Hey, if that’s where real-life patterns of terminology usage happen to shake out, I’m fine with it. I’m happy to abide by whatever terminological distinctions are most clear and universally understood.
ISTM, though, that the trend of actual usage of the term “racism” is in fact moving in the other direction. “Racism” as a concept is getting more and more widely applied to all sorts of manifestations of racial bias, both conscious and unconscious, both individual and structural.
No, I think you’re all wrong on this. Racism is easy if you don’t care about the damage it does. It’s not as if racists are being bombarded with counter-evidence and working hard to refute it. They simply ignore it, consigning that counter-evidence to live with all the other lies in the world that they don’t pay attention to. If one learned racial bias at one’s mothers knees (or father, in my case) there is nothing easier than just continuing to go along with it, especially if your cultural pocket is inclined that way. (p.s. and to be fair, my father did learn better to some extent over the course of his life. When I was a kid he was the product of his times, but he didn’t stay that way.)
These are probably not the people you are encountering online, as you describe them, viciously committed to bringing down the “other” that they hate. These are the ones you encounter at the family barbeque, snickering at a racist joke that someone else told, and carrying away that comfortable feeling of belonging back home and spreading it, by osmosis, to their children. This is more what I think of as implicit bias – unthinking, unexamined acceptance of attitudes to which you have been exposed for most of your life.
Certainly. if left unchallenged.
@Kimstu - Each version of racism you describes a conscious intentional effort on behalf of some party against another. Microagressions, slights, bullying, harassment, systematic polices and laws aren’t accidental.
It’s certainly possible to be anti-racist and benefit from a system or a society that is or was partially built on or benefitted racism.
Not so: the quote explicitly says that “personal racism” behavior such as microaggressions may be unintentional. Don’t let the word “aggression” in there fool you: it does not necessarily imply a conscious deliberate attack.
Why do you assume everyone’s mind works like yours?
I think that a group of people, originating in academic environments, are in fact moving to apply the word “racism” broadly; and I think it ends up creating more misunderstanding to those who have not had specific education on the concepts, that it pushes people initially naive to the concept but definitely allies to the broad cause of being “anti-racist” away.
It is not great marketing to have people on board with “racism bad, smash racism” and then “you racist” …
Accepting that to some degree we are all conditioned by a structure of historical racism and structures that still have racist impacts, that we each have an ethical obligation to deal with, is different than being racist. Really it is.
It is very difficult to challenge that which are unaware of, or even to hear a challenge that your behavior may be impacted by those biases, bringing it into awareness … without automatic defensiveness against a heard implication of being call “racist.”
I don’t think that’s correct. Sure, most people believe they are just and righteous people at the center of their own story and don’t like to be called anything negative. But I firmly believe what makes so many racist people take issue at the the implication that they have racial biases or racist behavior is that deep down they fundamentally believe they shouldn’t have to change it. The behavior I witness is that they believe “those people” don’t belong “here”. Sure, everyone deserves respect and yadda yadda yadda but “they” are not from “here”, “their ways” are different, “their values” are different, and it’s too bad they are from “shithole countries” but they should go back “there” instead of glomming off our superior work ethic, industriousness and moral character.
Those are explicit racist beliefs, even if they fail to recognize such. We are talking about behaviors not actually based on any explicit beliefs, often in direct contradiction of them: implicit bias. When a white man like me comes into a crowded waiting area and without thinking about it consciously in anyway picks the empty seat next to the white girl than the big Black man. And would as a knee jerk be offended by any implication that there was a racial factor in my choice of seat.
Why wouldn’t you sit next to a white girl vs a large black man?
Really, as someone who frequently rides the racially diverse NJ Transit / NJ PATH / NYC MTA public transportation networks, I’m pretty sure it’s not something that people think about all that much.
I’ll be honest, most of this thread sounds like nonsense to me. IMHO the only thing that matters and that I can control is whether or not I act in a “racist” manner. But I’m not going to beat myself up over it.
It was the hypothetical thought process of someone “like me” to try to get the idea of implicit bias better understood. The point is that that person like me has no expressed reason to do that, they don’t even realize they are doing that, but an objective outsider could still note that it happens. In fact if you ran that experiment - pretty sure you’d see the white person choose to sit near the white girl significantly more often than the large Black man - without any of those people explicitly making that choice. They don’t think about at all, they just do it … why? Because despite their anti-racist explicit beliefs they are still products of a society that conditions “large Black man” to read as more threatening than “white girl”.
If you can’t even accept the possibility that you are as subject to these effects as most other humans than there is little possibility you can control those actions.
That line of argument presumes that people are choosing where to sit for only one reason. Maybe they find the girl more attractive. Maybe they pick the black guy because they don’t want to be accused of harassing the girl. Maybe they choose the white girl because they think “being too near a guy is gay”. Maybe they avoid the guy because he’s a Scary Man Who Is Worse Than A Bear. Maybe they sit near the black guy because they think he’s cute.
I’m reminded of how when I was a kid, the teachers assumed I had race issues because I kept avoiding the one black kid in class; only (after calling my parents) when they eventually got around to actually asking me did they find out that was because he smelled bad. Apparently he didn’t bathe much. It’s not always about racism.
Yeah, I’m reminded of a time when I was a kid at summer camp back in the 80s. My black buddy in my cabin expressed concerned that the girls from the girls camp wouldn’t talk to him because he was black. I told him he was being ridiculous. Most likely they won’t talk to you because you’re ugly!
I think we can all agree that @DSeid did not plan a useful experiment.
The problem, as you indicated, is that there are lots of factors involved that may or may not have anything to do with race. Run @DSeid 's experiment again, but instead of picking bus seats, your picking a basketball team.
There is also the question of whether race does or does not matter. Like people got all bent out of shape with the new Disney live action Snow White and Little Mermaid because the main characters were played by people of color. And I kind of agree with it a bit because I grew up with Arial and Snow White looking a particular way and now they look completely different.
Or Scarlet Johansson playing Major Motoko in the live action Ghost in the Shell. Like it kind of feels white washing because it’s based off a Japanese manga/anime about a character with an Asian name. But even the creator agreed there’s nothing particularly “Japanese” about the character or story. It could take place in any future multicultural Blade Runner-esq megacity where some megacorporation decided to build a cyborg to look like Scarlet Johanssen instead of say Gemma Chen,
Period shows like Bridgerton with multi-racial casts I’m not really sure about. I know the focus is more about telling a sort of fairytale version about the love lives and whatnot of a bunch of aristocrats. OTOH, that sort of hereditary rigid class structure is literally the epitome of racism. Like not only is your future determined by race, it’s determined by every aspect of where you live, who you’re parents are and their station in society.
So I don’t think it’s as simple of just purging your brain of impure racist thoughts and pretending everyone is a neutral shade of carbon blob
It seems that implicit bias is a very difficult concept for some to comprehend.
No it does not. What it requires is that the individual is not consciously explicitly thinking “Oh I want to sit near the pretty girl.”, “I don’t want to be seen as racist.”, “Black and man are risky groups” or anything. They don’t realize that those considerations are at play. Intersectionalities definitely are at play.
Quick search and yeah the exact studies are there.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224545.1976.9923372
Interestingly investigating the intersection of race and gender on seating distance with white women subjects. Can’t prove though this was implicit bias as we have no data on whether or not the subjects were unaware that the seating choice was impacted by race and gender.
There is a whole literature available using seating distance as an example of biased behavior and subconsciously perceived threat!
Another example - a white man sees a person needing help of some sort. The person is in one case a Black man, another a white man, another a Black woman, another a white woman. This specific white man endorses no racist or sexist beliefs. Would you predict he’d help anyone the same. Do you think the odds are that his prediction is correct or that he would be more likely to help one most often?
Hell it even happens at crosswalks!
[wince] Yeah, it’s not like racially Black features and aesthetic ugliness have ever been conflated in a historically white-supremacist society. Two totally, totally different concepts. Uh-huh.
Look, I get that young @msmith537 absolutely meant no harm by that remark, and I hope and trust that his cabinmate saw no harm in it either. But it illustrates clearly that neither young @msmith537 nor his older self really grasps the concept of implicit bias or systemic racist bias.
There are handsome black men and ugly black men, no?
“Completely”? ”Completely”? Except for skin color, and beng actual humans instead of cartoon figures, the live-action leads in those movies looked pretty much exactly the same as the animated originals.
It’s a measure of how much societal racism is baked into our unconscious perceptions that an intelligent, non-racism-supporting adult white American can declare in all seriousness that he thinks one slender young beautiful green-eyed red-maned fish-tailed mermaid looks ”completely different” from another slender young beautiful green-eyed red-maned fish-tailed mermaid merely because her skin is somewhat darker.
There’s a reason that skin color is standing out so glaringly to you as an apparent indicator of “complete difference” in appearance. And it’s not because you personally support racism, but it’s not because the glaringness of that difference is an objective fact, either. It’s because centuries of societal racism have trained us to automatically see racially-linked differences in complexion as separating people into very distinct and separate categories: more so than similar differences in, say, hair color or height or shoulder breadth, etc.
Well, no. Different complexations and other superficial characteristics has served as an indicator of people’s ancestral origins since forever and various demographic factors, including racially-linked policies and stereotypes have separated people into distinct socioeconomic categories.
Those biases and stereotypes get reinforced by witnessing the results of those factors and policies over time.
I don’t dislike going to my kid’s lacrosse games/practices in Jersey City because it’s a disproportionately black neighborhood compared to more affluent (and white) Montclair or Saddle Brook or some other predominantly white NJ suburb. I dislike it because every other time we go, it seems like there’s some incident with drug deals or someone getting sprayed with pepper spray or teenagers shooting fireworks at people.
The trick is to not view everyone through the lens of a few bad apples. Most of the people who go to this park seem like they are just locals enjoying the park or teenagers practicing whatever sport they play.
Hey @Kimstu -
You know how I said that focusing on the behavior and not labeling racial implicit bias racism might allow for less defensiveness and more understanding of the concept?
Feel free to give me a “how that working out for you?” anytime.
Not evidence to support my position in this thread anyway.
There are handsome and ugly people of all ethnicities, of course. But if you’re not aware that there’s a very long and significant tradition among white people of considering, and describing, stereotypically Black-coded physical features as intrinsically and objectively ugly, then you’ve lived a kind of sheltered life as far as the history of race relations goes.
In particular, it’s clear that you’ve never heard of the influential work The Black Man: The Comparative Anatomy and Psychology of the African Negro by 19th-century anthropologist Hermann Burmeister. It’s too revolting to quote openly, so I’ll spoiler a few relevant passages.
Mind you, I think it would be great to live in a world where nobody remembers, even unconsciously, the traditional white-supremacist cultural association of “blackness” with “ugliness”, and white people and black people can good-naturedly tease each other about who’s handsome and who’s ugly without any lingering connotations of traditional racist aesthetics. But I think it would be very unwise to assume that such a world has already come into being at the present time.