Shame and anger are powerful emotions, Whitey.

[Atreus21]

It's a shame that progressives have gone so far off the deep end that we literally can't tell if the NYT is being trolled here. This is goddamned hilarious.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/14/...Article&region=Footer&contentCollection=Style

Dear Sugars,

I’m riddled with shame. White shame. This isn’t helpful to me or to anyone, especially people of color. I feel like there is no “me” outside of my white/upper middle class/cisgender identity. I feel like my literal existence hurts people, like I’m always taking up space that should belong to someone else.

I consider myself an ally. I research proper etiquette, read writers of color, vote in a way that will not harm P.O.C. (and other vulnerable people). I engage in conversations about privilege with other white people. I take courses that will further educate me. I donated to Black Lives Matter. Yet I fear that nothing is enough. Part of my fear comes from the fact that privilege is invisible to itself. What if I’m doing or saying insensitive things without realizing it?

Another part of it is that I’m currently immersed in the whitest environment I’ve ever been in. My family has lived in the same apartment in East Harlem for four generations. Every school I attended, elementary through high school, was minority white, but I’m now attending an elite private college that is 75 percent white. I know who I am, but I realize how people perceive me and this perception feels unfair.

I don’t talk about my feelings because it’s hard to justify doing so while people of color are dying due to systemic racism and making this conversation about me would be again centering whiteness. Yet bottling it up makes me feel an existential anger that I have a hard time channeling since I don’t know my place. Instead of harnessing my privilege for greater good, I’m curled up in a ball of shame. How can I be more than my heritage?

Whitey

And two columnists responded, excerpts of which are below. I dunno, maybe it's satire. But again it's hard to tell the difference these days.

Steve Almond: Shame and anger are powerful emotions, Whitey. And yet your central struggle is around identity. You write that you don’t know your place. In fact, your letter describes your place as a kind of prison cell of privilege. What you really feel is trapped within an identity that marks you, inescapably, as an oppressor. This feeling is especially acute right now, I suspect, because you’re suddenly immersed in a milieu that reflects your privilege back to you. We do live in a culture steeped in white supremacy and class bigotry, as well as patriarchal values.


Cheryl Strayed:Now that you’re living in a community that, at 75 percent white, roughly mirrors that of the American population, you’re feeling the full force of what it means to be white in a white supremacist culture and it makes you feel uncomfortable because up until now, in some unconscious way, you’d exonerated yourself from it. You were the “good white person” because you grew up among people of color. Now you’re another white face in the crowd at your elite college, and ashamed of it.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

I have no idea what I just read but on the plus side I can ignore it.

 

[13Gigatons]

It amuses me to no end that people are ashamed of being white, black, man or woman. The piece seems like trolling.

 

[mect]

You'll get no argument from me that there is a fringe element of the left that takes the race issue to absurd levels. The difference, this group doesn't really affect me or the nation at large. Meanwhile, the mainstream conservatives try to keep all the focus on this group while they continue to pillage and burn our nation.

 

[Moonbeam]

I have no idea what I just read but on the plus side I can ignore it.

Good move. I have a very good idea of what I just read, but am indifferent to the critique and the critiqued. It’s only a problem for people who are focused on the notion that self respect is external. I am a nobody so these identity issues have no relevance to me. Pride and guilt are for egos. This is why people like you have the option to ignore because the meek inherit the earth.

 

[Starbuck1975]

You'll get no argument from me that there is a fringe element of the left that takes the race issue to absurd levels. The difference, this group doesn't really affect me or the nation at large. Meanwhile, the mainstream conservatives try to keep all the focus on this group while they continue to pillage and burn our nation.

This group does effect our nation when you take into consideration that Donald Trump built his campaign largely as a reaction to this sort of thinking. The “fvck your feelings” sentiment specifically targets it.

 

[zinfamous]

OP found a weirdo that wrote a letter to some people.

One thing is for sure: OP is very concerned.

 

[zinfamous]

This group does effect our nation when you take into consideration that Donald Trump built his campaign largely as a reaction to this sort of thinking. The “fvck your feelings” sentiment specifically targets it.

Ah yes: yet another group responsible for the election of Donald Trump in exclusion of and to pardon the actual people that voted for and enthusiastically support Donald Trump.

You do good work, my friend.

--I get what you're saying, but you are still casting blame for the existence of Trumptardians on these fringe, insignificant weirdos, and not the actual legions of problematic Trumptardians that, we are assumed to believe, have their own capacity for individual thought and personal decision making.

The key point being: You and I also exist in the same world that this fringe loony self-hating white person exists in. Your and my response was not to declare war against them, decide that the war for morality and white nationalism and USA pride has begun and, the only rational response, is to elect Donald mother-fucking Trump. No, we reacted differently because, like Trumptardians, we have our own capacity for independent thought.

There is something truly dark and sinister at the core of every single Trumptardian in this country and outside this country: they all share a common hatred of egalitarianism and are easily-swayed by images of singular, self-proclaimed deities that can sweep in and fix all of the phantom ills of their lives. There isn't a single strange, counter group on this planet that could possibly be responsible for the central poison that infects and defines the utter inhumanity of the proud Trumptardian. They are what they are because they are exactly who they are.

 

[Atreus21]

OP found a weirdo that wrote a letter to some people.

One thing is for sure: OP is very concerned.

haha yes I'm terribly concerned.

 

[fskimospy]

This group does effect our nation when you take into consideration that Donald Trump built his campaign largely as a reaction to this sort of thinking. The “fvck your feelings” sentiment specifically targets it.

I think the idea that those ‘fuck your feelings’ people would be reasonable adults if those fringe elements on the left just didn’t talk about race in that way is wishful thinking.

Those people are that way because that’s who they are. I bet many of them were the same Tea Party people raging about deficits and debt until Republicans came into power. Their rage against their imagined enemies is the constant, the justification just changes.

 

[fskimospy]

haha yes I'm terribly concerned.

You have to admit people have a point when you consistently downplay racial issues as they relate to black and Hispanic people yet post things like this.

 

[VRAMdemon]

What is the debate here...That these people need a shrink?!

 

[fskimospy]

Also this is obvious satire, people.

 

[umbrella39]

Derp Concern Threads... This is all they have left... Pst, focus on losing the house in November...

 

[Atreus21]

Derp Concern Threads... This is all they have left... Pst, focus on losing the house in November...

I AM SO CONCERNED.

 

[mect]

This group does effect our nation when you take into consideration that Donald Trump built his campaign largely as a reaction to this sort of thinking. The “fvck your feelings” sentiment specifically targets it.

While they may leverage this type of movement for their benefit, in my opinion these people would have this sentiment regarding progressives working towards solving legitimate issues regarding race, sexual orientation, gender, etc. Yes, they like to use the absurd to argue their case, but what they actually fight for is anyone different from them being treated as a second class citizen. Sure, we can and should denounce extremists on the left, but not to the point that it detracts from the far greater issue of the extreme fringe that is currently ruling the right. Instead of trying to stamp out any trace of extremism on the left, I prefer to focus my efforts on getting thinking, rational conservatives to stop any form of support of the current republican regime, even if the support is as small as attempting distraction by pointing out silly little things on the left.

 

[Starbuck1975]

Ah yes: yet another group responsible for the election of Donald Trump in exclusion of and to pardon the actual people that voted for and enthusiastically support Donald Trump.

You do good work, my friend.

--I get what you're saying, but you are still casting blame for the existence of Trumptardians on these fringe, insignificant weirdos, and not the actual legions of problematic Trumptardians that, we are assumed to believe, have their own capacity for individual thought and personal decision making.

The key point being: You and I also exist in the same world that this fringe loony self-hating white person exists in. Your and my response was not to declare war against them, decide that the war for morality and white nationalism and USA pride has begun and, the only rational response, is to elect Donald mother-fucking Trump. No, we reacted differently because, like Trumptardians, we have our own capacity for independent thought.

There is something truly dark and sinister at the core of every single Trumptardian in this country and outside this country: they all share a common hatred of egalitarianism and are easily-swayed by images of singular, self-proclaimed deities that can sweep in and fix all of the phantom ills of their lives. There isn't a single strange, counter group on this planet that could possibly be responsible for the central poison that infects and defines the utter inhumanity of the proud Trumptardian. They are what they are because they are exactly who they are.

True, but I see two sides to the Trump equation.

There is the racist, xenophobic, white nationalist and religious right coalition who voted for Trump as a middle finger to liberal America.

They will reap what they have sewn. They are a dying coalition. Trump was their swan song.

But Trump couldn’t win with those people alone.

I relate to the blue collar, working class, union trade Americans who long for an America where having a good working class job enabled a good quality of life. These people feel abandoned and I think should rightfully be angry about globalization and automation. These people often tend to live in blue states, where they tend to encounter the eliticist liberal fringe who have completely lost sight and even look down at labor.

These people voted for Trump because it shifted the national dialogue to the things that were important to them. I can’t really fault them for that.

 

[zinfamous]

True, but I see two sides to the Trump equation.

There is the racist, xenophobic, white nationalist and religious right coalition who voted for Trump as a middle finger to liberal America.

They will reap what they have sewn. They are a dying coalition. Trump was their swan song.

But Trump couldn’t win with those people alone.

I relate to the blue collar, working class, union trade Americans who long for an America where having a good working class job enabled a good quality of life. These people feel abandoned and I think should rightfully be angry about globalization and automation. These people often tend to live in blue states, where they tend to encounter the eliticist liberal fringe who have completely lost sight and even look down at labor.

These people voted for Trump because it shifted the national dialogue to the things that were important to them. I can’t really fault them for that.

Trumptardia is a very real, and very specific thing. Whenever I or anyone refers to Trumptardia, it is only specifically to those ~30% deplorable clowns that will never abandon the King--the first group that you mention. The working class Americans that you mention were never a threat to this country. It is one thing to be duped, realize it, maybe feel some shame over it but then wake up and assess your admitted bad decision and susceptibility to a loud, angry grifter. It's quite another to be duped, love it, swallow it whole, and then beg for more.

Trumptardia is a threat, though. They are the solid base of GOP agitprop that has never abandoned the cause ever since Thurmond/Helms and the other deplorably racist and xenophobic southern democrats flipped and grabbed control of the Republican Party in the late sixties, after "their democrat party" abandoned them with that evil push for Civil Rights. They aren't going anywhere. One can look at their small numbers and shrinking popularity as "dying," but I don't really see it. They are loud and proud, and they vote dependably.

 

[UNCjigga]

I'm pretty sure a Sascha Baron Cohen character (or someone from Portlandia) wrote that column: