The Relationship Overshare Thread

[TheSameIdiot]

 

[Damien]

I'm not going to check, but please tell me that's a real quote. There's almost nothing more delicious than people who think they have superior DNA and admit that they also have to change everything about themselves.

 

[CTV]

I love asking white men why their hairlines start to wither at the age of 19 and why their skin can't stand the sun's light, since their genetics are supposedly so superior.

 

[AceofKnaves]

We need to make “white men hitting The Wall” a thing the same way they’ve tried to make “hitting The Wall” a thing for women.
I am a white man, and I strongly endorse this.
DO IT.

 

[Damien]

It's funny, in my youth I spent a lot of time trying to distance myself from the label of 'white guy.' This is well before all of, you know... the current events. And it's before I really fully understood racism as a systemic problem, even. It really wasn't about that so much. It was just that I grew up in Boston and only the worst people identified as 'white.' Everyone else identified by descent, given most of us were only one or two generations removed from immigrants. If you grew up in Boston in the 80s, you were probably Italian, or Irish, or Portuguese. Only the worst kind of pieces of shit would say 'I'm white.' And it always felt really important, even without really understanding it, to distance myself from people that would say that.

ALSO, as an Italian, you tended to be made casually aware that you're different from a typical white person. White people didn't view you as white not very long ago at all, so fine.. we're not white. There was definitely a chip on your shoulder kind of thing with blatantly rejecting being color-coded. And it's funny because I had to re-acclimate myself to being called a 'white guy' within the context of race discussions more broadly, and then I got slammed back into 1980s reality when my wife pointed out to me several years ago that if her grandparents were alive she would have literally been kicked out of her family for dating me, because Italians weren't the right kind of white (she is 100% Scottish descent, raised in a culturally English family).

Anyway.. white people are fucking terrible.

 

[Ru1977]

blatantly rejecting being color-coded.

This must have been even harder for you being legitimately color blind on top of that.

Yeah, I fell into the "Irish Descent" thing REALLY early as I was born in Virginia. I was literally waving an Irish flag before grade school, mostly my mom's doing heh.

 

[Chooch555]

Anyway.. white people are fucking terrible.

I think we can hurt our own message by going hyperbolic the other way. A white supremacist to borderline racist to guy not even thinking about race could see a white person saying this, take it literally, and get all inflamed. I get "white people that think white people are the master race are terrible" takes longer to say, but I dunno. The world could do with some more nuance.

 

[AceofKnaves]

I dunno, honestly . . .
I can look at things about the specific ethnic lines that led to me (mostly Irish, with some English, Belgian, general European in there), and say “that’s cool”, but when I think about “white culture” . . . what even *is* “white culture”? Does “white culture” as an aggregate even exist outside of a white-supremacist lens? Isn’t the very concept of “white culture” specially created out of white supremacy?

Like I wouldn’t say “Irish people are fucking terrible”, no fucking way. But if we’ve got a group of white people, congregated around “whiteness”? Yeah, I’m super comfortable saying “white people are fucking terrible” in that context.

 

[CTV]

Agree. I am vary wary of people who are emotionally attached to being "white" or having "white cultural pride" vs. ethno-nationalistic pride in Irish, Italian, English, etc. heritage.

 

[Chooch555]

Does “white culture” as an aggregate even exist outside of a white-supremacist lens? Isn’t the very concept of “white culture” specially created out of white supremacy?

I don't think so? I agree it's a flawed idea just like saying any-other-race culture. It's definitely been co-opted by people that make it about supremacy, but, you know, fuck them. I feel similarly about the U.S. Flag. Shitty people can try to claim it, but it's not theirs.

 

[Damien]

I dunno, honestly . . .
I can look at things about the specific ethnic lines that led to me (mostly Irish, with some English, Belgian, general European in there), and say “that’s cool”, but when I think about “white culture” . . . what even *is* “white culture”? Does “white culture” as an aggregate even exist outside of a white-supremacist lens? Isn’t the very concept of “white culture” specially created out of white supremacy?

Like I wouldn’t say “Irish people are fucking terrible”, no fucking way. But if we’ve got a group of white people, congregated around “whiteness”? Yeah, I’m super comfortable saying “white people are fucking terrible” in that context.

Exactly.

But to Chooch's point; there is a lot of unspoken nuance in there doing some heavy-lifting that can easily be missed by people that don't -already- get it. Like the 'not all men' argument. It makes perfect sense if you -already- get it to say 'men are the problem.' But to people that aren't invested in these conversations, they're just seeing, with no context 'men are bad.'

As a white dude, I don't want to speak out of turn here, but I think a problem in the blackness vs. whiteness debate is that blackness is a thing because, historically (and not so historically) black people have had their culture stolen from them and erased from their family memory. For a lot of black people, to my understanding, there IS an element of cultural context JUST in being black (or, more specifically, black in America).
White people, for some reason, want the same shared identity of 'being white' - without the misery of all the things that leads to people having no OTHER culture to identify with directly. White people don't want to celebrate being Irish - they want to celebrate just being WHITE in the same way they feel black people celebrate being black, without having any concept of why those two things are VERY different.

 

[AceofKnaves]

White people, for some reason, want the same shared identity of 'being white' - without the misery of all the things that leads to people having no OTHER culture to identify with directly.

And herein develops the persecution complex of white Christian nationalism, where the oppressors feel compelled to identify with the oppressed in liberation narratives.

And I should add that as a guy grouped as “white”, I absolutely want nothing to do with anything resembling “white culture” from this view, like I totally reject it outright. Not in a “hey, it’s not great, but let’s make it better!” kind of way, in a “nah, I’ll pass on all this” kind of way, basically the same way I’m “nah, I’ll pass” on being a “man” in the masculine-culture sense. I identify way harder with being a Dracula fan than being a “white guy”.

 

[CTV]

Basically. Black American culture is a specific thing in that the descendants of enslaved people were legally and politically grouped together and became an ethnic group unto itself, in a socio-cultural framework that is specific to being in the United States. Black American culture only exists because of racism. White American culture is also a specific thing (sundown towns, lynching, redlining, Citizens Councils...) but most White Americans would claim not to identify with [most of] it. Beyond maybe like, being a fan of Taylor Swift.

I think it's easy for people to get confused with America specifically though because there are Black American people, and American people who are also Black, and most people don't know the difference or care to think about it.