Tuesday, June 25, 2019

Victim mentality

1. This is my wrapup on the latest White imbroglio. A black Christian friend asked me what my opinion was of his tweet, which is why I originally commented. I did two posts:



2. Today I watched the DL:


In my deliberately limited experience of the DL, it was typical White: a self-adulation fest. Half-baked. Disorganized. Larded with layers of condescension and sneering. Defending the most defensible aspects of his position while ducking the indefensible aspects of his position. Responding to the weakest objections while ignoring the strongest objections. 

It's painful to watch these performances. Some incidental observations before getting to the main point:

3. He played a video by Taleeb Starkes, who begins by noting the victim mental: everything is someone else's fault.

The irony is lost on White. That's White's M.O. He's the voice of reason. He's the adult in the room. All his critics are immature. In my experience, White never takes takes personal responsibility for what he says or does. He always shifts the blame to someone else. And that's a mark of immaturity. 

4.He indicated that the first heard he heard "soft bigotry of lowered expectations" was a few months ago from Voddie Baucham. That's odd since George W. Bush used to say it.

5. In a truly strange turn of events, he compared light-skinned blacks and dark-skinned blacks. He say Samuel Sey is "fully black"–unlike Jason L. Rily, who is "black, too, but not as black as Samuel". Why on earth is a white Baptist elder commenting on something like that? How is that appropriate? Why does he care? 

He also noted how good Samuel Sey looks in a Coogi sweater. You have to wonder what's going on in White's head. 

6. He said 33% of prison inmates are black. While that does point to a serious problem with black criminality (among younger black men), it's a somewhat misleading comparison because a lot of that is due to incarceration on drug offenses. And it's disputable whether so many men should be behind bars for drug possession. 

7. He spent a lot of time inveighing against social justice, intersectionality, and critical race theory. That's fine since I don't support that. That's not the basis of my criticism.

8. He said there's a direct connection between the abortion rate and marital status. A disparity between unmarried women who become pregnant and married women who become pregnant.

But he didn't make that correlation in his tweet. His correlation was based on race rather than marital status. I was the one who suggested we should use marital status rather than race as the basis of comparison. He doesn't get retroactive credit for belatedly appealing to a different variable. 

9. He tardily admitted that one of the factors spiking the abortion rate in the black community is Planned Parenthood, with its white eugenicist past. But once again, that's an issue which I raised in my response to him, not something he originally volunteered. 

Having said that, he denies that it's the "'central cause" of the high abortion rate among black mothers. But that's the framing fallacy. Why assume the abortion rate is reducible to a "central cause"? 

10. He whined about how Twitter only allows you to express yourself in 280 characters. I suspect some people deliberately use Twitter for plausible deniability. If they say something indefensible on Twitter, their loophole is to complain that Twitter is a poor medium for complex analysis. You can't expect a tweet to have detailed qualifications.

But no one is forcing White to use Twitter to discuss the abortion rate in the black community. He could easily write a longer, more qualified statement on Facebook or the Alpha  & Omega blog. So that's a lame excuse. 

11. Now let's get to the nub of the issue. He acted like his tweet was unassailable because the statistic is demonstrably accurate or approximately accurate. He citied articles to back up his claim. 

i) But that's an evasion of the real issue. Speaking for myself, it's not the statistic itself that's controversial, but the statistic in combination with White's explanation for the statistic. What he posits to be the "central cause". He attributes that to "fatherlessness, sexual license, and rebellious sexual ethics". Moreover, fatherlessness isn't really a separate category or variable but reducible to "sexual license and rebellious sexual ethics" since he goes on to say, in the DL, that "Planned Parenthood doesn't force black man and women to fornicate". So according to him, fatherlessness reflects sexually active irresponsible men. 

ii) The logical implication of his statistic in conjunction with his "central cause" is that black men and women are sexually libertine/rebellious at upwards of 3.5x the rate of white men and women. 

iii) In addition, that plays into the old, damaging, defamatory stereotype of black men as oversexed animals. As a recall, that was a justification of antebellum slavery and postbellum Jim Crow laws. Black men had to be kept under heel. 

Furthermore, I believe that stereotype fueled lynchings. If you think black men have a raging, out-of-control libido, then that makes black men presumptive racists. That was the thinking of the lynch mobs, was it not? And that dangerous prejudice continues right up through Dylann Roof  ("Y’all are raping our white women!"). 

It's striking that James White has such a tin-ear for what his explanation entails. And he's impervious to correction by layers of smug impenetrable superiority. 

9 comments:

  1. Racism of others isn't an adequate answer for the problems of family breakdown in black America because society was more racist in the past and they had much better statistics in the Jim Crow South.

    So certain cultures seem to be prone to different sins. Since that smacks of racism and previous arguments by racists, everyone wants to take that off the table.

    But fortunately for both parties, we have a pretty straightforward explanation. The Great Society ripped families apart with perverse incentives for fathers to leave.

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    Replies
    1. As I said to Tim Dukeman:

      At the risk of stating the obvious, there are only two things that prevent men in general from being sexually promiscuous:

      i) Religious restraint

      ii) Lack of opportunity

      Left to their own devices, men are as promiscuous as opportunity presents. And in that regard, it's surreal for James W. or you (if you agree) to allege that white guys are less libertine in that regard. Examples are endless:

      • the history of Greece and Rome

      • the history of pornography

      • the history of prostitution

      • European art

      • movie stars

      • rock stars

      • sports stars

      • movies

      • drama and literature

      • The harems and courtesans of European royal and nobility

      • The sexual intrigues and escapades of life at the royal court

      • celebrities in general

      The scope of white fornication/promiscuity is a pervasive feature of American/European history and culture. To suggest that white guys (and women) lag behind black guys (and women) in that regard is factually preposterous. Is that really what you wish to defend? Do you stand by White's defamatory comparison in that regard?

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    2. I think I laid out the main reason we're seeing more issues in black America relative to other groups: incentives that came from the Great Society.

      Observing that different groups struggle with different sins (which can vary over different periods of time) shouldn't be considered prima facie racist which people do.

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  2. If population figures are anything to judge by:

    1. Asia has approximately 3.75x the population of Africa (Google tells me 4.5 billion vs. 1.2 billion give or take).

    2. What's more, even if we look at the population of the entire continent of Africa vs. the nation of China alone, it's 1.2 billion (Africa) vs. 1.4 billion (China). This includes state-wide limitations on children, forced abortions, and forced hysterectomies in China (among other evils).

    3. Hence, if anything, Asians seem to be more oversexed than Africans. Of course I don't think this is the case, but I'm just playing along with James White's logic.

    4. To be fair, the Mideast is included in population figures of Asia. Then again, the Mideast is included in population figures of Africa too.

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    Replies
    1. @Hawk, bare in mind, China also had a one child rule, so abortions were plentifyl for that 35 year time span.

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    2. Thanks, yes, I alluded to China's one-child policy when I said "state-wide limitations on children" (and actually it's been a two-child policy since 2016).

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  3. Replies
    1. Lol, yeah, that was a peculiar thing for White to say on the DL. Not sure what he was getting at. I think it took place around the 54 minute mark.

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  4. Just re-watched yesterday's DL. White really, really likes himself.

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