A primer on fairness

There is another term that I have to define, however operationally, before this conversation can continue. I will also be making repeated reference to the word ‘fair’. This is a much more difficult concept to define without someone raising an objection, or without descending into progressively more circular terms until I spiral inward upon myself and implode.

“Fairness” and “justice”, at least in the context of this discussion, can be considered largely interchangeable. I recognize that justice can take on a character that implies the intervention of a third party – in a religious case this would be the intervention of the gods, in a legal case this is a system of laws and law enforcers. I use ‘fairness’ specifically in order to avoid such associations, which would only serve to complicate a discussion that I anticipate will become highly complicated without any help from this particular semantic confusion. [Read more…]

A primer on myth

In the coming posts, I will be making repeated reference to the word ‘myth’. Among a group of atheists and anti-theists, the word ‘myth’ has taken on a decidedly derogatory meaning. Religious myths are used in the place of facts to justify deplorable and immoral actions and policies. Indeed, the primacy of the ‘Adam and Eve’ myth alone has been used as the basis for everything from extorting money from people under threat of ‘original sin’ to the most absurd and yet powerfully harmful anti-gay sentiment. The entire young earth creationism movement, motivated by a flood myth, is working tirelessly to undermine science education. Myths about the proper role of women (and their role in the fall) are used to subjugate women and pigeonhole men into restrictive gender roles.

Without wishing to excuse the harms done by mythology, I do want to recognize that supernatural and religious myths are, in fact, only one particular subtype of myth. Indeed, our idiomatic language would be severely weakened in the absence of mythology – one might even say it is our Achilles’ Heel. And again, beyond the value of myth as a common point of cultural reference, we also use myth to explain the world around us. [Read more…]

Trying something a little different this week

Hey all,

There’s an idea I’ve been kicking around inside my head for a couple of weeks, and I’ve decided I’m going to try and get it all down here this week. Unlike my regular pattern of posting, this week will be far more chaotic in terms of frequency and post length. I’m hoping to get feedback from you, and hope that this will prompt some rigorous conversation.

As a heads-up to new readers, I will be marking my customary observation of Black History Month by taking on this book. While I recognize that there is much more to black history than the story of racism, my emphasis continues to be on placing contemporary race relations in a historical context, which requires an honest exploration of what race has meant in Canada up to this point. I am sure, incidentally, that there will be abundant references to Canada’s treatment of Aboriginal people and various Asian migrant populations, so it will require a bit of branching out.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on over the next few weeks.

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Movie Friday: Where I Get it From

A year and a half ago, I got an e-mail out of the blue from my father, telling me that he had started learning the saxophone. Dad’s in a gradual state of growing retirement, meaning that he still works but on a purely opt-in basis. He does a number of things to fill his time, including a promising side-career as a photographer. Back in his youth, Dad played guitar in church choirs around the Caribbean – to hear him tell it, he was moderately famous. Since then he’s been singing in choirs and stuff, but the decision to acquire an entirely new musical instrument at the age of 60 was, I will confess, surprising.

Last Sunday, Dad did this:

A shocked reaction

I am crazy impressed with Dad here. I’ve heard him play a handful of times, and I knew he was pretty good, but I had no idea he was bringing game this hard. If you good folks would be so kind as to click through to the video, ‘like’ it, and leave complimentary comments, I know it would make his day.

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…I took the road most comfortably travelled by…

The following post is a continuation of a discussion we began this morning, looking at a paper by Daniel Effron and colleagues. In it, the authors conduct a number of experiments to investigate a phenomenon in which white people demonstrate a tendency to use salient examples of being “not racist” (choosing not to accuse an innocent black people in favour of a more guilty-seeming white person of a crime) to license more racist behaviours in the future.

The fourth investigation the authors conducted invited people to try and remember the number of racist decisions they didn’t make, after presenting them with statements that were either clearly racist, ambiguously racist, or racially ambiguous (i.e., no racial content). The authors hypothesized that, given a clear-cut and obvious example of a time when they were “not racist”, the drive to appear “not racist” would be satisfied, thus obviating the need to introduce “not racist” narratives into their memory. In other words, if you have a ready memory of choosing not to be overtly racist, you will have less motivation to seem “not racist” in a subsequent decision. [Read more…]

Two roads diverged in a racist wood…

Those of you who remember our discussion of System Justification Theory will recall that it posits (and goes on to demonstrate) that there are three overriding domains by which we guard our self-worth: ego motivation (“I like me”), group motivation (“I like us”) and system justifying motivation (“I like the way things are”). The balancing of these three motivations explains a great deal of behaviours that seem counter-intuitive or self-defeating, particularly in circumstances where power imbalances between groups are concerned.

When we consider race as a power imbalance, we would expect to find that the majority group is strongly motivated to preserve its ego when the fairness of the system is at risk. In other words, when confronted with a world that is clearly racist, there is considerable psychological pressure for members of the majority group to salvage their ego – the stereotypical “I’m not a racist” response. With the threat to our egos thus avoided, members of majority groups are then free to continue participating in an unfair system, confident in the knowledge that the ‘real’ problem is those ‘other’ people.

A fascinating new study from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology sheds some light on the depths to which this behaviour can sink: [Read more…]

Race/Ethnicity Just Isn’t Simple

A post by Jamie

Race is a social construct. It sounds like a pretty easy idea to wrap your head around, once you understand the meaning of what you’re saying. It’s the idea that the very concept of race itself isn’t genetically determined and isn’t quite as linear a relationship as simply contingent upon the colour of one’s skin (although this no doubt plays a significant role in racism and related constructs). Race as a social construct is a sort of discourse we pick up on, both consciously and unconsciously, throughout the course of our lives. Sometimes it’s literally hurled at us, and sometimes it’s very quietly and gradually written into (or out of) our day-to-day experiences. Race isn’t a Thing you can point at, reach out and take a sample of, and examine under a stereoscope. In my life, currently nothing is making this more clear than the public sphere of cyber activism in the Idle No More movement. The battlefields here are social media services like Twitter and YouTube, the comments section on online news articles, and blog posts. The battles being waged include re-education, de-bunking myths and stereotypes (watch for the Twitter hashtag #Ottawapiskat for a brilliant demonstration of de-bunking by inversion), and working towards inspiring others to start the work of decolonization from within. It can be and often is equally as exhausting as standing in the rain for four hours in the flesh, and it is an equally important tool in the greater repertoire of established tactics to counter racism, colonialism, and white supremacy.

And that’s right about where any demarcations you may have previously believed exist very rapidly become ambiguous and murky. Race/ethnicity and (anti-)racism is complicated as all fuck.

[Read more…]

Making their priorities clear

A government, like any organization, has to manage a number of competing interests simultaneously. The economy must be watched and occasionally massaged, health care has to be funded, as does a military, as does scientific research, as does infrastructure like roads and bridges. It’s a massive undertaking, requiring a wide variety of non-overlapping competencies and skills simply to keep going, let alone to improve.

Unfortunately, I live in a country whose government is a quasi-Soviet cult of personality, convened somewhat ironically around a man who has none. Stephen Harper runs what some refer to as a ‘tight ship’, but what is actually a gaggle of completely incompetent buffoons who, if the need was urgent, might be able to muster enough collective brainpower to run an alarm clock (provided the clock was small and it was okay if it lost a little time now and then). As a result, they seem to take not only their marching orders, but indeed their nouns, verbs, and syntax wholesale from the Harper machine.

This works incredibly well for a political party: [Read more…]

A response to Dan/Libby Anne – Civic Responsibility

Patheos bloggers Dan Fincke from Camels with Hammers and Libby Anne from Love, Joy, Feminism have launched a new and ambitious project to discuss and begin to codify values that are present in the online secular community:

Like many other bloggers, I spend most of my time criticizing the ideas of others – toxic religious beliefs, patriarchal gender roles, the elevation of virginity, and the agenda of the religious right – and comparatively less time building positive alternatives. While it’s critical to contest values and ideas we find harmful, it’s also important to build up positive alternatives, and it’s that understanding that birthed Forward Thinking.

The first issue has been posted:

Our first prompt involves an issue that is, I think, too often left undiscussed. It is my suspicion that differing ideas about the nature of civic responsibility and what all it includes often underlie political differences in ways we do not always recognize. I believe that we as forward thinkers would benefit from bringing this issue out of the shadows and discussing it directly and enthusiastically. And so, without further ado, I give you this month’s Forward Thinking discussion question:

What does civic responsibility mean to you?

I think this is a great idea, and will be responding whenever I can. My response to this prompt lies below the fold:

[Read more…]

Historical projection

One of the things that blogging has moved me to do more often is to learn about history. I am somewhat ashamed to say that between, let’s say, grade 10 history class (which was in 2000) and the founding of this blog (in 2010), I was not exactly what you might call ‘a student of history’. Sure, I picked up things in fits and snatches from newspaper articles and what I gleaned from just generally being a person who was paying attention to the world, but it would be a rare occurrence indeed for you to catch me studying history for its own sake. I have since learned the critical role that understanding history should play in our daily lives.

I think history is kinder to liberals than it is to conservatives (although these labels break down once you reach more than 30 years back). While there have been, and technically continue to be good conservative arguments to make about things, the political ‘left’ has moved to more or less occupy what was once the centre, while the right (particularly in America) has steadily moved to the extreme. As a result, American conservatives lionize Ronald Reagan – a man who was a terrible President and a terrible influence on the world – a man whose policies they would demonize as Satanic socialism were he living today. They don’t really have many other icons to boast about, nor major policy positions they can hang their hats on. They have become the less-clever Statler and Waldorf of policy – having nothing substantive to contribute, but always lobbing criticisms.

And it is a combination of their own lack of laudable history, and the same failure to learn actual history that I have been guilty of, that leads them to accept shockingly ahistorical statements like this: [Read more…]