Horizon

Loved this line:

One of their great-uncles fought in the most intolerant fashion at Inkerman...

And yet the same people who object to taking toy weapons away from boys think it's perfectly normal to saddle little girls with nothing but dolls and imitation ovens through their entire childhoods. I'll never understand that.

And yet the same people who object to taking toy weapons away from boys think it's perfectly normal to saddle little girls with nothing but dolls and imitation ovens through their entire childhoods. I'll never understand that.

Martha, leaving aside the Straw Parent you've created up there, ever tried to 'saddle' a child with a toy they don't want? Believe me, it's harder than you think. Choices like these aren't always a nefarious plot by social engineers.

I don't know about Pappa Straw, but I the first vision that popped into my head when that sonogram showed a girl was of a teenager competing at archery.

And no, her bow wasn't pink.

'And yet the same people who object to taking toy weapons away from boys think it's perfectly normal to saddle little girls with nothing but dolls and imitation ovens through their entire childhoods. I'll never understand that.'

As Citizen Allport notes, the fly in the ointment word--as inconspicuous here as Chandler's Tarantula on a slice of angel food--is 'saddle'.
It's revealing of the same old a rebours agenda and of an obduracy that you are always perceiving and sneering at in your opponents.

Alan's right about "saddling": it's denying children the things they want that hurts. I for one was excused from the doll nonsense, but what I wanted was a real bow, or at least permission to cut a suitable sapling to make one. Ben, do teach your daughter archery for me, will you?

It's my impression that children pay little respect to the manufacturers' intentions when they use their toys. Boys seem to be pre-programmed to turn anything into a weapon, whilst girls (much to the dismay of desperately non-gender-reinforcing parents) have an unfortunate habit of 'domesticating' even the most rough-and-tumble toys. But then age has a lot to do with it. My son (nearly 2) is still at a pretty neutral age: his Mr. Incredible action figure goes around kissing all the soft toys one minute, then becomes a flying missile the next.

Dunno. I remember this mean neighborhood girl who announced, "I'll be the mommy" and started physically throwing the rest of us into an improvised "car." Yes, it was female-role-model play, but it sure wasn't peaceful. Don't believe anyone who claims girls are nicer.

As for the nature-v.-nurture bit, well, for one thing parents aren't the only teachers; all kids are placed in groups with other kids sooner or later.

I had very few toys growing up. The only action figures I owned I stole from another boy's desk in maybe the second grade. But my friends had legos and GI Joes and between those two I had hours of mock-destructive fun. Can't recall ever putting together a lego tea party. Missles and spaceships were more like it.

Then again, now I think about it, one friend had a fancy Moonbase lego set, and as I recall we spent more time just operating the base (you know, raising and lowering the automatic gate, sending out moonbuggy expeditions, reinforcing the electrified security perimeter, etc.) than blowing things up, and in a way that was its own sort of "domestic" play.

Ben, do teach your daughter archery for me, will you?

Why Martha, I'd even teach my daughter archery despite you.

Seriously, I'm still a little torqued at your implication that there's a conspiracy to socialize girls to be domestic, and especially that such a conspiracy is run by "people who object to taking toy weapons away from boys" — i.e. me and my ilk.

[A]ll kids are placed in groups with other kids sooner or later.

Sara's just finished The Nurture Assumption, which makes the claim that children's peer groups play a far larger role in the people they turn out to be than their parents do. This is why Alan's son is unlikely to have Alan's accent, and is apparently also why children of households with professional mothers and domestic fathers come home to announce confidently that women cook and men work.

Seriously, I'm still a little torqued at your implication that there's a conspiracy to socialize girls to be domestic, and especially that such a conspiracy is run by "people who object to taking toy weapons away from boys" — i.e. me and my ilk.

Huh? Nonono, not you, nor your ilk, whatever ilk that may be. Saki, if anyone: Straw Victorian, not Straw Texan. It was just irking me that, while Saki saw the foolishness of denying war toys to boys, he likely wouldn't have seen any problem in expecting girls to be content with tea parties.

Nobody among present company is in favor of Girl Land, I don't think.

Straw Victorian, not Straw Texan.

Thing is, many people are wrestling with the issue of boys and "violent play" these days, and like most childrearing controversies the issues are cast in emotional and moral terms. I came across the Saki stories in this discussion of the issue, and I think you'll understand why I interpreted your comment that way.

Ah. Y'see, I do object when people start saying "boys" are like that. All kids are like that, provided they grow up feeling entitled to be active agents in their imaginary adventures rather than passive recipients thereof. I mean, all humans have aggressive impulses, and kids have to learn to control them, not to deny that they exist -- right?

(I did get to take a few fencing lessons as a ten-year-old obsessive medievalist. That part was cool.)

Ha, I'm not sure I'm following the ins-and-outs of this discussion, but I did have a chuckle at the following comment taken from Ben's link:

The answer to pop culture violence is the fierce denunciation of its misoyginism, its glorification of criminality, its degradation of the King's English, and its fascination with all things gang, thug and punk related.

Knights were bound by the duties of chivalry. Modern pop culture violence scorns chivalry.

(laughing)

I do object when people start saying "boys" are like that....I mean, all humans have aggressive impulses, and kids have to learn to control them, not to deny that they exist -- right?

I think we're back on the same page again.

Pity you didn't know my friend Dakao, whose hobbies are separated from mine by about three centuries.

One thing I found fascinating about the thread on Amy Welborn's blog was how many people draw very firm distinctions between good toys and bad ones, and how different each disctinction seems from the other:

• I'll never let a toy AK-47 in the house, but we do have a Star Wars-style battery-operated light saber
• So I decided that he could have guns and swords but only those that didn't bear any resemblance to those he might encounter in reality. Knights or Star Wars only.
• ZHAO is right about the computer games. They are different than playing with swords outside

And my favorite: "I thought it would be okay," she said, "Since it's a Crusader."

Wow. That guy is serious.

You ever try actually putting on any of that stuff? There's a visitor-center exhibit along Coronado's trail in southern Arizona where they let you try on a replica of standard-issue Spanish chain mail. Cripe. Terribly heavy, and a little frightening to slip over your head because of course it doesn't stretch so it's easy to imagine getting an elbow stuck. Can't imagine traveling in the desert that way, even by horse let alone foot. So much for romanticisms.

Never mind Crusader chainmail, try putting on a WWI-style tin (sic) helmet. Ever picked up grandma's cast-iron cookware? Well, try balancing it on your head. We're so used to light alloys now that we forget how goddammed heavy the real stuff is.

It's our great privilege to own two old cast-iron frying pans, both beautifully smooth. Lovely for pancakes. Not so pleasant as headware I imagine.

BTW does anyone know why all the new cast-iron pans and griddles you see for sale have rough cooking surfaces? I keep wondering if the pans we've got had to be smoothed down by past generations' steel-wool scrubbing or if the manufacturers used to sell a more practical article to begin with.

...

...

...And my favorite: "I thought it would be okay," she said, "Since it's a Crusader."

Laugh, cry, or start pitching historical monographs in her general direction?

(laughing)

I'm laughing too: but rap's still shit.

'Saki, if anyone: Straw Victorian, not Straw Texan. It was just irking me that, while Saki saw the foolishness of denying war toys to boys, he likely wouldn't have seen any problem in expecting girls to be content with tea parties.'

Saki would have recognised a tomboy and thought it natural: I don't think he would have thought there a secret coercive agenda to get girls who wanted to climb trees playing with dolls; he *would* have seen the folly of instituting a coercive agenda dictating what toys kids have, hence the story, which is just a sharp and concise **** you to socialistic busybodies and dour finger-waggers.
This thread has made me reflect on the arrogance of vociferous minorities such as feminists and lesbians, who seem to think the world should be dismantled and reconstituted to suit their unusual experience.

where they let you try on a replica of standard-issue Spanish chain mail.

I tried on something that looked similar at Chepstow, and of course had to model a few of Dakao's creations. I can't imagine moving in them, though.

And my favorite: "I thought it would be okay," she said, "Since it's a Crusader."

Oh, really! I would have offered that one, but it seemed like too much of a cheap shot. Ha.

I'm laughing too: but rap's still shit.

Well, I've heard some very good rap. Uh, but of course most of that is not mainstream and is not what non-fans are talking about when they say "rap".

But I do not buy the "rap creates violence" argument. At all.

But I do not buy the "rap creates violence" argument. At all.'

Since you have already reduced the argument to three words in inverted commas, you clearly don't.
I saw a programme on tv the other night about pop records banned in England; most of them--honourable exception to the wonderful Sex Pistols' (the last great rock and roll band the world has seen) occasionally ludicrous yet entirely brilliant God Save the Queen--should have been banned on grounds of their worthlessness as music, but the controversial ones (Marilyn Manson, 2 Live Crew and NWA etc) were worth thinking about.
The standard soft left approach (ie your's) is that music--like film--cannot cause anything bad, only good. So where you would nod righteously if someone said, as they idiotically did recently, that 'rap is America's CNN', in other words influential for good, you would hotly deny that it can be influential for the bad.
Which obviously it can: the thousands, perhaps millions of extremely pampered young rap fans of all races who spend their time swaggering, swearing and generally behaving like little groups of off-duty Waffen SS sergeants--though in point of fact the SS probably had a touch more decorum--are testament to this. The left's insistence on the importance of 'role models' also backs this up.
Then there are the even darker aspects: gang mentality, shootings and imitative culture of extreme misogyny, anti-homosexual, anti-semitic posturing.
Let me say now, loud and clear that the soft left has remained REMARKABLY QUIET AND EXTREMELY hypocritical on this subject and we all know why. That someone like you and Martha (who has persuaded herself that only white middle class boys listen to this crap so it's ok; and that, push come to shove, the only fault to be found is with white record companies, who probably press their records in a poor country, man) can stay quiet about all this--because we know that if, say, white heavy metallers were peddling such stuff, you'd be denouncing them with all the ire of Berkeley--is extraordinary.
Just because--to follow your reductionist argument--rap music, or Marylin Manson's music doesn't turn, under laboratory conditions, people into sociapaths, it doesn't mean that they are not highly influential on outlook and ideas; and that those ideas are unseemly and questionable and finally, in an Orwelline sense, indecent seems pretty irrefutable to me.
Did the Columbine killers have Marilyn ringing in their minds? Were the gang of black youths who poked a sub-machine out of a window in Birmingham, UK, and murdered two teenage girls in a drive-by shooting (imitive of the LA gang warfare and racial rancour that is imported into England through this music, among other channels) living in a mental atmosphere saturated with the machismo, arrogance and braggadocio of rap? I'd bet on it, and I'm a betting man.
Before you rehearse the 'that's what they said about Elvis' argument, please don't: the music we're talking about is a thousand-fold nastier (sorry hepcats, I'm using nastier in it's OED sense) than Heartbreak Hotel, but who knows, maybe where music and pop culture has gone gives a tiny batsqueak of credence to the old naysayers.
Naturally, I am not in favour of censoring it, but I am fully in favour of having a completely open and wide ranging discussion of it, leaving behind the hypocrisy and ethical protectionism of the Left.

"A great lady, Simone de Beauvoir, once said that there are two kinds of people; human beings and women. And when women start acting like human beings they are accused of trying to be men."

-- Joanie Caucus via Garry Trudeau

Since you have already reduced the argument to three words in inverted commas, you clearly don't.

Excuse me, I should have said "position" or "claim", not argument.

You make some pretty good points against some of the arguments you impute to me.

The standard soft left approach (ie your's) is that music--like film--cannot cause anything bad, only good.

Sorry, did you say something about reductionism?

This article is interesting reading in light of this question of the relationship of artistic movements to society, and how they affect each other.

Like the 19th century romantics who elevated depression and melancholia to an undeserved spiritual status, rap may have a negative influence on society in some ways, to some degree. I believe that increased violence is likely to be the most insignificant factor in this. The arguments which complicate anecdotes like the ones you offer are so familiar there's no point going over them, I think.

Also like the romantics, who did not just decide out of nowhere that dying of tuberculosis was hip, gangsta rap didn't come from nowhere. The violence was already there, and I think it got popular precisely because some of it was a valid (actually, rather ordinary, even predictable) artistic reaction to a particular situation. To claim that the music is the cause of this violence is idiotic.

I haven't heard any gangsta rap I liked without reservation, but there is a huge variety of rap and hip hop music out there now and I think very little of it is like the cliche which most anti-rap blusterers have in mind.

I think what really gets people's goats is the glorification of a violent criminal lifestyle, regardless of whatever real influence this may have on society. (No one cares when it's some film noir anti-hero robbing a bank with a shotgun for some reason. That's something worth pondering, probably.) The insistence that it causes rampant violence is a shallow but compelling rallying cry for people who, when push comes to shove, just find it offensive and are casting about for arguments with which to justify suppressing something which offends them.

(I should say that I'm by no means an expert on rap music, so if anyone knows more about the subject, feel free to pipe in.)

The one period when I managed to enjoy rap music was while working as a welfare rights advocate in Los Angeles. My job was conducive to your basic impotent rage on a more or less continuous basis against a very large and extremely callous bureaucracy. I now do softer work and am fortunate to be able to avoid feeling like that most of the time. As a result I don't really enjoy listening to high-energy word-spitting, and that goes for ordinary political rhetoric as much as for rhetoric set to music. It would be nice if the United States were a place that gave more people less reason to feel angry.

Dunno -- does that help?

Agreed that rap music is not in itself the cause of violence, but much of it is symptomatic of a much deeper cultural problem in which (as someone said in the New Yorker recently) we now know everything about killing and nothing about suffering.

Well, yes. Most people actively guard themselves against empathy because they don't feel they can afford to care for anyone beyond themselves and perhaps a few close relatives or friends.

Maybe if people felt more secure personally they'd decide they could afford to notice other people's pain a little more often? Noticing all the time is too much to ask of anybody: there's just too damn much pain and everyone has to draw a line somewhere. I mean, people who can't stop noticing, and who don't find something satisfying to do about it, end up as wreckage. Like the doormat lady in this story.

So knowing about suffering is always a relative thing really, because you can't really think properly at all unless you shut out awareness of what most people are going through -- but if you shut out all awareness of all others' pain, you go cold.

It took me a long time to figure out that one of the great moral challenges in life is deciding exactly what sufferings you are and are not willing to notice.

'Well, yes. Most people actively guard themselves against empathy because they don't feel they can afford to care for anyone beyond themselves and perhaps a few close relatives or friends.'

Blimey, you don't know much about humanity do you. This is the biggest straw yet: general humanity as empathy censoring conservative bigots. (Using bigot in its lazy soft left version: you know, fat, white and racist, as opposed to the OED bigot that defines us lot here: person with an obstinate belief in the superiority of their own opinion)

'I haven't heard any gangsta rap I liked without reservation, but there is a huge variety of rap and hip hop music out there now and I think very little of it is like the cliche which most anti-rap blusterers have in mind.'

I imputed opinions to you which you then, more or less, went onto voice in your reply. That's why I did it.

'Anti-rap blusterers' is revealing: the usual right-on brother pejorative against anyone who might question or, heaven forfend, *criticise* a favoured minority (this is the protectionism of the trendy left that I mentioned: other areas of society indulging themselves in ways like NWA would have been morally censured a generation ago; censured by the left I mean: Berkeley would have sent you a new hymn sheet). Your downplaying of the violence is also typical of your side of the argument: I would like to see 'violence' expanded to generally anti-social behaviour when discussing things like rap. I also don't think you could credibly call my objections and comments about rap culture 'bluster'.
Your highly academic wiggling relativism about 19th century depressives is specious; so specious in fact I laughed out loud and imagined a Wordsworth fan getting on a train a hundred years ago, kissing his teeth, doing some opium, dodging the fare and calling everybody motherf*cker.
Your paragraph about the huge variety of hip-hop and rap sounds like government spin quite frankly; so what if there is? I find it at best repetitive and bland and at worst aesthetically disgusting, barbarous and amoral.
But we were talking, really, about the effect of art on behaviour and this sort of music, with the kind of audience it has and the problems they are up against means that it *is* influential on mood and ideas and behaviour: a walk in any city England will demontrate that- terribly empirical I know, but push come to shove I'm an empiricist and refute things thus.
Your point about violent film noirs is pretty flimsy, though I have long been pondering violence in films and tv, gratuitous and otherwise. I *hope* you didn't mean 'when white people do it it's ok,' because that would have been beneath you.
You say that what gets people's goats is the glorification of a criminal lifestyle and then question whether it has any effect on society. I believe it does and one reason I can bring into the argument is that the Arts Council of England, the ne plus ultra of progressive leftism arts funding is forever pushing mediocre work that has, alongside the mandatory 'it's all really whitey's fault' message. a 'don't get suckered into the criminal lifestyle that your heroes and their record companies are pushing'.
Another reason is that, when a film actor made a violent film, when the film was over the fiction was over; but with rap--and pop music in general--the fiction is not over, it is connived at and stage-managed constantly; this puts the impressionable in a position of vunerability.
This is where I find people like Marilyn Manson irresponsible, because he takes his nasty-little-brother rip off of Alice Cooper way too far. This is the one of the interesting things about fifty years of rock and roll: at this stage, anyone who questions is uncool, unhip, a 'blusterer'; it brings us back round to political correctness almost: conform to the new diktats at moral gunpoint: failure to do so will send you directly to the Room 101 of the Apocalypse Now generation: un-hipness.
Your comments about people just casting about for ideas for suppressing rap are puerile: I said I didn't advocate censorship. But there's a more important point that you, and the Left in general, miss about rap and the great license of behaviour that you advocate through your advocation of rap and it is this question: is it doing the consumers of it any good? Is it doing the people who are just as poor as the consumers and have to live alongside their pathologies any good?
In London the trendy left who administrate London are very blithe about drug abuse, particularly marijuana; again, in the drive to be 'understanding' are these people not making other people's lives more difficult?
If you send out a message that actually it's ok to be stupefied and behave in a sullen, anti-social, violen way, don't you think it may affect that person's quality of life? It's quite obvious to me that the more opportunity you give people to behave badly, the more they will.

'deeper cultural problem'

Which cannot be solved by merely empathizing with 'pain'.

'It took me a long time to figure out that one of the great moral challenges in life is deciding exactly what sufferings you are and are not willing to notice.'

This is, surely, followed by the equally moral challenge of working out how to solve/cure the sufferings without inflicting more.

I imputed opinions to you which you then, more or less, went onto voice in your reply. That's why I did it.

I'm content to let others judge that for themselves.

I also don't think you could credibly call my objections and comments about rap culture 'bluster'.

That was not aimed at you.

But there's a more important point that you, and the Left in general, miss about rap and the great license of behaviour that you advocate through your advocation of rap and it is this question: is it doing the consumers of it any good? Is it doing the people who are just as poor as the consumers and have to live alongside their pathologies any good?

I suppose if everyone listened to showtunes my neighborhood might be a little quieter, but the people shooting each other and breaking into my apartment aren't doing it because of music. If any one thing is the main cause it's probably crack. So complaining about rap and calling for mysterious "solutions" is at best whining and at worst just the same kind of disingenuous argument for suppression which I outlined in my previous post.

Since you are so concerned about solving problems, why don't you give us some answers of your own? What should be done to shield these consumers from the insidious influence of rap music? What do you think it would solve?

'I suppose if everyone listened to showtunes my neighborhood might be a little quieter, but the people shooting each other and breaking into my apartment aren't doing it because of music. If any one thing is the main cause it's probably crack.'

The lifestyle around which--and other drugs--this music revolves. Whilst we're on the subject of drugs, how would you solve that one? I notice that you've narrowed the debate down to the place you feel comfortable with it: 'RAP DOESN'T CAUSE PEOPLE TO USE FIREARMS. READ ALL ABOUT IT. IT'S OK. WE DON'T NEED TO THINK ABOUT THIS ANY LONGER.'
Which of course allows you to stop thinking about the wider cultural and social implications; and the reason you want to stop thinking about the wider implications is that it impinges on your political and social ideas, which are built, it seems to me, on an abstract, po-mo, Foucaultian idea of there's no truth, therefore no morality, therefore any judgement of anything or anybody (excepting the Republican Party and old school--see I'm hip Al--white society) becomes impossible and just a reflection of quasi-fascist bourgeois society, man.
As you may have gleaned by now, I think that's a crock of crap, and a recipe for chaos. The chaos we now see. Before you yell 'Nike, dude', I will come on to this point. Meanwhile, like your comments about Scruton's attractiveness in relaltion to his success as a homosexual, your pissy sarcastic insinuation that everyone should listen to 'showtunes' is another revelation of ingrained peurility.

'So complaining about rap and calling for mysterious "solutions" is at best whining and at worst just the same kind of disingenuous argument for suppression which I outlined in my previous post.'

So expressing concern and making the connection between a violent, degraded, amoral music, which is the dominant cultural product consumed by a section of society plagued with the problems and pathologies that are NOT merely reflected but often celebrated and endorsed by the producers of that product and in that product is just 'whining'?
Now that's what I call disingenuous.
While we're on that subject, you haven't responded to my observations of the Left's arrant hypocrisy over all this; I assume therefore that you accept my conclusions, which are these:

1. The noisy Left ignores the wholesale flouting of its own principals in Rap music because the section of society that produces it is a favoured minority. You and the Left behind you are quite prepared to go quiet when rappers are calling for the execution of homosexuals, Jews, policemen, white people and any woman or anyone else who gets in the way.

2. The Left prefers to believe that the problems of the culture that produces rap is a sort of racket inflicted on poor black people by white businessmen. This is as far as most lefties on this blog want to go with it.

3. The Left are frozen in the headlights of this problem; academia and their own abstract ideas leaving them without any room to manoevre: well only enough room to make sarcastic comments and mutter darkly about 'suppression'.

And it is a mutter and not, as you say, an 'outline'. You seem unable to see that there is a problem here and elect to see the problem in terms of a wholly innappropriate infracaninophilia; in other words, your high-minded, yet rather juvenile construct of this argument as a contest between free-speech and authoritarianism is totally inadequate.

'Since you are so concerned about solving problems'

Ah, petulance; I knew it couldn't be far away.

'why don't you give us some answers of your own?
What should be done to shield these consumers from the insidious influence of rap music?'

Is your use of 'insidious' serious or sarcastic? It's important that we know.

What should be done? Well, first of all, the evasive attitude of the Left needs to be modified. I realise this is a sticky one since for the modish American left the idea of morality waxes and wanes--Martha's sliding morality from the other week--and for the wacky left, applying any kind of morality to rap music would be as quaint as dancing a jitterbug. Nevertheless, until people start using uncorrupted language about this subject (again, impossible for you because I suspect you will admit of no absolute truth) the problem will go on and people, far poorer than you, will be hurt by it with your approving license.
Secondly, the dominant media is irreponsible; behind them all manner of greedy people who would never stop to think that what they are doing might be questionable and if they did would quickly qualify it with the catch all mantra: 'it's all good.'
Thirdly, since the Left holds the maxim that white shall not speak unto black unless with evasion and deference, it falls to members of the Afro-Caribbean celebrity circuit--Cosby honourably excepted--to start piping up. This won't happen, because business is too damn good. (Yes, you may get the occasional worthy squeak about guns, but never nearly meaty enough)
Fourthly, lots more stuff having to do recovering the guts to say: 'I think this harming a lot of people.' In short, doing that hated thing, making a judgement.
I think this would inevitably lead to great outpourings of petulance, indignation and rage, backed up with mendacious broadsides from academia and the soft left media, like always. At this point people like you would lose the stomach for it; but, if the project was carried though, then I believe many people's lives would be better and more enjoyable, first and foremost the consumers, who at the moment are licensed to behave and think in highly destructive ways.

AH -- your apt. got broken into? V-sorry to hear. That takes a while to get over when it happens. Hope you didn't lose too many things.

'That takes a while to get over when it happens.'

Not as long as seeing your mate bleeding to death from a stab wound-luckily he survived; close run thing though- while we're all showing off how we've been victims and don't mind it one bit 'cos dey is po' victims!! GETCHA 'I BIN BURGLED AND I DON'T MINd COS THAT'S HOW BIG HEARTED AND ENLIGHTENED AH AM BADGE, WEAR IT WIV PRIDE NOW CHILE!! ONLY SEVEN DOLLARS TO THE PANTHER DEFENCE FUND!!'

Tsk.

'The vehicle, which was playing loud music and contained the girls and up to six men, left between 0300 BST and 0500 BST.'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/berkshire/4528273.stm

'Well, yes. Most people actively guard themselves against empathy because they don't feel they can afford to care for anyone beyond themselves and perhaps a few close relatives or friends.'

Blimey, you don't know much about humanity do you. This is the biggest straw yet: general humanity as empathy censoring conservative bigots. (Using bigot in its lazy soft left version: you know, fat, white and racist, as opposed to the OED bigot that defines us lot here: person with an obstinate belief in the superiority of their own opinion)

Robbie, did you really just accuse me of thinking all human beings are conservative white people?

No.