Carmen Van Kerchove of Raciallicious writes a guest post at TPM Cafe asking a seemingly simple, but in reality complex question: What role should white people play in fighting racism? One would hope that the post would spark a meaningful discussion. Instead, comments immediately start out bashing and belittling Carmen’s efforts.
Is this for real? Not a April Fools day joke? DF? Is this you? This chick actually used “snap” in a written sentence. I think I might have seen everything now.
Carmen, thats a pretty underwhelming effort thanks for stopping by.
Nice. Second comment and we have an almost textbook example of one of the posts that sparked her questions in the first place, How to Suppress Discussions of Racism. There’s no addressing the issue; there’s the deflection (who cares if she used “snap”?); there’s the attempt to control what the audience sees (really, it’s an April Fools joke!); there’s the attacking the person, not the argument (see again the attack against using “snap,” which also obviously means she’s uneducated and shouldn’t be writing publicly); and for added fun, let’s belittle her a little more and call her a “chick” rather than a woman.
What got my goat, though, was when someone insinuated that Carmen does what she does “for the money” or out of some sort of mixed-race identity crisis. That was comment number 8. I stopped reading after that one for fear of breaking things. Where do people get off saying such things about people that they don’t even know? Again, what does any of that have to do with the question at hand?
Perhaps, the comments get better farther down and people actually address what she has to say. You’ll have to let me know because I’m not sure I can stomach going back.
[H/T Tom]
Jebus alive. You get down to at least 20 or so comments before someone even actually addresses the substance of the OP. Before that, there are a few people defending the article, but nobody really talking about the question that Van Kerchove asks. But, further along, there’s an even worse example of the “she does it for the money” comments. Out of the over forty comments in the thread now, I’d say, like, two actually address the substance. The rest totally talk around it if they mention it at all.
Y’know Roy, there’s an alternate universe out there somewhere where that surprises me.
And it really sucks because these are important conversations and questions to be having.
LOL, it is quite ironic that the commentor simply displayed one of the points of the piece.
The dude’s a driveling idiot. He refused to address the question of the post. All of his commenting was a bunch of straw man, logical fallicy, and distractions from the issue; or any issue for that matter.
Yobachi – Yep, ol’ dude was an idiot alright.