What is "Woke"?

[nanana]

19 minutes ago, PozBearWI said:

The democrats lied and thus, implicitly you believe the Republicans didn't?  Listen again then...

You  clearly don’t get me. I think that people of all partisanships (including mine) have foibles. Love I say but don’t be gullible. Like my favorite church lady (I was Episcopalian) said, “God told us not to judge but he didn’t tell us we had to be stupid…”

[BlackDude]

22 hours ago, nanana said:

 

Sorry, didn't pick up on what you meant by #1 until right now when I was supposed to be working on some deadline, oops.

The "Slave Reparations" movement is a great example, but people could argue that it is a straw man for the point, since I  am not aware that any jurisdiction has passed "Slave Reparations," so I pick it more because it is a clear illustration of what I  was talking about rather than because it is more than a wish of a few percentage of our fellow citizens.  There are many muddier examples, but let's get the water out of the mud until it is crisp pottery that makes a good illustration.  

There have been periodic attempts to get various states and/or the federal government to pass a law to remunerate descendants of slaves for the agreeably unjust conditions and economic deprivations they experienced.  Since slavery was outlawed in 1865, a day-old slave-owner when the amendment passed would be 158 years, 11 months, and 8 days old.  It is unlikely that a 1-day-old would have achieved a high level of agency, so let's pretend that 18-year-olds whose families owned slaves (a tiny minority even in the South) who had reached their majority and who were in a position to actively REJECT the lives they had been born into were able to make full use of their "agency".  They would be 176 years, 11 months, and 8 days old).  It is unlikely that even very good gene therapy or vampirism would have enabled any slaveowner to live that long.  So, there's no way to apply reparations to anyone who had any agency at that time.  

Lest people wonder whether I deny the potential legacy to the progeny of slaves, I do not.  I am sure it has a multi-generational effect.  But when I  try to translate that into a percentage effect, and when I try to get the state to levy reparations against all citizens, many of which were not progeny of slaveholders, many of which were post-1865 immigrants with no direct or indirect role in slavery, I  find the traceability, onus, and practicality problematic.  

Let me also say that there have been many subsequent injustices, racial and otherwise, since 1865 (limiting myself so I don't overtax the patience of you gorgeous bareback sluts, inseminators, and receptacles) to African Americans (but I could pontificate on the Irish, the Chinese, the Japanese, the Italian, the Mexican Bracero dues-paying that happened).  

After 1865 at the hands of state and Federal government, trotted Jim Crow laws, FDRs creation of Social Security for whites and Welfare for blacks, the redlining of black neighborhoods by FDR's administration, Brown versus the Board of Education, the Civil Rights era, the "Great Sociaty" reforms of LBJ that may have had the unintended consequences of making black families jump through government hoops to qualify for subsidies, Dixiecrats, etc.  

Each of these injustices should be subjected to the same analysis of whether it is possible to trace the injustice to an ACTUAL PERSON OR GROUP OF PEOPLE and levy their profits from the bad behavior.  If it can be done, then okay for all of us.  If there were a way to have a more traceable payback to the source of injustice, I  would not at all be opposed.   The more diffuse and collective and involuntary the payback becomes, the more I  oppose it.  Let me be accountable for things I DID, but let me question the collective punishment I suffer when the real criminals or sources of injustice were just people who LOOKED like me.  (I'm mostly Caucasian by the way.)

I am VERY EXCITED, however, to be part of VOLUNTARY solutions that help all of God's children see and achieve their full potential.  

I  would also say, however unfortunate it may be from an individual perspective, that bloodlines have an effect on the POSSIBILITY to access past generational investment and the mindset of investment in FUTURE generations.  For example, if I  were born a princess as high-born as many of you are, you beautiful pixels, my parents might have indoctrinated me into a view that I was a 32nd-generation-prince(ss), which may have affected my allegiance to my class, my burden to carry the bloodline forward, and my desire to conform to (or potentially rebel against) my predecessors' expectations, including (happy or unhappy) impregnation of a (willing or unwilling) female spouse, and multi-generational accumulation wealth and capital.  If I  were an orphan (or academic middle-class trash like I actually am), I may have less consciousness that my decisions were a multi-generational investment in my 7th generation (to cite the time-horizon of native American tribal decision-making).  There may have been a contribution to my mentality of discrimination in the past that deprived me of my multi-generational consciousness that gained me access to past wealth (perhaps finagled from others) and gave me a consciousness to pay it forward so future members of my family could benefit.  There may be much injustice in this, but I  am not at all convinced that I  could quantify the portion gained from finagling (BAD & WRONG, BUT MAYBE SO FAR IN THE PAST IT BECOMES TOO WOVEN IN WITH OTHER VARIABLES) versus multi-generational investment consciousness (NOT BAD, PERHAPS UNDESERVING OF PUNISHMENT). (THIS MORALITY IS MUCH MORE RELEVANT TO BREEDERS than to most gay culture, which has mostly opted out of the gene pool, though please accuse me of simplifying if you think this diatribe is too short...). As much as DISCRIMINATION plays out in inter-generational wealth, so does a MULTI-GENERATIONAL investment consciousness play out.  

Without suggesting that people are immutable, and also without suggesting that thieving bigots of the past may have discouraged people from maintaining a multi-generational investor consciousness, it is hardly fair to expect the most far-sighted investors to adopt the habits of the most happy-go-lucky, here-and-now investors.  

Lady Fortune is a multi-generational bitch, and if we stay at her roulette table, Washington of the 22nd century may finally rival Baghdad of the 11th century or Giza of the 10th century BC.  

So basically, black people just need to the their “L” and move on?

[nanana]

That seems like too broad a takeaway. I’m not advocating that you listen to me unless I make sense to you. 
 

If I do make sense and you want to support a general claim for “black” people, I think I’ve pointed to MANY more recent injustices where you may be able to mount a specific claim on behalf of specific people against specific people that can prove a traceable specific harm that doesn’t have a lot of variables mixed up in them. Everyone has to decide for themselves how much energy they want to spend righting past wrongs versus building new positives. I’m not advising anyone on how to  spend their time and effort or how to deal with forces that are bigger than I am.