Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, the locals are pig-biting mad about racism. Are they organizing vigils for murdered black teen Trayvon Martin? Are they challenging the Hunger Games fans who are sending out racist tweets complaining about the character “Rue” being played by a black actress?
Nope. They are doing something much, much braver. They are taking on a white dude for mocking other white dudes who are convinced they are the truly oppressed.
Over on the Boston Magazine web site, blogger Barry Nolan sets forth this truly hateful argument:
I have been a white male all my life and to tell you the truth, I have found it to be a pretty sweet deal. … Wherever you look and by almost any metric, any statistic, it works out to be a pretty sweet deal to start out life as a white male. …
So I cannot, for the life of me, understand why so many white men like me can be found whining about how tough it is to be a white man. It’s a mystery to me how they came to feel so beset on every side by feminists, minorities, and “the system.” When in fact, the system is so stacked in our favor, it’s almost embarrassing.
On the Men’s Rights subreddit a post blasting Nolan as a “racist idiot” now boasts 90 upvotes. In the comments, the brave antiracists set poor Nolan straight on a thing or two. To Ellwood78, it’s just a big coincidence that most of the powerful figures in the US happen to be white dudes:
NoNoJCM, meanwhile, reports on his own bitter experience as one of the oppressed:
Irrel_M is apparently a Stephen Colbert fan who isn’t in on the joke:
To paraphrase Sojourner Truth, “ain’t I a white dude?”
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Note: This post incorporates some
I’m still not keen on the casting for the main character (too pale and baby-faced compared to what I imagined) but I’ll have to see how she does in the actual movie.
RE: indifferentsky
How many people were described white or purple?
Because at least in my local society, people assume default white unless stated otherwise. Annoying as hell, especially when writing a story where everyone in that society isn’t and so only see it as worth commenting on if someone IS white.
White guys should jus shut up and buy into the feminist narrative, with its “partriarchy” and “privilege.” I love all the nashing of teeth from a bunch of privileged white women on manboobz. The irony is hilarious.
The usual Inigo Montoya quote doesn’t quite cut it for Mags, so here’s a new version:
“You keep using words. I do not think any of them mean what you think they mean.”
@Crum:
It’s Kyle. He figured out my personal email somehow and sent me a message reading “why are you stalking my coworker and friend?”
Totally not creeped out and anxious right now.
Errrm, you do realise that the guy that posted that to r/MensRights is in fact black and he’s not exactly calling the author of that Bostonian Daily piece a racist against white men? Right?
His objection seems to be that not only is this piece erasing the black men within the MRA movement, it’s actually harming them by dismissing issues that disproportionately affect black men as a bunch of privileged whining by white guys who don’t have it so bad really.
I’d actually go a bit further and say that this is, at its core, basically playing into the same old divide-and-conquer tactics designed to prevent lower class people of different races discovering their common experiences of oppression and rising up against the oppressor class. By insisting that poor white men are somehow privileged over poor black men because they share a skin colour and gender with the rich and powerful – even though they stand about a whelk’s chance in a supernova of ever actually becoming either rich or powerful – he gives each a reason to distrust and resent the other.
Oh, and it’s “gnashing,” the “gnashing of teeth from a bunch of privileged white women.”
/Grammarjerk
Uh, white men are privileged over black men. They don’t deal with bullshit on race. It may suck to be poor, but it sucks harder to be poor and black. Welcome to Kyriarchy, concern troll.
That’s all the MRM at large actually cares about though. They’ll mention the problems of black or hispanic people (not just men, however much they pretend it is so) only long enough to use them as a cudgel against their enemies, not enough to actually do anything about it or to stop themselves from propogating it. Trans people and gay people get the same damn ‘deal’ from MRAs.
And no, it is not automatically ‘divide and conquer’ to point out that a white woman has race privilege over me as a hispanic woman, that I have neurotypical or class privilege over a poor white woman, or that a straight, poor person still has heteroprivileges over say, a rich gay person (Who will in turn have class privilege over the poor hetero). It can be used as such, sure, but it isn’t automatically such.
@shadow
nah i didn’t think you said that. like looking back that was clearly blockquote fail, but i thought the whole thing was something you’d pulled from a comment on that piece.
And menofvoice, the alleged black MRA who posted the link on Reddit, has deleted his account.
Kyle’s blog also disappeared at around the same time menofvoice became [deleted] and someone self-identifying as Kyle sent me harassing email.
Yo, don’t do that just because he’s a jackass.
Wait, missed Cotton Pony Wrangler’s posts, never mind.
Also, Travis Taylor makes me just think of “Travis Touchdown” for some odd reason.
I’m going to borrow Slacktivist’s it’s-more-complicated-than-that stamp. For crash tests involving cars before September 2010, the Hybrid III was the standard model for crash test dummies. That ‘family’ included two adult males, one adult female, and two non-gendered children, an infant and a toddler. The female model results are different from the male ones because the adult female model is designed to represent the 5th percentile*, while the male models are designed to represent the 50th percentile and the 95th percentile. That said, the 50th percentile male could be replaced with a female, but it’s impractical to use both since they would be so similar.
*’percentile’ here is referring to, AFAIK, USian demographics from the late 70s. They might not reflect the population now, but keeping a standard is more important than keeping up with changes in demographics over the past three or four decades.
Travis Taylor made six touchdowns for the Ravens in 2002, a year when he caught 61 passes for 869 yards.
In 2007, Travis got caught up in the “Minnesota Vikings Boat Party Scandal,” when players were alleged to have performed “masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, woman on man, woman on woman, man on man, toys, double penetration, middle of the floor, middle of the couches, middle of the room” in front of the crew members of a party boat.
I’m guessing this is a different Travis.
Afraid so. The self involved jackass who embarks on a quest to become the world’s number 1 killer, all so that he can sleep with a hot chick (Well, 70% that, 30% being the best at something) from No More Heroes.
@Sharculese
Aaaah, makes sense.
@makomk
So what you’re saying is: poor white folk are willing to band together with poor POC, as long as the POC shut up about any inequalities that they face that White folk don’t, for the crime of not being White.
Well I’m happy to tell you that this is not actually true, and that if it were true then most POC would be happy to tell you that we are not your slaves, here to fight injustices that YOU face, while ignoring/suffering in silence the ones that we do.
@Rutee
I have to admit, that was the weirdest, yet funniest, quest for glory I’ve ever been on
Makomk, I hate to tell you this, but as a poor white woman, I still got way more privilege than a black woman. Starting with the fact that I’m pretty much invisible as opposed to being assumed up to no good. Yes, poor people have a lot in common, and would likely feel more comfortable with people of the same class as opposed to mixing with “the higher up”.
I know that certain concerns that any single poor mother has is something to bind us together. But I don’t have to teach my kids to be wary of the cops, or how to handle racism directed explicitly against them. Or any nomber of other important issues.
I should note that people of the same class but different race will likely understand and empathize with each other better once race and steroetypes are put aside.
This is so damnably simple I don’t see why people don’t get it. Society elevates arbitrary* groups over other groups, considering these elevated (privileged) groups to be made up of superior people, be it in terms of “moral fiber”, intelligence, ability, physical attractiveness, stick-to-it-iveness, or whatever else. We then reward members of the privileged groups for these perceived superior traits. Often, this reward further entrenches their power. A working-class white person, for example, might be more likely to get a promotion than a POC in in a similar job, because the white person is perceived to be more reliable based on cultural assumptions about white people and POC. Promotions mean more wealth, which is another source of privilege. And so it continues, as long as nobody speaks out about it.
Here’s the thing, though; almost nobody belongs to every single privileged group in society, which means almost everybody is arbitrarily disadvantaged. This sucks. In addition, almost everybody belongs to at least one privileged group, which means almost everybody wields power over others for no damn reason. This also sucks. Both of these taken together mean that two individuals might be privileged each over the other in different ways. However, the one individual’s privilege does not magically “cancel out” the other individual’s privilege, because we’re human beings, not fucking math problems. It is more complex than that. The privileges associated with one group are not the privileges associated with another.
Finally, these privileges interact with each other in complex ways. For example, I am a white woman with an upper-middle class background, who also has a mental illness. I am therefore considered less valuable to society than someone who is mentally healthy. However, the way my illness is perceived by others is very different than the way the same illness would be perceived in a poor WOC. What is, in me, a treatable and unfortunate condition, is more likely to be thought of as an excuse for laziness and a personal failing in someone less privileged.
There. There you go. I laid it right the fuck out (as best I understand it — no doubt there’s a lot of nuance that I missed). Stop being jerks about it now.
*Arbitrary, as in these groups are not inherently superior to other groups. How they managed to grab power in the first place is not arbitrary.
Rutee Katreya:
Well, yes. See also the part in my comment where I actually said that. There’s a world of difference between “being poor sucks harder when you’re black” and “white men have no right to complain about being oppressed because they belong to the same gender and race as most of the rich and powerful, even when they have essentially no chance of actually becoming rich and powerful due to class as a system of oppression”.
Shadow:
Errrm, no, and I should also note that Barry Nolan looks pretty damn white to me. What I am saying is that the idea that poor white folk don’t get to count as oppressed at all because poor black folk are so much worse off is pretty much guranteed to prevent the two groups from banding together on any sort of shared platform against class-based oppression, even if that platform does take racism and white privilege into account too. (It doesn’t have to stop poor white folk from banding together with poor POC, it just makes the white folk Heroic Privileged Rescuers who must put aside their own interests in order to do so because otherwise they’d be oppressing the POC and displaying privilege. This is probably a Really Bad Idea thanks to the other part of divide-and-conquer – right wing dogwhistle politics aimed at convincing poor whites their poverty should be blamed on POC.)
@2-D Man(gina): the article also says on one of the later pages that the smaller-than-average-female test dummy has to be included because there have previously been problems with car airbags seriously injuring women who are smaller than average. Also, the reason the average male dummy is male is because men drive more and are therefore more likely to get into car crashes.
Makomk, the only person here that’s saying poor white folk don’t count as oppressed is you.
I never heard anyone tell me how good I got it when the only person eating in my house was my daughter….
White men can’t complain about being oppressed on grounds of being white or men, you illiterate asshat. White and male are majority groups. And yes, sharing a gender and a race with the most powerful still fucking helps them even without the ability to join their number; it means they get paid more than someone of similar class but different gender or race, that they are taken more seriously, and more readily hired.
None of this means that social class isn’t a form of oppression. But neither white, nor male, is an oppressed class (note to self – possibly find other term for income privilege), however much MRAs insist it is so.