We rarely go wrong when we remember not to be preoccupied by skin color. Ammo Grrrll is in serious mode again today:
Let me spell out the Left’s advice to blacks: Every attitude and behavior that can possibly assure a healthy and productive future is “white” and, therefore, off limits. But that’s OK. Because everything you need to know about yourself is the color of your skin. That’s not only your “hole” card, but your entire hand, your All-Areas Backstage Pass.
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Well, most of the Confederate statues are gone now. Did that convince the 70 percent of unwed fathers to marry one of the mothers of their offspring? Did it inspire some young black man to aspire to dental school or a plumber’s apprenticeship instead of joining a drug gang? The sad truth is that if a magic wand could be waved over the land to erase any and all negative or “racist” thoughts in the minds of white people, not one thing would change. We aren’t the problem; so we can’t be the solution.I never wasted much time worrying about whether I was "acting masculine." I just wanted to be able to make a good living and retire in comfort. It's less the fashion today, but when I was young it was still quite the cultural thing to warn women that the path to success in dating and marriage, with all its benefits in terms of freebies, ran through a territory I can only describe as "acting feminine," including dumbing down and camouflaging any hint of assertiveness or self-sufficiency. If you want a guy who wants that kind of thing, and you're looking for an economic sinecure, it's probably reasonably good advice. In fact, it's about like the advice that would lead a black teenager today to wreck his life in service of finding a permanent spot in a system of government dependency. As an alternative, I recommend learning to act like a grownup. If your peers don't like it, find better peers.
4 comments:
Some years ago you told me that anything you did was essentially female, and therefore by definition appropriate to you. I thought that was a smart way of approaching the issue.
A long time ago I saw a movie based on the life of Buddy Holly. The teenaged hero's father berates him for playing "jungle music" in the garage, but he replies, "Well, how can it be jungle music if I wrote it?"
I am two years older, and my recollection at highschool AP classes and at William and Mary was young women telling each other and all men within earshot the exact opposite, with tones of voice varying in subtlety. I remember some saying they had joined sororities precisely to have a haven away from that. I don't think their teachers, sisters, and professors told them any differently. Their mothers and aunts, I don't know. Maybe those. And the young men, yes, there was a fair bit of declaration about preferring "feminine" women. But if they wanted to get laid they dropped that fast, whatever their thoughts might be about it. They did likely enforce considerable selection in that direction. But females enforced selection as well.
It wasn't until I began reading Regency and Victorian novels that I ran across the idea that a respectable woman wouldn't accept gifts from a man not her close relative or husband. Those societies struck me as absurdly restrictive about sex--and nothing could be farther from my high school and college cultures than restrictiveness about sex--but I could see the point about what it meant to accept money (even indirectly) from a man who was declaring a sexual interest. I always preferred to keep that kind of development on a non-pecuniary footing. On the other hand, it was a real pleasure to find a man who wanted to invest in nest-building, and what could be sexier than a willingness and ability to do repairs?
In marriage, I adopted a completely different approach: all our income and property is commingled and community property, even when it otherwise would have qualified as separate property. We've always had joint accounts. Under my roof, it's a nearly perfect socialism.
Anyway, the point for me is that it's best to adopt behavior that suits one's goals, not behavior that fits a stereotype, especially if behavior that fits the stereotype is a fast track to failure, grievance, and dependency. It's hard for me to imagine taking seriously anyone's advice to fail on purpose in order to avoid seeming to violate some kind of pigeonholed norms dreamed up by someone who presumed to know best about what my true nature was. It should be enough to discover whether an action is right or wrong, without worrying about whether it's permissible to someone of my caste. The accusation of "acting white" ought to be treated with vicious derision.
Similarly, if by acting like an adult person I seemed to be acting masculine, well, tough. Luckily, by the time I graduated from law school, in the mid-80s, most of this nonsense had abated and the rest was avoidable with reasonable care. That was before the pendulum swung again, of course, and being a woman became once more a grievance category. Back then, we had the quaint idea that it should all be about what we could do and how we performed on challenges.
Back then, I also believed that was what the Democratic Party was about. By the time I left my law firm in 1999, the troubling trend of diversity training had just begun: it was called "sensitivity training," and it concentrated on not reviewing work as critically if it had been performed by a member of a hothouse-flower class. It struck me and the co-workers I respected as condescending and ridiculous. It was impossible to understand how anyone could treat a co-worker with respect if we had to apply watered-down standards to affirmative action hires. What an insult: "Not bad work for a _____."
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