Amy Schumer has stepped in it again — she did a parody video of Beyoncé’s Formation that wasn’t very funny, wasn’t at all enlightening, and most eye-rollingly of all, once again let a white woman pretend to be synonymous with being black. There was an awkward event in which Jessi Klein, Schumer’s producer, tried to defend her against the charge that she was racist. It did not go well, as described in this article by Nikki Gloudeman.
Because here’s the thing: Yes, Amy Schumer is racist. Amy. Schumer. is. racist. She’s racist because we live in a society founded on racism that has afforded her racial privilege, and she’s racist because she’s said some racist shit. Last night, Jessi made it clear that she’s racist, too.
And yes, I am white, and yes, I am racist too—because we live in a society founded on racism that affords me racial privilege, and because I haven’t always fully acknowledged how I move through this world differently because of the color of my skin, and I’ve done some racist shit. I’ve thought “that cop was nice!” when I got off without a ticket, instead of “How would that have been different if I wasn’t white?” I’ve viewed black men and white men walking behind me at night differently. I’m trying to be more aware every day, but I fuck up. I’m still racist.
So if racism can happen in contexts outside white-hooded vigilantism, and if it indeed perpetuates our entire society, what now then? It’s not quite as simple as saying “Yep, I guess I’m racist like everyone else!” For one thing, that ignores the nuances and degrees of racism. For another, that’s not really going to affect anything.
The most important step is owning that shit.
Yep. I’m racist, too, and I’m also sexist, because I take advantage of all of the immense privilege of being a white man in a racist, sexist culture. You take every advantage you are given, as well. It shouldn’t be so hard to acknowledge that fact, but I do know what is really difficult, and that is…changing it.
I also don’t often know how to “own it”. When a traffic cop doesn’t give me a ticket, in part because I’m white, it wouldn’t help to demand that I be punished; that I don’t get pulled over as often because I’m driving while white isn’t going to be corrected by pulling up to random patrol cars and insisting that I really should have my plates run and hey, officer, maybe you should check my trunk or frisk me? The goal of us privileged people shouldn’t be to share the injustices given to others, but to make sure we all get the same justice.
I think the first step is simply to listen to those who have been oppressed and honor their requests for respect. Schumer and Klein don’t seem to be able to do that.
Honestly, I have never found her funny. So maybe I’m sexist. And after a particularly awkward interview where she went completely passive aggressive on the, admittedly, inexperience radio hosts who interviewed her, I’ve found her to be a bit of a cow.
And in comment 1, we get an example of clueless privilege: calling a woman a cow because you don’t like her. Demeaning and dehumanising in one short phrase, bravo!
If we’ve now worked the word “racist” around to the point where one “is racist” because of things others do, then either we’re arguing for mass seppuku or we need to rethink the connotations that have been attached to the word over the last 70-odd years.
#3: read the article. It points out that racism is a continuum, from active oppressors to passive beneficiaries.
For the love of Ian Cromwell*, can we just stop using “racist” to refer to people, and reserve it for words and actions? Most people do racist and a-racist and anti-racist things, and it’s a huge waste of energy trying to parse whether a given person is racist. And it allows people cover for racist actions and words. “What I just said can’t be racist; look at all my black friends!”
If we use “racist” to apply to words and actions, that whole defense falls apart, and we can concentrate on improving behavior rather than just feeling good about how much less racist we are than that guy over there.
*I’m sure he didn’t originate this approach, but he is the first person I heard it from. Eloquently, of course.
I agree with the premise that we’re all racist to some extent (us white folks, at least), but the video didn’t look much like a parody to me. The most racist thing about it was the fact that there were, like, maybe 3 or 4 black women in it surrounded by a shit-ton of Tutonic-looking folks, when the song was about Black Pride.
Not all emulation is parody. Some of it is just lazy tribute. IMO, admittedly as a white male fan of Schumer, this seems like the latter. I still think it’s unintentionally racist, but for a different reason.
@1 – Not liking her comedy doesn’t make you sexist. Your dismissive, condescending attitude does.
I can’t wait to see how this thread is going to play out …
“I also don’t often know how to “own it”.”
I don’t think that you could ever “own it”, but there are many thing that you (a generic you which includes all white people, not just you as PZ Myers) can do to at least acknowledge that you OWE things to black people. Black people built the society that gives you those privileges through their slave labor, and anything you own and enjoy can be chalked up to exploitation and unfair treatment of black people from a white supremacist society.
You can start by supporting reparations: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/reparations-black-americans-slavery_us_56c4dfa9e4b08ffac1276bd7 And not just support it symbolically, by stating you’re in favor of it if the government will ever (if ever) enact institutional reparations, but support it in actuality. Give money to Black Lives Matter, to charities who help black communities, to projects that enable black people to live better.
Don’t just donate once to placate your conscience, donate as much as you can and never feel “proud” of doing it, because what you’re doing is just basic retributive justice. And let’s face it, it’s long overdue and you should HAVE to do, because you’re getting the benefits of policies which have enslaved and oppressed black people for centuries, many of which still happen today. You’re enjoying the profits of theft and forced labor.
You, just by being white in a white supremacist society, are living on the backs of black people. You’re like a parasite organism which is fed by a host and builds its life from the life of the host. Parasites can’t help but being parasites, but human beings have a choice. If you really care about stopping the abuse and exploitation and start a process of balancing the scales you don’t have to just apologize, you have to pay back.
But it wouldn’t be enough. It could never be enough. Even if you donated all your money to black people it wouldn’t be enough to repay black people of the numerous injustices that have allowed you to prosper and your country to be built. You should not only give money, but activism for justice.
Don’t let black people carry on the labor of fighting against injustice: they’re the victims and have been exploited enough, you should doing the hard work for them. Be an activist for causes of justice like Black Lives Matter. Correct other white people when they say racist thing, listen to black people, show other white people how much they OWE to black people and for fuck’s sake get the whitesplainers to just shut the fuck up. Petition your local government and vote only for candidates that have reparations for black people in their political agenda.
Volunteer your time for activism for black people. It’s not a way for you to feel better, it’s a DUTY for justice. White people should be FORCED to duty activism for reparations. They’ve earned so much from black people that ensuring that the plundering and exploitation stops is the bare minimum. You owe your time and money to black people, so giving them back is just basic fairness, nothing to feel proud or good about,
As for you personally, Mr. Myers, if you really cared about black people you shouldn’t have gone to China, but donated the money you spent in your travel to black people. You should donate the revenue of this blog, which claims to fight for social justice, to charities that help black people. You should donate a great part of your wage as a privileged white man in academia to black people. Ideally you should resign and offer your job to a black person.
After all the universities where you have studied and where you teach were created by the government using tax money over businesses which exploited black people, and using wealth accumulated through slavery of black people. So everything that has given you the chance to be a university professor is due to exploitation of black people, and it’d be only fair for you to pay it back.
That’s how you would have to address the injustices that have given you money if you cared about black people beyond empty words.
#5 – interesting point. People apply the words “racist” and “racism” to all sorts of things, and as you point out there isn’t much general agreement. I’ve read definitions of “racism/racist” that require that the accused to be member of a group that benefits from systems of oppression. I’m not sure that everyone would agree on this definition.
Is everyone who benefits from systemic racism a “racist” by definition?
“Is everyone who benefits from systemic racism a “racist” by definition?”
Of course they are. Do you think that people who benefit of a crime aren’t criminals?
Anyway regardless of what you want to call them they definitely have a moral and legal duty, according to international law (see here: http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199796953/obo-9780199796953-0003.xml), to pay it back, to make thing right.
Black people were enslaved and exploited for centuries. The structure of the American society is built on black slave labor and on exploitation of black labor. To say nothing of the damage that Jim Crow laws, redlining, gentrification, the prison system and the War on Drugs have done and still do to black people. If international law was applied even remotely fairly the US government would have to pay billions if not trillions on damages to the black people in America who descended from slaves and to their communities.
Since the US government doesn’t seem to want to pay and no American politician is supporting basic reparative justice it’s up to the individual white people in America to respect international law and basic morality and pay black communities and black people with their money and with their time. Otherwise any declaration of fighting for justice is hollow and a mockery of the suffering of countless black people in the past and today.
@4: “For the love of Ian Cromwell*, can we just stop using “racist” to refer to people, and reserve it for words and actions?”
How do you call someone who profits from a theft and doesn’t do anything to pay back what other people have stolen? Accessory after the fact, and they’re a criminal like the thief. In order not to be an accessory after the fact once you’ve aware that a theft was committed and that you’re profiting from it then you have to pay back the person who was harmed by the theft.
The people who enslaved black people, exploited them, killed them, raped them, robbed them and tortured them were racist criminals. This is uncontroversial, I hope. So how do you call someone who profits from the system established through enslavement and exploitation of black people and doesn’t pay back black people with their time and money? A racist criminal, too.
And today there’s no excuse for not knowing a rough estimate of how much white people have stolen from black people in America. Google is your friend (although I posted a link in my comment #8). We’re talking at least several trillions of dollars.
So if you have access to the internet and you’re a white person your next move is to choose whether to be accessory after the fact of racist crimes or to pay back with what you’ve earned from a racist society. It’s basic justice, and if the world was just white people would be forced to do it, just like people are forced to pay for damages in civil trials.
White people in America are racist criminals simply for the fact of being white. If they care about reparations and justice they should give their time and money to black people. That’s only basic fairness, so don’t expect cookies for it, but at least it would mean that justice will be done, and that you have a shred of basic human dignity to yourself.
If international justice worked, however, reparations for crimes against black people would be mandatory, not dependent on which white people can acknowledge that they’re profiting from countless crimes.
re @3
QFT // strong agreement.
In most cases it is a disservice to simply characterize one as “racist”. I think it better to identify an action as racist. The action may have been performed by a racist, yet still best to not try to be judgemental, and just note the action was racist. Might be a way to avoid causing defensiveness, and actually cause them to consider their actions before undertaking them.
Inherent racism is a characteristic most seem to have, yet I worry it may be used as an excuse. Trying to get away with racist acts by taking the deflection excuse, “I’m a racist, cuz that’s how i was raised, punish society, not me”, with no attempt to alter one’s behavior nor apologize for its consequences.
re 12:
typo: “re @3” was tpyo for —> re @5
oops
I feel like being in a joke, that goes like this: The Germans occupy Belgium, and an occupation officer steps before the local men. He orders: Walloon to the left, Flemish to the right! A guy steps out and asks: Where should the Belgians stand, sir?
Growing up in a socialist (or call it communist if you prefer) country, we had limited social upward mobility, as we weren’t members of the party. I do get, that we only shared jobs and the experience of oppression with out racial minorities (actually we don’t call it racial, but ethnic, based on the idea of there being a singular human race), prohibition only concerned universities and mid to upper level management position. So, in a sense we all had bosses who got promoted for being a loyal party member, and sometimes actually skilled. Previous higher education records were expunged, so college professors could only work as train yard night watchmen.
I feel a lot of empathy for people who were formerly enslaved, my ancestors could own land and move freely for a limited time, that got taken away. The central question is, can racism be fostered only in places that applied slave labor and had colonial empires? No. Despite all hardships, once democracy was introduced, people started to fear things they don’t know and encounter. I was an ultraconservative devout Christian at the time, my opinion about women wasn’t high. As for ethnic minorities I did not hated, but the community, the society led us to believe they can’t reach what we have because they’re lazy. Needless to say, if you’re not young anymore, the only way you can believe this to be true, when you discard the idea of judging people by their actions and merit. Ironically this minority had more opportunities during socialist times, nowadays people make up semi-legal excuses as to why the job isn’t for them.
Anyhow, I have abandoned these bigoted ways and became the opposite of what I was. I know you can be racist toward a minority even if you never encounter them, but that has little to do with comedians like Schumer. It doesn’t because she has a team, so before any public acts they’re to check if it’s too offensive in which they’ve clearly failed. Brash and controversial is her shtick. The track she is running is parallel to the ones other minorities have to run, and only meet at the event horizon, unless her sponsors rethink of the endorsements.
Post scriptum: I think Iliza Schlesinger and Maria Bamford are way funnier and more relatable.
Post post scriptum: Dear Mister Myers, I reject the notion we’re all racist, that’s the reverse of accusing minorities of having an attribute we made up. Reparations are a hot topic, it could start a second civil war, because haters gonna hate. Lessening policing aimed at minorities, abolition of unfair practices on the housing market, extension of federal and state funding into education, anatomically comprehensive sexual education I think are better solution. Lastly, the most privileged are WASP people, which is one of the reasons similarly dissed ethnicities like Italians, the Irish, Eastern and Southern Europeans don’t accept white privilege as self evident.
@2 and 6 I’m curious, if I had called Amy Schumer a bit of a dick would you have considered that offensive and demeaning?
gijoel #15
Calling someone a ‘dick’ is a gendered slur.
Not welcome here either.
I for one am happy to tackle the elephant in the room head-on:
‘Original sin’ has all sorts of negative connotation for atheists and free-thinkers, for a range of reasons which are as obvious as they are correct.
However, conceptually, the notion of ‘original sin’ can have valid work to do when it comes to racism.
I appreciate some folks will blanch at this – in part because of the religious baggage – but if less effort were expended on pointlessly arguing why we’re not racist, and just admitting we JUST ARE by virtue of being – I believe that’s the point at which real change might happen.
I can’t but help see an analogy to the Christian concept of ‘original sin’.
So, don’t.
Ah, you don’t because you can’t; implicit is that if you could, you would.
But you can’t, so you consider yourself racist and sexist.
(Seems perverse to me)
Leaving aside the merit of ‘should’, that implies that if everyone gets the same justice, it will fix racism.
(I doubt that; I can certainly conceive of circumstances where justice is truly blind, yet racism persists)
Or, to put it differently, I think implicitly defining racism and sexism as a circumstance rather than an attitude/belief is addressing the symptom rather than the cause.
PZ is essentially claiming that he will remain being racist and sexist until circumstances change, no matter his personal attitude, beliefs or actions.
Everyone is racist to some degree.
That’s not the problem, though.
The problem is in how you deal with that fact. All white/cis/het/male/able-bodied folks are going to be passive beneficiaries of society’s bullshit by default. Can’t avoid it at this point. It’s what we do with our privilege that matters. Do we just use it to coast on by? Or do we use it to boost the signals of non-privileged folks? Do we use it to oppress, or to lift up? Are we helping, or are we harming? Are we talking-over, or are we listening?
re @10
I sold my Wells Fargo stock about 2 years ago and made money off the sale. And I’m sure tens of thousands of people also benefited off their Wells Fargo stock trades over the last several years. I, along with a large portion of the country, clearly benefited, but that doesn’t make me a criminal because of the crime committed by their CEO that artificially inflated their share price.
John Morales #19
I see this as more of somebody admitting at an AA meeting one is an alcoholic. Being an alcoholic for the rest of your life doesn’t mean you are drinking now. Just that you recognize at one time you had a problem.
I grew up in the 1950’s with lots of institutional racism/sexism. Hopefully, I have progressed, but the original training is always there, beneath the more rational mind. Yes, I am a sexist and racist, but trying like hell not to be one.
WMDKitty:
But PZ didn’t indicate any degree; he merely stated he was racist.
If everyone is racist, it’s a pointless claim — it’s a given.
But you wrote ‘everyone’. Thus, all non-white/cis/het/male/able-bodied folk* are also racist, even though they are not passive beneficiaries of society’s bullshit by default.
And racism is the purported problem, right? The condition, not the attitude.
Why then cavil against its effect rather than its cause? Do you think it’s part of human nature?
You’ve just claimed it’s unavoidable.
The proposition thus reduces to accepting the unavoidable, but decrying it and seeking to mitigate its effect, which is that of unfairness to people who are non-privileged.
(Not that I have a problem with that, but it implies that had historical contingencies been otherwise, it might have been whites who were the non-privileged. Again, that indicates that it’s the attitude, not the result which should be addressed)
—
* folk is already a collective noun; folks would be the collective of the collective, but is otiose in this sense.
Nerd,
Sure. But that’s contrary to what WMDKitty wrote, since not everyone is an alcoholic.
I’m a decade after you, but… me too. But that’s not my point.
(My point is about the definition of racism — I think it’s an irrational belief/attitude people have, but here it’s defined as a systemic circumstance. And I think that conflating the epiphenomenon with the phenomenon is a mistake)
Easier said than done, John. But yes, that is of course the obvious thing to do when it can be done.
Are you sure that’s the implication? Maybe PZ wouldn’t do certain things that he could (because he enjoys some privileges too much, believes the costs would be too high, or for whatever reason).
I mean, look, it’s not obvious that he’s used much imagination here about what he could and would do. So where does the conclusion that he literally “can’t” do it come from? If, deliberately or not, this is just a way of pretending to be helpless about all of it, when actually he isn’t so helpless about a number of things, then passing the buck to somebody else (like the proverbial traffic cop) does have the racist effects he’s ostensibly concerned about. If that’s how it is, then this is all just a show.
In the quoted example, that person’s responsible for all of the influence they’ve ever had about how traffic cops conduct their business, the institutions which train/fund/support them, how they’ve been socialized their whole lives along with any other human being they’ve interacted with, etc. That’s certainly not nothing. If you accept our situation in the sense that you don’t make any significant attempt to change it, you are complicit in how that cop behaves differently toward those like you and those unlike you.
You don’t have to directly cause that cop to issue that ticket to this car and not issue a ticket to that car (however that would even work, since the cop’s not your puppet and you don’t sit in their back seat the whole time while they do their job). The thing is, you don’t actually need to have control of that sort over those specific actions at those times, because that shit has been brewing in so many ways for who knows how long. We can all influence how such things play out in the future in more indirect ways, and we clearly weren’t doing enough of it when it happens now (and you tell yourself a fairy tale that it was only that one cop’s fault, not yours, as if such things came out of nowhere).
This does all assume a somewhat-democratic system, making you responsible for the features of that system, those which are knowable and can be affected by us in one way other. And to the extent that you’re free to influence things outside the political or legal sphere (if your system allows for any such freedoms), you are responsible for all of those effects as well — how people around you think and behave, the institutions they make and so forth. I would say we can do many such things, which are often neglected in discussions like these, but unfortunately many of us do very little.
Yes, should implies can. But there’s still a separate issue of what can actually be done.
Maybe some privileged people can’t or won’t face the facts about what they should do. They’re not willing (or capable) of forming a relatively informed and unbiased view about what that is. Not hard to believe, is it?
It’s not clear you have in mind.
I do not believe that any race is superior and I do not discriminate based on race.
Therefore, I’m not a racist.
In American English, it’s standard to use “folks.” We’re probably not going to change that, as otiose as it (or we) may be. We’ll use “folk” as an adjective, as in “folk music,” but I don’t think it’s treated as a noun, not very frequently anyway.
Bullshit. If your actions in any way or any sense racist shit to happen, that shit is racist. That shit remains a problem, no matter which absurd syllogisms you may concoct to satisfy yourself. The end.
Whether “you are racist” is apparently some mysterious ineffable quality that I have no interest whatsoever in arguing about. Racist shit happens on your watch, so own it, get off your fucking ass, and do something constructive about it.
Yes.
Because what he can’t do is not take advantage of things thereby; as he wrote, “it wouldn’t help to demand that I be punished”.
Conflating individual responsibility with collective responsibility is also perverse. I am only responsible for my own actions, not for those of the collective.
You of all people should (heh) know better than to claim ‘should’ is some objective thing — all ‘shoulds’ are predicated on a particular ethos, and those are subjective.
(Also, there is no ‘maybe’; it is a brute fact that (at least some) privileged people don’t give a fuck about what other people think they should do, but rather do as their privilege allows)
Read my further comments. Symptom and cause are different things; when the cause is held to be human nature, either human nature has to change, or the system has to change so that the cause doesn’t lead to the symptom.
Specifically, I see racism as both a symptom and a cause, and the OP refers to the former.
“in any way or any sense cause or allow racist shit to happen”
CR, I think Jessie is being ironic.
—
And I’ll stop (if I can!) here for now, since I’m posting too much too quickly and thus breaching PZ’s commenting rules thereby.
@consciousness razor
“Racist shit happens on your watch”
No, it doesn’t. I’m a college student, not the President. I’m not responsible for the actions of others.
I don’t think I believe in this thing you’re calling “collective responsibility.” Agents are responsible for their own actions (the ones they have some kind of agency or control over, not involuntary behaviors and so forth) — we definitely agree on that. A collective isn’t an agent and isn’t a thing with responsibilities. So I don’t know why we would be discussing collective responsibilities.
You are responsible for things other than your own actions (not “only” those) in the sense that when you do something, it can* have further indirect effects, for which you are also (at least partially) responsible. Perhaps other agents are involved and are also partially responsible, perhaps not. In any case, I don’t see how it’s useful to attribute that to a “collective” which has responsibilities of its own.
*Whenever you do anything, it will have other effects, if you’re not in a causally-closed little bubble of your own making. And nobody is in that sort of bubble. Some of those effects can be morally relevant, and they’re the ones I’m talking about when trying to make sense of moral responsibility.
John Morales #24
Not quite sure what you mean, as back in college mathematics and philosophy were both considered logics, and I took the former.
A few months ago, I went to the post office to mail some bills. When I completed that task, and was getting back into my car, a young black man approached me at quick speed with what I considered untoward familiarity. At the point, the racism of my younger years came to the fore. Paranoid fear of being robbed. Clamped down on the paranoia, and failed to shake his overly familiar proffer of a handshake, then went about determining what he wanted. Turns out it was supposedly train fare to go somewhere. One rule from when I was younger, was that return fare is stored in your shoe, in case you are robbed or lose at cards (the latter seemed more likely) and needed to get home. I don’t give money to public beggars or telephone solicitors, period. Let him know that. He might have thought I was being racist, since I turned down a request for money from a black man.
I admit to racist thoughts. Which is my point, I can’t always be away from my early training. You may be saying as long as it wasn’t acted upon, the action may not be racist. I’ll admit it did make me uncomfortable.
@krsone #11
“How do you call someone who profits from a theft and doesn’t do anything to pay back what other people have stolen? Accessory after the fact, and they’re a criminal like the thief. In order not to be an accessory after the fact once you’ve aware that a theft was committed and that you’re profiting from it then you have to pay back the person who was harmed by the theft. ”
I’m an accessory in so many crimes, I couldn’t possibly pay back everyone who was harmed by the rampant and continual thefts that I’m an accessory to.
I’ve learned about wage theft and how it harms low-wage earners who clean buildings, work in fast-food joints, and do other easily exploited work. Yet, I still enter buildings, fast-food restaurants, car washes, and more.
Climate change harms everyone, and in particular is harming island nations, Syria, apple farmers in the U.S., Floridians, and many, many more. Yet, I still drive a car, fly to visit family, shop at stores that are stocked by global supply chains (and talk about exploited workers; they’re in the stores, everywhere in the supply chains), use a computer and other electronic devices that are powered by generators that emit pollutants into the atmosphere, and much more. I actually have to do these things to get by.
i use a smartphone that is made by exploited people working in awful conditions and that contains minerals that are mined by people who are exploited and live in abject poverty.
I wear clothing that is made by exploited workers in factories that often have inhumane working conditions.
Most of the products in my house were made by industries that pollute, and that pollution is going to cause or is already causing health problems for many people.
And I’m sure that there are many more crimes that I’m an accessory to, the majority of it due to the fact that being an accessory to crimes seems to be an inescapable fact of existence. No matter which way I turn, I’m contributing to misery and suffering.
Yet, I can’t work to remedy all of it and I do what I can, given my obligations to my family.
So, how can you tell me that I should do everything that you claim I should do? Are you making a claim for priority over all of those other people?
There are a few people missing from krsone’s narrative.
Nice work NOT (@32 Jessie Foster) implying the President is racist, when one of the most important points being made here is that the (well, this) President falls into a category of persons who can’t, be definition, be racist.
Jessie Foster #32
troll
cleese #35
I usually dislike wall-of-text but that was very good.
John, you missed the point.
I’m saying that yes, there’s a problem.
Now what are we going to do about it? We can ignore it while quietly reaping the benefits. Or we can acknowledge it and work to change society for the better, so it’s less of a problem in the future.
And that means starting with ourselves and our own implicit biases. Even the small “not really racist, because…” ones.
@Nerd #34:
I have the same reaction when anyone comes up to me to ask for money for train/bus/gas money. I can honestly say I have never been approached in such a way by a black man, so racism doesn’t enter into it (although, I, too, admit to racist thoughts at other times). I also have the same paranoia against being robbed by someone who comes up to me with that kind of familiarity, though it may also be part of my social awkwardness. You could also possibly call it classism (for me) though I am not much removed from the lower class whites, and definitely wasn’t removed from them when younger.
@krsone #various
You seem to be saying that everyone in the Western world should be paying reparations to those that worked as the underclass to serve them. This becomes a problem because of the many, varied underclasses that have been through time. In northern states, for many years italians, Greeks, Irish, and Poles (among others, but it would be tedious to name them all) were purposely pushed into the underclass in different cities and other areas. Does that mean that those of English, French, and Spanish descent should be paying reparations to those of Italians, Greeks, Irish and Poles, along with paying reparations to the blacks whose ancestors were slaves? How about the people of mixed ancestry? Does a black person who also has Irish blood get more reparations than a black person with English blood? How about a black person who has no white blood in their heritage, do they get even more?
I agree that most white people (possibly even all) do not do enough to make up for what has happened to those that were oppressed before, and even those that are oppressed now, but your answers are basically slavery in all but name, perpetrated only because of racial or ethnic guilt rather than institutionalized. If you truly believe people need to be equal, then people should be autonomous while being institutionally influenced to help those who have been and still are oppressed. All of our institutions should help with this, including government, the media, circles of friends, you name it. And yes, I do try to influence my friends to be more egalitarian when possible.
sometimes that invisibility thing is creepy
@kimberly1091
” implying the President is racist”
I was referring to the responsibility of the office, not to Obama specifically. I don’t think Obama is racist.
“the (well, this) President falls into a category of persons who can’t, be definition, be racist.”
What is it about black people which makes them mentally incapable of exhibiting prejudice based on race?
@chigau
Disagree with anything in particular?
@26
Assuming you’re a USian, you’re benefiting from a system founded and maintained by the oppression of some races by others. So, yes, you are indeed complicit in racism to some degree.
If your father steals someone’s car, keeps it for thirty years, and then dies, are you any less of a thief because you only inherited his stolen car? If you continue to drive that stolen car to work every day, are you somehow not complicit in a crime?
@Vivec
If you are the child of a rapist, are you also guilty? You’re directly benefiting from that rape (you wouldn’t exist otherwise).
And I’m mixed race, so am I simultaneously the victim and the perpetrator? How does that work?
Unwillingly and coincidentally benefiting from a crime =/= Knowingly and continually benefiting a crime that is still in progress.
The hypothetical child of a carjacker isn’t really culpable for the crime their father committed as long as they’re an unwilling participant only involved by virtue of their being the carjacker’s child.
They start being culpable when they keep driving the stolen car – continuing to take part in the theft of a car – with the knowledge that this car is stolen.
The child of a rapist isn’t actively participating in a rape by virtue of being the child of a rapist.
define “race”
@chigau
Google it.
Yeah, okay, disengenuous answer from a person with a history of bad faith argument. I’m out.
Want to JAQ off more about the need to profile muslims while you continue asserting your lack of prejudice?
@Vivec
I have no idea why he was asking me to define race. I’m not trying to be disingenuous, and it’s never been my intent to deceive.
Not going back to the profiling thing either.
@Vivec
And you know it’s more complicated than your analogy makes it seem, which is why you didn’t address the second part of my comment.
@jessie foster, various comments., including:
“And I’m mixed race, so am I simultaneously the victim and the perpetrator? How does that work?”
I’ll have a a stab at this. A person CAN be simultaneously be, and do, lots of things. That’s basically how cognitive dissonance work, but in this case in a mor positive way. The white part of you can be racist and the non-white part of you can be the victim of racism, and this CAN happen at the same time.
I have a friend who is about 20% First Peoples, but financially ok, and she has quite a sophisticated appreciation of how she is simultaneously an oppressed person and an oppressor. The percentages complicate it a bit, but she seems to handle it pretty well.
Jessie Foster, #26
Of course you’re not.
Link
Link
Aaaand, here we are wasting time on whether a person is racist. Can we just stop with that?
Fastest way to shut down the Jessie Foster derailleur is to limit “racist” to behaviors. Poof! You’re not a racist. Congratulations! But you still have racial bias, and do and say racist things. Because everyone does. And if you claim otherwise, you are rejecting 50 years of solid social science research.
@kimberly1091 on comment 53: that’s similar to the point I was trying to make. When Khrushchev spoke in the UN and was accused of oppressing and mistreating people, he retorted with black people are being beaten in America. Both statements were used for propaganda, yet both were true also at the same time.
The country that I grew up in had 3 failed revolutions/independence fights in 3 centuries, all of them linked with a central theme, the total dismissal of the interests of minorities. In the 19th century, after the failed second revolution, a locally revered leader toured the US to gather financial support for a second revolution. When asked on his stance on slavery (this was 1856 or 58) he supported the rights of Southern states to hold slaves, which of course pissed off abolitionists, so he failed to get money. This isn’t surprising if you learn the fact, that he actively fought a now nation state, whose language he used privately in favor of the majority.
I’m an ethnic German. My ancestors went there 300 years ago on the premise they can own land and practice Protestantism freely. Neither were held up, and they moved until they’ve found a place, that took them. Keep note, I’m not equating this to slavery, this is about mixed ethnicity. So, many of them were forced to convert to Catholicism, then about 110 years ago they were forced to abandon their names, their language in favor of the majority, known as forced assimilation. To this day, the majority that I belong to refuses to acknowledge any wrongdoing done to my ancestors, to whom I also belong to. Today, they fear people of different color and ethnicity or even religion, some openly proclaiming that accepting them means endangering their way of life.
I was taught to think the nation is but mere victims of wars waged by great powers, and that neighboring nations want our lifeblood, all being a part of a vast conspiracy. The part where some of them took the property and belongings of deported people is in the back of everyone’s heads.
I see that people conduct a vicious debate on personal responsibility. I propose the counterargument: how is anyone supposed to change the way how a society thinks, one that is 50 or 60 years back in terms of civil rights (they exist on paper, but one has to go to the high courts to validate them), when issues from 300 years ago are still seen through one lens? Cleavon Bundy for example still thinks 150 year after the civil war, that slavery was justified (oh, and in case anybody missed it, his son was found not guilty in occupying the reserve).
I might not have read it, in which case I apologize, but we shan’t forget, once minorities got the vote and their civil rights, people moved away from them. The US is probably the only country where people move out from the inner city to the suburbs for other reasons, than cleaner air. To identify what is being an act of racism one has to know the target of said racism, which is hard when people around you have the same color as you.
It isn’t just that, Mike Pence was born in the wrong country. 3 years ago, there was a movie called Coming Out. It’s about a gay radio host, who suffers a head injury and realizes he is into women now. At the end of the movie he comes out to everyone not being gay anymore. You heard right, this comedy had a green lit script, financing and was shown in cinemas. There was opposition, but not enough to bury it, like Lucas wants to erase that Christmas special. If I’m a coward for not staying and achieve Pyrrhic victory in these issues, so be it.
I don’t do racist, sexist or homo/trans-phobic acts, because they’re wrong, that’s half of it. The other half is, if I judge you on easily identifiable terms, I rob us both the opportunity to settle actual disagreements we might have, thereby validating the phrase: “two monologues don’t become one dialog”.
@chigau #36:
“There are a few people missing from krsone’s narrative.”
First Nation people of course also have a right to get financial reparation and territorial reparation, too, since they were the legitimate owners of the land before the European invasion, and every treaty they made with the descendants of the invaders was violated by the US government.
However I can’t speak on their behalf, since I’m not First Nation, and I don’t want to speak in their place. If you’re First Nation and you need help finding First Nation activism resources to ask for reparations I’ll be happy to help you.
To the others: it’s pretty appalling to see people giving all kinds of excuses not to pay for reparations. “I can’t do anything about this, there are so many people with other problems, blah blah blah”. Quite frankly, fuck this noise. I’m pleased that you acknowledge that just by being part of this society you’re accessory to many crimes, but this doesn’t absolve you from enjoying the benefits of white supremacist society over the labor of black people.
Reparations for crimes are a way to actually do something instead of whining ineffectually. And they’re far from being an extreme idea, they’re a staple of social justice.
Japanese American interned in WWII received some (meager, but better than nothing) compensation for their internment. It was Ronnie Reagan, hardly a champion of justice and equality, who was forced to acknowledge the duty of the US to pay back the Japanese who had suffered at the hands of the US government.
But nobody wants to talk about compensation to black people (and yes, for First Nation people too). Many people here seem to think that to even ask about reparations is some kind of hardship on white people. How convenient.
I really shouldn’t have to link to this but I’ll do it again: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/reparations-black-americans-slavery_us_56c4dfa9e4b08ffac1276bd7 This is an excellent piece by Julia Craven who uses the results of the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act to estimate how much white people owe to black people in the US. Newsflash: it’s probably in the trillions of dollars.
Ta-Nehisi Coates also has written a wonderful breakdown of the financial plundering of white people over black people in America here: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
As Coates has written Germany was forced to pay Israel for the damage they’ve done to the Jews. And they paid.
Now sadly there’s no country where black American people are safe to start a life on their own, away from the descendants of people who have killed them, robbed them, raped them and tortured them. But just because black people in America don’t have their own army and navy this doesn’t mean that they’re not a nation and that they don’t deserve compensation.
Coates and Craven are thinking about compensation from the US government, and that’s a very good strategy if you could pull this off. It worked with Germany and the Jews. However it only worked because other people forced the German government to pay. It works because it was enforced through the threat of the force of arms of Israel, who threatened Chancellor Adenaur himself, and because every other nation in the world recognized that Germany had to pay.
The US government isn’t threatened by anyone, so they’ll never pay. And no prominent American politician has any intention of paying. This should be disgusting and appalling to anyone with half a conscience, and I thought it would be appalling and disgusting to people here, who claim to be fighting for social justice. But I think I might have overestimated you, since you care more about making up excuses, discussing the meaning of “racist” or even talking about your oh-so-nice gardens and you make it all about your offended feelings when you’re presented with the legitimate requests of people of color.
As Coates has written:
“If not even an avowed socialist [Sanders] can be bothered to grapple with reparations, if the question really is that far beyond the pale, if Bernie Sanders truly believes that victims of the Tulsa pogrom deserved nothing, that the victims of contract lending deserve nothing, that the victims of debt peonage deserve nothing, that that political plunder of black communities entitle them to nothing, if this is the candidate of the radical left — then expect white supremacy in America to endure well beyond our lifetimes and lifetimes of our children.”
He’s perfectly right, since even people in this “social justice” hub are all about protecting the offended feelings of white people from legitimate requests labeled as “trolling” because they interrupt you while you were discussing your gardens. And you call yourself social justice activists.
Reparations will never come form the government, so they must come from the few white people who still have a shred of decency. If there’s at least one of them here (maybe Mr. Myers, since he hasn’t showed up to comment yet) you’re the ones who have to sacrifice (oh poor souls, I’m so sad) your stolen money and your time to pay back black people.
To those of you who whine that you can’t do anything because you’re just here, minding your own business, I say that if you own stuff that you don’t need to survive there’s plenty you can do without starving. Stop paying for all the useless stuff you have and the useless services you use and send your money to black charities (that’s just the bare minimum for being considered a human being with a shred of a conscience). Volunteer your time for black causes. Petition your government to make it so that reparations are made. Support and sustain the message of reparations instead of worrying about your white feelings because the truth has stopped your discussions about gardening. Shut the fuck up for a while and listen.
Otherwise you’re all talking and whining about how terrible you are for being privileged without doing anything about it. If you were honest with yourself you would realize that until the US government pays for reparations you should be forced to give all you can survive without to black people and it still wouldn’t be enough.
Maybe I’m not deluding myself and there’s still some hope for justice without the threat of arms. Because if you keep refusing to pay for all the things you’re enjoying as beneficiaries of white supremacy black people will HAVE to use the force of arms to get what they deserve.
Meir Dworzecki, a Jew who considered reparations from Germany to be (rightfully) just a drop in the sea, said “My soul would be at rest if I knew there would be 6 million German dead to match the 6 million Jews”. Many black people feel the same way about white people and think that justice would be paying back slavery and mistreatment of black people with the slavery and mistreatment of white people.
Others feel like Ben-Gurion felt when he said ““If I could take German property without sitting down with them for even a minute but go in with jeeps and machine guns to the warehouses and take it, I would do that—if, for instance, we had the ability to send a hundred divisions and tell them, ‘Take it.’ But we can’t do that.””
Yes, we can’t do that. And I really hope we will never have to do that and that white people will grow enough of a conscience to pay back as much as they should. But since even in this place, which claims to be about social justice, Mr. and Mrs. White Prissypants are outraged at the mention of true problems in their precious posts about gardening I’m not holding my breath.
Just listen to this: if white people in the US don’t give black people what they deserve black people are going to take it, if necessary with the force of arms. It’s not something I’m in favor, if only because white people are likely to react and kill more black people, and in general I’m not a violent person, but there are plenty who are willing to spill their blood to achieve real justice, and I don’t know when they’ll get tired of waiting. Your move, “social justice activists”. Lead other white people by example and pay up. You can start by donating to Black Lives Matter: https://donate.idex.org/checkout/donation?eid=66399
Donate fast and donate plenty. It’s your duty to do so.
I’m not a ‘he’.
I’m not American.
I don’t read Huffington Post.
Should Israel pay reparation to Palestinians?
“If your father steals someone’s car, keeps it for thirty years, and then dies, are you any less of a thief because you only inherited his stolen car? If you continue to drive that stolen car to work every day, are you somehow not complicit in a crime?”
Exactly. You need to give that car back. It’s not a matter of your feelings, it’s a basic matter of justice. If you don’t want to give that car back someone should force you to do it. Hopefully you care enough about justice to give it back without being forced to, but you have no right to complain that the heirs of the person that the car was stolen from ask you to give the car back. And if you tone troll them and ask them to wait until you’re done taking a ride before you even listen, and that they have to calm down and be polite and mellow when asking the car back because you deserve polite requests for some reason then you’re a horrible person who is adding mockery to the damage your father has done.
Give that car back, now, or prepare to be forced to sooner than you might think. To get out the metaphor pay reparations or prepare to be forced to.
“I’m not a ‘he’.”
I never said you were:
“chigau #36:
“There are a few people missing from krsone’s narrative.”
First Nation people of course also have a right to get financial reparation and territorial reparation, too, since they were the legitimate owners of the land before the European invasion, and every treaty they made with the descendants of the invaders was violated by the US government.
However I can’t speak on their behalf, since I’m not First Nation, and I don’t want to speak in their place. If you’re First Nation and you need help finding First Nation activism resources to ask for reparations I’ll be happy to help you.”
Did I ever mention to pronouns in relation to you?
Anyway if you’re saying that women and non-binary persons deserve reparations from men (in America mostly from white men) then you’re right. Lauren Chief Elk, a First Nation woman, has supported the hashtag “GiveYourMoneytoWomen”, which I fully support as well. However I’m speaking for black people now. You may want to speak with her if you’re a woman or a non-binary person and want to organize campaigns for compensations.
QUILTBAG people also deserve compensations, in their case mainly from the government and from white churches who have inspired policies that have harmed them, along with the heterosexual people who have done them harm. However, again, I’m speaking for black people now. If you’re a QUILTBAG person and you want to organize campaigns for compensations I can get you in touch with people who are organizing just that.
All of this doesn’t mean that black people don’t have a right to ask for the reparations from white people in America.
“I’m not American.”
Good for you. But Mr. Myers is a white person of American nationality, and so are many who post here. My words are directed to them.
“I don’t read Huffington Post.”
I added the Julie Craven Huffington Post article to make it clear how much white people owe to black people in the US.
“Should Israel pay reparation to Palestinians?”
Yes, of course. But again, I’m not Palestianian so I’m not entitled to speak on their behalf.
I’ve started talking about reparations for black people in America because in his post Mr. Myers was asking what he could do to give justice to black people as a white person in America:
Myers wrote: “I also don’t often know how to “own it”. When a traffic cop doesn’t give me a ticket, in part because I’m white, it wouldn’t help to demand that I be punished; that I don’t get pulled over as often because I’m driving while white isn’t going to be corrected by pulling up to random patrol cars and insisting that I really should have my plates run and hey, officer, maybe you should check my trunk or frisk me? The goal of us privileged people shouldn’t be to share the injustices given to others, but to make sure we all get the same justice.”
And I said: if you care about people getting the same justice you should care about paying back for the injustices that white people have done to black people. So I urged he and everyone white and American who posts here to stop whining about their own feelings and to do something concrete: PAY UP.
@Saad
Nice try.
1. Religion is not race. There are brown Christians and white Muslims. You can choose your religion, you cannot choose your race.
2. Believing that family members don’t make for unbiased witnesses isn’t racist. That’s an aspect of human nature, which is true regardless of race.
@krsone
” if white people in the US don’t give black people what they deserve black people are going to take it, if necessary with the force of arms. It’s not something I’m in favor, if only because white people are likely to react and kill more black people”
Gas the whites, race war now!
Horseshoe effect is real.
“Gas the whites, race war now!
Horseshoe effect is real.”
Yeah, because fighting for justice and forcing people to pay for crimes is the same thing as promoting genocide…NOT.
This is what only an extremely entitled, privileged white would think. But I see you’re racist against Muslims, too. Have a fun time with the other wizards, and remember that the the holes for the eyes go on your white hoodie, not on your ass.
krsone
It’s not always about you.
PSA
Doing this
<blockquote>paste copied text here</blockquote>
Results in this
It makes comments with quotes easier to read.
“It’s not always about you.”
How convenient. A white person (Myers) whines about what they can do to give justice to black people, but when they’re presented with things they can actually do (pay for reparations) people accuse the black people of making it all about themselves.
Thanks for doing your part in silencing black voices. If you want to speak up for reparations for women or non-binary persons, or for First Nation people, or for QUILTBAG people, why do you have to throw people who speak for reparations for black people under the bus?
krsone #66
You are raving.
@krsone Actually you’re worse. When a white supremacist alt-righter calls for a race war, they’re usually doing so somewhat ironically. I think you’re serious.
Jessie Foster #68:
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA No.
With some reservations, I’m invoking Poe’s Law on krsone. I’m reminded of a time when a white slymepitter pretended to be an overly confrontational black person in order to stir up trouble (comchinc is the commenter in question.)
It’s easy for you to dismiss that rage of black people at injustice using ableist rhetoric. Would you say the same thing to Ta-Nehisi Coates? Or to Julia Craven? Are their demands for compensation not justified, too? Or do you prefer them just because they don’t dismiss white people’s feelings? I can understand why they’re doing it. They need to contain their rage in order to get published by white dominated papers like the Huffington Post or the Atlantic. But the fact that they’re phrasing their requests in a way that’s more acceptable to white people doesn’t mean that they’re not as angry as others who do not cater to “whitey’s feelz”.
Coates has warned white people about the rage of oppressed people in his Atlantic article. He has written of when Jews like Ben-Gurion wanted rightfully to get Germany to pay for reparations by any means, even using force if necessary. Do you think that black people are less entitled to reparations from white people than Jews from Germany?
@kreator Maybe. I’m not really getting that troll vibe though.
PZ – All whites are racist –
Krsone posts –
Genie, cork, bottle.
How typical. Do you consider Ta-Nehisi Coates to be a white person pretending to be black? What about Julia Craven? Or the people of the Uhuru movement?
http://apscuhuru.org/issues/reparations/index.xhtml
The demands for reparations are real. They’re supported by a wide majority of black people in America. Black people are killed by the police, chased away from their spaces by gentrification, imprisoned at rates worse than any time in the history of the US. They’re exploited economically, socially, politically. They’re growing tired of injustice, and want reparations. If the US government is unwilling to pay surely people who claim to be interested in social justice will have the bare minimum of dignity of giving their money to black people.
But apparently white people cannot be bothered to do acts of basic restorative justice. Not even if they whine about how much they feel guilty about their privilege. We don’t need your tears, we need your money. And you need to do it fast, because for every injustice committed on a black person black people are closer and closer to not longer taking this in stride. You wish to believe that this isn’t true, because you’re afraid, but people can be oppressed only for so long before they fight back. Something fierce is brewing. Black Lives Matter is only the beginning.
Now, as I’ve written, I’m not in favor of violent solutions, but white people who claim to care about justice have to pay up, and do it fast. Black people are losing their patience and they’re no longer obedient little lambs. If Trump is elected black people won’t just lie down and let him enslave us again.
krsone, could you get through your head the idea, that some people – like me and Giliell – who are active in the garden topic that seems to be a thorn in your side are not US American and do not come from culture that was build on slavery.
I am white. I sympathise with POC around the world. I agree USA should pay reparations to black people and Indians. But there is more to the world than USA.
I donate money when I can without endangering my livelihood, I use my money to make the world a better place. But I personaly do not owe you anything (including my time) and I am in no way obligated to live on the verge powerty and give all my earnings to BLM or any other cause that you personally feel is the worthiest of worthy causes.
History is full of injustices. Deal with it. We should work towards better future, but this:
is just idiotic. Two wrongs do not make right. Vendetta is not a form of justice, it is only its perpetuation.
Not that I expect anyone to give half a damn, but I’m still grappling with a response to krsone. For dozens of comments, virtually everyone aside from the ever-elliptical chigau seems to have ignored them.
The most amenable interpretation of krsone’s output is as the trolling of a singularly clever provocateur, as per Kreator’s #69, and perhaps the ::ahem:: silent majority in this thread are just smarter than I am, and demonstrating same by refusing to engage. For my part, I’m still working through a response that more than likely I’ll never complete or post.
Whether krsone’s captious dialectic is an ingenious reductio ad absurdum presented by a troll of rarefied subtlety or the expression of a genuine overarching antagonism, I admit to its evoking discomfiture and a (doubtlessly futile) desire to argue. At the very least, I will go back and re-read Coates’ editorial on reparations, as my memory of it does not conform to much of krsone’s interpretation.
In the meantime, Jessie Foster #68:
Fuck you. No amount of diatribes of the sort put forth by krsone — whether sincere or otherwise — justify this kind of mealy-mouthed soft-pedaling of actual white supremacists. Being inured to those flavors of hatred by 4chan (or whichever cultural cesspool in which you’ve been immersed) is no excuse for this shit.
Actually, I’ve long thought that black Americans have an excellent LEGAL case for reparations for everything the US gummint has done to them since December 18, 1865, when the 13th amendment was ratified. That would include over 150 years of failure by the government to ensure equal protection and explicitly racist policies on housing, small business loans, farming subsidies, etc. In aggregate, these would amount to >>$100000 per family.
I think that the adoption of affirmative action programs in the 1970s was in part an admission of wrongdoing and an attempt to head off the reparations movement–but we’ve seen how well that has worked.
Unfortunately, the case for reparations for acts prior to 1865, while morally unassailable, if legally dubious, as the sins of that time were codified in law.
The case for Native Americans is tougher, as they were granted citizenship in 1924. The torts were abrogations of treaties, which are harder to win.
Again, the moral case is strong, but try enforcing morality in a court of law.
@Arren That’s been my experience discussing with them. I don’t think it’s productive or useful to lie about what people believe, even if those peOpel are racist fascists. So fuck you right back.
Bullshit. Are you a white European, white Australian, Canadian or New Zealander? If so then your culture WAS built on slavery of black people and, in the latter four cases, on expropriation of lands that belonged to people of color and on genocide. And if you’re white South African I only have a word for you: apartheid.
White Europeans based their Second Industrial revolution on the resources and the labor of black Africans. Have you forgotten the colonies in Africa? What about King Leopold’s personal possession of Congo, and the genocide, enslavement and tortures that happened in it? And even today white European and white American steal African resources (coltan in Congo, diamonds in South Africa, oil in Nigeria, etc. etc. I could go on all day) leaving black people to starve.
If you’re white you’re pretty much always benefiting from the slave labor and the stolen resources of people of color. The only difference between white people who live in various European states, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and South Africa is to which people of color they have to pay reparations.
Good. Then find out the people of color that your country has oppressed and pay their descendants. Otherwise your sympathy isn’t worth a damn.
I’m not talking about me. I’m not asking anything for me, I’m lucky enough that I don’t need the money of white people. This isn’t about me, it’s about social justice. Don’t like giving to BLM? Find another charity that you like, even better if it helps the people of color that are the descendants of the ones who were colonized or killed or forcibly displaced by your country. You owe THEM big time.
I shouldn’t be forced to do this, but here’s a list of former colonies/protectorates/client states of European/American states in Africa. Find out which ethnic groups of black Africans were exploited by your country and pay them back:
The US: Liberia.
The UK: Sudan, Lesotho, Bostwana, Kenya, Somalia, Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Egypt, The Gambia, Zambia, Malawi, Sierra Leone, South Africa,Namibia, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Uganda, Tanzania
France: Gambia, Benin, Algeria, Cameroon, Chad, Guinea, Republic of Congo, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Djibuti, Mali, Togo, Gabon, Cote d’Ivoire, Madagascar, Mauritania, Morocco, Central Africa Republic, Niger, Tunisia
Germany: Namibia, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Togo, Cameroon, Uganda, Kenya (Wituland), Mauritania, Ghana (Brandenburg colonies, today Brandenburg is a part of Germany)
Belgium: Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi
Netherlands: South Africa, Gambia, Angola, Senegal, Mozambique, Sao Tomé
Portugal: Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Benin, Nigeria, Sao Tomé, Guinea-Bissau
Spain: Morocco, Saharawi Republic, Equatorial Guinea
Italy: Somalia, Libya, Ethiopia, Eritrea
Sweden: Ghana
Denmark: Ghana
Norway: Ghana
Latvia: The Gambia (colony of Courland)
Switzerland and Liechtenstein: South Africa, Nigeria (economic exploitation, not direct colonies)
Austria: benefited from the colonial plundering of Germany after the Anschluss, see the colonies of Germany
Poland, Slovenia, Croatia, Romania, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovak Republic, Lithuania, Estonia, Luxembourg, Malta, Bulgaria, Cyprus and Greece: part of the EU, benefit from revenue of the EU, see the colonies of countries within the EU
Iceland: see under Denmark (they were part of Denmark until 1944)
Ireland: part of the EU, but also partially liable for debt towards UK colonies (although in this case it’s arguable whether they benefited much, and they could arguably ask the UK to pay them as a former colony)
Russia: Angola, Mozambique (unfairly favorable economic deals under Soviet rule, racism towards African people under Soviet rule)<though I recognize that Russians have a better case against duty to pay than other white people
The Ukraine, Belarus: see Russia (part of the Soviet Union until 1991).
Bosnia-Erzegovina, Albania, Kosovo, Serbia, Macedonia: off the hook for now until they become part of the EU, then liable to share the debt of the EU countries.
White Australians and White New Zealanders need to pay respectively the descendants of the Aboriginal people they enslaved, displaced and massacred and the Maori people. White Canadians have a huge debt due to their plundering of resources of the First Nations (and again genocide).
White South Africans have probably the highest amount to pay out to their neighboring black people out of all white people still in Africa. Apartheid ended only in 1994 (!!)
White people everywhere should check the taxes paid by white businesses who still exploit Africa to know which countries they have to repay.
This is very easy to say from a position of privilege. But again, as I’ve said, I don’t like the violent option. It’s much better for white people to develop some shred of dignity and pay on their own.
Your money or your life.
@78 krsone,
Should it be the US Government (ie all taxpaying citizens and business entities) that pay the reparations, or should the payers be ethnically separated and charged accordingly to how guilty each ones ethnic ancestors were?
Matt Harrison, The entity responsible for the tort is generally responsible for payment. When it comes to the strongest case–torts since 1865–the responsible parties would be the US government and in some cases state governments.
The case becomes much murkier in the case of claims based on slavery and/or colonial exploitation. In many cases, the governments involved do not even exist anymore. One could attempt to win a claim against specific families who benefitted, but this would be a lot more challenging.
krsone, you make sometimes good points, but you intersperse them with raving.
By the logic you are using, you, even though person of color, owe everything you earn to some other people of color. Because just by the virtue of being black in USA you are no doubt benefiting from the computer chips made by underpaid workers in Thaiwan from resources mined in poor countries and probably wear cheap cotton clothes made in Bangladesh etc. If they demand that you give everything short of dry bread and perhaps a toothbrush to them, will you comply and consider it a reasonable demand?
It is nice that you found something to blame on Czech republic – we are apparently complicit in the slavery and colonialism that the other countries in EU performed because.. well because you say so.
Even though Czechs were massively exploited very recently and were opressed under Austrian rule for hunderds of years before, not allowed to govern, being mostly serfs and subjected to systematic erasure of culture and language?
And how far in history do you want to go? Because word Slave comes possibly from word “Slav”. I am Slav, the odds are that at some point of history some ancestors of my nation were enslaved by Germans and Romans thus giving those nations an advantage that might have lasted to this day. So I might see the money flowing here from EU as repatriation for our exploitation two thousand years back. After all Germany and Italy were strong economies most of the time our country was poor as dirt.
You really are a pretentious asshole. I will not be talking to you anymore and I will not bother to read your drivel either.
Charly,
As I pointed out above, there is a difference between claims for reparations by black Americans for the period 1865 to present–precisely because there is a legal guarantee of equal protection that was not met and that inflicted demonstrable financial harm.
For claims about slavery or colonialism–where would you even file the suit?
Just a last observation – this whole topic is the biggest “Dear Muslima” I have ever seen. We are all apparently morally obligated to find the descendants of people whom our ancestors might have exploited and if we do not do just that, we are not allowed to live. I am not that well read on moral philosophy, so am scratching my head trying to understand the logic involved.
@a_ray_in_dilbert_space
I was not disputing your claim, but what krsones walls of text.
I forgot to add white people in Central and South America: they need to repay the First Nation cultures of the countries which their white ancestors (mostly Spanish and Portuguese in Brazil, but also British in Belize and Guyana, French in French Guyana and from the Netherlands in Suriname) killed, enslaved and displaced in their countries. Of course white Spanish and Portuguese (and British, French and Dutch) also need to pay for those actions.
And since many black people from Africa were used in plantations in Brazil, Mexico and Peru, the white people in those countries and in Spain and Portugal need to pay reparations to their descendants, too. This might be difficult to organize but needs to be done.
And just so you don’t think that I forgot about people of color in Asia and Oceania, here’s another list of former colonies of white European powers:
The UK: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Brunei, Nauru, Vanatu, China (Hong Kong), Iraq (with added damages for a war of aggression), Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bhutan, Nepal, Qatar, Bahrein, Jordan, Palestine, Iran (neocolonial influence), Papua-New Guinea
France: India, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Mauritius, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen
Portugal: India, China (Macau), Timor-Leste, Taiwan, Maldives
Spain: the Philippines
Germany: Papua-New Guinea, Nauru, Palau
Netherlands: Indonesia, India, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Taiwan, Mauritius
The US: the Philippines, Guam, Micronesia, Vietnam (war of aggression and plundering), Iraq (war of aggression), Iran (neocolonial influence), Hawaiian people (colonial domination and forcible annexation).
To say nothing of the reparations that ethnic Russian people need to pay to non-ethnic Russians in Russia and the former Soviet Republics/parts of the Russian Empire. And of the damages that many European nations and the US need to pay to China for the Opium Wars and the rape and pillaging during the Boxer Rebellion. The Japanese also need to repay the people of China, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Indonesia. Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore for the damages they inflicted to their populations in World War Two, although to be fair they were already ordered to do it and did it in part.
Charly,
The reason why I’ve weighed in here is because I’ve found the experience here in the US very interesting. In the early ’70s here, there was a pretty strong reparations movement. This was dulled somewhat when policy started to recognize the long-term effects of racism–through affirmative action and other measures. This seemed to be a promising approach in that it would address at least some of the claims and benefit the “best and brightest” among young black Americans.
Unfortunately, white Americans were having none of it. Not only did they challenge any school that had an affirmative action program, they automatically assumed that any success by a person of color (or woman for that matter) was due to affirmative action.
So, having rejected the only potentially viable alternative redress, what choice is left but reparations–which will be far more costly than all the affirmative action programs put together.
Good points, you have a decent case to ask for reparations from the Austrians.
Also a good point. You might also have a case for asking for reparations from Russia for the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
However this is all a derail from the main point, which is the exploitation of black people in the US.
@80 Matt Harrison:
It would be nice if the US Government decided to pay those reparations. I’m not holding my breath, though, and white people who claim to care about social justice shouldn’t wait for a decision of their government. As I wrote Mr. Myers wants to know what he can do to address the undue privileges which he’s been given due to him being white. Private reparations are a good place to start.
Interesting. With all these reparations, if we go far enough back in history and are thorough enough, I could actually end up with more than I would have started with. Depends on how willing the Turks are to step up and pay their debts.
Focusing on reparations as the end-all-be-all of compensating for racial privilege, or even as a significant way of countermanding it seems ill-advised.
We’re not even at the level of discourse where most people acknowledge these privileges exist, much less that we need to take serious financial steps to solve them.
Plus, even if reparations were paid, that would do nothing to address structural or internalized prejudice, so as far as I’m concerned, reparations should be the last step in any plan to solve oppression and privilege, not the opening salvo.
Don’t even get me started on the basic concept of using money as a stand-in for justice.
@krsone comment 78: You’re right, you really shouldn’t have posted such a list, at least not in its current form. First of all, the US is completely screwed up on that list, they actually created Liberia for freed slaves and protected the country during the Scrapes for Africa, just like Ethiopia or Thailand, they weren’t colonies. Ethiopia was under military occupation, as was Thailand (then known as Siam) under Japanese occupation, used as staging grounds, and as resources. However, and that became a trend, you are completely overlooking the war reparations Italy had to pay. Since Eritrea broke off from Ethiopia in a civil war, which is still a frozen conflict, the claim should be between those 2 countries. Yet, the more egregious thing is, although it does affect black people at least in Cuba, you’ve completely omitted the Spanish-American war. Duterte, the Filipino Trump would love them some reparations from America based on this logic. One imagines Castro wouldn’t be far behind. Timor Leste’s Portuguese ownership was violated by both the Western Allies and the Japanese during WWII, then its independence granted from Portugal by the Indonesians.
The Dutch never owned colonies held by Portuguese before they became independent countries in Africa. Nordic countries owned way more colonies, as evidenced by Scandinavian houses in the Caribbean, then again most of it were sold to the French. Which again leads back to the US. Even if you don’t like it, those actions were transferred with the Louisiana Purchase. However you can rest easy because the US isn’t part of the International Criminal Court so you couldn’t be sued until the recent law was passed. Speaking of which, if you can factually trace back your ancestry by genome mapping, I salute to you if none of your ancestors was an American black slaver or an African slave trader. Bear in mind, that people who can ask for reparations also have a right to know who took part in their enslavement which means you’d throw a lot of black people under the bus, because either their ancestor was a slaver or was raped by a slave owner. In other words, completely innocent people end up on the paying end if they’re the only living relatives.
I don’t see an inherent problem in the problem that you are not European, but I do see one in the fact you don’t know its history. Let me introduce you to the Baltic states, which did not exist as independent countries before 1918 (see Russian Empire) nor between 1939 and 1991 (see Soviet Union). The Gambia was a British colony in the 20th century until its independence. Which brings me to you not knowing the Treaty of Versailles. Not only has the German Empire lost all of its colonies, the following war reparations crippled the economy so far it has welcomed Nazism, and the Anschluss happened 5 years after that. To be fair, for 30 years the Habsburg Monarchy had a colony in Tientsin. Here comes the secret bonus round, the responsibility of the US. This should be a drinking game really. See, when new nation states were born in Europe with the help of Wilson, he had simultaneously denied the racial quality appeal of the Japanese. The problem isn’t that it preprogrammed the Pacific War, more like how Wilson was ignorant toward the promises made to China for its neutrality: the foreign concessions. The Japanese got almost all of it, except for the Shanghai International Settlement. You can, but shouldn’t ignore the fact, that black people able to escape the Jim Crow laws resettled in Europe and Asia as people were less racist. They paid taxes, so by your logic contributed to oppression.
You don’t understand how the EU works which again is a problem. It isn’t like only one party pays money, it’s a two way street, yet you guilt all of us, and like I said by that logic you should guilt every person who paid taxes in colonial empires. My other beef is that you’d be indiscriminate toward First Nations only because their ancestors held slaves.
I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt that you truly don’t like the violent option. When I say there are better options than reparations, I don’t say it out of a position of ignorance. If you take an objective look on reparations between any people outside your race, the connotation always is that a) it was a long time ago b) we have nothing to do with it c) heartless money grabbers d) what you’re claiming didn’t even happen. These range from the truly innocent through ignorant to downright racist. I’m not aware if you’re this young or this frustrated, but you should know that there are millions of people who deny certain genocides. May that be the Holodomor (in the Ukraine under Soviet rule) the Holocaust, Japanese war crimes or the Armenian genocide. Heck, white people hate on each other for something their great granddads did a century ago. What they have in common besides being acknowledged facts and thus in history books is how much people having perpetrator relatives deny it ever happened. You admire the Soviet better treatment of blacks (way to confuse propaganda with reality) yet unknowing about how Russian jail anyone for mentioning the Soviet cooperated with Nazis as a crime of denying Nazi acts. Yes, Soviet is already plural.
In short, you don’t seem to have a problem with a trial that lasts years, unearths unwanted secrets, even possibly about the families of victims, denigrates them into fictional con artists, and a horde of people will shout that the whole thing didn’t even happen. Even worse, you should be familiar with the fact, that alt-right circles push the statement that the “holohoax” only happened to make Israel. No sane person would wish Liberia getting the same treatment.
What would be better is something I already said: better funding for education, more jobs (not just unskilled ones), the de facto ending of real estate discrimination. It doesn’t matter what color of your skin has, if you can’t be responsible with money. Even though it would be a small minority, they’d burn through that, and Fox News would show, how all compensated people just want more, textbook counter productivity. Every ethnicity has poor people, but treating them as equal citizens is far better in my book.
You’ll have to pry my Lira from my cold dead hands. That is, after the Turkish government gives me reparations for evicting my family from our holdings in the 1800’s.
Jessie Foster, #61
Sticking perfectly to the white racist dude script.
There are other squares on the Bingo card too, you know.
It appears that we have someone with an impractical agenda who is preaching, not listening.
The descendants of Genghis Khan have a lot to answer for.
How far back are we going, and how specific? Do, for example, the descendants of the Mauryans need to pay back the Kalingans for the pogroms in the 2nd Century BCE? After all, the Mauryan empire certainly influenced the creation of the modern Republic of India – surely one could make the claim that the road to prominence was in part paved with Kalingan blood.
Thank you for your post, secondtofirstworld. I’d been working on what largely amounts to an unwieldy and inferior version of the same sort of argument.
~~~
Jessie Foster, by what measure do you ascertain, in your stated experience discussing calls for a race war with white supremacist alt-righters, that they only mean it ?
Watching two completely different attempts to derail this thread come into conflict is pretty entertaining.
On topic, people need to get over the idea that doing or saying something racist automatically makes one a terrible person. The appropriate reaction to be told “hey, that was racist” isn’t “I’m not a racist!”, but rather, “oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that.” Possibly followed up by “could you explain, so I know why it was racist?”
I had a fascinating conversation with a black co-worker about the word “cracker”, in which I discovered that the term actually had two etymologies, one among whites and one among blacks, and that the term was much more insulting when used by blacks than whites. Both versions come from the “crack” of a whip, but in the White version, it implied a wagon driver using a whip on horses and had the implication that one was a bit of a bumpkin. The Black version, of course, had the implication that one was a brutal slavemaster. I had no idea that this was the case, and I never would have learned about it if I hadn’t asked why my co-worker objected to the word. He felt it was too strong an insult to use casually, and White people using it to refer to themselves trivialized it’s meaning to Blacks. I saw his point, and I’ve tried to avoid using it.
Btw, that article written by Ta-Nehisi Coates that krsone linked to really is worth a read:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
Beatrice @99:
As is the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act (HR40), which has been proposed by Rep John Conyers in every Congressional term since 1989. Coates mentions it in that article.
@Saad
That religion and race are two different things is a factual statement. You know this. That you’re still using this tactic is a demonstration of how fundamentally dishonest you are. Fuck off.
@Arren
They troll a lot. They like to offend. The ones I’ve talked to who have elaborated in a serious way on their beliefs essentially want the world to be made up of ethno-states, with America and European countries for white people, African countries for black people, etc. Part of the reason they want this is to actually avoid a race war, as they believe that the close proximity of whites and non-whites inherently produces conflict and violence.
@101 Jessie Foster
This bring us full circle back to holding two ideas/positions at once (which you might argue is a reasonable definition of politics) and the positive role of cognitive dissonance
If Saad knows religion and race are different things, but argues from a position where the two are conflated, this isn’t necessarily dishonest. This may be necessary not just for rhetorical purposes, but for legitimate political ends.
I don’t think you should just discard it with a casual ‘fuck off’.
@102 Jessie Foster
“..the close proximity of whites and non-whites inherently produces conflict and violence.”
My partner and I resemble that remark…but we always seem to make up. Maybe if nations/cultures could just have make-up sex, we’d solve…ummm…everything!
Yeah, there’s no way a policy that does not directly target a race can be racist.
Voter ID laws and literacy tests aren’t racist because they’re only targeting identification and literacy, neither of which are a race.
Stop and frisk doctrines are ostensibly color-blind – they target criminals, and criminals are not a race. No way that can be racist, right?
So what if it disproportionately harms people of color? That’s irrelevant as long as it isn’t blatantly targetinging them as a stated goal.
(This is sarcasm)
Other not racist things:
The War on Drugs – Drug dealers/users are not a race.
The War on Terror – Terrorists are not a race
The Internment Camps – Potential Spies are not a race.
@Kimberly
I’m just frustrated because I’ve had this exact conversation with Saad before. It begins with him conflating religion and race in order to claim I’m racist. When I point out that religion and race aren’t the same thing, he does the “bingo card” response, as if knowing what someone is going to say ahead of time somehow renders their point invalid. The conversation never progresses beyond this point. I want to be charitable to most positions, but it just feels like I’m banging my head against the wall at this point.
@kimberly 107
No worries. Thanks for clarifying.
This comment thread is all the evidence you’ll ever need that the word ‘racist’ is in transition. It really does all come back to the meaning (or lack thereof) of the word ‘racist’; and largely the extent to which it is a noun or a verb.
The point of PZ’s OP is we’re all racist. And if you do a classical ingroup-affinity-outgroup-hostility analysis of any population, that’s exactly what you find. Problem is, you get stronger racism correlations (on this classical definition) from persons of colour. That’s where intersectionalism does the heavy lifting, by superimposing privilege and power axes on the racial sentiments charts.
Bottom line? We’re all racist – Saad is racist, as am I, as are you. Where we go to from there depends on the colour of your skin. This is not necessarily a bad thing (as might be your intuition, if you’re a left-leaning classical liberal).
@Vivec Erm… actually the plan to round up Hyphenated Americans into internment camps (which is today a crime against humanity) had backfired the most sanctimoniously with the Japanese. Why? For 2 reasons. After the Meiji Restoration began, the ruling class had realized, that there won’t be enough land for everyone, so before they started expansion by force, they did so bilateral agreements, which is how people ended up in America too. However unlike with the Italians and the Germans who held a strong connection towards their motherland, regardless how Americans mistreated Asian Americans, Japanese born in America, especially liberal ones did not feel that the home islands is their birthright. Now, Japanese spies started reconnaissance way back in 1870 in Asia, but it only went full speed after they secured Korea and parts of China.
So when all Japanese were interned together, they became exposed not just to the brutality of overseers (compassion sold separately, check your local catalogues for available stock) but also to actual spies, who had violently agitated among them. Kind of like closing in liberal religious people with extremist zealots, fun for the whole family. Last, but not least important. When your government depicts a war enemy as monkeys and rats, the excuse goes out the window, that it wasn’t racist.
The War on Terror, which isn’t even in use anymore should be renamed to A love letter to conflict: How I stopped bombing Afghanistan and looking for bin Laden, and started loving the new and unnecessary financially crippling war. For all those who preorder a special sneak is granted to follow up books like How the economic genius of turning corn into fuel instead of diabetes helped start turmoil in countries whose economies got crippled by spiking grain prices and gave birth to the Arab Spring or Remember that city from Libya that’s always on the news, but everyone forgot we launched bombers from there to annihilate the remaining oil reserves of the Third Reich?
On a more serious note, all these conflicts were just made worse by virtually making no viable plans and an exit strategy. Criminal enterprises like newer cartels and terrorist groups wouldn’t even exist had it not been for the first 2.
@Vivec
And racism was the actual reason behind a lot of those policies you listed. If you think I’m being motivated by some hidden agenda in order to deny brown people rights, I don’t really know what to say. I know that’s not my motivation, but you can’t read my mind.
Jessie Foster #102:
I’m familiar with their trolling and glee at giving offense, and contrary to your earlier outburst I don’t seek to .
Trolling is beside the point: claims such as that proponents of forcible ethnic separation are endemically disingenuous. This sort of deflection is a blatant cop-out deployed to make their fantasies less repugnant to neutral parties — more palatable to moderate white folk cognizant of racial strife yet ill-informed enough to entertain some Disneyfied fable of ethnic separation.
The history of ‘whiteness’ is as a fluid concept that morphs to serve the power-dynamics of elites at any given point in time. (Cf. the status of people of Irish and Italian descent in the U.S. over the course of the twentieth century.) Purporting the of whites vs. people of color as the impetus for conflict and violence is a willful equivocation, and a vile one at that. It is the very concept of ‘whiteness’ itself, the constructed exclusion and oppressive marginalization of the out-group that it entails, which inherently engenders conflict and perpetrates violence. (No, that doesn’t make us all evil villains. Yes, it does make us beneficiaries of systemic prejudice, and inheritors of a sordid and brutal legacy.)
Also: separating religious prejudice and racism in practice is not so straightforward. Your tactic of asserting their differing definitional categories as a conclusive is specious; the interplay between the two, particularly in contemporary U.S. culture*, is an ongoing phenomenon. Saad isn’t being , FFS, just brusquely dismissive. Vivec’s #105-106 cut incisively to the point without insulting you, perhaps you might try to give them a fair reading.
One does wonder why you so eagerly extend the benefit of the doubt to white supremacists, yet act the recalcitrant here while demonstrating ignorance of fundamental concepts regarding the nature and manifestation of race and prejudice. Folk here tend to respond with derision when someone parrots the micron-thin justifications of the alt-right, yet grasps pugnaciously at dictionary definitions in lieu of duly considering the other side.
(Thor only knows what whim has compelled me to take the time to explicate all this, when ordinarily I don’t even post — just another wasted hour in a life full of ’em, I guess. Take it or leave it — I’ve made an effort to respond to you in good faith.)
* (When textbook racism is popularly regarded as uncouth, other attributes are used as proxies for prejudice; in practice, these function as racism does. Again, see Vivec’s examples.)
@109
See the addendum at 105.
@110
Whether or not the intent behind those events is racist is impossible to tell without telepathy, unless you’re claiming that everyone who implements those policies does it for outwardly and ostensibly racist positions, which is a pretty fucking untenable position.
It’s also irrelevant. Those actions are racist by virtue of the fact that they primarily victimize and oppress people of color. It doesn’t matter what the stated goal of those policies are. Even if a hypothetical president put those in place with zero racist intent, they’d still be racist by effect.
Your and Harris’s little slimy “See we’re targeting Muslims so there’s no way this could possibly be a racist policy” defense is complete nonsense for this very same reason.
Given our standard TSA guidelines, which ostensibly are race-blind, people like me still get profiled.
When you tell the TSA to specifically focus on Muslims, most of which are people like me, you don’t think this might affect people of color more than white people?
Sorry, but if you think that, under this supposed screening guidelines, it’s going to affect more lily white businessmen than it will middle-eastern and asian people, you’re detached from reality.
@Arren comment 97: I don’t do this for my own benefit, and I think most of us also don’t do that either. What I want to make clear is that my problem isn’t the idea, but the execution. Congress wanted to pass a law so they can sue Saudi Arabia for 9/11, but the commander in chief warned them it would open the floodgates for the US being sued. What supporters of reparation ignore, even unintentionally are a couple of things:
1. Even though Obama is a right centrist, he’s not as liberal as to not say no to the plight of people born as American nationals. Such people can serve and die for the country, but they can’t become its citizens based on a highly racist law of 1908. This situation would get even more attention, if the Samoan American Dwayne Johnson had been born there, and the world would learn about how you can be born American, and still don’t become a citizen.
2. Pursuing and trying crime committed by people not living on reservation territory against people in reservations is fodder for discrimination. Belongs to the series where crime against American citizens can be committed, and it’s either tolerated or downright not pursued, something people of color understand very well.
3. Now this last one is a real dozy. There is but a limited reliable information on the persons falling victim to the Atlantic Triangle, as most perpetrators had forcefully gave christened names much closer to their own culture. Mary the cook might have been born in Mali, but there is little to no paper trail. If the US could be sued for slavery… the ones doing it are African governments. So, not only does that strip the actual descendants of victims from moral relief, this is but the first knife in the back. I guess we’re all aware how some African countries aren’t fans of human rights and president for life (in some cases, emperor) has became the most identifiable pieces of oppressive regimes. In other words, financial compensation would flow to finance child soldiers, that I’m guessing isn’t the goal of supporters of reparations. The second knife, the amount of compensation. African governments can settle for an agreed sum with the clause that no further financial claims are being brought forth on the same evidence, in conform with the constitution, that no same case can be tried twice. In other words, Jamarcus’ case won’t be heard before the Supreme Court because his ancestors were citizens of a kingdom/empire that has a legal contemporary successor, and the issue was settled.
What remains is to sue said African government, which is legally possible, but isn’t viable. As current descendants of former slaves are now US citizens, even if they present irrefutable genetic evidence, the basis of the claim of the reparation was the ancestor who wasn’t an US citizen, and his suffering was compensated. In theory they could put the compensation in a trust fostering children’s education who’re of African origin globally, but in reality I will remain in a fencer’s stance until Mugabe does it.
I’ve seen a fellow geopolitically Eastern commenter here, I’m guessing he’s aware how their reparation went down with those lovely coupons. The former Habsburg Monarchy has successor countries brimmed full with people who decry the other nations as having more bloodthirsty ancestors and still fight over issues which happened a century ago. Nevertheless, acquiring compensation from a neighboring country for deportation? Hell freezes over sooner. People damn bicker about how much minority language can be used, when they aren’t preoccupied with demanding territory back. Ever heard the joke when an Ukrainian, a Romanian and a Hungarian walks into a bar? You don’t because they kill each other before entering over the disagreement to whom the Ruthenian lands belong. In case an American reads this, it’s like those Mexicans who demand land lost in 1846, only we are all those Mexicans around each other. Lumping us together with Western Europeans who don’t have such conflicts since ’45 on the grounds of being white is unfair to both sides. This is one of the million reasons I moved.
When I claim not doing racist thing, it’s not for my own benefit, not for the benefit of people of color, but the benefit of individual merit. I don’t wish to patronize, to claim having all the answers or being smarter. Here’s where people from behind the Iron Curtain and American non-white ethnicities have in common: when we gained freedom, we got separated from others, we knew and know as much about them as they know about us. Before we gained said freedom, they turned water hoses, guns and batons on us. We both had elites that seemed to care more about the plight about the oppressed of others than that of their own. Both elites were driven by the privilege that they possess something which places them over us. We’ve both seen change but we did not know, only perhaps felt, that the change served the purpose of feeling better with a specially selected few. We both can get so frustrated to the point we ignore people in similar shoes, which is something only those can understand who felt the same frustration.
“We shall overcome” only works if we accept that people are capable for change. Real change only happens when bigotry does not enjoy popular support anymore. Yet to embrace the change of the other side only works if we change as well, because if we get stuck at the point of “they will use us, betray us and then drop us”, we are doomed to regurgitate things happened a century ago, and never examine any mistake we might make. The issue is global, Schumer is just a symptom of a much deeper underlying problem. This might seem pretentious, but the handshake, the ultimate sign of trust begun as a token toward the other party: I don’t hold a secret dagger up in my sleeve.
Okay, let’s take this analogy at face value.
Is a person who receives stolen property a criminal? Of course.
Is the temp worker who gets hired to fill the position of someone who’s temporarily disabled because of, say, an assault or a drunk driver hitting their car also a criminal?
Thinking things through, how does it work?
Looks like I’ll be bookmarking this comment to refute a few “NO ONE EVER SAID THAT”s in the future…
*keeps scrolling down* oh, hey, doesn’t this blog have a policy about threats of violence?
@Arren
I do not care if accurately portraying a group’s beliefs makes them less repugnant to moderates.
@Vivec
“Even if a hypothetical president put those in place with zero racist intent, they’d still be racist by effect.”
Would that president then be a racist? Does intent matter to you?
Yes and no, respectively.
What is the tangible difference between swearing up and down that your profiling has no racist intent and a conservative lawmaker swearing up and down that voter ID laws have no racist intent, given that I have no telepathy to tell your supposed sincerity from their supposed insincerity?
To be fair, I would already consider that president racist before they put said policy in place, just slightly moreso afterwards.
@Vivec
See which motivation makes sense. Is it likely that your conservative lawmaker is extremely concerned about voter fraud? Is it likely that I have a hidden agenda to slightly delay how quickly brown people can get through airport security?
Do your views apply only in a larger systemic context? Is a drunk driver who hits and kills a black person just as racist as someone who kills a black person because he hates black people?
Do I give a shit? Will his good intent somehow un-disenfranchise people of color from voting? Will your good intent somehow prevent the already-blatantly-biased TSA make them profile me and people like me less?
I am indeed primarily talking about systemic racism. That being said, I would indeed hold, as I said above, that all parties involved would be racist to some degree.
Jessie Foster, #110:
The listed policies have (or had) a disproportionately negative effect on people of a particular race. Those effects are what make them racist, not “the actual reason behind” them which is irrelevant.
You thought it was important enough to mention that we can’t read your mind. So, actually stop for a moment and consider all of the implications of the fact that we can’t read your mind. Your criteria for racism/etc. depend on it, and that is what makes them utterly useless. Try to understand what that is so. For one thing, as I’m sure understand, it gives you deniability, which you may or may not use to shield yourself from criticism. But more importantly, we shouldn’t care what you can or can’t deny, what may be hidden away in your mind, or what might have motivated you to do anything. So your shield from criticism is also useless, because it’s not protecting the real target. What you really meant to do helps no one determine whether a policy or action is bad. Something like that is bad by virtue of the fact that it’s unfair and harmful to people, not because you meant it to be so (or meant it to be anything else).
When you act, you may not be acting on good information, for instance, in which case your intentions are not a reliable indicator of what actually will occur. You may also believe that you have good intentions, when that is also not the case. Your intentions and beliefs are not necessarily or inherently true or veridical, and there is no need whatsoever for us to treat them as if they were.
So, we shouldn’t be impressed by what your intentions actually are, whether or not we can determine them, whether or not you’re willing to honestly share them with us, examine them critically for yourself, etc. Whatever they may be, they simply don’t make a difference with regard to the negative (or positive) effects that people ought to be concerned about. When we’re trying to affect what actually happens, in a way that will make some kind of tangible positive change to real people, reading your mind would have no valid place in that process even if it is something we could do.
Of course it isn’t even something we can do, so we could’ve skipped a lot much of this line of thought by simply noting that your recommended approach is literally impossible for anyone to actually use, by your own admission.
Do you often tell people that we can’t justifiably do anything about immoral or criminal activity, that we can’t make any conclusions about what happened or whether an action even counts wrong, because a criminal’s mind is inaccessible to other people? How much do you think everyone would ridicule that claim if you did make it?
Or does this absurd idea only get trotted out when the subject is racism or other forms of bigotry? If so, why? Because somebody taught you a definition of “racism” one time, and you never thought it worthwhile to question it? Why not start questioning it now, since you say you’re a college student and have plenty of time to rethink your position? Is that something you have a responsibility to do: questioning your own beliefs and what you try to convince others to believe?
@Vivec
The intent of a policy gives you some idea for how it will be implemented, and also for how those in authority will or wont respond to unforeseen (or foreseen) effects of the policy.
Ironically, it’s a pretty solid commonality between Jessie and most Conservatives that they’ve defined racism so narrowly that almost nothing qualifies save a KKK member in full regalia shouting “I AM GOING TO KILL THIS BLACK MAN FOR BEING BLACK” before doing it.
Even then, said KKK member might have actually had the intent to rid their country of a dangerous thug, so it still might not qualify as racist given that standard.
Unfortunately, us mere mortals lack the mind-reading powers required to tell a conservative lawmaker that legitimately believes in these policies from one that is only lying and actually has racist reasoning.
What we do know is that all of the policies I mentioned did have disproportionately (or solely) negative affects on people of color, every time they’ve been put into place.
Reasoning from the outcomes to the idea that the lawmakers put these policies in place for ostensibly racist reasons is an unjustified conclusion.
@Vivec
Racism is prejudice or discrimination based on race.
I do not accept that definition.
Amazing thread. I hope I get more time in here tomorrow.
@Jessie Foster
So it’s racist to focus on race when studying a problem that disproportionately affects a race?
None of you can read my mind, which means you have to use something I’ve said here as evidence that I’m racist. Speculating about a hypothetical unforeseen and unintended side effect to a hypothetical policy which I don’t even believe could be practically implemented is, I think, insufficient evidence to prove this. If you don’t have evidence, you don’t get to posit your desired conclusion.
You should do what you can to make the world a fairer place.
If you support the “War on Drugs” (for example), and you find that it affects a certain group unfairly, you should stop supporting it, in favor of other policies that would fairly address problems related to drug abuse.
Do you agree with those statements and many others like them, Jessie Foster? I’m not in the mood right now to have an argument with a dictionary about a hypothetical and unidentifiable human property that has no observable effect nor any practical significance. I may never be in a mood like that.
@Vivec
That’s the definition I’m using. That’s the standard usage of the word.
@Brony
No, it’s not.
Indeed, and your continued support for a policy that would almost certainly increase the unfair profiling faced by people of color in airports is more than sufficient.
The proof of the racism is in the support for a racist policy, to paraphrase the idiom.
@CR
Policies which have an overall harmful effect are bad.
Racism isn’t hypothetical, it isn’t unidentifiable, it has observable effects, and it has immense practical significance.
You claimed that mind-reading is the appropriate procedure: that is how “racism” would be determined, if it were something that we could do. If you merely said something, how am I to know that it expresses what you really think?
Either it is justifiable to use evidence that does not involve mind-reading, or it is not. Pick one or the other, not both.
If what you’re saying is supposed to be contradictory, then it’s trivial to show that what you’re saying must be false. I don’t think that’s the conclusion you wanted us to reach. Or probably, you wanted us to work a little harder to demonstrate that to you. So try again.
It’s a definition so reductionist that you could drown it in a thimble, and fails to reflect the actual systemic actions and beliefs that underlie your bullshit definition.
If that’s the definition you’re relying on, I reject it out of hand. Playing the semantics card doesn’t fly.
I asked you to tell me whether or not you agree with those statements. It’s not clear to me that you do. Just two yes/no questions, that’s all.
@CR
131: Yes.
135: You can make a plausible conclusion about how racist someone is based on what they say and do. In the absence of evidence, it is unfair to conclude someone is racist.
@Vivec
I don’t care. I reject nonsense definitions which include ideas like “unintentional racism.” Guess we’re done here.
Guess so. Always the last resort of a losing debater to play the scorched Earth semantics card, especially in a way so idiotic that the entire sociology department I work with just got spontaneous migraines.
Spoiler alert, there’s a wealth of theoretical and experimental research behind mine. That you throw that out in favor of the shitty layperson definition shows how ultimately vapid “thinkers” like you and Harris are.
In other news, forget getting a bingo, I damn near filled in the whole card.
@Vivec
Lmfao. Your sociology department making up new definitions to push their political agenda isn’t “research,” it’s a fucking circle jerk.
Ah yes, that “new definition” that was ancient by the 1970’s. Truly a bleeding edge neologism.
Also, thanks for filling in another box.
Jessie Foster
Provide your definition of “race”.
The one you use without googling.
@Vivec
“Also, thanks for filling in another box.”
There are people who have raised similar points to you, therefore those points are wrong. Fucking flawless logic.
That you’re guaranteeing me a win in “Conservative atheist bingo” has nothing to do with your points being wrong. They’re wrong irrespective of that.
@Chigau
Um, groups who share certain specific physical traits. There’s more to it than that, but I’m finding it kinda hard to adequately put the concept into words.
@Vivec
Tactic of dismissal. Sorta like calling someone a cuck.
So you agree that unfair behaviors/policies like that are immoral, or in other words that you should not support them. What makes it so is that they have effects that are unfair to different groups of people (in this case, different races), independently of whatever the intention may or may be.
If it is not the purpose of the War on Drugs to hurt black people more than others, if that is not what any legislator/agency/voter/etc. meant for it to do,* it nevertheless does do that, as a matter of fact, a fact which can be determined by the public through non-psychic means, in order to know what they should or should not support in a democratic society. You can decide it is unfair through some physical process of obtaining information about what happens in the real world, and then you can decide to do something about that (through voting, influencing others, etc.). There’s no need to appeal to any fictions about mind-reading here. That doesn’t play a role in anyone’s actual evaluations of a policy or behavior (even if they falsely believe they’re psychics). What actually matters is the effect it has on real people.
So, because it is unfair, you should not support it. That’s all you were given, and it was enough for you to agree with me about the right conclusion to make. That’s a perfectly coherent and sensible reason for making that decision. It’s hard to imagine any reason why you’d think it wouldn’t be — the fact that you’re not offering reasons for that, just asserting it, makes your claims unreasonable.
*Notice how many people I had to bring into this. Whose intentions were we supposed to be mind-reading here anyway? Which person? You? The President? A particular legislator? A particular lobbyist? This person in this agency which enforces it this way? Some other person in a possibly different agency? This fraction of the electorate who thought it was supposed to be aimed at black people? The remainder of the electorate which thought otherwise? What sense does it make to attribute it one way or another like this, since there’s obviously no need for any of them to have the same conception of what the purpose was supposed to be? Why would anyone be interested in answering questions like that, when there’s a legitimate problem with the policy and any conceivable answer would not help us at all to address that problem?
Are your preposterous arguments about the “meaning of racism” making the world a fairer place for everyone, or are they at best a distraction and a source of confusion?
Here is Jessie Foster #148 defining “race”:
festering fucknuggets
In case you missed it, Vivec at #141, that’s some shit epistemology. Probably already had that one, but I guess it may count if you’re going to play another round.
I wonder how we know what agenda a group has… Is that different from an intention? Somebody get John Edward on the phone. I’m sure he knows all about why people make definitions and how much stock sociology departments put into them.
I’m not dissmissing you because you’re a rediculously predictable harrisite, I’m dismissing you because you jump ship from each of your failed points like the first white chick off the titanic, culminating with some idiotic semantic argument.
The rest is just some added mockery, because damn if it isn’t fun to make fun of Harrisites.
@CR
I don’t view policies which effect one racial group more than another as inherently racist. That doesn’t mean they’re good. There is no racist/good dichotomy.
As I said, so narrowly defined you’d have to dress up in full KKK regalia and announce your intent to murder before it counts.
@Vivec
So broadly defined, literally every bad thing that has ever happened to anyone (except whites, obv) is a product of racism. A drunk driver hitting a black guy with his car is an example of racism. I wonder why your definition of racism hasn’t caught on in the mainstream (and never will).
Jessie Foster
ff
It actually wouldn’t, but I’ll be charitable and assume you’re misreading my post @122 rather than just being disingenuous. I was referring to upthread, wherein I stated that all USians would be racist qua USians.
Hence “all involved parties would be racist to some degree”.
Color me unsurprised that a specific field’s term of art hasn’t caught on with the mainstream. Next you’ll tell me that that the average layperson can’t explain Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.
Also really primo bandwagon fallacy there. Good hustle.
Assuming you oppose racism, what is your reason for opposing racism? Make the case for me, step by step, and be as clear as you possibly can. Or of course at any time you could just stop bullshitting us. But that said, I do encourage you to make the case and actually attempt to explain yourself. It could be helpful.
Along the way, I’d like to understand what “being inherently racist” involves, which I might be able to apply to some real world example. What does it mean? When does something qualify as “inherently racist”? Should we be considering things which are racist and not “inherently” so? You’ve just implied there are such things, so apparently we should be….
If I’m not inherently covered in green goo, could it still be the case that I’m covered in green goo? Yes, that’s how the word is used.
So, you claim having a better/worse effect (not “more” of an effect, whatever that would mean) on different racial groups isn’t “inherently racist.” It may be, you claim, but not necessarily. So, what the fuck are you telling me here? Do you have any reason at all for thinking that? Maybe you could tell us how your reasoning is supposed to be working.
And again: when would something be “inherently racist”? Should we care about things that are racist and not inherently racist? I would not prefer to be covered in green goo, for example, and it’s no consolation to me to be informed that it isn’t inherent to me being what I am that I’m covered in green goo. Still covered in the good, still a problem, so who gives a shit even if you did have a coherent point that you were actually going to make?
I do know very well that there are bad things which are not racist-bad things. Is that all you meant by your “racist/good dichotomy” remark? What is the sense in telling me something like that?
@Vivec
Because there have been no attempts by the highly activist driven social sciences to establish this understanding of the word in the mainstream. It hasn’t caught on because it’s fucking laughable. It gets shredded whenever it leaves extreme left circles.
Irrelevant even if true. How many people accept a claim has no bearing on whether or not it is true.
@Vivec
I don’t know what claim you could possibly be making. There aren’t “true” definitions of words. Definitions reflect usage.
The soundness of a definition – that the phenomenon described by that definition is a thing that actually occurs – is unaffected by how many people accept that definition.
Work a little better for you?
@CR
“Make the case for me, step by step, and be as clear as you possibly can.”
People cannot choose their race.
A person’s race does not determine their character.
It is therefore unfair to treat someone differently because of their race.
“So, what the fuck are you telling me here?”
Racism is a belief.
“Racism” does not exist outside of the belief of racism. Racism is not a thing floating out in the universe somewhere.
Actions done without the belief of racism are not racist. Even actions which may disproportionately affect a race.
@Vivec
Want to give your definition?
krsone @78
Technically, we were under German rule at the time, and not an independent nation, so we’re just going to defer this one to the Germans.
Also you forgot Tobago.
Agree, what Latvia does when the Germans are in town isn’t dinner-time stuff!
So it’s wrong to be racist, because it is treating people unfairly.
Yet you also claimed that racially-unfair policies, which are doing exactly that, are not inherently racist. Did you just happen to oppose those for some other nonsensical reason, or is this going anywhere in particular.
According to your definition.
According to your definition. Obviously, necessarily, incontestably true, by definition. No one can even imagine disagreeing with your fantastic definition, because it’s so definitionally definitional.
So your entire complaint here has been that you have a definition, and that this doesn’t match your definition. Way to waste a few hours on a load of horseshit.
You came to a conclusion about yourself, all the way up in #26. Do you think it was a statement about the real world, which may or may not be true of that world, that you aren’t racist? Or do you think it simply derives from an arbitrary, vacuous, self-serving definition that nobody has any reason to take seriously?
Somehow you think that what we’ve been talking about, what “extreme left circles” talk about, what sociology departments conspire about when constructing their nefarious political agendas, has been shredded everywhere it appears. I’ve yet to see evidence of that. Anyway, you seem to be shredding your own ideas without any help from us.
Have you ever considered listening attentively to any non-white person, to ask them what it is like in their experience? They of course have many different perspectives, but that kind of information is very well publicized all over the place, if you’re having trouble contacting your black friend.
Maybe you haven’t been deliberately ignoring them, but you should consider the possibility that you may not be an authority on the subject. You may have something to learn — and more than that, you should consider that there is something to learn, as it is an empirical feature of the natural world, which couldn’t be derived strictly from the definition of a word that you conveniently pulled out of your ass.
It’s like we’re having a fucking ontological argument here, and you just keep telling me over and fucking over that God is defined as “a being than which no greater can be conceived.” Yeah, I read your fucking definition. Doesn’t prove shit, asshole, and it makes no fucking sense to think that it would. That’s not a thing that they can do. Do you understand?
Jessie Foster @ 164:
So unless we know, with absolute certainty, that someone who performs an action which impacts negatively on a certain group of people is performing that action, with malice aforethought, in order to deliberately and purposefully cause that negative effect, we can’t accuse that person of performing a racist act?
Congratulations, you’ve just proved Vivec right.
* Pays $10 to Vivec *
Whereas my definition of a racist act is this: an act, performed either directly or indirectly, by a powerful group, which impacts another group in a negative fashion due to the racial identity of either the powerful group in question, or due to the racial identity of the second group. Note the inclusion of power in the dynamic. This is why so-called “reverse racism” against white people doesn’t qualify in most Western societies – white people are positioned at the top of the racial/ethnic power differential, and thus have the greater leverage to apply to their actions. The person at the top of the mountain who dislodges a pebble can cause more damage to people at the bottom of the mountain than the person at the bottom of the mountain armed with a trebuchet can cause to people at the top.
@rq comment 166: Pointing out some of the mistakes, which I’ve also did would still validate the point he’s making. If you scoured through the whole thing, you know, he still has you on the hook as an EU country citizen, grossly negating the fact, that all countries not only receive money from cohesion funds, but also put money into it. Take note, that it was argued Austria became part of the same exploitation with the Anschluss without understanding why that happened.
Anyone who knows about the Baltic states, also know that despite sharing cultural heritage with Germany, Poland, Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine, they still wanted national independence by 1918. Austria on the other hand was part of a country which has forcefully secluded itself from the ideas of the French Enlightenment and thus had no clear roots in what being a sovereign nation means, evident to anyone, who knows the Prussians winning the war of 1866 over the joint Bavarian-Habsburg alliance paved the way not just for leading all Germans, but also to have a colonial empire. The same sentiment can be seen in the unrecognized Donbass Republic, ethnic Russians were planted there by Stalin and they feel no connection to the country they actually belong to hence their separatist sentiments.
@Vivec comment 112: My bad, I missed seeing that we represent the same side with differing arguments.
@Meg Thornton comment 169: I get what you’re saying but it still needs focusing. The people on the titular top of that mountain are what Americans like to call WASP. Remember when JFK ran for the presidency, and the GOP painted the horrific picture, that he will accept orders from Rome?
I could mention the real estate market. True, people of color had little to no chance of getting loans, and who could move away fell into zones so that they can’t interact with the majority. However this does not negate the forceful assimilation, whereby people changed names and identities to appear more employable. It’s not like Irish need not apply wasn’t a thing. In other words, undue discrimination became illegal which had also helped white ethnicities. If one has Eastern European ancestors, the bare minimum is, and that’s today, that in alt-right circles you aren’t considered white, but before the CRA so did the whole country. The variation is in the degrees, but the intent is the same.
Lastly, it’s very misleading to say that belonging to a group without power exempts you from acts, like racism or even sexism. It would exonerate misogyny, misandry, and wouldn’t tackle issues, like the distrust between Korean Americans and African Americans. There are 3 types of power in America, you can elect, you can be elected, and you can own a gun. The lone gunman, a former disgruntled TV station employee killed a reporter and a cameraman for racial reasons. In his case, the power came from lethal force. It’s of course not systemic, but the intent was the same, exerting power over real and perceived shortcomings.
A whole lot of white people (probably the majority) fall into Jessie Foster’s category of racist. I like to call them the moderate racists. They define racism as being about slavery, lynching, explicit discrimination and belonging to the KKK. Then they conveniently use the definition to exclude themselves from the group and brand themselves as “definitely not racist” and proceed to whitesplain as POC are trying to tell them they’re blinded by privilege and explain to them what racism truly is (from lived experience and sensitivity to racism due to their backgrounds).
The “MLK Jr said to be nice to me” white people also fall in the moderate racists category.
@Saad comment 172: You’re describing the difference between a liberal and a progressive. You have every right to fault Northerners for not being aware on how anti-discrimination laws excluded states upward the Mason-Dixon line. You have also every right to proclaim the reason why racial minorities live separately isn’t because they hate them, rather due to lack in social mobility.
However… you can’t and shouldn’t be blind to the fact, that lack in access to such resources affect racial minorities in a different way. A girl, let’s call her Michaela, is African American, her grandfather was a priest, her mother diligently goes to church every Sunday. Michaela is a lesbian. The point I’m getting is that you formulate your statement in a blanket form, and disregard the fact that sexual minorities within racial minorities don’t enjoy the same support. Not just that, how about Creflo Dollar and James David Manning? If you said, this can only happen because racial minorities were disproportionately lumped together falling victim to exploiters, you’re right, but that doesn’t explain why in 2016 Dollar still can be a clergyman, when he’s clearly not about faith.
I contest the idea, that MLK Jr (the actual person, not the legend) and other priests would have accepted the LGBT community. Yes, you could argue, that white people not actually knowing minorities might support the cause to make themselves feel better. Yet, there is such a thing as a Dunbar-number which stipulates you can only truly know a maximum of 150 people in your life. Wanting to know more about the rest of the world is individual incentive. With the best of intentions you still can run into barely known plights of others, like the Sikh community, a religion based on not harming others, branded as terrorists in their native India (because ethnic profiling became illegal, but they still hate them) only to be attacked in America for being perceived as Muslims, unfortunately not just by white people.
The second somebody separates discrimination from discrimination based on who was how long affected becomes partially blind to the fact that the intent behind discrimination remains the same, namely ignoring and forcefully assimilating everything that is different.
@Jessie Foster
But don’t you see that focusing on race for the purposes of studying a problem that affects a race is discrimination based on race?
Your definition needs modification and it’s no coincidence that I’ve had problems on Facebook with people explicitly saying that any focus on race is racism. To some people limiting racism to that is a tactic.
Since you seem to have a problem with the definitions here why don’t you offer one that excludes the above and includes things that you see as racism. Let me be clear as a socially impulsive white person, fuck the opinions of people who don’t like certain definitions of racism. If their definitions do not address the phemonena in useful terms I really don’t care how they feel about it. I’m not convinced the dislike has any legitimate source and people like me will simply continue to use definitions that usefully address racism as it is actually expressed.
I have more when I get off of work.
secondtofirstworld, #173
Did you mean to address your post to me? I’m sorry, I can’t tell which part of my #172 your post is addressing.
@Saad The whole of #172, actually. My point is that you have valid arguments, but in its delivery you narrow it to the majority, when the intent itself in the case of racism and other issues is still relevant. For example, it wouldn’t be a lie to say that a devout African American/black (whichever you prefer) Christian would marry their daughter to a Jewish person due to the long standing belief they were responsible for the death of Jesus. Progressives always are ahead of time, depending on which time period socially their community exists in. Whereas a liberal adapts to the customs of the time, I give you freedom, but don’t you dare marry my daughter.
I’m unaware of the social dynamics that kept Manning in power, and it still does for Dollar. I know that white televangelists can keep making money because their flock literally believes in plan god supposedly laid out for them. Clergymen asking for seed money regardless of race only look out for themselves, and quite frankly in many countries it’s illegal. This practice exploits the weak and the poor.
I’m in the know about how white supremacists like to claim how their ancestors were less guilty than say, black slavers. It’s bovine manure of the highest caliber, but it does address, that once individuality can be freely exercised, it will also become individual if a formerly oppressed wishes to help others or jump on the bandwagon and exploit them. You can’t deny, that both the exploitation of racial minorities exercised by white people is just as diversely criticized, as is the exploitation of racial minorities by the members of racial minorities, the difference between a liberal and a progressive.
If you had watched the show shortly before it was cancelled, The Nightly Show even made a “funny because it’s true” joke about how they spoke more about Trump than about the crisis in Michigan which is still ongoing, and forms part of a larger problem on how lead paint wasn’t outlawed 90 years ago as it should have been. It was a racist policy, but it did affect everyone.
I still cant get over the fact that like, considering the most archetypally racist policies in history racist is supposedly some kind of academic circle jerk and not common knowledge.
That the HOLC and the FHA was racist was apparently uncontroversial enough to go in my 8th grade history textbook, and I bet you a hundred dollars the majority of people would answer “do you believe that categorically denying people of color financial aid and loan assistance is a racist policy” with a “Yes, no shit.”
But lmao sure. Us ivory tower liberals gotta be making up definitions to push our agenda – unlike your definitions, which are presumably freshly grown in an organic farm and free of any possible agenda.
You and Harris need to get back to the philosophy department and resume JAQing off to the trolley problem in peace.
secondtofirstworld, #176
I’m even more confused now. I’m not disagreeing with your posts. They just have nothing to do with what I wrote in post #172. I can’t even think of a loose interpretation of my post which would then make your posts relevant to it.
@Saad
“A whole lot of white people (probably the majority) fall into Jessie Foster’s category of racist. I like to call them the moderate racists. They define racism as being about slavery, lynching, explicit discrimination and belonging to the KKK.”
I’m not white, bud. That’s not how I’ve defined racism either.
@CR
“Yet you also claimed that racially-unfair policies, which are doing exactly that, are not inherently racist.”
Err, not everything unfair is racist. Racism is unfair, but those two words are not synonymous.
“According to your definition. Obviously, necessarily, incontestably true, by definition. No one can even imagine disagreeing with your fantastic definition”
Standard English definition. If you want to talk about racism outside of belief, outside of human agency, you’re not making sense. Are hurricanes racist?
“Or do you think it simply derives from an arbitrary, vacuous, self-serving definition that nobody has any reason to take seriously?”
The only people who don’t take that definition seriously do so for political reasons. They’re a fringe minority of a SINGLE political viewpoint.
“Have you ever considered listening attentively to any non-white person, to ask them what it is like in their experience?”
So I’m not denying the existence of racism. One of my friends parents was an executive at a fairly large corporation. He was also black. Their family moved out to the company HQ in Atlanta, and after a few years he actually stepped down from his position because of the frequency with which he had to deal with racism. I don’t know for sure, but I think some of that racism may have been tied to the fact that he was married to a white woman. So I know how pervasive racism can be. Their family was considerably wealthy, much more so than mine, but that wealth still wasn’t a shield against racism.
That’s pretty fucking rich.
“My narrative lends evidence to my conception of racism, but fifty-plus years of empirical research behind yours still amounts to nothing but an ivory tower circle jerk.”
@Meg
That’s a good description of systemic oppression, but racism can happen on an individual basis also. Your inclusion of “power” into the definition in no way disqualifies racism against white people either. That is, unless you deny that one individual can have power over another individual, which is a pretty fucking untenable position. Not every white person has more power than every black person. President Obama has more power than a homeless white dude living under a bridge.
Gee, not from what I see. You deny evidence of the reality of the residual institutionalized racism. We aren’t a post racist society until the results for all “races” are the same. We have a long ways to go before that is reality.
@Vivec
Research into what? Describe the fucking valid scientific process behind appropriating a charged word and changing it’s definition to better suit your political agenda.
@Brony
Sorry, I don’t really understand what you’re trying to get at. I think there may be a misunderstanding somewhere.
@Nerd
“We aren’t a post racist society until the results for all “races” are the same.”
Opportunities. I don’t want literal communism, thanks.
Jessie, I think I see your problem.
When you say: “President Obama has more power than a homeless white dude living under a bridge.” That is undoubtedly true. However, the white homeless dude under the bridge would not have Joe Wilson yelling out, “You lie,” long before he had even had any opportunity to lie. He would not have had the Senate Minority/Majority leader saying that it was his top priority to see to it that he failed. Such overt disrespect to a President of the United States was unprecedented. It showed that they thought they could get away with any insult with impunity, because of the color of Barrack Obama’s skin.
It is not just power that matters, but also privilege. An imbecile occupying the oval office (who went by W) got more respect than a brilliant constitutional scholar who happened to be black. THAT is racism, and so is the fact they they thought they could get away with it.
Jesse, how do you judge the opportunities if you don’t look at results.
@Saad comment 178: Americans, by which I mean all Americans are descendants of every existing and defunct country on Earth. The level of differences between ignorance, racism and plain lack of information can be traced back to a culture it came from. By the beginning of the last century this became so evident, that the subject of the so called Hyphenated Americans formed part of a presidential debate. They of course meant people born American but allegedly feeling more connection to their motherland.
Take the incorporation of territories (Montana, Wyoming, Indiana, etc.) for example where new immigrants had neither owned slaves, nor took part in slaughtering Native Americans. Like Scandinavian immigrants, or Eastern Europeans. Since their descendants still live there, and those states are predominantly white there isn’t much how they can relate to problems in Detroit, St. Louis or even Montgomery. Almost as if it wasn’t and isn’t the same country. To an extent it wasn’t since quite a few didn’t even exist when the Civil War happened. Unfortunately it leads to cases, where a Northerner flies the Confederate flag (what they perceive as such) because the only information he knows about minorities is what his favorite host tells them on Sirius.
That is as equally bad as living in a city where you don’t meet white people and other races. Certainly, there are different reasons on what constitutes as a “flyover state” and why poor minorities can’t move. Yet, especially today, social media only parrots what many already want to hear, as if you don’t live in the same country, hitherto this contributes to people only knowing about AP History as much they were willing to listen to and were taught. I don’t wonder why 8 people have 10 definitions on what constitutes as racism.
@a_ray_in_dilbert_space
“An imbecile occupying the oval office (who went by W) got more respect than a brilliant constitutional scholar who happened to be black.”
Maybe. But it’s also worthy to note that Obama’s approval numbers are more than twice as high as Bush’s approval numbers when he left office.
“Jesse, how do you judge the opportunities if you don’t look at results.”
By eliminating institutional barriers. America has a lot of different cultures with different values and priorities. I don’t expect everyone to turn out exactly the same. I don’t expect the racial distribution across every field to be directly proportional to the demographics of the United States.
Because, as we all know, it is a rare occurrence for a field to re-purpose a word with a different lay definition
Why not? Given that there is barely any biological difference between races, and given that these are ostensibly US citizens within the same culture, why should there be a disproportionate distribution of races into professions?
Spoiler alert: There are structural forces and cultural biases at work beyond simple person to person racism that leads to unequal results
@Vivec
Give your definition.
@Jessie Foster comment 186: You don’t seem to see the trend that is happening, but I’m partially happy you brought up communism.
The highly revered civil rights victories, that are law of the land came about during the Cold War. Regardless how overtly or subtly racist a congressperson was, even they agreed they had to curb alt-left movements from gaining popular support, which is why no matter how begrudgingly but they bowed to the will of the public. Cut to the Clinton presidency, or shall I say post-Reagan republicanism, and Gingrich started passionately the lead on the reversal of said civil rights. Partner to this is and was Scalia and Thomas, 2 constitutional purists who wish the country to be only ruled by the original 3 founding documents (DOI, USC, BOR).
This brought don’t ask don’t tell, DOMA, voting rights acts, Citizens United (a legal nonsense in other judicial systems), Hobby Lobby, defunding social programs, most if not all aimed at disenfranchising minorities.
Even those who do get in, many are still bound by lacking finances, so some of them get in on sport scholarships where they don’t actually get a valuable education. This doesn’t even mention how much money is being made from college sports, where players don’t even have the right to their own image.
How is any of that an equal opportunity? If people meant equal opportunity, why had SCOTUS heard a case about a white person suing the quota system designed for minorities, when said person actually got into an equally good school, but failed to be in the top 10 percent of her year, that granted those places? If there’s a security theater, this is a compassion theater, where players stopped pretending they’re willing to give an equal opportunity to all Americans.
Why? You’ve already dismissed my field as politically charged circle jerking. I have no reason to engage with you as if you’re an honest party. I’m just mocking you, by this point.
@Vivec
“these are ostensibly US citizens within the same culture”
The United States is one of the most culturally diverse countries on the planet. “Same culture” isn’t true.
@Vivec
Whatever, if you’re too embarrassed to actually type it out, fuck off and stop wasting my time.
Socio-neurological studies have shown that US citizens and long term US immigrants from disparate cultures show distinct commonalities in brain function that are not shared by their countries of origin and cannot be explained by neurological structure. This does, in fact, indicate that a measurable, gestalt culture exists among US citizens and has an effect on cognition.
Unfortunately, this is not your blog, so I will continue mocking you to my heart’s content.
@Vivec comment 198: Not wishing to undermine science, but there’s a layman’s explanation for that. Before the Midwest and the Wild West were incorporated into the US, several ethnicities who did not cross paths in Europe and Asia have begun to mingle. Out of the struggle of “carving out a piece of the American pie” came the shared commonality of feeling equal to the original settlers. A more peaceful version of this has begun to manifest after colonial empires fell.
This is also why descendants of people fleeing oppressing regimes (second and third generation) don’t feel much in common with people raised in those countries. However, there has undoubtedly been examples of supporting Axis expansion, Neo Marxism and also cultural festivals based on traditions brought from their home countries, Oktoberfest being one example. I’d suggest a more deeper cross country examination to reveal how differing cultures are.
What I can attest from personal experience (attest this as anecdotal) is that race relations in many places mirror that of Eastern Europe despite the fact most Americans expressing said behavior have no genetic link to the region. What isn’t anecdotal is that the phenomenon “bring your own pen/watch the elections” has popped up during the Brexit referendum, a 2002 national election in Eastern Europe and the Trump campaign, complete with the conspiracy theory that foreign powers are behind it. Well, OK, the last one isn’t on Trump’s agenda, but MI6 and the Mossad was blamed in other places, it’s a copy and paste DIY theory.
No fucking shit. My use of the phrase “racially-unfair” makes it obvious that you have no reason to tell me anything like this. Irrelevant.
It counts according to your own criteria for what makes something a racist policy. Your own argument for why racism should be opposed says so. Or else it is not an argument for opposing racist policies, as you said it was.
It was a strange argument, making use of claims that you can’t “choose” race and that race doesn’t determine “character.” It’s not clear how this would entail a conclusion about unfairness, which isn’t in any obvious way about choice or character but does have connotations of injustice or inequality. In any case, it’s your argument that you gave with the implication that you agree with it. Were you trying to correct me about something, or were you correcting yourself?
I haven’t been talking about it outside of human agency, fool. We can affect what people do. What they do matters morally: there are things they should do and should not do. Meanwhile, their intentions don’t matter. Any arbitrary reason they have for why they’re doing what they’re doing will suffice, when what we’re determining is whether or not they should do this or that, by understanding the effects an agent’s actions will probably have on other agents.
You already backed away from this, by suggesting we read your words here and disregard your inaccessible intentions, since we can’t read minds. But we keep coming back to this confusing bullshit for no apparent reason.
Citation needed.
That a political problem is viewed in a certain way “for political reasons” should be totally unsurprising and a non-issue.
If people were teaching that squares had three sides for political reasons, it would make some fucking sense to criticize those people on that basis. That is not analogous to the case here, and you make no fucking sense.
You don’t explain what those “political reasons” are even supposed to be, nor do you explain what is supposed to make them problematic. Just more bullshit icing on your bullshit cake, I guess.
Not an answer to my question. No apparent regard for doing what I suggested, which is to listen attentively to non-white people about their experiences of racism.
Jesse: “By eliminating institutional barriers.”
You mean institutional barriers like people representing the family of the first black president as apes–and getting away with it? Or how about the fact that FHA redlining practices in the 1960 resulted in a disparity of >$100000 between black and white families?
What about unconscious, cognitive barriers?
Your layman’s explanation doesnt explain the data, given that these studies include recent long-term immigrants.
If there was no US culture independent of that of the cultures that make it up, why do Americans and Long Term Japanese immigrants to the US have statistically significant commonalities in brain function that are not present in Japanese citizens and long term American immigrants into Japan?
@CR
No, you’re still not quite getting it. Unfairness is usually a feature of racism. Unfairness is not necessarily indicative of racism.
“Were you trying to correct me about something, or were you correcting yourself?”
You asked me to explain why racism is wrong. Unfairness is one of the reasons racism is wrong.
“I haven’t been talking about it outside of human agency, fool.”
Intent is the foundation of human agency.
“Any arbitrary reason they have for why they’re doing what they’re doing will suffice, when what we’re determining is whether or not they should do this or that”
Yes, whether an action should or shouldn’t be taken is something which can be evaluated in terms of how harmful it may be. Harm, like unfairness, doesn’t equate to racism, which is a specific belief.
“No apparent regard for doing what I suggested, which is to listen attentively to non-white people about their experiences of racism.”
I literally described an instance where I did just that. I’m non-white also, btw.
@a_ray_in_dilbert_space
Inadequate education would be one.
“What about unconscious, cognitive barriers?”
Teach people about them if you want. I doubt you’ll ever eliminate them.
@secondtofirstworld #113
I am not sure what you mean here, could you please explain a little so I can catch up? It seems you are much savvier about history than I am, so I might just sit on my line, or I might be totally clueless.
BTW, I was only trying to point out that history is not clearly and nicely divided into the colored opressed and the white opressors (not even in US, where the divide is possibly most clearly cut). So if one tries to force absolutist morals along the lines “if you are descendant of opressors, you absolutely MUST find descendants of those opressed by your ancestors and give them money NOW, or you are absolutely immoral person and have no right to even talk about anything else, especially your garden, let alone care about it”, one has to either choose an arbitrary point in history/geography/whatever where to draw a line, or one comes to untangle an infinitely regressing mess of tangled up relations.
The examples are aplenty, many already given. Turks are people of color from the point of view of white Europeans. Much of the opposition to Turkey entering EU is simple racism (although there are valid reasons). But Turks themselves were massive opressors of many white nations (some now in EU) under their rule in Ottoman Empire. There was, and still is, a good deal of white-on-white racism in Europe. Slavs were mostly opressed – but sometimes by other Slavs (there is a reason Russians were never too loved by neigbouring Slavic nations). To this day there are plenty of Germans to whom I am dirty slavic swine stealing their jobs, and plenty of Czechs to whom I am a bloodtraitor because I work in Germany for “Nazis”. Brexit was initiated by Brittish racism against Eastern European Slavs. etc. ad infinitum.
And possibly because in US the racism lines are (today) more clearly delineated along the skin color, it seems to me that some (maybe many) contemporary US Americans have trouble understanding this and think that social dynamics in US over last 100 years apply to every country around the world. Another example of American exceptionalism, I guess.
I chose as my arbitrary point of divide my life. I did not choose to live and be born where I was to whom I was. I am not responsible for the actions of my ancestors, even if I benefited from them. But I am responsible for my actions and their consequences, therefore I take care not to perpetuate former injustices, not to perform new ones, if I can avoid it (i.e. if I am aware of them) and to work in many small ways towards a world, where they will not exist. And I do not claim to have solution for all worlds ills and I do not condemn anyone who is not completely saint as the epitome of evil.
@Vivec comment 202: Naturally no layman’s explanation substitutes for actual science, but this can be experienced without studying, it corroborates it.
As for the Japanese Americans, or for that matter, any Japanese born and raised outside Japan. To state how a complicated issue that is would be an understatement. Before WWII, Japanese had an unofficial classification of mainland Japanese and for nisei and sansei. One such striking example is that of Sonny Chiba, who was born in Manjukuo, but was deported as an adolescent to a country he’s never been to before. The then atmosphere was Manjukuo Japanese are brash barbarians, so he was mistreated for a long time before he became an internationally known movie star.
While the Japanese themselves are xenophobic (its extent is a hot topic, depending on whose research they accept), but as a fairly common Confucian trait they are taught to conform to the majority. Many of the Japanese Americans, especially those who’ve never been to the main islands had felt a stronger connection to America. It might seem trivial but baseball, especially after desegregation brought communities more closer together, and by the 1980s American players went to Japan to play professionally before retiring. If many different grow up and mingle together, they share a common culture. They’re also less likely to be racist as well.
The more homogeneous a community is, the less likely it will become accepting. Ironically systemic racism created a vacuum where those not belonging to the ethnicity holding most power could share a common experience, and even intermarry.
I’m sure my brain functions would differ from Germans living in Germany as the majority culture is different despite the fact that until WWII there weren’t many marriages between ethnic minorities and the majority.
A_ray: “What about unconscious, cognitive barriers?”
JF: “Teach people about them if you want. I doubt you’ll ever eliminate them.”
So, is this not an admission that institutionalized racism still exists–at the very least as unconscious biases?
It could be indicative of sexism, homophobia, religious bigotry, and many other things. Whatever you mean by this, you’re saying nothing of substance that I don’t already know.
You’ve offered no additional reason. Were you planning on ever doing that?
If you were, all that’s going to do is add to the reasons for believing that racism is wrong. The question remains: What do you think are the kinds of circumstances when I would call something racist and you would not?
This is telling me there are more cases of racism than are accounted for by your own criteria. (You’re incredibly vague about it, but there is some such thing, you claim.)
It is not telling me that there are actually less than are accounted for by mine, because my criteria are somehow mistaken for some reason that you’ve failed to give. Mine are evidently more expansive than yours. In other words, when you go about adding to the ones you explicitly gave, it is doing nothing at all to make that case.
A > B, and you’re claiming C > A. In a case like this, I assume that implies C > B, and it isn’t a reason to conclude C < B. Get it? Just do the math yourself if want.
Don’t know what your cryptic unsupported statement means, and I don’t care.
I know that I’m harmed when I cut my finger, and that is not racist. I know that treating women unfairly is a form of unfairness distinct from racist forms of unfairness. You’ve got nothing.
Try it for more than one instance.
But even if you don’t…. If this is an acceptable approach to take, then it’s an acceptable approach to discount your a priori definition, when presented with a huge array of reasons to believe it is inadequate (and I would add incoherent). Having some vague concept or another is not an argument. If that concept doesn’t do the job it’s supposed to — which is to represent stuff which happens in the world, be capable of accounting for what is problematic about that stuff and how we could address it — then the lesson is that your concept sucks and you should change it, so it could be used to make some sense out of the world it’s supposed to be about. You should not defend your useless fucking concept to the bitter end, because you happen to like it anyway despite its uselessness.
@Charly comment 205: The reason I seem savvier in history is twofold. One, I did major in history, and two, after studying a major event, the following class was almost always, or at least in part a debate session, where we had argue, taking the role of one person from history (Churchill, Kruschev, and so forth) why things happened the way they did and how there was rarely a different outcome. The best benefit from that is learning to defend viewpoints you personally despise, but just like a trial lawyer, even the devil is entitled to the defense.
Anyhow, yes, world history is way more complicated than painting it in black and white. We do share baggage from the Habsburg Empire (and so do the Belgians, the Dutch and the Mexicans) and that “lovely sweet, white on white action” which is not a pun for a bad porn, but, to an extent mutual hatred and genocide.
When the US established the first then modern democracy based on ideas of the French Enlightenment, the Prussians, Bavarians, the Habsburg and the Romanovs rejected it, its effect is felt until today. Not only had such ideas arrived always 50 to 60 years too late, but also created a different narrative.
For example, the Czech people wanted freedom, but their president wanted a forced union with Slovakia. A 3-way hate bingo, where Hungarians hated both for loss of territory, the Slovaks hated both for wanting to regain said territory and for not getting independence, and 20 years later the Czech nation was occupied again. So deep rooted is the sentiment against the remaining Germans in the Czech Republic they blame them for things happening 80 years ago. Not to be outdone, all other nations blame Germans for partaking in WWII in which nobody was an instigator, Vienna Accords, what’s that? Nothing to see here, folks!
Oh, your second point hit so close to home. You work abroad, you’re a coward, a traitor, you could’ve done it here too, etc. My response is the same: for one, I’m not willing to hate myself for the actions of others, but do acknowledge them. Two, I’m done despising people I don’t even know. Three, Schengen is almost like moving from one US state to an other, what does it matter on whose land we stand when we travel freely? Four, the world does not revolve around us, there is no secret cabal to destroy our lifeblood. Five, learning new languages opens you up to different cultures and approaches in logic. Half jokingly I dare say it makes it easier to understand the other sex. Six, this should be obvious find the commonalities that holds you apart from other continents. If only there would be a day, when somebody from the American continent says I’m from America. Why? Because not everyone knows by heart where El Salvador is, and the opposite is true. Saying I’m from Europe preempts the explanation of where the country is when those surrounding it are ones you also haven’t heard of. Not joking, some people here don’t know where Hungary is, y’know the country that’s in the EU, which was the rage with that referendum? Oh, the camera lady who kicked those people, you heard only that? Yes, that’s us. Don’t be surprised about why I never bring that up.
America has a mixed race president, we have a black skier, a fencer of Middle Eastern origin (her parents, she was born there) and a former MEP of Romani origin. Except for Obama, more experienced could point out they’re token minorities and it’s half true. Once success is raked in, you’re one of us. Seriously, I’ve read people branding an Olympic canoeist being a traitor for exchanging citizenship for better equipped training. On the other hand, an NFL player can’t protest police brutality and deport Piers Morgan for… exercising First Amendment rights? Just like home. As the saying goes, between a rock and a hard place.
@CR
“If you were, all that’s going to do is add to the reasons for believing that racism is wrong.”
Yes, idiot, that is literally what you asked me to do. WHY you would ask me to detail an issue not in dispute (racism is bad) remains a giant fucking mystery.
“This is telling me there are more cases of racism than are accounted for by your own criteria. (You’re incredibly vague about it, but there is some such thing, you claim.)”
RACISM IS PREJUDICE BASED ON RACE.
“Don’t know what your cryptic unsupported statement means, and I don’t care.”
If you are talking about human agency, you are talking about intent. You said you were talking about human agency, and then you said intent doesn’t matter. That is incoherent.
“If this is an acceptable approach to take, then it’s an acceptable approach to discount your a priori definition”
You do not make up definitions. Definitions are defined by usage. The definition I am using reflects the usage of the word.
“when presented with a huge array of reasons to believe it is inadequate”
Name ONE.
@secondtofirstworld #209
You still did not explain what you meant with those coupons :) and it bugs me not to know what you meant.
And since I majored in biology and always was very shoddy with history, you are defintively and objectively savvier than me in this regard. Your posts were interesting read, thank you.
We have very apt saying for this in czech. Rough translation is “How many languages you speak, that many times you are a human(person).”
@Vivec
Can you give me the definition of racism? The closest thing I’ve heard is the whole ism=power+prejudice. Or maybe you can recommend me some good reading material from a sociologist perspective.
Also, I am reminded of creationist who say “Evolution is only a guess because that’s what theory means. Darwinist want to change the meaning of the word in order to push their bullshit science.”
@logicalcat
It’s very clear when the colloquial definition of theory applies and when the scientific definition of theory applies. This is not the case with the social sciences definition of racism, as we’re witnessing here.
The numerous policies that are racist by effect, despite being ostensibly colorblind, which cannot simply be explained by person to person bigotry?
Yeah, they keep that lie going. A scientific theory has a large body evidence for it.
Any definition of racism should meet the criteria used by academics, not just anybody off the street trying to avoid being called a racist. A dictionary definition:
A realistic definition would be any policy or attitude, held by a group or individual, that negatively effects those whose who are different from them by sex, gender, national origin, religion, or skin color. Both individuals and groups can be racist. Groups can be racist if those who aren’t racist don’t negate the actions of those who are racists.
You’ve forced us to take baby steps here, so I’m working through them.
I’ll ask again, since you ignored it: “What do you think are the kinds of circumstances when I would call something racist and you would not?” Pretty much any amount of detail on this would be an improvement, something more than just suggesting there are some, waving your hands around for a while, and leaving it at that.
Presumably, one such answer is that you think it must be intended, and I don’t. I think there are intentional cases as well as unintentional cases, and you think this is incorrect. That’s the obvious conclusion we’ve come to so far. Tell me how I’m supposed to be convinced of this, with some set of facts and some valid chain of reasoning.
Sure we do. People make up definitions. They make words and languages and many other things which don’t fall down on us from Platonic heaven. Sometimes those are helpful in communicating our ideas, sometimes not. When they’re not particularly useful for certain applications, we can make up something else which will be, as you can see happening throughout history in every culture.
The society we live in is soaked with racism. The fact that a “racism” gets used in a certain way, by many people in a racist society, means exactly what to you? Is there a reason why we ought to use the word this way, that we should believe it’s effective at conveying what the problem is about and how we may confront it, which doesn’t revolve around “because that’s how it’s used in our racist society”?
I would call that evidence that it’s not effective at communicating the problems of racism to people, if it’s such a ubiquitous concept of racism as you claim it is.
If it’s not so prevalent and not so responsible for how nearly everybody (ineffectively) thinks and talks about racism, because the concept many people have does not come in that form, then their usage is a relatively common one too and is just as relevant as yours. The fact that you use it one way is not any more significant than the fact that they use it another way. Which in any case leads us abso-fucking-lutely nowhere with questions about what the world is like, as opposed to what a word means to some group of people. A group of people who are capable of being wrong, capable of being immoral, capable of having shitty incoherent definitions that serve no good purpose, etc.
@nerd
“A realistic definition would be any policy or attitude, held by a group or individual, that negatively effects those whose who are different from them by sex, gender, national origin, religion, or skin color.”
Lol. Read over this definition of RACISM a few times.
Don’t need to asshole. You haven’t presented a good definition except for your inane arguments. Why don’t you cite third party evidence?
@CR
“Tell me how I’m supposed to be convinced of this, with some set of facts and some valid chain of reasoning.”
Racism is a belief. Racism therefore requires human consciousness. Racist beliefs do not exist outside of human consciousness (clouds are not racist). Racist beliefs may or may not lead to racist actions. The actuality of a person being racist is defined by his/her actual views (we can sometimes infer what these views are through their actions, although, like I said, not all racist beliefs translate into obviously racist actions).
For example:
A. A white man is drunk driving. He hits and kills a black man.
B. A white man hates black people. He does nothing about it.
Person A is causing harm to another race, and yet may not be a racist.
Person B is causing no harm to another race, and yet is still a racist.
Racist beliefs (what racism actually is) and actions which harm another race are therefore separate things, which may correlate, but do not necessarily inform you of the presence of the other.
@Nerd
“Don’t need to asshole.”
This coming from the person who, in another thread, implied that I view women as less than human. Fuuuckkk yooouuu.
@213 Jessie Foster
Its clear to you. Its not clear to those who do not understand. Like creationist or some friends of mine all of whom are intelligent, and yet did not even know this different definition of theory. Likewise, its is blatantly clear to me where the dictionary definition of racism, and the academic usage are being applied, but its obviously not clear to you. I only asked for clarification, because you know, asking the people who study a certain thing about that certain thing is smarter than closing up and assuming you know way more than they do despite not being a part of their field. Every purveyor of bad ideas question the science that contradicts their beliefs. Anti-vax, anti-gmo, ect, ect. I’m not saying you shouldn’t question the science, but if you do you better have good evidence showing that you are right. Good luck. *Thumbs up*
Argumentum ad dictionarium is till a thing just so you know.
@Charly comment 211: Oh, that? http://ec.europa.eu/europeaid/privatisation-state-owned-enterprises-czech-republic_en Coupon or voucher, the same thing, it’s how privatization was done.
Oh, before I forget, because it does relate to American racism directly: white supremacists like to claim both that they haven’t enslaved as many people as other civilizations and also that non-white slavery predates chattel slavery, one of their selling points are the Barbary Pirates, with whom the US fought a war with. Obviously these clansmen don’t count Greek and Roman slave traders as white, that predates the Berbers by a long shot. Also Berbers are not black.
Anyhow, some politicians like to claim that their not so subtle racist policies toward refugees equate to wars fought against the Ottoman Empire. The problem is, most people don’t hear about the Ottomans being landlocked because through the Barbary pirates who were their vassals, they presented a constant threat to the Spanish Empire, and the Venetian Republic and its allies bore the brunt of the conflicts. Ironically, even with the current migration, Italy is way more affected. What these politicians claim is described the trope “and then America won the war”. Sorry dude, you were not alone, not to mention the s**tload of money they sent as tribute, so they can’t break through.
The same pirates who menaced Europe and did send white slaves to Istanbul was the same American racists claim were way worse, and to top it off, they call them Arabs, which they aren’t nor were their bosses Arabs. Muslims sure, but not Arabs. I imagine the thought how some might digest the fact, that between the end of Arab conquests and the discovery of Middle Eastern oil, the most influential Muslims weren’t Arabs, the horror.
Who do you feel is less than human and why? Or, are you willing to admit you need to make sure those who are totally human, which includes everybody with >95% human genome, are included, not excluded from any systematic or individual bigotry? Or if not included, why we shouldn’t laugh at your attitudes?
Jessie Foster:
Is that a fact or a chain of reasoning? Or is it both or neither? This is so far from a coherent argument that I genuinely can’t tell what you believe it’s supposed to be.
Unintentional racism requires the existence of human consciousness, because it is something only conscious humans do.
In other words, there must be humans in order for humans to unintentionally cause racist shit, whether in their personal interactions or through systemic effects that are the racist consequences of certain social/political systems that conscious humans make.
Nobody cares. You don’t even care. I will quote you:
The fact that there is (or the fact that there isn’t) a “racist belief” makes no fucking difference here. We want to know whether an action has racist effects or not, and that is not how such questions are settled, as I’ve already explained.
We need to be capable of talking coherently about racism in those terms for that reason: because it is a serious social/political problem that ought to be addressed. Why would you or anyone object to us talking about it that way, unless they are racists who do not want the problems of racism to actually be resolved or even discussed?
Nobody ought to give a shit, under any circumstances, whether a person is “a racist” or is not “a racist.” That’s a pointless, stupid question, offering us no clues at all about how we should act and how acting in certain ways is wrong.
When evaluating all sorts of other questions which are pertinent to phenomena associated with race and racism, it is useless. There is no compelling reason to think in such terms.
Questions like this: What is a person doing which has racist effects, and how might that behavior be made different and non-racist in order to make it better?
If you thought that was a convoluted way of phrasing a question about which belief a person has, you thought wrong. It is not. That is not the issue. You cannot make it the issue. There is good no reason for you to want to make it the issue.
“no good reason” obviously. Sometimes the frothing rage causes typos and transpositions. My bad.
@CR
“The fact that there is (or the fact that there isn’t) a “racist belief” makes no fucking difference here. We want to know whether an action has racist effects or not,”
No, actually it makes all the difference. The effect may remain the same, but you cannot have “racist effects” without racist causes.
Effect: A black man is killed
Cause: A drunk driver
Effect: A black man is killed
Cause: Guy in a white hood
The identical effect happened in each instance, and yet one effect is racist, and the other is not. That’s because of the cause.
Racism is a quality. It’s a quality of reputation in racists. Unconscious racism is a thing on so many levels I want to post a text-wall. Subject: Tectum/Cortex and reasoning. Those contain many things that have to be implicit to a useful definition of racism. Of course it’s conscious and unconscious. Also overt and covert, and implicit and explicit and my social OCD is going off again.
@Jessie Foster
>”Sorry, I don’t really understand what you’re trying to get at. I think there may be a misunderstanding somewhere.”
You will have to be more specific. Since looking at the problems of people of other races requires a form of discrimination you are fundamentally wrong. Your definition is missing critical parts of reality like how racists are necessarily irrational.
@Brony
“Since looking at the problems of people of other races requires a form of discrimination you are fundamentally wrong”
No it doesn’t. You aren’t necessarily treating one group unfairly just because you’re looking at the problems of another group. I think you’re equivocating on the word “discrimination,” which can mean merely the process of selecting something but can also mean the unfair treatment of a group.
“Your definition is missing critical parts of reality like how racists are necessarily irrational.”
Racism is irrational. I don’t know if racists are necessarily irrational. Are you an irrational person if you hold an irrational belief?
And definitions are not meant to include every facet of a concept. Just knowing the definition of evolution isn’t enough to get you through a biology quiz.
@Jessie Foster I got to the point where I understand how others see debating your arguments both as pointless and tiring.
When people are being taught that histrionics affect all women and eugenics are a real thing by the effect of cognitive dissonance brought on by society at large, even liberals think and accept that certain people, especially those of other races are intellectually beneath them, that is systemic racism. Whereas Germans believed in racial superiority, the British believed non-white people are human, but still inherently incapable of learning the ways of white people, and to their best effort, they have to teach them. What the Voting Rights Act had corrected, Dixiecrats had “modified” it with literacy tests, and there’s ample evidence how said test were way easier for white people. Like describe what you had for breakfast versus describe the Heisenberg theorem in at least 1200 words. The people implementing those rules are, at least some of them are still alive, and they had passed on what they feel is right. What do you think current voter ID laws targeting people of color come from?
That’s not all. Since you try to discredit the definition of racism itself hoping for the fallacy to work namely if a theory can’t be defended adequately, despite said theory being proven right, it must be wrong in the eye of the public. You literally do the same thing that creationists do, and they fail too. Either you believe certain races have inherent abilities, which makes some superior or others inferior, or this belief of yours is shared with enough people so that it will become law of the land. The first is individual racism, the second one is systemic. I give you examples, real life examples on how unintentional racism works. A guy walks up and down in a hastily fashion, an other, bothered by this tells him: Stop walking around like pain in the Jew. A guy is eating but by mistake gets some food into his windpipes, he chuckles and says: it went the gypsy way. Both are pejorative but neither is aware as most of the Jewish people were sent to death camps, forced to move to Israel, and people rarely know actual gypsies so they could complain. Not unlike saying the N-word in Montana, where nobody records it. Speaking of which, since you like to stretch definitions: if the Voyager space satellite had been shot into space before the Civil Rights Act, and NASA puts a Mark Twain audio play in it, a new intelligent life would think we are all racist jerks constantly using that word and keep slaves. The image and sound of the first talkies with the blackface and yellow faces are 80 light years away, so it’s not that funny a proposition.
There’s currently a refugee crisis going on, you definitely heard about it because chances are your governor pledged to not welcome any of them. Certain countries in Europe affected by it did not gave the best of responses, some fearing an invasion. What links all these fears that they see these people as non-white non-Christians. Only keeping them out would be passive racism (guy B of your example), but it’s not that easy. Plenty of people have suddenly realized, that in Europe people are living who aren’t white and Christians, and they can move freely. It’s like if Southerners wished to drive former slaves away but somehow also want Northern blacks to keep out. Here’s where the problem begins. Elected governments per law must protect the rights of all citizens including foreigners of the union, but it’s dubious if they stop people from attacking other citizens based on preconceived notions. That has also happened with Northern blacks in the South during the civil rights fight.
People like Dylan Roof may act individually, but he was part of a group where they radicalize each other. The misogynist anti theist Christopher Mercer hunted religious people, was part of a group that radicalized each other and they viewed Elliot Rodger as a martyr of a sacred fight. Discrimination does not require violence just lack of resistance. Racism and sexism or homophobia does and even those too coward to do it themselves seek out the ones who are more than willing.
You’re intentionally disregarding human complexity, because it’s very real and verifiable how people classify others in one second and click like on a baby picture the next or wishes a happy birthday, since nothing should bother you if you ignore, that by doing so you’re part of the cognitive dissonance. Like Ken Bone who as it turns out is both a perv and a racist, and wishes he never went to that presidential debate.
Nerd, 223:
“Who do you feel is less than human and why? Or, are you willing to admit you need to make sure those who are totally human, which includes everybody with >95% human genome, are included, not excluded from any systematic or individual bigotry? Or if not included, why we shouldn’t laugh at your attitudes?”
I appreciate your argument, but not sure about the science quoted. Where does the figure of 95% come from? My only guess is that 5% of the genome is how much the largest chromosome carries, and maybe losing that chromosome is compatible with life so…95% human is still human? And obviously Down Syndrome etc would be >95% (in fact >100%) because trisomy. Is that it?
@secondtofirstworld
I don’t think you understand me, and I’m sure I don’t understand you.
Stupid example.
100 black people are killed because of X, and 10 white people are killed because of X. That is not an identical effect, you’ll notice, which is appropriate since in fact racism doesn’t have identical consequences for different racial groups.
I don’t need to tell you that anyone was wearing a fucking hood or what color that hood was. There need not be any such hood. It doesn’t fucking matter. The people responsible for it may have been drunk, and they may have even been driving, if you feel like imagining a situation like that. That also changes nothing.
Or you can imagine it was a policy put in place by many people, perhaps over a long period of time, who need not agree about the intent of the policy. I am able to discuss it coherently, while you refuse to do so, in a case when the plain, indisputable, simple fact is that a disproportionate number of one racial group was affected negatively by the policy, and that is the reason why it needs to change.
If you want to tell me I have a “political agenda” which says I should point out how racist it is and should try to do something to make it less so, I will agree and note that it makes me guilty of nothing whatsoever. That is what our political agendas should be like, and that is a clear and reasonable way to express them, so that other people like yourself will understand them and find something to agree about. Having one is not some sort of mark of shame or whatever you’re pretending it’s supposed to be. So just shut the fuck up, until you get that. It really is tiring to be talking to a brick wall with nothing coherent to say, much less something which might be a little bit interesting.
Jesse @180
“Err, not everything unfair is racist. Racism is unfair, but those two words are not synonymous.”
Dammed with your own words. The entire point of PZs OP is precisely that everythjng (and everyone) IS racist, albeit on a continuum.
Okay, let’s take the drunk driver example and put it in the real world. Not every drunk driver who hits and kills a black person does so because of racism, but it’s very easy to imagine a scenario where racism contributes to the death without any intent on anyone’s part to kill a black person.
You could ask this driver if he believes black people are inferior and he’d, to his mind, honestly deny it. But say he lives near the edge of a majority-black neighborhood and his favorite bar is on the other side of this neighborhood. He may not intend to hurt anyone by driving home through this neighborhood—say he figures himself a pro at driving under the influence—but he could feel too scared to walk through it or unconsciously think that exposing total strangers to some “negligible” risk is more acceptable than making him go out of his way to get home some other way.
Now, that majority-black neighborhood exists in the first place because of the long-time racist practice of redlining. And the lack of contact with black people resulting from that segregation could have contributed to the guy’s feelings of black people as dangerous or “other.” The more frequent neglect of crime affecting black victims could also keep the police from stepping in and stopping this guy before he kills.
So when a black person gets hit by this guy and dies, it’s thanks to multiple levels of racism. To say that racism had nothing to do with the death because there was no direct intent to kill the person for being black would be completely fucking absurd. Even if a white person also runs a risk of being the victim in this scenario, racism reduces their risk while increasing it many, many times over for a black person. And that differential exposure to risk—risk set up by no one person and maintained by no one person—is the primary way in which racism operates in the real world.
TRY TO UNDERSTAND THIS
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@Jesse
Because I’ve read posts in reverse order today (stupid way to catch up, I know), I’ve only just reached your 179 in which you mention you’re not white.
I had assumed you were white, and in hindsight I can see that was for no other reason than you’d take a particular ‘line’ in the debate in the thread.
I for one apologise; More than one of my contributions here, directed to you, now reads offensively to me (as I expect it did from the get-go), and I wish there were an edit button.
No hard feels, I hope.
Jessie Foster:
But it’s not merely a situation, where a cause (and its intent) makes a cause and that’s that.
It’s a stochastic process, an ongoing interaction between multiple causes and consequences with a wavefront of effects, and so the de facto racism propagates. Not a simple thing.
As I intimated above, I think that all of the (1) circumstances of racism, (2) its attitudinal basis (perhaps not everyone is a racist), and (3) its consequences are senses of racism. All racism, but all in different categories.
You’re no good at examples; I get what you’re trying to express, but there’s a reason “black lives matter” is a thing.
If the drunk driver is black, it shows their character, but if the drunk driver is white, it exonerates them. If the guy in the white hood is black, it’s their savage nature, but if the guy in the white hoot is white, it shows they were either defending themselves or enacting justice.
Realities of the USA, I get them, even though I live in South Australia. Too much to hide.
(Not saying we’re a lot better here :| )
—
PS I was obviously mistaken about you, in my previous. I have learnt better.
@CR
This is as clear and simple as I can make it. Read carefully and slowly.
My views:
A policy may have a disproportionate negative effect on one racial group.
That policy may have been motivated by racism. It may not have been motivated by racism.
If it was motivated by racism, it is racist. It is bad and should be changed.
If it was not motivated by racism, it is not racist. It is still bad and should be changed.
@235 chigau: Soz. That me, amongst others. Does one have to manually type ‘blockquote’ etc or is there a shortcut or icon?
kimberly1091, yes. You have to type the markup.
(Cut and paste is your friend, if you can’t type like I do)
@John Morales
“As I intimated above, I think that all of the (1) circumstances of racism, (2) its attitudinal basis (perhaps not everyone is a racist), and (3) its consequences are senses of racism.”
What do you mean by “circumstances of racism?”
I agree with 2 and 3.
“If the drunk driver is black, it shows their character, but if the drunk driver is white, it exonerates them. If the guy in the white hood is black, it’s their savage nature, but if the guy in the white hoot is white, it shows they were either defending themselves or enacting justice.”
If the guy in the white hood is black, it’s a Chappelle show sketch. Have you ever been to America? You can’t seriously think that what you’ve written is a reflection of the current social climate, right?
@kimberly1091
No problem. You’re actually almost too nice. It’s kinda disconcerting.
@chigau
Thanks.
kimberly1091, I here enumerate your propositions as I respond:
1. Then perforce it is a racist policy. No dispute.
2. Its motivation is irrelevant to is disproportionate negative effect on one racial group. But yes, the motivation might have been racist or not racist, as irrelevant it is to its effect.
3. See above.
4. See above.
5. [you’ve addressed the horns of the motivation, but not of its effect. Tsk]
@A. Noyd
I mean, yeah, you could restructure the hypothetical to make my drunk driver a racist. The point is just that it is possible for a bad thing to happen to a person of color because of a choice a white person made, without it being inherently racist.
Jessie:
Tell me where I misread some of the significance of “black lives matter”.
(There’s a visible asymmetry, I do seriously think that. So yeah, I can)
Jessie to A. Noyd:
But to my “(2) its attitudinal basis (perhaps not everyone is a racist), and (3) its consequences are senses of racism.” you wrote “I agree with 2 and 3.”.
Again, you focus on one horn, to wit (2) rather than (3).
@John Morales
I think DUI’s should be punishable by death. White people have the highest rates of DUI’s. My policy will have a disproportionate negative effect on white people over other races.
This is obviously a draconian policy. Is it racist?
Bingo.
Jessie:
Leaving aside the one of the three senses of racism I proposed with which you disagreed, (2) is possible and (3) is empirical. A problem with these sort of hypotheticals.
(Did I mention you’re no good at examples?)
Jessie::
<snicker>
So, if one defines racist as being racist in at least one of its substantive senses, you concede that whether or not the intent was racist, the effect certainly was.
(Your proposed definition above was rather limited)
@John Morales
I didn’t disagree, I just didn’t know what you meant.
Given how culturally diverse the United States is, it’s incredibly likely that any policy which has any negative effect at all would fall under your definition of racist.
Jessie Foster (#245)
But the driver, like you, doesn’t believe that any race is superior and does not discriminate based on race. So on what basis can you call him a racist?
No, that’s not then point because no one’s saying it’s not possible. You’re the one insisting that there needs to be some explicit race-based intent to harm on the part of the one(s) doing the harm. My drunk driver’s intent is to get home from a bar.
Jessie,
Bingo. A definition the parts of which you don’t dismiss out of hand you have yet to dispute.
@John Morales
Racist effects are necessarily linked to racist causes.
@John Morales
Okay, let’s take your definition. I now see no reason to care if a policy is racist. Essentially every policy is racist. Policies which are essential to maintaining civilization are racist AND NECESSARILY SO.
Jessie Foster:
Wow. Do you not realise you explicitly conceded above the two were different categories?
Again:
A racist effect is racist.
A racist cause is racist.
(That’s an inclusive or, not a conjunction)
You were struggling to express that some racist causes might not have a racist effect, yet you agreed with two of my three categories.
(They weren’t necessarily exhaustive, either)
Jessie Foster (#254)
That hasn’t been the point of contention, though. The point of contention is your erroneous corollary to this, namely: Causes require racist intent on the part of the causer(s) to count as racist. If you’re going to concede that point and move on to some bullshit about racism being necessary for maintaining civilization, do everyone a favor and own up to it.
@A. Noyd
Okay, I get you. Honestly, I kinda skimmed through your first post.
Racism can have a legacy, yeah. I agree completely.
I think my point still stands though. The white drunk driver didn’t help give rise to those conditions, so those conditions aren’t his fault.
Just very briefly on the role of intent – IMHO permitting intent into the calculus of what is, and isn’t, racist, is the thin edge of the wedge used by the sort of folks who push back against postmodernism and multiculturalism.
An example of where this ends up is the decoupling of ‘racist’ the noun, from ‘racist’ the verb. You can have people who’s actions lied to racist outcomes but who aren’t racist themselves. This seems to me precisely the mischief against which PZ’s OP rails.
@John Morales
Again, I don’t even know what your first category was.
I agreed with what you wrote: “its consequences.”
The consequences of racism are definitely one of the senses in which racism can be discussed.
@A. Noyd
I don’t believe that.
Jessie:
Let’s see: “(1) circumstances of racism”
Consider the drunk driver in your proposed example above being pulled over by the cops.
Are their circumstances the same, ceteris paribus whether they’re black or white?
You’re so very, very close. You’re almost there.
(Do you want to dispute that those consequences thereby constitute an epitome of racism?)
@John Morales
Sorry, I don’t really have the energy to argue anymore. Have a good night. Or day. Whatever.
No worries, Jessie. You’re not a troll.
Jessie Foster (#258)
What point would that be? I was addressing, in particular, your point that a black man being killed by a drunk driver is a “not racist” effect and, in general, your point that direct racist intent is necessary for a racist outcome. I showed several ways that racism could cause a black person’s death indirectly via drunk driver. So what exactly “still stands”? Spell it out.
Just to make the basis of your new argument explicit, you saying that no one can be held responsible for acceptance of or inaction towards already-existing conditions of injustice? Because you’re going to either have to justify that or explain what the fuck you really mean.
(#261)
No, per #255, you do believe that. You’re just clinging to a particularly self-serving, unrigorous, colloquial definition of racism to avoid realizing you believe that.
@Jessie Foster
I mean the latter. Conceptual and perceptual separation. Literally to discriminate among kinds of humans. I’m not equivocating. Focusing on a race of humans as having specific problems is a form of discrimination. The key here is that if you want to study a group’s problems separating out the group is rational discrimination.
“Your definition is missing critical parts of reality like how racists are necessarily irrational.”
Racism is a form of bias. Irrational bias (good decision making involves rational bias). Since you can have racist beliefs, patterns of thought (reasoning can be racist), and actions (communications are actions) then racists are indeed irrational. A racist person will reason in a racist way. If racism is irrational you are just making excuses at this point.
Definitions are supposed to usefully explain a concept for the specific needs at hand. Since I am interested in confronting the racism expressed by racists that requires a definition of sufficient detail. One that includes motivated reasoning, group conflict dynamics, bias and reasoning, how experiences turn into errors of thought, how fear, anger, and disgust can connect to memories and push ones interaction with and thoughts about people in the present.
You fucking better produce a good enough definition if you want any respect from me. I consider bigots (of which racists are a kind) to be legitimate targets of analysis and confrontation. If you wish to have any sway over my behavior you will start taking this seriously.
Personally, I see this as somewhat of a category error. Racist and racism are being used in two different senses in two different circumstances; individual on the one hand, and societal or institutional on the other. I think these two things are different, and can and should be defined and discussed differently. Of course, they overlap, intertwine, interact, and reinforce each other, so either or both may be appropriate in any given discussion.
Jessie is defining individual racism, which yeah, properly requires racially prejudicial beliefs and attitudes (whether conscious or unconscious), but he’s ignoring that his definition is useless when discussing society, government, and other institutions, where the individual beliefs of the potentially millions of individual actors are unknowable and not necessarily all the same, but instead they can and must be judged by the outcome, and thus the sociological definition needs to be applied.
OTOH, I don’t find the sociological definition of racism to be very useful when discussing individual actions or beliefs, such as Ms. Schumer’s comedy. Power dynamics have little to nothing to do with whether an individual’s beliefs or attitudes (as revealed by their speech or actions) can or should be called out as racist. Schumer’s choice of certain jokes or topics gives us ample evidence to judge her (conscious or unconscious) biases as racist, and would still do so if she was a black woman making jokes about other minorities, or about white people. Institutional racism inherently requires societal power, but individual racism doesn’t.
IMO, yes, we’re all individually racist to some degree or other, because we all have attitudes and beliefs towards other races that are so deeply ingrained that we may not be aware of them consciously, but which affect our actions, which in turn are evidence of those attitudes and beliefs. This includes blacks and other minorities.
But, we also live in a institutionally racist society, racist in terms of the power structure, as evidenced but the unequal and unfair outcomes for minorities and other groups on the bottom of the power structure even in cases where there may be no racist motivation on the part of individual actors.
In the case of Jessie’s DUI example, A Noyd gives an excellent hypothetical showing how the intersection of societal racism (racist financial and housing policies that result in segregated neighborhoods) and unconscious individual racial bias (being more fearful of walking through that segregated neighborhood) can result in a racist outcome.
I would go a bit further and say that a drunk driver hitting a black pedestrian could hypothetically reflect institutional racism even when the actual actor does not have any racist motivations or intent at all. For example, if nation-wide black pedestrians were at significantly greater risk of being the victim of drunk drivers than white pedestrians (possibly due to lower rates of driving among blacks, or higher incidence of drunk driving in racially segregated neighborhoods), or that black victims were at greater risk of dying as a result than white victims (possibly due to unconscious bias in the treatment or prioritization of black victims), then yes, it would be an institutionally racist outcome even if the drunk driver himself did not have any individual racist motives or intention.
@224 consciousness razor
How does that help though? If you determine an action as “racist” by this criteria, it still doesn’t tell us that the action is immoral. Any policy will always necessarily impact various demographics differently, thats why we bother with demographics. Is it even technically possible to make policies which aren’t racist?
@danielhenschel comment 267:
I give the benefit of the doubt you mean this purely theoretically and not in real life. I will now attempt to deconstruct 2 of my examples on unconscious unintended racism. The saying goes “Don’t walk around like pain in the Jew!” What seems totally harmless here (to the point even my mother uses it) has actually multiple layers and connotations. It is built on the proposition, that the action of person A who walks back and forth in a hasty fashion annoys person B, that, for the most part is common occurrence. So, how do Jewish people enter the picture? This addresses the preconceived notion that Jewish people blow everything, even pain out of proportion to get attention, and this saying, like the other one, predates WWII by a long shot. This bring me to the second saying. What kind of a connection has a gypsy/Romani/Sinti person with getting food accidentally into your windpipe? On the surface it does only address the mishap, but does make the cognitive connection, that food getting into your windpipe is just the same as a Romani person getting on the wrong way of life. Both insinuate innate and inherent traits of ethnicities and religions. What may have had started out as an individual remark found its way to societal consciousness and became part of it. In addition these are the least actively racist actions.
Have you heard of the ethnic group of Piresians? Neither has anybody else, yet 10 years ago (so not today during the migrant crisis) a poll was conducted in my country (I still lived there) asking if they were in favor accepting their settlement into the country. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pir%C3%A9z_people I add this so you can see the numbers for yourself before I could be accused of making them up. What it did reveal, and hasn’t changed, that fictitious people or not, race plays a huge role in societal acceptance although this is the same nation that fought on the Axis side, unfortunately took part in the Holocaust by deporting hundreds of thousands of people to their deaths, and after the war helped deport non-ethnic citizens.
Your argument is that individual racism is different from a large scale one, but I refute that. Since the Elders of Zion you can find organized material for individual reading on how and what to think about people. Timothy McVeigh read the Turner Diaries before the Oklahoma bombing, and took its premise about an UN coup to overthrow the US and place blacks in power while taking away weapons from whites literally. There are numerous people who still disseminate the old Nazi diatribe that there’s no such thing as an economic crisis just a well orchestrated plot to defraud people by a cabal of bankers disregarding the fact how actual crises have real reasons.
I talked about Dylan Roof, but I forgot to mention the published photos on how he embraced South African white supremacy. To what extent individuals can radicalize each other depends on the fringe they turn to, still, said radicalization is based on a former or still existing racist heritage. The poll I mentioned earlier falls in line with contemporary remarks like an illegal border crosser should be shot ( a sentiment shared among some Southerners openly admitting to it with people in post socialist countries) or that the legal text on regulating the circumstances of asylum seekers should change because the situation has changed.
Take note here, that what they mean is: when their relatives fled communism, that was being a refugee, but today’s people aren’t, a solid scientific reasoning based on “I know nothing about them, and they aren’t white and Christian”. The Slovakian prime minister went as far as saying they’d only accept Christian refugees as if this is a supermarket. Yet, the bigger problem lies here: the ones rejecting this statement are mostly human rights NGOs, the majority of society is either indifferent or treats these NGOs as foreign agents and wish them prosecuted.
There are but a few occurrences where racism develops absolutely individually without any outside trigger. I never did became a racist, but I did accept the idea how we unfairly treated and how I should despise others for breaking us apart without knowing us, which is ethnocentrism. A cousin of racism. One might command and learn a language and still become trapped in the quagmire of their own mother tongue. What I mean is, if one wishes to tackle this deep rooted ignorance, although the responses will be in impeccable English, the thoughts themselves will still lack the spirit of any English culture, because instead of listening to you, what they want is to show you your wrong ways, something that takes balls by the way.
There is no need to define racism differently based on who’s doing it.
@ secondtofirstworld #269
No, I don’t think you understand me.
I’m just saying that the words “racist” and “racism” have more than one definition. One definition, the colloquial one, is the belief that a given race is superior or inferior to another, and is usually directed at individuals. Another definition, the sociological term of art, has to do with institutionalized power structures, and is usually directed at institutions like societies, governments, organizations, etc. Both definitions are valid and useful, in their given contexts, and both can be irrelevant or useless in the wrong context, leading to conversations like this one. Of course, OTOH, sometimes both meanings may be at play, because individual and institutional racism interact and reinforce each other.
It’s the same situation as different uses of the word “insane.” The legal definition is an inability to comprehend that one’s actions are wrong. But colloquially, it’s often used to describe bizarre or deranged ideas or beliefs. If I were describing a conspiracy theorist’s reasoning as insane, it would be a category error for a lawyer to pop up and say, “no, insanity is the inability to distinguish between right and wrong, so his argument isn’t insane.” But, if I were a lawyer pleading insanity for my client on the basis that his reasoning is bizarre or deranged, I would be committing the category error and would lose the case. Or, a particular person may BOTH hold beliefs bizarre enough to be colloquially called insane AND suffer mental impairment that qualifies them as legally insane.
In this case, as I see it, Jessie is using the colloquial definition, and ignorantly refusing to accept the validity of the sociological definition, whereas Vivic is using the sociological definition, and stubbornly denying the usefulness and validity of the colloquial definition. I think they’re both making a category error, because both terms may be valid and useful depending on the context.
Let me try another example; voter suppression laws have a clearly racist effect, in the sociological sense. If the context of the conversation is whether or not voter ID laws are racist, it would be a category error to argue that you can’t call them racist because it applies to all races equally and you don’t know whether the individual supporters hold racially prejudicial beliefs. You’re arguing from an inappropriate definition in that context.
OTOH, if the context is discussing whether a particular latino politician is racist towards blacks, it would be a category error to insist on the sociological definition and say that a latino can’t be racist by definition because latinos don’t control the top position in the power structure. The appropriate meaning of the word in that context is the colloquial meaning referring to the person’s beliefs and attitudes, as evidenced by their words about and actions towards blacks.
And on the other, OTHER hand, if you’re discussing whether a latino politician is racist for supporting voter ID laws, then BOTH definitions may be in play; the sociological definition when discussing the racist effects of voter ID laws, and the colloquial definition when discussing the politician’s individual racism.
@danielhenschel #270 I want to get this straight off my chest, the power structure argumentation is an exceptionally American phenomenon, and since we discuss racism itself should be put under a different review, if it were up to me, ignored all together.
In 1529, 3 years after the Ottoman Army has defeated the Christian coalition, and ensured a suzerainty from a royal pretender, 3 persons of Jewish origin were accused and convicted of kidnapping a young non-Jewish boy on a blood libel. They basically said the accused kidnapped him to murder him to eat his blood and use it for rituals. Said boy turned up alive 2 years, he went for apprenticeship in Vienna and did not inform his parents. The last blood libel case I’m aware of happened in 1946 in the same country, mere months after the accused returned from concentration camps. At no point had any of the accusers a speckle of power, authorities just went with what they felt right.
You’re right, it would be a huge misnomer to claim non-white people can’t be racist. Animosity between Korean and black Americans is a real thing, so is animosity among Latinos with each other. Heck, Christians despising Jews for killing Jesus knew no racial lines. Racism in the porn industry and in the LGBT community is a real thing. Just like with the aphorisms I mentioned there’s also the blind test on racial discrimination, and in communities of white people not exposed to different ethnicities associating white with good and black with bad is prevalent even if we don’t raise them racist. Why? Because games like chess is built on that premise (white moves first, it’s more likely you’ll start with white) and fairy tales, were evil characters wear black or dark and good characters have white shining armor. The same story that tells girls to be princesses who are damsels in distress.
I do admit my judgment could be clouded by the fact, that I come from a highly xenophobic and casually racist culture that’s also highly sexist. A different aphorism praises good money management but also keeping women in line with a barrage of punches. On the other that’s also why I’m not exposed to racism, sexism or homophobia based on new individual ideas, but on slight variations of the age old material.
As much as I wish to be a mere interlocutor, I do relate real life examples only, where I see that third of the society I lived with treat non-white people as subhumans based merely on preconceived notions. Goebbels had recognized that if you accuse someone long enough and repeat it, it will stick even if nothing is true from it. This is also why Americans of ’68 fought for civil liberties, the French thought for replacing the old elite, but the Germans took their parents to task on what their role in the war was. It was forbidden to talk about it.
The two things I agree on with Jessie is that racism, like any other belief doesn’t exist outside a sentient conscience, and that it is an irrational belief. The more progressed a community is, the more you see only individual racism and ignorance. I do not say country because even among federal states Americans have varying degrees and approaches to it. I could make the insane claim that I never want to visit Maine because Cabot Cove is the murder capitol of the world, the state has murderous cars, rabid dogs, demonic clowns, brain snatching aliens, and the governor says there’s a huge heroin problem brought on by racial minority dealers from the Tristate Area. What’s that? All of it is fiction, because Murder she wrote, Stephen King novels and most of what LaPage says aren’t real? It isn’t that of a different preconceived notion from believing people with dark skin from birth are up to no good.
When Saad said he had different classification for white racism, he had valid points. It isn’t enough that we point out which laws and policies target minorities with surgical precision, those who can, should vote in local elections to change people’s perceptions from cultural conformity to a fact-based decision (something all atheists should do if they wish to be electable as well), but I do add this: if a question is leading on, too complex or can’t be answered by yes or no, bring attention to it to have the question changed or if that’s not possible, don’t vote.
In closing, there was a proposed amendment to the national constitution (which I refused to vote on, the question had nothing to do with the amendment) that is a love letter to the international and European law on refugee applications, that excludes restrictions on the freedom of movement and settlement of EU citizens. Problem is, the citizens “don’t get the memo” and still claim their government vows to protect them from non-white non-Christian people. However, the EU has citizens without religion and some of them are non-white. So, if and when assaults happen they’ll prosecute wrongdoers but without condoning the motivation behind the act itself, and this is the same posse that got elected into the UN Human Rights Council. I look forward to a massive amount of Orwellian doublespeak come this January.
erik333:
I wasn’t giving a comprehensive moral argument in that one sentence you quoted. I’ve linked it to unfairness already in the thread (as the quote itself said), and you can make a very clear and very general case that acting unfairly is immoral. Racism is one flavor of that.
If you’re expressing skepticism about morality of any sort at all — why lying, stealing, murdering, etc., are all immoral, or whether anything is — then I’m not going to derail this thread with that. To the extent that you’re willing to grant that there are immoral acts of many different kinds, I’ll try to focus on those parts which are relevant to racism.
We bother with them so that we can understand what the world is like. We shouldn’t be doing that in order to have a differential impact on demographic groups. That knowledge can be used for good or evil, and it isn’t always or necessarily the case that it’s used for evil.
Of course it is. To pick some examples you also shouldn’t like, consider a few policies which are sexist (e.g., not granting women voting rights) or homophobic (e.g., not recognizing same-sex marriages). The problem in such cases isn’t that they’re racist due to the fact that certain racial groups are disproportionately and negatively affected by them, because the fact is that they’re not so affected. Black gay women may be hit especially hard by multiple policies of that sort. But if that collection of policies turns out not to be better or worse for them than for white gay women (for example), who are also hit especially hard, then you haven’t identified a noticeable racial component to it. Instead, you’ve identified that it’s sexist and homophobic, which is also bad for similar reasons.
Now, if you can weed out all such things from your policies (no reason to think that’s impossible), then you’ve done a satisfactory job of making and enforcing them. There might still be more efficient or less costly ways to do it, blah, blah, blah — you may also be interested in trying to satisfy all sorts of other criteria when making and enforcing a policy. But on those specific terms, you’ve done good work.
Here’s the requirement for me as a person interested in treating racism and the behavior of racists as a thing to be dissected apart so I can more effectively eliminate it from society. You give me a definition of racist that meets MY needs. Fuck all of the potential definitions of racism. If you don’t like what I’m doing give me something that will serve my needs and eliminate whatever is concerning you.
I need a way to take into account the fact that I will be dealing with racists that just want me and people like me to stop criticism online. I require, REQUIRE you to get specific about real-world examples of things that bother you. Not vague feelings laden characterizations of something that happened before and that I was not there for.
And yes, the things I learn in the brain sciences will be implicitly taken into account. No we don’t know everything about the brain or mind, but we do know things that tell us about bias and racism. Everyone is biased, if you don’t know how to correct for yours I’m going to find a discussion fascinating.
@Brony, 273
QFT:
“You give me a definition of racist that meets MY needs.”
Brony, #273:
I am not familiar with your oeuvre here, so let me say that right up front. I might not be as well versed in the more intellectual arguments about race(e/ism), but I am for sure confused by this comment. I genuinely cannot discern which “side” you are arguing for. So, simple question: do you think that racism is what it is, or do you think we should try to get rid of it?
@miles links
I hope this is not too late. I did not realize there was anything else here.
I think that racism is what it is and we should get rid of it. People can change how they reason, it’s just not always easy. Some theories on humor think this is one reason humor became a thing. We socially shame. We privately criticize. We educate. We convince. We persuade. We make example of people who act badly.
Does that help?