To very loosely paraphrase Kermit the Frog, it’s not easy being white.
Here, one worried Redditor, posting in the Tumbler In Action Discussion subreddit (r/TiADiscussion) wonders what horrors will await him and others like him in the future if the dreaded SJWs get their way.
A White Tax?
Don’t be ridiculous. There won’t be any White Tax.
There will be a straight, cis white MALE tax.
BY DWORKIN’S HAMMER, what a tax law!
H/T — r/BestOfOutrageCulture
Charging white people extra for campus bake sales? Anyone who charges Spiritanium extra must know zie’s a shitty person and wants zir to get lost.
Of course there won’t be a White Tax. White people will be executed by the SJW junta, everyone knows that.
Anyone got a can evener I can borrow?
Uh…buddy? You do realize that it isn’t liberals who do “affirmative action bake sales,” right?
You know there’s something awry with a movement when its adherents can’t recognize the satire put out by their own side.
We’re worried they’ll kill us, they’re worried we’ll tax them. And only we have actual reality as a basis for our concerns.
Even if he didn’t intend it, this really serves as a beautiful demonstration of privilege right here.
Talk about first world problems. In the states persons of colour were murdered with impunity and in many ways still are by a white supremacist police force. In Canada the government practiced ethnic cleansing against Aboriginals until the early eighties and actively sterilized the mentally ill until the late seventies.
And this asswipe is concerned about something that exists only in his head?
Well I guess when you have no empathy your thoughts are as good as God’s law and other people are abstract concepts with less rooting in reality than the concept of pie.
does anyone know what “charging what people more for bake sales” is referring to?
Andrew Johnston already touched on it above, he’s probably talking about affirmative action bake sales. Conservative student groups at colleges will sometimes put on a bake sale and charge white people more. It’s supposed to somehow demonstrate that affirmative action is unfair to the poor oppressed white people.
We say “We don’t like bigots,” they hear “We don’t like white people”… Kind of a low opinion they have of white people, there.
TIL: Social justice was invented by tumblr, instead of having been around for decades before David Karp was even conceived by his parents, and tumblr just being a place where like-minded people came together to share and spread ideas over the internet, so information gets out a lot faster and to far more people.
What it must be like to live in the mind of a cishet white dude…
Though, I would maybe suggest to OP that he thinks about why people act “bigoted” towards him. Maybe it’s less about the fact that he’s a cishet white dude and more about the fact that he’s saying shit like this.
“We’re worried they’ll kill us, they’re worried we’ll tax them.”
Well, ‘death and taxes,’ ya know. Though this theory is working off the basis that they’re equivalent, not just inevitable.
There’s a big wage between white people and people of color. Plus, there’s the practice of police going into poor neighborhoods populated by people of color and ticketing for minor infractions like loitering or littering that well off white people usually get away with. So I would argue that there’s already effectively a race based discriminatory tax and it’s not white people suffering it.
@ Tanya Nguyen:
There have been groups on high school and college campuses that have held bake sales to illustrate the wage gap. Because women make around 3/4 of what men make (I’m too lazy to look up the exact number right now), they only have to pay 3/4 of what men have to pay at the bake sale. Some of these bake sales also take the racial pay gap into account.
Congrats on making it to college, spritanium! Maybe you’ll learn something about the real world.
And I do hope that you, personally, will have to pay a White Tax. Just you and all the racists and homophobes and other such assholes.
He’s sure doing a good job convincing me that he doesn’t care.
I wonder where the money from the bake sale went?
When he gets older he’ll probably think it deeply unfair that his higher wages make him eligible for a higher tax bracket.
My attempt at a translation:
“Two or three years ago I first heard the term SJW in the youtube comments. I googled it and found right wing extremist and libertarian message boards and comment sections where the term was being thrown around. The SJW’s were described as “angry teens on Tumblr”. Now, after a few years in this echo chamber, I’ve heard more and more about these SJW’s every day. My fellow commenters on these websites are claiming that SJW’s are taking over government and the world, and I for one believe them. I’ve worked myself into an irrational fear of white people’s rights being taken away, because I haven’t stepped out of this bubble in years. HELP”
dhag85: Well put.
@snorkmaiden
I’ve actually had managers complain to me that they got a raise and it bumped them into a higher tax bracket.
It is, right now, harder to be a straight/white/cis/male/insert-privilege-here than it has ever been. It’s still far and away easier than being anything else, but in truth, those privileges have been shrinking as a natural result of gradual progress toward greater equality.
I think most of us here can concur that this trend is an unequivocal positive for society, but it’s important to consider how human psychology works, and understand why some folks who are not necessarily bigots or assholes might unthinkingly push back against it.
This dude, and other dudes like him, is having stuff taken away from him. He just plain doesn’t GET to behave the way he would have been able to a generation ago. Hell, at the rate of accumulating progress (just think how fast the national opinion on gay marriage reversed), a few mere years ago. Now, the things he used to say in jest are unacceptable rudeness that has consequences. He has to treat people who are different from himself with more consideration, and that takes effort he’s not used to putting forth.
Are these losses in any way significant? Of course not, in comparison to what’s been suffered by minorities of all kinds at the hands of people in his own privileged demographic. But Mr. Dude, here, can’t see from their perspective; that’s just not something people usually do, unless prompted to. Many of beneficiaries of privilege become allies once they understand how other human beings are truly suffering from the status quo. That’s an unavoidable fact–progress simply would not happen if a good number of the people in power weren’t willing to help it happen. Mr. Dude clearly isn’t at that point. An awful lot of them aren’t. A sad lot of them never will be.
He’s losing ground. When that happens to a person, their primitive monkey brain kicks in; they don’t stop to consider whether the privileges being taken away were deserved, or necessary, or had been savagely abused throughout the entirety of history. The base, emotional mind is not that sophisticated; it hangs on “GIMME BACK MY STUFF, DAMMIT!” And because that’s a powerful sensation, people can get stuck there very easily.
This is why social progress is so often generational. Some folks can just never get over the fact that things aren’t as easy for them as they once were, nor should they be, and dig their heels in.
There are, make no mistake, true bigots and assholes everywhere. But I don’t personally believe their numbers are as great as their noise can sometimes make it seem. It may be naive, but just knowing how the human mind works, I think it’s far more probable that the world is filled with people–potential allies, even–who simply don’t yet get it.
Obviously, they need to be stopped when they’re trying to hold back progress, or harm people. But hostility is a useful response only in a very few, very specific cases; more often it just makes them hunker down harder. Some people you just can’t reach and will never manage to… But some you can.
I think it’s worth taking a moment to wonder, at least, if you’re dealing with a true asshole or someone who just doesn’t understand. I can attest from my own experience that when you are in a privileged position in society, the combination of media bias and internal confirmation bias makes it very hard to be reached. All those voices trying to tell you what is truly happening in the world get filtered out as so much white noise. It takes an exceptional circumstance, or exceptional effort by someone else, to pierce that fog and get a person to start really thinking about how easy they have it, and how hard other people do. That’s not because people are stupid, or evil-minded, it’s simply a weakness wired into our psychology that must be taken into account by those who want to see change in the world.
It’s amazing how many folks are willing to help, though, once they do get it.
Damn that loosely organized planetwide conspiracy created by completely ineffectual powerless tyrannical overlords!
What’s hilarious is, the only people charging white people extra at college bake sales are libertarian d-bags trying to make a point about affirmative action. Now, “social justice warriors” are being blamed for the stunts done in opposition to them.
They do realize that ‘SJWs’ aren’t leaking into universities, they’re leaking *out* of them, right? If they knew anything about sociology or psychology, they’d know that what ‘SJWs’ advocate is generally stuff you learn in 101 or 102 in their respective courses.
I don’t necessarily want a “white tax”, but can we have a “this guy in particular tax?” Like we tax this guy extra for everything?
I am definitely not regretting getting the chrome plugin that changes “SJW” into “Necromancer”. (It’s usually ‘skeleton’ but I find it funnier this way.)