ArtiFact #16: Two White Guys Explain Racism | Alex Sheremet, Dan Schneider

ArtiFact: Books, Art, Culture

Over the last few years, we’ve heard that white people ought to “shut up and listen” when it comes to questions of race and racism. Yet Dan Schneider’s 2005 book, Show & Tell: A White Man’s Antiphonal Primer on Race, argues the exact opposite: that understanding white psychology, white leverage and material advantages is the key to unlocking all else. As he writes in the text, racism, to black America, is a burden to be lived through, but what is it to white America – and why does it persist? In this conversation, Dan Schneider and Alex Sheremet discuss these and other questions, set against the context of Dan’s own experience of racism in New York City through the 1970/80s. Topics covered: the black Noble Savage myth in liberal + conservative factions; the materially hollow antiracism of Robin DiAngelo (“White Fragility”); the killing of Ma'Khia Bryant; multi-ethnic racial tension; white “appropriation” of black culture; the myth of the model minority, and much more.

Purchase Dan Schneider’s “Show & Tell: A White Man’s Antiphonal Primer On Race”: https://amzn.to/37feJQK

You may also watch this episode on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/8bfdI_qvcYY

Timestamps:
0:24 – Why racism is a white person’s problem, the nonwhite’s burden, and ought to be discussed as such

09:08 – Why the Robin DiAngelo model of antiracism fails to do much of substance

12:48 – Alex: “Out of Africa” liberals & other race propagandists are trying to have it both ways

20:45 – How liberals and conservatives use the black Noble Savage myth for their own ideological purposes

24:18 – Dan: are our positions on race truly leftist?

28:23 – Dan Schneider describes 1960s – 1980s racism in Ridgewood, Glendale, & Jamaica vs. today’s Golden Age thinking

42:00 – Is racism biologically ingrained or otherwise “natural”?

45:18 – Are older black Americans reflexively deferential to whites?

54:40 – Why police brutality has gotten better since the 1960s, but began to go up again in the late 1990s; why ‘being a cop’ takes precedence over other in-group + tribal thinking

01:06:02 – Racial tensions between blacks, Asians, Jews, and Hispanics

01:14:00 – Is there a conflict between personal responsibility, “free will”, and a material analysis of history? Plus: the anthropology of black sexual dynamics vs. conservative hypocrisy

01:24:12 – The Asian “model minority” myth & reverse bottlenecks: why Hmong, Vietnamese, and Laotian crime rates in America approach that of the worst and poorest neighborhoods

01:29:19 – Why does there seem to be so little bigotry, violence, and resentment directed towards whites by the very communities whites have historically exploited?

01:35:38 – Black vs. white mask compliance, black vs. white vaccine compliance & why the Left is uncomfortable here

01:37:24 – What is the “wigger”, and how do different communities interpret him?

01:43:47 – The killing of Ma’Khia Bryant in Ohio

01:53:00 – Would Ma’Khia Bryant have been killed if she were a white girl?

01:59:00 – Why don’t police shootings of white victims garner the same media attention?

02:04:44 – How ideology inflates some stakes, deflates others; Tucker Carlson, more NYC crime from the 1970s/80s, reparations TODAY, cop non-compliance with mask mandates

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