Can we hate America now?

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botany: Apr 27, 2013; by Lowtax

By extension, not being racist isn't the same as color-blindness and that lovely liberal "oh I don't see race" crap. It's making sure that one's race doesn't lead to them being unfairly disadvantaged by society. You absolutely have to look at race if you want to do that, because you can't fix what you can't see.

# ? Nov 11, 2016 22:22

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# ? Apr 19, 2024 10:45

silence_kit: Jul 14, 2011; by the sex ghost

botany posted:

Racism isn't "judging people according to race". I don't know where you get that from.

I get it from the normal English definition of the word. Again, it's no wonder you aren't getting what Mercrom is saying.

botany posted:

By extension, not being racist isn't the same as color-blindness and that lovely liberal "oh I don't see race" crap. It's making sure that one's race doesn't lead to them being unfairly disadvantaged by society. You absolutely have to look at race if you want to do that, because you can't fix what you can't see.

In other words, you are arguing that the ends (greater opportunity for the oppressed black and Hispanic people in the US) justify the means (writing racism into the law which gives preferential admission to blacks and Latinos over Jews, whites, Indians, and Asians). A lot of people agree with you, including me, but it is important to realize that that is kind of argument you are making.

# ? Nov 11, 2016 22:37

botany: Apr 27, 2013; by Lowtax

silence_kit posted:

I get it from the normal English definition of the word. Again, it's no wonder you aren't getting what Mercrom is saying.

yeah tell me more about your gut feeling about words

quote:

In other words, you are arguing that the ends (greater opportunity for the oppressed black and Hispanic people in the US) justify the means (writing racism into the law which gives preferential admission to blacks and Latinos over Jews, whites, Indians, and Asians). A lot of people agree with you, including me, but it is important to realize that that is kind of argument you are making.

No I'm arguing that systematic racism has to be countered by antiracist policy like AA, which is not itself racist. You're the one claiming that anything that makes a distinction based on race is racist, which is an idiotic standpoint.

# ? Nov 11, 2016 22:41

Kurtofan: Feb 16, 2011; hon hon hon

nyet

# ? Nov 11, 2016 22:41

Mercrom: Jul 17, 2009

Main Paineframe posted:

I for one am seriously disappointed that, as an American, I can no longer smugly mock Europeans for being openly racist and having a serious right-wing resurgence.

Don't worry we have our own issues. There was recently a big blow for women's rights here when a feminist snow plowing initiative failed and made the sidewalks slippery.

botany posted:

By extension, not being racist isn't the same as color-blindness and that lovely liberal "oh I don't see race" crap. It's making sure that one's race doesn't lead to them being unfairly disadvantaged by society. You absolutely have to look at race if you want to do that, because you can't fix what you can't see.

Not acknowledging racism is ignorant and probably racist, I agree. But I don't think should go around actively thinking about other people's race. That's just gonna make you condescending to them.

silence_kit posted:

I get it from the normal English definition of the word. Again, it's no wonder you aren't getting what Mercrom is saying.

I don't think anyone agrees with me tbh. The definition of racism is false judgement of someone because of their race. AA is kind of in the same category as a hospital putting more resources into checking black people for signs of sickle cell anemia or something.

# ? Nov 11, 2016 23:00

Soy Division: Aug 12, 2004

Lol at a German criticizing the American legal system for systemic racism. Ever hear of the NSU-Aff�re?

# ? Nov 11, 2016 23:29

botany: Apr 27, 2013; by Lowtax

Gail Wynand posted:

Lol at a German criticizing the American legal system for systemic racism. Ever hear of the NSU-Aff�re?

Yes, and if you ever joined us in the Germany thread you could poo poo on our country for its failings with us (as long as Gaussian Copula or Riso aren't around :v:

) The fact that our criminal investigation into a Nazi underground terrorist group was screwed up beyond belief doesn't excuse you from literally, without exaggeration, writing racist laws into your statutes.

# ? Nov 11, 2016 23:31

Rush Limbo: Sep 5, 2005; its with a full house

Mercrom posted:

Reverse racism is real and terrible. You can't just go around saying asians are good at math!

Also AA isn't racist because it doesn't judge a person because of their ethnicity, it judges people based on their position in society (as a consequence of their ethnicity).

Yo, the Asians good at math thing is literally not a good thing and not actually reverse racism, because that doesn't loving exist.

When people say poo poo like that, what they're doing is creating a fictional ideal based on a very limited and prejudicial understanding of how poo poo actually is. This is not actually a positive thing because there are many many Asian people, like other people, who struggle with math. How does that fit? Are they bad Asians? Are they letting the side down?

This is bad because it ties up people's sense of self worth with a racist and unjustified notion that they are burdened with living up to, no matter the reality, which has serious effects on people's mental health.

# ? Nov 12, 2016 00:46

botany: Apr 27, 2013; by Lowtax

wow next you're gonna say it's wrong to tell random black dudes they're probably really good at basketball where will this PC insanity end :confused:

# ? Nov 12, 2016 00:53

Mercrom: Jul 17, 2009

Rush Limbo posted:

Yo, the Asians good at math thing is literally not a good thing and not actually reverse racism, because that doesn't loving exist.

When people say poo poo like that, what they're doing is creating a fictional ideal based on a very limited and prejudicial understanding of how poo poo actually is. This is not actually a positive thing because there are many many Asian people, like other people, who struggle with math. How does that fit? Are they bad Asians? Are they letting the side down?

This is bad because it ties up people's sense of self worth with a racist and unjustified notion that they are burdened with living up to, no matter the reality, which has serious effects on people's mental health.

Yeah that's not rocket science. It was a joke.

"Reverse racism" is a purposefully nonsensical phrase only used to shut down discussion just like a lot of things that are right now killing the left. All forms of racism are a problem and what you wrote illustrates a part of that. Saying asians are good at math normalizes it, making asians who aren't good at math believe they are abnormal. Saying women are bad at math normalizes it, making them not try as hard. Any stereotype of white people is going to have an effect and probably not a good one, if only because it reinforces the belief that there is an inherent difference between ethnicities, and that there are sides defined by race that you can (and will) stick to.

# ? Nov 12, 2016 02:37

suck my woke dick: Oct 10, 2012; I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!

Put this cum-loving slave on ignore immediately!

botany posted:

By extension, not being racist isn't the same as color-blindness and that lovely liberal "oh I don't see race" crap. It's making sure that one's race doesn't lead to them being unfairly disadvantaged by society. You absolutely have to look at race if you want to do that, because you can't fix what you can't see.

individuals matter, groups don't :smug:

# ? Nov 12, 2016 13:52

OwlFancier: Aug 22, 2013

Mercrom posted:

The courts systematically disadvantage the poor because the poor are more often criminals. That doesn't by itself mean the system is classist or racist. Capitalism isn't racist either, but it is inherently classist.

Well, specifically the poor are more often convicted of crimes because the wealthy have more means to hide and legally escape their crimes and police really like arresting and charging poor, black people with things because it's easy and they can.

So, poor people commit more crime because the justice system is racist and classist, is also an option?

# ? Nov 15, 2016 01:23

ToxicSlurpee: Nov 5, 2003; -=SEND HELP=-; Pillbug

OwlFancier posted:

Well, specifically the poor are more often convicted of crimes because the wealthy have more means to hide and legally escape their crimes and police really like arresting and charging poor, black people with things because it's easy and they can.

So, poor people commit more crime because the justice system is racist and classist, is also an option?

There is also the fact that poor people are more likely to be desperate. That and the poor tend to commit different crimes than the rich. The other big difference is in drugs; poor people go to jail, rich people go to rehab.

There are even provable discrepancies in drug sentencing. Crack is punished more harshly than cocaine. Guess which race prefers which?

# ? Nov 15, 2016 01:31

TheFluff: Dec 13, 2006; FRIENDS, LISTEN TO ME
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OF WEALTH AND TASTE

Historian George M. Fredrickson writes in Racism: A Short History (Princeton University Press, 2002):

quote:

Although commonly used, �racism� has become a loaded and ambiguous term. Both sides in the current debate over affirmative action in the United States, for example, have used it to describe their opponents. It can mean either a lamentable absence of �color blindness� in an allegedly postracist age or insensitivity to past and present discrimination against groups that to be helped must be racially categorized. Once considered primarily a matter of belief or ideology, �racism� may now express itself in institutional patterns or social practices that have adverse effects on members of groups thought of as �races,� even if a conscious belief that they are inferior or unworthy is absent. The term is clearly in danger of losing the precision needed to make it an analytical tool for historians and social scientists examining the relations among human groups or collectivities. But few would deny that we need, as a bare minimum, a strong expression to describe some horrendous acts of brutality and injustice that were clearly inspired by beliefs associated with the concept of race�the vilification, lynching, and segregation of African Americans in the South during the Jim Crow era; the Nazis� demonization and extermination of European Jewry; and the noncitizenship and economic servitude of South African blacks under apartheid.

(...)

A further conceptual refinement can be derived from Kwame Anthony Appiah�s distinction between racism and �racialism.� He defines racialism as the belief �that there are heritable characteristics, possessed by members of our species, that allow us to divide them into a small set of races, in such a way that all the members of these races share certain traits and tendencies with each other that they do not share with members of any other race.� Such a belief essentializes differences but does not necessarily imply inequality or hierarchy. As a moral philosopher, Appiah finds such a viewpoint mistaken but not immoral. Racialists do not become racists until they make such convictions the basis for claiming special privileges for members of what they consider to be their own race, and for disparaging and doing harm to those deemed racially Other. In an early work on color-coded racism in the United States, I implicitly made a similar distinction when I coined the phrase �romantic racialism� to describe the belief commonly held by antebellum abolitionists of both races that blacks were intrinsically different from whites in temperament and psychology (more �spiritual� and less aggressive). I did not wish to use the pejorative �racism,� because, for at least some of these antislavery men and women, the alleged peculiarities of blacks did not sanction a belief in their inferiority or justify enslaving them or discriminating against them. But when groups whose differing ancestry is culturally and/or physically marked come into adversarial contact, there is a powerful temptation, especially on the part of the more powerful group, to justify aggression, domination, or extermination by invoking differences defined as �racial��meaning that they are intrinsic and unchangeable.

Unlike some sociologists, I do not believe that one can regard race and ethnicity as clearly distinct and unrelated phenomena. To my way of thinking, groups designated as races could also be regarded as �ethnic� in the Weberian sense of being historical collectivities claiming descent from a common set of ancestors. Race can therefore be described as what happens when ethnicity is deemed essential or indelible and made hierarchical. There are, however, cases�and African American ethnicity would be a prime example�in which ethnic identity is created by the racialization of people who would not otherwise have shared an identity. (Blacks did not think of themselves as blacks, Negroes, or even Africans when they lived in the various kingdoms and tribal communities of West Africa before the advent of the slave trade.) From this perspective, racism is the evil twin of ethnocentrism. The latter may involve racialism in Appiah�s sense but can also be based on individual cultural identities that are not viewed as unchangeable. (Many premodern communities�American Indian tribes, for example�have regarded themselves as superior beings and their enemies as utterly unworthy of respect but have nevertheless readily assimilated captives and other strangers regardless of phenotype or cultural background.) The erroneous but relatively harmless doctrine of simple racialism is rarely found among members of the advantaged or dominant groups in a plural society, but racism is all too common. One is more likely to find tolerant or egalitarian racialism among stigmatized groups: they may embrace and reevaluate some of the differences traditionally attributed to them, attempting to change them from defects into virtues, thus affirming a positive cultural identity and making the case that difference does not mean inferiority.

The reason that my efforts to dispense with the problematic term �racism� in some of my earlier work came to naught was simply because I could not find a satisfactory alternative to describe the phenomena that I wished to study. �White supremacy� is limited in its application to only one type of racism�what I would now call the �color-coded� or somatic variety. A review of the historical discourse on racism that began in the 1920s reveals that the term was first applied to ideologies making invidious distinctions among divisions of the �white� or Caucasian race, and especially to show that Aryans or Nordics were superior to other people normally considered �white� or �Caucasian.� The term �race� has a long history, but �racism� goes back only to the early twentieth century, and the �ism� reflected the understanding of historians and others who wrote about it that they were dealing with a questionable set of beliefs and not undeniable facts of nature. It might be said that the concept of racism emerges only when the concept of race, or at least some of its applications, begin to be questioned. Our understanding of the core function of racism�its assigning of fixed or permanent differences among human descent groups and using this attribution of difference to justify their differential treatment�has changed less during the past century than have the specific categories of people who are viewed as its victims.

(...)

If racism is defined as an ideology rather than as a theory, links can be established between belief and practice that the history of ideas may obscure. But ideologies have content, and it is necessary to distinguish racist ideologies from other beliefsystems that emphasize human differences and can be used as rationalizations of inequality. The classic sociological distinction between racism and ethnocentrism is helpful, but not perhaps in the usual sense, in which the key variable is whether differences are described in cultural or physical terms. It is actually quite difficult in specific historical cases to say whether appearance or �culture� is the source of the salient differences, because culture can be reified and essentialized to the point where it has the same deterministic effect as skin color. But we would be stretching the concept of racism much too far if we attempted to make it cover the pride and loyalty that may result from a strong sense of ethnic identity. Such group-centeredness may engender prejudice and discrimination against those outside the group, but two additional elements would seem to be required before the categorization of racism is justified. One is a belief that the differences between the ethnic groups involved are permanent and ineradicable. If conversion or assimilation is a real possibility, we have religious or cultural intolerance but not racism. The second is the social and political side of the ideology�its linkage to the exercise of power in the name of race and the resulting patterns of domination or exclusion. To attempt a short formulation, we might say that racism exists when one ethnic group or historical collectivity dominates, excludes, or seeks to eliminate another on the basis of differences that it believes are hereditary and unalterable.

He has a long-rear end appendix just about what the term means and what it has used to mean. Really I'm only here to try to sell you on that book, it's great, read the entire thing if you are even vaguely interested in history. It seems like it's out of print but a quick googling found this PDF.

TheFluff fucked around with this message at 01:49 on Nov 16, 2016

# ? Nov 16, 2016 01:42

Morzhovyye: Mar 2, 2013

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKbEaZ-Jnws

# ? Nov 16, 2016 03:19

doverhog: May 31, 2013; Defender of democracy and human rights 🇺🇦

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OO18F4aKGzQ

# ? Nov 16, 2016 06:58

Freakus: Oct 21, 2000

Mercrom posted:

Defining away the issue is probably the best option. Racism is ordinarily defined as irrational and emotional. AA is rational.

Your response to calling it racism is irrational and emotional though. Does that make it racist now?

# ? Nov 16, 2016 07:22

silence_kit: Jul 14, 2011; by the sex ghost

TheFluff posted:

Historian George M. Fredrickson writes in Racism: A Short History (Princeton University Press, 2002):

He has a long-rear end appendix just about what the term means and what it has used to mean. Really I'm only here to try to sell you on that book, it's great, read the entire thing if you are even vaguely interested in history. It seems like it's out of print but a quick googling found this PDF.

Lol, in the excerpt you quoted, he confesses that he and some other guy Kwame tried to coin a different term 'racialism' which served the same purpose as the common English definition of 'racism', but didn't have the stigma associated with that attack word.

The excerpt supports what I have been saying in this thread--that the meaning of the term 'racism' has been warped so that that attack word doesn't get applied to things that liberals like. It's just sophistry/advertising copy, like how both sides of the abortion debate have their own euphemism for their position: see 'pro-choice' and 'pro-life' vs. 'anti-life' and 'anti-choice'. Why posters on this message board choose this hill to die on is beyond me.

silence_kit fucked around with this message at 13:54 on Nov 16, 2016

# ? Nov 16, 2016 13:41

doverhog: May 31, 2013; Defender of democracy and human rights 🇺🇦

I thought "race realist" was the new fashionable term?

# ? Nov 16, 2016 15:01

silence_kit: Jul 14, 2011; by the sex ghost

doverhog posted:

I thought "race realist" was the new fashionable term?

I had to look up what that was--I didn't know what it meant.

No, I'm not talking about what term white supremacists use to avoid having their ideas be associated with the term 'racist'. I'm talking about how in the excerpt TheFluff cited, the author and the guy he cited proposed using the term 'racialist' to describe things like Affirmative Action so that those ideas wouldn't be associated with the attack word 'racist.'

silence_kit fucked around with this message at 16:39 on Nov 16, 2016

# ? Nov 16, 2016 16:32

Red Bones: Aug 9, 2012; "I think he's a bad enough person to stay ghost through his sheer love of child-killing."

I have only heard the word racialist (used exactly the same as you would use racist) in a Graham Greene novel from the 1970s, so I just sorta assumed it was an old fashioned version of the term particular to upper class British people.

# ? Nov 16, 2016 16:43

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# ? Apr 19, 2024 10:45

Calibanibal: Aug 25, 2015

Racialism used to mean what racism means now, that is correct. Its now obsolete though, so no reason not to recycle it I suppose

# ? Nov 16, 2016 17:37

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