Yes, Milo you are being marginalized but by who you think or for the reason you think. First of all I know you have endured a lot of hate and insults lately and I will not add to those. I think a lot of your Idea's are wrong though and I feel a need to attack your arguments, but I will not attack you. I feel too many of us slip right into the personal attack which is unfair and wrong, not to mention lazy. If you have the right idea's then present those and disprove your adversary, when someone goes straight to the personal attack often it is because they don't have a logical argument.
Many have said you are stupid or an idiot or that you are guilty of hate speech. I don't believe any of that is true. I do believe that you are confused and wrong and have been marginalized and I hope I can inform you and help you demarginalize (I think I just made up a word) yourself at least a little bit.
This is specifically in response to your video "All Cis people are Transphobic, (And your probably racist too." Towards the beginning of this video you say that since you are white that none of these opinions are your original thoughts and that you got them from two other beautiful people. Then you show to black peoples that you had gotten your ideas from. Now in a bubble you say that Gazi isn't beautiful, but not because he hates white people, but because he says some pretty anti-Semitic things. Gazi specifically says that he hates white people repeatedly but that isn't as problem for you?
I am going to define a lot of things in this post because I think words and definitions are indeed important. Bigotry is defined as hating or opposing a group of people. By its basic definition Gazi is an admitted bigot, and you are excusing that? I am opposed to all bigotry no matter who it is leaved against, whether it is white people, black people, or Jews or whomever. You give an admitted bigot a pass. For some reason you think a black man who is bigoted against whites should not be held to the same standard that the rest of us are held to. Perhaps you think because black people have been treated like chattel in the past that we can't hold black people today to the same standards that we would hold white people to? I believe this is wrong and treating black adults like children. I hold everyone to the same standard no matter what race they are. The truth is it is not that you were even holding him to a lower standard now that I think of it, because you did not forgive him of all bigotry. You condemned him of bigotry against Jews, antisemitism, but forgave him of anti-white bigotry. So this is not a matter of holding a black man to a lower standard but it specifically about being anti-white.
Then you go on to say that all white people are racist and all cis gendered people are transphobic and so on and so forth, and that all majorities are biased against the minorities. You claim that words like racist and transphobic are not insults or generalizations they are merely facts about the way we are socialized in a western society.
First of all it is a generalization, the next statement you make does not prove that all white people are racist is not a generalization. What it attempts to do is justify the generalization. See not all generalizations are wrong or bad. They do have a place, but any time you say that all of any group is anything it is a generalization whether you think it is justified or not.
Secondly you use the word facts, when these are really your opinion not facts. I don't believe that white people in western civilizations are socialized to be racist or racially biased which are to different things. I will get more into these definitions later.
Now you jump into gender identity. You claim that the fact that we are raised in a society that believes that gender is based on anatomy and chromosomes is not a stereotype. That we are all exposed to the idea even if we have parents who try to raise us better than that. I have a few issues here. First you seem to be taking the position that gender is a social construct and if you think that there is any nature involved here you are transphobic.
Well the truth of the matter is that there is a lot of scientific evidence to back up the idea of gender being innate and less to back up the fact that all of the traditional gender roles merely being a social construct. Don't get me wrong this is a complicated matter. Men and women are different physically. Now I am going to get into generalizations but the good kind. Men tend to have more upper body strength, thicker skin, literally and a thicker skull. Women tend to have wider hips and they are built to live longer due to many factors in their systems. The brains of men and women are quite different. Men have more grey matter than women and women have more white matter than men. Women have more connecting neurons to the right side of the brain than men. Here is the 2013 study that shows this, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131202161935.htm.
This is why men tend to be more left brain thinkers. They tend to be better at math and logic starting very early in their development. Women tend to use the right hemisphere of their brains more and becasue of that they tend to excel in communications also starting from a very early age. They also tend to be better at using emotions. An important note outside statisticians looked at this data and said that the differences were not as great as the study innitionaly said. This also does not mean that all mean are better than women at math and all women are better than men at languages there are many variables. It could be why we do see trends in these areas though. If we look specifically at the science and tech fields we often here about how few women are achieving degrees in engineering and while that is true we rarely here about the fact that in biology they are earning the majority of degrees. Could that be because biology tends to help humanity in a more direct and personal way and women as a general rule are more attracted to that? That could be. Another important note is that that study does not look at older brains so things could change with age.
This is an article that has real issues with the for mentioned study http://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2013/12/08/study-the-brains-of-men-and-women-are-different-very-different/#43864df61d0c. The point is I don’t think the science is really settled one way or another. But I personally believe that gender is biological and I think there is a lot of evidence that it is. I do not appreciate these opinions that are based in fact being automatically dismissed without a thorough examination of the evidence.
There are also psychological differences as well, but I am not really going into them. Since people would likely argue that the psychological differences are only a product of socialization. I will include this article from a feminist that does not think that women get equal pay or rights in this country but who does except these psychological difference https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/21st-century-aging/201209/differences-between-men-and-women. Another reason not to go into detail about these psycoilogical details is this post is going to be too long already and I don't have time to bring up everything. The truth is there are many physical differences that I skipped over as well.
So why do men and women have these differences. They help us in our roles. Gender roles were important to ancient man, not as a means of control and dominance but as a means of survival. Men going out hunting for food, farming or using a craft, too provide substance for his family while protecting them from any threats that may come upon them, at the same time having a woman who would stay home and provide emotional support for the family while she raised the children and kept up the house, provided stability for a family and helped societies grow and prosper.
Why did these gender roles arise? Two possibilities, the first is simple. God made man and woman different yet equal. Both having strengths and weaknesses to compliment the other. The other possibility is that it is the product of evolution, otherwise known as natural selection. When ancient men who were best able to provide for the physical needs for their families were the ones that had the most offspring produce offspring of their own. The same is true of women. The ones who best met the needs of the family were the ones that produced the most offspring that in turn produced the most off spring, either way the roots of most gender roles are genetic and not strictly a social construct.
Now it is true that in many cases society has gone too far with these gender roles. Society can take a nature driven gender characteristic like men tend to be stronger and warp it into if you are not strong than you are not a man. This is wrong and where we find this going on we should stamp it out. But the roots of most of our gender roles are genetic and I think science bears this out.
The second issue I have with the way that said that society teaches you that gender is a result of chromosomes even if your parents don't, is the implication that if you think that gender is biologically based that is bad. Given that the title of this video is "All Cis Gendered People are Transphobic,' I have to assume that you are implying that if you believe that gender is biologically based than you are automatically transphobic.
For me it is the opposite. First of all I have never had feelings of hatred or any animus towards transgendered people. At first I heard that if someone chooses to identify as a female I have to except them as female despite the fact that every cell in their body disagreed with that (I realize there are exceptions to that but it is the rule). I didn't like having to go against science and nature. But when I learned that the brain scans of a transwoman was closer to a woman than a man that started to change the way I looked at the issue. The parts of our brain that influence gender are affected. This mean that a transwoman is wired in the brain to be a woman, something that would not be possible if gender were just a social construct. You couldn't have a woman's brain in a male body or a man’s brain in a females body if gender was a social construct. The fact that trans people are trans people and that they haven't been socialized into being cis gendered speaks to the fact that gender is biological not merely a social construct.
Then you get back into race by referencing a study where they postulate that whites empathize less with blacks than other whites. First of have you ever noticed that a scientific study can come out one day and say one thing and another can come out the next day and say the opposite. There is a lot of bad science and one of the hall marks of good science is the fact that it is repeatable. So if this really is a thing and it is true, others will repeat it and confirm it. Right now I have my reservations and even if you believe everything that is in it says "Finally, Experiments 5 and 6 provide evidence that this bias is rooted in perceptions of status, not race per se." This seems to undermine how many are using this study.
You then say something like were raised to think that black are dangerous even though history has proven the opposite to be true. First of all speak for yourself not for me. I was not raised that way. You may say that society had an influence on me but one of my favorite movies growing up was roots and I have never felt that a black man will put me in danger, just because he is black. So I guess society is doing a bad job socializing me. Now you use that phony history argument. Don't get me wrong I love history and I think we can and should learn a lot by it but I don't think the fact that there used to be slavery in this country as well as Jim Crow laws means that a black man today is in greater danger today than a white man. Too much has changed since then.
It also cherry picks history. When I was growing up in the eighties there was a madman named Mugabe. He is still in power but it was in the eighties when he was at his worst. His country was run by a racist white government but when he got in he became much worse. It seemed harmless at first. He bought farms from white farmers and gave it to black farmers to make up for pat racial injustice, but soon local warlords started killing the white farmers and taking their lands and Mugabe did nothing to stop it. The truth is that man has an incredible propensity for evil towards one another and skin color has little to do with it.
Instead of looking at history we should look at current crime stats to decide who we should be afraid of and they tell a very different story. White men are more likely to be attacked by a black man than a black man is to be attacked by a white man, far more likely. But a white man is far more likely to be attacked or killed by another white man than a black man. And a black man is far more likely to be attacked and killed by another black man than a white man. So if you actually look at the data available today about crimes happening today whites should be most scared of other whites and blacks should be most scared of other blacks. Here is the raw FBI data https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/expanded-homicide/expanded_homicide_data_table_6_murder_race_and_sex_of_vicitm_by_race_and_sex_of_offender_2012.xls.
You said "Once a discussion boils down to disagreement over the definition of a word it's probably not going to be very productive." Although that might be the case I feel definitions are important and you do use improper definitions so I feel I must talk about what the words mean.
You use the words bias and racism as if they are the same thing and they are not. Racism has a specific definition traditionally it meant the belief or ideology that one race is superior to another, modern definitions keep that and add the traditional definition of bigotry the hatred of or hostility to another group of people, but in the case of racism it is hatred of another race of people. Bias is favoring or prejudice for or against something. The real difference here is that racism can never be by accident it is always on purpose. You all ways know that you believe others are inferior to you or you are superior. Do you believe that black people are genetically inferior to you? Do you hate black people? If you answered no to both questions you are not a racist pure in simple even if you think you are.
Also we do not have institutional racism in this country, not any more at least. We used to and it was despicable. Institutional racism or systematic racism is when someone systematically oppresses a group of people because they believe that the race is inferior. Examples include slavery, Jim Crow and apartheid. The point is it has to be done on purpose and with animosity.
What you call institutional racism is actually institutional bias.
The problem is that there are many trying to redefine racism and you seem to be a part of this group. If you don't believe me look it up. I have never heard of a regular standard dictionary defining racism the way you and others like you do. Here is why they do it. They want to convince people first of all that only white people can be racist and secondly if they repeat it enough it will eventually end up in the dictionary. It worked before that's how they got the definition of racism to include bigotry in the first place, but this is unnecessary and harmful.
There are people out there who are trying to divide us into classes the oppressors and the oppressed. Those who marginalize others and those who are marginalized and that a majority is always biased against the minority but this is not always the case. I am not saying that bias does not exist it is just not that simple.
American society has worked hard to eliminate the actual structural racism it had and hundreds of thousands died in that effort. Even today many time white people are so afraid of being racist and work so hard to not be racist that they can sometimes be biased towards black people and you see this often in the media, both traditional and social. I will give some examples.
A decade ago back when you were in grade school we had the Duke Lacrosse incident. There was a college party that had some strippers and got a bit rowdy. On their way home one of the strippers called the police and made rape allegations. The police talked to both women and her companion said that nothing happened and the woman who made the allegation was under the influence and did not make a credible witness so the police dropped it.
But the two women were black so the Reverend Jessie Jackson heard about it and told wrote an op-ed how the police never even went to the fraternity to gather evidence. So a full police investigation was launched. In the course of that investigation nothing of what the woman said could be substantiated and there was evidence that proved her story wrong. That did not stop the district attorney. He ignored the fact that the young men were not guilty and went after them, pressing charges, so he could secure the black vote. That city is predominantly Black so you need to get the black vote to win. His actions were so egregious he eventually lost his job his license and plead guilty to a criminal count. During the height of the madness professors and others at Duke signed a letter demanding that player’s accused be kicked out of school before they had their day in court, and the coach was fired for no reason what so ever. Eventually the evidence came out that most of the accused were not even on campus at the time of the rape, but not before these innocent young men’s lives were in tatters and their reputations were destroyed. There are many to this day that believe that they were guilty because they have not bothered to do the research.
This is an interesting case because these should have been the most privileged people in this nation, rich white kids going to an elite school and playing lacrosse can you get more privileged than that? Yet they were treated horribly because of biases in the legal and media systems. That does not exactly fit the narrative does it?
There are many other examples I could give to you. You say that we need to use your definition of racism to tear down the systems of oppression that exist in our society. To that I ask what systems of oppression. We worked hard to tear down those systems and for the most part I think we were successful but if any still exist let me know where I can find them please and I will help you tear those down as well.
You seemed to imply that one place we can find those is in police brutality cases but I have found no statistical evidence that supports this. If you have any please give them to me I would appreciate it. You might ask what about all of the cases against young unarmed black males, well although statistically young black males do get killed at a slightly higher rate than their white counterparts it is not nearly at a high enough rate to justify this claim. This is where the media bias comes into play. Unarmed white men get shot on occasion too but it is rarely covered in the media because it isn't as juicy a story.
Ferguson Missouri is a perfect example of how our media and society can be biased against the cops to the detriment of the truth. Michael Brown while on drugs decided to rob a store with a friend. He roughed up a man and stole a box of cigars as I remember. Then as they were walking home officer Wilson stopped the two because they were loitering in the middle of the road. He was about to let them go when he heard over the radio the details of the violent robbery and the description of the suspects. The two young men knew that their time was almost up and they reacted.
Officer Wilson tried to arrest them but Michael Brown resisted. There was a struggle in the vehicle for the officer’s gun and the officer was injured but retained possession of his weapon. Brown got out of the vehicle and made a run for it. Officer Wilson still injured got out of his vehicle drew his weapon and told the young man to freeze. Michael Brown turned on Wilson again and charged at him head down like a bull. The officer defended himself by shooting Michael Brown who died.
Brown's accomplice started to spread the rumor that the cop had shot the young man in the back of the head while Brown was kneeling with his hands up. Many who were nearby said they saw what happened and later admitted that they had not. They repeated the hands up don't shoot notion so that another coop could not get away with shooting another unarmed black youth. Many of them believed it was the truth because of bias. When the police interviewed all of the witnesses they heard conflicting stories. Some told what really happened including multiple black people and corroborated the officer’s story; others repeated the lie started by a robber trying to get away with the robbery. As the autopsy and grand jury reports came available it became clear that all available physical evidence supported the officer's account and nothing supported the account of those who supported the hand's up don't shoot mantra and many of the witnesses admitted they lied but just so that justice could be done.
The entire Black Lives Matters movement was based upon the lie of "hands up don't shoot." And who were the real victims of this nonsense? The blacks who lived in Ferguson who had their lives turned upside down and some of them had their businesses burned down by rioters and they had nothing to do with that whole mess. Luckily many helped those who were affected in this manner.
So I ask once again what real evidence do you have that there is systematic racism going on in our law enforcement on a nationwide basis. I need facts not just anecdotal evidence. I have already shown I can produce anecdotes to in fact for every anecdote you can produce I can produce one as well. I need real evidence.
Not that there isn't real bias going on all the time there is, not that there isn't black people that suffer because of bias because there is. There are all sorts of victims of bias and we need to look at every case on an individual basis.
Then you closed the same way you began by saying that the thoughts on race were not your own. And you implied that whites could not have orriginal thoughts about race. Why can't you or anyone else decide what you or they believe on this matter. Just because you are white you don't get an opinion?
According to Merriam and Webster to marginalize is to "to relegate to an unimportant or powerless position within a society or group." If you are not allowed to have a voice about race relations your opinion has been marginalized and you have been marginalized by those who are attempting to change the definition of racism. That is why they are attempting to change the definition to marginalize those who disagree with them.
Everyone needs an equal voice in the important matters that face us all. We can't allow any of us to be marginalized. I have heard so many times that I don't understand what it is like to be a black man in America. That is true. But the Black man does not understand what it is like to be me either. In fact none of us understand what it's like to be anyone else. That is why we need everyone’s voices and can't allow anyone to be marginalized even cis white males.
Please feel free to respond and let me know why I am wrong.
Thanks for your time and I hope you stop letting people marginalize you. God bless you and keep you.
Shane Swenson
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