Man, the minimum standards to qualify as a culture war sure have fallen lately.
47 thoughts on “Culture war, culture battle, culture skirmish, culture fuss, culture stir. What’s the next level below that?”
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Cats, charts, and politics
Maybe not a culture war. But really, this white woman is worried her child might feel guilty about racism? Kids aren't born feeling guilty about racism. They're taught. More specifically they are taught by their white parents that they are superior or more important simply better because they are white. That's the culture war. White supremacy, white privilage, those are the beliefs they are taught at home.
You know I don't feel guilty about racism, but conservatives sure think they ought to.
Yeah that’s what doesn’t make any sense to me: I don’t feel personally guilty that past white people treated black people (and Native Americans, and Asians, and…) terribly. I *do* however feel sad that all that happened… and angry that some present day white people continue to treat other groups terribly. Sadness and anger aren’t guilt, but it’s easier for the Karens of the world to argue “protect my child from feeling guilty” vs “protect my child from feeling sad or angry.”
Are you a white person? If so and you feel no sense of guilt for the centuries of racism and oppression that have led you to whatever level of economic and cultural success you have, well that is just amazing to me. I'm not saying you should be wracked by guilt constantly but really? You feel nothing at all? No sense of responsibility or shame about what your forbears did? Wow.
I would make a distinction here, because I think it matters:
(1) Do I feel guilt or shame about something someone else did before I was born? No. BUT...
(2) Do I realize that I have had a huge range of unearned advantages in life resulting from those earlier actions of other people, because they were done for the benefit of people who look like me (and maybe even by my own ancestors)? Absolutely yes. That puts a serious moral responsibility on me to try to correct or ameliorate the effects of those injustices to the extent that I can.
It is the (often intentional) blurring of this distinction that lies at the heart of the right-wing distortion of "Critical Race Theory", etc., into an alleged project intended to make white children "feel bad."
Well said! Like + 25.
This is it. Well said, Mike.
I got those same advantages, starting with the red-lined neighborhood I grew up in, which meant that my (public) elementary and junior HS were nearly all white and had far more resources than the mostly black one half a mile away. I didn't have to compete with those black kids my age for college scholarships because I was by then way ahead of them.
No, I didn't do anything to create or perpetuate segregation, but for sure I benefited from it, benefits that continue to lift up me and my family 50 years later.
I don't feel "guilty", but certainly queasy about taking those benefits, and one obligation is to teach my kids about how we got to be so fortunate.
What does guilt come into it?
I bear responsibility for my cat but no guilt.
If my cat severely injured another human being I am pretty sure I would feel guilty. Maybe the issue here is in how we are defining feeling "guilty"?
I completely disagree with this and think this attitude is completely unhelpful. Yes, I feel awful for the history of racism, sexism, discrimination, etc... etc... and feel that there should be a comprehensive system of some sort of reparations made by all of those who profited (including my historical family) to those whose families were, are and continue to be affected by why would I feel any responsibility or shame about what my forbears did. Especially since they were mostly poor immigrants from Germany and Ukraine in the late 19th century.
If your great grandfather murdered some people in 1903 would you personally feel a "sense of responsibility or shame" about what they did? I don't find that plausible. I know that those crimes don't compare in scale to slavery or the systemic history of racism and discrimination, but I think it's still a fair question.
Racism needs to be addressed but running around telling people how racist they are and how terrible they should feel about something they had no personal involvement in is probably not a way to address it that will get beneficial results.
Um. I tend to run around and tell people how much unearned privilege they have, to paraphrase. But that's just me and everyone else I know personally.
Why should I feel shame about anything my forebears did? Or pride, for that matter? They are not me.
I feel a certain sense of responsibility in the sense of "it is everyone's responsibility to rectify injustice and inequity in the world" but I absolutely don't feel responsibility in the sense of culpability. Culpability requires agency.
Or to put that another way; I have a responsibility (moral and ethical duty) to drive safely. I am responsible (culpable) if I fail in the first one and t-bone a guy.
But no, I don't feel shame about what my forebears did. Why on earth would I?
I sure do not. I didn’t do it. Why should I feel guilty about nothing I could influence? That is an absurd take. The old sins of the fathers…
It's nonsense like what you just said that led to our Stop Woke law here in FL. Of course we shouldn't feel any sense of guilt or shame for things our ancestors did. Especially when it was as common as slavery, which, up until the last couple hundred years, has pretty much existed worldwide since humans have existed.
Empathy and sympathy certainly are in order. I think most of us feel that for anyone who was a slave, victims of racists attacks or suffered under unjust laws. But guilt and shame for something we had no part in just because of our skin color? That is ridiculous.
I think maybe we are just defining the feeling we call "feeling guilty" differently. I am not meaning this in the sense of feeling personally responsible for all the actions of all white people in history. Feeling somewhat, I don't know, abashed to have benefited from centuries of oppression as a white person? I hardly think that's such an unusual thing to feel but maybe you guys are all a lot tougher than I am and I'm just a big ole squish.
The past was another planet. Even as recently as 40 years ago seems like another planet so quickly have manners changed.
I feel empathy for the victims of past atrocities and sorrow for their suffering but to feel implicated in it seems as absurd as feeling proud that I invented the telegraph.
The idea that all of society is built upon the benefits of a past injustice is to forget everything else that ever happened. You have no way to act upon the past, you might dislike it but you cannot help it.
It is the present condition of things that you can help and understanding how they got that way is not the same thing as feeling responsible for the past.
What I am offended by is the presumption of racists to speak for me and the sense that many have that I am implicated in their vulgarity merely because of who I am. Nazis, racists, misogynists, abusive bozos in general, are always gleeful that they can get away with it because just being an asshole isn't a crime and to get away with the abuse is at least 75% of why they act the way they do, and they'll act like that whether they call themselves white supremacists, Chinese supremacists or ISIS; they're all dirt and the purposeful abusiveness and injury they promote in their gleeful getting away with it, hate speech, is the laziest kind of terrorism. These people should be treated like the feckless crap they are.
This is all so stupid, Really.
What is our moral duty to stand up to people and say, "You're stupid," or being more gentle, "You're being stupid..."
I have had to terminate one long term male friendship, which some people are appalled at my doing...and a long term female, more than a friend, one in Florida, and the woman of course here in LA....for being Tucker loving Putinista's...
Some things just have to end....
Likewise if a person is raising a ruckus over this movie...Hell with 'em.
Sorry.
Traveller
Standards are mostly the same. What's changed - in a big way - are the demographics of the nation over the last 50 years. This is not surprising. Also, try reading a little history about how people react to large and rapid demographic/cultural change. It's not pretty.
Notice how the headline frames this as "the movie caused the culture war." The white jerk started the culture war - can we come right out and say it, please? Blaming the movie - basically, blaming the facts of history - is falling right into white supremacist grievance that uppity blacks caused all the problems. Her little girl wouldn't have to feel bad about racism if racism were still the law of the land!
I agree. If you read more about this incident, you learn that the schools there were showing this movie for like 2 decades before anyone complained about it. And the kicker is that they’ve always allowed parents to opt their kid out of watching it. But that’s not good enough for this Karen, who has to stop all the other kids from watching it too, even if their parents permitted them to watch it.
Parental rights for me, not for thee indeed.
It seems to me that parents "complaining" about such have a questionable relationship with their children. It is not the child's fault. It is the parent who will not or cannot have a relationship with their child that would alleviate such guilt.
I wonder that the parent believes that someone who is not white does not "earn" the same consideration as whiteys.
Yes, the title is really appalling.
However you might want to describe this incident, there is nothing in it that has anything remotely to do with culture wars. A more accurate headline would read something like, "Privileged mother attempts to exercise that privilege."
The irony that the media seems to be missing is that the story about this woman is just another variation of exactly the same story as is in the film.
Exactly and well said.
It's a culture war: white supremacy making war to erase all mention of its crimes.
Maybe that's exactly why they published. But given that the MSM tends to preen, that lack of words wrt your latter point is concerning.
Kultur kerfufle?
Kulture Klatch?
Kulture Klatter?
i'd be worried my if my kid didn't feel guilty about racism.
THIS. Although I'd phrase it a little differently and say I'd be worried if my kid refused to acknowledge the significant but unearned privileges she has inherited by virtue of her skin color.
yeah, i don't mean personal guilt. but a recognition of inherited privilege AND collective guilt for being part of a society that perpetuates that privilege. i'm not white and i feel guilt about the massive injustice and inequality in the US and my part in it.
Wow. We have the exact opposite mentality on this. I would be extremely worried if my kids ever felt any shame or guilt because of the color of their skin. It's truly amazing to me that you would feel the opposite.
This is completely unsurprising coming from you.
This should not feel guilt. They should be appalled at the racists treatment a fellow kid got. Not feel guilty for some red neck aholes poor behavior.
The poor little snowflake....
Perhaps Culture Tempest In A Teapot?
"cultured" and "kambucha"
😉
In terms of the continuum, perhaps culture shrug.
The latest news: https://www.tampabay.com/news/education/2023/04/03/disney-pinellas-county-schools-parent-challenge/
‘Ruby Bridges’ movie cleared for use at North Shore Elementary
After a parent complained, a panel of teachers, parents and community members decided the film was appropriate for kids in elementary school.
Unanimously.
So there are still at least 7 sane people in Florida.
I teach indigo workshops, and in 2020, I taught a series of outdoor workshops to local middle and high school students in an outdoor, socially distanced setting.
The gentleman who runs the local community-access channel (who is very conservative) wanted to film one of my workshops for the channel. Sadly, in the few minutes I discuss the history of indigo, including its value as a "spice" in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, I discomforted him. He could not bring himself to edit the show and refused to hand make me copies of the video, because of just this kind of sentiment: he thought I was trying to make white people feel bad and guilty.
But I was very clear: my interest was in keeping the knowledge of ancient skills, skills threatened and often lost to colonization, alive.
These two different perspectives are, I sometimes think, irreconcilable.
In fact, he should have been glad that there was something he could do to at least partially make up for how he got the his current and ongoing privileges (which I suspect he has no intention of giving up.) Maybe it's a Cristian thing; isn't it part of the Christian (Conservative) doctrine that everyone is born irredeemably doomed? That's the first part of the pitch as I recall it 😉
The funniest part was when he tried to fold a shibori to make a design of a cross on a tee shirt.
I offered to show him how he might accomplish this, but my help was not accepted ad the tee shirt did not look like it bore a cross.
I think the act, however, was some sort of attempt at a cleansing/purging of the filth I'd spoken.
And we all heard about this because... the media sucks.
No, Ruby Bridges and other things going on at that time started the ongoing culture war, if you want to separate the Republican-led culture war from the preceding Jim Crow war on blacks.
While this bizarro kerfuffle seems trivial, it behooves those of us who think the "Right" is wrong to step forward and disagree. Loudly, and with facts and certainty. There are more of us than there are them.
Do NOT let the hecklers exercise an uneducated veto over what children are taught. NO MORE HECKLERS' VETOS.
(Notice how I keep repeating "hecklers' veto"? I'm hoping it will catch on with the Left. We have so few slogans and phrasings that aren't total crap.)