Facebook finds Declaration of Independence 'racist'
bbc.com
bbc.com
Uh....1984, much?
Uh... no? It's a simple, straightforward English phrase. Speech which is problematic, as opposed to speech which is not.
"Problematic" being defined as "constituting or presenting a problem or difficulty."
Racist speech in historical documents constitutes and presents a problem or difficulty for modern readers. That's kind of the entire premise of the posted article. There is no doublespeak or newspeak or whatever "1984" is supposed to imply, involved.
Of course, I think it's their right to choose what they want to hear. But that does not mean I defend censorship.
How to filter the content they consume should be every individual's choice.
Now, platforms definitely should choose sensible defaults, but one should be able to easily opt out of them.
To be fair, that's just a restatement of the original definition. If someone doesn't want to hear a certain kind of speech, then they find it problematic.
> Now, platforms definitely should choose sensible defaults, but one should be able to easily opt out of them.
Also to be fair, Facebook apparently caught the error and corrected it, and it does have plenty of ways to opt out as a user.
The biggest problem here seems to be the assumption that a sensible policy can be automated.
>> Editor Casey Stinnett wrote afterwards of the offending paragraph: "Perhaps had Thomas Jefferson written it as 'Native Americans at a challenging stage of cultural development' that would have been better. >>
Seems racist as well. Not from Jefferson, but from the editor. The only real “challenge” was that the colonies wanted their land and resources and were willing to do anything it took to get them.
Jefferson was racist, trying to mask that with language may be hard.
The closest thing I can come to is just admitting one is racist or awareness of your own projections.
“The native Americans are a strong mirror for our own disowned savageness. For the way in which our disconnection from Self and has lead to a quest for power and resources which have blinded us to the common humanity we share with all peoples. Our inability to resolve the savageness we harbor towards our own humanity within us leaves us no choice but the futile attempt to destroy its reflection in those we project it upon.”
I'm fairly certain that you could even automate the transformation of text such that it remains essentially the same without triggering any bots.
Edit: This isn't a comment on whether or not Jefferson's evaluation of his and the natives' cultures was valid or correct.. but what I gather from your comment, is that you're implying any such value judgement is "racist" ("culturist"?).
I mean.. not sure I disagree
What would be our reaction today if a group of people attacked a family and did such things? We talk about the horror of mass shootings, but they don't even come close to that level of horrifying. All of this violated the rules of war and decent behavior. After seeing the remains of this horror show, what would you be inclined to do when you caught up with the perpetrators?
Mens Rea
If I sell you the Brooklyn Bridge and demand payment in Monopoly money, who's the real crook? I would be because I sold what I did not own and reaped a profit (however small) at your expense. If an Indian sold land they didn't believe they owned for what they believed to be valuable, who was the real thief?
Consider scalping. While it is generally considered a method of trophy collecting, the meaning was deeper. A scalped warrior was denied access to the eternal hunting grounds. Literally, to their minds, scalping was a way of keeping someone from going to heaven. Doing this from the motive of hatred or payment by the French/British was still the ultimate condemnation (and in the case of payment, without even the excuse of honor).
The re-writing of history to fit current politics doesn't do society any favors.
Who's rewriting what now?
That aside, you cannot claim land cannot be owned then claim ownership over it. However, if ownership can be claimed, then who is the owner, the thief or the thief who steals from the first thief?
Consider the Sioux. People think of the Sioux as the plains Indians, but they lived in the great lakes area. The Iroquois stole their land from them. In turn they fought to drive off the semi agrarian Pawnee Indians (who had good relations with the settlers -- probably because they were settling down themselves) winning a decisive victory by massacre.
If you go farther back than that, there is tribe after tribe fighting and butchering the previous one.
Going to Europe, you see the same pattern. Tribes butcher each other until they are conquered or a tribe survives long enough to settle and establish dominance. I don't hear about the land argument when discussing those indigenous peoples (and unlike the Indians, most of them believed land could be stolen).
Torture and revenge are not justice. If a man raped, tortured, and killed a little girl then her mother hunted him down and tortured him to death the same way he made her daughter suffer, both acts would be the same action. Both would be evil. The motive and duress of the mother would lead to a different mens rea and different punishment because anyone except a psychopath would understand the difference in situation.
Perhaps also add a “historical” or “contemporary” tag.
People could opt out, but more importantly, we could see who is posting racist stuff vs. it being censored before hand and not allowing anyone to engage with the poster.
I’m not certain nerfing all social media is the answer.
A BBC exec recently criticized Monty Python for being politically incorrect (in today's terms). Of course they were on the leading edge at the time, and now they are being vilified.
Political correctness is the western equivalent of the hard-line extremists that destroy ancient art in the middle east. It's just wrong.
Just because something is from the pages of history, doesn't mean it should be presented as perfectly fine today - that's also wrong.
This is a very common human trait. When you have a group of people experiencing hardship, they will look for someone at a greater disadvantage than them to redirect their retribution to. The economic hardships that Germany felt after WW1 were blamed on the marginalised Jews. Most people in the antebellum South were poor, not wealthy plantation owners, but of course the entire white population could punch down towards what they viewed as childish or animalistic slaves. Today economic downturn and lack of jobs can be blamed on illegal immigrants, instead of the galloping wealth disparity.
This has got nothing to do with being very careful with speech so as to not offend anyone. It's got nothing to do with political correctness or incorrectness. These words, "merciless Indian savages" are about one of the greatest atrocities committed in the name of freedom.
Your claim that disease is genocide is ignorant (probably linked to the "smallpox blankets" hoax). There was no germ theory at that time. They thought you'd catch smallpox from bad humors and that blood letting could cure it. In contrast, blankets were super expensive. Making thread and weaving it was a painstaking affair before automated looms. A goodwill gift of blankets being turned into a desire for mass murder is quite a large shift. Likewise, it wasn't illegal to sell guns to Indians until long after the homestead slaughters happened.
The average American settler family lived on less than $2 per day (less than $60/month) in today's money. For contrast, the average Chinese individual monthly income is $850 or around $28/day. Any settler was way more oppressed than anyone alive today.
The "oppression lens" of history and politics is seldom (if ever) useful for rational discourse. It forces a propagandized view of the situation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_smallpox#Epidemics_...
You can be poor and still be punching down. There's always someone further down you can find. Illegal Mexican immigrants in the US are often quite racist against black people, for example. Or other impoverished European immigrants against the Irish in the 19th century.
This isn't about guilt and you seem to be defending against some kind of guilt. Guilt and blame is utterly pointless, especially close to 250 years later. All we can do now is recognise that "merciless Indian savages" is a kind of dehumanisation of a group of people that had already suffered greatly at the hands of Europeans and would continue to do so still for centuries to come.
As to the idea of "punching down". The North was punching down when they invaded the South and forced them to free their slaves. I think this was a good thing. Having power and using it isn't synonymous with evil. The issue with "punching down" is that it implies that position always entails abuse. People who use the phrase always seem to shut up when the punching down is in their favor.
> Illegal Mexican immigrants in the US are often quite racist against black people, for example.
Illegal immigrants leave a terrible situation to work the worst kinds of jobs here because they are still better than what Mexico offers. They live under constant threat of deportation too. You then paint these people as having privilege and say they're all racists. If punching down is a thing, you might just win a medal.
If you're interested in this sort of history, there are many good books. Here's one:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17571536-the-heart-of-ev...
The atrocities committed by the US government against the first nations should not be whitewashed. Neither should the atrocities committed by one tribe against another. But few would contest the obvious truth that the former greatly exceeded the latter in terms of scope and effectiveness, particularly due to the imbalance of power.