The pedigree of that image is that it started as a list created in a facilitated focus group on race and race relations. It assigns no positive or negative connotations to those items; they're things people said off the top of their head when they were asked "What does 'white culture' mean to you?"
Later, it was shared with the inaccurate description of being a list of negative aspects of white culture.
It's kind of funny really; the pedigree of that list being considered a list of negative things is white people making assumptions about the intent of a list assembled of things white people self-attributed to white culture.
Regarding the previous "iceberg" image---that's a lot of words to go looking through to try and pick out the items you're describing as 'perfectly normal and valuable things.' Can you highlight which ones you were referring to? Assuming good intent, I assume you didn't mean "Racial profiling" or "Fearing people of color."
> It assigns no positive or negative connotations to those items; they're things people said off the top of their head when they were asked "What does 'white culture' mean to you?"
The result is the same, the subconscious associations between "white" and "whiteness" and those traits has been strengthened. The meaning of words comes from what people think about when they hear it. By increasing the amount of things people associate with the word "white" the definition is expanded.
No negative connotations have been assigned by the document. But "white" and especially "whiteness" has very negative connotations. I've never come across any text or material suggesting "whiteness" is a good thing. Its always stuff like this: https://news.csusm.edu/ask-the-expert-the-problem-with-white... (That alone is already pretty fucked up when you think about it for more than a second) Furthermore, the meaning of words comes from what people think about when they hear it. But "white supremacy" has extremely negative connotations, and so all those normal things get tarred by association with imagery of the Nazis and the KKK.
>Regarding the previous "iceberg" image---that's a lot of words to go looking through to try and pick out the items you're describing as 'perfectly normal and valuable things.' Can you highlight which ones you were referring to? Assuming good intent, I assume you didn't mean "Racial profiling" or "Fearing people of color."
Of course not, those are the actually bad things that are used to tar the "perfectly normal and valuable things". If the iceberg picture only contained good things, it would associate positive valence with the term "white supremacy" rather than associating negative valence with the normal things as the picture was designed to do.
To take specific examples, "Calling the police on black people". This is a perfectly normal thing to do if your being robbed or harassed and the perpetrator happens to be black. Doing so does not mean your promoting white supremacy. Now if you're doing it because they're black, thats a bad thing, but the image makes no destination, so the normal thing is tarred by the bad thing. There are also some supper egregious ones, things like "White parents" and "there's only one human race/We're all one big human family". These are actually anti-racist perspectives that are now being associated with one of the most racist and destructive ideologies in history. Another one is "All Lives Matter", this is an explicitly egalitarian message that is now viewed as racist by association.
I can keep going through the list but then my arguments would turn into a gish-gallop.
This kind of rhetorical tarring has been going on for so long that certain kinds of explicit institutional racism is now viewed as not racist (affirmative action), and explicitly anti-racist and unifying statements "All lives matter/there's only one human race" are viewed as racist.
All lives matter, in particular, is perceived as racist because it's only trotted out as a response to black lives matter (a phrase it is not at all incompatible with, so people tossing "all lives matter" out as a response to "black lives matter" are immediately casting it in a racist connotation).
As for the reason it isn't really a retort to "black lives matter", that's been explained better by Chris Straub than I ever could.
It's more that they're saying people just believe black houses are likelier to catch fire innately and that's acceptable, when they're not and it's not.
You could replace, "black" in that sentence with a whole bunch of other things. There's nothing special about race, and their shouldn't be. Again, multiple factors of variation. If someone is focused on "poverty" it's not that they find black people being disproportionately affected acceptable, it's that they have exercised their judgement and don't see it as a priority. And (IMO) rightly so.
Now you can make the argument that 99% of people don't give a shit, and only care about themselves. But that leads you more down the path of effective alturism than BLM, again because the former doesn't ignore the other factors of variation.
For those who genuinely care about the state of the world, and have identified issues that in their judgement that are more pressing, or those who do care but are currently busy keeping their own heads above the water for whatever reason, the accusations that they believe the current situation is acceptable are at best tone deaf and at worst downright insulting.
Political reform? How many people protesting actually voted in their municipal and state elections?
Even if that were the case, it would be a pretty solid argument to focus on more tractable problems rather than whatever the past few months have been.
Saying "Other options have been tried and failed." Is BS post-hoc justification. This round of BLM started because of 1 egregious viral video in a country of 300,000,000 when a whole bunch of young people had nothing better to do. When your dealing with complex systems like police-community interactions, you will never be able to completely eliminate egregious incidents, even if you can reduce the incident rate by 90%. Any kind of legitimate attempt to improve the situation will necessarily involve something resembling multiple A/B tests carried out over multiple areas and multiple years to understand the relationship between policy, environment, culture, and policing outcomes. This will necessarily take time, it will be extremely expensive, and the gains will be marginal. That's just how things work when your dealing with massive complex systems and rare events.
It wasn't just one video, it wasn't one just one incident, It's not a small amount of people who are upset, and it's not okay.
Quite a few of the protesters have documented why they're out in the street. If anyone is having difficulty understanding the situation, I recommend reading what they've said.
For me personally, it was very educational to bear witness to people protesting police brutality being met with more police brutality---not justified force escalation, but attempts to bait protesters into breaking laws to justify arrests, antagonize nonviolent protests hoping for violent ones, and straight up lying about the situation on the ground. The last part I find insulting, because it's not like the video cameras aren't there. They know the video cameras are there. They believe the system will protect them from violating their own protocols and the law, and so far, it does.
