[QUOTE=What Exit?]
Offenderati hate generalizations based on race, class, country of origin or gender.
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It’s not necessarily about being a member of the Offenderati. Sometimes, it’s simply that things would be a lot better for a great many people, if the fallacies of composition and division weren’t used as often as they are.
[QUOTE=What Exit?]
You made a statement that despite being positive about blacks is considered racist. Someone already explained it is the same as saying Chinese are good at math.
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Well, it is. Judging people based on what race they belong to (fallacy of division) rather than who they are as individuals, is a racist thing to do. Even if you say good things about them. It’s not necessarily offensive in the case of ‘good racism’, (myself, I just roll my eyes and look at my bank account when people say that Jews are good with money), but the FoC and FoD do, indeed, contribute to ‘classicial’ racism still being viable.
If you (pl) have already decided that it’s okay to make positive generalizations about an entire racial group… why not negative ones? The genie is already out of the bottle once it’s acceptable social discourse to say “Blacks inherently have a better sense of rhythm, because black brains are just wired that way”. Once you say that, you really don’t have a leg to stand on if you want to call someone out for saying “Blacks are inherently of a criminal bent, because black brains are wired that way.”
The point is, once you’ve allowed for one claim, you lose your defense against the second. Especially since the same mechanics (cherrypicking individuals) can be used for either. Someone claiming that blacks are inherently ‘more musical’ and who goes and chooses some good black musicians to ‘prove’ that claim has no intellectually honest defense should someone else claim that blacks are inherently criminals, and chooses some really odious black criminals to ‘prove’ that claim.
The point, as I see it, isn’t about being a member of the Offenderati or, as Dio has oddly repeated, demanding that racist population-fallacies be negative before they’re correctly called out as racist.
[QUOTE=What Exit?]
I don’t fully understand the phenomenon but apparently by praising a group for something they appear to be good at you are implying they are not as good at something else or at least sustaining the idea that they are different.
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No, not really.
In some cases, (eg. blacks are just not as logical as whites and can’t learn from books like white people do, due to their ‘differently wired’ ‘black brains’, that is, the original claim in GD that Dio was defending)… while people may mean no offense, calling a group irrational and unable to deal with object-centric learning is, indeed, calling them intellectually inferior. Even if that wasn’t the case, what I pointed out above is still true.
As long as children grow up thinking that “black people are better at music because of their brains” is not just an acceptable but an accurate claim, there’s nothing really to stop them from thinking “black people are inherently criminal because of their brains.”
There will, at some point, have to come an essential logical/semantic/perceptual shift where people who might even hold Dio’s strange beliefs, learn the difference between “blacks are better musicians” and “In America during the periods of 1800 to 2000, black musicians were overrepresented in what I would describe as the elite among musicians.”
It’s the difference between talking about some-but-not-all, and making broad brush generalizations that implicitly rely on the Fallacy of Composition. And come on, we’re all adults here. Anybody who is really too lazy to talk about “some blacks” instead of “blacks” as if they were a fungible group, really doesn’t have a leg to stand on when they complain that people didn’t know they were only talking about ‘some’ blacks instead of ‘blacks’.
