I’ve already addressed this on a linguistic level. Racism has always had the connotation of personal bigotry. It has this meaning even if it also has other meanings. It’s not really consistent to claim that everyone always subconsciously absorbs racist messages but doesn’t subconsciously absorb the meaning of the word they grew up with. If you can never be completely sure that you’re not subconsciously bigoted, you can also never be completely sure that you aren’t subconsciously thinking of the members of a less-disadvantaged group as being personally and intensely bigoted.
Maybe this is so… but who cares? Why would this matter?
You don’t need to tell me, but it in no way changes my point.
It’s not better to not be thought of as hopelessly bigoted? Does that make you more or less likely to want to be seen as an ally?
Also, people have already made a similar mistake in reflexively thinking of the “privileged” as having more resources than they do. If that is left unchallenged it would imply that those kulaks can easily afford a massive transfer of supposed wealth.
In addition, it seems to be rather important for people to insist on an additional definition for a word despite its connotations, so one could ask the same question of them.
Are you serious? You don’t think that unconsciously believing every white person you know is personally and intensely bigoted against you might be kind of bad for your confidence and mental health?
Are you really doing this, or are you parodying something?
No one can know for sure what’s in the minds of others. Maybe this is so, maybe it’s not… what’s the point in speculating about things we have no control over and can’t possibly verify anyway? At least in relation to CRT?
This thread is surreal. I feel like you’re all having a conversation with some imaginary person, not with me.
Who gives a shit?
White people need to get the hell over themselves - their allyship, while nice to have, is in no way the point of CRT. It’s not primarily a tool to make allies, it’s a means of speaking truth.
And guess what - if hearing those uncomfortable truths stops someone from being an ally, their proposed allyship was never worth anything anyway. One iiandyiiii, who hears the truths and is an ally anyway, is worth 100 wypipo running some kind of emotional protection racket over the victims of racism with their cry of “Stop telling the truth, it hurts my fragile White fee-fees”.
I can agree to drop this in this thread, but I replying to your puzzlement why some people think of racism as having connotations of personal racism, not weighing in on its relative importance.
I have a question. Do you beleive that systemic racism exists? That systems and institutions can work in racist ways (even outside the awareness of the individual actors who participate in the system)?
Talking about systems removes any need to explain racial effects via causes of private bigotry, while not ruling out examples of personal maliciousness. It also has the benefit of recognizing the importance of previous / historical events in shaping our present realities.
Sometimes it obviously does, when there are policies that are deliberately created by people with racist intent. I believe applying it to systems that have an unequal outcome regardless of intent is not useful, but not as harmful as overly-applying it to individuals. Then of course there are situations in between where it is neither particularly applicable or inapplicable.
That’s part and parcel of fixating on imaginary problems.
Do you think the requirement of personal racist greivance to be a bit willfully blind?
If an institution is having a disproportionately negative racial effect, requiring an identifiable “racist architect” is not particularly productive. Honestly, for a lot of people the standards of “proof of racist intent” is so high as to never ping except in the most socially grievous / embrassing events.
Either way, racial effects are what can be quanitifed and proven most easliy via statistical data (there is no need for any soul searching of bad actors nor ethical judgement to recognize resulting data). It also has the benefit of addressing the multidimensional aspects of systems and institutions.
Why do you think such analysis is “not useful”?
It’s not useful to label it as racist. In the balance it is useful to analyze it, but doing so requires you to label people with races.
Exactly.
Maybe someone should start a separate thread on “how to convince fragile white people [that’s the subgroup of white people who are fragile, rather than a slight against all white people, in case this isn’t clear] to aid in the dismantling of white supremacy in America”, since that seems to be a big concern of many. To be clear, I actually think that’s a reasonable topic of conversation – in my understanding, white fragility was a bigger barrier to the US Civil Rights movement than racial hatred. @MrDibble can correct me if I’m wrong, but I suspect white fragility was also a huge barrier to dismantling apartheid – many white South Africans probably didn’t hate Black South Africans, but were terrified about what would happen if apartheid went away and those people gained power. So white fragility truly can be a significant obstacle to progress. But that really is a very different topic from CRT, or similar discussions about the facts of oppression and discrimination through history and today.
By this I mean there are already going to be people who look at the obviously disparate outcomes and chalk it up to inherent genetic or cultural inferiority, so studies can be useful in refuting that.
Maybe not useful in the quest to convince all white people to help. But useful in accurately describing how these things really affect the real world? I think it can be very useful there.
In the UK there is something called an equality impact assessment, which is supposed to be done by government institutions when they change law or policy, to ensure the proposed changes won’t have a disparate impact on protected groups. This seems eminently useful to me, and would not seem to require labelling people with races or worrying about intent.