While you can argue that racism is universal, that doesn't excuse anyone for racist behavior, whether they're Japanese, Iranian, or American.

If you examine "may have anxiety about their communities changing", it clearly implies they think non-whites are changing their community for the worse. It also implies the community belongs to the whites, and they get to define it.

Alternatively, they could (but don't) view their community as something they share, becoming more diverse, more interesting, more inclusive, etc.

Tribalism is a part of human nature and you engage in it, too.

It's not pretty in any circumstance.

Your assumptions about me are wrong.

It doesn't matter how the change manifests itself. People often dislike change, especially of communities they are familiar with.

Hence my point that it's not a problem with white people, but rather a condition of human beings. If a community of majority Latinos became subject to sudden white immigration, I'm sure there would be a certain amount of anxiety on the part of the original residents. I can understand and sympathize with these anxieties though.

Can you?

How did they not deserve the privilege? Did they not work for it?

If I rob a bank, does that mean I deserve to keep the money?

Almost all cultures and societies on Earth are living on land that once belonged to another group of people.

According to you, no one on Earth deserves to keep anything they have, because their ancestors took it from someone else.

And if so, if the bank takes it back is it wrong?

You're literally advocating non-empathy for a large group of people due to their heritage. You can't simply divide people into groups based on immutable characteristics and decide who does and does not deserve sympathy.

Punishing a person for perceived faults of their ancestors is a recipe for ethnic conflict and racism.

>You're literally advocating non-empathy for a large group of people due to their heritage. You can't simply divide people into groups based on immutable characteristics and decide who does and does not deserve sympathy.

No, I'm advocating non-empathy for people who lack empathy for others. Fear of the presence of other ethnicities and of their cultural influence is not an immutable characteristic of the European genotype.

From over here in Asia, your comments are both non-empathatic and dangerous.

Best of luck with your "non-empathy" approach, but I suspect it will make things worse for you.

I'll cop to the lack of empathy, obviously, but I don't see how it's dangerous to not feel sorry that a formerly privileged group is now slightly less privileged.

And I'm not in Asia, so... fair enough?

It's natural to think this way and it's a struggle to overcome it.

People are not only members of "groups" that you chose for them based on their race, sex, country, etc. Each person deserves dignity as a human. Even if their ancestors and yours were enemies, it's not right to use tribal affiliation to judge them. Doing this promotes conflict and eventually violence.

A group is made up of many people and deciding how much "privilege" a group has is like asking the temperature of Europe. You can use math to average, but that doesn't mean much to a person in Turkey or a person in Norway.

Yet here we are, discussing an article which frames the effects of globalism, automation and the economic collapse of Middle America explicitly in terms of a crisis of white identity.

If this same article were written about "rising anxiety among American blacks," many of the people insisting that we understand and respect the plight of the white rural male and recognize how justifiable their anger is, would denounce it as racist and ask what being black has to do with anything.

I can have sympathy for the poor, for the downtrodden and oppressed, but I can't have sympathy for someone who feels the mere presence of other races is a threat to their identity.

It's not that they don't have empathy though. It's that they are uncomfortable with their communities changing, regardless of how that change manifests itself.

And they feel this way because they are human beings, not because they are morally callous.

People dislike gentrification in part because it displaces established communities. People don't gain or lose the right to sympathy because they are a majority or minority group. They are human beings regardless.

Their culture isn't changing. They're still American, they're still white, they're still Christian, probably. The only change is their relative status amongst an already heterogeneous population, and the assumption that their point of view represents the "default" (and therefore most correct) American identity.

You have made no argument and are not really helping your cause. Please refrain from name calling, over generalization and ad hominems.

At what point does identifying and labelling an ideologically driven argument devoid of any rational substance class as "name calling". Clearly the poster is parroting views consistent with identity politics and I was merely pointing out the blaring lack of propositional logic.

So far, you haven’t displaced, or even responded to the claims so much as expressed something along the lines of a threat, a type of discussion that is much more offensive in my view.

I do not tolerate nor deem the claims worthy of a response. There must be a minimum acceptable level of intellectual debate which warrants engagement. The poster is incapable of providing any form of evidence and hence such laziness must be punished to enforce quality of debate in the wider interests of human progress.