chromepaxos
Full Member
- Joined
- Jul 29, 2015
- Messages
- 192
I don't think we are far apart on this, and I take all your points. Re the "if it happens one time..." thing, of course you're right, I was just trying to keep the thought experiment simple. And re your example of homelessness, again my qualifier is that to be complicit, you need to participate, i.e. benefit. I'm not sure if anyone benefits from homelessness.If you are going to play the analogy game, you'll have to come up with a better one than that, but OK I'll play along.
"If that happens one time and you do nothing, you're a good person and I wouldn't describe you as being complicit" - this is completely morally wrong, you are literally advocating walking on by. If I witnessed the incident then I'd speak to the police to tell them what I saw. If I didn't then I would not describe myself as a good person at all. Anyway its a poor analogy and not relevant.
The point I'm trying to make is that whilst my belief is that racism is bad and should be eradicated wherever it is found, its not so important to me that I will proactively go out and spend my time and energy trying to alter things. I'm a white bloke btw, so obviously this doesn't have a big impact in my life (you may argue its had a positive effect due to white privilege) and I fully appreciate that the situation may well be different if I was black. If a situation arises where I feel obliged to do something (I see someone being abused in the street or I become aware of something at work etc) then I will step in, because its right there in my face and its the right thing to do.
I head the charity committee in my office and spend lots of my own time organising charitable activities and events for 250 colleagues. We do plenty of good things for various local charities and that is where I do my "proactively trying to make the world a better place" stuff. For me personally that is enough.
Am guessing obviously, but I'd say quite a large percentage of people fall into a similar category to me. As I said originally, there are way too many issues for everyone to be personally involved in all of them, you pick the ones that are most important to you. What are you doing to help eradicate homelessness for example? By your definition, you are complicit in perpetuating the situation because it is within your power to do something (let a homeless person share your house/flat) but you don't.
So, you're right that we can't do everything all the time to make everything right. But not everything is built into society the way that racism and historically racist policies are. Black people as a community have suffered from housing/job/incarceration/drug policy inequities for a hundred years and more, and the opportunities and wealth denied to them were appropriated largely by the white community (I'm a white guy and it makes me uncomfortable to write this, but it is the truth of our history). Look at the figures for household wealth that compare the black community and the white community - the difference, in both the UK and the US, is startling. Unless someone wants to go down some IQ/race-based science black hole to explain these differences, I'm not sure what else does other than...long-term, structural racism.
As white guy then, living in those societies, I've profited off those policies my whole life. Did I choose to? Did I make a decision against black folk? Did I conspire with anyone? No. But have I participated in the society that maintained those systems? That kept locking up black kids for dealing marijuana even as it is now being legalized across America because white people want to take it for their aches and pains? Yes, I have.
Here's the thing. Accepting that we are complicit doesn't mean we are evil, or even bad. And it especially doesn't mean, to address a particularly silly comment from @Bola, that simply being aware of it means we are beating ourselves up over it. It just means we should feel obligated to do...something. Voting for the right politician, challenging the racist a-hole in the pub, making an argument on a football forum...you know, something. And, don't be the person that claims they don't see colour while criticizing everyone trying to actually do something.
Again, why is it so hard for us to just accept that we benefited from screwing over a bunch of people for a long time and so we have a responsibility to try and do something about it?
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