Twilight Hue
Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
No because you don't, or simply refuse to recognize racism when it surfaces.
There is no reason whatsoever that a special message to white people is warranted. None.
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Sign at George Floyd Square gives list of special orders for white visitors
- Thread starter McBell
- Start date
There is no reason whatsoever that a special message to white people is warranted. None.
rrobs
Well-Known Member
Just as it has since the beginning.
rrobs
Well-Known Member
"n 1: the prejudice that members of one race are intrinsically superior to members of other races" The Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
This sign sure hints at white inferiority, so who's the racist here?
Secret Chief
Veteran Member
Decenter myself and bring my own processing?
RestlessSoul
Well-Known Member
Augustus
…
It's also literally the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, but some people may disagree that it really is democratic.
Virtue statements claimed by one party in the name of their ideology, may not be accepted by those who do not share the same ideological framework. This isn't that they don't 'get it', just that they don't think it is true.
Would you accept that due to the complexity of human society and the issue of racism that we do not know the best way to solve the problem and that well meaning people can disagree as to what will be most effective?
Given our limited cognitive abilities and endless historical examples of well-meaning people producing negative unintended consequences, would you accept that it is at least possible that modern "anti-racist" ideology may end up causing such negative unintended consequences? Obviously you think it is a positive movement, but would you accept that it is at least possible it may actually end up doing more harm than good.
I am not infallible. I may in fact be wrong about some things, including this.
Would you concede the same?
Augustus
…
Of course.
I may be wrong and modern "anti-racism" might indeed help create a better and more harmonious society via hyper-focus on race, racial essentialism, neo-segregationism, racial hierarchies of virtue based on perceived oppression, encouragement of victimhood, etc.
I seriously doubt it based on my thoughts regarding the nature of society and human psychology, but I may also be wrong on these.
I think it far more likely to be an iatrogenic fad though.
I assume they meant decanter and bring your own processor.
Apparently there's going to be a picnic at some point.
I remember when it was unthinkable that we would let people like me get married. It was so...different from what marriage had been thought of, traditionally. And so many people were so upset that their traditional understandings of gender and sex and marriage would dare be challenged by some upstart minorities peddling some nonsense about two men or two women getting married. Can you imagine? The utter nonsense of it! Next people will want to marry their dogs, for goodness' sake! Just you watch - this will not be good for society!
What we see in modern anti-racist thought is similar. People are encouraging those in the majority to challenge their assumptions about the world and prejudices to which they've been blind - not just personal prejudices, but cultural, societal ones, the water in which we swim every day. I anticipate that this way of thinking will become more normal over time and become integrated into how we think about race. Those in the majority will bristle and be outraged and offended, as they have been in the past with the ending of segregation, and women's suffrage and feminism, and LGBT people being more free and equal. But slowly they will realize the sky has not fallen and a new way of relating to one another is possible, and in fact, a good thing for everyone.
Secret Chief
Veteran Member
My cat and I just want a small ceremony. A few friends and maybe a bowl of milk.
Augustus
…
Out of interest, how would you judge the success of the "anti-racist" ideology?
What future societal markers would illustrate that this worked?
This is not remotely similar imo.
Simply accepting people from minority groups as being equal and choosing not to discriminate against them is the 'old fashioned' approach to dealing with racism (and has now been deemed 'racist').
Humans, understand the concept of fairness pretty easily.
"Anti-racism" requires adherence to a much broader ideological framework along with adapting behaviour to meet this and signalling that you 'get it' and are thus a good group member.
It also requires people to accept differences based on immutable characteristics - unfairness (unless this unfairness can be justified by adherence to an ideology that redefines it as fairness)
This seems to assume that people who oppose "anti-racism" do so because they are ignorant or prejudiced rather than they disagree with a single highly ideological approach to a complex social problem that utilises similar methods that have consistently failed in the past and thus believe it will prove to cause more harm than good.
By any measure, racism has declined drastically over the past few decades and this is particularly true among younger generations.
While it is still a problem and in a perfect world progress would be faster, we should expect this trend to continue.
Human elites have consistently tried to top-down engineer their societies to produce 'right-think' of one kind or another, usually completely failing in this goal.
If someone sees a course of action as likely to increase racial disharmony, then are they not moral bound to oppose it?
Scientific studies have shown the (quite obviously predictable effect) that the more we encourage people to view others by particular markers of identity, the greater these markers are used for discrimination. Yet, "anti-racism" encourages a hyperfocus on racial identity and assumes this hyperfocus will not have the same effect it does in all other situations.
That essentialising racial groups will not only breed stereotyping and discrimination, but also encourage people to identify as 'white' (if other are defined by their racial grouping, you can't "abolish whiteness'")
Creating racial hierarchies of virtue (and if that isn't happening why create an acronym like BIPOC), collective guilt, shaming of people for immutable characteristics is both immoral and creates resentment.
Awarding social credit to those who can demonstrate oppression encourages people to view themselves as victims and magnify if not outright create perceived 'oppression' (and if you don't think this happens then try to name another situation in which humans, in general, have failed to take advantage of opportunities to improve their social status).
Create a framework for hypersensitivity, and teach them to assume racism whenever possible. Make any form of 'racism' akin to 'violence' (micro-aggressions, etc). Encourage people to view themselves as victims even if they do not experience direct discrimination themselves.
It also creates a climate of fear or discomfort about making a faux pas - disagreement is ‘violence’ - need to be a good coalition member. This creates a system where you incentivise display of group identity by make public commitment to values (virtue signalling) or attack enemies/‘bad’ group members (often by manufacturing problems and bad faith argumentation).
While these problems obviously don't apply to all people, and some people who are motivated to be 'Good Coalition Members' can negotiate the mental gymnastics required to maintain the ideology's coherence, most people aren't going to do that.
The main problem though is that it creates a problem that is impossible to solve and that incentivises people to magnify the problem (and thus maintain their social status on the back of it).
"But it should work in theory" "If I can do it, why not other people?" are common perspective before well intentioned things designed by intelligent academics fail.
What future societal markers would illustrate that this worked?
I remember when it was unthinkable that we would let people like me get married. It was so...different from what marriage had been thought of, traditionally. And so many people were so upset that their traditional understandings of gender and sex and marriage would dare be challenged by some upstart minorities peddling some nonsense about two men or two women getting married. Can you imagine? The utter nonsense of it! Next people will want to marry their dogs, for goodness' sake! Just you watch - this will not be good for society!
This is not remotely similar imo.
Simply accepting people from minority groups as being equal and choosing not to discriminate against them is the 'old fashioned' approach to dealing with racism (and has now been deemed 'racist').
Humans, understand the concept of fairness pretty easily.
"Anti-racism" requires adherence to a much broader ideological framework along with adapting behaviour to meet this and signalling that you 'get it' and are thus a good group member.
It also requires people to accept differences based on immutable characteristics - unfairness (unless this unfairness can be justified by adherence to an ideology that redefines it as fairness)
This seems to assume that people who oppose "anti-racism" do so because they are ignorant or prejudiced rather than they disagree with a single highly ideological approach to a complex social problem that utilises similar methods that have consistently failed in the past and thus believe it will prove to cause more harm than good.
By any measure, racism has declined drastically over the past few decades and this is particularly true among younger generations.
While it is still a problem and in a perfect world progress would be faster, we should expect this trend to continue.
Human elites have consistently tried to top-down engineer their societies to produce 'right-think' of one kind or another, usually completely failing in this goal.
If someone sees a course of action as likely to increase racial disharmony, then are they not moral bound to oppose it?
Scientific studies have shown the (quite obviously predictable effect) that the more we encourage people to view others by particular markers of identity, the greater these markers are used for discrimination. Yet, "anti-racism" encourages a hyperfocus on racial identity and assumes this hyperfocus will not have the same effect it does in all other situations.
That essentialising racial groups will not only breed stereotyping and discrimination, but also encourage people to identify as 'white' (if other are defined by their racial grouping, you can't "abolish whiteness'")
Creating racial hierarchies of virtue (and if that isn't happening why create an acronym like BIPOC), collective guilt, shaming of people for immutable characteristics is both immoral and creates resentment.
Awarding social credit to those who can demonstrate oppression encourages people to view themselves as victims and magnify if not outright create perceived 'oppression' (and if you don't think this happens then try to name another situation in which humans, in general, have failed to take advantage of opportunities to improve their social status).
Create a framework for hypersensitivity, and teach them to assume racism whenever possible. Make any form of 'racism' akin to 'violence' (micro-aggressions, etc). Encourage people to view themselves as victims even if they do not experience direct discrimination themselves.
It also creates a climate of fear or discomfort about making a faux pas - disagreement is ‘violence’ - need to be a good coalition member. This creates a system where you incentivise display of group identity by make public commitment to values (virtue signalling) or attack enemies/‘bad’ group members (often by manufacturing problems and bad faith argumentation).
While these problems obviously don't apply to all people, and some people who are motivated to be 'Good Coalition Members' can negotiate the mental gymnastics required to maintain the ideology's coherence, most people aren't going to do that.
The main problem though is that it creates a problem that is impossible to solve and that incentivises people to magnify the problem (and thus maintain their social status on the back of it).
"But it should work in theory" "If I can do it, why not other people?" are common perspective before well intentioned things designed by intelligent academics fail.
A vexed question for pretty much any ideology in the real world, no doubt. I would think that if it produces more equitable outcomes between people of different races, those would be measures of success. But such things are complicated as controlled experiments are rarely possible in implementation of public policy or the spread of ideology.
This both misunderstands the analogy and presents a caricature. "Accepting people from minority groups as being equal and choosing not to discriminate against them" is not "racist," according to anyone I know or have read. What antiracist thinkers have observed is that while overt racist ideas and behaviors have certainly declined in recent decades, we remain in a situation where a) latent racism, ie unconscious bias against people of other races, remains common and influences our behavior (and repeated scientific studies have shown this), and b) systemic racism, ie ways in which our society racially disadvantages particular groups by virtue of how it is structured rather than by individuals consciously choosing to be discriminatory, is also pervasive. In other words, what it actually means to discriminate against someone has been recognized as a deeper and broader issue than my simply looking at you and consciously deciding that I'm going to treat you differently because of your skin color.
Regarding my analogy, my point was that all these societal changes required an ideological shift that upset the apple cart of those in power at the time.
Do you think there are no between-groups differences in the lives and experiences of people of different races? Socioeconomically? Educationally? Geographically? Judicially? None at all?
Overt racism, yes. See above.
That's an interesting question. White supremacists often believe that it would be better for racial harmony if we reinstituted segregation. Do you believe such a person is morally bound to oppose efforts to racially integrate society?
I'd be curious what literature you're citing there. You're claiming that educating people about implicit biases and how to counter them, for example, is ineffective? In fact such training increases discriminatory attitudes and behavior? I'd be fascinated to read that.
That's exactly how I feel about people who encourage us to be color blind and pretend that race and racism are not relevant concepts for understanding how the world works.
I'll give you the final word here.
Twilight Hue
Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
Almost sounds like them thar Canadians. You know how they love putting an 'e' at the end.
Hmmmm........
Augustus
…
Is there any evidence that "implicit bias" training is effective? That would be the start point.
But it is not about 'implicit bias' but encouraging people to view other people as being significantly defined by their racial identity and encouraging different treatment of different groups based on this characteristic.
This is an interesting article on race and coalition instincts:
Throughout our species' history, intergroup conflict depended on the categorization of the social world into us versus them. When this divide occurs along racial lines, this categorization and its malignant consequences appear capable of persisting stably. Indeed, ingroup favoritism paired with outgroup indifference or hostility appears to exist in all human cultures (1, 2). The simple act of categorizing individuals into two social groups predisposes humans to discriminate in favor of their ingroup and against the outgroup in both allocation of resources and evaluation of conduct (2–7). Following on historical experience, field and laboratory studies have confirmed that this behavior is remarkably easy to elicit: people discriminate against outgroups even when they are assigned to groups temporarily and anonymously by an experimenter who uses dimensions that are trivial, previously without social significance, and random with respect to any real characteristics of the individuals assigned (2–8).
Most people in modern society agree that racism and racial discrimination are harmful and desire their elimination, although there is significant disagreement on how this is best achieved.
One tenet common in modern progressive politics relates to privileging certain identity markers above all others, key among these is the idea of race. Such a view has become so entrenched that even professing a desire to have a 'raceless' society is seen as offensive and racist.
One argument against identity politics is that by fetishising exclusive identity markers (race, gender, sexuality) above all others, you create divisions which act counter to the intent of a more inclusive society. Instead one should look for inclusive markers of identity that do not depend on an accident of birth.
The following article provides some support for this idea. The more race is used as a marker of identity (and thus form a basis for in/out groups) the more racism increases.
Can race be erased? Coalitional computation and social categorization
Robert Kurzban, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides
PNAS December 18, 2001. 98 (26) 15387-15392;
Previous studies have established that people encode the race of each individual they encounter, and do so via computational processes that appear to be both automatic and mandatory. If true, this conclusion would be important, because categorizing others by their race is a precondition for treating them differently according to race. Here we report experiments, using unobtrusive measures, showing that categorizing individuals by race is not inevitable, and supporting an alternative hypothesis: that encoding by race is instead a reversible byproduct of cognitive machinery that evolved to detect coalitional alliances. The results show that subjects encode coalitional affiliations as a normal part of person representation. More importantly, when cues of coalitional affiliation no longer track or correspond to race, subjects markedly reduce the extent to which they categorize others by race, and indeed may cease doing so entirely. Despite a lifetime's experience of race as a predictor of social alliance, less than 4 min of exposure to an alternate social world was enough to deflate the tendency to categorize by race. These results suggest that racism may be a volatile and eradicable construct that persists only so long as it is actively maintained through being linked to parallel systems of social alliance.
What is most striking about these results is just how easy it was to diminish the importance of race by manipulating coalition—especially given the repeated failure over decades to find other means to influence racial encoding. The sensitivity of race to coalitional manipulation lends credence to the hypothesis that, to the human mind, race is simply one historically contingent subtype of coalition. Our subjects had experienced a lifetime in which ethnicity (including race) was an ecologically valid pre- dictor of people’s social alliances and coalitional affiliations. Yet less than 4 min of exposure to an alternative social world in which race was irrelevant to the prevailing system of alliance caused a dramatic decrease in the extent to which they categorized others by race. This implies that coalition, and hence race, is a volatile, dynamically updated cognitive variable, easily overwritten by new circumstances. If the same processes govern categorization outside the laboratory, then the prospects for reducing or even eliminating the widespread tendency to categorize persons by race may be very good indeed.
Regardless of what one deems normatively desirable, coalitional instincts are very powerful, and human 'rationality' cannot consistently overcome our hardwired tendencies towards irrationality.
Given what we know about in/out group bias, the idea that making people hyperfocus on race and making people hypersensitive about race seems to be exactly the opposite of what reduces discrimination.
Augustus
…
What would these markers be and what level of 'equity' would constitute success?
For example, conditional on parental income, black women have higher college attendance rates than white men. Should we want this gap to increase to demonstrate antiracist policies are working?
At the moment, 'more equitable outcomes' seems to include certain minorities being discriminated against for doing too well.
Their success is not to be celebrated but they are to be moved down the racial hierarchy of virtue as 'white-adjacent'
You've never heard anyone say you can't be 'not racist', just racist or antiracist?
Someone who considers they do not discriminate and believes all people should be treated equally would be 'racist' on this measure.
'Antiracist' activists has advocated for segregation in certain situations, opposing segregation is therefore 'racist' for some activists.
Many anti-racists also support forms of segregation.
I personally strongly oppose both, but each person has to act in accordance with their own moral compass.
Groups that outperform white Americans include Asian Americans, Nigerian Americans, Indian Americans, etc.
This is obviously not evidence of anti-white systemic racism, but any perceived inequality with certain racial minorities is 'obviously' the consequence of racism.
But systemic racism is such a nebulous concept that people will always be able to find 'evidence' of racism wherever they want thus justifying the 'anti-racist elites' maintaining their social status.
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SkepticThinker
Veteran Member
Go ahead and prove that. The defense couldn't do it.
It's been proven in a court of law that Chauvin was directly responsible for killing George Floyd. Case closed.
Sit on anyone's neck and lungs for nine minutes and 29 seconds and they will die. Whether they're on drugs, not on drugs, having a panic attack or whatever. That's how you kill a person.
I have panic attacks quite often. They don't kill.
SkepticThinker
Veteran Member
Ah, so you bought into that Facebook meme too, eh?
Twilight Hue
Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
No. I agree with Morgan Freeman.
SkepticThinker
Veteran Member
That's what I said. I see people all over social media trying to use that as some kind of final authority on the matter, as though he represents all black people or something.