I only get into trouble on DU when I try to get to what's real.

[shaayecanaan]

317. I am not calling you a homophobe...

As I have indicated elsewhere, I am not a big fan of essentialist statements on race (eg "White people love carrots" or "Black people like bicycles&quot . So, no, I do not think that "Black people are homophobes".

My interpretation of that graph is that generally, white liberals (and even not-so-liberals) will strive to adhere to the safest, most anodyne political positions possible (on race and other socially topical issues). They get very anxious if they are called racist, or homophobic, etc etc.

Non-white people seem relatively indifferent to being called a racist. My wife is Asian, her parents are quite racist, in a casual kind of way. I know from personal experience that Arabs can be quite racist, Saudis in particular can be extremely hard on the hired help, and Arabs in Mauritania treat Blacks as if they were slaves (no exaggeration, honestly). On the other hand, the only time my wife was called a "ricer" was by a Black guy (who was actually behind the counter in a shop). No anger in it, he just threw it out there in a completely casual, offhand sort of way.

That anxiety about being on the wrong side of an issue explains why, in part, once support for gay marriage reached some kind of critical mass white people flocked very quickly to support it (and it is striking how quickly this happened, it really did flip from one side to another in mere years).

Exactly why white liberals so anxiously hew to orthodoxy is the real question. One potential answer is that whites have lower levels of ethnic affiliation than others, and that therefore they invest in orthodoxy and the organisational status quo so much because they have relatively little invested outside of it.

An example: during the 2011 London riots, groups of Turkish men formed groups and barricades in the street to protect the Turkish sections of town from the rioters. Sikhs and Punjabis and many other ethnic communities did the same. The whites could not assemble their own groups - precisely because they were not a "community" as such - and therefore they were therefore critically reliant on the police in order to establish and maintain order. When that order broke down, they were lost.