Jason: Childish thinking infects all races – and in fact, as noted in @Robert Lindsay’s article, is a main characteristic of “identity politics” – including the White kind.
One example is making fun of people but not being able to take “being made fun of”.
Dual morality:
It’s ok for me to do it, but it’s not ok for you to do it. I hate to say it but most people act this way. Even the people I most love in my life act like this.
I think there are a few people who are decent enough to not act like this. Your best friends won’t act like this, at least not around you anyway. And I’ve had some girlfriends who, I must admit, didn’t really engage in this hypocritical behavior because they thought it was beneath them. Then again, I’ve had quite a few girlfriends who excelled at this bullshit.
This thinking is associated with diminished self-awareness, which is probably just a huge dose of Denial, plus Denial’s twin, Projection, in which other people blame you for doing the bad things that they do but are too proud to admit to. This is a basic human defense system that you see every day.
I don’t mind Denial so much, though it can be fatal. You are at an outdoor dinner party in Africa, cocktail in your hand. You see an elephant charging the party a ways away. No one can hear it yet, but there it is, heading right towards your happy gathering.
You turn around and say, “Elephant? I don’t see any elephant,” and go back to your merry ways. For a short while anyway – until you are stomped to death. But hey, it was worth it, right? You got the pleasure of denying that something terrible was about to happen to you along with the sense of relief that that generated.
Projection is a much more nasty defense, but it is extremely common. In mental health we call this one of the primitive defenses. These defenses are often used by children. Everyone keeps using them as adults, but a mature person is supposed to use them less often.
Projection is nasty stuff. You do a bad thing, but you are so gutless and pathetic that your weak ego can’t admit that you do it, but you feel guilt anyway (even subconsciously) that you have to deal with because it makes you uncomfortable, so you diffuse this guilt by projecting it off onto someone else. “I don’t do this lousy thing; other people do!”
This sort of hypocrisy seems to be programmed right into the human race. In a sound bite, humans are selfish. Human selfishness probably boils down to simple survival thinking. If you don’t usually put yourself first, pretty soon you will end up dead. No matter what, you and your survival always come first. It is folly to think otherwise.
Selfish thinking generates the dual morality and hypocrisy cited above. Further, all tribes are extremely hypocritical. In fact hypocritical thinking is typical of all tribes. That’s why tribalism, including its modern variant, Identity Politics, is so poisonous.
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Identity politics is natural – but in certain arenas, like social media – the hypocrisy is over the top. Well, on posters into black identity politics – page after page on “black first achievements” and “crimes against blacks by whites” – and on the white side – some “Andy Griffith Show” crap – that, of course, is an exaggeration!
Well, Blacks had Mayberry equivalents in the US. Koreans in Cali looked like a White Americans in dress. There’s differences of course too.