of social and economic relations exist synergistically with contemporary dominant articulations of power — namely capitalism — they never actually disappeared. If we begin to understand the colonial foundation of racism, then it becomes much easier to see how racial hierarchy functions today.”
And that’s why I said in block letters that WHITE PEOPLE INVENTED RACISM, because IT IS A FACT. Deal with it.
As it still stands, black racism – as you call it – pales in comparison to white racism’s history and impact. So, you criticizing this blog is irrelevant, because it will not bring forth any consequences – short or long term – against a large group of whites let alone individual whites.
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@ Mary Burrell
Thank YOU! You’re right. It was #BlackOut Day. All the comments on that thread were hopeful and bright – until kiwi weighed in with this:
“Something that keeps nagging me is who would qualify as black. Abagond said you have to be part African to be acceptably black. Would people be upset if an Australian aborigine posted a photo of himself? How about those who personally identify as black but don’t look the part, as with some multiracial people? Will these people be scrutinized and subjected to the judgement of a racial litmus test that would basically amount to a reverse One Drop Rule?
Just something to think about before getting too excited about “unity”. One cannot expect others to stop stereotyping you as a monolith while at the same time expecting certain standards of conformity within your “community”.”
Veronica said a mouthful to kiwi that matched my sentiment:
@ Kiwi
Yea, no. I “read” you correctly the first time. I don’t know whether you’re a troll or not, and I have admittedly seen you challenge anti-blackness on this blog before, but you seem to have a real problem with Black people doing anything SUBSTANTIVE to unify and empower themselves. Like Just Me says at least with someone who is direct about their anti-blackness you know exactly what you’re dealing with. But someone like you…you seriously sound no better than racist white liberals insert themselves into conversations that are CLEARLY none of their business, discourage Black people from “being too militant” or doing anything that makes them uncomfortable, and try to dictate the terms of our liberation from white supremacist system that literally robs us of our humanity.
And I really can’t believe you’re using a “I have a Black friend” type of excuse to to figleaf over your racially problematic behavior. That’s disgusting. Black folks aren’t here to be PROPS for you to pull out in order to silence other Black people who are criticizing you. You sound like yet ANOTHER non-Black person of color who is engaging in anti-blackness. I don’t care whether it’s conscious prejudice or unconscious bias. The only thing that is making you sound suspect is YOU. Period. Get it the fxck together and just address it. Seriously.
I repeat: Whenever the discussion is “Black poverty” we’re all clear on who the Black people are, but whenever it’s used for the purposes of trying to empower ourselves it’s “Who’s Black?” I’m tired of it and it’s a ridiculous roadblock people constantly try to use to take our eyes off the prize. Instead of trying to fixate on what Black people are trying to do to resist the particular racism WE face, why don’t you concentrate on whatever community you feel you belong to needs to be doing. Either way, stop trying to mock or condescend to people whose experience you don’t share and who’s politics probably won’t work for you. It’s as simple as that.”
So, as far as I’m concerned, Kiwi was behaving like an idiot long before the Liang thread.
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I’d love for the white people who’re enduring under so-called “black racism” to articulate how it negatively impacts their lives. That’s right, it doesn’t and they’re all full of 5hit.
Their idea is predicated on a fantasy that racism is symmetrical when it is really one side despoiling and oppressing the other while armed with criteria for determining who belongs to which group and being able to ENFORCE those distinctions. If the side being victimized resists they’re not being racist.
Haitians didn’t revolt because they were racist but because of the onerous conditions imposed on them. If black people boycott white businesses in protest or in order to build their own communities that’s also resistance. They’re resisting a racist order in which the supposed guarantees of equal protection under law do not exist therefore necessitating self-protection. If some people are to be believed the only morally acceptable response is complete passivity in thought and action. You can’t even criticize! How convenient.
They clearly have no interest in addressing “white racism” but are more concerned about the irrelevant notion they fabricated only for argument’s sake. Their intention is simply to distract and derail with the childish retort, “you too”. This behavior pops up in many contexts.
[Police Killings]
“But what about black on black crime” .. which they don’t really care about
[Racism]
“But what about black racism” .. which really does not affect them at all
I don’t know if it’s funny or sad that they’re often so deluded that they think being blind as a bat wrt to their own attitudes equips them to enlighten us.
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@ Lord of Mirkwood
Those are some industrial-strength blinders you’re wearing, as Solitaire put it.
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@ Lord of Mirkwood
It would be lovely and glorious if the French lived up to their own hype, the stuff you and Jacques talk, but unfortunately, they seem to be just as phoney-baloney as White Americans.
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@Origin
“Their idea is predicated on a fantasy that racism is symmetrical when it is really one side despoiling and oppressing the other while armed with criteria for determining who belongs to which group and being able to ENFORCE those distinctions. If the side being victimized resists they’re not being racist.”
I noticed this attempt at intellectualizing racism when I had an argument with a white Biology Professor from a European country. To him, racism is another term for general discrimination; including discrimination based on ethnic group, based on sex, based on disability or ability, based on skin color, based on class, education and so on. In effect, according to his notions on what racism meant, racism was in fact meaningless. Everyone, according to him, was a racist.
I had to take him through the history of racism for him to start understanding what black people mean when they point out an incident of racism. Racism became what it is because of the ideas of various thinkers in Europe who wanted to divide human beings into categories. Racism is about one group believing it is superior to another group based on mostly skin color. It is not about someone calling you a “cracker”, which I believe means a person who cracks a whip at slaves.
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@ Lord of Mirkwood
Fine. Let’s discuss your nuanced defense of blackface, shall we?
Also, instead of running your mouth, perhaps you should ask Herneith about her experiences with and opinions about racism in Canada — and really listen.
Leigh204 too, and anyone else I’ve forgotten.
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@ Lord of Mirkwood
So what you’re saying about blackface is the opinions and feelings of black Canadians don’t matter.
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@ Lord of Mirkwood
“Abagond, even when we have disagreed in the past, I have always respected you as a man of reason…. You can do better than “phoney-baloney.”
Even men of reason can grow weary of hitting their head against a stone wall. You’ve about used up my patience for this round, too.
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@ Lord of Mirkwood
“The discussion I’m having is about Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism.”
It’s a one-sided discussion you’re having with yourself.
“What do you find so telling about my views on Québec vs. those of the South?”
What, a smart boy like you can’t figure that out on his own?
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“…and of course you are responsible for the metamorphosis… it all started with the constant back and forth you 2 had. It was funny at first but then turned strange
Kiwi couldn’t handle it anymore, lost his mind in the Peter Liang post and went rogue… you somehow let the beast out the cage.
take your crown and wear it proud, amigo… you earned it”
No problemo, It all started, innocently enough, with our differing evaluation of Mao. Kiwi got offended because I wouldn’t concede to his 40+ million dead from the famine that occurred in China from 1958 to 1962. Instead of agreeing to disagree like two adults, he started with the name calling. He began to make racial comments like I don’t know the Chinese, blah,blah,blah.
Here is a sample of my interaction with him. I’m plaguing you with this long quote because you were tempted to blame me for his behavior. Glad to read that you’ve stepped away from that erroneous view:
“on Sun 11 Oct 2015 at 22:39:18
Kiwi
@ gro jo
Who cares about Frank D.? You have Chinese writers like Yang Jisheng, Chen Yizi, and Yu Xiguang, but you don’t care because they’re not White.
“I’d like to read your attempt to defend the incorporation of the clearly deranged Ms. Pan Zhenghui’s claims about how she was turned into an unfeeling Maoist robot, who abandoned her child and gleefully recounted how that child died decades later!”
Why is it surprising? White people sold their own children into slavery and are still aborting their children by the millions. I’m flattered that you think all Chinese are family-oriented saints but your racist assumption is just wrong.
on Tue 13 Oct 2015 at 14:36:31
gro jo
“Who cares about Frank D.? You have Chinese writers like Yang Jisheng, Chen Yizi, and Yu Xiguang, but you don’t care because they’re not White.”
Lordy does, not me, Dongpin Han, my source, is as Chinese as You and your sources. Try a little harder at race baiting!
“White people sold their own children into slavery and are still aborting their children by the millions. I’m flattered that you think all Chinese are family-oriented saints but your racist assumption is just wrong.”
Again, your race baiting needs some work, I made no racist assumptions about the Chinese being saints. I just pointed out to you that the article you linked to quoted somebody who sounded deranged to me. This has been a fun exercise in mutual antagonism, since I know that the only thing we really disagree on is the scale, not the nature of the disaster. How do I know that? Let me quote you:
“on Fri 22 May 2015 at 10:22:56
Kiwi
@ gro jo
China’s government has political reasons to downplay the Great Chinese Famine, so we would expect them to underestimate the number of deaths. Frank Dikötter cited Chinese sources who had also had access to government archives, like Yang Jisheng, Chen Yizi, and Yu Xiguang. On average, their estimates come to over 40 million dead.
I do agree that the Great Chinese Famine was not murder, however. I would call it extreme incompetence and negligence that cost human life on a scale rivaling World War 2. There was no intention or reason for Mao and the communist party to kill that many of their own civilians.”
We are in agreement, except for the numbers. Keep working on your race baiting, you’ll get the hang of it soon enough.
on Fri 16 Oct 2015 at 00:34:52
Kiwi
@ gro jo
Dongpin Han, my source, is as Chinese as You
The thing is, Dongpin Han is not “as Chinese as” I am because I was not born or raised in China. Just like your racist stereotyping of Chinese as family-oriented, you assume that anyone of Chinese descent must somehow think or behave a certain way. In fact, from the very start, you have zeroed in on my race as an attempt to discredit me. The fact that you are unwilling to look past my race in a simple discussion proves that you are racially biased (or maybe just racist), especially since you would not accept the same treatment from other races. If you wish to criticize others for not treating you as an individual, you will have to learn to see others as individuals.
Hypocrisy aside, you believe the Chinese government’s number for those who died due to Mao’s famine merely because the source is Chinese. But when presented with contradicting Chinese sources, you wave them off as “deranged”. If I am to accept your claim that my sources are invalid on the mere accusation of derangement, then I can also reject your sources on the mere accusation of derangement. You can’t have it both ways.
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on Tue 20 Oct 2015 at 16:37:21
gro jo
Kiwi, your race baiting and sophistry has become deranged. Keep telling the same lie over and over again, you’ll soon start to believe your bs. Until you stated you were Chinese, I had assumed you were the product of a White and Chinese union, the kind you take such dim view of. All I did was to point out how implausible the 40+ millions your sources claim is. As I said before, we both agree on what occurred we only disagree on the numbers and who should get the last word. Why aren’t you outraged that Lordy’s source, Frank D. turned out to be a fraud? Being the paragon of virtue you claim to be I would have expected you to frown on the use of doctored pictures from 1942 to ‘prove’ famine in 1959. Instead, you produced an article from the daily beast where one of the main ‘witnesses’ is clearly deranged. Your pretense to moral rectitude is looking threadbare from where I stand.
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on Fri 23 Oct 2015 at 11:03:26
Kiwi
@ gro jo
Until you stated you were Chinese
I never said that I am Chinese. I’m Chinese American. Or are those the same thing now? Dongpin Han and I are from opposite ends of the planet and yet you see him as being just “as Chinese as” I am. That makes you a racist. Try challenging an American Jew’s stance on Israel by pointing to his ethnicity and see if that’s acceptable.
Racist hypocrisy aside, this thread will be of use to you:
Why aren’t you outraged that Lordy’s source, Frank D.
Can you read? I will say it a third time: I don’t give a s#%& about Frank D. I already pointed to Chinese sources like Yang Jisheng, Chen Yizi, and Yu Xiguang but you keep deflecting by bringing up Frank D. like some hopeless kid with Tourette’s. Let me guess- you’ll ask about Frank D. again and purposely ignore my Chinese sources.
Anyway, feel free to have your last word.
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on Fri 23 Oct 2015 at 14:00:26
gro jo
“Anyway, feel free to have your last word.”
Good, that’s what I wanted all along, your ignominious capitulation! You are racially Chinese, Han maybe? I don’t know or care, but you do because you were the one confessing here how you thought Asian women were ugly to you. Self-hatred is a bitch, projecting your insecurities on me is no way to deal with them. I sincerely hope you grow out of the phase you’re in. I enjoyed our run ins. You write the most fantastic and funny bs, “But knowing you, you’ll more likely link to a photo showing someone farting and call that a “gassing”.” Keep it up, you might have a career writing cheap dumb jokes. I adequately dealt with the Chinese source you provided from the daily beast and gave you my frank impression of his article. I wish you had done me the kindness of reading my source and expressed what you found wanting in his claims. Too bad, we might have had a serious dialog instead of this silly, but enjoyable pissing contest.”
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“What is your point here? Is it to tell me that, as a French person, I cannot speak of racism / be of any relevance in the fight against it because France was once governed by a cynical dictator? Or because, according to you, two centuries ago the French people wanted black people to be slaves? Or even, because you reckon most French citizens are racist morons these days? I fail to understand the logic behind your reasoning. But then it’s quite obvious from what I read that although I wish I did, I still don’t quite reach your level of mastery of the art of rhetoric.”
Jacques, my point isn’t all that hard to grasp, 225 years ago, 1791, Blacks put the world on notice they would no longer endure inhumane treatment. In 1794, that message got through to the leaders of France and they acted on it by decreeing the abolition of slavery. Bravo. I won’t quibble over the fact that, aside from St-Domingue(Haiti) and Guadeloupe, that law had no effect. A positive first step was taken. Once some stability returned, this first step turned out to be the last step in the direction of abolition and racial equality. My point is that when dealing with Whites, it’s wise to pay attention to their deeds rather than their words. I suggested You get the opportunity to demonstrate your non-racist writing, you’ve disappointed so far.
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abagond
Indeed. The same country, the USA, which declared that all men have rights that can’t be taken away allowed chattel slavery. Many of the men who founded the country under those supposed ideals had actually owned slaves. This fact was used by Supreme Court Justice, Judge Taney, to build his argument in the case of Dredd Scott who sued for freedom. The judge said that the learned men who wrote the constitution would have been acting contrary to their own declarations if they had intended for “Negros” to be included under the men who have unalienable rights. Therefore the evidence indicates that you, Dredd Scott, are not a man to whom this applies by law.
As gro jo suggested above, you’ll be easily mislead if you only pay attention to words and not actions. Another example is the characterization of “Christianization” as noble act of salvation while they flagrantly violated the supposed ideals of the religion by their actions. This is the “rhetorical ethic” at work. It being, “a statement of value or of ‘moral’ behavior that has no meaning within the culture” It is intended for export to those outside in order to encourage naive interaction. Many cultures actually had values that encouraged hospitality and exchange of gifts which they genuinely lived by. These fell easily to the Europeans who were only pretending; they were intending to plunder all along as their own historical records indicate. Liberté, égalité, fraternité? Prove it.
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I suggested You get the opportunity to demonstrate your non-racist writing, you’ve disappointed so far.
Did you get any gut laughs out of it?
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there’s nothing to laugh at or praise. Jacquot decided to do a gavotte (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKOXVE_pskA) rather than deal with the task. I expect him to go in full whirling drevish mode soon to get out of demonstrating his ‘superior’ writing. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2POyCVvEoQ)
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@ Lord of Mirkwood
One can be oppressed by the British and still be massively racist. One well-known case of that are White Americans – who practised Black slavery and Native American genocide.
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@ Lord of Mirkwood
You show an appalling lack of empathy for Black people:
1. I point out that the French worked Black people to death, you say the French are not “perfect”. Yeah, Hitler was not perfect either.
2. The effect of Quebecois blackface on Black Canadians has been brought up at least twice, yet you seem to brush that aside. An actual Black Canadian is on this very thread, but you dismiss that too. The right of Quebecois comedians to thumb their noses at Anglophones is of more importance to you. Two wrongs do not make a right.
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@ Lord of Mirkwood
Yeah, phoney-baloney. The French and all their fine talk of universal liberty, equality, and fraternity and what do they do? Create the second largest White colonial empire in the world. How is that not phoney-baloney? How am I not being a man of reason in saying that?
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@Herneith
Many are disgustingly sanctimonious and want brownie points more than anything else. They’re really using other people’s struggle in a selfish, parasitic way for their own validation. Any movement that becomes infested with too many of these will become consumed with babysitting them and tiptoeing around their feelings.
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“Blackface Is a Black Eye to Canadian Values” by Rachel Décoste
http://m.huffpost.com/ca/entry/3375047
The above article contains numerous links to others, including this one by a self-described “Black Quebecer” writer:
http://m.huffpost.com/ca/entry/3276801
I’m having enough difficulty just posting these links from my phone, so I can’t copy and paste excerpts right now. They are both worth the read.
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@ Lord of Mirkwood
This is why I find it telling:
Numerous times on these threads, you have said Northerners cannot be virulent racists. If one is proven to you to be so, you say the individual must be a neo-Confederate sympathizer.
You identify as a white Northerner, and you cannot stand the idea that a white Northerner can be racist, so you project it all onto white Southerners.
But you admire France and Quebec. They stand in your sympathies near the same height as the North. Therefore when confronted with their racist past and/or present, you excuse, deflect, and derail in much the same way. Now it becomes a narrative of the evil Anglophones and the evil French monarchy to explain it away.
Let’s talk then about French Indochina. Tell me, please, how the French monarchy is to blame for that colonial escapade of racist imperialism.
Perhaps after that, we can discuss why there is such a thing as Francophone Africa.
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Lordy, you write the most fantastic bs. Are you high or just stupid?
BS Number one:
Really? What happened to Dieudonné M’bala M’bala when he turned Annie Cordy’s “Cho Ka Ka O” (Chaud Cacao or Hot Chocolate in English), done in blackface (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIBu6Bf0A58) into “Shoananas”, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PRyQhn5ggs) a portmanteau word combining Shoah and the French word for pineapple? “He has been accused of and convicted for hate speech,[1] advocating terrorism [2] and slander[3] in Belgium and in France.”
and, wait for it, Banned from entering Canada in 2016. Take a look at Michel Leeb’s racist caricature of an African. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_W21vh1Ds0)
BS Number one:BS Number two:
Please take your historical illiteracy somewhere else. Monarchists, Republican and Bonapartists tried and failed to maintain Slavery in St-Domingue and failed. They succeeded in Guadeloupe after they massacred the people.
Conclusion: You’re full of shit.
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@ Lord of Mirkwood
I think any sort of racism in the French-speaking world is fair game on this thread, at least until if and when Jacques returns.
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@Solitaire
I have to say I’m loving your razor sharp dissection of LoM’s gushing pronouncements about the French, Quebecois and Northerners, etc. There is extreme anti-Black, anti-Semitic and anti-First Nations bigotry among those groups.
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New Hampshire was one of the very last states in the North to outlaw slavery. Technically, it didn’t end until the passage of the 13th Amendment.
http://slavenorth.com/newhampshire.htm
Many of the Union troops from New Hampshire were virulently anti-Black. University of New Hampshire senior Nathan Marzoli, a history major from Dover, investigated the attitudes of New Hampshire Civil War soldiers for his senior undergraduate research project, New Hampshire Civil War Soldiers and Slavery. Marzoli noted:
.
http://www.unh.edu/unhtoday/2013/04/student-finds-surprising-views-slavery-among-nh-civil-war-soldiers
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The French are hardcore racists. They merely package their racism and White Supremacist sentiment differently. The Spanish and Portuguese express their racism with numerous racial classifications. The English have the “one drop rule” and notions of “racial purity”. The French like to make high sounding pronouncements about “equality”. Their behavior toward Africans and Arabs belie all of those noble words. We won’t even begin to discuss their ugly behavior during the Algerian War for Independence. Torture, beatings, disappearances, murder and massacres.
In 1961, hundreds of Algerian protestors were murdered by police in Paris. Manu Saadia describes some of the carnage in an article about the massacre:
http://fusion.net/story/233279/1961-paris-massacre/
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In short, Northerners and Francophones are just as White Supremacist as their European and American cousins. Americans have been socialized to worship the French—-their food, fashions and other aspects of their culture. Scratch the surface of their vaunted culture and you find the same racial ugliness in France as you will find anywhere in Europe or America.
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@ Afrofem
Thank you for taking the time to do the research and share from what you found. The 1961 massacre was indeed a low point in French history.
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@ Lord of Mirkwood
I’m not trying to create a toxic environment or to slander your character.
I’m trying to get through to you.
I seem to be failing miserably, however.
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I skip most of Mirkwood’s posts because they make me want to vomit. I think I’m allergic cephalobutt (I wish that was seafood).
But I’m in wholehearted agreement with this gem! I know it means nothing but you certainly have my unreserved support for your sabbattical. It’s certainly nice to be able to remove yourself from “toxic situations” in which youre “made to be what you’re not”. I can definitely empathize with that desire.
Go Irish snowflake! You may hit the ground here but an ocean awaits after melting. There you will find accomodating surroundings of the same substance.
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LOM
Yes, please go elsewhere. Don’t you have your own blog space, not to mention a plethora of young minds, that you can manipulate with false facts, ideas and theories?
No one here is buying/believing your nonsense.
(Wish we could get a 2fer by you taking Kiwi with you!)
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@LoM
I saw on another thread that you were observing a form of radio silence in the comments section of this blog. You are free to continue your silence or choose to engage.
However, I have a few questions to ask you. I promise not to descend into snarky criticism or vulgar put downs. I’m genuinely curious about your answers.
I will only ask one question at a time.
#1 What attracts you to the comments section of this blog?
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@LoM
#2 From your perspective, how do your viewpoint and comments add value to discussions about politics, history and current events on this blog?
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@ Lord of Mirkwood
Your comment is in moderation because it has an email address.
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LoM
My 2 pence worth. Whenever you post your comments, they generally relate to things that matter to you ie Ireland, French Canadians and your dislike of the British. From what I can understand, you don’t even live in these places so this is not your day to day reality!!!!!!! Your dislike of the British is not going to get you shot however, whether or not they like the police, black people are getting shot, even when they put their hands up, just because they are black! No one knows just by looking at you what your heritage is, it is just accepted that you are a white male and that seems to be acceptable in many parts of the world but particularly in the US.
I may be wrong but at times it seems your timing is off, you want to discuss another historic or political when the commenters on this blog are reeling at another injustice that will reverberate around the community.
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My, my, my. Didn’t Jacques give up quickly?
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@villagewriter
Abagond did an informative and somewhat amusing post on the word “cracker”
in 2013.
I grew up in a Southern, Black American household and never knew the origins of the word myself until I read that post.
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This video might explain what happened to him. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqNoUfaf5aM)
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I guess Jacques got scared when we challenged him and ran off.
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@LoM
#3 Do you interact with any Black people (on a first name basis) in your daily life?
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Not that I am in any way referring to a stereotype about French people, not even in a joking manner. Because that would be wrong and Francophobic and might bring on another flood of white men’s tears.
As someone who is part French, I would have to protest against myself for even thinking such horrid biased thoughts.
But, wow, did you see the cloud of dust that French boy left in his rush to run away?
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@ Lord of Mirkwood
You’re not alone. There are a number of Introverts here, including our gracious host:
INFP myself, although on the tests I break almost evenly between F and T.
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@LoM
Thanks for your thoughtful answers.
I won’t presume to tell you how to interact on this forum because you are a grown up. Plus I’m still learning a lot here myself.
I do see a couple of fault lines that may have eluded you so far.
There is a significant age difference between you and most of the commentariat. Older people are very aware of cycles of attitudes and behaviors that are not readily apparent to a person under thirty. That awareness is both a strength and a weakness for people past fifty. We have had time to become extremely cynical.
Many of us come here to relax and for Black people and other non-White people that means some amount of grousing about “the plantation”. The “plantation” is everywhere we encounter White Officialdom: work, school, contacts with government types, the grocery store and restaurants,etc. Most media is also a part of the “plantation” because many Black people are aware of the lack of accuracy and the silencing of our voices in the media. (I can count on one hand, the times I’ve seen accurate portrayals of Black people in any media.)
A lot of White people take it personally, but for Black people releasing their feelings about “the plantation” is healthy and not directed at any individual person. If Black people expressed our true feelings in public, many of us would face severe sanctions: assault, arrest or death. That feeling is heightened in this period of free floating violence in the US.
Since you don’t really socialize with Black people, you may not be aware of those cultural cues and any possible faux pas. I think the concept is called cultural competency.
What has helped me with cultural competency and understanding people from other cultures is:
1. Reading fiction and biographies, autobiographies written by people very different from me. Those works gave me a window into lives, customs and ways of thinking that broadened my perspective. Reading the history of other cultures has also been an eye opener.
2. Performing service oriented projects that allowed me to meet and interact with a variety of people in safe, controlled settings. Humbling and very educational.
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I think you are intelligent, enthusiastic and knowledgeable. I think you have a lot to add to the conversations here and elsewhere. Consider enlarging the scope of your reading (one of your strengths) so that you have a firmer grasp on how others see the world.
One criticism: I have noticed on many blogs and forums that men will always strive to have the last word. Male behavior that eludes my female mind. It’s is not always necessary to have the last word. Sometimes you have to stop while you are ahead. Sometimes you have to have the self control and self confidence to let other people have their say and you move on. This is not real life—–it is an online forum. No one here knows the real you. That can be a good thing.
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@ Afrofem
“I can count on one hand, the times I’ve seen accurate portrayals of Black people in any media.”
Somewhat O/T, but I wonder if you would mind sharing what those were. (I’m assuming I haven’t watched/read most or all, and I’d like to add them to my list of things I need to see/read.)
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But when other people, like Fan…and Herneith, who taunt me – and like to go ad hominem a lot, and like to take a stab at my ethnic background – are involved, I feel like I need to have the last word.
You should be thankful to me for helping you grow some balls. I am trying to make you more manly. I see it’s not working! I’ll refer you to this post so you get my drift Mirkwood!
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@ Solltaire
One film stands out. It was called To Sleep With Anger starring Danny Glover. It was released around 1990. It was set in South Central LA and featured characters whose speech and mannerisms corresponded to real live Black people I’ve met.
http://www.indiewire.com/2014/08/charles-burnetts-other-masterpiece-to-sleep-with-anger-235516/
Ditto for many of the Black characters in the film Mississippi Masala. If I think of more, I will include them later.
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@ Afrofem
Thanks so much for getting back to me. I did actually see “Mississippi Masala” in the theater when it first came out! Good to know that the African American characters were for the most part accurately written and portrayed. That movie was also very rare in that it depicted an interracial relationship that didn’t involve a white person.
I have heard of “To Sleep With Anger” but never did see it. Will definitely put it on my list to watch soon!
Thanks again!
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Hi there! Well, the ‘French boy’ hasn’t quite run away in fear, I’m afraid 😉
It’s only that I have a life outside the internet. You will note that I wasn’t the one deciding to start a thread to begin with, one of the main reason being that I knew I materially wouldn’t be able to keep up with the demand of producing argumented enough answers to commentators on the long run.
This lapsing experience proves quite telling however. Some people here showed themselves under a brighter light, and the fallacy and bias of their reasoning, as well as their level of prejudice and seemingly assumed racism and prejudice, associated with the fact that they clearly have material and intellectual access to a wealth of academic ressources and knowledge will never stop to astonish me. Almost like it’s a consciously irrational choice.
Anyways, I still find the reading interesting and enriching in many regards, and the thread never left the back of my mind. I always promised myself that I would try to clarify a thing or two. I think now is a good time:
1. About the interpretation of my initial comments as revealing that the only cause that seemed to raise my concerns was racism towards ‘white people’:
this is fallacious in the light of my own reasoning that racism is not an ethnically specific issue. I am concerned with the issue of racism, whenever and wherever I see it. I would also object that when I see it in the middle of a blog apparently populated by cultured people accessible to reason, my thinking is that it may be productive and relevant to raise the issue of a few of these people paradoxically using racist arguments. As, maybe, opposed to the relevance of raising the issue of racism whilst coming across a blog of fascist psychopaths unaccessible to reason.
Also, just to let you know, my main concern atm is to try and build a sensible and articulated argument for myself in regards to the recent interdiction of the burkini on some French town’s beaches. My conclusions so far are that, although I reckon there is, in a lot of cases, a political message conveyed by the wearing of the burkini that I strongly disagree with, and that IN SOME CASES this political message could amount to calls to acting against some fundamental principles of the French republic (such as equality of dignity and rights between men and women), I still consider that it is impossible to prove it on the sole basis of the wearing of the piece of clothing. Therefore I consider these bans to be unfair, illegal, effectively quite discriminatory and counterproductive. And I am not the only French person to think that. I hope that these local decisions will be invalidated by the national legislators. That’s for the non-selective indignation.
2. I also wanted to make sure that people don’t think that I dismiss the point that racism against people with ‘black’ skin, and of (mainly apparent) African ascent IS more prevalent than racism against people with ‘white’ skin of (mainly apparent) European ascent, at the very least not in ‘western’ countries. Because I know it is a fact. I never said that the manifestations and consequences of racism were ‘symmetrical’ in this context. I know they’re not. You’ll have noted that I am being slightly provocative in my use of ‘politically correct’ language four sentences ago, but if we are to try and be precise in the way we express things, then let’s do it for real.
Also, on a side historicaI note, I recently found this link, that I thought could be of interest to you guys, regarding the history of imperialism, colonialism and slavery. This is genuine, I wasn’t aware of this part of history before today (obviously it is only a wikipedia article, so I will dig further into that):
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Better with the link;
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_pirates
And sorry in advance to those of you feeling offensed by me publishing of a link meant to share some historical enlightment if they feel they were long and better informed of these maybe well known facts!
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@jacques
To make this short and quick, every post you wrote has been a fallacy so I find it hilarious that you are screaming about everyone responding to you with one. Your most recent one is an ad hominem, just so you can have the actual term for what you are doing. Perhaps in your next post you can present the terms for what you claim others to be doing because so far it looks like a false fallacy call.
Secondly, your post still avoids the very questions that people have been asking you for several posts now. What is it you find racist? Saying something is without explaining is a fallacy as well.
Thirdly your link didn’t enlighten anyone as everyone here knows about the Barbary slave trade that was done by…dum dum dum…Muslims. I know I know it was the closest things most whites could come to blaming blacks.
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Bored Jacques, or did you get out of jail?
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Racism is a product of the complex interaction in a given society of a race-based worldview with prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination. Racism can be present in social actions, practices, or political systems (e.g., apartheid) that support the expression of prejudice or aversion in discriminatory practices. The ideology underlying racist practices often includes the idea that humans can be subdivided into distinct groups that are different in their social behavior and innate capacities and that can be ranked as inferior or superior.
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Yada, yada, yada,zzzzzzzzzzzzz.
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… thats the English wikipedia definition, with which I would tend to agree. On that basis, writing an non-ironic article with the title “How White people think” is a prejudice against a certain category of the human race based on their ethnicity (you, Abagond, and many of you, fellow commenters would most likely use the word race here instead, which I will not). It is a blatantly racist prejudice against, namely, people of caucasian ethnic background, in that by making such generalising statements and suggesting that these statements are valid on the basis of the color of their skin you take away from them any possible consideration of them as individual beings, able to think outside of what is attributed to them by you as their common, fallacious and perverted ideology. I also note that, as stated earlier in my comments, by doing this you seem to create other racist categories of people with inherent qualities based upon their supposed ethnicity.
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Herneith on Thu 25 Aug 2016 at 12:57:54
Bored Jacques, or did you get out of jail?
Thanks for supporting my arguments. That is called an ad hominem attack.
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Earlier repeated statements by some commenters here such as: “Oh, I hate the French, they’re the worst ones” or “Who are you to speak about racism, you dirtpiece French?” or again “The French boy just ran away again”, I won’t insult your intelligence / waste tour time to comment them any further.
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Thirdly your link didn’t enlighten anyone as everyone here knows about the Barbary slave trade that was done by…dum dum dum…Muslims. I know I know it was the closest things most whites could come to blaming blacks.”
I did write a bit of a disclaimer on that one, part of the very same comment. However, it is still interesting to witness YOUR continual, persistent obsession to racialise everything, to talk of blame all the time in this perspective, but I am sad to see some form of acceptance of the ugly theories of racism in your own discourse. Well, at least I should feel grateful that you deemed relevant to write the word ‘most’ before ‘White’, I guess… Can you please enlighten me on how mentionning a historical fact about the muslim empire has anything to do with “putting the blame on the blacks”?
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@Jacques
Not sure what you disclaimer has to do with anything I mentioned. Perhaps you should save the ad hominem attacks and focus on the argument itself. I know it is hard for you, but do try.
I have made very few comments on this thread so how do you get that I “continual, persistent obsession to racialise everything, to talk of blame all the time in this perspective, but I am sad to see some form of acceptance of the ugly theories of racism in your own discourse”? I asked one question of yo that never produced an answer. Another unnecessary ad hominem.
The “historical fact” has no bearing on the subject matter at hand at all. You threw it out on a discussion that is seeking to find out what you find so racist and offensive about this sight. It is in essence a deflection or red herring if you want to talk fallacy. Also it is a historical fact that many white present to claim “blacks held whites as slaves”. It is used in conjunction with “blacks did it too” or “No one wants to talk about blacks holding whites as slave.” Need more?
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@Jacques
“Earlier repeated statements by some commenters here such as: “Oh, I hate the French, they’re the worst ones” or “Who are you to speak about racism, you dirtpiece French?” or again “The French boy just ran away again”, I won’t insult your intelligence / waste tour time to comment them any further.”—How about directly quoting individuals because so far this only shows something you said.
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@jacques
For starters that post focuses on white AMERICANS, so that bumps a great deal of your so called generalizations of the “Caucasian” race.
Secondly Caucasian is usually a term white Americans give to themselves, but does not mean white people, but people of the caucus region.
Thirdly, the article never said all white people, which would indicate that there are whites that it does not apply to. So your argument rests on a fallacious foundation to begin with. Also it is not so much a skin color as a mindset. Which is why he listed some of the things that they think.
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Jacquouille la Fripouille is back after a month long hiatus! Still no rewrite of Abagond in ‘non-racist’ language, just the same old complaints from a month ago! Admit it, you’ve got nothing. I’m forced to conclude that you are, indeed, the clown I suspected you to be.
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Oh, that’s right. France shuts down during August.
Welcome back from your lovely holiday month, Jacques. Doesn’t look like the rest helped you to relax any, considering you’ve still got your knickers in a knot over how oppressed this website makes you feel.
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@gro jo
“I’m forced to conclude that you are, indeed, the clown I suspected you to be.”
LOL!. “Clown” is too kind; self-absorbed poseur is more accurate.
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@ LoM: sorry, only now do I understand your (old) remark about “taking the mick”. Please see this for reference:
http://www.alphadictionary.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=6447
@ a few of you who will reckognise themselves (including Grojo, Abagond and some others): intellectual dishonesty, coupled with ad hominem attacks, and attempts at ridiculing, apart from discrediting yourselves, actually make me wear out a bit, motivationally speaking. I now think I was probably wasting my time when trying to point out to you fallacies and paradoxes of your reasoning that, in the light of you further comments, seem to actually constitute conscious irrational choices on your part. This is becoming sterile. I have other things to do than spending time reading through tens of commentaries to note down every single biased, intellectually dishonest, disrespectful or plain racist occurences (of which there are plenty) to then answer them one by one, especially if the people responsible for these occurences have long ago decided to adopt an irrational standpoint. Keep hating, keep theorizing racism further in order to eradicate it, keep using the very tools of your ennemy. You might get somewhere, but I suspect not anyplace very enjoyable.
As a side note, I have no duty to “reformulate” articles the very titles of which are already blatantly racist; as for the content, lazy as I now feel, I’ll still make the one last effort of quoting the following for further ‘reflection’:
in ‘Whites are still racist’ (…), Abagond writes:
‘about 9% of the American middle-class is black. I am a part of that “missing” 8% so I know where it went and why:
When I got married and wanted to move out of New York, I was shown a dozen or so houses in this one place that was south of some railroad tracks, but only one house to the north of those tracks: a small, strange-shaped house no one wanted. The people north of tracks were no richer than I was – but they were white. South of the tracks, where I was shown so many houses, was where the blacks lived. This is called racial steering.’
> There’s no denying what you call here ‘racial steering’ exists: I would personally call it encouraging the perpetuation of a communautarist system, either out of personal conviction, or simply by (erroneously?) postulating that this is what the members of the said communities will want. And please note that I also think that whatever the reason, this is not a good thing. But Abagond, are you now telling us that you based your decision as to where you to buy a house and live the next years of your life upon the political choices / prejudiced postulates of a local estate agent? Allow me to doubt.
And if you did, question yourself.
You also state:
‘6. There was a drug war in the part of New York where I lived. Not because it was black and poor: in fact, it was largely black and middle-class. But the police had pushed the war there from other parts of the city. They made it crystal clear they did not care about the lives of black people, not even middle-class ones. So Katrina did not surprise me one bit.’
> I can’t wait till you back this up. You really should substantiate such heavy, blanket-statement riddled claims.
‘7. Why is it that when an unarmed man is shot or beaten dozens of times by the police (Sean Bell, Rodney King, Amadou Diallo, etc) he is black, never white?’:
> Factually completely wrong, obviously. And you know it. Does blatantly proving your (ethnically motivated, lived with) bias help your cause? Allow me to doubt.
The problem is, you see, when people dig further about your wild claims, they might well come across this type of article (it took me about 20 seconds to do so):
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/02/08/black-and-unarmed-behind-the-numbers#.3k01PkS0t
And I think it’s a shame. Because I can’t help thinking this woman writing up apparently very coherent articles backed up by figures is ALSO BIASED. She features at Fox News on a regular basis, has been rewarded for her work by a few prominent police-related organizations…. Still, in comparison to what you wrote, she looks to be the more CREDIBLE. Ask yourself. And remember, ethnically motivated, lived with bias may end up amounting to this:
‘Racism is a product of the complex interaction in a given society of a race-based worldview with prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination. Racism can be present in social actions, practices, or political systems (e.g., apartheid) that support the expression of prejudice or aversion in discriminatory practices. The ideology underlying racist practices often includes the idea that humans can be subdivided into distinct groups that are different in their social behavior and innate capacities and that can be ranked as inferior or superior.[1] Racist ideology can become manifest in many aspects of social life. Associated social actions may include xenophobia, otherness, segregation, hierarchical ranking, supremacism, and related social phenomena.’
Also, I mean, don’t you wish your articles would rather have the effect of pointing readers at this kind of research:
?
or this kind of newsreports:
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/fabricated-drug-charges-innocent-people-meet-arrest-quotas-detective-testifies-article-1.963021
?
you later state:
‘Why is it that in a country that is one-eighth black and is world-famous for its black entertainers, only one Oscar in 80 for Best Actress went to a black woman – Halle Berry?’
Whilst factually true, I can’t help noting you are being strangely selective in your reading of the full facts:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_black_Academy_Award_winners_and_nominees
Don’t you see a very clear trend here? Are you placing yourself in 1950 or more towards the 21st century on this timeline?
Further, you say:
‘9. Why is it that in a country where a third of the missing women are black the ones you see on cable news are always white?’
I abund. However inaccurate your wording of it maybe (cf ‘always’), this strong MEDIA BIAS has been a proven, recognised fact for a while, described by a lot of people, and a lot of people, including of ‘caucasian ethnicity’, have raised it as being an problem for society:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389×2354511
– Also see this reaction:
‘Lynch, a young, blonde, white woman, received far more media coverage than Johnson (a black woman and a single mother) and Piestewa (a Hopi from an impoverished background, and also a single mother), with media critics suggesting that the media gave more attention to the woman with whom audiences supposedly more readily identify.[19][20]
Lynch herself leveled harsh criticism at this disproportionate coverage that focused only on her, stating in a congressional testimony before the United States House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform:
“I am still confused as to why they chose to lie and tried to make me a legend when the real heroics of my fellow soldiers that day were, in fact, legendary. People like Lori Piestewa and First Sergeant Dowdy who picked up fellow soldiers in harm’s way. Or people like Patrick Miller and Sergeant Donald Walters who actually fought until the very end. The bottom line is the American people are capable of determining their own ideals of heroes and they don’t need to be told elaborate tales.[21]”
, from: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_white_woman_syndrome
I would describe this phenomenon as a cynical covering bias by the media probably mostly based on commercial considerations. I do think being part of a media comes with specific moral responsabilities and duties such as striving for objectivity and AVOIDING BIAS, showing intellectual honesty, having a moral duty of candour, trying not being too inflamatory or divisive of society, etc.
Oh wait, don’t they say the new media that’s slowly burrying the ‘old one’ is made in a considerable proportion of INTERNET BLOGS?
Finally you make this statement:
‘Yes, blacks are racist too but they do not have the power in American society to do even half the things listed here. And their racism is directed more against themselves than against whites.’
Racist, but… But what? So what? Does it disminish the fallacy of ‘their’ racism? It doesn’t, does it? So why showing here your lack of interest for the issue? Or should there be an official scale of guilt for being racist based on… ‘race’!?
My final point: although that hasn’t shown much in the content of my comments (simply because their point wasn’t to focus on what I agreed with) , I actually probably agree with / find interesting at least 75 percent of what you write in this blog. I will not deny a lot of issues you raise along it. That is precisely why I feel compelled too, and WILL object to the ‘racial’ stance you seem all too obsessed to take on many things, that in the end makes it possible to interpret your own attitude as pro-racist.
Because I am sad to see that even somebody intelligent and cultured like you, seemingly wanting to change society for the better, and putting effort being their words, ends up showing far too much complacency to stances and attitudes (demonstrated by yourself or by long-term commentators of your blog with no apparent moderation on your part) that resemble the very ones they denounce.
All the best in your fight against racism; what gives me hope is to see many adolescent kids joking with each other on the prejudices they’re meant to have against one another. That makes my day.
Jacques
PS: one race.
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Jacquouille la Fripouille is back after a month long hiatus!
I think he was either in jail, rehab, or on vacation. What say you? Discuss everyone; where was Jacque, and who gives a turd?
Thanks for supporting my arguments. That is called an ad hominem attack.
I adore ad hominem attacks! They come in handy when dealing with obtuse, white supremacist bungholes such as yourself. You only wish to bloviate. Given what the French inflicted colonially, and are still benefitting from, you should stfu.
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; self-absorbed poseur is more accurate.
That is too staid. If it wasn’t for the word moderation here, I’m sure there would be numerous things we could call him.
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Jacque, you must have a lot of time on your hands to type such tripe! Either that, or you are a fast typers.
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@Herneith
Amazing he does not have time, but he had time to find all that and then come back to write a long post.
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@jacques
So basically you prove Solitaires point. Your issue is with what he says about whites as he says similar posts along those same lines about others and you don’t seem to take issue with those posts at all.
As to this particular article: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/02/08/black-and-unarmed-behind-the-numbers#.aMpru2nOP
It actually misuses and redefines term meanings to come to a contrived conclusion. Perhaps you should avoid refuting a persons personal experience with confirmation bias.
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Herneith on Fri 26 Aug 2016 at 15:03:37
“; self-absorbed poseur is more accurate.
That is too staid. If it wasn’t for the word moderation here, I’m sure there would be numerous things we could call him.”
– I’m sure you would. That’s integral of my point. Although, the more I dig into this blog, the less sure I am about any attempt from Abagond to live up to his stated moderation policy:
Thokozile Xaba on Fri 25 Oct 2013 at 20:34:28:
‘(…)every living thing on this planet has sighed the sigh of immeasureable suffering being held hostage and our freedoms held in sway by this monstrous race, (…)’
or:
”
Stacks on Fri 25 Oct 2013 at 22:05:57
…And white women ARE ugly”
etc etc.
a few of youse now strike me as torn up fascists and racists desperately trying to wrap pseudo-academic theories around their painful hatred. That reminds me of something 😉
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…Sorry, I should have stated where these quotes were extracted from:
Have a good hate!
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Jacquouille la Fripouille wrote 3518 words but said nothing!
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Jacques For Dummies:
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@ jacques
What is communautarism and how is it different from racism?
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Just a reminder:
From Wed 20 Jul 2016 at 04:53:56:
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@ jacques
Re: https://abagond.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/whites-are-still-racist/
I wrote:
Even though Halle Berry is STILL the only Black woman to win an Oscar for Best Actress eight years later, you found my statement “strangely selective”.
So if you wanted to give an example of Oscar racism back in 2008, what would you have said?
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@ jacques
Sean Bell, etc: It is true that Whites are affected by police brutality too, although at a lower rate. However, in 2008 that was not widely known – because the press was in bed with the police and had little to zero interest in reporting police brutality. Except for Rodney King, all the cases I knew of were in New York and mainly because of protesters.
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@ jacques
By “backing it up” I suppose you mean news articles from a White press that was in bed with the police, that only seem to come to my neighbourhood in a cop car. I know what I saw. Katrina, and all that has come out about the NYPD and other big-city police departments since then, and what I have learned about slave patrols, shows me that I was not at all “imagining” it. If anything, my memory is a better guide than whatever the New York Times was printing back then. I was dead-on about the police’s lack of empathy for Black people, even middle-class ones.
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@ Jacques
You say that I fight racism with racism. So please show an example where I said something racist, say why you think it is racist, and then show how YOU would have said it. This is the key issue, what this whole thread comes down to.
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@abagond
I read an article that stated there was no reporting on cops killing people until 2012, so not sure where his article is getting its information.
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Nevermind the article I speak of is current
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Abagond, quit wasting time on Jacquouille la Fripouille. He can’t help himself, since he is a product of the middle ages. He probably mistakes you for a “Sarrazin” = Saracen.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHA4W3g5Ta4&index=2&list=RDxLxAEogVOCY)
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@ jacques
Concerning this comment you quoted:
‘(…)every living thing on this planet has sighed the sigh of immeasureable suffering being held hostage and our freedoms held in sway by this monstrous race, (…)’
Dude. That’s called venting. Hyperbole, and rather poetic hyperbole at that. Oppressed people vent about the oppressors. It’s one way to keep their mental health intact despite all the unfairness and discrimination they experience.
Also, what you’re calling ad hominem attacks are mostly joking banter. But you’ve proven that you can’t take a joke.
These uptight white males — no sense of humor, I tell you. Overly sensitive, quick to take offense, quick to yell “racism.” Triggered by the mildest playful jokes. It must be so, so hard to be you, jacques. The indignity of it all!
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@ Herneith
“I think he was either in jail, rehab, or on vacation. What say you?”
I think it was a combination of all three! Isn’t that how the best vacations go?
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“I think he was either in jail, rehab, or on vacation. What say you? Discuss everyone; where was Jacque, and who gives a turd?”
Jacquouille la Fripouille wrote: “… And just to make things clear, if I have to get in the street and physically protect people from racist herds (I sometimes think it might happen at some point given the context), I will. Be it White people, Black people, ‘Foreign people’, whatever. I am no hiding promoter of racism.”
My guess is that he spent his summer on the beach of Villeneuve-Loubet, France wearing a burkini and getting arrested and fined for it. I’m assuming that his statement isn’t a lie, of course. If it is the case, then bravo Jacquot!
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37198479
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a few of youse now strike me as torn up fascists and racists desperately trying to wrap pseudo-academic theories around their painful hatred. That reminds me of something 😉
No dear. Gas pains and haemorrhoids are painful. What pseudo-academic theories have I quoted? MAD magazine? I don’t recall doing so, I wouldn’t waste my time or energy. Your just entertaining. If anything, you are a pseudo-jackarse. The fact is, I don’t hate anyone. The opposite of hate is love. In order for me to hate them, I would have had to have loved them at some point. I never did. That is why their white supremacy doesn’t affect me as viscerally as it does others. This is for you Jacques:
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TsRdkrxl4g)
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Alert! What Frenchman uses the word ‘youse’? something aint right here!
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LOL, Thanks for the laughs Herneith/Solitaire.
We must find a way to monetize white tears because it’s the only thing obtained from talking about racism in their presence.
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@ Herneith, Solitaire & Origin
What you said! LOL!
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