The premise is that the system is white supremacist in nature and must be torn down. From there it is implied that if you do not support tearing down the system, you are a white supremacist. And what do we do to white supremacists?
Except the vast majority of people who are iffy about what's going on aren't supremacists of any sort. The word "racist" is quickly losing effect.
Politics might not be 1 dimensional, but pendulums are.
Recent experience would say: not a whole lot. Well, maybe elect them president. You know, real scary stuff for the white supremacists.
> Except the vast majority of people who are iffy about what's going on aren't supremacists of any sort.
So is your entire complaint that, in truth, you believe in the goals that BLM has, you just are really miffed by their characterization of you as a "white supremacist", which carries too negative a connotation, and because of that you just can't bring yourself to support them?
I mean it's really easy to acknowledge that one benefits from white supremacy. I do, all the time. That doesn't inherently make me a bad person, it makes me a (white) person who lives in a society. That I happen to benefit from the same structures that put other people down, on its own, doesn't impact my moral character. What I do with that knowledge though, now that does.
Have you considered why Amy Cooper called the police on a black man for making the heinous crime of asking her to leash her dog? Why there are white people calling the police on black people that did nothing wrong?
And there are many ways that the average white person benefits from mass incarceration: prison labor, electoral over representation, not to mention that I strive to have empathy for others.
It seems reasonable to say that Amy Cooper was being bigoted, but I'm not sure how that relates to the OP's saying that everyone who happens to self-identify as white should be doing penance for somehow "benefiting" from a grossly unfair system.
This isn't about me. This is about the country running off a cliff. And it's the fact that I'm not even allowed to question your presumptions about how the system benefits whites at the expense of blacks - which is statistically unsupported, but that's beside my point.
Again, it's the fact that I risk being unpersoned for even bringing it up.
I don't see this assumption anywhere. People of any race can be white supremacists and can benefit from white supremacy (consider for example Candace Owens).
As for the rest of your comment, I can't really address your fears. You appear to be living in a reality so different from mine, that unless you provide more explanation of how the country is running off a cliff or how black lives matter will reinstitute segregation or why you think you'll being unpersoned for... actually I can't tell what your beliefs are other than abject terror, there's not much more I can say.
You mean like in general, or in very specific spaces? Because while there are black separatist groups that exist, they're fringe-of-fringe.
> And the California legislature just recently passed a bill to re-legalize racial discrimination.
I think we'll agree to disagree that legalizing affirmative action policies is a setback in racial equality.
Sure, but these have been around for quite a while (the first example I see is from 1969).
I think this speaks to an interesting impedance mismatch in terms of race-blindness vs. race awareness. There's two kinds of arguments in this vein. One, the dogwhistly kind of race-blindness that's characterized by "I don't see race" and "America hasn't been a racist nation since 1965" kinds of things. You're not making this kind of argument, and I want to be clear that you aren't, but I want to touch on it for anyone else reading, because I think there's some interesting history there about the broader "race-blindness" statement.
Interestingly, right in the shadow of the civil rights movement, race-aware policies were the norm. School bussing and forced re-integration to make sure things weren't separate were commonplace and even mandated. But we've been slowly moving in the opposite direction, with the specific issue of school desegragation seeing a reversal in 2007, where race-aware re-integration policies that tried to account for de-facto segregation were declared unconstitutional. In other words, policies crafted during the civil rights era were declared to violate the "equal protection" clause, and as a result, school districts have grown significantly more segregated since 2007. The upshot: race-aware policies aren't "new" and in fact sentiment and legality for them has drifted against, not for, them over time.
So if we start from the axioms that black American culture is unique, and that it is valuable, then we might want to protect and foster it in a college environment. If you have a minority spread across a majority group, they'll be forced to integrate in various ways. Certainly things like black student unions and culture clubs exist (and they exist for other cultures as well, as do insular dorms in some cases), but who you live around has a huge impact on the culture. We know this is true in cases beyond ethnic culture: universities have insular dorms for all kinds of things, pre-med programs, honors programs, sports programs etc. Not to mention unofficial insular communities such as marching band, where I know many students choose to live near each other at many schools. Not to mention, like, fraternities and sororities.
So if we recognize the value of a culture, and we recognize the value of an insular community in protecting that culture, the next step is to foster an insular community to protect and encourage this culture. That way it doesn't get lost, and people can learn from and about it.
So the question becomes: is separate but equal being inherently unequal, as Brown v. BoE said, the end of the story, or does equality through assimilation cause it's own kind of inequality? And if so, how do you balance those inequalities?