This was never more obvious to me than when I was in college. As an out gay guy who studied Arabic, this seemed to short-circuit the expectations of my peers; being in awe of Islamic art, and wanting deeply to travel to Iran and see the mosques of the world was something that, for some reason, didn't compute to them. "But don't they hate your kind over there?" was not an uncommon reaction. I get it, I really do, but sometimes it felt like I wasn't allowed, in their eyes, to have access to those beautiful things in the world, or else I was considered "brave" for trying to access them. But to me they have been wholly distinct interests from the start, and only incidental that they happen to coexist in me as a individual person.
The most famous example is probably Maajid Nawaz - a former member of Hizb ut-Tahrir who renounced his extremist views, and since then has been actively criticizing political Islamism (of both violent and non-violent variety), while remaining a practicing Muslim. Despite that last fact, he was identified as an "anti-Muslim extremist" by SPLC - and they only retracted this after a massive outcry.
Lord have mercy on anyone who takes temporal leaders more seriously than those absolute truths to which those leaders (purportedly) point.
[1] Reference to the movie "Stripes".
"Should you hear any one in the public thoroughfare, or in the midst of the forum, blaspheming God; go up to him and rebuke him; and should it be necessary to inflict blows, spare not to do so. Smite him on the face; strike his mouth; sanctify your hand with the blow, and if any should accuse you, and drag you to the place of justice, follow them, and when the judge ... calls you to account, say boldly that the man blasphemed the King of angels!"
But we don't judge all Christians based on that. Neither should all Muslims be judged on the basis of a particular interpretation of their scriptures, especially when the vast majority of them do not subscribe to it at all.
For example, my grandfather was a Muslim. His wife was Christian. His son - my father - is an atheist, and so am I.
It sounds like your problem isn't with Islam, but rather with a strawman that you have constructed.
Also, is being gay the issue? or committing homosexual acts?
And anyway, that had nothing to do with the original discussion of the having someone to force an opinion on something.
In Iran, homosexuality has been punished by imprisonment, torture, and execution. People who are gay in Iran do not have the luxury of being able to go and visit, they live under that threat every day. And many countries in the Middle East have similar policies and their gay population - rarely out - live under similar threat.
Wanting to go study the beautiful works of art in Iran is brave. As an atheist, it would be dangerous for me to do so as well, and yet the Islamic scientific and cultural golden age is still quite interesting to me.
But yet, it's still true that many, perhaps most of them "hate my kind" over there. Atheism is also punishable by execution in several countries in the Arabic speaking world. If I told friends I wanted to go study and live in Iran and they were concerned and asked me that question, I don't think it'd be disproportionate. If they said it was brave, I don't think I'd dispute it.
(Though in all fairness and perhaps you find this cringeworthy, I am fortunate and privileged in that being a straight atheist in these countries is a lot easier than being gay, and being gay and Muslim might actually exacerbate the threat.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2012/12/10...
How on Earth does that make it better in any way? That is the hallmark of any fascist or authoritarian state. That these type of laws exist to punish cultural outliers does not make them just or right.
I feel like I'm the upside down here, why are people in any way defending actual thought crime laws in countries like Iran? In what universe is it acceptable for the state to make not believing in something a crime punishable by death?
How did you arrive at the conclusion that GP was saying that? Did you read sentence 2 of 2, in which he clarifies he was not making a moral comparison? If you feel you’re in the upside down, it’s because you’re reading something that isn’t there. Not everything you encounter must be immediately classified as ‘for’ or ‘against’ whatever moral issue you currently feel passionate about. Nuance exists.
It is undeniably true that in Iran and several other countries, blasphemy and apostasy is a crime. A real, actual thought crime which the state punishes with violence.
>> Wanting to go study the beautiful works of art in Iran is brave. As an atheist, it would be dangerous for me to do so... But yet, it's still true that many, perhaps most of them [Iranians] "hate my kind" over there.
In practical terms, for your trip to Iran, US citizenship is a more likely source of potential issues than your religious beliefs.
And yes, my passport would pose a bigger problem for me on first blush. But even for a European in Iran. Or an Iranian in Iran, apostasy is a crime and one that can be severely punished. We should decry that as a threat to freedom of thought and religion.
"The National Museum of African American History & Culture wants to make you aware of certain signs of whiteness: Individualism, hard work, objectivity, the nuclear family, progress, respect for authority, delayed gratification, more."Oh, and emphasis on scientific methods.
So, for the sake of identity, let's attack modern civilization. This. Is. Fucking. Insane.
However, absolutely nothing about it suggests that "internalizing aspects of white culture" makes you a racist. It's fine if you don't respect or understand the idea that the web page is trying to communicate here because frankly they did a shamefully bad job. They are preaching to the choir. But absolutely nothing about it suggests the thing that angers you. You are bringing that idea to the infographic with you.
[1] https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/whiten...
The easiest bullet point to see this distinction for is "Christianity is the norm". It's not saying that being Christian makes you white, but that white people in the US made Christianity the norm. For example, people tried to cast Obama as un-American by claiming he was Muslim.
A longer bullet point to explain is the Scientific Method, but I'll take a shot at that one too. Science is a way to seek truth and reduce bias. However, the people who practice science are not fully objective actors free from bias. For example, evolution is absolutely true, but social darwinism is how many people understood evolution. A scientific truth was used to support a political position. People who would complain about inequalities could be said to be anti-scientific because they were arguing against the natural social order. Science itself isn't the issue, it's people using science to reject individual stories or support their priors.
So whatever that infographic is, if the people who wrote it would consider it a racist attack if someone else did it and used "black" instead of "white", it tells you how they really intend it, regardless of how they might edit the definition of "racism".
Black and White are not interchangeable. For your rule of thumb to make sense, you'd have to believe that Black and White people experience the US in the same way.
People will argue over the facts, naturally. That's as it should be. But if you are encouraged to criticize one race without penalty, whether the criticism is factually correct or not, but you aren't allowed to criticize another without being guilty of "racism", whether the criticism is factually correct or not, it's not about the facts. It's about who you can criticize and who you can't, regardless of your specific claims or evidence.
In other words, if you want to judge its nature, swap races. If the only thing that would happen if you swapped races is someone would say, "well then that wouldn't be factually correct", then it IS just about facts. But if instead, those in power would rage about racism and punish the "offender", they are not merely disputing facts. Something else is happening.
Suppose you criticize someone for being slow at reading. It's not the nicest thing to say, but it's run of the mill as criticisms go. But then suppose you criticize someone for being slow at reading who has dyslexia. That would be considered extremely insensitive and rude, even if it's factually correct.
Suppose you say "I screwed up". Pretty unremarkable; self-deprecation is common in our culture, and people won't consider it a sign you're being too hard on yourself, unless the mistake you made was extremely minor or harmless. But then suppose you say "You screwed up". That would be considered far too aggressive and direct for most situations.
Of course it matters who you're criticizing.
Even if it is Americans making these statements in an American context, the Internet and the media broadcasts them to the rest of the planet.
You have to think, not just about whether they make sense in an American context, but also whether they make sense in the non-American contexts in which they are being received.
Your other comment about the Australian experience was interesting and it's useful when comparing the US to the rest of the world. However, it feels like you're trying to say I'm off topic because I'm discussing an American document and an American reaction by using American history.
This American talk about "whiteness" doesn't just get posted in an American museum. It gets posted on Twitter etc and then people on the other side of the planet read it. And the people on the other side of the planet may understand it very differently. But Americans never seem to think about that. (And I'm not saying the concept of "whiteness" might not have some application or usefulness in other countries, including Australia-but it certainly doesn't have an identical application.)
Or, maybe one is a non-US-based employee of a US-based multinational company, and the company leadership starts promoting all this talk to the entire company, without seeming to ever stop to think about how much sense it makes in a non US-context. (But would any non-American employees dare raise the question of how US-centric the biases of its US-based management are?)
So, my relatives want to know, are the baizuo (white leftists) claiming that in China, nothing white people say about or do to Chinese or blacks can be racist? Or are they claiming that they are actually "in charge" of us in China?
Then why call them white at all? Is his a cultural, or a racial definition? Do you believe the two can be separated?
>A longer bullet point to explain is the Scientific Method, but I'll take a shot at that one too. Science is a way to seek truth and reduce bias. However, the people who practice science are not fully objective actors free from bias. For example, evolution is absolutely true, but social darwinism is how many people understood evolution. A scientific truth was used to support a political position. People who would complain about inequalities could be said to be anti-scientific because they were arguing against the natural social order. Science itself isn't the issue, it's people using science to reject individual stories or support their priors.
I'm honestly not sure how to respond to this. It sounds like you mean to say that science was sometimes used in a biased way. This may be true in some sense, but it's not clear that this has anything to do with the scientific method itself being a "white value."
White is a cultural definition in the US which used to be legally defined and still carries cultural implications. It is intrinsically tied to race because race is also culturally defined. The US's "one drop" rule defined people's race as Black even if the vast majority of their ancestry was "White European".
As an analogy, consider the names we give various colors. We can tell that light blue and dark blue are different colors, but in English we will default to calling them both 'Blue'. In Russian, you cannot call those two the same color. There is a continuous gradient of colors, and we divide those colors into different named categories due to culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Basic_color_terms
Culture determines racial boundaries as well, since there are no clear genetic/cultural dividing lines between the "races". Slavs used to be excluded from Whiteness in the US because they were considered "Asiatic", but now we consider Slavs "White".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_th...
So to answer your questions, "White" is a cultural concept which is used to define racial boundaries in the US.
> it's not clear that this has anything to do with the scientific method itself being a "white value."
The scientific method is not a "white value", but whiteness values scientific data over interpersonal opinions. One example would be: "IQ tests show that Black people are dumber than White people, and that explains why there is an income gap". You would be elevating scientific data over personal narratives of schooling and job discrimination.
I'm not saying that science is bad, what I'm saying is that science is a combination of technical and cultural aspects. The bullet point is referencing the cultural motivations and impacts of science more than the technical aspects.
Right, but this was a bad time. We should be moving on from this. The infographic apparently does the opposite: reinvigorates, and then accidentally claims that white traits are mostly superior. I know you're going to claim that there are not value judgements in the info graphic, but the opposite of hard work, individualism, and the scientific method are in fact bad things. (And, even if you're non-white, the Greco-Roman heritage is in fact a large part of how the American system of government came to be.
I'm trying to be constructive because we're on hn, but I have to say I'm absolutely disgusted by the modern tendency to reduce everything to race. The color of someone's skin is not important, and people of the same skin color don't all share the same values. More importantly, racial groups cannot "own" values such as hard work, and formal logic.
"White" is not a cultural concept. People on the new left are trying to make it a cultural concept, and it's backwards and racist.
You can't discuss racism without discussing race and skin color. I'm trying to think of why you wouldn't think talking about race would be helpful, and this is what I came up with: race isn't a problem in modern America; discussing race causes racism; or examining race & racism creates racial differences.
> but the opposite of hard work, individualism, and the scientific method are in fact bad things.
These are good traits, but their "opposites" aren't inherently bad.
- Hard work is the key to success; "work smarter not harder"
- The individual is the primary unit; cooperation and mutual assistance.
- Scientific Method: "Quantitative Emphasis"; qualitative readings of personal narratives such as interviews.
> accidentally claims that white traits are mostly superior
This is addressed in the webpage, and is the entire point of the graphic. "Racism is perpetuated by deeming whiteness as superior and other racial and ethnic groups as inferior. … [The superior traits] describes the experience and attitudes of those who are members of the dominant, privileged, or powerful identity groups."
The infographic is asking you to examine why you think these traits are superior. That doesn't mean they're inferior, but they aren't the best in every situation either.
Hard work
“Delayed gratification”
Planning for the future
The “nuclear family”
Rational thinking
Promptness
Politeness
“Decision-making”
Personal responsibility
Speaking standard English
I guess where some non-Americans feel concerned about this, is the tendency to export US discourses about race to the rest of the English-speaking world (and even the world more broadly), despite the fact that other countries have different histories and cultures and understanding of what the words mean.
The Australian Human Rights Commission recommends analysing racial and cultural diversity in Australia in terms of four broad categories [1] – Indigenous, Anglo-Celtic, European, and non-European. ("European" is defined to exclude Anglo-Celtic people.) Slightly reminiscent of the American "one drop rule", people of mixed backgrounds are assigned to the more diverse background. By contrast, the US has an official classification of people into five different races [2].
Australia does have a rather horrible history of racial discrimination – for example, the "White Australia Policy" which for decades banned non-European immigration. However, I think the way Australian officialdom (governments, academics, etc) have tried to deal with that, is to avoid using racial categories like "white", and focus primarily on culture and multiculturalism. They are happy to talk about different ancestries/nationalities/cultures (Italian, Chinese, Indian, Lebanese, etc), but grouping them into racial categories is avoided in official contexts, although it still sometimes happens in less formal contexts. (Journalists sometimes talk about "Asian Australians" or "African Australians", but the government prefers to talk about Chinese and Filipinos and Sudanese and Eritreans.) When it is necessary, they'll split them into not explicitly racial groupings like Indigenous/Anglo-Celtic/European/non-European. That splits two groups of people both considered "white" in the US (Anglo-Celtic and European), while lumping together as non-European both some people officially considered "white" in the US (e.g. Lebanese people), and also multiple non-"white" races (Asian, African, Pacific Islander).
I think Australia's ways of dealing with its history are at times quite different from those of Americans, precisely because their histories are in many ways quite different. But I think many Americans unconsciously assume that understandings of race and culture that make sense in a US context must make sense for the rest of the world as well.
[1] https://humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/document/publ...
[2] https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html
(Throwaway because I'm scared of talking about race and culture using my real name.)
Were the Obama religion conspiracy theories being driven by "Christianity is the norm", or by Islamophobia? Suppose, counterfactually, that instead of a nominally Muslim father and stepfather, his father and stepfather had been Jews or Hindus or Buddhists? And, likewise, suppose, that instead of spending some of his childhood in majority Muslim Indonesia, he'd spent it in Israel or Nepal or Thailand? And, suppose instead of an Arabic-derived middle name, he had a middle name derived from Hebrew or Sanskrit or Pali?
An "Obama is a secret Hindu" or "Obama is a secret Buddhist" conspiracy theory would have had far less steam, because whatever misconceptions the average American likely has about those religions, far less Americans fear them than fear Islam.
And "Obama is a secret Jew" would have struggled because it sounds antisemitic, and antisemitism is far more taboo in American culture than Islamophobia is.
Anti-Muslim sentiment in American culture is largely specific to Islam, most of it is not driven by some generic "hate everyone who isn't Christian" sentiment.
The same propaganda machine that labelled Obama "a socialist Muslim Kenyan agent and anti-Christ" also assassinated the character of Bill and Hillary for 30 years (including attributing something like 40 murders to them) and later credited them with the "under age sex trade ring" (queue PizzaGate and the QAnon canon). Then they attacked Obama's birth certificate. The same thing happened with Obama's advisers (eg. Valerie Jarrett).
It's a power play by politically-biased news sources which convince people of conspiracies. The details are irrelevant because the conspiracies that don't gain traction are left behind and the propaganda evolves. The only details that matter are the ones that best apply to Confirmation Bias.
The NYTimes has a podcast called RabbitHole[1] which describes how this works so well on the internet and reverse engineers how a YouTube visitor was radicalized and later rejected his previous radicalization views.
The fact that there are a plethora of conspiracy theories in the ideology and that it's largely people who identify as Christian or are pro-Christian seem tangential to me.
The "natural social order" for humans isn't scientific because there is none that we can identify, unlike in animals with much simpler social structures. Social Darwinism isn't based on evidence, being promoted by quacks that are anti-science.
You're trying to draw a distinction where there is none.
Science is the way to seek truth. And yes, we should use scientific evidence to reject anecdotes, if that evidence is strong enough. Not sure what you mean in your last sentence but it sounds wrong to me.
I hope I’m totally wrong about my interpretation about the infographics and I hope my frustration is unsubstantiated.
1. "Whiteness and white racialized identity refer to the way that white people, their customs, culture, and beliefs operate as the standard..."
2. "Whiteness (and its accepted normality)... communicate hostile, derogatory, or harmful messages." [ed. because whiteness causes microagressions.]
3. "Racism is perpetuated by deeming whiteness as superior and other racial and ethnic groups as inferior."
4. "White supremacy is an ideology where white people are believed to be superior to nonwhite people."
5. "[I]nternalized racism, [] happens when an oppressed group believes the racial views that society communicates are true, and they act as if they were true."
So, if the graphic isn't clearly critical, the page is. If you hold the "white" ideas in the graphic as "superior," that is to hold "whiteness" superior. Holding whiteness superior is the definition of "white supremacy." If you hold these "whiteness" views as a minority, it is because you have internalized racism -- the "whiteness" has colonized your mind.
Families. Science. Christianity. Hard Work. Democracy. If you think any of these are superior, it's "white supremacy." If it's not properly nuanced, this is how it's being churned out for the masses.
Also, this comes from 1990. A lot has changed since then. Maybe it's not quite as controversial to be non-Judeo-Christian, for example.
I think the infographic connotes a negative view of whiteness, and that translates to racist, IMO. -
Your perception of it as an attack is your own.
Yes, but most social scientists would describe these as bourgeois values (or "bourgeois virtues"), not "Whiteness". Why bring race into it? I mean, I get it that they're looking at this from a US-centric point of view, but even then it makes zero sense other than as an intentionally provocative and sharply divisive statement. (But why would the Smithsonian Institution want to blatantly troll their patrons like that? It's mind-boggling.)
Note that this doesn't mean that people who don't exemplify them are not considered white, or that people with non-white skin who do exemplify them are considered white. What it means is that it's assumed to be the norm for whites, and ideal for other groups to strive towards - and the lack of attainment is deemed as the root cause of their troubles.
Furthermore, if public perception shifts on this for some group - i.e. if they are deemed as having largely attained the ideal, when they weren't perceived as such before - they get to partake in "white privilege" to the corresponding degree; first, promoted to "honorary whites", separate but (gradually more and more) equal; and then finally fully adopted into the fold. This happened historically with e.g. Catholics (especially Irish and Italians), Eastern Europeans, and Jews; and is ongoing with some Asian nationalities, and some subgroups of Hispanics.
Note also that this is about perception of those groups by the dominant group in society, not the actual degree to which they really manifest or don't manifest those virtues. The determination to exclude the group comes first, and then their supposed failure to adhere to the virtues is used to morally justify it, and shift the blame onto those excluded. Conversely, the dominant group becomes dominant first, and then claims that its dominant status is merely an inevitable and justifiable outcome of adherence to the virtues.
This feels like a just-so story to me. The story of "white" identity as such in the U.S. is really a lot simpler than that, and we can trace it very easily in the primary sources: it does show up early on as something that was talked about mostly in opposition to Natives and the enslaved blacks, and to some extent it kept that role in the "Jim-Crow" segregated south after the emancipation of slaves, up to as recently as the Civil Rights Era. In the meantime, and quite importantly for this discussion, it got actively repurposed throughout the U.S. as a way of assimilating the fractious immigrant identities from Europe into something that could be shared by European-Americans in general. This shows up especially clearly wrt. immigrants from Germany in the run-up to World War I, who were heavily encouraged to shed any association with their nationality for obvious reasons; but the same is true of other nationalities.
But to say that Asians have been subsequently adopted as "honorary whites" in some sort of continuing dynamic, let alone that this is also true of "white Hispanics" (a categorization that does formally exist in the U.S. Census but that very few would acknowledge as such) really strains credulity. I do think that this whole way of talking about "Whiteness" as something terrible is purposely divisive; it is exploiting a deep equivocation about the legacy of slavery and segregation in order to disregard the fact that "white" is what many, many millions of people in the US have been explicitly requested to identify as, and it's really not feasible to disregard or deprecate existing identities like this without being divisive.
And as for Asians, you can easily observe the dynamics by first looking at the "yellow peril" scare, or, say, the justifications for the internment of Japanese-Americans during WW2 - and then compare it to how the same groups are treated today. The difference is obvious and immense.
I do agree that "white" is a bad term for it overall. But thing is, it's a pre-existing one - the reason why we talk about stuff like "white privilege" is because "white" and "non-white" was the language used to get us where we are, and the same distinction (usually obscured shibboleths like "inner city youth") is what largely fuels systemic racism today. So it's impossible to meaningfully talk about racism without talking about whiteness.
(I'll also add that SJ vocabulary is pretty bad overall when it comes to conveying concepts accurately - e.g. "privilege" is another highly misleading term that I wish was never popularized to describe the very real concept behind it.)
"What fuels structural, systemic racism" is another can of worms entirely and I see little reason to get into it here, other than to note that our aforementioned attitudes to class, wealth, gratification etc. might just as well be "fueling" other systemic social problems that people don't generally describe as "systemic racism", such as the opioid overuse epidemic among lower-class whites. So again, bringing race into the description of these problems risks adding confusion for little gain.
And yeah, this is the historical meaning of "white". Consider the one-drop rule, both as a legal concept, and as a social convention. You could be white as snow, and yet the moment the society knew you had a black ancestor several generations back, you were treated as black - and thus, you were black. In other societies, it was different - e.g. the Spanish system of meticulously tracking blood percentages, and a formal hierarchy based on that, made it possible to "whiten" a bloodline.
The one-drop rule is no longer a broadly accepted social convention by itself, true. But while it had been, it created numerous derivative cultural markers, above and beyond skin color, which continue to be the basis of the social conventions establishing race today - distinctive names, for example, or use of AAVE. Somebody can still be white as snow, have stereotypically European facial features and hair etc - but if their name is DeShawn or Shanice, and they "talk black", they will be categorized as "black who can pass as white", and treated as such. Scenarios where their appearance isn't in the picture at all - e.g. that famous study with swapping names on resumes - make that rather apparent.
BTW, the opioid abuse epidemic is very much a manifestation of systemic racism - the reason why it started in poor white communities is because they are more likely to get an opioid prescription to begin with, and because the prescriptions are more generous (and thus more ripe for abuse). These both stem from long-standing racial stereotypes - one about blacks having inherently higher pain tolerance [1], and another about them being less responsible and less able to exercise self-control. Ironically, as those stereotypes are getting addressed, the epidemic is starting to affect black communities more.
But you're absolutely right that not every social problem is about racism, even when it stems from some social value that is also used to define race. For example, the overemphasis on "rugged individualism" destroys informal community safety nets regardless of race, and the adverse effect is the same for somebody in the same position on the economic ladder. It's brought up more often specifically in the context of black communities mostly because theirs haven't been destroyed as fully as those in white communities. So the process is much more apparent there to begin with - and then economic effects of systemic racism (i.e. the fact that black communities are much poorer on average) make the negative effects of this destruction much more blatant.
[1] https://www.aamc.org/news-insights/how-we-fail-black-patient...
It's not "objective" or outside of culture - on the contrary, it is definitely subjective and inter-subjective. It's what some people have been expected to identify as for quite some time, "as a social convention". I don't think the current "social convention" agrees with e.g. "Marco Rubio is white because society treats him as white". Not because of the color of anyone's skin, or anything like that - but because he is widely identified as Latino/Hispanic, and a widespread "social convention" treats that as something other than white. (Perhaps this sort of identity is less socially important than it formerly was, but that's quite different from positing a sort of "honorary white" identity wrt. Rubio or anyone else.)
> ...For example, the overemphasis on "rugged individualism" destroys informal community safety nets
Is it really the overemphasis on rugged individualism that does this? Some people might dispute that, and blame widespread dislike for traditional values or traditional community institutions - something that, for better or for worse, seems to be very much part of the "progressive" ethic.
Most of the things listed are very much cultural, and the bourgeois assumptions within different cultures would vary massively.
E.g. "Follow rigid time schedules" is a good example that is very much cultural. My ex is Nigerian. She'll adjust her adherence to schedules based on whether or not she's going to meet white or black friends. With white friends e.g. a 2pm start for an event means the event will start at 2pm. With her black friends a 2pm start means 2pm is the earliest it's ok to consider arriving, and most likely people will start arriving by 3pm-4pm. "African time" is very much a real cultural expectation that has nothing to do with being bourgeois or working class. It's not better or worse; just a different way of thinking about time.
You might suggest she's just not "bourgeois", except she comes from a family full of leading lawyers. When I first started dating her, her dad disapproved enough to have the wife of Nigerias then vice president call her to try to talk her out of it. She grew up with servants, before she was shipped off to an expensive English boarding school. In other words: "African time" has nothing to do with socioeconomic status, and everything to do with culture.
In the US these are "bourgeois values" because bourgeois values in the US are values mostly influenced by European protestant values, and so dominated by "white" cultures.
It doesn't mean none of these values are shared by subsets of black people. Or Asian people, or whatever other group. E.g. the section on justice is very much shared by Nigerians for example, as the Nigerian system very much adopted British legal customs.
It does means most of these values are culturally dependent, and not universal, and that the origin of the US take on this is "white". It doesn't map neatly to race, but it works as a short-hand to point out that a whole lot of things we take as given about how society "should" operate and what is polite, or bourgeois, is based on cultural expectation that very often follows ethnic lines for historical reasons.
That cultural aspects can change quickly does not mean they don't exist.
But note how your question presupposes that competition is the only viable form of coexistence - or, at least, the only one that matters. But competition only occurs when at least one of the participants is acting competitively (i.e. treats the whole thing as a zero-sum game with winners and losers). If all players decide to collaborate, or even simply to coexist, why would a conscious choice resulting in a lesser degree of technological development be considered problematic? And if it's not problematic in that hypothetical arrangement, then what is the actual source of the problem IRL?
When it comes to interactions between cultures, such mechanisms are still nascent. But since we're one of the cultures that have historically been defecting in this sense, the onus is on us to develop those mechanisms. We are in a unique position where we can take all those gains from unrestricted competition we engaged it, and utilize them to prevent the same in the future. And, conversely, if we treat other cultures as inferior on the basis that they couldn't (or refused to) remain competitive against us, that's straight-up victim blaming.
As for the counter-argument that if it weren't for us, they'd just be outcompeted by someone else, well... would you consider it acceptable to murder a person for material gain, if you knew with absolute certainty that they'd be murdered later by somebody else, anyway? Our society in general certainly does not consider this a valid justification - whatever the hypotheticals, the person who actually committed the murder bears full responsibility for it. If somebody were to say that the victim had it coming because they weren't able to muster an adequate defense, or because they refused to defend themselves for moral reasons (e.g. pacifism), that would be considered a morally repugnant position, right? So then isn't it hypocritical to not use the same logic for moral judgments on how our culture interacts with others?
Given that not every need or want can be fulfilled, they have to be prioritized in some way.
People with differing opinions on the value of fulfilling a particular need or want are going to have difficulty cooperating; a competitive system enables people to build up resources to fulfill their own needs and wants as they desire and are capable.
Societies have often found a way to balance these- markets for the majority of cases, and charity or taxation to fulfill the rest up to the point where they peacefully agree to do so.
A purely cooperative society, as you pointed out, works up until someone opts out. It is a fantasy.
A lot of times, when black Americans speak up about racism,they are dismissed and told they wouldn’t have a problem if they valued nuclear families and hard work etc. before even checking to see if black individuals who do embody these values struggle with systemic racism or not.
"We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable."
That isnt the only other place i have seen equivalence between valuing the nuclear family and being white either.
For example "Winning At All Costs" <- this is absolutely not characteristic of 'Whiteness' and the vast majority of White people would reject this notion, even by measures of behaviour, this is not true as well.
The infographic lacks many empathetic qualities, and so in the end, it borders on bigotry.
To make such assertions, I think would require a lot of nuance and objectivity. The wording of the graphic is 'off' and it should not be published as such, at least in any official quality.
Instead of recognizing these people as not part of the problem, it throws us in with the rest of the "whiteness" and creates major group division, reducing our ability to change things collectively. I've gotten in arguments with a couple of black people here and there about how because I'm "white", I shouldn't involve myself in black politics and have no right to fight for black civil rights in America. Nevermind that I'm 4th-generational Italian and come from a long line of poor indentured servants, and that my ancestor was met with racism and segregation when entering the US. My ancestor was an illegal immigrant stowaway because of racist immigration laws targeting Italy at the time. I fight for them as well as any other person whose family has a history of oppression.
Reminds me of the Niemöller poem...
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist."
What does that say about the life works of Frederick Douglass, Booker T Washington, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.?
As I read it, it's a list of traditional WASP traits. Some mostly good (hard work, objectivity, delayed gratification) others much less so (respect for authority, religious intolerance, commoditization of time, normalisation of the "rat race" as the only acceptable path to the only acceptable idea of success, etc)
> A study of 1880 family structures in Philadelphia, showed that three-quarters of Black families were nuclear families, composed of two parents and children. Data from U.S. Census reports reveal that between 1880 and 1960, married households consisting of two-parent homes were the most widespread form of African-American family structures.
> In the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in 1925, 85 percent of kin-related Black households had two parents. [By 1965,] out-of-wedlock birthrate had increased to 25% among the Black population. This figure continued to rise over time and in 1991, 68% of Black children were born outside of marriage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_family_struct...
Similar arguments can be made against just about every point, but I'll address "Protestant Work Ethic". The NBA is majority African American, and players routinely share their workout regimen on social media: Jimmy Butler touted his 3:30a wake-up before his first Heat practice (https://www.miamiherald.com/sports/nba/miami-heat/article235...), Dennis Rodman—can anyone label him as a symbol of whiteness?—was admired for his grueling post-game workouts, Kobe and countless other players were known for hours-long shootarounds that would exhaust anyone. Are NBA players embodying white culture?
It's worrying to me that if you shared the "White Culture" traits with racists from the past, they would agree vociferously, especially when you consider the implied inverse of those traits. They would use it as an argument for white superiority. It seems that the modern left has somehow embraced the racist stereotyping of the past, with the only difference being that they are painting the same traits—many of which are correlated with individual success—as otherness and a source of oppression.
I don't understand how infographics like this could possibly make the world a better place. Are we meant to embrace them? As an individual of any group, should I somehow be factoring "information" like this into my beliefs and actions, and if so, how is it making my life and the lives of the people around me better?
It is not universally objectively the best thing ever.
It could be, but I don't see the infographic saying that. The infographic could just as easily be saying that no family relationships at all is the (implied to be more desirable) alternative.
In fact, that's a big issue with the infographic as a whole: what alternatives are we supposed to compare all these things to? None are given.
Traditional alternative to nuclear family is extended family. Nuclear family as we know it is early 20 century norm, basically 1950 ideal.
Or Asian and old Eastern European arrangements where woman goes to live with husbands familly.
Interestingly, the different structure of black family (including supposed matriarchy, really) was blamed for social ills in black communities in 1965.
See this UN paper [1] regarding stats on the nuclear family. The nuclear family is a phenomenon that exists on all continents. It's not the only way, but it's certainly not a "white" thing. The nuclear family is actually most prominent in Northern Africa. See figure 10 on page 19.
https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publicatio...
First, who produces it? Whites? Yeah, that will go over big. Blacks? That makes it look like propaganda or wishful thinking. Professional sociologists? Is sociology objective enough to produce a consensus?
Then there's the content. Black culture? Which one? (There are several.) Any one you pick, those in other cultures find your infographic to be nonrepresentative.
But every bit of what I said is true of the actual infographic. Who produced it? Whites? Blacks? Professional sociologists? And, which white culture? There is not one uniform white culture across the US.
Separately, I'm not clear on how "white cultural norm" is defined or what exactly it means. Is it meant to imply "majority norms in much of Europe, the British Commonwealth, and the US"? If so, why call it "white" instead of something more precise like "EBCU"? Otherwise, is it implying the existence of a shared white culture based around color of skin? When Latino and African and Asian individuals/families share similar ideals, are they contributing to the white cultural norms, or not?
I think the terminology here is important to get right, as I believe that the popular terminology is a source of a lot of the strife at present, whether intentional or not. For example, the tyranny of the majority is a well established problem in democracies. Society has debated for centuries how best to protect the rights of minorities while implementing the will of the majority. Strong individual rights is one method, as it provides a platform for all of us to actively participate to expand and protect the rights of every person. Recasting that debate as white vs. black seems to needlessly alienate potential allies and to reinvent a bunch of concepts without benefiting from the lessons and debates of the past.
For a concrete example of the terminology issue, I think that a big part of the controversy around the Black Lives Matter movement is disagreement about the meaning of the omitted, implied adverb. Does it mean "Black Lives Matter too", or does it mean "Black Lives Matter more", or perhaps something else? Radicals and dissidents on both sides of the spectrum seem to assume the "more" interpretation and react accordingly, whereas sympathizers interpret it along the lines of the "too" interpretation. To complicate things further, some sincerely respond that "All Lives Matter" in a well-meaning way, apparently attempting to clarify and agree with the "Black Lives Matter too" interpretation. Declaring "All Lives Matter" is currently a fireable offense, which brings us back to the theme of PG's essay.
To summarize, I think that terminology is incredibly important. Using "white" as a placeholder for a nebulous concept, especially when it routinely has a negative connotation, only seems to make unified progress more difficult.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTU2He2BIc0 wasn't aired outside New England, for instance.
"We play croquet / and go rollerblading / here's to homies on lock / for insider trading"
[1] In the past, it was White, as opposed to say, coloured, Anglo-Saxon, as opposed to say, irish, and Protestant, as opposed to say, catholic. One might not, seeing pictures such as:
https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images...
suspect that JFK and Jackie, both undoubtedly privileged, were not considered orthodox by a large segment of the US population.
https://www.courant.com/opinion/editorials/hc-xpm-2013-11-29...
(as to White: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_history_of_African_Am... says the US military already started integrating in 1948. Due to their long experience, in 2020 they may serve as an example for the elected politicians of ways to run a colour-blind meritocracy.)
"In the 21st century, WASP is often applied as a derogatory label to those with social privilege who are perceived to be snobbish and exclusive, such as being members of restrictive private social clubs.[63] A number of popular jokes ridicule those thought to fit the stereotype.[84]"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Anglo-Saxon_Protestant...
The purpose of the sign is to show how people who DON'T have those things have been discriminated against because of circumstances beyond their control.
If you're poor, rugged individualism is less important than getting through the day. Collectivism is the more intelligent approach in that situation.
Hard work for a lot of white folks is seen in the context of having "a job that matters."
Objectivity in this situation is a farce. Yes, it's stupid to take out a payday loan. But when your wife just lost her job or you lost your child care benefits and you have to pay rent, you do what you have to do.
Nuclear families are great if you're born into them. What happens when you aren't?
And so on, and so forth.
And the funniest thing about this whole thing? White society is trending away from AAAAAALLLLL of these as the cost of living outpaces inflation and wages stay stagnant.
Turns out that it's pretty easy to check the items off of that list if you have the means to do it.
Most of which cause me to wonder what kind of person wouldn't agree with those things... which just goes to show how fully a part of my culture I am. :-)
I didn't see the article refer to those things as right or wrong, merely default positions.
Even asking a question, and honest question where I want to hear someone's POV / answer ... and folks assume you're a troll and assume you're the polar opposite of them.... and no amount of explaining otherwise changes people's minds.
Even outside questions I'll say "I agree, I think X too." and folks will still insist on arguing about how I believe Y. Bro I just said I agree...
It's a strange thing and I find myself constantly having to preface my statements in hopes people won't misunderstand.
Speaks out against my belief: Mortal enemy.
Questions my belief: Mortal enemy who my powerful comrades have cowed into not directly speaking out against my belief.
Fails to show appropriate support for my belief at the appropriate times: Mortal enemy sleeper agent.
Speaks in favor of my belief, but not in the way I would have: Exploitative opportunist who believes nothing but seeks to benefit from the glorious revolution.
Speaks in favor of a belief that's almost identical to mine, but still, subtly distinguishable: The worse kind of heretic; a heretic within the faith.
Anyone who breaks the kayfabe by expressing a human-like "ought" belief, would have their post flagged until dead (but isn't kicked out or punished otherwise; it's too easy to do accidentally, especially if you're new, and the point is to take such people and gradually get them used to having conversations that aren't fundamentally conflicts between opposing "ought" beliefs.)
Also, it might also be very frustrating to not be able to express your "ought beliefs" about whether ethnicity X deserves to be put into concentration camps, and so on.
However, when I post "Global warming is occurring" and you post "global warming is not occurring", I suspect you will not get very far into exploring your disagreement before you come to a wall, below which are only "ought beliefs". And the same for most points of political disagreement. Very few political arguments online rest on questions of fact.
Are you saying that people would change the subject because they prefer ought debates to is debates, or are you suggesting that trying to measure the temperature trend somehow depends on moral questions?
B: "Global warming is not real." A: "It is real. Here are peer-reviewed articles, etc. etc." B: "That research is fraudulent. There's selection bias in choosing which papers to publish, etc."
Now, A has a bit of a conundrum. He might like to say something like "Once there are 1000 published articles, studied this way and that way by so many different people, we can trust that it's actually happening", but this is an ought belief. I struggle to imagine how A can constructively respond with an "is statement."
You are misunderstanding what it means for something to be an "ought" belief. Your example is actually an "is" belief: it's a claim that across all cases where 1000s of published articles exist, most of the time the contents are true. The "ought" version of that would be, "you have moral duty to believe anything that enough literature has been published in support of," but that's absurd, nobody thinks that's a moral rule.
The Humean is-ought idea is specifically about distinguishing ethical problems of value from empirical problems of evaluation.
The whole thing would be short-circuited by saying "When 1000 papers agree, and almost none disagree, we should take the claims to be broadly true."
Also, see how we've gone from having a discussion about the topic at hand to impossible-to-prove factual claims about how often a group of 1,000 academic papers are true? It doesn't seem like a very interesting discussion, at least to me.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Mc6QcrsbH5NRXbCRX/dissolving...
"There's a certain probability that certain things are happening. Grouping those things together and calling that group 'global warming' has no effect on the likelihood of each of those individual things happening. Can we agree to avoid the muddled concept of 'global warming', and instead discuss the probabilities of the individual effects?"
Then, to go deeper:
"We seem to be arguing under a condition of uncertainty. We can't be sure whether the evidence does or does not prove this particular effect. Thus, since in the case where this effect was happening it'd be highly-valued by humanity to stop it (and thus high value for us AIs to understand it, if we're to predict humanity's actions), there is high value for us in evaluating both sides of the logic-path right now, rather than waiting for more definitive evidence to resolve our confusion."
"So, presuming this particular effect is proven to be happening, then what would happen to the Earth if humanity kept doing what it was doing; what would humanity have to do to return the Earth's climate to homeostasis; and would such actions have positive or negative ROI over humanity's long-term utility, given all else we know about their plans for the distant future?"
"And likewise, presuming this particular effect is proven to not be happening, then what will happen to the Earth if humanity seeks to ameliorate it anyway, under the mistaken belief that it is happening? What will the costs of that be?" (and vice-versa.)
"And, as such, if humanity itself is to act under uncertainty, then what is the expected value of each course of action, given the ROIs and the current probabilities of each outcome? And will humanity actually take that optimal-expected-value path, or will it be led elsewhere by tribal/political considerations?"
Arguments about facts under uncertainty are co-operative, you see. They're not truly "arguments" at all, but rather collaborative fact-finding missions. You don't "take a side", but rather everyone takes all sides, at the same time, and works together to find certainty from uncertainty; while also making progress in navigating beyond the veil of uncertainty, such that when an uncertainty is resolved, intellectual progress can "take the shortcut" of the contingent facts already derived in the mean-time.
Yes, most humans might agree that "global warming" exists. AIs might also "mostly agree", in the sense that they have high Bayesian confidence in some of the individual things that make up "global warming" being proven-real effects. But a true Bayesian-updating AI wouldn't think that "mostly proven" and "proven" are the same thing; they'd still want to evaluate the branch where the proof turned out to be false, unless the probability of that being true was so vanishing that it outweighed the intellectual labor-costs of exploring that branch. (And they'd value the continued participation of the other AIs in the "collaborative fact-finding process" highly-enough that even if they personally saw the probability as vanishingly-unlikely, they'd explore it anyway for the sake of another AI who thought differently. After all, these AIs are all acting under the "uncertainty" of having been exposed to different subsets of the evidence. That's why they're working as an ensemble in the first place!)
Here is one person who advocates some for improvements to the nature of the conversation:
"Bjorn Lomborg: False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions And Fails To Fix The Planet"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl9rTxdSZWg
> Bjorn Lomborg is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. Dr. Bjorn Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and visiting professor at Copenhagen Business School. His numerous books include The Skeptical Environmentalist, Cool It, How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, The Nobel Laureates’ Guide to the Smartest Targets for the World: 2016–2030, and Prioritizing Development: A Cost Benefit Analysis of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. His new book False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet is forthcoming in July 2020.
Full disclosure: The Hoover Institution is a conservative think tank.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Institution
> The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace is an American conservative public policy think tank and research institution located at Stanford University in California. It began as a library founded in 1919 by Stanford alumnus Herbert Hoover, before he became President of the United States. The library, known as the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, houses multiple archives related to Hoover, World War I, World War II, and other world-historical events. According to the 2016 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report (Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program, University of Pennsylvania), Hoover is No. 18 (of 90) in the "Top Think Tanks in the United States".[2]
> The Hoover Institution is a unit of Stanford University[3] but has its own board of overseers.[4] It is located on the campus. Its mission statement outlines its basic tenets: representative government, private enterprise, peace, personal freedom, and the safeguards of the American system.[5] The institution is generally described as conservative.[6][7][8]; Thomas W. Gilligan, a director at the Hoover, has disputed the application of political labels to the institute, saying the institution's charter is not partisan but rather tries to remind Americans to "think twice about the dangers of the hubris of centralized solutions to civic and political challenges."[9]
This is stating a prediction of the future not as speculation, but as fact. Now it's almost certainly at least partially true (at least one species will likely become extinct in the future, at least as far as we are able to measure such things, which is often not entirely accurate), but nonetheless, it is unknown.
I'd like to see HN try some variation of @derefr's "I would be highly interested in watching (or maybe participating) in a forum where the rule is..." idea [1] on occasional appropriate HN threads, and see what happens. With the advent of the internet (and some other things), a very serious problem (of literally "existential risk" magnitude in my opinion) seems to have arisen in the sphere of human communication, both domestic and international. I do not know of all that many people or organizations who are studying this problem even in theory or with small trials, and not one single organization who is studying it in practice, with real people, at scale. I believe HN is an ideal place to do something like this, because most everyone here could easily understand the details, and why [2] we are doing it. If no one steps up to the plate and this phenomenon gets completely out of control (I'd say that happened long ago) leading to a major fundamental breakdown in society, what might be the ultimate consequences?
Obviously, going forward with some sort of initiative like this is the choice of HN & @dang, but I really wish we could have a discussion on the matter. Do few people see the potential value in this idea (speaking of Orthodox Privilege)?
With respect to:
> B: "Global warming is not real." A: "It is real. Here are peer-reviewed articles, etc. etc."
...what seems to not be apparent to many people is that there is a major but unrealized disagreement on the definition of the term "Global warming", in numerous ways. It is a very semantically overloaded [3] term.
[1] I'd approach it by group brainstorming a set of various "rules" that should be considered, and then these rules could be A/B tested in designated threads to see what happens. I can think of several ideas for rules, and I imagine others could come up with many that never crossed my mind.
[2] Just some of the many reasons are included in the LW article @derefr posted: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Mc6QcrsbH5NRXbCRX/dissolving...
I'm very nearly a free speech absolutist, both politically and culturally. But we have "gut checks" for a reason, and I think it's okay to sometimes make a call that someone's BSing or disingenuously grandstanding, even if their surface arguments sound reasonable (Stefan Molyneux is my canonical example here). Obviously that has to be tempered and can easily go awry (per Eric Weinstein's model of "critical feeling"), but to eschew that instinct entirely robs us of a valuable "cheater detection" mechanism.
Be charitable anyway. Be kind anyway. Love anyway.
The alternative - not being charitable, not being kind, not loving - can ruin your life. Yes, you can be exploited. But give charity, kindness, and love, if not for the other person, then for yourself. Being the kind of person who won't be kind or love is miserable.
Still, I think it's better to make such choices intentionally, informed by both conscious deliberation and gut-check instincts. There are instances where one can "throw good money after bad", wasting altruistic resources to no end; or, where "tough love" is warranted, such as the case of enabling addicts and alcoholics, and the kindest act to take might be to withdraw.
Reframing back to speech issues, the current standard I'd like to see in public squares, is the "beyond a shadow of a doubt" standard that is (ostensibly) applied in our legal system. It's easy to squint at something like "The Bell Curve" and see arguments for scientific racism, and under a "preponderance of evidence" standard, perhaps it would be found guilty; but we should find the prospect of discarding potentially true ideas as abhorrent as convicting a potentially innocent citizen. Nonetheless, in private life, we are free to draw whatever conclusions we please, where we consider that OJ Simpson probably committed murder, and Charles Murray might not be an entirely unbiased analyst. (Though perhaps the very crux of the matter is the blending between public and private realms of thought. What would a quasi-Bayesian Rule of Law look like in the court of public opinion and outrage mobs?)
The classical "community" being referred to here is academia. The Principle of Charity works within academia. It also works within trade-guilds, member's clubs, etc. Any group with both friction to get in, and the ability to exclude people for bad behavior, filters for there being almost-entirely "well-behaved towards fellow group-members" people inside the group at any given time.
The Principle of Charity can work in open-membership communities, like HN, but only for as long as the community remains a niche community with linear growth.
The Principle of Charity probably fails within society as a whole, or in open-membership forums with exponential growth, e.g. Reddit or Usenet.
And it especially fails when you have people from cultures with conflicting beliefs in the same place. Which is why "diplomacy" was invented: to create a shared "diplomatic pseudo-culture" that diplomats can be members of, such that they share norms with one-another and can communicate in a way their non-diplomat citizens cannot.
> The Principle of Charity probably fails within society as a whole, or in open-membership forums with exponential growth, e.g. Reddit or Usenet.
I disagree. It likely won't maintain itself naturally, but I see no reason why it couldn't be maintained with a more substantial enforcement/education initiative. Similarly with overall society - I agree achieving this in a widespread fashion down to the individually is likely possible, but if we could even achieve some compliance from the media, politicians, and experts, I reckon it would go a long way toward improving the current state of affairs.
>> Alt-righters (the real ones) can use the Principle of Charity as cover, cherry-picking their talking points...
Members of every tribe do this, sometimes knowingly, sometimes unknowingly. It seems to be an "unavoidable" artifact of the evolution of the human mind. But with some work, I believe this too could be dramatically improved.
I've actually seen people try to do this, and it never works. Imagine, if you will, a closet tankie trying to nudge "classical liberal" discourse towards praise of Stalin, Mao etc. They'll never get around to revealing their "power level" because the whole worldview is just too silly from an open and "broadly charitable" PoV. It's only a few worldviews that can hope to subvert that framework, and ironically enough authoritarian "wokeness" seems to be one of them.
Twitter (the medium) is about shouting and preening (the message). Honest discussions happen despite Twitter, not as a result.
Instagram (the medium) is about jealousy and looking good (the message). Human to human connection happens despite Insta, not as a result.
HN (the medium) is then about what (the message)?
Maybe it's because teachers, rightly and wrongly, feel themselves to be the moral betters compared to the wealthy. And this is all an elaborate cope and power grab.
It's because academia, especially in the humanities, rewards radicalism. Thus the endless parade of overwrought sociological theories spinning the prosaic into complex systems (in the area of race, phenomenological systems) purporting to not only explain but prescribe and proscribe correct behavior. Yet, none of them seem to add anything of substance that earlier writers, such as Frantz Fanon[1], haven't elucidated in far better detail. (This radicalism is today no less a problem on the right, or in other partisan domains, than on the liberal left. On the right, though, you often see it as an obsession with counterfactuals and supposedly "gotcha" empiricism, very much in the vein of the popular book Freakonomics--many of their "gotcha" theories turned out to be bullshit, but people eat up anything that purports to overturn conventional thinking. Freakonomics was pretty moderate, with authors of liberal sentiments, but that's beside the point. These patterns of argumentation are independent of views, it's probably just accidental or, perhaps, path dependent the degree to which they're adopted by various groups.)
All of this debate represents its own privilege. And it reflects our own impotence--our inability to make substantive change, or even to come to an agreement on simple, concrete remediations. For example, qualified immunity probably isn't going anywhere anytime soon, unfortunately. You don't need a theory of white privilege to explain the violence wrought against blacks when barely hidden racial animus is still widespread. In fact, internalizing theories of white privilege is a damned good way to overlook one's own animus as it doesn't address, for example, the palpable fear and angst a white person (or any person, including black) might feel when a young black man walks into a convenience store; but rather diminishes its importance. And you don't need whites to internalize a guilty conscience to agree to substantive changes. It happened in the 1950s and 1960s, at a time when the open views of almost all whites would be unspeakable today. You just need to focus on and emphasize our basic humanity, and the cold consequences of racist policies that can no longer be openly justified. And, most importantly, to do so relentlessly and with a unified voice. (It worked for gay marriage, and without needing the majority to internalize sophisticated, radical theories about sexuality or to even come to terms with gay sex.)
Modern culture wars are like trench warfare--when you end up in the gutter of philosophical debate it should be clear your strategy has failed.
[1] Somewhat ironically, writers like Fanon often ended up concluding that it's simply not possible for blacks to find complete justice in a predominantly white society. And it's hard to argue with that if you adopt all of his assumptions. (It's certainly hard to find fault in his observations alone.) I can't claim to know of better frameworks for understanding and addressing larger sociological problems. But maybe they'll emerge on the path to addressing the more egregious and indefensible behaviors using solutions that are staring us in the face.
It's one of many forms of labeling that are easily attached to people and it's one of many reasons why I'll be firmly independent until the day I die. Although I'm sure that has a perception associated with it too.
Surely it wouldn't surprise you to learn gay voters are more likely to support pro-gay-rights parties?
To assume that they endorse every other stance of those parties because of that? No.
And more so, biologically or religiously based political alignment also prevents the other party from even attempting to win your votes. If they know you won’t sway...why try?
The implied association likely have a lot to do with those visible differences.
Free throught does not mean that everyone finds same appeal of same policies and groups regardless of their differing interests and experiences. Quite the opposite.
In fact what you seem to be arguing against is stereotyping based on your identity. This is in fact a big part of what identity politics argues against, and would consider it to be a form of racism or sexism etc.
However a certain type of (usually well meaning, white) college liberal will want to "respect your background" by which they mean what they think you are like, based on various prejudices they have accumulated until then.
Identity politics is when your politics stem from your identity. Holding opinions that are atypical of people with your background is the cardinal sin of identity politics, as disunity saps your group of its strength.
After all, most people belong to multiple groups - one can be black, and a woman. One can be a jewish gay man, etc.
Now there is one exceptional case in which you will be denounced: If you argue that people of identity X should not have it better. They'll denounce you all the more if you're of identity X; but will still denounce you either way. Most other atypical opinions are welcome..
(again, I'm not advocating for identity politics per se)
You appear to be using property to refer to other identities. So someone who identifies as both Black and a woman would thus be a black person with with the property of woman. Of course proponents of identity politics want as many people of their identity on their side as possible, regardless of what else they may identify as, but you have to ask what being on their side means. Just saying X should have it better hides an implicit question: what does it mean for X to have it better? Many proponents of identity politics simply assume that everyone of identity X will agree on what they collectively want, but this is to assume they share the same properties A, B, and C which make them want these things.
It's always been a fantasy that the whole of society could accept all corners of a person's thoughts and feelings, as-is, laid bare. Before the internet, we could pretend the fantasy was true because of our mostly-local social spheres. But now the veil has been removed completely.
This isn't to say you should never vocalize controversial beliefs. But you should pick your battles. Ask yourself whether it really matters to society that X gets discussed - and that it's therefore worth risking offense and/or backlash - or whether you're just being pedantic.
I really liked this quote as a broader description of political correctness:
> Perhaps the solution is to appeal to politeness. If someone says they can hear a high-pitched noise that you can't, it's only polite to take them at their word, instead of demanding evidence that's impossible to produce, or simply denying that they hear anything. Imagine how rude that would seem.
"If you don't think X, you aren't A." "Well I don't think X, and I am A." "If you don't think X you aren't A." "Well then I guess I'm not A."
"If you don't think Y, you aren't A."
...and so on.
We've seen it with a few specific political groups.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
To many people, that means I don't support socialized healthcare.
Well, in a way, you don't. Because you apparently think socialized healthcare should not be an agenda priority in the short term, and what's the purpose of political activism if not agenda setting? Many other people who "don't support socialized healthcare" at this time might well regard it as worthwhile, if the other blatant issues w/ the healthcare system were addressed first.
I want to be on the JavaScript and baking forums that he's on.
Really???
Vi vs Emacs Linux vs Microsoft vs Apple Android vs iOS java vs C++ Rust vs any other programing language Gnu Linux vs Linux copyleft vs mit/bsd style licensing js framework x vs yet another javascript framwork y
there is a reason these are called religious wars.
baking i don't know their religious wars i am not big on baking outside of my cookbook, but pretty much any technical debate degenerates into the same thing in my experience.
In my experience on any given issue if you were to ask for a simple comparative analysis with 5 points for both sides almost no one can get beyond the talking points of the day from their favorite cable news channel.
I rejoined twitter a few months ago, and quit again: it was inciting negative emotions and it felt addictive. The UI made me feel like I was having a mild stroke. It was disorienting.
Having bailed on it again, my take is: generally the loudest and most attention-seeking people are the ones on there making the most noise and seeking attention most thirstily.
Twitter is part of the problem, IMO.
Until the incentives of social media change these tendencies keep up or get even worse.
...listed in a tweet.
I block twitter though /etc/hosts so I can't click through to see what you're talking about.
My point is, get off Twitter entirely.
> I was hoping that the so-called elites have some common sense.
I still can't figure out whether the world is run by evil sociopaths or well-meaning idiots, nor which possibility is scarier.
I mention all this because I saw that lady you linked to being frustrated at highways having been called racist.
If anything that thread illustrates how weak and stupid the "anti-identity politics" arguments are.
And that's just employing sales tactics in politics.
There just should be more than one or two parties, than there will be more diversified supply
This is how marketing works.
Getting really esoteric (and admittedly not thinking to hard about it), I wonder if the prevalence of individually targeted advertising is responsible for amplifying this trend in modern social discourse. How would we study that?
I think identity has been more of a focus of right-wing movements right throughout history, although people frequently refer to it in the context of the current US progressive zeitgeist; identity and nationalism are very intertwined. Identity and what it means to be an American plays a large role in Trump's support, for instance.
My personal takeaway TLDR:
faceted identity is normal.
increasing sorting and polarization somehow coincides with all of our identities becoming much more aligned, aka superidentities.
the novelty is social media activating and amplifying identity.
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Presumably these social pendulums will swing back. Methinks Millennials and younger will go in the direction of the phyles from Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Where people chose their cohorts, which all kind of mutually coexist.
That's not what it means. That sounds like a caricature of it you read in libertarian media. "Politics" in its modern meaning is about getting votes, not telling people what to think.
Identity politics is the recognition that people of similar backgrounds tend to have similar political desires, coupled with the fact that people tend to "trust" politicians who have supported those needs in the past. And that's all it means.
So white christians vote republican because of a long history of opposition to abortion rights, black votes have gone to democrats ever since the Civil Rights Act passed, etc... Not everyone, but enough that it makes sense as political strategy to court specific groups via these affiliations.
And they're mutable over time. We didn't used to think of the divide between college-educated whites and non-college whites until the Trump campaign was able to exploit that divide. Men/women is getting larger now too, etc...
You're defining identity politics in a way that's so broad that it encompasses all politics and some non-politics (corporate brand loyalty). That makes it a non-useful phrase. Generally it's useful to define phrases in ways that exclude a lot of interpretations.
And again I tell you that this definition is fake. It's not the way these groups think about this at all. And more over it's fake in a deliberate way, designed to fool YOU, as a member of your particular libertarian subculture, into discounting the political desires of other demographics by leveraging YOUR trust in your own group due to "primordial tribal identification".
Seriously: I know you think that your desires are "real" and these other groups are just "identity politics". You're wrong. All desires are real.
What would you call it when every Republican since Sara Palin has talked about "real American folks", in contrast with "godless coastal elites"?
It's true that the latter is more specific. I don't see how that makes it better.
[1] See? Identity politics at work. You don't seriously think no one targets libertarians via the same tricks, do you? You're literally falling for one in this very thread by discounting the discourse of "centrist political scientists" in favor of your in-group's spin. So when your in-group tells you to vote for someone, who are you going to believe? Them or the crazy centrists and their warped understanding of the evils of "identity politics?"
Using words like "quantum," "AI," and "blockchain" as examples, in all of those cases you have one community with a meaningful definition and another community with a meaningless definition. In deciding which definition is "better" one would typically go with the way it's defined in the community that uses it to mean something.
Which, to me, is a very apt statement in context. For example, when dealing with someone trying to dismiss an important point without consideration by labeling it with his own subculture's spun definition.
To wit: online libertarians screaming about how terrible identity politics is as a way to disparage their political enemies are absolutely practicing identity politics.
But haven't you heard? Anyone who places value on liberty is a libertarian, anyone who says something in today's hyper-connected age is "online" (because their ideas could make it to the internet, even if they didn't put them there themselves), and screaming is indistinguishable from speech because it exists on the same continuum. Furthermore, as you point out, identity politics is politics, but in an even deeper sense, politics can be anything. Furthermore, any claim can be construed as disparaging depending on the values of the listener, and "political enemies," if you think about it, really extends to anyone who is not yourself - because no two people believe exactly the same things. So, now that we realize the true meanings of all the words used, we are left with the sentence:
>Anyone speaking against anything are practicing activities.
You're taking a very short-term view of "identity politics". When the US was founded under the phrase "all men created equal", it was with the clear understanding that "men" meant white landowners, and specifically not women. This was marked progress from previous royalty-based governments where "god" selected some fantastically rich white men to rule. Identity politics are as old as history itself. Only the name is new.
I'd call it an assumption more than a recognition, and take it from there.
Every person is different from any other and each deserves to be judged individually.
"Identity politics" even has the benefit of being so generic, it allows everyone to replace it with the worst example they can come up with: you hate "identity politics" for the one time that <person> invoked <their identity> to get <something ridiculous> (see examples in this threat). But you use it to tarnish complaints about black people dying twice as often from COVID and five times as often from police bullets.
So, please, continue to be outraged by how unwilling others are to, for once, see it from the perspective of a white heterosexual man with a suburban middle-class background. And how unwilling people are to be "free thinkers" like you, boldly telling people on HN that you kinda think women and black people should shut up.
But please stop glorifying reactionary opinions as some sort of revolutionary insight! When people tell you you are wrong, you are extremely more likely to be wrong, and not Galileo Galilei. If in doubt, maybe try to think of something revolutionary in particle physics or plate tectonics, before going all-in on the biological origins of intelligence or whatever it is you're being criticised for.
If I criticise the left it's not because I'm right, it's because I want the left to be better.
I find term to be so broad as to be useless. And, like the linked article, and like the litany of generic complaints about free speech on HN in the last few years, I tend to see it as convenient stand-in for people who know their opinions cannot be uttered in polite company.
Nobody gets cancelled for proving p!=np, or finding a new antibiotic, or coming up with a melody that is impossible not to sing along. So the shtick about conflating the (sometimes apocryphal) hardships of innovators in the Middle Ages with the bland low-level hate today's young adults come up with to compensate for their mediocracy is getting tiring.
[0]: obligatory disclaimer that the Galileo incident was at least as much about him deliberately pissing off the Church as about his scientific beliefs, which if I understand correctly you were allowed to express if you tried to be at least a bit subtle about them.
But we as humans tend to see things from the prism of a late concept we just learned about and gauge it against various models in order to test its validity. The problem is that in this case it is not about being valid but about some sort of subjectivity.