Who gets to define what’s ‘racist?’ (2020)
contexts.org
contexts.org
I found it hard to directly criticize anything they said as the majority of it was common sense and anything objectionable wasn't so egregiously objectionable to warrant any real complaint from me (not that they gave me the option, feedback in the series was suspiciously absent).
The main problem with it as mentioned in the article is the incessant fixation on victimhood. I feel that our culture's relationship to victimhood is no better than the ancients but just in the opposite extreme. Before there were precious few 'celebrated' victims (victims lifted up and supported by society) - they mostly lived and died in obscurity perhaps not even knowing the nature of their victimhood.
Now we want to explore each person's past and expose anything that could possibly be construed as oppression/victimhood and expose it to the world. We end up with the other type of error: people presented as victims who aren't (relative to our perception, of course victimhood is on a spectrum).
No one wants a society full of victims, but we equally can't have a society organized via victim hierarchy (intersectionality).
Did everyone at the company take it?
I mean, look, I don't want to return to the days where if you were technically good, you could be a sexist jerk or a racist jerk or just generally a jerk. I don't want to work in that kind of an organization. But... equal weighting? Your organization isn't fighting for its life on technical merit, I suspect...
The person working on the engine should be the best qualified person to do so. And similarly for the other technical areas.
Nobody said anything disparaging about the need for sales, communication, or relationships. Only that in those respective fields you would also probably want the person who is most qualified, no?
Could you give examples? It's hard to understand what you mean. Everyone objects to 'victimhood'; the significance is in the actual events.
For example, many forms of microaggressions mentioned in the article do not (in my opinion) lead to victimhood. To say otherwise runs the risk of making victims that don't exist. Being offended for example does not _necessarily_ make you into a victim.
Um, what? Victimhood has become THE status symbol of the left. If you aren't a victim you're an abuser, so anyone looking for status reaches for whatever victimhood they can get.
Victimhood is also a potent weapon - if anyone disagrees with you, you can claim they are oppressing you, denying your victimhood, gaslighting you, and so on.
Victimhood is the ultimate passive aggressive weapon in a culture that has seemingly forgotten that everyone lies.
You can't just claim a political movement controlled the public zeitgeist for 50 years without some serious citations.
When I started my career in the ‘80s, I worked at a large metro daily newspaper. There were certainly gays and lesbians who worked there (probably a hundred or more), but you wouldn’t know it because not a single person that I recall out of nearly a thousand people was “out”. Why do you suppose that was? It was because people were afraid of ostracism and losing their jobs and livelihoods. If that wasn’t the equivalent of being cancelled…tell me what the hell was it?
Also, fast forward 40 years—do you think you could find a news organization in the US today with no one out? Attitudes have changed and they have changed because the left was vocal and had political power enough to change culture.
Perhaps you don’t believe that, or you wish it happened faster. But don’t denigrate the progress that liberals made over the last 50 years, while it may be slow progress it’s progress that will stick.
A few weeks ago, the brilliant young lady Alexi Mcammond was cancelled as the new editor of Teen Vogue due to some arbitrary Tweets she made while she was 16 years old (She's now 27). Career ruined, age 16.
A few months ago we saw Harry and Meghan make unspecific claims of behaviour that caused her to have 'suicidal thoughts' (while living possibly the most privileged life imaginable) - while at the same time her own staff and entourage had accused her of bullying, and a lot of information coming out didn't maker her look very good.
The next day, a popular television presenter in the UK essentially disputed some of her claims in slightly terse, but nevertheless polite terms.
The presenter lost is job immediately - which should be very distressing.
If a person claims victimhood - the emotionality of the situation creates a hyper sensitivity such that their story must be in and of itself treated as absolute moral authority.
Tears = Truth.
Merely to disagree publicly with someone's claim is now 'cancel worthy' in polite culture, that's how far we've come.
This is weaponized by individuals, and amplified by some sectors of the press for various reasons, some ideological, some commercial, and then of course the 'reaction' of the 'other side' is weaponized as well ... ad nauseaum.
I feel sorry for Lizzo, the American entertainer, because almost everything ever written about her concerns highly defensive and aggressive posturing by generally leftist press, declaring her victimhood.
I'm not cherry-picking here - this is the most recent article about here in The Guardian (i.e. left wing press) [1]
" They made her into a global star – but also opened her up to extreme and often conflicting attacks beyond anything that Eilish or Lorde might experience owing to being a visible, confident, Black, fat woman: subject to racism as well as arguments that she panders to a white gaze; fat-shamed but also criticised for sharing her experiences of a juice cleanse."
It's always about her victimhood and never about her music. It's predictably comedic, a little sad.
Why does this happen?
I think that some people believe there's too much at stake in the grander scheme i.e. 'racism and police aggression do exist' - ergo - 'this story must presented as evidence of this fact irrespective of the actual nuances and facts'.
In an age where everything is politicized in an ugly way (i.e. climate change, vaccines), I believe that the emotionality of gender and racial issues elevates such things to the level of 'national urgency' and we end up in useless wars over it.
Nobody is arguing over Epstein and Weinstein ... that's not the issue.
But the issue is the perpetual fodder of these issues creeping into our media, culture and institutions without objective thought, dispassion etc. with which they should be approached.
I always believe that 80% of people are quite willing to hear issues of legitimate grievance and 'things they can do to help' but that this goodwill is ruined pretty quickly by irresponsible claims and heavy-handed activism.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/aug/20/billie-eilish-...
Oh, good grief. Consider the things you say. You make a ridiculous claim.
In my experience, it’s an effort made to listen to people whose needs aren’t being met, because whatever policy or design is being discussed either forgot them entirely or designed something inappropriately. Easiest non-political example I can think of is an office bike locker where I worked which had hanging bike racks — as people started using e-bikes, that worked out badly, because e-bikes are heavy and the people using them didn’t all have the strength to hoist them. They weren’t the majority of cyclists, but they were causing the majority the problems of bikes being left in awkward or unsafe places. Turns out some regular cyclists struggled to lift their bikes too, so we installed floor racks (and power outlets) - clutter solved and back injuries hopefully avoided.
That effort to listen is definitely misused by some people who (in my respectful opinion) thrive on attention, but I think you’d find lefties talking about the project in terms of equality and inclusion.
And in addition, both the left and right extremists like to misrepresent the other, and demean them, which is also wrong. The problem here is that someone in the middle, like me, is happily pigeon-holed as an extremist by either side, as you do in your comment. I did not, and have never, demeaned the leftist error as "oppression Olympics" because this throws the baby out with the bathwater. Racist policy has momentum and it's foolish to deny it. What I stand firmly against is the credulity with which every allegation of misconduct is accepted from anyone that has certain characteristics. Privilege is real, but that doesn't imply that everything the underprivileged say is true, or that they would never be tempted to use the power of allegation to achieve personal ends.
This is a ridiculously broad statement. It is not an argument in good faith. It does not contribute beneficially to the discussion. GP needs to do better.
It is super tiring and doesn't seem to actually be necessary or informative.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DarkAndTroubledP...
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeceasedParentsA...
Granted... Comic plots, in general, are way to dependent on exceptionalism for my tastes nowadays.
Did you have to take part in this in any way or just observe?
I've had to take training sessions that left me feeling ...hateful, to be honest.
In the Chinese-Maoist sense, a struggle session is where you are essentially forced to take part in some ritual denunciations of self or of your friends/family with the threat of violence or violence applied or looming in the background.
In the American version of this today the threat of violence isn't there but firing and shaming by coworkers/friends; And therein career/social death.
Your session doesn't sound like a struggle session per se (unless you had to take part), it sounds like a "training" where the professional victims shared their stories. But yes, it's a growing industry and they're paid handsomely to embellish their stories.
And that, right there, is how the history books end up filled with horrors like the gassing of Jews. Couldn't happen again? Well, that's the mechanism as to how such things occur. Probably not Jews next time, but some Other; like white men.
I heard an anecdote from a monk once. He knew someone into activism, trying to save something-or-other, I don't remember what. Then, one day, the monk opened a book, and to his utter astonishment there was a picture of the guy. He was in charge of executions.
Great atrocities are perpetrated in the name of righteous anger.
To quote Nietzsche: if you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back.
The individualization of racism for example feels like a failure both in how it offends people and also how it leads to policy prescriptions that don't really solve the underlying power relations.
Marx subscribed to this way of seeing individuals as mouthpieces for the collective. So did people like Marcuse. You know, one of the influential thinkers from "Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School of Marxism". Name sound familiar? You are giving these people more credit then they deserve.
Intersectionality is about the experience of privilege/disadvantage/discrimination differing, on a way that is not a simple linear combination of effects, by combinations (“intersections”) of group memberships. While it applies to groups, there's no magical lower bound on size for its applicability, and when you consider more axes of differentiation, the size of the groups represented by distinct intersections approaches one.
Common sense is surprisingly uncommon. Some people need to be taught the basics.
One of the problems with the discourse right now is that white liberals amplify those who wallow the most in their own victim hood. The vast majority of Hispanics and Asians, for example (70-80% according to a study linked in this article) say they “never” or “rarely” experience discrimination.
But all the XYZ studies professors and activists marinate in feeling discriminated against. You can’t get tenure in an American university saying “yeah racism sucks but it’s actually quite rare.”
For what it's worth, Pew says that roughly half of Latinos have reported experiences of discrimination. But that's not the point. The most polarizing political slogan of the last several years wasn't "Latino lives matter". In the airless vacuum of a message board, I guess it makes a sort of sense to appeal to the experience of Asians and Latinos as summative of the experience of non-white people in general. But obviously, that's not how the world actually works.
> For all racial and ethnic groups represented in the data, the majority reported experiencing either none or infrequent discrimination.
The majority of non-white people are Latinos and Asians. The discourse has recently pitted whites versus non-whites.
Over the last few years, I’ve seen media outlets and academic institutions amplify the most aggrieved (and frankly weird) Asians as part of the general “people of color” discourse. Hence my comment above.
It’s likely the half that votes left and is told on a daily basis they are being discriminated against.
This is what is called Cancel Culture. It is really not OK to be offended on behalf of someone else. When people do this, they are infantilizing (is that a word?) the supposedly offended and some of them don't like that behavior.
But go ahead and change your git repository to "main" instead of "master" just in case someone thinks it's some kind of slavery reference (everyone will update all their documentation and tutorials right?). Next we can work on your cars brakes (master cylinder), anything that involved master templates, certain golf tournaments, and what on earth are we going to do with all those masters degrees?
The Cancel Culture term is one that is thrown around as if it is only something that leftists do. And with respect to projecting offense to perceived racism, the left certainly has that market covered. But what about projecting offense to veterans when someone takes a knee to the national anthem?
The rush to define Cancel Culture is just as politically motivated and politically applied as the rush to define racism.
First, someone can be offended but not targeted. My dad's racist rants offend me, that's not cancel culture. And it's not on behalf of the group he's ranting about, it's because he's a savage. I'm offended by his lack of effort, empathy, and curious conversation.
Second, surely you can appreciate the difference between master in a master-slave configuration and master as in, good at something. A masters degree doesn't imply a slave degree.
No, I'm not the one glossing over anything. git repositories don't have "slave" branches, just a "master' as in template or origin. It's other people who think every code repository needs to be renamed because they don't understand the difference. Or worse, since like the article indicates it's mostly highly "educated" white people that want this, they are implicitly saying other people don't understand the nuance (I wouldn't even use that word, since the situation is so far removed from slavery).
That isn't true - master in git comes from master in BitKeeper which did have slave replicas.
https://github.com/bitkeeper-scm/bitkeeper/blob/master/doc/H...
Not that there is anything wrong with slave in this context.
People will say “listen to black people” while simultaneously dehumanizing all black people into a monolithic and tokenized opinion-vessel. I personally know black people, gay people, trans people, disabled people, who are exhausted of being that vessel. Of being a walking textbook for other people to memorize. The truth is that black people, and all people of color, are diverse culturally, emotionally, and intellectually and in order to be a good ally you have to not only listen to All of them, as well as your own heart, and you must use your critical thinking skills to determine what you personally think is correct - and act on it. You must be active and competent, and you must not regurgitate. At the end of the day there will be black people who agree with you and black people who disagree with you, but you can hope your efforts at activism will help both groups regardless.
A sociology teacher I had at UMich said a lot of things I disagreed with but one idea that I'll never forget is that prior to the 20th Century, there were no homosexuals. Humans haven't changed- there were homosexual acts, which individuals may have practiced at varying levels according to the time and place in history. But it wasn't something that came to define one's identity until very recently in history.
Well everyone loves their boxes, don't they?
It's so neat and easy to put everyone in one of those and finding the right box for someone just requires a glance at them or maybe some exchanged words. And suddenly all that persons problems and motivations are understood, and it is known wherever what they say should be praised or ignored.
There's no box to "tick", done, but you might try to get to know different kinds of people. Yes, they come in different kinds, even different personalities (did you think in colour again?).
'Latino Republican' is a really common identity for example that 'breaks the mould' and it's not a voice you're going to hear from very often.
Anyway, to try to summarize it all; Nothing surprising about the article; the difficulty comes in where very well meaning people try to come up with concrete/discrete "solutions" to racism, which is difficult. My take on most of them is, yeah, a lot of them are awkward and clumsy, but a hell of a lot better than nothing? It's a conversation.
Anecdotally, I'm remembering a thing where at my alma mater they wanted to change the name of a title from "House Master" to "Faculty Dean." Fundamentally, like, who cares either way? It's really not important..but
For me, the most telling thing wasn't so much the name itself (which me and my friends had a ton of jokes over), but how much people appeared to be invested in keeping the old name, as if it were that special, i.e. -- as people tried to defend the old name and just had terrible arguments for doing so, it became clear that the cause was "something else," i.e. if the old name was "House Leader" or something, I'm 100% certain those same people would NOT have been fighting that hard.
So yeah, it's complicated.
The easiest way I can think to explain it: e.g. Any white person who openly calls me the n-word is very likely a harmless loser to me.
More likely to harm me and others; a more powerful person who's intelligent enough not to use it, but may wield language strategically, like perhaps while trying to get elected, denigrates the black opponent by saying "let's not monkey this up." That person might actually like black people, and was being strategic to get racists votes through the dog-whistle, since they have plausible deniability.
The second guy feels "less racist," right? BUT HE'S MUCH WORSE THAN THE FIRST GUY in my opinion.
1) They are secretly racists and the House Master was a racist term, so they liked it (this is what you seem to imply?) 2) Accepting the change would mean accepting that they were formerly acting in a racist way in using the term House Master (since they are implicitly accepting that 'master' is a racist term) 3) They felt that the House Master was a small but important part of their cultural heritage and continuity as members of / alumni of X University, and now that is now being taken away. 4) They want to draw a line on this kind of change (the give an inch and they'll take a mile theory), rather than be subjected to future demands to change X, Y, and Z also.
Which is to say, something should not be labelled 'blue' if it is not 'blue'?
And definitely not 'guilty' if they are indeed not 'guilty'?
It's one thing to 'change the name' it's another to do it on the basis of some accusation of very criminal wrongthink.
Different cultures call different things blue, and some don't even have blue. Frequently subjective.
"Guilty," as you are likely using it -- is emphatically not an objective description of an event that happened in the real world. It is a description of a judge or jury's best evaluation of such given certain evidence. Again, also subjective.
The principle that I think you're invoking is something like "prescriptive" (as opposed to descriptive) language, which tends to be useless at best and a dangerous tool that keeps powerful people powerful at worst.
We can make populist, emotional, political, purely rational and technical appeals, but 'principled' is the approach that I believe should be taken.
It shouldn't even be remotely controversial to say that.
While 'Blue' is less subjective that 'Guilty' we have 'Principled' ways of assessing those things outside the context of hyperbole.
While 'guilty' has much more broad meaning that simply the notion of 'legal guilt' as you're implying, even within that context we can absolutely make objective determination (or try to) given legal parameters aka: Murder is illegal, we have a video of a man shooting someone and killing them, he's admitted to doing it ergo -> he is 'guilty' in a very objective sense.
A 'principled' approach would involve trying to assess if there's material objectivity to the degree something is offensive, weighing the gravity of the change, listening to those who are personally aggrieved and trying to determine why, contextualizing the information and making an assessment etc..
An 'unprincipled' approach would be making a decision that appealed so some kind of populist emotion, virtue signalling (in either direction), placating the powerful, ignoring facts, appeasing the loudest voices, doing what 'Twitter' is pressuring to do, caving to threats, applying oddball ideologies, over representing or poorly contextualizing information etc..
As the article points out, research shows that fear of racism hurts minorities. Insofar as these “solutions” cause minorities to perceive racism where there isn’t any, without effecting real change, that may be worse than nothing.
> It's a conversation
It’s usually not.
> but how much people appeared to be invested in keeping the old name, as if it were that special
People get antsy when flimsy reasoning is used to change things around them. The “master” as a label for school heads dates back at least to 15th century England, long before Britain participated in the slave trade. But that doesn’t matter and it makes people mad that it doesn’t matter.
/sarcasm
as once a branch is merged, it effectively becomes the master.
Who wouldn't hop on that positive PR bandwagon in their position? /s
that just gets you demonized too, for not falling in line 100%. any questioning of the narrative means you must be racist yourself
The term "master" as used in git is thought to be derived from master-slave terminology by way of it borrowing the term from bitkeeper:
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2019-May/...
At least until he was bullied enough on Twitter to take a more "maybe it was, maybe it wasnt- it was along time ago"-type of stance so folks would leave him alone about it.
- master/slave terminology and
- statues of people who held what is today racist views
were actually a problem, why wouldn't they actually keep them around as examples.
I mean: we really want to remember Churchill, both because he lead Europe out of World War II but also because of the rest of what he did say and do; he is a very good example that people can do good things and still not be saints.
In the same way regarding master/slave setups it is good - I think - from time to time to be reminded about our past, and not only during black history month?
But of course, I'm neither leftist nor sociologist, I'm just someone who tries to make a difference.
Actual sacrifices are hard and uncomfortable. Who wants that?
Can't we do both the hard and easy? Neither precludes the other. How are you helping by obstructing either?
> gives you a feeling of moral superiority
Can you give evidence of that being the motive? It's too easy to smear people with it. Maybe you are motivated by moral superiority, maybe I am.
Probably not? That would assume people have infinite time and energy, and unlimited political and social capital to urge other people and organizations to change, which I don't think is true
By publicly taking a stand for/against certain things, you show you're a loyal member of the Blue Tribe.
One important thing about that is that the weirder the stance is, the stronger the loyalty signal is.
Saying something borderline idiotic that the Tribe likes, shows you're ready to publicly humiliate yourself for the tribe, which earns extra credit.
I'm not at all saying this is the only thing in play here, but once you realize this is a "thing", it makes some crazy things seem less crazy.
The only twitter account I find worth voluntarily stepping into that pool, is this though:
https://twitter.com/desiraethinking
Of course linked to many others sharing similar opinions and free-thinking spirit, as opposed to political identity and bigotry.
Are you actively seeking a diverse range of people to listen to? The majority of prominent people in tech are white men, so it's not particularly likely you'll hear non-white people's opinions unless you actually seek them out.
BTW, the argument isn't as simple as "because master has etymological origins in the concept of slavery" because "master" has many varied meanings (see https://www.etymonline.com/word/master ), the slavery one was not the first, and at most only a tiny fringe want to change terms like "master's degree" or "master mariner" to something else.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/05/realestate/master-bedroom...
L'oreal is stopping using the term "whitening" and "fair" in their products.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/27/business/loreal-removes-word-...
Don't forget "master/slave" used in general computing terms, beyond "git branches."
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/technology/racist-compute...
It's happening in the wine industry.
> The Court of Master Sommeliers, which "sets the global standard of excellence for beverage service within the hospitality industry," will stop using the term "master sommelier."
We must purge those words from all of our vocabulary in all contexts, for they can only mean one thing.
I'm already starting to believe it. Do we really play a game with white and black pieces where white always goes first? Where black loses more games than white? Not everybody knows the history of Chess. To some new players, especially from less privileged groups, it may seem like just another example of leftover oppression. Even to those who know that the history of the colors predates white European enslavement of black Africans, it nonetheless serves as a painful reminder due to the meanings of those things in a modern context.
This is an interesting claim. My Bible has numerous instances of slavery, and none of chess.
I make no claim over the validity of "white going first" predating the Atlantic slave trade, however. I simply don't know.
Peter Grimes in the George Crabbe poem murders apprentices and get off Scot free until an eventual comeuppance.
People choose a starting point of history that is convenient for their narrative.
If a black person is answering "Is this offensive to me" and the white person is answering "Is this offensive to some black people" the numbers make total sense.
One approach might be to argue that relatively well-off and highly-educated liberal whites — by virtue of their college education and higher rates of consumption of ‘woke’ content in the media, online, etc. — simply understand the reality and dynamics of racism better than the average black or Hispanic. I would strongly advise against anyone taking a stand on that hill.
So it's not ridiculous to claim that a highly-educated person can perceive actual cases of racism that the victim, if lower-educated, cannot.
First-hand experience is powerful in some situations, but worthless in others. If it weren't, diabetics wouldn't need doctors.
- I come from Eastern Europe
- my ancestors were enslaved, bought and sold for hundreds of years as far as we know
- my family was raped, prosecuted and killed by NKVD, KGB and has been through gulag
- my family always struggled with poverty and only hard work and education of multiple generations got me where I am
- I’m white and didn’t see a person of color until I went abroad
- I emigrated to US 10 years ago
Company trainings are obviously a wrong place to ask this but: what is my place in the racism discourse? Why am I lumped with all the white people group and forced to “accept” white privilege? How do I get out of this madness without hurting myself?
So the question is crucial. It is lost within most debates and within most legal judgments, yet it is the foundation of argument. Muzzy definitions provoke disagreement without the participants' understanding.
Clear definitions are the bedrock of reasonable conclusions. The article doesn't specify the answer either. It appears to enter into a circular argument: that because "woke" leftist white people habitually get the nod, they do here too. There is something fundamentally wrong here but I cannot put my finger on it.
There are multiple examples were the sources actually do not say what they are being quoted for, for example the citations about the harmfulness of the perception of race, or the argument on the non exist ant connection between implicit and actual racism (the cited sources say that the test hasn't lived up to scientific standards, which does not necessarily mean that implicit racism doesn't exist). They also compare numbers in different studies to each other which really doesn't work.
I do agree that we need to have a discussion about how we deal with racism and be careful to ever expand its definition, but we should be have this discussion evidence based and not try to resort to strategies of selective quoting.
-- Thomas Sowell
"Who, whom?" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who,_whom%3F)
This isn't really about definition of the word; it is about political power, because whoever gets this word branded on their forehead, loses.
https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2012/11/adore-river...
A very controversial analogy I can give which I hope is not in misunderstood is analogous in degree is child sexual abuse. I forget where I read it but because children are innocent, they don't often feel hurt from the initial abuse. However, from growing and becoming aware what had happened does the nature of the abuse become apparent to them after which the trauma begins to become real. Hopefully in this case it is clear that "not being aware x is bad" is not a sufficient argument for "x is not really bad." I feel like on some level that is well below this analogy in terms of severity and mere obliviousness to the overall connotation of what might be happening (as we're talking about adults who are merely oblivious to facts of history or power relations in society) lie acts or systems of racial discrimination. For example, perhaps a black person trying to get financing to buy a home in the 60s wasn't aware of redlining and instead might merely interpret it as being how things are. It does not mean that that obliviousness meant it was okay and that such harm crept into other areas that were more apparent and directly felt (like lower rates of wealth for blacks, and thus more exposure to crime and neglect in communities). The average poor person of color would be cognizant of the more apparent ills of ghettos while not really being aware (and thus offended) by the deeper structural causes of the more apparent ills.
Another example, a new refrain amongst some activist is that urban highways are a legacy of racism. This is a true fact if you look at the history, urban highways often demolished poor parts of a city and divided the remaining poor neighborhoods from well-off neighborhoods, intensifying segregation and its ills. If you ask an average poor person if they think urban highways are a source of ills for them today, they'd probably say no even though it is a fact that it was. Even for someone without a car who is more likely to be a victim of road fatality (poor POC are more likely to be victims of pedestrian fatality from car drivers) they may know life is harder for them in general without a car but they simply are unaware of it being a system of power (car culture) that has a lot of roots in history and isn't merely the state of nature.
Anyway, while I feel like it is good for academics to be tempered by the groups they want to understand (that's fair and should be a key consideration, of course), people really should not discount sociologists and their research, especially as not all of them are white and some do in fact experience said systems of power they critique and have in addition tools and knowledge of history to put said analysis in context.
Edit: Downvoters should be required to also take a molecular biology course.
However, since we're relying on (Gricean) charity, let me point out that you're not following up with the maxim of relevance. The headline and article are centered around the question of the definition of racism, not whether the amount of racism exceeds some particular benchmark.
From the article:
Charges of “racism,” for instance, are primarily deployed against the political opponents of upwardly-mobile, highly-educated progressive white people. Even to the point of branding prominent black or brown dissenters as race-traitors (despite the reality that, on average, blacks and Hispanics tend to be significantly more socially conservative and religious than whites).
A racist is somebody who believes in race.
Maybe, other things being equal, some heritable traits are good. People possessing them might have superior body models. However, I think racism needs two more beliefs:
1) that race objectively exists
2) that race correlates with superior/inferior body models
Whether race exists objectively is another question. Per some schools of buddhism, material things don't exist objectively because they lack their own substance.
Really? How many body types are there?
Or are you suggested "race" does not denote a category of superficial predicates relating to extended family, genotype, phenotype, ethnicity, etc.?
> Modern science regards race as a social construct, an identity which is assigned based on rules made by society. While partially based on physical similarities within groups, race does not have an inherent physical or biological meaning.
I don’t believe in race. I think it’s a dumb and harmful social construct detached from reality. I consider anyone who does believe in race a racist.
So you’re not saying it’s wrong, you’re just saying it’s offensive?
It’s not that idiosyncratic [0], though even if it were, appeal to the masses is a fallacy.
> If anyone other than yourself used this definition, it would prolong that racism.
I disagree. I don’t see how you can fight for race and fight against racism at the same time. I also don’t understand why you would want to - science is the ultimate ally.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)