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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

I don't know what you mean by "racist". Can you provide a clear and unambiguous definition? I don't think you can.

You're being willfully obtuse. The points the parent was making were not reliant on a concrete shared definition of 'racism.'

Do you want to be part of a discussion, or do you just want the rush of endorphins that contrarianism provides?

I don't think yummyfajitas is.

I don't like Trump but I still agree that racist is now used as a general slur.

You may think it is becoming a general slur. Many other people think we are finally just calling things for what they are.

You're still missing the point the parent was making.

What then? This:

"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.

Yes, that.

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.

If there's miscommunication due to semantics that's preventing people from reaching understanding on an important issue, the semantics are indeed important. There has to be some area of common understanding to make that happen, which includes agreed-upon semantics.

To be clear: Racism is important but arguing about its semantics isn'?

Racialism is is the idea that Homo sapiens can be divided into separate social categories or "races" based on a variety of relatively arbitrary society-specific markers: religion, kinship, skin color, and so on. The ideas of race is tied up with the idea of ancestry (and nation), but the biological link between genetic ancestry and racial identities is very ambiguous. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/12/22/a-lot...

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.

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