"The Problem Of Blackness"

[H10]

Just now, bcsapper said:

It's not been an interest of mine, and I don't see it becoming one anytime soon.

What if the experts have found the purpose was for creating the problem and that as such, whiteness is the problem?

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, hernanday said:

What if the experts have found the purpose was for creating the problem and that as such, whiteness is the problem?

I would trust my own judgement, as I always do.  If experts can't quote the maths, I'm not sure I trust them.

[H10]

2 minutes ago, bcsapper said:

I would trust my own judgement, as I always do.  If experts can't quote the maths, I'm not sure I trust them.

So should all of society just suspend experts, evidence, facts and trust your judgement?

[Guest]

8 minutes ago, hernanday said:

So should all of society just suspend experts, evidence, facts and trust your judgement?

I don't require anyone else to do anything.

When it comes to things like Political Science, Social Studies and the Humanities, there are no experts.  There are only people one agrees with, who are often confused with experts, and people one doesn't agree with, who are often confused with idiots.

[betsy]

5 hours ago, dialamah said:

Why would I excuse myself from trying to do better because those people are worse?   

 

You shouldn't. 

 

  It depends on one's perspective.  Usually, our perspectives are colored by how we feel about our own selves.

Like, instead of feeling sorry for ourselves, and getting all twisted up with resentment over things we can't change - like the family we're born into, or the color of our skin -   we should try to rise above all that, and get on with living our lives, and making the best of what we are.

 

If life gave you lemons - make lemonade!

 

 

Edited December 26, 2016 by betsy

[betsy]

 

Quote

 

14 hours ago, Moonlight Graham said:

Agree.  There's no "black" culture either.  What do black people in Zimbabwe have in common culturally with ie: African-Americans who whose family have lived there for centuries?

There's no culture based on the colour of one's skin.

 

 

Black culture in the US doesn't have to be based on the culture of African blacks.   Yes, American blacks have their own black culture.  It is distinct.  Look at Hip-hop as an example.

Edited December 26, 2016 by betsy

[betsy]

3 hours ago, Smallc said:

No, not really.

 Yes, there is.

[Michael Hardner]

9 minutes ago, bcsapper said:

 When it comes to things like Political Science, Social Studies and the Humanities, there are no experts.  There are only people one agrees with, who are often confused with experts, and people one doesn't agree with, who are often confused with idiots.

There is no such thing as an expert in the humanities ?  What about history ?  That opinion really invalidates education and makes peasants of all of us.  Of course the political elites believe there are such experts and they pay good money to use them.

[betsy]

2 hours ago, hernanday said:

Professors in academia who study race and culture.

 

 

oooohh.  "Academia".....like as if the word is something to be uttered in reverence.   

 

In today's world, a lot of professors in this so-called academia had dabbled to interpret their own studies to suit their ideology.  

 

Quote

 

Criticisms

 

Writer David Horowitz draws a distinction between whiteness studies and other analogous disciplines. "Black studies celebrates blackness, Chicano studies celebrates Chicanos, women's studies celebrates women, and white studies attacks white people as evil."^[40] Dagmar R. Myslinska, an Adjunct Associate Professor of Law at Fordham University, argues that whiteness studies overlooks the heterogeneity of whites' experience, be it due to class, immigrant status,^[41] or geographical location.^[42]

Barbara Kay, a columnist for the National Post, has sharply criticized whiteness studies, writing that it "points to a new low in moral vacuity and civilizational self-loathing" and is an example of "academic pusillanimity." According to Kay, whiteness studies "cuts to the chase: It is all, and only, about white self-hate."^[43]

 

 

Kay noted the leanings of the field by quoting Jeff Hitchcock, co-founder and executive director of the Center for the Study of White American Culture (CSWAC), who stated in a 1998 speech:

“

There is no crime that whiteness has not committed against people of colour.... We must blame whiteness for the continuing patterns today... which damage and prevent the humanity of those of us within it....We must blame whiteness for the continuing patterns today that deny the rights of those outside of whiteness and which damage and pervert the humanity of those of us within it.[43][44]

”

Regarding whiteness studies (WS) more broadly, Kay wrote:

WS teaches that if you are white, you are branded, literally in the flesh, with evidence of a kind of original sin. You can try to mitigate your evilness, but you can't eradicate it. The goal of WS is to entrench permanent race consciousness in everyone — eternal victimhood for nonwhites, eternal guilt for whites — and was most famously framed by WS chief guru, Noel Ignatiev, former professor at Harvard University [sic, Ignatiev was a Ph.D. student and then a tutor at Harvard, but never a professor], now teaching at the Massachusetts College of Art: "The key to solving the social problems of our age is to abolish the white race — in other words, to abolish the privileges of the white skin."^[43]

In addition to such criticism in the mass media, whiteness studies has earned a mixed reception from academics in other fields. In 2001, historian Eric Arnesen wrote that "whiteness has become a blank screen onto which those who claim to analyze it can project their own meanings" and that the field "suffers from a number of potentially fatal methodological and conceptual flaws.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiteness_studies

Edited December 26, 2016 by betsy

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, Michael Hardner said:

There is no such thing as an expert in the humanities ?  What about history ?  That opinion really invalidates education and makes peasants of all of us.  Of course the political elites believe there are such experts and they pay good money to use them.

Okay.  Right experts and wrong experts then.

[Michael Hardner]

Just now, betsy said:

 

oooohh.  "Academia".....like as if the word is something to be uttered in reverence.   

 

In today's world, a lot of professors in this so-called academia had dabbled to interpret their own studies to suit their ideology.  

If you don't believe in knowledge and learning, then you should have something better to replace it with.  

[Michael Hardner]

Just now, bcsapper said:

Okay.  Right experts and wrong experts then.

Yes, that happens with all knowledge - people try to follow the path to betterment and sometimes get lost along the way.

[betsy]

10 minutes ago, Michael Hardner said:

If you don't believe in knowledge and learning, then you should have something better to replace it with.  

 

I don't like swallowing propaganda, thank you.  If you can't differentiate that from actual knowledge and learning -  it's you who's got a problem, but you just don't know it.

 

Edited December 26, 2016 by betsy

[Guest]

2 minutes ago, Michael Hardner said:

Yes, that happens with all knowledge - people try to follow the path to betterment and sometimes get lost along the way.

I think that's because in a lot of cases the path to betterment is the one paved with preconceived notions.

[H10]

26 minutes ago, bcsapper said:

I don't require anyone else to do anything.

When it comes to things like Political Science, Social Studies and the Humanities, there are no experts.  There are only people one agrees with, who are often confused with experts, and people one doesn't agree with, who are often confused with idiots.

I disagree, experts have degrees, they are dedicated to the study of topics.  One could even say the same about science and climate change, how many european scientist claimed the world was flat?

[H10]

10 minutes ago, betsy said:

 

oooohh.  "Academia".....like as if the word is something to be uttered in reverence.   

 

In today's world, a lot of professors in this so-called academia had dabbled to interpret their own studies to suit their ideology.  

Sure, but we also have good academics.

[Michael Hardner]

3 minutes ago, betsy said:

 

I don't like swallowing propaganda, thank you.  If you can't differentiate that from actual knowledge and learning -  it's you who's got a problem, and you just don't know it.

Academia is propaganda ?  That's a pretty extreme view and worthy of its own thread.  I encourage you to either submit an alternative to centuries-old institutions, suggest an improvement for them, or withdraw and create your own isolated ecosystem.  

[Argus]

28 minutes ago, bcsapper said:

 and people one doesn't agree with, who are often confused with idiots.

Some of them ARE idiots.

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, hernanday said:

I disagree, experts have degrees, they are dedicated to the study of topics.  One could even say the same about science and climate change, how many european scientist claimed the world was flat?

I don't know, how many?  Did you not just contradict yourself in the space of one line?

[betsy]

6 minutes ago, Michael Hardner said:

Academia is propaganda ?  That's a pretty extreme view and worthy of its own thread.  I encourage you to either submit an alternative to centuries-old institutions, suggest an improvement for them, or withdraw and create your own isolated ecosystem.  

 

Are you having problems understanding what you read, Michael?  Who said anything about academia being propaganda?  Go back and read my post again.

 

Seems like all we have to do is slap a label that says "academia," and certain people are only too eager to swallow everything without question. 

Edited December 26, 2016 by betsy

[Argus]

11 minutes ago, Michael Hardner said:

If you don't believe in knowledge and learning, then you should have something better to replace it with.  

That's an intellectually dishonest reply to what she posted. She pointed out ideological zealots who interpret evidence whichever way suits their particular ideology, and that yes, these people infest the humanities to an unhealthy degree. The mere fact one has a university degree, even a PHD does not in any way suggest you aren't a moronic idiot and that we should take your statements - sans real evidence, as reality. Witness the PHD professor from Florida state fired this last month for harassing the surviving family of a murdered child because he was a conspiracy believer.

[Michael Hardner]

Here is the exchange.  I think its meaning is obvious:

Quote

Betsy: "Academia".....like as if the word is something to be uttered in reverence.   In today's world, a lot of professors in this so-called academia had dabbled to interpret their own studies to suit their ideology.  

MH: "If you don't believe in knowledge and learning, then you should have something better to replace it with.  "

Betsy: "I don't like swallowing propaganda, thank you. "

 

 

[H10]

2 minutes ago, bcsapper said:

I don't know, how many?  Did you not just contradict yourself in the space of one line?

Hundreds. No, I was addressing your arguments though, which kind of did argue both ways. It is true not every expert is the best, but it is also true those european scholars where a minority of the earth scholars who thought the world was flat, most africans, asians understood it was round.

[Michael Hardner]

1 minute ago, Argus said:

That's an intellectually dishonest reply to what she posted.  

Sorry, but the claim is hers.  If 'academia' is to be mocked outright, then I expect the claimant to be responsible and suggest something better.

[betsy]

3 minutes ago, Michael Hardner said:

Sorry, but the claim is hers.  If 'academia' is to be mocked outright, then I expect the claimant to be responsible and suggest something better.

I don't mock academia.   I mocked how it's used.

 

Like as if, the use of the term "academia," is enough to prove his point.

Edited December 26, 2016 by betsy