That annoyance definitely stems from the (strangely masochistic) white liberal male tendency to blame the world's problems, or at least society's, on white males. It's part of a guilt-expiation pathway that I think a lot of people find emotionally cleansing, rather than actually doing anything constructive to fix the so-called problem. Of course, it also denies agency to non-whites, since their station entirely rests on the invisible oppression of white people constantly bearing down on them, something I view to be a little bit hysterical in this day and age, and unfair, since it basically denies non-whites equality for the sake of perpetuating the race narrative of a previous century.
Well, no, I think you're unfairly characterizing the narrative. The argument is not that there's nothing people can do about it, and "oh isn't it a shame that blacks are helplessly victimized," but it stems from older philosophical critiques than that. Take Marxism, for example. It is an error, albeit a very popular one in the American middle class myth, to insist that class warfare is irrelevant because anybody can rise up. "People aren't helpless!" they cry. Well, that's just not true. Individuals aren't helpless, but
people are. People are the victims of massive forces they do not understand. Not merely racism and sexism, but economics, politics, and the natural world. There are large forces outside of the control of people that individuals can nevertheless defy. Now, whether this qualifies as a breach of justice, or is merely a condition of life, I won't comment on - but when people say that white male guilty liberals just want someone to feel sorry for... well, maybe it's true. I've been accused of it before and I still don't know if there's some truth to it. Do I actually believe in social justice because it's right, or because I want to be seen as right? Am I, in my own way, perpetrating injustice? This thought keeps me up at night.
However, in no way should that be taken as a rejection of the principles of social justice. I think that if women and minorities talk, as often (enough) they do, about the issues that are important to them - equal pay, abortion, racial profiling - it behooves someone such as me, who is not privy to those
particular disadvantages, to listen, and think about it in the context of a wider society. The actual policies to be implemented to fix these things is, I think, not as important as the central idea of shutting up and listening to people talk about their problems.
It's utterly epitomized by Gretchen and Elliott, whose lifestyle (the epitome of enlightened liberal capitalism) you failed to engage with in your previous analysis. In their funding of a meth treatment center, they act out of guilt and the desire to undo the catastrophic life choices of their former business/science partner, but their actions won't do a whit of good in stopping the drug war. We all know that. It's a PR stunt, made for image-crafting and self-justification.
Yeah, this is a good point. Also their insistence that Walter White wasn't truly involved in their business venture. It's pretty much the epitome of ivory tower ho-hum liberalizm. I think, in a way, that is altogether more dangerous to the efforts of the true believers - a false friend being more dangerous than a known enemy - but that is a different discussion.
Which is the same way I view your blithe comments, then hastily covered by a veneer of "oh look at how much I know about Breaking Bad." Hence my annoyance.
Fair enough.
(EDIT 2: First couple paragraphs of Crezth's post below actually portrays fairly accurately how I feel though)
