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Mytracks stepcounter collapsable treadmill12/23/2023 There is a general pattern that is very common in Social Justice where bad things that more often happen to the ‘less privileged’ subgroup get portrayed as exclusively happening to that subgroup, while bad things that happen disproportionately to the ‘more privileged’ subgroup get portrayed in a way that hides this difference and thus hide the privilege of the ‘less privileged’. Don’t quote someone doing something different and say that because of their prose style you’re sure it’s something they would Dawn If you think BLM defenders are very likely to muddle the statistics around who is actually hurt in interactions with the justice department, go out and find someone actually doing that. Failing to present actual examples, and suggesting that your opponents’ prose style, and your judgement of their likely rhetorical tactics, make your point for you strike me, ironically, as examples of “making expansive claims” without an “intermediate level of specific claims”–something I’ve heard lends itself to dishonest debating style? It is much easier to dismiss your opponents when you get to attribute to them what they are “likely” to say. In context, responding to DavidS as you were, it’s hard to read you quoting that herstory as anything other than an example of someone suggesting that black people in general face discrimination at the hands of police and the justice system, rather than black men specifically. You may well be right that “a critic who asks for BLM to recognize that men have these specific issues much more than women is likely to be countered by a claim that the critic is marginalizing of women, gay and trans people”–but you suggested originally that the herstory was an example of a “perversion of the civil rights movement”, presumably because it moves the focus away from black men, who genuinely are disadvantaged, to black LGBT people and black women, who are not. So a critic who asks for BLM to recognize that men have these specific issues much more than women is likely to be countered by a claim that the critic is marginalizing of women, gay and trans people or an attempt is made to change the debate from a discussion about the victimization of black men and women to a discussion about black men and black trans women where the high level of victimization of trans women is used to implicitly defend a focus on women as a whole. In this case the ground work for both tactics is laid on the page, with the bits about marginalization of women, gay and trans people as well as the near-equation of women with trans women: “we particularly highlighted the egregious ways in which Black women, specifically Black trans women, are violated.” Then when this is called out, they can either act indignant that certain groups are ‘silenced’ or ‘not recognized,’ or temporarily concede the point (motte-and-bailey). This lends itself especially well to dishonest debating tactics, where they can argue with the extremely expansive claims and/or ignore disparities between subgroups or even claim that subgroups that are victimized less are actually victimized more. The page is written in a style of prose that is quite common in Social Justice circles: a combination of extremely expansive claims and anecdotes, while mostly lacking the intermediate level of specific claims that can be challenged or defended based on facts. So your surprise is rather unsurprising to me as well Dawn Of course, the popular narrative, that you see espoused pretty much everywhere, is not very intersectional and claims that black people are policed and punished more harshly regardless of gender. If so, it is very likely that policing has the same biases, so one would then expect that the transition from black woman to black man would produce the largest change in experiences with the police, catapulting someone from the most privileged end of the spectrum (on this issue) to the least privileged end. Then women regardless of race are considered ‘ mostly harmless,’ while white men are considered dangerous and black men more so. One can theorize that these gaps may be due to how dangerous groups are considered to be, where stereotypically ‘scary’ people get longer sentences for the same crime. I don’t consider it surprising, since Sonja Starr found that black men get 74% longer sentences than women after correcting for factors that may justify longer sentences, white men get 51% longer sentences, while black women don’t get longer sentences than white women.
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