I know what "hate" means. I know what bigotry is, and I know what racism means.
Don't you?
Don't you?
I'm told I'm racist because I think blacks and whites are interchangeable, and because I don't care about one over the other.
I'm told I'm racist for thinking the opposite.
I'm told it's racist to discriminate on the basis of race.
I'm also told it's racist NOT to do so.
The closest principle I can find that predicts who is considered a racist is "republican = racist". Can you provide a clear definition of racism that you'll endorse, even if I can derive conclusions you dislike?
#1 leads to #3 leads to #2.
But there is a lot more to it. Not a simple concept. There is a lot of reading to do if you'd like to understand more. Can provide some links.
As an example, a minority in the US may be prejudiced or bigoted, but they cannot be racist since they lack the societal power that whites enjoy. Thus only whites can be racist.
Just to be clear, I'm not endorsing one definition over the other, I only meant to illustrate that even seemingly well defined words can have different meanings.
I'm not very smart though so you should keep that in mind, I could be totally off base here.
It kind of reminds me of the time I was arguing with my brother and his response was "I don't believe in logic"
How do you deal with people that refuse to argue with logic and facts?
It is one thing to try to deal with people who refuse to argue with facts; it's quite another to deal with people who refuse to accept that their can be different interpretations of the same facts by different people.
This is a good point, and circles back to the original thought in this thread. When words are unclear, how can you discuss logic and facts? People don't have the patience (nor should they) to sit down and cooperatively define dozens of key terms each time they have a meaningful discussion about the direction of society, culture, and government.
Relabeling and redefining things to assert power (instead of reasoning with others) inhibits cooperative reason and is therefore, in my mind, irrational and harmful.
My wife and I define things to each other frequently. We often are saying the same things but confusing each others meanings because of wording.
Most people aren't practiced in keeping sets of definitions in mind that vary from context to context.
You're also opening the (aspirationally meaningful) conversation with somewhat involved semantic discussion and debate.
"Now that we've labored over the meanings of 'race', 'diversity', and 'equality' for fifteen minutes and invented three new terms to encompass the meanings of 'racism' that are relevant here, tell me how the latest executive order might end up exposing your family to more of racism-type-B."
I used to love text because it felt unambiguous. I just realized a part of me fears speaking because I don't want to be misunderstood.
My favorite example of this is the legal system. The legal system is racist against blacks and Hispanics because it is harder on them. The legal system is also sexist against women because it is easier on them. When someone sees both of these views together, the entire concept of bigotry is called into question.
And it's becoming a self parody as well. People are now being called transphobic for being unwilling to have sex with a transsexual they aren't attracted to. A gay guy who is only attracted to people with a punishment is now a bigot... what? Yeah, that view isn't by any means common yet, but it has been appearing online for a while now.
understanding what "racism" is requires you to keep up with the thought development that's ongoing, and frankly it's too much work for almost everyone to do so.
perhaps a different perspective will be useful, and i'm just making this up as i go, so bear with me.
imagine a utopian society in which 100% of people have complete equality of opportunity as well as ability to capitalize on opportunities. the society itself has no needs which are unmet, and vast resources which are disbursed equally. this means that the choice of what to do with one's destiny is limited only by their share of the society's resources. if there ever were any ethnicity, religions, or races, they've long since been forgotten, and all the members of this society are united in their affection for equality and humanism.
here, someone going for a facile point would ask what color do you imagine the people of this society to be (looking for a "gotcha", you're a racist), but that's not my purpose. instead, try to work your way backward from this theoretical society to the broad term of "racism" we have today. what needs to change?
for one, the actual situation of an arbitrary group of people needs to change, along with their mental outlook. let's say that this arbitrary group starts off with fewer opportunities than the rest, though their ability to capitalize on what opportunities they have is supposedly unchanged. their mental outlook is thus that of starting from behind, and they're not wrong.
because they've started from behind, the development of this group to reach their individual goals for life is slower. if the citizens of the rest of the society truly love equality in the fashion that they claim, then they must redistribute all of their resources en-masse, removing the disparity between the groups. unfortunately, in our thought experiment, a one-time transfer isn't enough, and each new generation the disadvantaged group will need to receive some resources from everyone else.
this spawns resentment among a portion of the egalitarian-minded population. we'll call this portion the conservatives. fed up with having less as a result of the group requiring their resources, they decide as a bloc to withhold their contribution despite still benefiting from the general climate of promoting equality themselves. predictably, the disadvantaged group begins to fall further behind, as they're not receiving as many resources as before. we now have the poor, the liberals, and the conservatives.
eventually, the withdrawal of resources by the conservatives begins to impact the poor more severely, and limits their ability to capitalize on opportunities as well as additionally hurting the resources that they start with. their sphere of potential paths to take in life shrinks expediently. education becomes more limited, many lose sight of egalitarian ideals, and a few turn to crime. the utopian society is no longer utopian at this point in our journey toward our reality.
let's fast forward a number of generations. the situation of the poor group has degraded considerably, and poverty has scarred the minds of its people. the egalitarian ideals of the past are still alive, in some people-- but to ignore the dilapidated condition of the poor group is impossible, and so calls to renew equality are aspirational. many have invented stories about why exactly it is that the poor are so unsightly, seem to be the only one committing crimes, and don't have the same resources as everyone else. these stories aren't fantastical, so much as they are filters of perception instantiated in specific incidents. many people treat the group differently as a result of the stories that are told, further reducing their opportunities. we can, at this point, generally say that these filters are equivalent to "racism".
so, let's say you're one of the old-school idealists, and you still think that, even though the challenges are greater than back in the day, equality is necessary and desirable. would you say that the group at the start of the thought experiment is interchangeable with the other groups? no, not anymore, though they were at the start-- and this is a sticking point for understanding the concept of racism in a more nuanced way.
are they NOT interchangeable? at the start of the thought experiment, they were in fact fully interchangeable, until we changed the variables. now, they need more resources to succeed. is it "racist" to discriminate on the basis of race? well, yes, if you believe in egalitarianism, you shouldn't be disqualifying someone because their starting conditions were different-- and if you really, REALLY are serious about egalitarianism, you'll give up some of your resources to them to help them catch up. the liberals would prefer it if everyone were in the REALLY serious camp, and tend to describe alternatives as "racist".
i wonder if this made any sense
Whether or not you have bigotry in your heart is beside the point—no one can know such things. When you spend all your energy trying to prove that you are untainted and innocent of racism, it seems like you are missing the point: in a pervasivly racist society, discriminatory behaviors creep in the subconscious of everyone, black/white/antiracist/whatever, and we have to consciously struggle with them. The question is really more about how you interact with broader society racism, not whether you are a naif.
Do you want to be part of a discussion, or do you just want the rush of endorphins that contrarianism provides?
I don't like Trump but I still agree that racist is now used as a general slur.
"it seems like you are missing the point: in a pervasivly racist society, discriminatory behaviors creep in the subconscious of everyone, black/white/antiracist/whatever, and we have to consciously struggle with them."
?
I have recently argued against my own misunderstanding of someones explaination and find that embarrassing so I am actually listening.
We all hold prejudices that we all need to be mindful of. Getting tangled in the weeds of arguing about semantics completely derails that point.
Racism is the discriminatory or prejudicial treatment of people based on these socially-salient-but-mostly-arbitrary social categories. This is pretty basic stuff, really.
> I'm told
> I'm told
You're on HN, so you're obviously capable of research, learning, etc. Why don't you go do your own research and try to understand instead of blindly listening to what you're told and then complaining of being confused?
The best way to prove me wrong would be to provide a clear and unambiguous definition. Strangely, no one has done that.
Also I'm not sure why you'd look to HN for clarity on any sort of social issue. That's not this community's expertise. That's why I'm saying go forth and learn.
Sometimes when you cut some one open and take out body parts it's called surgery.
CONTEXT MATTERS
Surgery is the treatment of injuries or disorders of the body by incision or manipulation, especially with instruments.
Racism is ___?
Please fill in the blanks so I can apply your definition to an action/belief together with it's associated context.
That's why it's such a great slur; there is no clear definition of it, no way to prove it false, and it inspires such negative emotions.
Not that you care. You will happily argue that MLK was the real racist for making white people let black people eat in their restaurants.
I have no idea what you are trying to argue in your second line. Is that an attempt at a strange ad-hominem attack?
"Racism" is a catch-all for the typical set of human behavior directed towards out-groups. This includes distrust, aggression, and in-group signaling. It doesn't matter what defines out-group: dress, gender, skin color, etc, but is generally something tied to identity, something easy to recognize and hard to change. Negative feelings get amplified and applied to all members of the group while positive feelings are suppressed.
In its most extreme form, this permission-to-otherness motivates genocide. Slightly farther down, slavery. Waaaay at the other end it manifests as nervousness around Koreans or something. This is just human nature. There are quite a few things in our nature we no longer casually tolerate in society and work to eliminate. Like ignorance or incest.
But on top of that, context matters. In a situation with heavy power asymmetry, both protagonists may harbor "racist" feelings, but the only attitude that matters to outcome is the attitude of the one with the power. If you feel you're being held to a higher standard, its probably because you are.
"Racism" as used, say, in the 50s, was shorthand for "institutional racism". The game had been rigged against minorities, most especially blacks, to the point that the law told them where to live and eat, who they could and could not marry, etc. This was enforced day to day by the actions of regular people employing regular, everyday racism directed downwards in a situation of power asymmetry.
Since then the institutional stuff has largely been dismantled or covered with tarps, and institutional "fixes" applied, often unevenly and stupidly, but that's also human nature.
Stop, and chew on that for a while. Think about your black friends - do you think any of them believe blacks and whites are interchangeable? Do you think a cop pulling them over, or a person interviewing them for a job, always believes this? No matter how colorblind you may think you are personally, much of the rest of America is not. Equality is theory, not practice. If you step up and do something about it, you have to acknowledge that inequality is real, that black and white are not interchangeable. If you don't step up, you're denying reality.
Do you though? If you can't distinguish the difference between fear of the unknown and hatred, then you are fortunate enough to never have experienced hatred.
Since everyone likes to compare Trump and Hitler. Hitler hated the Jews, which resulted in genocide. I've talked to several people who support what he did with the ban and it has nothing to do with hating Muslims or immigrants and its all driven by fear (statistically irrational) of attacks like the ones in Germany.
I vote against allowing children to drive not because I hate them, but because I fear the thought of them driving on the same road as me. Do you see the difference?
Sure. The administration hates, some people let it slide because they fear.
Oppose both.
And Hitler drove fear of the Jewish people taking over and kidnapping and killing christian children as his catalyst to power as well. There were negative traits ascribed to Jews, just as there are now of Muslims. Prior to implementing camps and genocide, Hitler stoked an environment of fear. Fear of the others.
Hell, hatred of blacks in the American Antebellum South, and the hatred that continues to this day, stemmed from white people's fear of blacks.
Fear inspires hatred. While they are not the same thing, they are related.
Simply calling someone "hateful" is an emotional argument at this point, and hurting discourse.
One argument I hear is that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with the West's values, that immigrants from those countries don't integrate well, and that the dangerous ideas within Islam aren't limited to radical fundamentalists. Under this view, a temporary ban is not necessarily a bad idea, nor is it necessarily racist except in the literal sense.
I disagree with this — I think the perfectly reasonable people from those countries need to be shown compassion, not to be lumped in with their oppressors — but the discussion should be about that, not who can scream "racist" louder.
No, everyone knows racism is ostracised. Plenty people cherish it. And now that there is less stigma with racist president in charge, they come out of closets.
I don't see how that is not clear. I thought it was clear. I thought people defending these executive orders think it's all fine and good to basically blacklist entire countries and every person on earth who is a citizen of those countries.
Because you're not even using the right word? Discriminating by country is not racist, it's xenophobic.
Otherwise everyone who says American tourists are annoying or has a stereotype about Americans is racist by your definition.
If you replace "racism" with "discrimination" (or where applicable, "xenophobia") my comments here may make more sense.
>certain areas of the world produce people who seek to do us harm.
What's your definition of race? It's a hard thing to define since it doesn't objectively exist, but I think 'people from certain areas of the world' is pretty indistinguishable from what most people mean by race.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2017/jan/29/donald-...
To the "alt-right", fundamentalist christians, nationalists or simply less-informed conservatives someone from the middle east may appear to have a similarly fundamentally incompatible value-system as a nazi would have to an american in the 1930s or a commie during the cold war.
Race and Nationality are a proxy for religion and culture which is a proxy for value systems. And value systems are what people disagree with and vote against.
Um, no it is not.
I ask because after seeing babies being defined as racist, I have no idea what racism means.
I think the word you're looking for is xenophobia. And while xenophobia certainly isn't any less of a problem, calling it racism makes it sound far more grandiose than it really is.
Racism is a political (and ideological) issue. Feminists define racism in terms of power dynamics. Supremacists use racism to attribute different qualities to different ethnic groups. Historically racism can be seen as the latent effects of slavery and racial segregation.
Xenophobia is just a mental bias that used to give humans an evolutionary advantage but is becoming increasingly counterproductive in a globalised society. It's a flaw in human thinking that leads us to irrational attitudes but that can be overcome with conscious effort and exposing ourselves to that which is foreign to us.
Conflating the two is one of the main reasons race is still such a hot topic in the US. The US is culturally and ethnically diverse, yes, but that diversity is not equally distributed. In rural white majority areas "blacks" and "Jews" and "orientals" are still as foreign as ever and calling these people racist because they are afraid or unsympathetic of something they only hear about in news reports and on TV is not only unfair but unproductive, no matter how reassuring it may feel to us educated cosmopolitans who are so very progressive and distant from that backwater mindset.
That is why Trump got elected. Republicans who were sick of being told they're racist and Democrats who were disillusioned with the choice of candidates. It didn't even take a record-breaking Republican turnout to get Trump elected, it just took enough Democrats being disinterested in supporting their own candidate.
But I digress. I don't even have any skin in the game -- I'm not even in the US.
"Racist" is no more than an insult at this point. They way it's commonly used it is now either tautological ("Well, yeah, everyone is racist"), an accusation of racial supremacism, or something in between.
"Xenophobe" is equally tautological but xenophobia is something you can actually address. If used as an accusation, at worst it accuses someone of hatred, at best it accuses them of an unintentional bias. It doesn't accuse people of being part of a system that maliciously ruins people's lives.
Racism, sexism and so on are pathologies. Calling someone a racist is no more productive than calling them a communist. They may agree with the label or not but it doesn't express the actual problem and its cause. Even worse, it implies an intentional choice. It's political.
Xenophobia is not political. It can give birth to politics: isolationism, for example, or discrimination. But it's not in itself political or politicised.
Of course if you just go around calling people "xenophobes" to avoid saying "racist" you're not making it any better, but xenophobia simply doesn't lend itself to being used as an accusation without making a point of painting yourself as infallible (which is ridiculous).
As for racism, sexism, and so on, or the political aspects of these, or xenophobia, those are beyond what I was addressing in my first comment, and not a mess I'm interested in digging into right now.
I believe racist used to mean someone strongly racially biased. But now its used to mean, has some amount of racial bias, which is non-descript.
This is the primary issues once you actually dig into things he might just as well just be nationalist which means occupied with US citizens not world citizens.
From the perspective of a nationalist the extreme measures Trump have taken are simply to secure the country.
From the perspective of a globalist he is destroying the very foundation of the global society. None of those are wrong, they are just different perspectives equally valid.
Then one could also take into account many of his critics aren't remotely globalist and some of them have invested significant political effort into trying to destroy the very foundation of global organisations like the EU.
I think based on the above no reasonable person could conclude the argument his primary focus was security has as much merit as the argument his primary focus was to cause maximum chaos to upset liberals, enthuse the elements of his base most excited by anti-Muslim gesture politics and test the loyalties of his colleagues in Congress and border agencies.
Risk change.
I think this ban was extreme amateurish done and I am fundamentally against it. But the job of the require them sometimes to take som drastic moved.
I think Adam Scott have a pretty good take on it.
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/156532225711/the-persuasion-fil...
We are talking about people who went around, even here on HN, telling that half the American population were dumb racist haters because they either voted Trump or IIRC just because they respected the election.
And half the American population did not vote for Trump.
Trump hasn't started a war yet although I am afraid that might just be a matter of time.