This is potentially helpful. I was just clarify that with your last sentence which you present what you think might be my thought, “wrong” would mean *not an incident of racism.
*
So, let me ask you, what would you say is the difference between “racial” and “racist”?
Can you explain how you’re using “racial” here? I know we’ve had this discussion before, but I still don’t get it.
That’s touches on the reason I try to keep the language we have more specific, as opposed to more general and muddying. We have a word, “racial” that we used when we’re talking about race are actions involving race that are simply with, sans any notion of hate or notion of superiority. So we don’t need another word for that. We have another word, “racist”, that covers instances that are racial, with the addition hate and/or superiority. The more we keep the use of these terms assigned to the meanings I described, the less we need some other solution. The problem arises when people with an agenda try to make many of the things that are accurately ascribed as racial seem like it are racist.
Then the disagreement is about when something includes “the addition [of] hate and/or superiority”. IMO, assertions about the supposed inherent genetic intellectual inferiority all into that category. IIRC, you disagree, and only believe such assertions are “racial”.
Depends. If some ignorant yahoo just decrees it so, it’s racist. If it’s geneticists—and lets say they’re all black—who have decided to look into it, it’s not. Facts of nature are not racist. Divulging that one race is taller than another is not racist. Pointing out that there may be different facial characteristics among populations (which we refer to loosely as races) is not racist. Facts cannot be racist. People can use facts to racist ends, but the facts have no feelings, motivations, or agenda.
“Inherent intellectual inferiority” for humans is in the realm of subjective opinion, not objective scientific fact.
But further, the science points away from this hypothesis, and has for decades. It’s counter to every understanding of genetic diversity – there is no “black” race, genetically speaking. It’s a sociological descriptor, not genetic. The idea that something as complex as intelligence would just-so-happen to perfectly map onto sociological differentiators, but not genetic populations, is crazier than Flat Earth.
As for objective facts like height or foot speed (which are very different from intelligence), actual science isn’t racist. But so much of that kind of discussion isn’t about objective facts – like our frequent disagreement about the top sprinters. You say they’re all black. And maybe they are, sociologically speaking. But what does that have to do with genetics? Most or all of them have some mix of African, European, Native American, and/or other ancestry. That doesn’t tell us anything about supposed “black” genes for sprinting.
I don’t mean to rehash old arguments. I’m just trying to give examples of why we disagree. It’s not about “racial” vs “racist” – it’s about what leaps we’re making (or not making) from actual facts and science to pseudo-science and nonsense.
:rolleyes: It is a privilege of my favored-group status that I am realistically able to be much more secure in my enjoyment of that right than non-heterosexual people are.
And I repeat, I don’t consider that privilege to be in any way “slight” or “superficial”.
Sigh. So, you accept that genes are part of what determines human characteristics. But for some magical reason you’re certain that they can affect every human trait except intelligence. Certainly you’re entitled to hold such an odd position. Shrug. And to refresh your memory, I have no position on whether one race is, on average, more intelligent than another. My argument has always been that looking into the subject is not racist. Again, nature, evolution, facts are never racist. Even if we do not understand how they work.
That’s not my position, though.
Populations are not races, and it’s completely disingenuous to pretend that people are referring to the former when they use the latter.
It might be true. But it still doesn’t make it the most important issue that people face, regardless how infuriating it might be for the person subjected to this mistreatment when it happens. I have the same issue as Scylla with this discourse. You see for instance a black woman from a wealthy background, smart, went to the right Uni, became a successful lawyer and became famous enough to be sometimes invited on talk shows. And when she’s on hair she says “check your privileges”. Who watches this : among others, tons of not very smart white straight men from a poor background, who started working after high school, lost his relatively correct job in a factory whose activity moved to China 15 years ago and has since be struggling to find one low income job after another and isn’t sure how he’s going to pay the rent next month.
You see the problem? There’s no way this woman is less privileged than the overwhelming majority of the watchers, despite her gender and race. In fact, she’s among the most privileged people on the planet, and even of the whole history of mankind. She has essentially no business lecturing anybody about privileges. And hearing her doing so is going to infuriate a lot of people, and rightly so.
Mind you, she could talk about her higher risk of mistreatment. But couching it in this sort of speech that has become common nowadays of “I’m sooo oppressed, and you’re sooo privileged” is unreasonable to put it mildly, and I often perceive it as a need for the speaker to put himself in the “oppressed” category since nobody wants to admit being an oppressor even when wearing expensive trendy clothes made in an Asian sweatshop, so if by luck the privileged college student is a woman or has nebulous sexual identity concerns she will use that to put herself in the correct category and lecture others.
I’ve no doubt that a white man has an edge. But then again, so has a tall man, a beautiful woman, an intelligent homosexual, etc… Racism, feminism, etc are valid causes to fight for. But as Scylla said, in this place and time, there are sources of privilege much more important than your skin color and sexual preferences. You’ll always be better off now being born black, female and homosexual in a wealthy, educated and supportive family than being born white, male and straight in a poor, uneducated, uncaring family.
The problem is that nowadays, part of the left is concentrating almost solely on these identity issues, pushing always further about it to a point where their observations, claims and demands begin to seem absurd to most listeners, and all the while ignoring most of the issues that had been in the past the purview of the left, in particular economical issues, and so leaving in the ditch the unemployed factory worker. Who is instead basically told that he should count his blessings for being white
when he’ll be kicked out of his house for not being able to pay rent by some random student who never worked in his life and has extremely important concerns like safe spaces at the uni (that our factory worker would never be able to afford for his children) for offended people.
While his father felt that he was supported by the old left, he’s considered as a class enemy by the new left by virtue of his skin color and gender. And I’m not using “class enemy” lightly. The discourse on the left is indeed demonizing people simply for being white/male/straight : “shut up and check your privileges”. Those white cisgender straight men have replaced the wealthy “bourgeois” as the main source of oppression in the discourse of a large part of the left, regardless of their actual situation in life and possible complete lack of any actual privilege. And these identity issues became the main concerns for a whole generation of people, who like every young generation, searches for a worthy cause to fight for (and, most importantly, to feel good about themselves, enlightened and virtuous). And then, when he has to choose between a leftist candidate who talk about identity issues and a right wing candidate who talks about employment, who he decides to vote for shouldn’t come as a surprise.
There’s in theory no opposition between the fight against racism and such and fight for economic equality. The left managed it for a long time. But when the first becomes so prominent that the second seems mostly ignored (and is openly categorized as vastly less important by many, who, surprise, even if they’re racially discriminated, are socially among the privileged elite) and more importantly when most of the “oppressed” of the second category are openly told repeatedly that they’re in fact privileged oppressors by default, hence ennemies, that’s definitely not possible anymore.
I think there might be a very real but extremely tiny portion of progressives and liberals who act this way (focus solely on identity and say things like “check your privilege” from rather privileged positions themselves). But right-wing infotainment media has successfully convinced many Americans that this is how most Democrats/progressives/liberals are… when most Democrats in office are focused on things like health care, reasonable and pragmatic immigration policy, infrastructure, etc; and even the most social justice-focused activists generally give a reasonable and nuanced take on complicated concepts like privilege and institutional bias.
Amen. Quoted for truth.