scarletwoman

scarletwoman's Journal

August 4, 2015

You've posted some good things in this thread, but you really stepped in it here:

But what Bernie supporters are trying to get across to the AA community...

The AA community does not give a rip about what "Bernie supporters are trying to get across to the AA community", they want Bernie supporters to listen to THEM.

This white privileged attitude - that if white folks just keep explaining what they think will help the black folks, those black folks will eventually "get it" - is the core of the disconnect.

It's paternalistic, condescending, disrespectful, and totally dismissive of the possibility that white folks just might have something to learn from the AA community - if only they would get off their white privileged high horse long enough to actually LISTEN to what the AA community has to tell them.

All the resistance I've seen from Bernie supporters to the message in the bravenak's OP comes from this place of presuming to know, better than the AA community knows, about what's good for them. And the refusal to consider that there might be something to learn from the AA community.

As long as there's no listening happening, it just demonstrates disrespect and dismissal. Why should people who are not being respected, who are being dismissed, who are not being listened to and their messages heeded, who are brushed off as if they had nothing to teach, give any respect or bother listening to what you have to say?

The fact that we have just one mouth but two ears ought to be a constant reminder that we need to listen twice as much as we speak.

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Gender: Female
Hometown: Minnesota
Current location: up north
Member since: 2001
Number of posts: 31,893

About scarletwoman

I'm an old white woman, born in November, 1949. My parents lived through the Depression and WWII (my dad's a veteran). I've witnessed a lot of history firsthand, plus I carry the stories handed down to me by my parents, aunts and uncles from their generation, and my grandparents from their generation. Basically, my memory is a depository for most of the 20th century of U.S. history, plus the 2 decades (so far) of the 21st century. //////Important quote: Milos Forman (film director, b. 1932, d. 2018) - "I hear the word "socialist" being tossed around by the likes of Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and others. President Barack Obama, they warn, is a socialist. The critics cry, "Obamacare is socialism!" They falsely equate Western European-style socialism, and its government provision of social insurance and health care, with Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism. It offends me, and cheapens the experience of millions who lived, and continue to live, under brutal forms of socialism." (He lived in Czechoslovakia under Communism before emigrating to the U.S.A.)