I was really prepared to hate her based on that video.
She has said absolutely nothing wrong.
New York Times stands by 'racist tweets' reporter
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She has said absolutely nothing wrong.
In the clip she is making sweeping generalisation that "things suck" because of one particular group of people, in this case "white men", the same group she has repeatedly target for sexist and racist abuse on twitter.
The point is not whether she is being an offensive bigot or not, that's not even a question, she and her employers openly admit that she is. It's that she kept her job by insisting she doesn't really believe in her statements and only expressed them on twitter as "counter-trolling".
It's true that was a short clip. I looked for a longer one and couldn't find it. If there is a full version that shows she is responding to someone telling her that "things suck" because of "Asian women" then I owe her an apology
The point is not whether she is being an offensive bigot or not, that's not even a question, she and her employers openly admit that she is. It's that she kept her job by insisting she doesn't really believe in her statements and only expressed them on twitter as "counter-trolling".
It's true that was a short clip. I looked for a longer one and couldn't find it. If there is a full version that shows she is responding to someone telling her that "things suck" because of "Asian women" then I owe her an apology
It really is alarming that she wasn't fired and that several other large media outlets have tried to paint those complaining about it as neo-Nazi trolls. I'm honestly quite uneasy about this trend of white people being told to simply suck it up when insulted and undermined by people of other groups.
And inevitably, even my saying of the above will make people reading this think "oh boo hoo, it must be so hard being a poor straight white male" etc. Not surprising at all that the left is hemorrhaging support to the point where the Dems/Labour can't manage to defeat such woefully inept and unlikeable opponents as Trump and May.
And inevitably, even my saying of the above will make people reading this think "oh boo hoo, it must be so hard being a poor straight white male" etc. Not surprising at all that the left is hemorrhaging support to the point where the Dems/Labour can't manage to defeat such woefully inept and unlikeable opponents as Trump and May.
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The problem with the video clip is that it's a incredibly stupid and simply analysis of global capitalism.
It's true, although overly simplistic.In the clip she is making sweeping generalisation that "things suck" because of one particular group of people, in this case "white men", the same group she has repeatedly target for sexist and racist abuse on twitter.
The point is not whether she is being an offensive bigot or not, that's not even a question, she and her employers openly admit that she is. It's that she kept her job by insisting she doesn't really believe in her statements and only expressed them on twitter as "counter-trolling".
It's true that was a short clip. I looked for a longer one and couldn't find it. If there is a full version that shows she is responding to someone telling her that "things suck" because of "Asian women" then I owe her an apology
Which we don't know if it was the subject she was talking about. It's hard to argue against the fact that most of our current political, economical and social constructs as well as the plights of post-colonial 3rd world countries in Africa/Asia/ME are the products of a bunch of white men (which in no way implies that they are unique in this regard).
Yeah I guess although she did say everything in the world. It's not that I disagree with her that much because it's mostly true, my frustration is that 1)it's such as lazy argument that doesn't do anyone any good other than pissing people off 2)Doesn't talk about racism as social & economic system and plays into the liberal ideas of well the system is fine the problem is the individuals etc..
I don't what to be to harsh but it's a talk at Harvard just read a bit of marx before you go on stage.
Harvard hired Ali G for their class address, you are putting too much stocks on reputation here.
I went to their equivalence in Oz and there are tons of dodgy, actually paid speakers who are invited on campus, so I'm not going to hold it against a hippy kid for doing the same in front of (again, we have to assume) a bunch of her peers.
To properly contextualize - Jeong was doing a Q&A at the end of a one hour lecture about her book "The Internet of Garbage" that deals with online harassment.In the clip she is making sweeping generalisation that "things suck" because of one particular group of people, in this case "white men", the same group she has repeatedly target for sexist and racist abuse on twitter.
The point is not whether she is being an offensive bigot or not, that's not even a question, she and her employers openly admit that she is. It's that she kept her job by insisting she doesn't really believe in her statements and only expressed them on twitter as "counter-trolling".
It's true that was a short clip. I looked for a longer one and couldn't find it. If there is a full version that shows she is responding to someone telling her that "things suck" because of "Asian women" then I owe her an apology
During the Q&A, a female audience member who identified herself as a developer, commented that as a female web user/developer, she felt as though tech was largely a male driven field and asked Jeong whether she felt equal representation in the tech sector may be a solution to designing better interfaces or uses of the internet to better accommodate female psychology. The audience member said she also studies urban development and has learned that it too is largely a product of masculine psychology and that more representation by women in the tech and design sectors would create a situation where women feel like they can participate more.
Joeng's answer was that she agreed 100% that more female engineers, CEOs, venture capitalists, more women on boards of directors were needed.
This leads directly into Jeong's comment in the below video where she basically talks about the idea that its not just largely male driven, but more specifically white male driven, which can be problematic given that tech is largely being driven by one demographic that at a global level is in the minority.
Jeong's comment about "this is why so many things suck" is therefore not an attack on whites (imo) but rather an acknowledgement that there are imbalances in the system that can easily be corrected with greater female participation.
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Didn't Cohen go to Oxbridge?
Cohen the person compared to Ali G the comedy act are two different entities though.
Robin Williams doing an acceptance speech is obviously different from Mrs. Doubtfire showing up, for instance. If Harvard can be adventurous in such an event it’s hardly a big deal for a young tech journalist not to delve into the complexities of our social power dynamics.
Ah I see what you mean; that is a good point.
"When all you're accustomed to is privilege, equality feels like oppression"
etc, etc.
If history ever stops getting written by the victors (white men) then it's not really gonna look to kindly on us for all the shit we've pulled with virtually every other demographic so that we can remain on top of the pile.
etc, etc.
If history ever stops getting written by the victors (white men) then it's not really gonna look to kindly on us for all the shit we've pulled with virtually every other demographic so that we can remain on top of the pile.
Who is we ?
As a white male, I was speaking for white males. We suck.
Having said that, given we (hunans) are tribal creatures, who’s to say any other demographic wouldn’t have done the same if they were the dominant, powerful ones? We suck.
They quite literally have done, are doing, and will continue to do. All over the world.
Humans suck. White males suck just as much as everyone else.
Ah fair enough then.
That's just it. All people suck. White people have simply been the most successful at being cnuts. That's also the reason that saying bad things about white people causes less outrage. Historical context is everything.
I don't think I've ever oppressed any demographic.Is it possible to say that what white people have done in the past is terrible but I feel absolutely zero guilt towards it?
It is possible to say that what some (even "many" if you would prefer that term here) white people have done in the past is terrible. It is also possible to say that what people of any other race have done to each other/other races in the past is terrible. (e.g. Rwandan genocide, Imperial Japan, Arab slave trade)
Is it possible to say that what white people have done in the past is terrible but I feel absolutely zero guilt towards it?
I do agree with your general point though. Any race of people should not be held accountable whatsoever for what their ancestors or people that had same skin color had done in the past.
I think the point is that if you're not actively trying to combat institutional racism you're part of the problem and to blame for keeping in line with the status quo.
Is it possible to say that what white people have done in the past is terrible but I feel absolutely zero guilt towards it?
That being said I don't feel the white guilt either. I sympathize, but I don't walk around feeling guilty for the white man's transgressions.
Certainly is possible, you've got your own perspective on things unique to you after all.
Is it possible to say that what white people have done in the past is terrible but I feel absolutely zero guilt towards it?
White males have dominated the world above everyone else probably since we started recording history and have done an awful lot of shit to every other demographic in that time. Certainly as a global point of view and definitely in the western world, they still hold all the money, all the power, all the resources and control everyone elses lives from their health to their social mobility and they control discourse too thanks to owning all the media and being in all the governmental positions.
We've done a lot as a society to get equality for other demographics in certain areas but it's still within a safety net of control for white males and the hilarity of people saying it's double standards and only white males are allowed criticised just smacks of the equality feels like oppression quote and feels like a persecution complex. Perhaps white males deserve to be the punching bag for a while because they've had it so good for so long as the expense of everyone else.
This is only really the case in the last two to three centuries.
European colonialism started in the 14th century didn't it? On the back of the Ottoman empire - if the Ottomans count then you're going back as far as the 13th century.
I wouldn’t personally count the Ottomans as ‘white’, which is not really about the color of skin but about one of the ways in which the Europeans distinguished themselves as superior to those they conquered (the other primary means was through their Christianity). The Ottomans simply didn’t think in those racial terms, at least not until they consciously attempted to model themselves on the Europeans in the late 19th century.
Hard to say exactly when the European colonial age began, but they certainly didn’t come to “dominate the world” until sometime over the course of the eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries. The Ottomans for example were laying siege to Vienna as late as 1683, a time when the European presence in Asia and Africa was mostly limited to a few ports and the seas. And China held out against European encroachment until the mid-19th century, by which stage the process was certainly complete.
Well, of course they didn't use their whiteness as a means for their colonialism - but they were still white while they colonised. Were they not?
Regardless of when they dominated doesn't mean much when you've got over 600 years of pillaging and razing other countries in the attempt to rule the world and assert your alleged superiority.
Ottomans were Turks originally from central Asia and of the mongoloid race. The emperors usually took Christian wives from white parts of their empire, but they're not an inherently white empire at all. They do not at all fall under the name of European colonialism imo.
They weren't "racist" in their slavery either, they took slaves from Africa and eastern Europe all the same.
Honestly I’m unsure how ‘Turks’ (who originally hail from inner Asia) are racially classified by those seeking to apply modern-day racial categories to a historical context in which they were irrelevant or simply did not exist. As a historian that’s exactly the type of pitfall I’m trained to guard against. The ruling class was racially mixed, but what was important to them was that they were Muslim (of the Sunni type). The empire was extremely racially diverse at it height and in theory any Sunni Muslim subject of whatever race could rise to the very top of the hierarchy.
As for the chronology, I was simply responding to @matherto’s assertion that white domination has always been the way of things.
The idea of 'European colonialism' is not really a valid one when you're going that far back. We're beginning, by the mid-fourteenth century, to see something like a homogenous culture that we can identify as European, but Europe is still colonising itself, so to speak, at the point. While we see the genesis of activities that would come to typify early-modern and modern colonialism medieval colonialism looks very different.
Rob Bartlett's, The Making of Europe is a shortish book which is well worth a read on this topic.
One caveat here - there is a growing debate among Ottomanists about the ways in which the empire began to model itself on and reflect European colonial forms of dominance following the reforms of the mid-19th century, to the extent that the dominant position appears to be that by the turn of the 19/20 century it could be considered a colonial empire in regards to its rule in Libya, Yemen and other peripheral areas such as the deserts of southern Syria.
This might well be true, I have to admit I'm not exactly an expert on the later Ottoman empire (or the early one for that matter), but the biggest difference is their religion isn't it? The white Christian man is quite a central figure when talking about colonialism and that's not something associated with the Ottomans.
Yeah I wasn't sure about the ethnicity of the Ottomans which I admitted to.
Which is a good point, but my point remains around the Brits, Spanish, French etc history of colonialism.
So of course @matherto's point that white domination has always been the way of things isn't accurate - but i'm sure everybody realised he was being hyperbolic?
I'm always open to reading more on this topic, but what is it that you're trying to say? Europeans weren't largely white in the 1400's?
As far as I know Europeans invented the concept of race to begin with as part of distinguishing themselves.
The argument goes that in attempting to save their empire from the domination of the Europeans, the Ottomans attempted to reform along European lines, and in doing so came to adopt many of the same paternalising attitudes with respect to their subjects; they developed a civilizing mission, a kind of Ottoman ‘white man’s burden’ (though without the explicit racial undertones) especially with regard to the nomadic tribes of Libya and the Syrian deserts, and the Yemeni mountain-folk, despite the fact that these were also Muslim. The reason we don’t really associate the Ottomans with European colonialism is because this was only a brief period in their history confined to a few peripheral regions while the empire was already under the European thumb; and because research into it has only recently started. If you’re interested here’s a good article on this topic, you might need an academia.edu account to access it though -
"They Live in a State of Nomadism and Savagery": The Late Ottoman Empire and the Post-Colonial Debate”
Pretending to be a history professor at the University of Chester allowed me to download the pdf
Will read later, thanks.
This really bugs me, and it's not just you who has said it or alluded to it in this thread.
I can totally understand the rationale that it's revenge but that is just a short sighted solution. So "white people" have oppressors for 600 years...should they now become the oppressed for 600 years to even things out? This whole shit that you are grouping "white people" with is tiresome. You ever owned a slave? I've never owned a slave? I treat everyone equally stop throwing me into that shit with your
"As a white male, I was speaking for white males. We suck."
Unfair as it may seem, the only way to move forward and reach equality is by leaving the past in the past and treat everyone equal from now on. Affirmative action stems from the best intentions, but it only polarizes things further.
Would it be justice to put PoC on top for the next 2 centuries and reverse the roles? Hell yes! Would it be the way to complete equality? No fecking way.
Can't see how that could possibly be true. If racial inequality is itself unjust then surely that should hold true for all forms of it.
This is all great in principle, and no you shouldn't walk around with guilt for things that happened in history.
But conversely, what things do you do today that actively help stop racism?
I meant justice in a revenge type of way. Definitely not the way to go forward.
I think it could have been expressed better, but yes, I get what he was trying to say. The actual period of White European dominance has been relatively brief (my admittedly pedantic initial point/correction). But I think it's definitely fair to say that it has had a global impact that is unparalleled in human history, and that the imposition of race-based hierarchical categories on societies previously organized along more traditional hierarchical lines has been and continues to be one of the major pernicious consequences of that impact. No argument from me there. I understand racism primarily as a product of modernity, as shaped to a large degree by the dominance of white Europeans.