The job description of a CEO is pretty vague, but you got the idea. Running a corporation…………which can mean almost an infinite number of different things.

Executive in that sense just means “head of….” nothing more. No mention about job skills……..etc.

sometimes I think this stuff is intended for some reason to appear more complicated than it really is.

The title just gives a lot of those people really inflated egos and bragging rights and ridiculous benefits and………so on.

There are notable exceptions to the stereotype of a CEO, but that’s what first comes to mind for me.

Never underestimate the level of idiocy you will encounter at any moment…..(re: the attempted posting of white pride comments on this particular post…..)

And, to be clear…

When I talked about modern-day racism, I meant racism against people of color, not some bizarre myth that white people are the main victims of racism and people of color its main beneficiaries (WTF?). When I talked about Dr. King being likely to be disturbed by what he’d see if he were alive today, I was not saying that he’d be supporting “white pride” causes. I wouldn’t think I’d have to point that out, but I’m pointing it out.

I mean… I went to a school that was mostly made up of kids a lot richer than me. I got the sense that it wasn’t that these kids made some conscious decision about class. I mean they were born into their classes like anyone.

But they never seemed to have to think about anyone poorer than them (which was most of the world). It was an option they could just turn off. And if they did think of anyone poorer than them, it was considered a sign of great virtue. But bringing $50 or $100 bills to the snack bar and being baffled when the woman who worked there (who was not paid a whole lot) got snippy with them about it… they were just oblivious, and they were able to be oblivious. They were in this little bubble that made them capable (unless they had family or friends that crossed the class divide) to not even notice class all the time, or even to have to. Or for that matter to notice that not everyone in the world had several houses and flew around the world all the time for fun.

And that kind of oblivious little bubble, and the circumstances that allow it to exist, is often far more harmful than something deliberate.

Able-bodied people get to be mostly oblivious to disability for the same reasons. Especially since the world as it currently works affords the option for disabled people to be shoved into little “special” places for us where nobody has to deal with us (but of course we have to deal with them). And that bubble effect, and things related to it, cause a lot of damage, even death, among disabled people (and even allows people to think that our deaths are better than our lives, in a way unique to disabled people). It can’t be underestimated just because people aren’t deliberately “keeping people down”.

I have a limited experience of rich adults, but certainly rich kids seemed to have no intentional malice towards middle-class, working-class, and poor people, they just had a very limited world where they don’t have to think about them, nor about how, in the case of some of the kids I knew, their parents’ companies (since many of them were children of CEOs — argh, I still don’t know what a CEO does aside from “run a corporation” and those are just more patterns of words to me, “executive” has no meaning to me either, I will not torture my brain on this further, I just know they’re high up and make a lot of money) benefited from exploiting them in sub-standard working conditions for too little pay etc etc etc. This was just not part of their world as far as I know.

(The caste system there was presented in a way that was supposed to sound a little neat and fun. Seriously.)

So you don’t have to notice, understand, or condone (or indeed feel any particular way at all about) this kind of inequality to benefit from it, and I thought that was understood, thus got confused about rocobley’s statements and how to react to them.

Along with what Amanda said, I don’t think any “ism” (racism, classism, sexism, etc), is always about consciously keeping people down. Where I live, I can go anywhere and find lots of other white people there. I can turn on the TV, and see lots and LOTS of white people represented. That’s part of white privilege.

In America, we’re getting ready for our presidential election, and voting to decide on who the nominee of each party will be. One party has 3 strong candidates: one’s a white woman, one is a black man, and one is a white man. We’ve never had a female or black president, and the news media keeps focusing on the races and genders of the candidates. Newsmen ask silly things like: “Will black women vote for their race or their gender?” and people say stuff like “Oh my gosh! A woman or a black man could become president! This is a historic moment!” (And usually they forget that the third white male candidate could still get the nomination).

All this focus on the candidates’ identities–and not on, like, their policies–is racist and sexist in itself. It’s not just that white women and black men have been kept out of that political space–although they have. It’s also that when they enter that space, people are so fascinated with thee *because* they are black men or (white) women that they can’t focus on anything else.

This isn’t meant to make anyone feel guilty (in fact if they are, they don’t understand the problem), it’s just a fact. If I had had the same general body (including brain) type I do now, but been poor and/or anything other than white, instead of white and middle-class, I would not have been given the level of “understanding” I got on my IQ test (disregarding my weaknesses, at least according to the tape I found) as I did as a kid, and might not even have been tested in the same manner — and if I was sitting here typing this, I might have been typing it as someone who’d grown up being considered of either average or below-average IQ rather than above-average. This doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with me or that I ought to feel bad for what I did get, it just means I got advantages in life that not every autistic person gets, that in fact probably most do not get.

And no, this doesn’t mean I believe every single widget that comes with some sort of theory I’ve heard of but never grasped. It just means that I notice that people tend to get advantages and disadvantages in life based on broad categories and widespread biases that are more part of how a society fits together than part of individual people (this doesn’t mean individual people can’t do anything to change things, it just means that one individual person, while good, is not enough).

And saying that in general white people get advantages other people don’t get, doesn’t say there aren’t other forms of unfair advantage in a society, and doesn’t say how much of an advantage one thing is compared to another, and doesn’t say that there aren’t nuances to this, and doesn’t say that there’s any need for some sort of separated us-vs-them worldview. It just says this exists and that it’s wrong.

I do know from learning about racism, that the whole idea of “It’s not racism, it’s just classism, and that’s all there is to it” is horribly flawed, and doesn’t grasp the extent of racism that exists. Particularly in the USA, which is a country built upon it to a degree most people don’t even realize. It’s possible to work to change a whole lot of things, a person doesn’t have to pick just one. And a person doesn’t have to see the entire world through the lens of just one kind of injustice either: Yes, class plays into a lot of things, including disability (and even our notions of what is disability and what isn’t, as well as the hierarchies of disability). But it’s not the only way to analyze the problems in a society (at that point, it just becomes a widget, and I don’t do widgets).

Dr. King never settled for only fighting racism — the tendency of people to settle for only fighting one thing, and acting like this work is not part of something broader, and splintering into teeny-tiny groups and insisting that is the only way to be, came after his time, and would never have been part of his ethics. He was also committed to fighting poverty and the situations that give rise to it. And a lot of other things. This isn’t an us-vs-them, pick-just-one, zero sum sort of thing. There are a lot of injustices in the world and there’s never, ever been a need to work to change only one of them at a time.

I agree. In fact I’ve just finished writing something rather similar myself.

I think that Dr. King probably *would* be disappointed with the large amount of racism still present in today’s society. But what I realized yesterday (and maybe I’m slow in coming to this conclusion) is that even in 1963, when the situation was much worse, he actually believed that we could all overcome racism even in the face of tremendous personal hatred. To me, his words seem as relevant now as they did then, and they present his genius – getting people to believe that they could overcome their differences and come together. Which is something that I, and I’m sure many other disillusioned people from all races, was starting to lose hope in. Any fight for equality is sure to include the law, nitty-gritty details, and a massive front of strength. I think that’s what’s most often remembered about Dr. King. But what seems most significant to me right now is that throughout the fight, he never came to an “us vs. them” sort of attitude.