The Trump Administration (just Trump) Thread

[KI4MVP]

Just throwing this out there, but do you think that white racism gets talked about more than black racism because African Americans only make up 12% of the population?

Here me out.

I have a Spanish name and I look absolutely white. I went to a predominantly African American school, so trust me I get that they can be racist. So can anyone, and I don't think anyone on this site has argued that only white people can be racist because that's stupid. Anyone who says that is stupid.

The problem that I think people are ignoring is that since White Americans make up such a larger amount of the population than African Americans that, assuming the percentage of racism is similar across both races, racist White Americans have the ability to significantly negatively affect others simply because of they have more power based on numbers.

Even assuming (for example) only 30% of White Americans hold SOME racist thoughts, that is still a larger group of people than the ENTIRE African American population.

78% of cops are white for example. Most of our interactions are going to be with White cops, and most cops have superiors who are White, and most internal investigations are done by White people investigating White cops. So a small population of racist white cops are able to have a much larger negative effect on the White population than racist black cops.

Now extend that logic towards government, corporate America, and other areas where White Americans are the majority. It's just much easier for White Americans to negatively affect minorities on every single level of American society than it is for minorities in this country to negatively hold back White Americans from succeeding.

Everything about racism is stupid.

 

[billmac91]

I do not believe it impacts lives on a daily basis nearly as much as you appear to be suggesting. Nor do I believe that race relations deteriorating as the internet has become more ubiquitous is just a coincidence.

People internalize shit they see, hear, and read on the internet, and it needs a mindset of exaggeration and resentment.

Another sidebar comment from me, but it's been really interesting following race relations in this country while being married to a West African woman. And while she is very sympathetic to the struggles of African Americans, and is sensitive to the differing aspects of early childhood here in the US compared to hers in Ghana and hiw it may have influenced where she is today, I think she also struggles with the vast amount of opportunity America has afforded her because of "can do" attitude and appreciation for what this country offers. She grew up 4 sisters in a small house that didn't have running water, and while her parents sent her to a private school, it was a school where the girls would walk a mile in the morning to fill up a bucket with fresh water, so they could bring it back to the shower stalls and wash off without the use of running water.

She gained her citizenship 4 years ago, but has been serving in technical support roles for multiple banks over the last 10 years. She has had amazing experiences at all of her places of employment and moved up the ladder in each company she worked for.

This year in December she will be opening her own business.

Same skin color (actually a few shades darker) as so many who feel oppressed, and yet a completely different mindset of viewing America as a great land of opportunity not oppression. In talking with her about one of the things she mentions is growing up in Ghana everyone was the same so they didn't endure racism....some "classism" but you didn't see racism. When she came to the US she was overwhelmed with the amount of career paths and jobs to chose from. And she has never once felt oppressed in a job or held back based on her gender/race.

And I don't want to put words in her mouth...again, she is sympathetic to the injustices we do see, she hates Trump, although she is level headed in regards to policy on both sides of the aisle and how that will impact her business going forward. But between her and the many friends she has from her home country, there is also a general feeling of frustration for the lack of appreciation for the many resources all minorities have in this country. How many schools are asking students to walk a mile to fetch a bucket of water so they can bathe and wash their hands?

But I was listening to Kijuana Nige today (woman who released video of Miami Dolphins coach snorting cocaine) and it kind of floored me. I'm paraphrasing but she kept commenting on how horrible this country is to African-American women and how hard it is. And it just strikes me as ignorant. I don't know her living situation but if she has electricity, running water, and job opportunity (apparently she is a high-end "entertainer").....like, does she realize how difficult it'd be if she wanted to go live in Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, etc.

I personally think everyone needs to calm down a bit and recognize just how lucky we are.....good things come to those who out in the work, are generally good people, and carry themselves with dignity and respect. Yes, there are examples that can be cherry-picked over the last few years, but by and large I truly believe the content of your character wins the day....I see it every day in my wife and many of her West African friends who are all doing great things in their lines of work.

Just my opinion...

 

[gourimoko]

But I was listening to Kijuana Nige today (woman who released video of Miami Dolphins coach snorting cocaine) and it kind of floored me. I'm paraphrasing but she kept commenting on how horrible this country is to African-American women and how hard it is. And it just strikes me as ignorant. I don't know her living situation but if she has electricity, running water, and job opportunity (apparently she is a high-end "entertainer").....like, does she realize how difficult it'd be if she wanted to go live in Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, etc.

FWIW Bill, I've lived in a third world country before; so I understand where you are coming from. But, comparing the plight of African-Americans living in the United States, to that of Africans living in a third world country, is .. odd. I mean, why are they comparable and why should an African-American look at the plight in Africa as a means of diminishing their plight in the States?

Look at it this way... When a Black person enumerates the societal problems facing them in America, the last thing one would want to tell them is "well, think of what your situation would be in Africa!"

And I know you have the best of intentions in your post, but.. it somewhat reduces to a very Bill Clinton-esque critique.

Anyway, regarding your wife's situation; I know a great many West African immigrants, and frankly, they would agree with you before they would agree with me. Their views on race are exceptionally different than African-Americans because there does not exist an expectation of equality. African-Americans are not arguing from the perspective of an immigrant, but from one of a people who have been disenfranchised for four centuries. There is a completely different line of reasoning here.

For example, my wife doesn't look at society the same way as I do. She perceives the government as a monolithic entity unto itself, one where authority is derived from ..somewhere.. but not inherently from a free and equal society. My German ex-girlfriend was the exact same way... I think the point here is that, my wife and her family view American society as wholly beneficial to them, given their ability to come to the U.S. work, attain upwards social mobility (comparatively) and that in and of itself makes emigrating and establishing a life her worthwhile. As an African-American male, I will tell you that her views (and for example, my step-father's views a few decades ago) are almost entirely informed by their status as an immigrant.

When I was an ex-pat in the Philippines, it wasn't my place to complain or lament the societal woes of the people there -- in fact, doing so might be considered rude by many. The same is true for my friends living in Japan or China.

It's a generalized immigrant mentality, and I can't speak for your wife, but my wife, my father and step-father, members of my family are all the same way when it comes to how they view the United States as this magical land of opportunity.

Now ... with all that being said, while you may believe that discrimination isn't a factor in success, it's very hard to actually make that case considering how widespread racism actually is in this country. And while it's not the primary determining factor in the outcome of a person's life (on average), to argue that it all boils down to a desire to work hard is a bit strange; as it would imply Black people simply don't want to work as hard as Whites to achieve the same goals, which seems more a racial stereotype than an empirical observation. It would also require us to throw out demonstrable examples of widespread racial disparities that cannot be accounted for by other, non-racial factors.

tl;dr, while it surely feels better to think that we're all equal and we all have the same opportunities as each other -- it's not actually true -- we're not all equal in the eyes of society, and that's the point many aren't willing to even acknowledge let alone address.

 

[Sebastian]

I don't believe Septimus Severus was black. He was born on the continent of Africa, but that didn't make him black.

Contemporaries describe him as dark with tightly coiled locks. And he married a white woman with a big ass.

Thankfully, Severus is one of the few Emperors of whom we have a contemporary oil painting:

Looks like a brother to me.

Incidentally his nephew became the only Transgendered Emperor (and twit): Elagabalus

 

[Wrathe]

...and I don't think anyone on this site has argued that only white people can be racist because that's stupid

They have, they absolutely have argued FOR that very point, and I agree w/ your supposition.

 

[Sebastian]

Don't know where else to put it, but here is a neat excerpt on SECDEF Mattis' library and why he chooses to read certain books. He has good taste. I think I have read 80% of the books he mentions. Guy Sajer's book, The Forgotten Soldier, is a must read for those who want to understand wartime Germany and the horrors of the Eastern Front.


Defense Secretary Mattis Discusses his Favorite Books, and Why

[General James Mattis, you have] accumulated perhaps one of the largest personal libraries of an active-duty military officer ever known in the modern world. What was behind this?

I’d like to tell you mine was designed with purpose in mind. In fact, it was to read everything interesting in the world and ignore the boring, which was about the only challenge. I learned a lot from it, obviously. I was never perplexed for more than a moment when the enemy did something strategically or operationally or tactically, and I learned a lot about human nature from Sherman’s book and Marcus Aurelius and Mandela’s memoirs and everyone else’s. I don’t have a good storyline for what I did.

Part of it, of course, was the Marine Corps had a reading list, and every boss I worked for seemed to have one, and they had rather a lack of sense of humor if I decided I didn’t need to read what they thought was important. They were not there to help me through my midlife crisis or find my inner child, so it was rather a blunt organization in terms of taking responsibility for your own development. History was just natural as well as biography, and for me, even fiction must be a part of it.

Well, I read an article that said you’ve kept track of everything that you’ve read. When your library started to grow, what were the major titles that you had decided on that would be the foundation of your library? I mean, looking at reading in its basics as one of the three legs of the stool of personal development.

Well, personal development is a broader issue when you deal with violence. If you don’t have an understanding of a letter from a Birmingham jail, and how Sherman put the enemy on the horns of the dilemma, and how Scipio Africanus was able to triumph, if you can’t take those lessons of life and tie them together as a military commander, you’re going to have a hell of a difficult time, especially in a democracy where if you rise to high rank, you’re selected for tactical reasons, and operational, but then you have to deal with strategic reasons, and often you’re bringing war’s grim realities and trying to reconcile those with the political leaders you eventually deal with, their human aspirations, which are for a much better world than the primitive, atavistic one of the battlefield.

So you develop by broadening your understanding of human nature, of the ascent of man and everything else so that you can reconcile war’s realities, grim as they are, atavistic and primitive, with human aspirations, without becoming a narrow-minded person who at that point, you ought to give good military advice, but you can’t do so without trying to achieve a better peace, and so you need to have that broader reading as you grow and personally develop so you can actually do the job as a military officer, if you’re so fortunate that they keep you around long enough that you get promoted for a while.

I guess on a tactical level there was a novel by M. M. Kaye called The Far Pavilions, and, of course, Guy Sajer’s The Forgotten Soldier. Nate Fick had OneBullet Away, and there’s some others on the tactical level. I think probably Alistair Horne and his Savage War of Peace — that was certainly one. Let me think. E. B. Sledge With the Old Breed was a really good one.

When you go up to the operational level of war, where you look at operational and strategic, you can’t go wrong when you read Grant’s Memoirs or Viscount Slim’s Defeat into Victory. Oh, gosh, Liddell Hart and his book on Sherman and also his book on Scipio Africanus. I think Colin Gray’s Fighting Talk and The Future of Strategy are just two tremendous ones. Williamson Murray’s Military Innovation in the Interwar Period, up on the strategic level, plus Tony Zinni’s Before the First Shot Is Fired and H.R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty are really first-rate.

But you have to understand how they walk those paths, too, so you’ve got to read Colin Powell’s My American Journey, and you have to keep your peace up there, so you’d better read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations.

And when you read books like Guy Sajer’s The Forgotten Soldier, it just reminds you of the penalties that are paid by the private soldiers who have to carry out your orders. Then you read things like Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedomor Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire, and you realize we’re not asked to do anything that’s all that much greater than what others have done before.

If you look at Bob Gates’ book — I was the executive secretary for two secretaries at Defense, I worked closely with three others — and when you read Gates’ book Duty, you get a real sense of the breadth and the gravity of what faces people at that level. And in some way you look back on Will and Arial Durant’s The Lessons of History or Ron Chernow’s book on Alexander Hamilton, and you realize, man, you can get an awful lot out of people who have been through this sort of thing and studied the ones who did it before. Then you realize how few things are really new under the sun if you do good reading. Any Marine who has not read Lucas Phillips’ book The Greatest Raid of All should. This is about the raid that shattered the dry dock at Saint-Nazaire, France, so that Bismarck would never have a place to be repaired if they went out to sea. You see how you can apply strategy to operations to the tactical costs and all.

You look at our reliance on communications today, on cyber and all this stuff, and then you read Andrew Gordon’s book on The Rules of the Game about what went wrong for the Royal Navy between Nelson’s navy at Trafalgar and Admiral Jellicoe’s navy one hundred years later at Jutland, and you get a real reminder of how you can take fundamental errors that just screw you up royally. Certainly you get that too if you look at our nation, where we’re at right now, if you read Barbara Tuchman’s March of Folly or The Guns of August, or you read Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of the Great Powers or Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy and World Order, you can see what’s happening to a nation in a broader context, which I think is critical.

At the same time, you’ve got to study ethics and not confront your ethical dilemmas for the first time on the battlefield, so you read Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars or Malham Wakin’s War, Morality, and the Military Profession. Sometimes you can actually write books about the specific job you’re in. For example, there’s a lady named Gail Shisler, who is related to General O. P. Smith. She wrote a book called For Country and Corps: The Life of General Oliver P. Smith. He was the general who brought the 1st Marine Division on its way out of North Korea when it was surrounded there in that first bad winter in 1950 at the Chosin reservoir.

So again, you don’t end up flatfooted — if you know what I mean — but there’s a host of these things that help guide you. They don’t tell you what the answers are, of course, they help guide. . . . That sort of approach to how I looked at strategy versus operations, tactics versus ethics, and the spiritual sense shows up repeatedly in many of these.

When I started getting rid of books it was heartbreaking because I had to get rid of thousands because I was tired of hauling them all around. I knew I wouldn’t read them again. I kept my geology books, some of my military books, a lot of my history, especially of the West, the American West.

So as you think through how to put together a personal library, remember that it is an intensely personal adventure. You may be entranced with the ability to hold a book in your hands, scribble in the margins, show the volume to friends who are visiting. Or you may want an entirely electronic library that resides remotely in the Cloud, available in a moment over your smart phone, tablet, or home computer.

Your personal library may be seven books you deeply value or seven thousand, and it may be beautifully organized and alphabetized or simply arranged by the color of the book’s cover. What matters is that it is your library, invested with your intellectual capital, and serves as a garden of the mind to which you can return again and again.

Reprinted, by permission, from The Leader’s Bookshelf, by Admiral James Stavridis, U.S. Navy (Retired) and R. Manning Ancell, (Annapolis, Md: Naval Institute Press, © 2017).

 

[Wrathe]

Why is the concept that children learn racism from their parents acceptable, but the idea that children learn victim-hood from their parents is so seemingly inconceivable?

 

[gourimoko]

Why is the concept that children learn racism from their parents acceptable, but the idea that children learn victim-hood from their parents is so seemingly inconceivable?

Because it ignores the opinions and experiences of the very people being categorized.

 

[Jack Brickman]

Don't know where else to put it, but here is a neat excerpt on SECDEF Mattis' library and why he chooses to read certain books. He has good taste. I think I have read 80% of the books he mentions. Guy Sajer's book, The Forgotten Soldier, is a must read for those who want to understand wartime Germany and the horrors of the Eastern Front.


Defense Secretary Mattis Discusses his Favorite Books, and Why

[General James Mattis, you have] accumulated perhaps one of the largest personal libraries of an active-duty military officer ever known in the modern world. What was behind this?

I’d like to tell you mine was designed with purpose in mind. In fact, it was to read everything interesting in the world and ignore the boring, which was about the only challenge. I learned a lot from it, obviously. I was never perplexed for more than a moment when the enemy did something strategically or operationally or tactically, and I learned a lot about human nature from Sherman’s book and Marcus Aurelius and Mandela’s memoirs and everyone else’s. I don’t have a good storyline for what I did.

Part of it, of course, was the Marine Corps had a reading list, and every boss I worked for seemed to have one, and they had rather a lack of sense of humor if I decided I didn’t need to read what they thought was important. They were not there to help me through my midlife crisis or find my inner child, so it was rather a blunt organization in terms of taking responsibility for your own development. History was just natural as well as biography, and for me, even fiction must be a part of it.

Well, I read an article that said you’ve kept track of everything that you’ve read. When your library started to grow, what were the major titles that you had decided on that would be the foundation of your library? I mean, looking at reading in its basics as one of the three legs of the stool of personal development.

Well, personal development is a broader issue when you deal with violence. If you don’t have an understanding of a letter from a Birmingham jail, and how Sherman put the enemy on the horns of the dilemma, and how Scipio Africanus was able to triumph, if you can’t take those lessons of life and tie them together as a military commander, you’re going to have a hell of a difficult time, especially in a democracy where if you rise to high rank, you’re selected for tactical reasons, and operational, but then you have to deal with strategic reasons, and often you’re bringing war’s grim realities and trying to reconcile those with the political leaders you eventually deal with, their human aspirations, which are for a much better world than the primitive, atavistic one of the battlefield.

So you develop by broadening your understanding of human nature, of the ascent of man and everything else so that you can reconcile war’s realities, grim as they are, atavistic and primitive, with human aspirations, without becoming a narrow-minded person who at that point, you ought to give good military advice, but you can’t do so without trying to achieve a better peace, and so you need to have that broader reading as you grow and personally develop so you can actually do the job as a military officer, if you’re so fortunate that they keep you around long enough that you get promoted for a while.

I guess on a tactical level there was a novel by M. M. Kaye called The Far Pavilions, and, of course, Guy Sajer’s The Forgotten Soldier. Nate Fick had OneBullet Away, and there’s some others on the tactical level. I think probably Alistair Horne and his Savage War of Peace — that was certainly one. Let me think. E. B. Sledge With the Old Breed was a really good one.

When you go up to the operational level of war, where you look at operational and strategic, you can’t go wrong when you read Grant’s Memoirs or Viscount Slim’s Defeat into Victory. Oh, gosh, Liddell Hart and his book on Sherman and also his book on Scipio Africanus. I think Colin Gray’s Fighting Talk and The Future of Strategy are just two tremendous ones. Williamson Murray’s Military Innovation in the Interwar Period, up on the strategic level, plus Tony Zinni’s Before the First Shot Is Fired and H.R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty are really first-rate.

But you have to understand how they walk those paths, too, so you’ve got to read Colin Powell’s My American Journey, and you have to keep your peace up there, so you’d better read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations.

And when you read books like Guy Sajer’s The Forgotten Soldier, it just reminds you of the penalties that are paid by the private soldiers who have to carry out your orders. Then you read things like Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedomor Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire, and you realize we’re not asked to do anything that’s all that much greater than what others have done before.

If you look at Bob Gates’ book — I was the executive secretary for two secretaries at Defense, I worked closely with three others — and when you read Gates’ book Duty, you get a real sense of the breadth and the gravity of what faces people at that level. And in some way you look back on Will and Arial Durant’s The Lessons of History or Ron Chernow’s book on Alexander Hamilton, and you realize, man, you can get an awful lot out of people who have been through this sort of thing and studied the ones who did it before. Then you realize how few things are really new under the sun if you do good reading. Any Marine who has not read Lucas Phillips’ book The Greatest Raid of All should. This is about the raid that shattered the dry dock at Saint-Nazaire, France, so that Bismarck would never have a place to be repaired if they went out to sea. You see how you can apply strategy to operations to the tactical costs and all.

You look at our reliance on communications today, on cyber and all this stuff, and then you read Andrew Gordon’s book on The Rules of the Game about what went wrong for the Royal Navy between Nelson’s navy at Trafalgar and Admiral Jellicoe’s navy one hundred years later at Jutland, and you get a real reminder of how you can take fundamental errors that just screw you up royally. Certainly you get that too if you look at our nation, where we’re at right now, if you read Barbara Tuchman’s March of Folly or The Guns of August, or you read Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of the Great Powers or Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy and World Order, you can see what’s happening to a nation in a broader context, which I think is critical.

At the same time, you’ve got to study ethics and not confront your ethical dilemmas for the first time on the battlefield, so you read Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars or Malham Wakin’s War, Morality, and the Military Profession. Sometimes you can actually write books about the specific job you’re in. For example, there’s a lady named Gail Shisler, who is related to General O. P. Smith. She wrote a book called For Country and Corps: The Life of General Oliver P. Smith. He was the general who brought the 1st Marine Division on its way out of North Korea when it was surrounded there in that first bad winter in 1950 at the Chosin reservoir.

So again, you don’t end up flatfooted — if you know what I mean — but there’s a host of these things that help guide you. They don’t tell you what the answers are, of course, they help guide. . . . That sort of approach to how I looked at strategy versus operations, tactics versus ethics, and the spiritual sense shows up repeatedly in many of these.

When I started getting rid of books it was heartbreaking because I had to get rid of thousands because I was tired of hauling them all around. I knew I wouldn’t read them again. I kept my geology books, some of my military books, a lot of my history, especially of the West, the American West.

So as you think through how to put together a personal library, remember that it is an intensely personal adventure. You may be entranced with the ability to hold a book in your hands, scribble in the margins, show the volume to friends who are visiting. Or you may want an entirely electronic library that resides remotely in the Cloud, available in a moment over your smart phone, tablet, or home computer.

Your personal library may be seven books you deeply value or seven thousand, and it may be beautifully organized and alphabetized or simply arranged by the color of the book’s cover. What matters is that it is your library, invested with your intellectual capital, and serves as a garden of the mind to which you can return again and again.

Reprinted, by permission, from The Leader’s Bookshelf, by Admiral James Stavridis, U.S. Navy (Retired) and R. Manning Ancell, (Annapolis, Md: Naval Institute Press, © 2017).

Must be frustrating for him to serve a president who can't read.

 

[Sebastian]

Must be frustrating for him to serve a president who can't read.

Undoubtedly. For a thinker like Mattis working with people, let alone being subordinate to, who are so un-intellectual, and who revel in their own ignorance, has to be hell.

Thankfully, he has seemingly cordoned himself off from the dullards in the NSC and probably deals mostly with Kelly and McMaster.

It is ironic that Mattis, Kelly and McMaster, all three known as intellectuals, are the only guys keeping afloat the Administration of the king of the intellectually non-curious blowhards.

 

[Wrathe]

Because it ignores the opinions and experiences of the very people being categorized.

What does that mean?

 

[gourimoko]

What does that mean?

Let's break down what you're asking:

"Why is the concept that children learn racism from their parents acceptable,(?)"

This idea isn't simply acceptable, it's widely understood as a fact that people largely learn racism from both their parents and their immediate societal influences (school, family, friends). Tribalism is inherent, but racism is socially learned behavior.

So it's not a question of acceptability, given this known to be the case.

...

And the second part of your question was:

"but the idea that children learn victim-hood from their parents is so seemingly inconceivable?"

Now, my answer to this was simply:

"Because it ignores the opinions and experiences of the very people being categorized."

And what is meant by that is, sociologically, why would anyone attempt to avoid taking into account the opinions and experiences of the group one might think is "learning victimhood" from their parents? These groups, i.e., Black people as an example, would argue that if they learned about the realities of racism from their parents, it was as a warning about the world they live in -- not a lesson in how to be a life-long professional victim.

Now, that's the concise answer... The longer answer is here in spoiler tags if needed:

Spoiler

It's an odd characterization (but one with a dark past), and that's why it's not widely accepted -- because, in effect, it relies on a stereotype; that being of an entire people, collectively, perceiving themselves to be within a minority group enduring discrimination that have largely learned a victim mentality from their parents rather than having real-life experiences within society that might otherwise cause opinions about discrimination to form on their own.

This idea, specifically about Blacks, is always loosely based around a conjecture about how African-Americans have come to perceive America as discriminatory when, surely, it mustn't be. And this conjecture is not centered around evidence of their sampled opinions, but instead, around the unshakable notion that American society must be equal, therefore Black people, on the whole, must be wrong about what they perceive.

This type of thinking seems to serve the sole purpose of shifting the blame of the effects, outcomes, and realities of discrimination onto those being discriminated against. As if to say "life is tough, deal with it," which, is fair enough, but, it's also fair for someone to point out the inequalities of society without being labeled as someone relying on a learned past-time of victimhood.

Moreover, this notion that Black people learn victimhood from their parents rather than the realities of society implies that Black people, en masse, almost universally, are wrong about their own experiences; and that their opinions of those experiences should be taken with a large grain of salt. The notion effectively attempts to nullify the realities and experiences of 40 million people, simply with the idea that they might be delusional and wallowing in their own victimhood; rather than experiencing a very real effect of prejudice and discrimination.

tl;dr, the idea itself is a convenient and transparent way of shifting blame for societal problems onto undesirable elements within said society.

Make sense? It's not that some Black people can't have a victim mentality, but, the entire race of people aren't deluded by ideas of victimhood and an invisible, unreal, counterfactual oppressive and discriminatory force. That's preposterous. That's largely why the idea not widely accepted.

 

[Sebastian]

Let's break down what you're asking:

"Why is the concept that children learn racism from their parents acceptable,(?)"

This idea isn't simply acceptable, it's widely understood as a fact that people largely learn racism from both their parents and their immediate societal influences (school, family, friends). Tribalism is inherent, but racism is socially learned behavior.

So it's not a question of acceptability, given this known to be the case.

...

And the second part of your question was:

"but the idea that children learn victim-hood from their parents is so seemingly inconceivable?"

Now, my answer to this was simply:

"Because it ignores the opinions and experiences of the very people being categorized."

And what is meant by that is, sociologically, why would anyone attempt to avoid taking into account the opinions and experiences of the group one might think is "learning victimhood" from their parents? These groups, i.e., Black people as an example, would argue that if they learned about the realities of racism from their parents, it was as a warning about the world they live in -- not a lesson in how to be a life-long professional victim.

Now, that's the concise answer... The longer answer is here in spoiler tags if needed:

Spoiler

It's an odd characterization (but one with a dark past), and that's why it's not widely accepted -- because, in effect, it relies on a stereotype; that being of an entire people, collectively, perceiving themselves to be within a minority group enduring discrimination that have largely learned a victim mentality from their parents rather than having real-life experiences within society that might otherwise cause opinions about discrimination to form on their own.

This idea, specifically about Blacks, is always loosely based around a conjecture about how African-Americans have come to perceive America as discriminatory when, surely, it mustn't be. And this conjecture is not centered around evidence of their sampled opinions, but instead, around the unshakable notion that American society must be equal, therefore Black people, on the whole, must be wrong about what they perceive.

This type of thinking seems to serve the sole purpose of shifting the blame of the effects, outcomes, and realities of discrimination onto those being discriminated against. As if to say "life is tough, deal with it," which, is fair enough, but, it's also fair for someone to point out the inequalities of society without being labeled as someone relying on a learned past-time of victimhood.

Moreover, this notion that Black people learn victimhood from their parents rather than the realities of society implies that Black people, en masse, almost universally, are wrong about their own experiences; and that their opinions of those experiences should be taken with a large grain of salt. The notion effectively attempts to nullify the realities and experiences of 40 million people, simply with the idea that they might be delusional and wallowing in their own victimhood; rather than experiencing a very real effect of prejudice and discrimination.

tl;dr, the idea itself is a convenient and transparent way of shifting blame for societal problems onto undesirable elements within said society.

Make sense? It's not that some Black people can't have a victim mentality, but, the entire race of people aren't deluded by ideas of victimhood and an invisible, unreal, counterfactual oppressive and discriminatory force. That's preposterous. That's largely why the idea not widely accepted.

This is so pernicious.

Meanwhile, the GOP is extolling the virtues of the "Forgotten Man" and hand-waiving their addiction to welfare as an example of legitimate victimhood. As if 40 years isn't enough time to adapt to a changing world instead of demanding the US subsidize dead career paths.

 

[Wrathe]

Let's break down what you're asking:

"Why is the concept that children learn racism from their parents acceptable,(?)"

This idea isn't simply acceptable, it's widely understood as a fact that people largely learn racism from both their parents and their immediate societal influences (school, family, friends). Tribalism is inherent, but racism is socially learned behavior.

So it's not a question of acceptability, given this known to be the case.

Sounds like you're disagreeing to agree here So yes, it's an accepted concept. One way children learn racism is through their parents.

And the second part of your question was:

"but the idea that children learn victim-hood from their parents is so seemingly inconceivable?"

Now, my answer to this was simply:

"Because it ignores the opinions and experiences of the very people being categorized."

And what is meant by that is, sociologically, why would anyone attempt to avoid taking into account the opinions and experiences of the group one might think is "learning victimhood" from their parents? These groups, i.e., Black people as an example, would argue that if they learned about the realities of racism from their parents, it was as a warning about the world they live in -- not a lesson in how to be a life-long professional victim.

I'm not saying that victim-hood is the panacea for the issues in "Black America", anymore than racism is the answer. It's a factor though. It's a factor in any demographic, it's not unique here. I'm not intending it to demonize. I mean, we all tell our children they can be anything they want to be when they grow up. Why do we do that? Are we going to pretend that the reverse message has no ramifications?

 

[The Oi]

I miss The Mooch.