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I have literally made this exact same point before! (I’m not going to try and sift through this site’s awful search function to try and track down the comment, but I know it made the AAQC list.) The reality is that it’s both! They are terrified when black women’s “righteous anger” is turned on them, absolutely. However, I believe that white women see black women as their avatar - their “anger translator” - who can say to the powerful white men in their lives the things that the white women themselves are too acculturated, too bourgeois, too timid to say themselves.
I work in a pink-collar setting (I’m literally the only man on my team) and I can tell you that the number of “sassy black woman” GIFs shared by the white women on my team daily is staggering. Each of them seems to want to believe she has a little “black woman” inside of her - the unrestrained, unabashedly emotional part of her personality - and that only black (and to a somewhat lesser extent Latina) women are able to reliably access. Note that white women almost never want to actually be black women themselves; they just want to have one (1) black woman around for when some white man is being unpleasant or unreasonable, so that somebody can say to his face what all the white and Asian women have been saying behind his back.
I’m not fond of it, because I don’t think that the “brave iconoclast” is an unambiguously admirable figure. I think that being a contrarian is very often overrated (I say this from experience, because being a contrarian has largely wrecked my life in many ways) and that actually our society would be far better off if we stopped valorizing the archetype of the “individual genius standing alone against the close-minded majority”. Our culture has a dearth of social harmony. Even if the progressives of today were still the real transgressive nonconformists, I’m not sure that would speak positively of them!
This absolutely still does shock the normies! The whole “groomer” discourse on the right demonstrates conclusively that the queer left is still successfully scandalizing normal people. Yes, obviously the ratchet has turned significantly since the 70s in terms of how vulgar something has to be in order to shock people. Maybe in fifteen years we’ll be saying, “Man, I wish gays could just go back to the time when all they did was expose their gaping anuses to people.” Maybe we haven’t seen the true depths of depravity people are willing to stoop to in order to maintain shock value. Will every pride parade in 2040 be indistinguishable from a GG Allin concert? Perhaps!
Yes, but note that the normies pretty conclusively don't give a damn outside of that temporary shock. You can get them to give a damn once the left starts explicitly defending rapists, but they don't press the issue. It's the "well, why aren't Republicans bombing abortion clinics any more?" argument all over again.
The "groomer" discourse is a failure for the same reasons the longhouse is inevitable: simply put, Western society is unwilling and unable to control female bad actors. The LGBTQuestion is just the latest instantiation of "man bad woman good", after all, and the HR and education departments responsible for pushing it are majority female.
European society (that does this) is significantly less wealthy and its individual citizens less powerful than in American society. And that didn't save them from progressivism; in fact, it made them more vulnerable to it due to lacking the inoculation that American society has against that very thing.
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