What are your thoughts on Charlie Cheon’s “What are we doing to white people?” video essay?

11 comments

1. I think I’m not watching a 17 minute video without any context or explanation as to why it’s important or worth the time

2. Based on the comments on the vid, it’s really annoying.

   One of the top comments is literally comparing modern day white people to pre-Holocaust Jews…

3. I’ll watch it later, but I’m not even gonna glance at these comments

4. I avoid racists, no matter what their color or ethnicity. Life is too short to waste my time with sad and angry creatures

5. I’ve heard about it, and he’s not wrong with a lot of the points he makes. Racism against white people is unfortunately a thing these days and anybody who wants to try and argue that it’s not is just proving why racism is still around and still a problem.

6. He just overshoots the runway a lot. Like yes, there are valid points about the derogatory way some tik tok creators talk about white people and how that’s not making race relations in the US better because it’s just divisive and mean-spirited. However, I don’t think white people are being “oppressed” because of it nor do I think the struggles of white people who encounter racism are necessarily comparable. Doesn’t make it okay to treat a white person poorly, but there is perspective from a larger scale.

   A lot of the videos he shows are nasty and absolutely cringeworthy (asking permission to bring a white friend, mocking menial things white people do or making hasty generalizations of them), and being a douche about white people isn’t going to solve racism against POC or make it better, but that’s probably the worst you can say about them.

7. I’ll tell you one thing, those tiktoks in that video are vile.

8. It’s obvious that the main idea of the video is true. Just look at how academics now use the term whiteness, which is a term that refers to anything that the speaker thinks is wrong with society. Greed, violence, environmental harms, and eating too many carbs all fall under the umbrella of whiteness.

9. Bullshit, straw man arguments.

10. Skipping through that quickly I think it proves that TikTok is cansur.

11. Ha, I’m old enough to remember the first time someone tried to slide in that new definition of racism that conveniently excludes racism against whites. I wasn’t buying it then and I remain unswayed, and I’ve given plenty of thought to the possibility that I’m just a hopeless old dinosaur, and my answer is I don’t think so. Our old definition was fine. The prescription was fine: don’t hate people, don’t perpetuate stereotypes, don’t treat people differently, don’t expect more or less from anyone, based on ethnicity.

    I’m not all bent out of shape about it in its present form, but it worries me about the future, and it worries me for the children growing up with these messages around. As a white person who grew up when I did, I’m aware of how these messages seep into your developing mind and the work it takes to uproot them. And that’s if you DO the work – and that requires you to be convinced there is work to be done. A lot of *white* people still haven’t got the memo that they need to clean up their hard drives, after all the sermonizing that’s been done. Because nobody likes to think of themselves as harboring evil ideas, bad code. My point is, once this shit is in there, it’s sticky.