That creates a catch-22 for anyone who commits a faux-pas (like mistaking the black CEO for a subordinate). Either admit to racism and cast oneself in with the cross-burners, or bail out of the situation ASAP.
We have the same kind of problem with the label of "sex offender." It's a category that runs the gamut from "guy who got arrested for public urination while walking home drunk from the bar one night" all the way to Jeffrey Dahmer.
Scott over at Slate Star Codex has a fantastic piece that covers this phenomenon [1]. The core idea has to do with the tension between central and non-central examples of a category:
Remember, people think in terms of categories with central and noncentral members – a sparrow is a central bird, an ostrich a noncentral one. But if you live on the Ostrich World, which is inhabited only by ostriches, emus, and cassowaries, then probably an ostrich seems like a pretty central example of ‘bird’ and the first sparrow you see will be fantastically strange.
I'm glad we're having this conversation in society. I honestly don't know what to do about it though.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweap...
To be honest - everyone, no matter who they are, makes judgements and has biases.
That's a major criticism I have of the crusaders against "systemic racism." While I think the term is intended to capture the accumulated, "death by a thousand cuts" set of disadvantages that are faced by marginalized groups, it characterizes the problem in such a way that it makes it seem intractable. This is a perfect framing for politicians and activists, whose focus (IMHO) is on getting people mobilized by describing/raising awareness about problems, rather than actually solving them.
To me, when somebody describes specific examples of "systemic racism", I am immediately able to suddenly identify specific actions that can be taken to address each tractable problem. Replace "America is inherently racist" with "End Qualified Immunity" and "ensure public schools share funding across regions", etc. I think framing things like this makes the problems more solvable and far less politically useful for the demagogues.
I’m not sure I fully appreciate the point your making with breaking down the idea “America is inherently racist.” Outside of Twitter I’ve encountered exactly zero conversations that start and immediately end with such a statement. Of course things like qualified immunity and equitable education come into play - these topics have been heavily discussed in the public sphere for decades! To link them in this case to speak to a community’s broader experience seems both reasonable and necessary.
For a light hearted analogy — say I get a burrito from a taqueria on Monday and shit my pants and then go back Tuesday for tacos and shit myself again. When I’m retelling that story on Wednesday over sushi, you’d better believe I’m using the name of the restaurant.
The group which can self-identify as biased is probably much larger (fortunately?). The challenge is that by naming/labeling the big discussion systemic racism, its possible for a much larger (and perhaps more influential) group of people to blissfully ignore the big discussion being had about both systemic racism and systemic implicit bias - the latter of which to a certain extent the original article seems to be about.
any position that doesn't losslessly compress into a chant or a rally cry or 240 characters is effectively censored by its own unfitness for the infrastructure of mass propagation.
this ultimately favors certain corners of the anti-censorship crowd, for you can be vocally against censorship while knowing full well that it is the most overbroad, reductionist and populist strains of messaging that prevail under such conditions.
Same thing happened after me too where many men were afraid to risk power for a real life hookup with the risks involved and have opted out for paided (where legal) risk free transactions. Which in turn has reduced the amount of relationships in general and made everyone lonely.
P(Alcoholism|Denial of Alcoholism) = P(Denial of Alcoholism|Alcoholism) * P(Alcoholism) / P(Denial of Alcoholism)
Pop in any reasonable numbers for those terms and it becomes readily apparent that denial of alcoholism does not constitute meaningful evidence of alcoholism.
It doesn't take a single prejudiced person to enact it. It's built into the laws and the systems and considered "neutral".
Can you give any specific examples of these rules and laws? I assume you mean rules and laws that are actually written down.
I'm interested because while it's easy to find rules and laws that are explicitly 100% to the advantage of non-whites over whites (affirmative action, Gladue in Canada, etc), I've not been able to find any that work the other way around.
(Also worth noting "more likely to end up dead for no reason at all" isn't actually true[0]; there's no statistical evidence that cops kill blacks more than whites in comparable situations.)
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evi...
It would be dumb to assume this doesn’t impact managers hiring decisions, conciously or unconciously. Olds can just think of it as culture fit.
Nope. Alot of people keep attempting to change a definition that is older than any of us alive, and nope. You have to make up a new word. I don't mind "Institutional racism" or "systemic racism" so much, because they're more descriptive expressions, and lead to useful discussion, but to infantilize whole groups of people by making them incapable of a part of the human experience (to be personally racist towards people whose skin is a different color than theirs) is simply absurd.
You can identify the problem without making your language a personal attack on every individual. And attempting to accuse every individual, DOESN'T solve the problem does it? It doesn't unmake the laws. It doesn't unbuild the institutions. It doesn't drive people to talk about how laws unfairly target blacks, like the "war on drugs". But it most certainly makes enemies. It's a useless and impractical approach.
There is NO statement you can make that is true of all humans, nor even any particular "group" of humans, for whatever that means, because NO "group" of humans is remotely meaningfully homogeneous. Except for very broad strokes like "humans must breathe to live", no universal statements are true.
And it seems that majority of people is supporting the current protests and BLM movement.
The sex offender thing looks a lot like a straw man argument, so. When I think about racists, yes KK Nazis and so on come to mind. But more often I think about the daily, systematic racism white folks show towars people of colour, migrants, other religions. More often than not accompanied by discriminating women and the LGBTQ community.
And there seem to be quite a lot of people willing to implement said solutions.
That group is perhaps ironically the most racial diverse group one could conceive.
It's not a change of definition. It has always been systemic. Slavery abolitionists and civil rights activists were not fighting to get white people to stop calling black people the n-word, they were fighting to end institutions that treated black people as subhuman. Black Lives Matter isn't trying to end people's personal prejudices, it's trying to end an endless stream of black lives being taken.
Racism is, and always has been, about power and control. It certainly intersects with, and is bolstered by, individual feelings of racial prejudice. We can certainly call those individuals racists. But they are invariably helping to reinforce a system, not atomically expressing personal hate in a vacuum.
> You can identify the problem without making your language a personal attack on every individual. And attempting to accuse every individual, DOESN'T solve the problem does it? It doesn't unmake the laws. It doesn't unbuild the institutions. It doesn't drive people to talk about how laws unfairly target blacks, like the "war on drugs". But it most certainly makes enemies. It's a useless and impractical approach.
> There is NO statement you can make that is true of all humans, nor even any particular "group" of humans, for whatever that means, because NO "group" of humans is remotely meaningfully homogeneous. Except for very broad strokes like "humans must breathe to live", no universal statements are true.
I'm not sure what you're talking about, but it sounds like you were predisposed to treat me as an enemy already. I didn't personally attack any individual. Describing a system, and who is disadvantaged or advantaged by it, is not a statement about any of the people affected by it.
The 13th Amendment is a pretty big one, worth starting there.
> I'm interested because while it's easy to find rules and laws that are explicitly 100% to the advantage of non-whites over whites (affirmative action, Gladue in Canada, etc), I've not been able to find any that work the other way around.
If your criteria is that it must be "explicit", you're dismissing the entire concept without considering it. These laws and rules take advantage of context and produce predictable outcomes without needing to put on a white robe and state their intent.
> (Also worth noting "more likely to end up dead for no reason at all" isn't actually true[0]; there's no statistical evidence that cops kill blacks more than whites in comparable situations.)
> [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evi....
I can't get past the paywall, but it is actually true. What I can see above the paywall fold doesn't even represent your claim. And even if it did, "in comparable situations" isn't the criteria. Cops can (hypothetically) behave equally violently in all situations, and still be more likely to kill black people because they police black people and communities more.
I know there is a lot of well-deserved focus on the ways our racist systems do more damage to blacks. That doesn't mean we should exaggerate, simply because the ground truth is horrific enough.
YOU might not see white privilege, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. If my brother had been black, in his words... “I HOPE I would have been treated the same way”. But he knew that’s a false hope. If my brother had been black, would he be just one more statistic to debate here?
You're off the mark. Way off.
Strange : society and "systems" are responsible for everything when it's about certain people but individuality and personal responsibility are the reason when it's other type of people...
100% of white people are advantaged by racism. I didn't claim that all experience that advantage equally, and I didn't claim that the advantage negates any other disadvantages each individual white person experiences due to the specifics of their lives, their class or social status, any number of other systems of identity-based power, or even countervailing individual prejudices.
You may find it hard to notice the advantage it gives you, but it certainly exists.
"You may find it hard to notice the advantage it gives you, but it certainly exists," isn't carefully worded, and it's designed to effectively squash any sort of disagreement with the assertion in the first place.
There are libraries worth of literature on the subject. I encourage you to spend some time seeking it out and understanding it better.
> isn't carefully worded, and it's designed to effectively squash any sort of disagreement with the assertion in the first place.
It was carefully worded, but you don't seem to be interested in coming to the discussion to understand. You seem determined to fight. The wording was intended to give you the grace that maybe other challenges in your life make it difficult to see this particular advantage. The words chosen were intentionally placed in the same comment with other words giving that grace explicitly.
It appears to me you take the position that you are correct, and that any challenge is necessarily one coming from a position of ignorance or malice. I invite you to re-think your approach to this sort of conversation.
Always, and always open to reconsidering my position or approach.
> (e.g. that I have not done reading on this subject)
You're not demonstrating familiarity with the subject. Your questions have come from a perspective that is addressed in the subject matter.
> or that you are making personal accusations (e.g. that I may not recognize advantages)
That wasn't an accusation. It was a fig leaf. Your positions have rejected your advantages as a white person. "You're off the mark. Way off."
> That perhaps my interest isn’t in fighting but merely challenging your assertion and assumptions?
Your interest increasingly seems to be defensive.
Edit:
> I invite you to re-think your approach to this sort of conversation.
Thank you, but no thank you. You don't seem to be interested in actually discussing the topic, or reconsidering your own positions. I'm 99% certain that I won't make any headway with you regardless of my approach.