That’s exactly the point @Johanna is making: that we each need to be self aware enough to recognize any prejudices we have before they impact others.
This may well be true. If so, is it accurate to blame racism on being “a product of our society,” or does it go deeper, to human nature itself?
I do not know that everyone has some racism in them. I don’t know how you could know that.
I do accept that I almost certainly have some (largely unconscious) racism in myself.
If that makes me, and anyone else in the same condition, a racist, it seems to me that we’re applying the term “racist” so widely that it loses any usefulness it might have had.
I think you make a good point in the other thread – that there are certainly non-racist societies, since there have always been societies with no contact with other races. I don’t think there are any non-biased societies – people will tend to look down on others from different groups/tribes/etc., even if they’re the same “race”.
When nuclear fallout blankets an area, does everybody there absorb rads?
“I don’t know how you could know that.”
This is how: You measure a representative sample of the population. If every single person in the study has absorbed rads, with a large enough sample size, it’s possible to make a confident prediction that everyone is indeed affected. It’s also consistent with such an all-pervasive pollutant.
Bob Marley again: “When the rain fall, it don’t fall on one man’s housetop.”
I agree with the first sentence (at least for purposes of this discussion). I’m not sure the second follows. Why would it be impossible?
Respectfully, what you’re advancing feels less like an argument and more like dogma. It’s based on the premise that everyone is racist which, as has been pointed out, is unfalsifiable. I mean, how could you possibly know?
If you only want input from people who already buy into your central premise then that’s fine. Nothing wrong with that. Not every debate has to involve everyone. But if your purpose is to convince people who don’t buy into your central premise that the premise is valid then you need to be able to tell us how it can be tested.
When nuclear fallout blankets an area, do you think anyone there remains unaffected? Is anyone free from pervasive environmental pollutants? Bob Marley sang: “When the rain fall, it don’t fall on one man’s housetop.”
You can test for nuclear contamination. You can’t test for racist thoughts. If a person never commits a racist action, the presence of racist thoughts can only be hypothesised. The two things aren’t analogous.
The hell you can’t. Social psychologists test that all the time, it’s their bread and butter.
Yes, yes, we must be intolerant of intolerance. That’s a platitude by now, not a philosophic principle of note.
That we should all strive to eliminate intolerance within ourselves is also a truism become platitude. Of course we should. Who is disagreeing? Why even bother starting a thread about it?
What is worthy of discussion is our attitudes toward other humans. I personally have strong feelings about many subjects and consider many people to be completely wrong to the point of evil about their beliefs. Well, about certain of their beliefs. I don’t know all their beliefs. I don’t know how strongly they hold some of their beliefs. I don’t know whether they are striving to eradicate themselves of those beliefs I find intolerable. How, therefore, do I proceed in my day-to-day when they are a factor?
Kindi writes that if I do not actively counter their beliefs I am a “***ist.” It is not enough that I try to eradicate my own failings, I must publicly denounce the failings of others. He says this in the context of antiracism, i.e. about the black experience, but I hold this is wildly inadequate. Those failings manifest in thousands of ways, many of them more personal to me than racism in American society.
How does a decent human being rate and sort the multitude of isms in the world? Sure, confronting racism in oneself is good. In American society it is pure folly to assume that those with white skin can somehow be immune to the sea we all swim in. (It is equal folly to assume that those with black skin do not have similar reactions to other minorities.) What about confronting the sexism or homophobia or Islamophobia or body shaming or classism or stereotyping in oneself? (Random examples, not rated or purported to be equivalently bad.) Is there any person anywhere who can pass through the eye of this needle?
I have absolutely no problem with being intolerant of intolerant others. I revel in doing so. Yet as a thinking being I also recognize that absolutes do not apply well to other humans. Philosophers have spent thousands of years debating the duty of a person in relation to other individuals and the society they live in. They do not come to a consensus because the world is both too individualistic and too general for any final statements.
I will defend to the death that being 23% antiracist is better than being 2.3% antiracist but not as good as being 73% antiracist. Saying that is exactly semantically equivalent to saying that antiracism is a goal and a process that should always be ongoing. But so are all the other antis.
Argument by analogy? Why is nuclear fallout a reliable analogy for racism?
Shamelessly stealing from my own book-in-progress, main character’s internal-monologue thoughts after watching a similar argument erupt between two ancillary characters:
In feminist thought, you can say someone is a sexist pig and you can also and separately say that somebody is a participant in the patriarchal structure and should look at how. Examine our own role in the ongoing framework, you know? Sexism is an attitude, a shitty belief system that reinforces the unfairnesses; patriarchy is the institution and it’s almost impossible for any of us not to be caught up in participating in it in at least some ways. That may be an oversimplified way for me to divide it up, but it really helps to have two words. For race we just have the one word, really, and for most of us white people, who aren’t the target of institutional racism, we first learned that racist meant having the shitty biased attitudes and beliefs. I guess it’s easy for us to be oblivious to the systemic stuff and to go around thinking if we’re personally nice and fair to nonwhite people, hey we’ve done our part.
There’s a couple of problems with this. Firstly, social psychology is involved in a widely publicised replicability crisis. There are numerous examples of studies which have purported to show racial bias which have ended up showing nothing at all when attempts have been made to independently replicate them. I don’t have a huge amount of confidence in the field’s findings in this arena.
Second, even reputable studies showing racial bias don’t test for racist thoughts. They can’t. That would literally be mind-reading. They observe racist actions that are the result of racist thoughts. What if the actions aren’t there? Imagine an unconscious bias study conducted on 100 people which finds that 90 of the 100 are racially biased in some way or another. You’re asserting that the other 10 are also racially biased, but how would you know? The study itself exonerated them! That’s what I mean when I say your premise is unfalsifiable. Even being found “innocent” (so to speak) under controlled conditions isn’t evidence of innocence.
They’re both all-pervasive pollutants.
To me, racism seems more analogous to a contagion than a pollutant. It can’t exist literally in the air, or on the ground or in the water. It can only exist in the minds and hearts of human beings (and possibly also in their cultural creations).
I’d like to quote RitterSport’s excellent post in that other thread (the political one about Barney Frank) to share here, which says well what I am trying to say, so I’ll boost this signal!
If I said something racist and someone told me how racist that was, my first (and second, etc.) response is going to be to take that to heart and try to do better.
If your goal is to try to be less racist, you’ll appreciate the feedback. If your goal is to cling to your old bigoted ways, even if you didn’t realize they were bigoted, then you’ll take offense.
Correction to my OP: The 23% remark was not by Doper 1, but by Doper 3.
There are so many geeks and freaks in the city that I possibly should have ignored the racist loony on the bus the other day, but I did not. Like the creep who was aggressively sexually harassing two young women in public, there surely must not be room left for people to think any of those things are remotely tolerated.
Nobody is perfect. Nobody shoots 18 at Augusta National. Nobody goes through life without making mistakes. Nobody has “figured out” racism.
If someone HAS gone through the work of figuring it all out, of managing to live in THIS world without having racism ever touch their thoughts or deeds, they’re not going to dismiss it with a trivial “This is not true.”
Anyone who thinks they figured it out and are immune to those thoughts, and dismisses the concept this easily… is fooling themselves.
Good point.
One easily checked by machine and specifically defined, the other checked by the opinions of others supposedly already “infected”.