EricTheRed
Paranormal Maven
Interpretation of a text involves more than just facts. It involves determinations as to what is fact or not, the relevance and significance of claimed facts, and how propositions fit into a larger framework of knowledge and ethical understanding.
1. Dear White People is “anti-white” and promotes “white genocide.”
It’s a commonplace anti-intellectual response to confuse criticism or satire with hatred or racism. Nothing I’ve read about the show would suggest it’s promoting racism. It appears to satirize people on all sides. If the show were promoting the idea that all whites were genetically or otherwise inferior to other groups of people and doing so in a straight faced way, this would be problematic. But this isn’t taking place, at all, from what I’ve read.
Second, ‘white genocide’ is simply a confusion, a myth, a conceptually incoherent attempt at appropriating the word genocide by neo-Nazis, white supremacists, anti-Semites and related right-wingers, to describe their opposition to diversity. Genocide has historical and contemporary meanings that have nothing to do with how white genocide is used in right-wing discourse. Put simply, there is no ongoing attempt to physically eradicate white people nor destroy anything imagined to be the “culture” of white people. Further, it’s not even clear what “white culture” is supposed to be.
2. “The last thing blacks want is for white males to organize and that’s not too far away!”
First, note the racial bias in ascribing a universal motive to all black people. Next is the delusion that all whites somehow agree with Ventre’s delusions. I’m a white male, and think that Ventre is fundamentally wrongheaded about many things.
3. Affirmative action.
a. Whether affirmative action violates the 14th amendment is, perhaps, open to debate. It’s an easily discoverable fiction that affirmative action is illegal since it currently is legal.
b. That affirmative action’s primary motive is to “target” white males is also fiction. It’s intent is to correct systemic racial bias. The claim that there’s an “absolute” intent to “target” while males lacks any evidence in the law or in the legal/legislative discourse surrounding affirmative action. That Ventre believes to the contrary only shows that he’s capable of inventing facts that suit his white supremacist views.
4. “The media also attacks us constantly with interracial couples in every show and commercial and portraying white males as incompetent.”
The only way it seems that displays of interracial relationships could be construed as an attack on white males is if one is already a racist. Interracial relationships aren’t in the least bit wrong or inappropriate. (Alas, a 2011 Gallup poll found that nearly 25% of conservatives still opposed interracial marriage.) What else then could explain Ventre’s opposition? How could the display of human pair bonding across race ever be construed as an “attack”?
Then there’s the fiction that interracial couples are in “every show and commercial.” Critical thinking 101 mandates that you guard against false generalizations like this. While failing utterly as accurate description, it damns itself again with psychological projection of racist ideation. The idea that white males are “constantly” portrayed in the media as incompetent lacks evidence. That one or two instances of satirical portrayals of white males is amplified into a concerted invidious media portrayal is indicative not of a judgment based on evidence, but one based on misplaced and even paranoid confabulation.
5. “Everything this world is was created by Europeans and Americans. F’ing blacks didn’t even have a calendar, a wheel or a numbering system until the Brits showed up.”
It’s difficult to even know where to begin to unpack the confusions in this statement. First off there’s the false generalization of “everything.”
Next is the implication, based on the context of his entire comment and with an ear pressed to the rails of historical and contemporary racist rhetoric, that Europeans and Americans are racially pure or homogenous. This was never true.
Then there’s the implication that only white people could have made various inventions, discoveries and cultural products. This is, of course, classical racism—the idea that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. This is pseudoscientific nonsense, but I’m not surprised that Ventre would buy it anyway.
Ventre misstates the reality of calendars in African history.
What about the wheel? 99.9999% of whites (or blacks or asians or anyone else) would have no idea about wheels as a possible technology unless one person invented them. Here Ventre seems to presuppose that there’s some kind of superior racial intelligence at work that predictably allowed “whites” to discover the wheel. Again we see his pseudoscientific racism rearing up.
Numbering systems? A quick google search reveals Ventre is wrong on this too. This in turn suggests that Ventre isn’t interested in an objective examination of this or possibly any other question having to do with race, but instead is looking for ways to prop up his presuppositional racism.
Lastly, “F’ing blacks”? Are you serious? This alone would reveal Ventre’s racist hand.
6. “google serotonin by race….”
This sentence is nothing more than a racist rant, ill-informed, and biased beyond salvage. If Ventre can so easily waltz into the above mistakes, there’s no telling how many more he’s embraced in this sentence.
Putting aside the defunct debates about race and IQ, I’d like to focus on violent crime for a moment.
When I’ve had online debates with white supremacists they’re very reluctant to own the totality of “white history.” They’ll embrace Newton or Einstein (inevitably they haven’t heard of numerous other names in science, the arts and humanities), but they’ll conveniently forget about the Holocaust, WWI, WWII, or the endless pre-20th century wars in Europe, or the genocide against Native Americans, the horrific mass crimes committed by the Belgians in Africa, etc., etc.
If you’re going to play the abject game of awarding gold stars to your racial team, you have to be honest about it. And if you are, you’ll be forced to the conclusion that the amount of violence and destruction committed by the white West probably has no equal in world history. This history of imperial, religious and colonial conquest, theft, violence, torture and genocide makes any street crime in America pale by comparison.
All Ventre is doing by bringing up black violent crime is to perpetuate the myth of blacks’ inherent propensity to violence. Any sociological, political and historical understanding of violent crime—the only kinds that have scientific validity—would reveal that violent crime does not stem from race, but a multiplicity of non-racial factors.
How can there possibly be any doubt that Ventre’s rant is anything other than evidence of systemic racial bias and animus? The man appears obsessed with race. He seems steeped (drowned, more like) in the kind of ignorant and malicious neo-Nazi/white supremacist bullshit that I've been debating against for years in online forums.
Ventre is another reminder that UFOlogy’s problems are at least to some extent self-created.
